800 Words: Robin, Woody, Joanie, and Bill (part 1)

We live in a great time to love standup comedy, but it’s a horrible time to be a standup. We live in an era when Louis CK has more influence than any standup comedian since the 1970’s heyday of Pryor and Carlin. Within his kingdom is a treasure trove of great, slightly more minor comics: Stewart and Colbert of course (though you can’t really call what they do Standup…), Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifinackis, Maria Bamford, Ricky Gervais, Kristin Schaal, Mike Birbiglia, Sarah Silverman, Eddie Issard, Tig Notaro, Brian Posehn, Amy Schumer, Aziz Ansari, Wanda Sykes, Marc Maron, Margaret Cho, Jim Gaffigan, Chelsea Handler, Doug Stanhope, Adam Carolla. Among the veterans, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Kathy Griffin, Lewis Black, Lisa Lampanelli, Colin Quinn, David Cross, and Jeff Garlin are still going strong. Until recently, Patrice O’Neal, Joan Rivers, Robin Williams, and Greg Geraldo were going strong, and Bill Cosby and Dave Chapelle both look determined to make a strong comeback.

And yet, it must be a stressful, anguishing time to be a comedian, because nothing is guaranteed to be funny anymore. Whether or not the outrage is justified (and I’m willing to acknowledge that much of it is), we live in a society of perpetual anger, perpetual grievance, and perpetual victimhood. Much of the anger, grievances, and claims to victimhood are entirely justified, and the voice which the internet gives to such people is so long overdue in coming as to render it an historic event in human history. When women, gays, and ethnic minorities have been bullied for a million years of human existence, it’s rather understandable that when given a medium which allows new levels of independence, they might overreact to some provocations. But our concern here is neither the long view of human history nor the history of twitter outrage, it’s merely standup comedy. Comedians can now stream their own albums with no intermediary, their work can also be scrutinized by more people than ever in the history of comedy, and combed through for matter which gives offense to anyone looking for it. This may spur comedians to still greater flights of creativity, but it must also makes their job that much more terrifying. There is already no job in the arts more punishing than the standup comic. Only foolhardy people would ever countenance becoming one, and in our day of internet searches and viral content, the burden of that job just became that much more onerous.

Nothing in entertainment or the arts dates faster than comedy. Routines from favorite comics which seemed hilarious three months ago can leave you in stunned silence as you wonder how you could ever have thought that bit was funny. Fifteen years ago, Bill Maher was considered the vanguard of comic performance for the morally righteous. Today, both most comedians and most progressives view him as an embarrassment for his sexism, his racism, and his pomposity. Whenever Conservatives need a straw man to show that liberals are ‘just as bad’, they use Bill Maher. But Bill Maher is merely an extreme example: every major comedian has a few bits that in retrospect make some among their listeners cringe - Louis CK has a bit about fantasizing about murdering his children, George Carlin had a bit about how rape could be funny, Sarah Silverman has a joke about how 9/11 is the worst day of her life because she found out that a Starbucks soy chai latte has 900 calories.

The job of a comedian is to push every conceivable boundary and find our weak spots. They are the frontier workers of our culture, working on our most sensitive fault lines. They inspire more love than anyone else in the arts, and consequently also inspire more hate.

Comedy is virtually the only artform that demands a completely visceral response from the viewer - if you don’t laugh, the comic fails. No artform takes more courage to practice, no artform runs a greater risk of failure, no artform requires more refinement and evolution, and in no artform is the humiliation of failure so obvious. It therefore follows that the people attracted to comedy are the biggest risk-takers. They’re often the smartest and most interesting people in the world, and they’re often the most dangerous too. To be a good comic, there must be a hole in your life so deep and empty that only the sound of laughter can fill it.

In the last year, the world lost two comedic icons, and it’s in the process of losing a third. Weirdly enough, not a one of them is Robin Williams. You don’t lose an icon through death, if you did, then we’d have to remember David Brenner (does anybody?). You lose an icon by the icon ceasing to stand for what made him iconic. We lost Joan Rivers to death, though perhaps we lost her as an icon a number of years before. Back in Februrary, the world re-lost Woody Allen as an icon, just as it prepared itself to re-embrace his hallowed status. And as of this week, we seem to have lost one of the biggest icons of them all: Bill Cosby. Both Woody Allen and Bill Cosby are still alive, but everything which made them such legends is dead.

On the other hand, we will never lose Robin Williams. Through suicide, Robin Williams underwent an amazing transformation. Just three months ago, he was a washed-up hack. He is now an Icon of American History. He was more than simply a Shakespearen/Mozartian talent of comedy, however ill-utilized, he was a primal archetype. He was the father my generation wished we had, who loved us unconditionally and always knew what to do to cheer us up. He bridged the divide between children and grownups, assuring us we didn’t have to be terrified of the adult world. But the adult world is a terrifying place, and to the end, Robin Williams was clearly half child. And like a child, when he realized that the world might not love him unconditionally, he couldn’t help but take it as a personal offense. It must have been terribly difficult for an unhinged talent like Robin Williams to process rejection. I can’t imagine that he wasn’t devastated by the downturn in his fortunes. I imagine him in his final years being something like TS Eliot’s infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. Surely Williams had a dark side, but he admitted to it, and never excused himself for his flaws. In later years, his standup specials were virtual catalogues of his various human frailties. And even so, he never glorified in his failings. He wanted to be known for being a better man than he was, but since he was not a better man, he would be forthright about who he was instead.  

In death, as in life, he generated more love than any other person ever could. In its way, his death was as devastating for my generation as John Lennon’s death was for our parents. It’s the ultimate wakeup call - our youths are over because Robin Williams will never give us any new consolation. We now have to fend for ourselves, and Robin Williams belongs to the Ages. In a hundred years, people will still watch his routines and marvel that this comedic volcano could possibly exist. What other comics had to log hundreds of hours honing and sharpening, Robin Williams seemed to do with no edit button necessary. Comedians like Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld gain tremendous respect for using no vulgar language - ‘working clean’ they call it - and supposedly that is the hardest thing to do in comedy. But I would argue that Williams worked clean in a much deeper, harder sense - he barely made fun of anyone except himself, and yet he was still the funniest man alive. His comedy was utterly without compromise. It hardly made fun of no one but the most powerful people, he never used it to project an image of himself as anything but the trainwreck he was. What he did was not only pure comedy, it was pure integrity.

But to Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, we now learn that there is very little integrity to what they do, and that the truth about them is unfortunately more interesting than the front they no doubt slaved to project. In retrospect, it’s difficult not to wonder how more people didn’t see the truth about them before.

It would seem as though every decade had three comics which dominate: the white comic, the black comic, and the female comic. The audience for comedy is sufficiently small that the same people usually listen to the same comics. But the traditions and concerns which they represent are so different that there always seems to be room for all three at the top of the food chain. And yet, today, the dominant comic is so obviously Louis CK that it seems tough to remember that there are other comics. But even today, clearly Chelsea Handler and Sarah Silverman together tower over female comics in both recognition and respect, but the comic who would probably be today’s dominant black comic is Patrice O’Neal, but he died quite painfully and tragically a few years ago. Perhaps Hannibal Burress will soon take his place, or perhaps Wyatt Cenac, or perhaps Key and Peele. But think of the 00’s, clearly Jon Stewart was biggest white male name, and clearly Dave Chapelle was the biggest black Male name, and clearly Margaret Cho was the biggest female name. In the 90’s, you could clearly see that Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Ellen DeGeneres were the most important names. In the 80’s it was Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopie Goldberg. In the 70’s, it was George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Joan Rivers. In the 60’s, it was Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and Phyllis Diller.

800 Words: Bee Movie - Jerry Grows Up

(a rerun from early 2009, and a blog I'd forgotten I'd had)

The final two seasons of Seinfeld were supposed to make the working relationship of its creators crystal clear. Larry David was the volcanically productive genius who with Curb Your Enthusiasm continued to mine existence for its minutia in an eternally darkening palette of existential triviality. Whereas Jerry Seinfeld served merely as a socially acceptable face for an anti-social genius, the very affability and tastefulness of his cynicism-lite serving as the perfect ringmaster for a cast of freaks.

Let's face it, it's partially true. Listening to Seinfeld's standup by itself is a bit like looking at expertly crafted wallpaper. Word by word, rhythm by rhythm, the delivery is impeccable and can render flat jokes funnier than they have any right to be. Yet taken out of the support structure of a stand-up routine, the jokes crumble like six-month old matzoh.

In real life, it's probable that Jerry Seinfeld is exactly as he is rendered on his show - an A student arrested emotionally at the age of 16 - the seeming ease with which life carries him masking a profound bundle of neuroses he makes visible only to people too neurotic themselves to care about them.

