While “We Do Stand-Up” takes a hiatus, we thought we’d compile the handful of notes we took into a single, quasi-diaristic/quasi-essay format.
April 7th, 2009:
What else did we see at Tufts? We wandered around the hill with a t-shirt on our head — lost — while a co-conspirator tried to pitch the show to potential attendees; we watched a basketball hoop turn in dismay at a terrible shot; we watched the Governor of California ask what in fuck Denmark was; we watched Cheap Sox dance around the space at the end of the show, some literally kicking off the walls to gain momentum; and we saw store workers rename themselves ‘Panic Attack’ and ‘Yes, We Do Accept Debit,’ for reasons no one could quite figure out at the time.
April 24th, 2009:
Behind the Scenes: New York:
“I’ll bail you out if I have to,” Jack said, “but I really don’t want to.”
“And remember,” John said. “Thomas Barrett, 100th Precint.”
I start to write it down.
“Please, please don’t actually have to use it.”
*
*
Outside the door, I scribble a note, tear if out of my notebook, and try and shove it beneath the door. It reads: “Don’t worry. We’ll write.”
*
“Shrek: the Musical? That’s a thing?”
“Yeah. It’s a thing.”
“Fans, welcome to Opening Day at Shrek the — ”
“Be sure to come back for Tiny Tim Tuesday, where anyone who brings in a midget gets in free.”
“What sort of bored, listless producers would do that?”
“I don’t know. But I like the fact that it’s baseball.”
“Brawls — ‘That was an E-flat and you know it!’”
“Say the thing’s 90 minutes long. 70 minutes in, everyone stands up and — with the performer’s knowledge, without, I don’t know — starts singing, ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame.’”
“The similarities between baseball games and gimmicky musicals are really striking.”
“You wouldn’t expect it, would you?”
*
And then we saw a young man from Indiana play host to some fine musicians:
*
*
P.S. If you want to see another reason for the trip, click here.
May 28th, 2009:
Hugging as a ‘phenomenon?’ What? Are the Beatles on Ed Sullivan just to hug? What? Time limits on hugging? What? From the article:
Parents, who grew up in a generation more likely to use the handshake, the low-five or the high-five …
OUR PARENTS CAN’T HANDLE THE HUGGING. THE YOUNGER GENERATION CAN’T HANDLE THE ELDER GENERATION’S CONFUSION. HUGGING IS WHAT SENT JAMES DEAN OVER THE CLIFF.
Again:
She added: “I hug people I’m close to. But now you’re hugging people you don’t even know. Hugging used to mean something.”
Remember in my day? Hugging used to mean something. Those days are gone. Long gone. And remember back in their day, when people would remember back-in-my-day’s about — oh, I don’t know — the war?
June 11th, 2009:
At the beginning of the month, Dan and I went to New York to pitch a few things to a television network.
Three items worth noting:
1. Not only did they not know why we were there, not only were we directed to the wrong person handling the matter, but the representative said they’d taken “three pitches last month from comedians,” which means — given how long it took them to complete the sentence — that they were working very hard.
2. This was our DVD background:
As Dan explained it, his girlfriend had just told him that they needed to go on a break, and he discovered this picture on Christmas — his what-he-thought-was-his-girlfriend making out with a random stranger, and there there it was, and it ruined his Christmas.
After a moment, I let the representative know we should hit play.
3. The last thing we had planned was to offer the representative a subscription to Cat Fancy.
June 13th, 2009:
Come on, now. David Letterman is not Don Imus, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, a politician, shock jock, or Bill O’Reilly. He is David Letterman — he is himself, not a one of these spurious analogies — the inheritor of Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, and Ernie Kovacs.
I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but if I was in your position, the story would be seem to be this: Sarah Palin took a joke literally. And that’s it. In the interview with Matt Lauer, she mentioned that it was the 14-year old she took with her to the baseball game. Now, did Letterman know this? Probably not. Is the 14 year old ‘media famous’ in any way? No.
Some comics operate under a dualistic nature. It’s a kind of joyous hallucination that comes over you, and it keeps thought fluid — or, at least, it allows for that possibility. That doesn’t mean we’re not conscientious of social responsibility, morality, or the ‘public discourse,’ but it also doesn’t mean that our comedy is an immediate part of that either. It’s mistaking A for A.’
What’s discouraging is when people step into this pocket of nonsense, this crossroads where — and this isn’t immediately empirically verifiable, but I get the impression from reading faces, tone, and language — a kind of malicious nihilism and glee meet:
In another one of those delicious, you-know-you-love-it-even-as-you-roll-your-eyes media flaps
Because this doesn’t matter, but — somehow — there is content.
Letterman issued a clarification of sorts, saying he was referring to 18-year-old Bristol Palin, who is an unwed mother. “I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl,” he said on the air, but conceded that the line was “an act of desperation.”
But that’s not exactly an apology, not even the weaselly “If anyone was offended by my remarks, I’m sorry …” variety. And it’s far short of what Palin says she wants.
