Category Archives: comedy

Sketch comedy in the age of Discord

Posted by on 01/05/2022 2 comments

Where do the “Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players” go when there is no more prime time?

demon-cake from baking championship contestant vomiting on another cake

Built into the name”Saturday Night Live” is its nature as “appointment tv”. Wickedly subversive in its heyday, the current incarnation seems to have nothing left to subvert. It’s target age-group doesn’t watch tv anymore, they hang out in Twitch virtual rooms, watch 15 second TikTok videos, or log on to Discord servers.

SNL debuted in 1975, when there were only 3 networks and a handful of VHF channels. You want to talk about an “Influencer”? Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show dominated late night t.v. and had a huge role in defining popular culture. Today the late night genre offers us exhausted “Jimmys” in suits, aping the talk show rituals, sets, and sidekicks of their grandparents era. Ratings are way down: there are too many online and cable alternatives, and the guests are too scripted. You will not find the spontaneity of guests who regularly drank and smoked prior to going on air. The Charles Grodins, Robert Blakes, Angie Dickensens….now that was reality t.v.

Thus the SNL parodies of the time didn’t need to squeeze too hard to get the juice. Remember Dan Ackroyd’s impersonation of Tom Snyder, host of the Tomorrow Show? It was considered wildly over-the-top at the time. Compare it to anything the current show’s breakout star, “walking 4th wall” Kate McKinnon does.

If you believe in Truth in Comedy, it’s important that the writers and performers on SNL reflect the lived-experiences of their age cohort. Instead they are writing and acting in sketches that take place in a bygone reality. I sympathize, they have an impossible task, teenagers and young adults today simply barely interact with each other outside of virtual spaces. What you are seeing in SNL is nostalgia performed by people who never made the memories.  

Imagine a skit set in a Thanksgiving scene: probably a bunch of family members arguing, someone has a secret, there’s a weird overly-political uncle, etc. In reality, although a family will be in the same room, anyone under 30 is going to be glued to their phone, in some version of cyberspace.

So how do you make comedy without interaction? SNL hasn’t figured that out – nor has practically anybody – so they resort to barf jokes, poop jokes, and endless clunky impressions.  

I’m not saying that the original SNL didn’t have some of this. But the shock value of a character throwing-up in a sketch is just not the same the 5th decade in.

The closest I’ve seen of someone seeking comedy in the virtual world is Bo Burnham, who’s Netflix special “Inside” is shot in an attic room, with him alone, singing songs about things like chatrooms, Facetime, Jeff Bezos, and Instagram. In the final frames you see him sprawled out on the floor, alone and surrounded by technology. It’s sort of a “Krapps Last Tape” for the internet age. But it’s more wistful than funny.

Bo Burnham: “Inside”

Is comedy in the same predicament? Throughout the ages comedy has relied on elements like misapprehension, mistaken identity, false bravado, exaggeration, absurd physical action, mockery (especially of the powerful by the powerless), and exposed hypocrisy. Virtualization, mediated reality, and the identity curation endemic to social media, inhibit all of these. How can a status difference “land” when we don’t know anyone’s real identity (“on the internet no one knows you are a dog”)? How can an exaggeration retain its power when every TikTok video features grotesque facial affects and speeded-up helium dialog?

Comedy also can’t exist without consequences. Seeing two clowns bop each other over the head with harmless foam baseball bats over and over gets boring very quickly. When consequences are “virtualized”, e.g. the worst that can happen is you lose armor points in an RPG, or you have to create a second account in Twitter, then there’s is nothing to get worked up about, or to laugh about.

Compare this to a historical phenomenon where the stakes cannot have been higher: “Jonkunnu”, a Christmastime holiday in the U.S. during slavery, during which the enslaved would dress up in grotesque costumes and mock their enslavers – I imagine the subtexts of danger and subversion must have made have made a fertile ground for hysterical laughter.

When considering the harms of mediated reality, I remember a comedy improv class where the teacher, in counseling us towards naturalism, stated that the most fascinating thing in the world was an awake young baby. People are naturally drawn in, because every motion and utterance is spontaneous and true. Which is the opposite of mediated reality.

Don’t make a sad face though. There are 3 trends that bode well for comedy:
1. Ever-greater technological privacy invasions: tracking, biometrics, facial recognition, etc. which remove anonymity
2. The inevitable class exploitation that will take place on the internet, of which Jarod Lanier has forewarned, which will create status disparities
3. Emerging general artificial intelligence’s baked-in inflexibility and tyranny

So we will eventually have a return to consequences, status differences, and cyber-overlords to mock. The question is, will the algorithms allow anyone to tell a joke?

