The Mayor's Big Secret

Looking back on his legacy as Austin mayor, everyone is missing Steve Adler's greatest strength -- his unbelievable comic daring.

I have worked for hundreds of politicians and public officials, sometimes in crisis, sometimes in peacetime, most often during ordinary campaigns, and there never was a time that it was so glaringly obvious that I should have been fired as when I allowed Joe Barlow to interview Austin Mayor Steve Adler.

Back then, Mayor Adler was pushing an effort to help the live music industry, and I was his communications director, so when Barlow, who didn’t exactly pass himself off as a regular reporter, asked to interview him about this effort at a local dance hall, I thought, “Great! What could go wrong?” I wrote up some talking points but didn’t staff the interview. I figured he could handle himself.  

When the story aired, I wondered why I hadn’t already been fired. (You can see it here.) Barlow, who I later learned was a comedian, tested whether Mayor Adler was, in fact, a fan of live music by performing “The Streets of Laredo” on a ukulele while sitting across from him in a booth. Then they did a straight interview about the Mayor’s proposal – god bless him, the Mayor actually stayed on message – while slow dancing. Neither one’s expression betrayed the slightest discomfort or even awareness this was obviously ridiculous. In comedy terms, the Mayor never broke character. 

“I was shocked with how game he was to do basically whatever we wanted,” said Barlow. “We literally slow danced together for part of the first interview. Who agrees to that???”

Adler knew Barlow was testing his limits, and the prospect of dancing so closely to another man in a comically homoerotic situation gave him reservations that he found personally distasteful, so he got over himself. Besides, says Adler, “It also looked like it would be fun to accept.”

The resulting news story set the humor template for the Mayor’s two terms in office, leaving a largely unheralded legacy. Adler can be thoughtful to a fault. He speaks in quantum hypotheticals. His qualifiers have qualifiers. He has a severe allergy to brevity and considers declarative sentences morally offensive. But given the opportunity, he never shied away from injecting his staid persona into ridiculous situations for comic effect. I do not know if Steve Adler is the funniest mayor Austin’s ever had, but he leaves office as maybe the most comically courageous mayor ever, not just in Austin but perhaps anywhere.   

Yes, future Portland mayor Bud Clark flashed a statue of a naked woman in the iconic ‘70s poster “Expose Yourself to Art,” but he never declared a breakfast taco war against Beaverton.  

Sure, Anthony Weiner was hilarious during his race for mayor, but not only did he lose (can’t be a funny mayor if you’re not a mayor), he was the butt of the joke. We were never laughing with him like we were with Adler's reply to a sexist made headlines around the world, briefly making him known as “the Wonder Woman mayor.”

And of course, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti jumped the slow jam trend to announce a highway closure, but that didn’t sniff the comic daring that was Adler’s 2018 parody of Zach Galifianakis’ web series, Between Two Ferns. In an effort to encourage people to sign up for the Affordable Care Act, Adler reunited with Barlow in Between Two Flags. 

“I just rewatched our Between Two Ferns parody, and there are plenty of parts I still laugh at, but the one that gets me the most is in the intro,” remembered Barlow. “I apologize for being late because I couldn't find a place for my Bird scooter, so I threw it in the middle of the sidewalk. And he just says quietly in almost a whisper, ‘People are doing that.’ It's so damn funny.”

For my money, Adler’s finest comedic moment came late in 2016 when he spoke at a Democratic Party fundraiser. If you haven’t been to one of these, they can be rhetorical slogs, speeches chockablock with clichés. The jokes are more often effortful and snide than funny. And in this case, with less than a month to go before people would get to cast ballots in 2016, the audience would be in a sour mood. An ordinary speech would just make the Mayor another player in a mediocre murderers’ row. 

I needed to find the funny, so I reached back out to Frank Spring, a New Mexico-based writer who helped script the mayor’s remarks in the summit for the breakfast taco war of the previous year. Smarter and better-educated in the classics than I, Frank lent that affair an air of ludicrously elevated oratory. “As St. Paul admonishes us, let us not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with breakfast tacos.” That sort of thing. Frank was game, and as it had only been three weeks since a Trump surrogate warned that if Hillary Clinton won there would be taco trucks on every corner, he had his jumping off point.