Perhaps this is why it's so unsurprising that while Larry David keeps mining their mountain, Seinfeld has largely retreated into smug silence. Seinfeld, once widely touted as Johnny Carson's heir for the Tonight Show, is a natural mouthpiece to showcase the greater talents of others. As it was on the show, he is the sympathetic face and ear for other people.

This is what makes his animated film, Bee Movie, so surprising. Seinfeld claimed to be a show about nothing, and for Jerry it probably was nothing more than a review of his weightless early adult years. But what made it possible was that for many others involved, the show was weightily, painfully about themselves. Larry David and a host of writers mined every angle of their personal experiences to create it.

It should follow that someone as seemingly unaffected as Jerry Seinfeld, the only appropriate following act would be a retreat into silence. He's made his money, and now needn't do anything but enjoy the time he has with it. Instead, Seinfeld has begun to make a series of increasingly self-revealing movies. It's as if middle-age, wealth, leisure and family life have halted Seinfeld's seemingly unshakable belief that there is no more to life than Superman and cereal.

First, a documentary about the craft of comedy called Comedian. An all-too-loving, fawning, almost hagiographic tribute to the heroic efforts of a profession supposed to be the first to dispense with heroism. In this documentary you can feel Seinfeld wrestling with limitations which the show seemed to assure us he never cared about. Learning and hugging was rampant. The world's most nonchalant comedian was assuring us that appearing nonchalant was sheer agony.

And then comes Bee Movie. A children's picture as self-revealing as any divorce episode on Curb. 90 minutes exposing the inside world of a beehive: populated with industrious workers whose entire identities are bound up within their careers, which every bee has to flippantly decide upon the day he graduates from larva school. Bees who practice 'Beeism' (woe betide the Bee who dates a Wasp) are all-too-accustomed to the casual anti-sebeetic abuse of the world outside the hive, and base their lives on routines so stultifying that any young 'Bee' with half an imagination would do anything to get the hell out of the hive forever and experience New York City in all its glory. And so he does, and through a mixture of charm and flinty grit, he gives back by achieving eminence and (Marxist) justice for 'Bees' around the world, only for the bee colony to become beset by inertia and apathy due to his efforts (what must a Seder be like at the Seinfeld's?). There's then the obligatory save the day heroics and by the end of the movie, Barry B. Benson Insect-At-Law has a mid-town practice whose property he shares with his human friend Vanessa, whose banter with him has a certain suggestive sting (you knew that was coming...).

It's difficult not to read too much into this, particularly in how quickly his satire has dated. In 2007 nobody has the same career for more than a decade and surely there must be a more diverse breed of shiksect for him to date. But there is no doubt that these bees are not 2007 bees. This beedungsroman (sorry) is the bee world of Great Neck, Morristown, Paramus and Yonkers a generation ago. White collar bees whose ancestors flew across the ocean, fleeing pogroms perpetrated by bears jealous of their honey-making abilities.

And so Jerry Seinfeld, the most effortlessly casual celebrity of his generation, has willfully allowed us to watch him perspire in an effort to make us see him as more than just the front man. It is often said that in Noel Coward's effort to seem like the most effortless creator of his time, nobody worked harder. No doubt the idea has occurred to Jerry that the expense of fame and fortune is to be viewed as everyone's favorite lightweight manchild. So expect a lot more Jerry projects, perhaps even a few exhibiting a grown-up version of himself, before he's done.

800 Words: The Age of Louis CK (part 1)

About a month ago, people in my band (Orchester Prazevica) and I were discussing scheduling over email and bandying about youtube clips when one of our drummers said ‘I’ll be Huck Finn to your Tom Sawyer’ in response to a call for a gig that only he and the bandleader could do. When he sent that email, I was sitting on the toilet and watching Patton Oswalt clips (you'd be surprised how often that happens...). One of the side links to the clip I was watching called ‘Louis CK - Tom Sawyer vs. Huck Finn.’ Now I had never heard this clip, but it was Louis CK, and he was discussing precisely the matter at hand. So I sent the clip - figuring that it couldn’t possibly be anything but a home run. After I send the clip, I listen to it....


(Tom Sawyer vs. Huck Finn)

Now my band’s other drummer is black - a great musician and a nice guy who’s always a delight to work with. I should have absolutely figured what ‘word’ would be said over and over again in this clip, but for reasons passing my understanding, it never occurred to me before I sent it out. I quickly emailed what amounted to a self-deprecating non-apology apology to the band, it said ‘Yeah...wow...I sent that without listening to the content first. So....I’m a total idiot...not that you didn’t know that already. I should have known much, much better.’ Of course, there were many problems with this apology. Firstly, the fact that I didn’t actually apologize - not only because I was irresponsible, but because by not stating the offense outright I thought maybe he wouldn’t see it and I could sweep it under the rug. I’m not just a coward, I’m a manipulative coward. I still don’t know if he saw it or what he thought of it, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be a little nervous about it for the next few years. Secondly, whom among people who know me is ever going to believe that I sent this clip without looking at it first? Anybody who’s gotten to know me in the last year-and-a-half knows that I can’t get through a ten-minute conversation without bringing up Louis CK.

The next day I saw some (white) bandmates, I mentioned the apology and the clip. They didn’t understand why I sent the apology - they thought the clip was hilarious and clearly takes an anti-racism stand. If they were in my position, I probably would have said the same thing to them. Not because I believed it, but because it’s not something worth making any more of a fuss over. What clearly bothered me about this clip is not the use of the word ‘nigger,’ but the fact that I managed to bring up racism at all and all the taboos associated with it. I managed to remind this guy that he’s black, and the rest of us are white. I don’t like being reminded in a room full of goyim that I’m Jewish, so I can only imagine what that’s like for black people. And even by recounting this incident, I worry that I run still more risk of making this person feel more of an ‘other’ than perhaps I’ve already made him feel. And so it goes with the idiotically neurotic conundrums of white privilege...


(Louie on the N-word)

But Louis CK is a far braver, more heroic, person than I. And the irony is that neurotic entanglements like the one I’ve gotten myself into with this Louis CK clip illustrate precisely why comedy like Louis CK’s is so absolutely necessary. Louis CK has managed to take all the issues that delineate our society into separate, unmergeable groups, and by discussing these issues so honestly, he brings us together in appreciation of the problems’ messiness, their intractability, and precisely why they cut so deeply to the core of our society’s hurt. And whether or not it’s his intention (probably not), he’s doing more than nearly any figure in America in any line of work to drain us of our sepsis. What Louie is doing is so absolutely necessary and effective for America that I would go as far as to make this sweeping declaration:

The two people in Contemporary America who are the greatest forces for progress are Barack Obama and Louis CK.


(Or maybe not...Louie on the word ‘Faggot’)

For the moment, let’s leave aside that he may be the greatest standup comic since Carlin and Pryor, and let’s leave aside that he might be making the greatest TV show since The Simpsons and Seinfeld; let’s leave aside that in 2005 he was only #98 in Comedy Central’s top 100 standup comics, and let’s leave aside that as late as November 2009, the Onion AV felt the need to warn potential listeners that “he isn’t for everyone.” Let’s just focus on how this heretofore marginal standup comic has completely revolutionized the way we think and talk about one another.


(Louis CK on ‘backlash’ - ...and Aaron Sorkin.)

The parallels between Louis CK and Obama are actually rather striking. Until five years ago, they were both rather obscure figures in their respective fields. They were both born to multi-ethnic, multi-religious families and partially raised in foreign countries to speak foreign languages that they’ve since forgotten (Obama in Indonesia, Louis CK in Mexico). Both’s parents were divorced intellectuals who met at university and whose fathers left them at an early age. Both of them seemed to fall ‘off the rails’ as teenagers with burgeoning drug problems and street-tough attitudes. Both of them spent their early twenties embracing in the radical avant-garde of their respective fields before age made them realize that more mainstream approaches would be more effective. Both of them can rivet the attention span for an hour at a time, using a virtuoso command of language to deftly couch brutal, cold truths within a velvet glove; and both do so to a greater purpose. In the work of both President Obama and Louis CK, we see a burning desire to bridge different worlds and fuse them together with greater understanding. In the same way which Barack Obama has became the greatest unifying force in American politics in generations, Louis CK is causing the same earthquake in American culture.  



