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"A lot of my friends are pro-marajuana legalization, believe that prohibition is a nightmare, and that the prison industrial complex is terrible. They won't describe themselves as libertarian but when you lay out all their points of view for them, that's what the platform is," explains Los Angeles-based writer and comedian Heather Anne Campbell. "And then I found out, some of my closest and best friends are just straight up libertarian."
Campbell has written for Saturday Night Live, Cartoon Network's Incredible Crew, The Mightnight Show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, performed with Drew Carey's Improvaganza and the CW's Who's Line is it Anyway? Currently, she writes for a new block of animated programing called Animation Domination High-Def (ADHD) on the Fox network.
The promotion for ADHD has included a website full of animated GIF images and online animated shorts including "Robama," an imagined world where presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama are fused together after trying to fit through a small doorway. Campbell has played a major role writing and performing in these shorts which have been embedded all over the internet.
"There are times like with the Robama piece, it's kind of clear what my view politically is. ... I didn't go into that piece saying, "I'm going to write a libertarian sketch." It was more like what would be the funniest thing that would happen is: Well, they kind of talked about the same things at the debate last night so why don't we just make them the same person."
Campbell says that comedy is in an interesting place right now because more young people are interested in comedy, get their news from comedy shows, and want to be comedians themselves.
"More kids want to be comedians than they want to be rock stars now," she says, pointing to a 2012 study from MTV's parent company Viacom that lists a host of reasons why comedy is the pathway to being cool. She says young people may be attracted to shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and publications like The Onion because they bring a point of view to the news that you wouldn't necessarily get in a mainstream newspaper or a nightly news program.
"It's almost like the traditional news anchor role, the way that anchors used to drive the news," she says.
You can follow Campbell as a Google Glass explorer at Glasstronaut.net, watch sketches she writes like "Drive Recklessly" at The Midnight Show's YouTube channel, and follow her on Twitter @heathercampbell.
Produced by Paul Detrick. Camera by Tracy Oppenheimer, Sharif Matar and Zach Weissmueller. Music: "Tripped Fell in Love" by YACHT.
About 10 minutes.
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