Name: "We're Trying to Wake the Dead" | Why Ken Burns Makes Documentaries
Uploaded: 2026-01-29T01:01:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video '"We're Trying to Wake the Dead" | Why Ken Burns Makes Documentaries' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-01-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video '"We're Trying to Wake the Dead" | Why Ken Burns Makes Documentaries' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-01-29. Transcript available.

And also you manipulate the past, right?
Just in a way to bring it to life, right?
That's right, that's right.
It's almost like you're giving CPR to it in a way, you know?
I can't believe that you said that
because my mom was sick from the time I was born,
like a couple years in.
And you grew up here in New York City,
which is where we are.
No, no, no.
I was born in Brooklyn.
I grew up in Delaware and Michigan
and came east to Massachusetts for college.
But my mom had cancer from the very, very beginning.
And she died-
From when you were a child?
Yeah, when I was 11.
And it was just a horrible,
just the worst, shittiest growing up.
And my dad had some mental illness stuff.
So it was really hard.
I'm not alone in having a hard childhood.
It's not self-pity, you're just sharing.
But I watched my dad cry at a movie after my mom died.
And I'd never seen him cry when she was sick
or when she died or at the impossibly sad funeral.
And I realized, 12 years old, I go,
I'm going to be a filmmaker.
This is 1965.
This is, you know, a long time ago, 60 years ago.
A great time.
It's way too long to be without a mom.
But I said, that meant I'd be John Ford
or Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood directors,
and stuff like that.
And then I went to Hampshire College
in Amherst, Massachusetts.
And they were all documentary,
still photographers and filmmakers.
That reminded me that there's as much drama
in what is and what was
as anything to human imagination.
So I'm a documentary filmmaker.
By 22, I'm making films in history.
And I've been doing that for 50 years.
So I had a crisis, going through a crisis.
My late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist.
And I said to him one night, I said,
I seem to be keeping my mom alive.
And he goes, yeah, I bet you blew out your candles
on your birthday wishing she'd come back.
And I go, how'd you know?
And then he named two or three other things
that only I knew, you know, really intimate stuff.
Because that's how children like that operate?
Yes.
And it's just, you know, what grief does
and what the inability to express it
when you're 11 years old
or when you're two years old
and realize there's never a moment
when there's not a sword of Damocles
hanging over your head
that's going to ruin everything.
So I just, I said, what do you mean?
And he goes, well, look what you do for a living.
You wake the dead.
You make Jackie Robinson
and Abraham Lincoln come alive.
Who do you think you're really trying to wake up?
And then all of a sudden, I knew that's what I do.
I'm waking the dead.
And it's, everything is a conversation
with this woman that has not been around, Theo,
for 60 years.
60 years, which is way too long to be without a mom.
It's all a love story, isn't it?
In a way.
It's all a love story.
Life.
You know, there's a musician, Stephen Wilson Jr.
who's really great.
He's a great poet.
And he says that grief is only love
that's got no place to go.
Yeah.
That's perfect.
And man, I just.
Well, just think about the energy,
the propulsion of this loss, just for me,
is, and also my father's sort of,
he's the smartest guy I knew,
but kind of a Maserati without a clutch, you know,
looked really good, sounded voom, voom, really good,
but couldn't get into first gear.
That made me, you know, such, you know, keep working.
I mean, I've got 40 films, you know,
I'm not stopping.
All my friends are retiring.
And I'm like, what?
What's retiring?
You know, I'm, you know.
Yeah, you're drinking plasma at the house
and taking electrolytes.
I got stuff to do.
I got, you know,
if I were given a thousand years to live,
I would never run out of topics in American history.
Like, so this is sort of a, you know,
I make films about the U.S.,
but I make films about us.
You know what I mean?
Got you, yeah.
The lowercase, two-letter, plural pronoun,
all of the intimacy of us and we and our
and all of the majesty, complexity, contradiction,
and even controversy of the U.S.
And it is a magnificent space to operate in.
I feel incredibly lucky and privileged
to be, have the responsibility,
it's a huge responsibility,
to dive into something like the Vietnam War,
right now, the American Revolution,
which we just finished.
And, you know, or the Civil War or World War II.
Since we're talking about kind of information and stuff,
where do you get your information?
How do you do it?
Do you have a team that helps you source?
Like, what do you guys do?
It's pretty-
Do you walk into the Library of Congress
and, you know, they're like,
Kenny boy!
You know, what happened?
They do know my face.
So, in the American Revolution,
we've got materials drawn from 340 sources,
archives, libraries around the world.
We have drawn on thousands of volumes
and we have gone to scholars
who spent their lives delving deep
into one aspect of it.
Maybe it's the British Empire's economic structure, right?
Just to understand the difference
between the 13 colonies that we are
and the other 13 colonies
that really make their money for them
because in Jamaica,
they got 90% of the population is enslaved
and Barbados, same thing,
as opposed to, you know,
very few in Massachusetts
and maybe half in South Carolina.
So, you know, we just want to find out that.
We want to check the dates.
So, we always have lots of different sources.
We want to source things from scholars
who've been working in
and you find there's sometimes
a little desperate stuff,
different stuff.
So, we will say,
even after we lock the film,
we might have the word 16.
It might be battleships,
it might be days,
it might be dead,
whatever the number is.
But we've got footnotes on our script
of all the sources
that have contributed
to why we believe it's 16.
And then you read a fifth source
and it says,
I'm not sure.
So, we go somewhere
in all the narration
that Peter Coyote has read
and found the word perhaps,
cut it, duplicate it,
and pull it and go,
perhaps 16.
We do not sleep at night
until we know
we're absolutely dead certain.
We don't want to slander even the past.
We don't even want to,
we particularly don't want to slander the past
because the past's our greatest teacher.
And people manipulate the past.
We know what it's like
in a Soviet system
where they cut somebody else
out of the picture
or there on the presidium,
you know,
and the Politburo
in front of the May Day Parade
and somebody's out of favor.
So, suddenly they edit it
out of the pre-Photoshop.
It's like the libraries in Cuba.
You can't even get history books
before certain years.
Because people want to manipulate this stuff.
And what's so great about a free country
is we go,
yeah, we screwed up there.
And what's so great about a free country
is we're going to have a free country
and we're going to have a free country
and we're going to have a free country
and we're going to have a free country
and we're going to have a free country
and we're going to have a free country