Has success ruined Marc Maron?

Posted by on 06/07/2015 2 comments

marc maron in designer jeans

 

Marc Maron’s redemption from life in the lower-middle tiers of the comedy world began in 2009 with his podcast, “WTF”, done from his garage in Highland Park, a hipster-friendly neighborhood in Los Angeles.

“WTF” features a musical intro that features the sound clip “Call off your dogs!” which is, I think, originally shouted by Heathcliff, the tortured hero Wuthering Heights, although of course the idiom goes back further than that.   Maron like Heathcliff feels continuously under attack, by the memories of his own neglectful upbringing, by his own demons, but mainly by the successes of others.

As a showbiz professional Maron had the role of the ultimate “Insider’s outsider”, eclipsed by the good fortune accorded to his peers: Louie CK, Sarah Silverman, Denis Leary, and anyone who made it into the cast of Saturday Night Live.  But unlike most carefully-calibrated celebrities, he was mad as hell and going to tell you about how angry and jealous he was –  an extremely compelling point of view in a society that says that as long as you pursue your dream, you will end up a winner (see blog post “Not tickled by the magic feather“).

Here then was the worst nightmare of our national myth:  that you can try your best, be pure of heart, but due to bad luck fail miserably as you watch others, perhaps less talented and dedicates, succeed.  Maron feels instead the more ancient truth of Psalm 73:3 “For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.”

Who wouldn’t feel sympathy hearing about his struggles to understand being rejected by the pasha-like Lorne Michaels in favor of the lesser lights that have made up the cast of late-stage Saturday Night Live?

Marc Maron shared the struggles in his personal life as well: his difficulty maintaining relationships, his lack of male friendship, a certain weirdness with food, and loneliness on the road.

But his fortune slowly started to change.  The podcast caught on.  He hosted, and often reconciled with, many of his former comedy buddies who had since become luminaries.  This made for dramatic “podio”.

More success followed, spots on NPR and a development deal that resulted in his show “Maron” on IFC and Netflix.  the series follows his own life: Maron lives in a little house in Highland Park, with cats, doing podcasts and kvetching. His character is  entertainingly unapologetic about not living up to the mainstream requirement of being an “alpha male”, and there are some funny moments when he makes a go and fails at doing traditionally male activities: retrieving a dead raccoon from a crawlspace (he doesn’t know what a crawlspace is), and dressing up in a gaudy Los Angeles Kings jersey in an attempt to get into the spirity of watching a hockey game with Ray Romano.

As the show develops we begin to see something different from the rough-edged persona from the “WTF” podcast, instead a carefully-curated character who is not only quite successful but fiercely competent, a bit prissy, and perhaps a little entitled.  Maron lives in a beautifully-appointed, carefully-landscaped house, with tastfull mid-century furniture and Pottery-Barn-style paint jobs.  His wardrobe changes frequently and would make Ira Glass jealous: hipsteresque Western shirts with pearl buttons, up-market boots and jackets, and designer jeans (see his New York Times article “My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants“).

Maron’s social life becomes lavish as well.  An attractive woman 19 years younger sends him a fan email with a photo of her vagina, she then picks him up at the airport for a “sex-fest” and later becomes his girlfriend.  A pretty single mom picks him up in a coffee shop when his much younger barista sex-buddy is too busy for him.  A realtor insists on being “taken” up against a grand piano in the  empty house she is showing.  And Maron is often accompanied by a coterie of less-successful male comedians.  He hires a very funny, Maronesque young assistant (Josh Brener) who worships him and wants to be him.

This is a very different dynamic than the disheveled man we imagined behind the mic, doing his podcasts after a cat food run.  The factors that made the podcasts interesting (and they weren’t always, there are plenty of boring ones) began to become less apparent on the t.v. show Things like figuring out the degree to which his lack of success was due to personality flaws versus bad luck or fate; enjoying see the example of another man, my age, dealt with loneliness and a feeling of “not fitting in”;  and finally seeing how someone who was in the popular culture navigated how his personal life should be integrated into that culture.

The last issue as an example, the interplay between his personal life and his onstage performances,  became reduced in the t.v. show to a plot-advancing devices with little nuance, e.g.,  Maron alienating his new girlfriend by revealing aspects of their relationship in public.  This may have indeed occured, but it’s treated in such a broad comic way that seems very different from his more confessional radio style.

