For as long as there’s been stoner comedy, there’s been Cheech & Chong. With eight feature films and ten comedy albums under their belt, the toasted twosome are among the most celebrated double acts of all time, with legions of dedicated fans all around the world. Now pushing into their 70s, Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin and Tommy Chong are embarking on a ‘greatest hits’ tour of Australia, celebrating more than 40 years of good times, laughter and the almighty herb.
“A lot of teams are manufactured by management,” says Chong ahead of the tour. “But Cheech & Chong, we came out of the chute original. The fact that a Mexican and a half-Chinese hippie could literally change the world is mind-boggling. We’re part of the English language … before Cheech & Chong, there was no dope humour in the way we did it. Now it’s worldwide. And I don’t think there’s a movie or a television show or a comedian that doesn’t mention getting high.”
According to Chong, a big part of the duo’s success comes from people being able to relate to them. “We’re the hippies. We’re the poor. We’re the crazies. And that’s what a lot of the world has,” he says. “We started with absolutely nothing. Cheech never finished college and I never finished high school. We did all the terrible jobs you can just to put food on the table. [But] we’re not cynical. There’s nothing cynical about us. If you have this attitude, you can’t lose!”
Chong’s cheery outlook was put to the test in the early 2000s, when he was sentenced to nine months in prison for selling bongs and other drug paraphernalia. But when we ask him about it, his reaction is not quite what we expect. “It was like going to camp!” he exclaims. “I got to hang out with a lot of my fans and I was having the best time. Everyone wanted to talk to me and everyone wanted to hear what I had to say. Everybody was down on the government for putting me in jail.”
Unsurprisingly, Chong still has a lot to say about the legal status of pot. “In America, we have the right to the pursuit of happiness,” he says. “To me, that means having the ability to live our lives the way we want to live them. And especially now they’re doing studies and finding out that marijuana helps with so many ailments.
“The pot laws around the world really are racist laws,” he continues. “They were designed to keep black and brown people down. It’s a racist law that has to disappear, along with the opposition to gay marriage, and the way we treat ethnic people … We’ve got riots in Baltimore, and I tweeted that instead of a SWAT team, we need a pot team. We need a team of potheads to take a bag of really good kush and just spread it around the neighbourhood and mellow everybody out. We’re going to sit with the heads of state and smoke a bowl. The only burning should be the burning of the herb.”
Asked what Australian fans can expect from the tour, Chong promises a night full of classic bits. “We’re going to go into our library and dig out the obscure bits that people still quote,” he says. “We’re going to go into our closet and see what still fits. We’ve got a lot of older fans now … Then we also get a lot of young kids who have never seen us before, but heard of us from their parents. So we get a very eclectic audience, and we love them.”
Cheech & Chong: Up In Smoke – The Greatest Hits Tour is on at Enmore Theatre on Friday June 19.
