Interview Series #16: Trenton Willey

The NO PART OF IT Interview series was a strain of questions sent to a number of different people between February and March 2019. Each entry was scheduled chronologically to be thrust upon the world on a monthly basis since then. Each individual is introduced informally as if they were being discussed at a bar.   

Scheduled March 2019Wow man, so I've known Trenton for almost 10 years now.  And he has not "grown out of it".  I have never met another person like him, and I know I never will.   I spent three days with him while on tour, in Austin TX, and it was some of the funnest times I've had.  I think he wore the same ceremonial robe and rambled ecstatic nonsense most of the time, and on one occasion re-enacted his imaginary appearance on the Jerry Springer show, doing obscene things with a pencil eraser.   Trenton seemed to casually look over and observe your responses to his ad-lib obscenities, and slowly turn it up a notch so that it either tested your sensibilities, or made you uncomfortable about something that is only slightly different than what you did laugh about before.  In application it is not only a very clever and witty form of comedy, but also the only presentation I've ever known that actually played on the context of expectation in anticipating the crowd's laughter, almost forcing it out of them due to the fact that they know they are supposed to laugh at this juncture. I just don't know what to say about how his work takes shape, where it begins and ends, or how it has "evolved".  I will just say that I let him do stand up comedy on the phone for 6 hours straight (or at least tried to) during my radio show, and it is documented in an article I did for WFMU's blog.  A lot has changed since then, culture wise, but my intro there is still about the best I can do here:



...While it may seem buffoonish at first, Willey's surrealistic stream of brutish puns and  psychedelic one liners eventually seem like they are transcendent; Some kind of ultra reality where humor is only the pretext for the sort of nonsense that finds us leaving theaters feeling drug-addled after a particularly mind bending movie, or just guiltily laughing our asses off. He appears as someone who happened to take mental imagery of dinosaurs, care bears, made for TV movies, and soap operas, along with mass murder, racism, sexual abuse, daily news, political correctness, and various media histrionics all into the blender of his mind, set on liquefy.  But rather than presenting these sometimes turbulent concepts as a means to shock people with the severity of them, he presents them with the sort of aplomb that one might expect from Mister Rogers and in the context of total madness.   When I heard that Trenton was talking about going for the Guinness Book of World Record for the longest stand up comedy set (40 hours), I invited him to do stand up on the phone for 6 hours with no audience, to be aired on my radio show.  
I'm fascinated by the concept and the purported benefits of image streaming, and I'd be happy to uphold someone who would be able to go through with it, especially if he is keeping with this style of slinging  ludicrous word diarrhea throughout.   It would certainly add to his body of work; endeavors  such as interviewing his father about gay animal marriage, making a play with a dead cat, the animated film "Hair Camp" (featuring Venus, a vegan cannibal Venus flytrap with a British accent), teaching invisible children about death (WARNING: this one is particularly viscous), a group protest where every person protests something different, stabbing himself during a knife dance, and getting chased by hecklers....

1.  What kinds of things have you been getting into lately?

1.  I've been cum dumpster diving.  I got enough semen to inject into totem pole.  Turns out the heads are in different dimensions and they all don't know it except for the one in the middle who is super intelligent.  The rest are really dumb.  More like a todumb pole right?  Now he's my wacky next door neighbor.  To him he's blocks away, doors and doors that I can't see flying above the 8th day in-between Saturday and Sunday where he lives.

 

 2.  What you do, do you do it as an artist, or is it a hobby?  If you don't like that question, what do you have to say about true art (vs. "entertainment")? 

2.  Making coherence and sanity appear in a dream realm, when you wake up the real killer is at the edge of your bed and your eyes have been removed and put in a seeing eye dog.  Now you have the vision of a dog that is leading a blind man straight to the foot of your bed.  Your skull has been opened so he can read your mind, the brail in your brain tells him your deepest secrets and that secret is that you're in a golf cart in a clit garden and the killer has made you the kind of the garden and the mayor of flying musical notes coming out of a guitar.  Cook those notes and eat the tunes you grove with your dudes on youtube with a brew. I bench press canvas and climb explosions. GO HOME TEAM!

 

3.  How would you describe what you do?

 

3.  I think anything and everything can and is funny.  Dark, surreal, anti humor, whateves.  The more gnar gnar the more cray cray it is.  Sometimes the laugh track will pull his green arms out of nothingness and ask for a coffee.  He might laugh at what you think is the wrong time, but maybe the laughing at cancer was a coping mechanism.  Remember I am a rape joke survivor.

 

4.  How would you describe your creative progression over the years, in a brief synopsis?

4.  I sucked, I peaked, someone wrestled me over an abortion joke on stage, someone got knocked out in front of me while I was on stage.  I've been banned from places, I've "killed it" and that it was my ego the time in Hollywood I preformed on mushrooms.  I met a guy with elephantiasis that night.  His hand was huge and that wasn't the shrooms making his hand that big.  He was a nice guy who is dead now.  Graveyards are useless boxes of sadness that could be converted to houses for the alcohomeless. I once did stand up in a grave yard where the ghost booed me.