Just like President Obama, Louis CK is not for everybody - but he should be. The formula for Louis CK’s success is all the more devastatingly effective for being deceptively simple: go into those uncomfortable spaces of our lives which none of us want to talk about - the words we’re not supposed to say, the thoughts we’re not supposed to utter, the situations we’re not supposed to discuss publicly, the humiliations we don’t want anybody to know about. And bring those dark crevasses of human experience into the blinding noonday light. Suddenly, all of those terrible fears we have as people, as social groups, as a society no longer seem all that threatening because we’ve found a way to talk about them - and people are still listening.


(Louis CK on rape)

George Carlin used to talk about dragging an audience by the scruff of their collective neck to those fearful places they least wanted to go, and by doing so, making the audience glad he took them there. Carlin was a man of the 1970’s, and the 70’s were a golden age (perhaps THE golden age) of comedy. The idealism of the 60’s had shattered and in its wake lay the dark, angry realities of the Nixon era and the oil crisis. The idealism of the 1960’s was expressed through music. The anger of the 1970’s was expressed through comedy.

All great music is a kind of hypnosis which takes us out of our own minds. In order to receptive to great music, we need to be willing to divorce ourselves from control of our own mental state. The 1960’s, with both its idealism and its experimentation, was the perfect time for music to inflame America. But comedy has no such hypnosis - the very process of comedy is a primitive reflex that takes us back to cavemen’s expression of superiority and submission. Yet at the same time, comedy appeals to reason in the same way that music appeals to the heart. Music takes us out of ourselves, but comedy makes us more ourselves than ever. Comedy brings all of our anxieties to the forefront, and by making them ridiculous, it shows us that we need not be so anxious. Most great music makes us forget our worries, but most great comedy shows us why we should calm the fuck down.

The 1970s was the era of the Comedy Club. Comics were no longer received as borscht belt entertainers who owed it to their audience to charm them, the great comics weren’t even thought of as artists; they were thought of as old testament prophets, received by their audiences with fear and awe amid increasingly uncomfortable laughter. The comics owed us nothing, it was we who owed them. And our parents happily gave them their attention and allegiance. Beginning with Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trials in the late 60’s, comedy took on all the danger, the meaning, and the similarity to religious rites which Rock Music possessed just five years earlier. By the mid-70’s, comedy had fully replaced music as America’s engine of liberation. The old guard was still there, but it was comedy, not music, which best represented the generation gap. It was Richard Pryor, not Marvin Gaye or Red Foxx, who forced a discussion of American racism’s obscene hypocrisy into modern discourse. It was Joan Rivers, not Joni Mitchell or Phyllis Diller, who made women’s issues something which men could not ignore. It was Andy Kauffman and Steve Martin, not Lou Reed and Frank Zappa or Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar, who delivered the most avant-garde conceptual performances to the largest imaginable audience. Mel Brooks was making movies that skewered the prejudices of every American. Woody Allen made movies which demonstrated that comedy and intellect could go hand-in-hand. Monty Python and Fawlty Towers showed that English were just as willing to breach good taste. And it was a decade dominated by Saturday Night Live, not the Smothers Brothers.

And it was during this period that virtually every comic whom we’ve fed on for the last thirty years got his start: Jay Leno, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, Richard Lewis, Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Paul Reiser, Robert Klein, Stephen Wright, Lewis Black (though technically a comic playwright then), Richard Belzer, Garry Shandling, Tim Allen, Whoopi Goldberg, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay, and Eddie Murphy were all beginners during the 70’s. This was the era when the most powerful man in America was whichever comedian last got invited to sit on Johnny Carson’s couch.

But the righteous anger of the 70’s gave way to the complacent denial of the 80’s. Standup comedy had once again become something domesticated. Sure, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay and Eddie Murphy could sell out stadiums. But in order to retain the visceral thrill of Carlin and Pryor in their primes, they needed to reach so far into anti-social rhetoric that their comedy was drained of any humanity. The shocks of ‘Seven Dirty Words’ still feel liberating, but the shocks of ‘Dice Man Cometh’ simply feel mean and pathetic. True comic greats of the 80’s like Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks were only able to do so on a relatively small scale, and for a brief period before early deaths brought on by fast living. The only ‘80s comedian who came close to that level of edgy humanity while still maintaining a large audience was Robin Williams. And Robin Williams paid for that ability by killing his comic genius in dozens of movies that are completely unworthy of his talent. The defining comedian of the 80’s was probably Billy Crystal, who turned the experience of the Comedy Club back into something resembling a borscht belt vaudeville house.

Were things really so dire in America that we were scared of speaking honestly to one another? In the Reagan presidency we were lead for eight years by a consummate actor ready to show up to work for every carefully scripted public occasion. As the Cold War drew to its close, America began to be fed a daily diet of policy propaganda worthy of anything issued by the Politburo. We had the ‘Reagan Revolution’, the ‘Reagan Doctrine,’ ‘Reaganomics,’ the ‘War on Drugs,’ ‘Peace Through Strength,’ ‘Star Wars,’ and ‘START-I.’

The 1980’s was a time when we embraced false comforts, feared the truth, and feared people who might tell it to us. The incomes of the upper-class among us grew ever richer, while the incomes of the middle and lower classes stayed the same - at best. The suburbs were thriving, yet the inner cities fell into ever-increasing disrepair. Black celebrities like Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby were allowed into the mainstream of American life, yet they were allowed because they watered down their original talents to sell themselves to Middle America. In so many ways, White America turned a blind eye to Black America, and white comedy turned a blind eye to black comedy.

The 1980’s was no more or less despairing a decade than the 70’s. It was not an American golden era, it was a gold-spray-can on rusty tin. Even to rebel, you had to sell a piece of your humanity. Kids could once shock their parents with Beatles and Ray Charles - and by listening to such spiritually meaningful music, kids knew that they were on the side of enlightenment. But if you wanted to rebel against the manufactured pop of the 80’s, you generally had to retreat to bands in the Heavy Metal or Punk or Hip-Hop scenes who (at the time) were too interested in shock and disturbance to be bothered with writing something that could heal and soothe their listeners. In academia, the culture-wars were in full swing. It was no longer sufficient to do research for its own sake, it had to subscribe to an overarching theory. And any statement, even an off-handed one made in good intentions, that could offend one of the many special interest groups who took refuge on college campuses, was a potential career killer. The great movies of the 70's were character studies based around genuine actors and writers which managed to take on the entire American experience within them. But Jaws and Star Wars showed movies that greater money could be made without worrying about the movie's character development. And thus Hollywood producers had the only reason it needed to back away from projects which told the uncomfortable truths about our country. Thanks to Star Wars, Hollywood will never again make movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Network, Chinatown, M*A*S*H, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Blazing Saddles, Serpico, Deliverance, The Godfather, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter, which tell truths all too unpleasant about the country and era which made them. Instead, viewers can be treated special-effects ladden entertainment whose story can hopefully be told with some wit and charm, but not enough of either to distract from the machines that run our movies. Meanwhile, American-funded dictators were squeezing every political freedom out of Latin America and the Middle East, and civil wars were fought around the African continent with either side backed by the US or the USSR. The US lived in perpetual fear of the USSR overtaking them as the #1 military powerhouse, and lived in fear no less grand that Japan would eventually defeat America as the world's #1 economic powerhouse.

The 1980’s was an era when people were afraid of telling the truth. The 80’s managed to cover up the broken limbs of the past two decades with a band-aid. Anybody with enough money and privilege could ignore all the social decay around them without fear of retribution.

No wonder their comedy sucked...


(Louie on why it’s ok to hate your children)

800 Words: Boss Lear (Part 1_)

It’s easy to forget how good an actor Kelsey Grammer is. How can somebody who acts with such gravitas be such a joke in real life?  With the cocaine, the DUI, the insane right-wing pronouncements, the bimbo wives, and the sex tape (!) – it all sounds like a life that should more be lived by Sylvester Stallone than a Great American Actor. And yet this is the same guy who could play Frasier Crane for twenty years. Lest anybody condescend to Frasier and think it’s wrong to put such an accolade on Grammer, allow me to differ. Frasier was an extremely hard part to play, and only a truly great actor could have played him well. For two decades, this actor embodied America’s image of the two things all Americans hate most: pomposity and pretension. And yet he made the character not only hilariously funny, but also regularly brought a level of pathos and caring to the character. While so many other comedies of Cheers and Frasier’s vintage had pathos that felt like utter sap (Friends anyone?), Frasier’s problems felt real. For all his pretensions, he was not unlike the rest of us.