As this interesting outsider voice becomes muted, there becomes less to talk about and the episodes become more confabulated:  there is a pot-smoking sequence with David Cross (whom I love) where he gets Marc’s parents high, resulting in a sodium pentathol-like effect where they reveal their caring side to the tune of a sitar playing in the background.

To his credit the issue of success is occasionally addressed through interplay with his less-successful buddy comedians (Andy Kimmler and Dave Anthony).  There’s a revealing episode at the end of Season 2, where Marc and his friends make a trip to a trailer park in the desert to check on an older hack comedian who has stopped answering texts.   It turns out he has suffered a heart attack and died in his trailer, after writing the setup – but not the punchline to the joke “I can’t stand magicians.You know what would be a real trick?”.  The comedians struggle with how to finish the joke (my favorite punch line “You know what would be a good trick? If someone could stop this crushing pain in my chest”.) just as much or more than they struggle with their feelings about his death.  During the long period while they wait for an ambulance Marc is ribbed about an upcoming appearance on the Charlie Rose show and is forced to admit that he is now a cut above, but insisting he has not become arrogant about it.

Inevitably the show is going to have to explore whether Maron’s success, getting what he wants, makes him happy.  It’s easy to say that it won’t, that he’ll be like Karl Knausgaard, grumblingly collecting accolades. That would certainly be in-character, however the degree to which the show can honestly address this issue, even if it means exposing artifice in his previous “pure” persona, will determine whether the show stays interesting.

 

 

Whatever

Posted by on 11/01/2009 Comments Off on Whatever

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In the Woody Allen film “Whatever Works” a tone-deaf Larry David plays a Woody Allen manque and falls flat.  It doesn’t help that he’s plugged into a poorly-written formula comedy.  I love Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” but he appears to be one of those supremely successful orchestrators who, like Madonna, cannot get outside themselves, or rather, can’t get inside themselves.

The character he plays “Boris Yellnikoff” is crueler and more astringent than Alvy Singer or any of Allen’s previous protagonists.  When the adoring Evan Rachel Wood appears with snowflakes in her eylashes, I literally cringed.  I did the same when Mariel Hemingway’s character appeared in “Manhattan”.  I can’t suspend my disbelief that these attractive young women are attracted to self-congratulary old farts.

A far more realistic scenario played out with the relationship between Max Von Sydow and Barbara Hershey in “Hannah and Her Sisters”.  Hershey, although younger,  doesn’t play a noble innocent, and Von Sydow, although bitter, is gritty and truly wounded.

In order to be successful, “Whatever Works” should have been written as a broad, character-driven comedy.   In that case the lack of realism wouldn’t have mattered.  They key is “broad” though, think early Woody Allen.  An alternative would have been to go for realism – to make Boris Yellnikov a serious person, someone more like Sherwin Nuland’s old-world father in “Lost in America” (the book, not the Albert Brooks movie), someone who has seen their beliefs fail.  This would raise the stakes tremendously when the character finally goes against all his fears and falls in love, only to be abandoned.  Von Sydow and Hershey approached this in “Hannah”:

“Lee, you’re my whole world….Good God.   Have you been kissed tonight?  Yes, you have.   You’ve been with someone!

Stop accusing me!

I’m too smart. You can’t fool me!  You’re turning red!     Leave Me!  Oh, Christ! What’s wrong with you?

I’m sorry.

Couldn’t you say something?  You slither…”

Tough stuff and I liked it a lot better.  “Hannah and her Sisters” stopped there though, it tacked on a sentimental ending with a pregnant Hannah and all the main characters neatly paired up.   I wonder if Woody Allen subconsciously put Larry David, in some ways his spiritual heir, into a movie he can’t have helped knowing was a weak imitation of earlier work.  On the other hand he has put out a lot of weak imitations.

Most of the reviews I’ve read for “Whatever Works” have praised the “sunny” performance by Evan Rachel Wood is the best thing about the movie.  To me this is an intellectual shortcut because Wood was in fact playing a “sunny” character, it’s like saying someone gave a “tired” performance when they were playing a fatigued character.  Argh, like Boris Yellnikoff sometimes I hate everyone.

If there is a positive aspect to this film, it’s to put in sharp relief what an original, strong and interesting character Allen Stewart Konigberg created in “Woody Allen”. Woody Allen, more than any other public figure of the time,  broke through the dominant American “Gunsmoke” culture of anti-intellectualism and anti-semitism.  He snuck in through the back door of comedy and soon could not be ignored.