Frank’s speech was a thing of sardonic, histrionic beauty, recalling Churchill, Ecclesiastes, Lincoln, Steinbeck, Pericle’s Funeral Oration, Hebrews, the St. Crispin’s Day Speech, and 30 Rock. And unlike other bits Adler did that played off his quiet manner, this speech was a pretend stemwinder, requiring him to appear to be sincerely trying to whip the crowd, already dulled by pedantry, into a frenzy. He’d need to go all the way out there without anyone knowing for a long time what the hell was going on. 

The Mayor called shortly after I sent him the speech. “Do you think this will work?” he asked. 

“Yes,” I answered. I tried to sound confident, because if I told him the truth, that I thought it was as likely it would be a disaster as a success, he wouldn’t do it. His wife Diane Land, god bless her, thought it was funny and encouraged him to do it. I tipped off a local political writer with a sense of humor that he would want to tape the speech and showed up so I could bite my nails in the back of the room. If he bombed, I wanted to be there to take the blame. 

You can watch the speech here. Frank deserves the credit for the words, the Mayor for two instances of brilliant performance. The first comes at a minute and forty-five seconds through the short, nearly eight-minute-long speech. Imagine a normally kinda boring politician getting up and carrying on about “speak[ing] in praise of good and decent people whose noble pursuits have won them not the universal praise that is their due but the disdain, disrespect, and distrust of a Republican campaign and political party that at long last seem unable to tell good from bad or wisdom from foolishness.”

And now imagine you have no flipping idea who or what he’s talking about. It would be like watching three television commercials in a row but not knowing what product was being advertised. And then, finally…

“Let us here give due thanks and honor,” he said, drawing out the pause,” to our taco trucks.” 

It landed. From there he was off to the races, yelling his fool head off about taco trucks in language more often found on the BBC than at an American political event.

And so I enjoin you friends to stand with me, to tell the enemies of taco trucks that we will fight them on the street corners. We will fight them in the parks. We will fight them with tortillas, cheese, and chorizo. We will fight them with growing confidence at breakfast and at lunch, and most of all, after closing time. 

And he didn’t let up, keeping the energy as heightened as the language all the way through the mockery Frank made of the St. Crispin Day speech before stopping, pausing, downshifting, and concluding with an apologetic tone, “I don’t know how to put it any more plainly than that.”

Almost as funny is the headline on the web story from the local CBS affiliate: “Adler wows crowd with unoriginal speech.” But the reporter I invited got the joke and wrote a story that was reprinted all over the country. For the second time, Mayor Adler had hit paydirt with taco-related humor. 

I mistakenly got most of the credit for a lot of Adler’s comedy bits, especially the Wonder Woman letter when it wasn’t even my idea in the first place. But it’s one thing to write something funny or to conceive of a comedy bit that’s more performance art than political. It’s another to use one’s authentic public persona as a comic foil in a ridiculous situation. The stakes for an elected official are high. Done well, people are laughing with you. Miss the mark even slightly, and you’re cringe. Mayor Adler knew, and took, the risks, and he could only attempt these high-wire acts because he had the ability to find the sweet spot and not come across as a sweaty try-hard. 

“What I appreciate about him comedically is that he understands where the joke is and actually can nail it in basically one take. I'm always the buffoon, but everything I say is with a straight face so Steve Adler's sincerity and soft-spoken nature is the perfect counterbalance for me. His delivery is also hilarious,” says Barlow. “I doubt I will be allowed to interview another mayor. Especially after what I did with the last one.”

Most people think of bread and circuses – or the practice of politicians keeping the public happy with distractions – as a bad thing because, well, they are. But there is value in not taking yourself too seriously to participate in the circus. And you can’t lie and be funny at the same time. A good joke is based on truth. And a comedian trading in tropes isn’t a comedian but a clown. As we assess the successes and failures of his two terms as mayor, it would be a sad omission to forget that when it came time to grab the balancing pole and walk out onto a comedic tightrope, Adler never blinked. 

Respect. 

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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