| |||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News  PeoplePolitics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon People stories, go to the
People home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon People Nothing Personal Brilliant Careers Nothing Personal What's Your Story? The Raw and the Cooked - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Looking for life in all the wrong places
- - - - - - - - - - - -
"In the time of hedonist fascism, nobody dares scream or judge what is so pathetically suspended in mid-air, which is life itself ... Meaning that if you aren't mad, you're crazy -- we are being eaten body and soul and no one is fighting. In fact, practically no one sees it, but if you listen to the poets you will hear, and vomit up your rage." "The thing is that people don't have to try not to feel anything anymore; they just can't ..." June 16, 1999 |
I was to cover some comedy performances this week. Mainstream comedy is an endangered species, because political correctness is doing everything it can to clip all its limbs into useless stumps and/or kick it in the head until it stops moving altogether. Comedy, at its most potent, tends to be based on cleverly viewed insights about the eclectic differences between people and miscommunication between groups. These hearty revelations can now be identified not as comedy but as sexism, racism or frightening and offensive to our corporate sponsors. The funniest people in the world, I've always felt, were smartly cruel teenaged boys, and those who recognized this natural comic supremacy and emulated it. Very little that is astonishingly innovative and funny has happened in comedy since the 1970s, which was the absolute zenith -- the adolescent male comedy renaissance of the world. "Saturday Night Live" was the gold standard, up until the original members started dying. National Lampoon writers were comedic Sun Gods. All the comic greats were wretched cocaine fiends, and were boldly and dangerously sly and irreverent about everything. And somehow, back then, major corporations were less Maoist and killjoy-esque about censoring them to death. The current corporate oligarchy that controls fame would never bring us another vague, disturbing wonder like Andy Kaufman; only low-brow, obvious, scatological sports fan humor enjoyed by Adam Sandler and other mullet-necked dipshits can get any serious backing these days. The more weird, nervy and sophisticated stuff either gets ghettoized to HBO or never makes it out of the dining room. Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal are America's beloved comic laureates now, and who cares? Does anyone actually find them scathingly, electrically funny? As far as I can tell, they've just become incredibly adept at provoking thoughtful semi-chuckles while carefully being totally inoffensive to anything that ever walked or crawled. Thank God for the Onion, the great hope of comedy today, which previous to its new mega-popularity seemingly subsisted solely on ad sales for Wisconsin subway sandwich shops and a tall, round student apartment building that apparently never got any tenants, ever. I'm absolutely stupefied by what people will laugh at lately. Last week, I saw two "comedy" events that caused me varying degrees of terrible pain. One was Richard Belzer, an actor from the defunct TV show "Homicide," having a "comic conversation" with talk show maven Joy Behar as part of a lecture series at the 92nd Street YMCA, which is where the white, middle-aged campus that is New York's Upper East Side goes and gets its middle-of-the-road, leather sandal-wearing, intellecto-yucks. Belzer was unscripted and a little wine-smeared, telling stories from his life, peppered liberally with the "f" word; a "lively" discussion about how he bought his summer home in France by suing Hulk Hogan, who accidentally choked him into unconsciousness on live TV, once upon a time. I think I might have been the only person in the audience actually thinking of writing the Hulk a glowing fan letter for this accomplishment. I snuck out of the auditorium before the first half-hour; it was just too gruesome, all those gray-haired, expensive glasses-framed people tittering in a civilized fashion, ho ho ho, their tired, pear-shaped desktop-computer asses slog-full of Chardonnay and goat cheese, having a little low-volume fun-time before collapsing from the weight of their adult responsibilities into a seven-hour rest. Belzer was the laugh-show equivalent of the calisthenics done in old-folks' homes, where anything but raising your arms and wiggling your fingers is too strenuous for the withered, juiceless body. Real, hard laughing is too demanding, apparently, for the jerky-dried baby boomer spirit. I couldn't seriously cover the Belzer travesty, I decided, so I checked the New York papers for some off-Broadway thing that promised serious, jugular entertainment. I chose the show with the most hyperbole: "Thwack," whose press suggested its two stars were the Next Big Thing. Now, I know from being close to theater and its workings that having a full-scale Off-Broadway show in New York is about as easy as getting together a bobsled research expedition to Antarctica. You have to make a whole lot of people with money and connections fanatically believe in you. Then you have to convince them to give you money with solid blood-pact contractual commitments, which, given the palsied economic norm of American theater, is tantamount to hustling someone into gambling thousands on a long shot double-exacta. Then, you have to sustain this hypnotism of the investors for the six or seven months it takes for various time-eating fuck-ups to happen, i.e. other shows' unplanned extensions to peter out, too-similar shows to close, etc.
| ||
 |
 |
 |
 |
Next page |