Other comedies of Frasier’s time have held up much better. Frasier was far from perfect show, and like so many 90’s comedies, it feels utterly ridiculous compared to the later sitcoms; the laugh track, the redundant plots and jokes, the idea that Frasier could continuously court stunning women, the ridiculous caricatures of intellectuals; it was all a product of its time. Later comedies like The Office, How I Met Your Mother, and Everybody Loves Raymond, all did the pathos thing too – and each of them felt more earned than Frasier. Later comedies like Arrested Development, Community, and South Park featured actual intellectual concerns instead of caricatures of them. But what is amazing is how in spite of so many faults, Frasier still holds up so well.

The success of Frasier boils down to two matters. One was that at its best, the writing was amazingly sharp. Frasier at its best was not satire, nor was there anything truly tragicomic about it. Frasier is farce, and amazingly well-executed farce. The other factor is the acting. Not all the stars of Frasier were equally good – the women on Frasier were not particularly distinguished, and the writers never figured out how to write to the actresses’ strengths. And John Mahoney felt a little wasted as Frasier’s father. What made Frasier unforgettable was the chemistry between the two brothers – Frasier and Niles Crane.  Whichever writer came up with the idea to give Frasier a brother more foppish, more pretentious, more ridiculous than him should get an Emmy just for that. Thanks to Niles, Frasier seemed human and in touch with reality. 

But what ultimately made Frasier work was the unbelievable chemistry between Grammer and his newfound acting partner, David Hyde Pierce. I suppose what the right-wing, womanizing Grammer and the monogamously gay same-sex-marriage activist Pierce actually thought of each other was anybody’s guess. But there was more in common than first met the eye: both dropped out of piano study at high-level institutions (Grammer at Julliard, Pierce at Yale), and both had mid-level theater careers that didn’t go much of anywhere before they came to television.  But whatever their dynamic off-camera, the onstage result was amazing. They looked and sounded almost exactly alike and they seemed to play on the same wavelength every time they shared scenes.

After Frasier, Grammer had a number of failed sitcoms – none of which I’ve ever seen and I’d venture no one else has either. Their failures were not surprising. It was frankly amazing that a heavy like Kelsey Grammer ever succeeded in comedy.  He’s a larger-than-life actor who arrived a generation too late for his acting style. Had he been born twenty years earlier, he might have become one of the greats in the last generation for whom stage was more important than film along with George C. Scott, Jason Robards, James Earl Jones, Hume Cronyn, Hal Holbrook, Sidney Poitier, Zero Mostel, Stacy Keach, John Lithgow, Frank Langella and Raul Julia. His acting style is far less natural than most actors we see today. It’s acting of a different time; an old English style, the classically trained style of acting that dominated before the world became in thrall to Marlon Brando’s naturalism. It may strike us as overacting, but it ensures that the stage is dominated and never dull. It’s acting for theater, not film. For outsize drama, it’s usually preferable.

This is why Boss is the perfect show for an actor like Kelsey Grammer. 

Jerry Lewis Telethon 'Bloopers'

Friday Playlist #5: Borschtbelt Comic TV Edition

Sid Caesar: The Clock


Closest Modern Equivalent: Tina Fey (I'm serious)

Milton Berle: Sparring with Sidney Shpritzer


Closest Modern Equivalent: Conan O'Brien

George Burns and Gracie Allen: Two Scenes


Closest Modern Equivalent: Any Male/Female Double Act, didn't exist before them.

Jack Benny:


Closest Modern Equivalent: Stephen Colbert

Ernie Kovacs: Chef Miklos Molnar


Closest Modern Equivalent: Tracy Ullman

Henny Youngman: On the Steve Allen Show


Closest Modern Equivalent: Mitch Hedberg

Advanced Playlist:
Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (on Parks and Recreation Tonight)
The Two Thousand Year Old Man







Closest Modern Equivalent: Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner

800 Words: How to Save The Simpsons

August 23rd,1998. We’d waited all summer long for The Simpsons Season 10 premiere. Season 9 ended in May with an episode called "Natural Born Kissers," during which Homer and Marge develop a taste for sex in public places. An instant classic. The Simpsons looks to be on a run without precedent: entering its second decade of 23 episodes a season with no demonstrable decline in quality. Greatest. Show. Ever.

What’s next?

I’m going into my junior year at Beth Tfiloh Community High School. I sit down with Jordan, Ethan and my father to watch the opener I’ve been pining for all summer. It opens with the usual 10-minute subplot. Homer and Bart see an ad on television for the benefits of having a nuclear power plant next to the water. At the end of the commercial, Mr. Burns announces the Grand Opening of Springfield Heavy Water Park: complete with waterslides, spraygrounds, lazy rivers, and the world’s largest Tidal Wave every five minutes (with footage of an old Japanese tsunami accompanying). Bart is entranced, Homer says this is awful, until Mr. Burns announces: “and for the grownups we even have a river of beer.” Then comes Smithers’s voiceover saying very quickly “The water in the river of beer is not beer, however, ingesting large quantities of it will get you drunk.” Homer is sold immediately. Mr. Burns closes by saying - “After all, would Springfield ever have a water park if there were any chance of the town’s children getting radioactive poisoning from the water?”

They both rush to tell Marge and Lisa, who disapprovingly stand over a newspaper article about the Heavy Water Park. Lisa lectures them about how this is putting the town at pointless risk. Marge agrees with Lisa until Maggie accidentally turns on the radio and they all hear Mr. Burns say “And by the way, we have a special nuclear power knitting competition. Whoever knits best, knits with power.” Marge says ‘We’re going.”

The line for the park’s Grand Opening wraps around the plant, and then goes into the plant and into the radiation chamber and beyond. The Simpsons are, of course, not there yet. In the car, Lisa once again says that we are pointlessly endangering our own lives by going to a water park next to a nuclear plant. Bart replies that he, for one, is looking forward to swimming in nuclear waste and will find the shiniest pool he can on the offchance it makes him into a superhero. Marge replies “Now Bart, I’m sure that the nuclear waste will give you cancer before it makes you into a superhero.” Marge gets her knit diorama of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. They step out of the car, go up to the line. But when they get there, Jimbo points out that Homer is missing his bathing suit and completely nude. The entire line laughs at him and they have to go home for Homer to change.

At the front of the water park, Mayor Quimby announces the grand opening, and gives a giant pair of scissors to Mr. Burns so that he may cut the ribbon. Mr. Burns, of course, falls down when handed the scissors, so Smithers cuts it instead. And the whole line immediately tramples all three of them. We see individual scenes of people having fun at the park. We see Nelson pushing Martin down a waterslide head-first. We see Groundskeeper Willie lifeguarding the pool, and when Chief Wiggum tries to get Ralph about to dive off the shallow end, he says “Oh my God Nah! (brief pause) You gotta put yar arms sepparrately, not togetharr.” We see Rod Flanders ask their Dad if Satan’s work is in the water, whereupon Ned answers that God made rich people to tell us what’s right and wrong.

By the time the Simpsons come back, there’s no line. Everybody is crowded around something and Mrs. Lovejoy is screaming. What’s all the commotion? Millhouse fights his way out of the crowd and comes up to Bart. “Hey Bart, I have a chest hair and my voice changed!”

But it’s not Pamela Hayden’s voice anymore. It’s Barry White’s.

(Cut to Commercial...)

Evan: What the fuck...

Mom: (from the next room) EVAN!

Evan: Sorry Mom, you gotta see this.

Dad: Wait. So was it the radiation that causes Milhouse to have a different voice?

Evan: Probably.

Ethan: Is Mr. Burns going to jail?

Jordan: I like the thing with Groundskeeper Willie.

(The Simpsons resumes)

The family sits on the couch, watching Kent Brockman report on the discovery of a ten year old whose voice “reminds you of the sweet silken sounds of your Prom afterparty.” The camera cuts to Milhouse strapped to a bed in a laboratory with test tubes in every direction. Milhouse says to the camera: “My mom told me puberty doesn’t happen until after you stop bed-wetting.”

Over the course of the next ten minutes, Lisa uncovers a shocking conspiracy. It’s revealed that it was not nuclear power at all which caused Milhouse’s voice to deepen. It was good, ol-fashioned puberty. Ten years ago, Professor Frink came up with an invisible force-field that could freeze the ageing process of Springfield’s residents.All the town’s residents would remain exactly as they were ten years ago, and so long as they stayed in good health could live forever (cue Homer eating jokes). But the force-field has broken down. The magnetism of the force-field came from a “metal so rare that the chance of finding more is truly, truly laughable. More laughable than the chances of surviving a black hole implosion in your back yard. I ask you Lisa, is that not laughable?”

(Second commercial)

Jordan: Wow.

Ethan: Are The Simpsons going to get older now?

Mom: I think so.

Dad: Well how could they keep The Simpsons going much longer if they didn't. The Simpsons couldn't possibly run another ten years with the exact same characters as they have right now.

