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Paul Provenza is not OK with the status quo in the comedy world. To him, stand-up comedy in the United States has become, in his words, “bland.”

“There’s something arch about it,” Provenza told me last week. Many comedians these days “take on characters. It’s a lot of winking and nodding. Some comedians almost even apologize for the fact that they’re working in the form of comedy, and they make fun of the form as they’re doing it. That’s the overriding trend. So what you get is people who are not actually talking from the heart. They’re always putting some layer of detachment from their real, you know, emotional and intellectual passions.”

Despite the dim view the producer of ‘The Aristocrats’ has of the overall stand-up world, he knows plenty of people in it who will speak their minds. That was the aim when he put together ‘The Green Room with Paul Provenza,’ a really fun and frank chat series that debuts on Showtime on June 10 at 10:30PM ET.

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