KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS CULTURE Seasoned Greetings CULT FILMMAKER JOHN WATERS BRINGS HIS HOLIDAY COMEDY SHOW TO DENVER. BY JON SOLOMON Chapter twelve in fi lmmaker and author John Waters’s book Crackpot is titled “Why I Love Christmas.” Waters, the man behind fi lms like Pink Flamingos, Cry-Baby and Hairspray, opens the chapter with “Be- ing a traditionalist, I’m a rabid sucker for Christmas,” then spends the next eight pages proclaiming his deep and mad ob- session with the holiday. The book was originally released in 1986, and years later, a promoter from San Francisco’s Castro Theatre asked Waters if he would do a show based on that chapter. The fi rst A John Waters Christmas show took place in 1996 at the Castro, and Waters decided to make it into an annual tour. While his material has mutated over the past 25 years, this year’s tour, which stops at the Soiled Dove Underground on Saturday, December 4, is completely different. “I think every comedy show that was ever written before the pan- demic you can never use anymore, because everything is completely different,” Waters says from his Balti- more home before the tour. “And no- body wants to hear a whole show of COVID jokes, either. People are sick of talking about it. That’s what every conversation is about — everything. So basically, it’s a thin line of how COVID has affected Christmas and everybody’s life. I think that’s where the comedy hopefully will come in.” Waters says the pandemic lost him about forty speaking gigs. That meant he wouldn’t see his fans in person, which he fi nds incredibly important. He says his fi rst time back on stage was in June, when he emceed the Orville Peck and Yola show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. “I remember walking out there thinking, ‘Whoa, God, I haven’t done this in two years!’” Waters says. “And I had to think up a country-Western comedy act. That was something I had never done before, so that was a challenge. I think it went very well.” Since then, Waters has been flying 18 more, and jokes that he hopes he can get through his Christmas tour without being duct-taped to the airplane seat. “Although I do want to see that happen once,” Waters says. “It’s a new phenomenon. … I have not been on a plane yet where anybody has shown bad behavior at all. But once I saw this woman say something like, ‘I don’t like it when somebody touches my bag’ to the fl ight atten- dant. I almost said ‘Duct- tape that bitch!’ just to see her expression. She would have gone so crazy if I’d said that.” But Waters says when he’s on airplanes these days, he’s usually mind- ing his own business. “Usually I’m memo- rizing my shows on airplanes, mumbling to myself,” he says, “and when people look over and see these legal pads fi lled with writing that looks like Cy Twom- bly’s on speed, they just leave me alone.” Sometimes people recognize him on John Waters’s Christmas tour comes to the Soiled Dove Underground on Saturday, December 4. fl ights and in airports, he says, but he’s never had any problems. a fl ight attendant asked me if I was Ed Wood. That was a new one, but I get why they got mixed up, because Johnny Depp had played him, and they knew I’d made a movie [Cry-Baby] with Johnny.” Waters, who released the A John Waters Christmas compilation al- bum in 2004, says that even if people haven’t seen his fi lms, they should still come to his Christmas shows. “Even if I talk about my movies, I talk about them more in context of what’s happening today and what has happened with those movies — how did we get away with this, and how did we get them made, that kind of stuff,” he says. “There’s hardly an anecdote I haven’t milked out of a movie speaking tour, eight books and everything.” Waters, dubbed “the people’s pervert” and “queer Confucius” in the press, has never been afraid to shock or offend in his movies or books. There’s the infamous scene in Pink Flamingos where drag queen Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead) eats fresh dog poop, as well as scenes that deal with exhibitionism, masturba- tion, cannibalism and a whole lot more. He says there aren’t any trig- ger warnings for the holiday shows. “I thought you went to college to have your values challenged,” Wa- “Somebody once said to me, ‘The only people who recognize you are the ones you’d want to,’ which is kind of true, ex- cept people who think I’m Steve Buscemi, which happens a lot,” Waters says. “Once ters says. “I thought that was the point.” When Waters was writing material for this year’s tour, he was reminded of cancel culture. “The censors who used to attack me were old, uneducated people, and now they’re the smartest younger people,” he says. “I see that on both sides. I’m not saying I disagree with them. I say this, and I’ve said this before: The only thing that’s lacking is we did the same thing — we used political correctness as a weapon or to make our enemies feel stupid, but we made fun of ourselves fi rst. Righteousness is the thing I fi nd troubling.” Waters adds that when people are an- gry, humor is a great weapon. “And lecturing and standing on a soap- box sometimes makes you lose the battle,” he points out. “If it’s going to be a revolt, it has to be fun. I mean, people have fun at riots — I hate to say that — no matter which side you’re on.” At a recent show, Waters asked the audience members, “What can I get away with?” “I think I needed to see what young people would think,” he says. “My audi- ence is all ages and not just young people. Most people would think it’s old people, but it’s not [all] them, either. And for the ones that are there, I tell them to take LSD, like I did in my last book, even though I hadn’t done that in fi fty years. I don’t tell young people to take drugs. The only people I tell to take drugs are my age, at 75, [who] haven’t done it in fi fty years and never had a bad experience when they were young.” A John Waters Christmas, 8 p.m. Saturday, December 4, Soiled Dove Underground, 7401 East First Avenue, $50-$150, tavernhg.com/ soiled-dove. DECEMBER 2-8, 2021 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com NOAH LYON GREG GORMAN