Evan: No. No they couldn't.

(The Simpsons resumes)

Moe wakes up to find his face still more wrinkled and cries. Patti and Selma brush their hair in the bathroom (with synchronized strokes) and suddenly notice that their grey hair has turned more grey, they both scream. At breakfast, Ralph Wiggum is loses a tooth and his horrified mother comments “...and you didn’t even bite your spoon this time!”

As reports of looting and chaos lurk all around Springfield, Lisa assembles everyone in town hall and tells them what Professor Frink told her. Silence for a moment. Then everybody laughs. Why is everybody laughing? Marge goes to the stage and explains that every adult knew about Professor Frink’s “life ray.” It could keep them alive with their children forever and spare everyone the terrors of death. Lisa is shocked...

Lisa: You mean....people get older?
Marge: Yes they do. And we’re going to have to get used to getting older too.
Professor Frink: If only I knew why it stopped working.
Apu: I think this may explain something.

Apu puts in a video cassette and a video plays behind Lisa on a screen. The video displays footage of Homer behind the Quik-y-Mart, seeing a candy bar and trying to pass through the forcefield so he can grab it. He getting electrocuted five times until he gets a rageful running start and plows through it.

….Closing shot of the whole town sitting with jaws dropped. Homer whistling non-challantly as he sneaks out of the theater.

…...................

After the first decade, The Simpsons got old by staying young. Homer and Marge never reached middle age, Bart and Lisa never reached adolescence, and Maggie never got a personality of her own. Just think of what was missed. We’ll never get to see Bart get his comeuppance from Homer conspiring with the grandson Bart had with Cletus’s daughter out of wedlock. We never got to see Lisa get into a fictional Ivy League school where she becomes engaged to the socially concious egghead of her dreams, only to divorce him for something petty at the end of their wedding episode and marry Milhouse on the rebound. We’ll never get to see Homer’s exhaustion from Marge’s post-Menopausal libido - or Martin returning to be a Professor at Springfield University with a boyfriend in tow, or Nelson become a rich ambulance chaser, or Ralph Wiggum defeat Mayor Quimby in a mayoral election.

People usually date The Simpson’s decline to Season 10. Truth be told, it wasn’t a bad year. This was the year of Homer emulating Thomas Edison, and the Jerry Springer Halloween episode, and Pinchie the Lobster, and Max Power, and the Battling Seizure Robots. But compared to years past, the number of classic scenes was paltry. Ever since, the great moments seem to grow fewer by the year. The Simpsons has plowed through 11 more years in what can only be considered a concerted attempt to self-sabotage the legacy what was once the greatest TV show of all time.

Decline is rare among television shows. Much rarer than among movie directors or poets. TV is littered with shows that were cancelled too soon, but far fewer were cancelled too late. It’s hard enough to get a TV show on the air, let alone keep it on. If a TV show declines, it’s almost always replaced to give some other masochistic schmuck a chance. But one look at salary figures tells you precisely why it’s still on the air. When it began, the principle voiceover actors got $30,000 an episode. Today, they get $400,000. Matt Groening now pulls in roughly $18 million a year, and has a total net worth of $500 million. Money corrupts as much as power.

This isn’t a post to talk about what makes The Simpsons great. Just to marvel at how they’ve let that greatness spoil. The truth is, even when the Simpsons is a hollow shell of its former self (i.e. 95% of the time), it’s still more original than 3 out of 4 shows on television. But 3 out of 4 is a pathetic average for a show that once had Ozzie Smith get sucked into an alternate dimension or had Homer talk to an imaginary coyote voiced by Johnny Cash. If the people who made The Simpsons wanted it to be as good as it once was, they’d have tried harder. Maybe they wouldn’t succeed, but at least we’d see the effort.

The truth is that The Simpsons was always a show that gained its power from bending the line of plausibility. The show was composed of characters that looked, sounded and sometimes acted as though they were from another solar system. Yet they also seemed exactly like us. It was the first TV show with the flexibility to do anything from the surreal-est laugh gags to reducing us to tears. No TV show ever lived in a universe as large as The Simpsons, and few have ever dared to try.

What happened? The Simpsons’ universe got too large - so large that it couldn’t bend any further. It simply broke apart. Instead of concentrating on the perils and rewards of life in The Simpsons universe, the focus broadened in ways that it never should. Every time Fox cut a deal for another country to air the show, The Simpsons seemed to take a family trip. Parodies that used to last thirty seconds would last an entire episode. We got dozens of episodes featuring minor characters that should never have been made. They would be worked into the fabric of The Simpsons’ lives in a completely implausable way, clearly as a smokescreen to keep the Simpsons family as the primary focus. It never worked, but they’ve plowed the same soil for a decade, hoping for a different result every season.

They’ve been plowing bad soil for longer than they ever plowed good land. Whether on TV or in a dusty volume of poetry, artistic genius can be fickle. Whitman and Wordsworth both had ten years of great poetry before they turned out decades worth of crap. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas have not directed great movies since the 70’s. The Rolling Stones still coast on a reputation earned 40 years ago. There is nothing more pathetic than seeing something once great reduced to mediocrity. In 200 years, people will watch the early Simpsons episodes and still marvel at how great a comedy it was. But they’ll get to the second decade and quickly realize that the comedy turns tragic.

800 Words: Why I'll Never Go See The Producers

So I suppose I should begin this by saying that if anybody has tickets to The Producers which they can’t use, I would be delighted to take them off your hands. Of course I’ll watch The Producers, but this makes for a much better title than “Why I’ll Never Forgive Mel Brooks for Making a Musical Version and a Movie Version of the Musical Version of the Funniest Movie Ever Made.”



The original The Producers is the funniest movie ever made. Don’t believe me? Watch it. Still don’t believe me? Watch it again. Humor dates, but this is a movie that can never stop being funny. The whole point of The Producers is to make the grandest possible joke in the worst possible taste and then watch people be offended by it. And because the joke is meant to be every bit as offensive as it seems, you can never help yourself from laughing at the very fact that The Producers exists.

The very existence of The Producers is the joke. We’re watching people put on the worst Broadway Musical ever made in the hopes that it will fail. It can’t just be bad, it has to be the most spectacular flame-out in the history of Broadway. It has to close by the end of the opening number. And after months of searching, they find it: “Springtime for Hitler - An Early Morning Romp with Adolf and Eva.”



Hitler: the baddest bad person ever. The guy who killed a third of the world’s Jews and 44 million goyim. A guy whose depths of badness the the world did not even realize until sixteen years after he died at the Eichmann trial. A guy who in 1967 was still spoken of with living terror by a New York that still spoke Yiddish and an Israel whose very existence was threatened from all sides and a Europe which feared annihilation - even nuclear incineration would be better than Hitler. This is the guy who killed my Aunt Tzipporah and my Great Aunts Rachel and Chaya and Chaya’s family and my Great-Grandmother Miriam and countless other relatives.

And yet here were two Jewish seeming characters, clearly somewhat loony but nonetheless lovable, with the brilliant idea of exploiting people’s terror and grief and humiliation and trauma so that they could make a bundle of money. Max Bialystok and Leo Bloom took the most inhuman horror of human history and made it into a banal all-too-human scheme to get rich. For the first time ever, Hitler was human. This is not the Charlie Chaplin/Bugs Bunny caricature of Hitler, but the Hitler with a song in his heart. In 1967, with the stench of the ovens still in our noses, we were given permission to laugh at Hitler.



Whatever the musical’s virtues might be, this is why it will never be the real thing. I never saw the musical in the theater. But I’ve heard the soundtrack plenty and, god forgive me, I even saw the movie version of the musical. The original movie is a look back at the horrors of 1943 from 1967. The musical is a look back at the joys of 1967 from 2001. The original is an overwhelming assault on every front of good taste we know. The musical is pure nostalgia for a past in which there was good taste to assault. There is not a single moment in which the original Producers trivializes Hitler. It fully knows how outrageous Hitler is, and in that way it pays homage to all the people Hitler killed. The musical uses a movie about spoofing Hitler as an excuse to pay homage to things that had nothing to do with Hitler. The musical is the one that trivializes Hitler.

By the twenty-first century, the world of everything which the musical celebrates has vanished. The world of The Producers depends on people remembering an era before the movie house. This is the world of Vaudeville: variety shows, silent shorts, concert saloons, minstrelsy, dime museums, burlesque, cabaret, freak shows, trained animals, magicians, Shakespearean actors, jugglers, classical violinists, acrobats, mimics, chorus lines, strong men, poetry recitations and striptease. Whatever it takes to entertain the audience - The Show Must Go On.