Of course he’s referring to Bristol. She’s been a target of jokes since the Palins entered into the 2008 campaign, and anyone who’s even remotely familiar with Letterman knows that that isn’t the tradition he heralds from, that this kind of behavior isn’t in his repertoire, and that the personal nature of the statement from Palin continues to reflect more on the nature of the Governor’s personality — angry, personal, often misses the point — than anything else.
Now, why would you — the Post — frame it that way? “Apology?” “Weaselly?” There’s no need for Letterman to apologize. Palin took a joke literally, and then got angry in public. We don’t live in a world where jokes are taken literally, and if we did, I suppose a lot more social drinking of mercury would be involved and required.
And it’s disingenuous for you to frame it that way, and chances are, you know it.
But Letterman strayed into dangerous territory when he decided to poke fun at a public figure’s child. Sen. John McCain learned this lesson in 1998 when he made a crude joke about Chelsea Clinton, then 18. He apologized, both to the president and in the press.
It really isn’t dangerous territory. It’s dangerous territory when you’re a German cabaret comedian railing against the Nazis in a cabaret filled with Nazis. And — again — Letterman is Letterman, a comedian. McCain is a Senator.
Now, if you don’t mind — a lot of us have a lot of work to do.
Love and puppy asthma,
E.
*
In a related bit, the NYPost’s take on it — “Same, smug” — is borderline illiterate.
June 24th, 2009:
Stephen Weissmann, M.D., offers us a new biography on Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin.
The book is fairly straightforward: it is a stringently post-Freudian reading of Chaplin’s life and work, but it brought us to this point: while creative acts can produce therapeutic balms, and while we write with great deference to speech therapy, music therapy, and all other art-based therapy, a lifetime of creativity is not a substitute for a lifetime of therapy, as the book’s disappointingly limited exegetical strategies seem to suggest — i.e.,
“Telescoping memories of Chaplin’s failed actor parents, coupled with equally painful memories of his own experiences with ’stage death’ … were enough to provoke a massive and disruptive level of performance anxiety on the eve of his long anticipated moment of stardom …”
or:
“Charlie had witnessed his father’s descent. His screen character commemorated it symbolically.”
This is as narrow as it is misleading; the world aims at totality. “Visions of Joanna” isn’t about Joan Baez because their names are similar, nor is Charlie’s screen character his own father because he saw what he saw.
More to the point, though: comedy is not a sickness or some sort of afterbirth occasioned by a psychic wound; it is an ability. The best construct their words with an almost geometric precision. Compare Johnny Carson and Justice Leibowitz in David Frost’s The Americans.
Carson: … I had a very brilliant young biologist on the show by the name of Paul Erlich. He brought up this point that if you don’t limit the population somewhere along the line, inevitably it will become an unbearable situation of just too many people.
Frost: But everybody says that your show, by keeping everybody up, is contributing to that.
Carson: We have a lot of commercials, David.
…
(When asked if he’s ever broken the law.)
Leibowitz: … I guess there isn’t a person in the world that hasn’t broken the law. I suppose traffic laws, something of that kind. But what law are you talking about?
Frost: I just wondered. Speeding, perhaps?
Leibowitz: Speeding or parking. Gosh, how much do you have to pay to park your car here in this neighborhood? About three bucks for a couple of hours? Pretty expensive, isn’t it?
(Laughter.)….
Because here’s the thing: a minefield part of it is based on pre-conditioning, and pre-conditioning and misconceptions aren’t necessarily a bad thing; most are opportunities in disguise, but it is something to correct, an arrow pointing in a different direction. If a comedian is introduced as just starting out, even when he’s not, it sets a baseline of expectation; if a comedian is introduced with a post-Freudian frame, the durability of the reader’s ego/counter-voice comes into play. If it’s a strong one, then they can rightfully say it was just another piece of the puzzle and move onto other parts; if it isn’t, then it sets up some sort of disappointment.
One of the tenets of modern comedy is, arguably, “Yes, and –.” It accepts everything and builds. It would have been nice to see that willingness to continually turn itself on its head play out in the book, too.
October 1st, 2009:
via FP:
So, five years later, I have a half-assed blog question to ask — did Jon Stewart hurt America by driving these shows off the air?
If you’re expecting a lengthy defense of the Crossfire format right now, well, you’re going to be disappointed. My point rather, is to question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse. Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have…. Hannity. Is this really an improvement?
That’s mistaking one side of the train track for the other, or — as I’ve written before – A for A’. Stewart had nothing to do with that kind of programming, or that kind of network. And it’s a simple strategy that’s pursued — and I’ve written before about this, too, but I’m not going to link it here — : unnecessary arguments attract attention. The audience pushes back, and then the networks push on. Shows aren’t regularly taken off the air because they regularly abuse the public space, and that’s what made Crossfire such a little ping! out there.
It’s not about right-left once together splitting into right/left individual pods. It’s that the march of the unnecessary marches on.
October 26th, 2009:
We discovered that when the full moon runs out of Lycanthropic-related ideas, the local burrito place becomes a full-on, get-your-actual-freak-on-in-an-actual-burrito-place dance club, complete with women throwing their hair and the tops of dress shirts left to the elements. Kind of reminds me of the time Clinton fell asleep in a cheap strip joint grading papers while sitting in front of a decapitated goat’s head — neither are supposed to happen.
