Documentary ‘Too Soon’ examines comedy immediately after 9/11

If you remember 9/11, you probably remember that among the sentiments that immediately followed the tragedy — along with shock, anger, a desire for vengeance — was a kind of enforced solemnity: Thou shalt not laugh. Irony was quickly declared dead. No one knew when we’d ever find anything funny again.

Award-winning comedy journalist Julie Seabaugh, a former Las Vegan (full disclosure: I hired her at the Las Vegas Weekly back in the mid-aughts), has co-directed, with Nick Fituri Scown, a documentary about the dilemma of comedians after the towers fell. “Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11” stitches together interviews with a metric ton of funny people — David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, Gilbert Gottfried, Cedric the Entertainer, Marc Maron, Aasif Mandvi, Rob Riggle, Lewis Black, Doug Stanhope, Russell Peters, to name a bunch — into a multifaceted look at the period.

It was a deeply conflicted time when some comics were attacked or lost their jobs for speaking out about 9/11, notably Garofalo, Bill Maher, and “Kids in the Hall” star Scott Thompson. But others, including such institutions as The Onion, “The Daily Show,” David Letterman and others found ways to bring people together through humor. “The Onion for us, for a lot of people,” Seabaugh says, “was the first time we laughed since 9/11.”

“Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11” airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on Vice TV, and will be shown Saturday in Los Angeles in the Dances With Film festival.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How long have you been gestating this film?

I met film director and editor Nick Fituri Scown at a mutual friend’s wedding in 2015. We were sitting at the same table, and you talk about what you do. He was a comedy fan, but not actually in that world like I am. A couple of months later he invited me to lunch, and he said, “I’ve had this idea for a documentary for a long time, but I don’t think I can do it myself. You might be the right person, so here’s this idea I’ve had. Let’s try to do it together.” We started filming that year (at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal). It was very piecemeal for a few years. I handled all the interview stuff and the comedy history; he did all the film stuff I have no idea how to do.

You interview a lot of comedians, some very famous. How big was the logistical challenge?

Well, I definitely called in every favor in the book (laughs). We first wanted to make sure that we limited the scope of the story somewhat, or we’d be talking to comedians forever. So we made it a point to only interview people who were (1) directly affected by 9/11, either personally or professionally, or (2) who made jokes about it. Those were the threads we followed. In addition to Montreal, we made two trips to New York, and we went to Boston. (During the pandemic) it was a lot of Zoom interviews.

Why did you feel this was worth doing?

I was in college at the time, I wasn’t in New York, and I didn’t know a lot of the stuff that had happened. And now there’s this new, young generation of comedy fans who doesn’t remember 9/11 at all. So we wanted to create something that could be a recent American history lesson, and also comedy philosophy, social psychology, and it’s a lens through which … (pause). This was a time when Muslim American comics had death threats, Marc Maron got in a fistfight with a Marine, Bill Maher loses his job. And it was because they were skeptics about being told they couldn’t address certain topics.

It’s always been my belief as a comedy journalist that comedy is much more than impulsive laughter. There is certainly something about being in an audience with other people — somehow you’re all laughing about the same things — that has always given me a lot of optimism. But for me it’s also a bit more about sharing truth and your perspective. Comics like Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, George Carlin — they’ve really helped push society forward, and that’s something comedy’s always done. And this was a time when it really mattered.

The film makes you wonder what it would have been like to sit in those early audiences. It must’ve felt like a real-time referendum on what you’re willing to laugh at in any given moment.

Yeah. For me the big takeaway from the film is not so much that comics have the right to say anything, but it’s more that comedy is subjective, and we can’t tell people what they can and cannot laugh at. It’s a personal decision.

Watching how those comedians rallied to that moment — what do the events of that period say, if anything, to the toxically divided, chaotic period we’re in now?

In a lot of ways, that was a milestone for creating those divisions. I would say there are absolutely a lot of parallels. Not only in the political climate, but also, you know, thanks to living with COVID — 9/11 was the first time all the comedy clubs closed. And there’s this idea that we don’t know what’s happening, we don’t know what normalcy is going to look like, if it’s ever be normal again.

But also, like, the idea of “too soon” was very real after 9/11. But there’s no one who’s gotten canceled from COVID jokes. That’s not a thing.

In my mind, it goes back to trying to process it, however you feel about what’s going on today, about COVID. Comedy helps give a lot of perspective. There’s a lot of gray area, and comedy’s gonna help us deal with that anxiety.