If you’ll permit me some ridiculous fancy here, I would say that this is the era in which Max Bialystok grew up, and it’s probably an era which Leo Bloom has only heard stories, yet about which he dreams. Max Bialystok might produce a musical about 1943 in 1967, but in his mind it’s still 1926. In my mind’s eye, Bialystok was trained as a vaudeville producer, and his entire mentality shows that he is only comfortable when chaos is all around him. Chaos of the level that can only be provided by an eight-hour variety show. No doubt his training served him well at the beginning of his career, in which he could assemble shallow Broadway musicals with all sorts of empty spectacle. But as the American musical moved towards ever-more substantial fare, there is no place for a Max Bialystok in the age of Sondheim.

Ironically, it would be less than a dozen years later that the musical would lurch back into Max Bialystok territory, a place from which it still hasn’t escaped. If he hadn’t gone to jail, Max Bialystok would could have been the King of New Broadway - able to bring back the ‘let’s put on a show’ mentality without skipping a beat. All the old ladies he shtupped would be dead, and some of them would have left him money in their wills.



This is also the paradox of Mel Brooks himself. While Woody Allen was very clearly a hip New York intellectual of the 60’s and 70’s (even today he is...), Mel Brooks is a throwback to the early part of the century - so important to the comedy of his time because he is so clearly out of step with it. But he never evolved from there, and as a result, the quality of his work suffered immeasurably. He is one of the few filmmakers to have started his way at the top and worked his way down. It is almost a hard-and-fast rule that every one of his films will be slightly less funny than the last. Anyone who begins with The Producers and works his way to Dracula, Dead and Loving It has to answer for a lot. And even if The Producers musical revived his career, it might have been the most egregious step of all. Talk about Bad Taste.

And if you still don't believe me: read Roger Ebert

800 Words: The End of Jon Stewart?

The Anthony Weiner scandal looks to be, definitively and thankfully, over. As with every sex scandal in American history, historians will be flummoxed that Americans were so oblivious to the world that they devoted a two weeks of their free time to reading about the genitalic contents of their leaders (to say nothing of the year they devoted to Bill Clinton’s). But the Weiner scandal reached an especial level of stupid - even for a sex scandal. The fact that his behavior was even a scandal says something about our stupidity, and the fact that he would engage in it says that much more about his.

Yet just as this particular scandal was particularly stupid, its ramifications will reach particularly far. Unfortunately, not in the realm of politics, where neither the politicians nor the people who vote for them have learned anything more than they have from the last hundred sex scandals. The place where the ramifications will reach deepest is on Comedy Central. Whether or not we acknowledge it, it is possible that the Age of Jon Stewart just ended.

When the same historians of America stop marveling at The Weiner Twitpics, they will turn to things that matter (hopefully) and not hesitate to proclaim the 00’s a decade in which America was principally shaped by three people (or at least their handlers): George W. Bush in politics, Francis Collins in science (chair of the human genome project), and Jon Stewart in culture. Why Bush should be obvious and why Collins will become moreso as time advances. But Jon Stewart is at least a bit more elusive.

Anybody who’s sat through a Daily Show episode, let alone thousands, realizes that Stewart is as inconsistently funny as he is likable. There are fists-full of jokes that don’t work, a revolving door of variably funny correspondents, and an assortment of guests boring enough to make you think you’ve accidentally switched to Charlie Rose.

But when he’s on...oh my, when he’s on...

The pummelling starts out slow. All Stewart has to do is report the news as any serious newscaster would, albeit at a much faster pace so as to alleviate boredom. Then, with a sleight of hand subtle enough to stupefy a FOX newsman, all it takes is one word in a perfectly placed context - an ‘is’ or ‘has’ to frame the whole thing - and then the show cuts to a politician uttering a phrase so ridiculous as to defy belief. We have no idea how it would sound without the setup, but we double over every time. Not only because it’s funny, not only because we never saw it coming, but also because we can’t believe that we live in a country in which people this stupid run our lives. Then we cut back to Stewart, who in his best moments knows that no commentary can improve on what he just did. He just sits there, with a vague shake of the head, and we absorb it as if it were our own reaction, because it is.

Then the pounding starts to build. More news. A story that grew out of the first story, and before we know it we’re watching another political figure saying something even dumber. Now the cackle is loud enough to make the person in the next room wander over to ask what’s so funny. “Sit Down.” you say every time.

Stewart’s reaction is a little less modest this time and there’s a corny joke made in a corny voice. It isn’t funny, nor is it really meant to be. It’s his way of saying, ‘don’t pay attention to me, pay attention to what I’m showing you.’ Not that we need to be told twice, but self-effacement is the most important part of his brand.

Now comes a bit of editorializing. Not Lou Dobbs faux-grandiosity, not Andy Rooney triviality and certainly not Bill O’Reilly finger-pointed-at-camera. Usually, just a sentence long. “Gee, maybe they should try _____ _____ _____” And those last three words, whispered with the back of his right hand shielding his mouth from whoever’s backstage left. And out comes the most obvious statement imaginable, said as though it’s the most subversive thing anyone’s ever said. A mild titter follows that puts us at ease.

“I mean, if they didn’t think of that, maybe they could try this?” And out comes a random youtube clip or 80’s music video, the height of stupidity. A connection we could never have thought of ourselves between the youtube video and the important people on the screen, which makes us both elated by the comparison and depressed by how dumb these guys are. We suddenly find our ribs hurting, as though we’ve been endlessly walloped by a prizefighter, and still we can’t stop laughing.

And now all the clips we’ve seen and more are going together as the screen erupts in total anarchy. We’re assaulted by a montage that includes Star Wars, Stan Bush, babies dancing, John Wayne, Fox & Friends, cats playing pianos, Jimmy Buffett, Al Jolson, a human cannon ball and The Unabomber. We’re down for the count, the tear ducts are flowing, and we can’t stop laughing all through the commercials.

The apparent irony of it all is that the moment we’re worked into that helpless state is the moment Jon Stewart strikes the serious note and tells us why the world should be a different place than it is. The sermon is never more than three sentences long, and one would think we’d never be able to hear it through our spasms. But we hear it every time. We’re never more receptive than that moment when we’ve passed over from laughter to tears. For anybody who could do that to us, we would march on Poland.

What we’ve just been through is our generation’s defining experience; as crucial to our development as dissecting Dylan lyrics was to our parents, or dancing the lindy-hop was to theirs; an experience that lets us experience the freedom of a part of us which our elders forbade us to ever know was there.

Sex was the forbidden for our grandparents. Rebellion was the forbidden for our parents. For us, the forbidden is plain speech. The simple notion that we should say what we truly think has so long disappeared from modern life that we no longer recognize it as a necessary part of human nature, and therefore it has all the attraction to us of a fresh self-discovery. And how could it be anything but a discovery in today’s world? Businesses trample our need for plain speech with every TV advertisement we watch. Academics thumb their noses at our need for plain speech with every incomprehensible journal article they publish. Political actors exploit our hunger for plain speech with memes like ‘Straight Talk Express’ and ‘No Spin Zone’ as a means of feeding us a daily intake of political spin. Every time there is the whiff of a celebrity scandal, every television network pretends as though it is at all shocking; and we the consumers pretend that it is at all interesting. Financial firms pretend that the worries of your life will simply wash away so long as you invest your money with them, and do so while creating mathematical money-siphoning schemes too complex for the regulators to ever understand. Soundbites have become more reductive, intelligent speech more obfuscating, and the twain never doth meet. Our government was so convinced by half-truths of its own invention that it convinced itself to launch a (thus far) eight year war in Iraq - a country whom every major intelligence bureau in the world decided had weapons of mass destruction without a shred of empirical evidence. The lack of plain speech has become the most prevalent, and probably most destructive, feature of our daily lives. None of us are immune from its reach, and all of us have become less trusting of others as a result. As Peter O’Toole’s character said in The Last Emperor, ‘If you do not say what you mean, how can you mean what you say?’

The Princeton philosophy professor, Harry Frankfurt, perhaps put it best when he said; ‘One of the most salient features of our culture is that there’s so much bullshit.’ in his monograph, ‘On Bullshit.’ To Frankfurt, bullshit and lies have less to do with one another than lies do to truth - at least a lie is told to evade the truth, bullshit is spewed with disregard for it.

The world we grew up in was ripe to be skewered. All that was needed was two things:

1. A person who could dissect bullshit and do it in an engaging manner.
2. A person able to take on bullshit without getting smeared by it.