 

5.  How would you describe your philosophy?

5.  My philosophy is have fun with life before you die.  God thinks he exist so hard he thought himself into existence and we can think him out.  Then we can stop god from letting millions starve, drown, and be hurt.  Make jokes about everything.  Some people think jokes = belilting.  I think jokes can be made because it's on your mind and or you care about it.  People say certain things can't be funny.  It's funny racism is one of them.  If something is profoundly ignorant how can you not laugh and make fun of it?  Who ever said scarecrows were scary, a farmers hayfork could fuck that starfish extortionist apart faster than a building that no plane hits without the mayor inside it falls to the ground.

 

6.  Do you believe in psychics, magic, ghosts, or gods?  If no, then maybe you'll share your favorite conspiracy theory (whether you believe it or not).  

6.  I don't believe in any of those things.  I like proof.  Things I even see and feel end up turning to be fake.  Like the lost love of a love that lost her love.  Let's just say that I did believe in those things.  Here are my fake beliefs. 

 

Psychics - Last time I went to one, her crystal ball was broken, it was only playing flashbacks.  Then it flashed forward straight to my funeral where people where spitting on my corpes, to lube it up before my body gets lowered down.  Is it too much to ask for one lover to get in my coffin to be buried alive and be able to fuck me until air runs out? Corps - a main subdivision of an armed force in the field, consisting of two or more divisions.  kind of ironic that a huge percentage of them will become individual corpes.  No strings are hidden in this puppet show.

Magic - If you can make a house of cards, put a card pool, a card hot tub, and card dog in there.  I will live there and you can saw in half any card person in front of a card audience and I'll watch.  I don't have a house.  Homeless jokes hit close to not home for me.

Ghost - A ghost with an electrical outlet in his lower back who made my toast calls it ghost toast and plays pranks.  He puts the Virgin Mary in toast to fuck with Christians.  Come on what a wusspuss do Muhammad.  Religious fanatics can't kill a ghost.  If you kill a ghost he's an alive person again.

Gods - I only believe in Muhammad the prophet of the Muslim faith.  I saw him on a piece of toast.  He told me I could have a slave and a king for the cost of 14 baseball players head aches.  Sucka sucks, I would have settled for an text anagram of the history of yourself.

 

7.  What would you say was your most definitive experience?

 

7.  DMT with a friend who is not alive anymore.  Thanks a lot heroine.

Heroine - You are welcome, I'm glad I devoured that druggy

Me - I was being sarcastic, he showed me the other side of space where colorful creatures brought me on to their craft.

Also a 7 year relationship I had with a woman I still loves, that doesn't love me anymore.  All I need is a basement to chain her up so she can never get away again.  I miss her. 

Also I was born in a full screen movie, when it transferred to widescreen I was just a floating head for a year.  All I could date was a jackolatern.

 

9.  Would you care to name any theoretical "desert island" records, or at least releases that you think are approaching your concept of "perfect"?  

9.  The screams of all the foster children that wonder why the icy hearted masses chose to let more kids plop out of c section hole after c section hole.  I snuck a dog into a c section, when she gave birth to the dog man it became big news, but it's just a regular old seeing eye dog with human eyes.  Hence why the day stalker wanted a new pet.

 

10.  What is the earliest childhood memory you can (or are willing to) recall?   

10.  Preschool, a bunch of kids hated me, bullied me, kids me, chased me, threw sand at me, and I would get in trouble too for doing nothing.  I had one friend that joined them then started kicking me too.  I ripped the wing off a moth after that then cried a lot and my mother lied to me telling me the moths mother would come give the mother new wings.  Maybe she believed it.

 

11.  Are you able to appreciate other peoples' creative work regardless of their personal shortcomings or inherent flaws?  To what extent?  

11.  Art and the human are completely different.  Lenny Bruce who was Jewish could like a nazis art.  The person can be terrible, the art could be good or terrible.  Some great people make shitty art too.  Sculptures, made of human shit.  They are great for fucking the shit out of.  The glass birds break through the shit chest and shatter in the night skies.

 

12.  Do you have any heroes or heroines

?  Who are they?  Feel free to add anything that makes them stand out.  

12.  Lenny Bruce, Vernon Chatman, Trey Parker, Psychedelic drugs, Poop, Schizophrenia.

 

13.  What would you like to have on your epitaph?  Or what is your favorite quote?  

13. I won't have a grave because I'm going to die on the streets. If I did I would say everyone can laugh at my death because I think humor can be made ab out anything. Also I'm dead people can use my dead body anything. Sex food, make me into a backpack. Anything.