Janeane Garofalo follows politics, talks about politics, at times even finds it funny - although in an absurd, disturbing way. Sometimes, politics even creeps its way into her stand-up routines.
But Garofalo is not, she stresses, a political comic. Those who go to her Baltimore show this weekend - scheduled for 7 p.m. Saturday at Rams Head Live - expecting an evening of political humor may end up disappointed.
"I don't know why some people would think, after all these years I've been doing stand-up, that politics is the dominant theme of my show, because it isn't," the 44-year-old comic says over the phone from Long Island, where she had just finished a gig at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. "It never was. It's certainly there ... but there's so much more going on."
Like social commentary, which is not, she stresses, inherently political (she prefers the tag "populist"). Like introspective humor, which she considers more pragmatic than self-deprecating. Like observations about the world around her and us, which Garofalo often jots down in the notebooks that always accompany her on stage.
Nothing political about that, she insists, sounding like a comic tired of being pigeon-holed.
So, OK, Janeane Garofalo is no political comic. Still, it is, perhaps, easy to understand people's confusion.
She spent a TV season working alongside the political right's favorite whipping boy, Michael Moore, as a correspondent on his "TV Nation" series. And she was co-host of Air America radio's "The Majority Report."
Plus, she's never shy about expressing herself. As an example, she goes off on a rant about the "controversy" over whether President Barack Obama should have been allowed to speak directly to the nation's schoolchildren earlier this week. Not only can she barely hide her disgust over the issue, she doesn't even try.
"That's what I meant about obstruction for obstruction's sake," she says. "That is absurd. There is no controversy, there is a manufactured problem some people on the right pretend to have about this talk in school. It breaks my heart. I don't understand it. It's killing us as a society, all this obstructionism, it's killing us."
Still ...
"I just don't want people to think they're coming to see a great political comic, like Lewis Black, because they will be mad at me," Garofalo says. "I'm not as talented as him in that area. I'm not Bill Maher. I wish I was as strong a political comic as they are. I'm not."