There were many who tried. Michael Moore gave it his all, so did Bill Maher, and Al Franken, and David Cross, and Chuck Palahniuk, and Garrison Keillor. To say nothing of Christopher Buckley, Dennis Miller and P.J. O’Rourke as advocates for the ‘other side.’ But none of them understood the one thing that would let them pass test #2.

Satire is comedy first, message second. It is impossible to make fun of pretension credibly if you have pretensions yourself. In each of the above cases, the humor seemed to serve a larger agenda. No matter how skilled each of the above humorists were at the mechanics of satire, their aim is so consistently in one direction that they can’t arrive at something which seemed like plain speech. Every time we watch Michael Moore yell at an unsuspecting passer-by, or Bill Maher growl at the camera, or Dennis Miller reference mid-16th century chiauroscuro, something in us suspects that they’re going over the top merely as compensation. Perhaps there is something in them no more credible than the people they foil.

Before Jon Stewart inherited the Daily Show, he was thought of as a comedian who never hit his peak, with a movie career that sputtered before it began. At one point in 1993, he was considered the prohibitive favorite to replace David Letterman at NBC’s Late Night; and instead watched himself passed over for a comedy writer with almost no on-camera experience named Conan O’Brien. He had no less than four failed TV shows to his credit. In all likelihood, he was the party to feel lucky to land The Daily Show, not the other way round.

When he arrived, The Daily Show’s aim was far lower. The content of the show was grounded in entertainment, not satire. Craig Kilborne had wanted the feel of a local news show, with spoofs of human interest news stories and celebrity snark being the driving forces and politics a distinctly secondary concern. It certainly seemed like the right choice for the time. It was the 1990’s, and politics seemed to have little interest to America except for how politicians’ behavior mirrored celebrities. The hook for the show was its edginess. His show was marketed, correctly, as one that made jokes too edgy to be shown on the on Saturday Night Live newscasts. Perhaps the early Daily Show’s most obvious decendent is The Soup, with the similarly vinegar-veined Joel McHale taking Craig Kilborne’s place.

Kilborne left The Daily Show after three years for what he had thought would be greener pastures - following David Letterman at CBS. While Stewart changed the format dramatically, he did so with almost all of the same writers, same production team and same correspondents whom Kilborne used. Comedians are, generally speaking, an intelligent group of people. So Stewart simply told his writers to start writing pieces about the issues they cared about. Perhaps, Stewart must have reasoned, if the writers felt an engagement in the material, they’d come up with funnier things to say about it.

As a comedian, Jon Stewart was always funny. But there was always something a little too sensible about him to be one of the immortals of traditional standup. Unlike Robin Williams or Louis CK he seems far too aware of the risks involved to throw himself completely into the performance. His comedy was always not only more substantial and more literate than other comedians, but also nicer. Sure, there was always the same vulgarity you’d find in Carlin or Pryor; but unlike the true greats, Stewart was always at great pains to show you that how generous, how principled, how earnest he was. Every breech of good taste would immediately be followed by a step back. “Can’t the aliens catch the people we don’t want.....like Kathy Lee Gifford?” he would say, followed by “Kathy Lee Gifford personally insulted me on her television program, and I think I’m still holding a grudge.”....just in case Live with Regis and Kathie Lee fans were not mutually exclusive from the people who frequented late night comedy clubs.

Even with the steel it must take to nightly hammer on points about the Iraq War which journalists never dared, there is something within Jon Stewart that naturally defers. He is at his best when his material does the speaking for him. Even his best shows are peppered with throw-away jokes that don’t work, if only to fill the space. But those jokes serve a second purpose as well - they deflect from the idea that Stewart is personally as funny as the things he’s showing you. Stewart’s personality does not radiate from the screen. If one were asked to describe the personalities of David Letterman or Craig Ferguson from their onscreen personas, it would be fairly easy. But to describe Stewart off-camera would be far more difficult. One would probably conjure an image of a vaguely likeable guy who’s interested in politics. It should then follow that a genuflecting sort like Stewart would leave a vacuum on the screen that would require more dominating figures to occupy the space he was loathe to take up himself.

Enter the Stepvhens. Two homonymically eponymous comedians who seemed joined at the hip from the beginning of their careers. One, the most dominating comic presence the Boob Tube has seen since the heyday of John Cleese. The other, the quickest comedic improviser in Hollywood since Johnny Carson.

It was Colbert and Carell, roughly simultaneously, who developed the correspondent persona which dominates The Daily Show to this day. Where Stewart was jocular and amiable, while the correspondents were deadly serious. Yet Stewart was the straight man and the correspondent the clown. It was the utter humorlessness of the correspondent’s delivery that made it so funny. In every show, they would present us with a deadly serious justification of behavior that defies logic in every way, and do so by contorting logic in a way so outrageous that we had to laugh, both delighted and scared by how easy they made it seem. What we were seeing was more than simply the bending of logic. Every time we watched the Stepvhens at their best, we got a brief glimpse into the ease by which bullshit can harden into Newspeak. On some level, it disturbed us as much as it delighted.

Inevitably, the Stepvhens were far too hot to keep around. Fundamentally, each could have had the other’s career, but both of them chose wisely. Colbert, the more imposing presence, becoming the second half of the Daily Show brand - an O’Reilly-style blusterer as self-aggrandizing as Stewart is effacing. But Carell, whose talent relies more on agility than strength, chose the harder path. He has taken the Daily Show correspondent model, softened it, and made it work for mainstream comedy. What is Michael Scott but the Stephen Colbert persona trapped in middle management? So much of The Office is clearly unscripted that one can’t help marveling at how Carrell makes his character consistently one-up the outrageousness of twenty other characters, each played by a gifted performer.

Neither Jon Stewart nor Stephen Colbert were ever the Orwellian prophets of some people’s fevered imaginations. In an authoritarian regime, a Jon Stewart would never have been possible. He’d have been assassinated about five minutes after the first time he aired a Lewis Black commentary. America is not an authoritarian country, and contrary to some people’s beliefs, Jon Stewart is neither the leader of a ‘resistance’ nor a man with an especially insightful ethical code for us all to follow.

The reason we find Jon Stewart compelling is because he speaks to a specific, nameless fear we all have. America is still very much a democracy, and every Jon Stewart super-fan who blames capitalism when his credit card maxes is evidence of that. But in a country where our leaders no longer inspire trust (whether they ever deserved trust is a question for another day), Stewart is the mouthpiece for that barely nameable fear we all have that all these bullshitters may be taking away our ability to ignore them; and that if they did, we’d never see it coming because they’ve been spewing bullshit the entire time. The day we wake up and realize that we are being forced to proclaim our allegiance to bullshit or face dire consequences, if or whenever it comes, is the moment when Bullshit will harden into Newspeak.

We’re not there yet. But the delicate dance between Stewart, Colbert and the Mainstream Media shows how perilously close we continually come. The MSM never knew what to make of them, and Stewarts relationship to the MSM provides greater evidence as to why he is America’s defining cultural figure of our time than any other facet of his career.

At first, there was no reason for the Media pay attention. Stewart was testing formats for a year and only hit upon the right one during the 2000 election cycle. But the first time when Stewart was indispensable was after 9/11. After David Letterman bravely went back on the air only six days after 9/11, Jon Stewart returned three days later. Letterman’s response, like ours, was one of dumbfounded incomprehension. It was riveting television, and very moving. But Stewart’s return was cathartic. It was Stewart who showed us the way forward with these lines:

"They said to get back to work, and there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position...We sit in the back and we throw spitballs – never forgetting the fact that it is a luxury in this country that allows us to do that...The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center. Now it's gone. They attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can't beat that."

It was the first moment when he changed the curve of America’s arc. Letterman was in the present, but Jon Stewart looked toward the future. More than any of the thousands of public figures on television during that time, he demonstrated that there was a proper way of looking forward while still honoring those who died. From this moment on, Stewart was impossible to ignore.

When Stewart proved impossible to ignore, the MSM made a grand show of embracing him with all too open arms as if to offer him a place as one of them - Newsweek and Time covers, profiles on every major network news show, pundits marvelling about how substantial he can make comedy seem. And as time went on, the MSM’s paeans to Stewart got increasingly ostentatious; as though their hope that he was one of them turned into fear that he excelled them at their own job. Stewart not only pointed out the tried and true hypocrisy of politicians, but also of the journalists who cover them. But it was Stewart himself who brought an end to the MSM's overtures by appearing on Crossfire, CNN’s 20 year showcase for out-of-work pundits looking for a quick buck, and telling them to ‘Stop Hurting America.’ At that moment, Stewart became larger than journalism itself. ‘Do your job’ he said to the MSM, because as a comedian he did his job better than most of them ever did theirs; and showed how much overlap on both sides there could be between the two.

To most of us, 2003 seems like so long ago that we forget how close we came to the bullshit hardening. It was one of the few times in American History when a sitting President declared criticism of his policies to be unpatriotic. Dissent was nearly silenced in the name of unity; in the face of an enemy that remained virtually unidentifiable.

For all the deserved criticism of the media during the Bush years, one consideration should be remembered. They were scared. After 9/11, most of us had enough good faith to believe that when our President says that there are Weapons of Mass Destruction in a country with the desire and capability to attack us, he damn well means it and knows something we don’t. Most people would believe their President on something that grave even had 9/11 never happened. But even if we take our politicians on faith, it’s the job of journalists to be skeptical.

In an age when scared journalists would not ask questions, it took a comedian to regularly put the questions we all should have been asking on television. It was not a question of bravery, because if Stewart were ever subject of intimidation, he could have simply hidden behind ‘I’m just a comedian on a comedy network.’ He has many times before. What motivated The Daily Show to ask questions about Iraq was not bravery, it was comedy. The fact that reputable journalists refuse to ask the most crucial questions about the outrageous facts their government claims to find without displaying empirical proof........that’s really funny.

After twelve years, the frequency at which The Daily Show still manages to reach those moments of stupefied hilarity is remarkable. The edges are certainly fraying, but the core remains fundamentally intact. After the capture of Saddam Hussein, people predicted the end of Jon Stewart. After the Stepvhens left, people predicted the end of Jon Stewart. After the election of Obama, people predicted the end of Jon Stewart. After his somewhat ill-conceived Rally to Restore Sanity, people predicted the end of Jon Stewart. Yet Stewart has remained through it all, because his hold on us is larger than any facet of his show. If it’s funny to make fun of a public figure’s pretense or hypocrisy, whether Conservative or Liberal, he’s never had any scruples about it (one can’t help it if there’s simply more comic fodder from the right).

And this is why his reluctance to go after Anthony Weiner is so troubling. Weiner was, in so many ways, The Congressman from The Daily Show. Granted, Weiner and Stewart are good friends. They had known each other since their college years, and it is not hard to see why they befriended one another. Weiner has long been known as one of the funniest members of congress, probably less afraid to use humor to emphasize his points than any present member. He is also, like Stewart, doggedly persistent; able to ask questions about the hypocrisy of fellow members which less brave congressman would never dare. Like Stewart’s favorite foils, he is also a dominating presence - in his way, as imposing a television personality as Stephen Colbert. The fact that such a man with so close to, and so similar to Jon Stewart could make such a grave (and gravely hilarious) lapse in judgement calls for all the more reason that Jon Stewart had a responsibility to treat him like any other.

But this was the first moment in the history of the show when you could feel Jon Stewart wishing himself to be a self-effacing standup comic again. The Daily Show provided him with a program where he could entertain people with the most biting possible humor and still earn plaudits for being principled and respectable. But how can a person be principled and respectable if he lampoons his friend on National Television? The humor of Jon Stewart was supposed to shield us from bullshit exactly like this. And now we’ve learned that like everything else, it doesn’t. The moment this story hit the headlines was, perhaps inevitably, the moment which Jon Stewart broke his contract with us. We would view life with all the silliness and directness which he demanded. And in return, he would provide us immunity from all the bullshit which politicians tell.

But every revolution betrays its principles eventually. That never means the revolution was a complete failure. Jon Stewart put plain speech back into our discourse. We’ve now elected a president who admits to marijuana and cocaine use without fear of stigma. We routinely share things on Facebook and Twitter which, eight years ago, would have taken Patriot Act Authorization to discover. Financial firms are finally being warned (if not held accountable) for obfuscating about the ways they make money. Academics are occasionally held accountable for writing unclear prose.

None of this is Stewart’s doing. But as history turns its wheels, it will need a figure who epitomizes these beginning steps in returning towards clear, plain speech; in which people speak their minds freely and without fear of giving away some advantage for having done so. Why would Jon Stewart exemplify this? Because no one has done so in public as well or for as long. Just look at what he says here:

"….And I may have mentioned during the discussion we were having that Harry Truman was a war criminal. And right after saying it, I thought to myself that was dumb. And it was dumb. Stupid in fact. So I shouldn't have said that, and I did. So I say right now, no, I don't believe that to be the case. The atomic bomb, a very complicated decision in the context of a horrific war, and I walk that back because it was in my estimation a stupid thing to say. Which, by the way, as it was coming out of your mouth, you ever do that, where you're saying something, and as it's coming out you're like, "What the fuck, nyah?" And it just sat in there for a couple of days, just sitting going, "No, no, he wasn't, and you should really say that out loud on the show." So I am, right now, and, man, ew. Sorry."

Try to imagine Bill Maher saying that.

Will Future Generations Understand The Simpsons?

Matt Zoller Seitz is a fantastic critic that I don't often agree with. He seems to have become an important voice only in the last year or two, and has since proven up to the task with a veritable blizzard of articles, the sheer volume of which would make John Updike proud.

Last week he released a piece asking a question that I've often thought about myself - entitled 'Will future generations understand the Simpsons?'. In the article he makes a number of claims I find ridiculous -- like that Seinfeld has dated far faster than the Andy Griffith Show. However, I still can't blame him for asking that question.

I would be willing to argue with anyone that The Simpsons is the greatest television show that ever was or will be (or at least the first decade of it...). It was the TV show which displayed to the world what television is most capable of being. Aesthetically, of course, it's barely functional. Yet the content held within their ugly style has a constant stream of extraordinarily crafted lowbrow, highbrow and middlebrow gags that never stop being funny no matter how many times they're viewed, quoted or remembered. No live show, not even Seinfeld, could keep up with the speed of The Simpsons comedy. And, unlike Seinfeld, the fact that The Simpsons could combine so much good comedy with cultural commentary both satirical and earnest makes it more than just a great TV show. To me, The Simpsons is the most extraordinary work of art created in my formative years that I've ever had the privilege of seeing. When people remember the end of The American Century, they won't first think of Philip Roth or Quentin Tarantino, they'll think of Homer Simpson.

And yet, as much as I want to believe that, I have my doubts as well. Posterity plays tricks on us all, and nobody knows what aesthetic priorities 2150 will have. It's entirely possible that future generations will have no idea why it's hilarious that Homer screams about Sherrif Lobo in his sleep. Or why it's incredibly clever to have Mr. Burns looking vaguely (more) like a monster and speaking in rhyme after shutting down the town's power. No two generations can possibly have the same frame of cultural reference, and the meaning of lots (perhaps most)of their jokes will become lost in history's dustbin.



Nothing dates as quickly as comedy. There once was a time when Jack Benny seemed edgy and Dennis Miller didn't sound pretentious. But even the comedy that did not age changed immeasurably before our eyes. No doubt there was a time when Jacques Tahi and the Ealing Comedies seemed LOL funny. Some poeple must have convulsed with helpless laughter as they watched Alec Guinness play eight characters who are all murdered in Kind Hearts and Coronets. To our eyes, movies like the Lavender Hill Mob and M. Hulot's Holiday are still comic gems, but they are not funny in the way the Zucker Brothers or the Farelly Brothers are funny. Perhaps we're more meant to enjoy those 'high comedies' -- we are amused by them even if we don't often LOL.



In a different style of comedy, like The Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy, we also don't LOL that much. But even if we don't, we're amused. There isn't a single gag, no matter how stupid, which is beneath them if they think it'll provoke a laugh. Their desire to entertain us is nothing short of manic, and even if we don't often LOL at their antics, we can't help being entertained by 'low comedy' because there is simply so much to watch that we can't help being swept up by its spirit.



In Chaplin and Keaton, or the Marx Brothers, something still weirder is at play. The gags still occasionally make us LOL. But even when they don't, we can't help admiring the artfulness, the sheer cleverness that went into crafting something so perfect, even if it's not as funny as it once was. At their best, their movies have all the elegance of a mathematical proof, and fortunately have the added appeal of sometimes being extremely funny.

So the cliche goes, a table lasts because it's well-made. Over the years, people may see its qualities differently. But something made with as much innovation and creativity as The Simpsons is bound to have something for everyone. It's highly probable that at least 3 out of 4 jokes will not hold up in 50 years, at least not in the way which we find them funny. And yet it's entirely possible that people will still watch The Simpsons and find them as entertaining as we do. How will they see it? I have no idea, but I think it's safe to assume that they'll find something worthwhile in it.


Springfield Gorge. As far as I'm concerned it's the greatest moment in the history of television and exhibit A as to why the Simpsons will last forever.