It’s no suprise then that growing up, Allen Konigsberg was an capable athlete, musician, magician and all-around non-schlemiel. These days I can’t keep up with the churn of his mediocre movies.  It was only because of Larry David that I watched “Whatever Works”and I was disappointed on all counts.

1940’s meet the 1960’s: “Go Man Go!”

Posted by on 02/18/2008 3 comments

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A charming time-capsule starring another charismatic but forgotten actor, Dane Clark (not the execrable Dane Cook), alongside a young Sidney Poitier, “Go Man Go!” features a bebop score by Slim Galliard, who was a favorite of Jack Kerouac. I wonder what the connection with “On the Road” is — I remember the phrase “Go Man Go” as an exhortation Sal Paradise shouted out to improvising jazz musicians.

Slim Galliard makes an appearance, playing a piano with his fingers upside down for a small gathering of Globetrotters. I love Kerouac’s description of a Galliard concert:

‘… we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who’s always saying ‘Right-orooni’ and ‘How ’bout a little bourbon-arooni.’ In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums.”

“…Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, ‘Great-orooni … fine-ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …” He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can’t hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.”

What kills me is “ovauti“, it makes sense next to “o-rooni” but it’s so weird, where is it coming from? It’s perfect though.

That’s the 1950’s part of this movie, the 1940’s part consists of stereotypical interactions between Clark as Abe Saperstein, Bill Stern (as himself) a hard-bitten but honest sportswriter, and the evil Potter-like sports magnate Mr. Willoughby. The Bowery-Boys-style slang they use — “Hey ya mug! Ya gonna be a chump all your life? Of course you’re invited!” — is the direct precursor of today’s crushingly unimaginative board-room Ebonics appropriation: “Quarterly earnings doubled? Girl, go on with your bad self!”. It was probably just as hard to listen to back then.

The 1960’s part of the movie is best shown in the final scene, Abe Saperstein, arm-in-arm with the Globetrotters, walking triumphantly towards the camera, in a hopeful message of racial healing. Shades of Blackboard Jungle. I can’t recall another movie from the 1950’s that was this hopeful and unabashed about race. Today’s derivative ironic culture cannibalizes sentiment like this.

“Go Man Go” also has something to say about acting. In an early scene real-life Globetrotter “Sweetwater Clifton” speaks some lines about how he likes soda pop (the origin of his nickname). He delivers them woodenly, although with charm. This is the low end of the acting scale.

Raising the bar, Dane Clark as Abe Saperstein, shows real conviction, but he’s always hitting something when he acts. “I’m going to get us into big arenas if it’s the last thing I do!’ (SMACK). It’s as if the director fired him up before every scene (“Now this time really mean it!”) without thinking what the cumulative effect would be. Clark’s “average Joe” always seems to be in a harangue.

The best actor in the movie is Sidney Poitier, in a relatively minor role, who pops up from time-to-time to speak a few impassioned lines. He does so with quiet conviction, and having seen the other actors telegraph and flail, one gets a sense of the star quality of Sidney Poitier.

A couple of minor points about this movie: it is exemplary in showing what I like to call “old-time small basketball court syndrome”, action shot in a remarkably cramped gym. Another film that features this is “Angels with Dirty Faces” where the players are dodging trapezes and other non-basketball equipment as they play on a tiny court.

“Go Man Go” made me think of why, although everyone knows Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, no one knows who did it in the NBA. It turns out that Charles Cooper was the first drafted, Nat Clifton was the first signed, and Earl Lloyd the first to play in a game, all in 1950. Even though it’s complicated, I would think this deserves a little more recognition. Is it because basketball is not “America’s Game”?

Futureman

Posted by on 11/21/2007 1 comment

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Super-hero who subdues criminals by use of a tremendous cough.

Funerals in the future, the eulogy is simply a recitation of the deceased’s Google search term history.

New anti-depressant trade-named “Ethelmerman”.

Baby-showers attended by single women.

If I am at a bar or other singles-oriented gathering and people bring their baby, I suddenly I feel peer pressure to act charmed and avuncular. By that logic shouldn’t I be able to go to their house and they should have peer pressure to fuck me?

If you are glad when “Speaking of Faith” is over so that “The Joe Frank Show” will be on soon, that’s a good sign.

“Speaking of Faith” is the most irresponsible show on public radio: Krista Tippett talks about the “conversation” between faith and baseball, when she should be talking about how we are all going to die in possible agony.

How could Paleolithic man ever find enough food to eat? I’m not fat and I need to eat constantly, I need a conveyor belt. On the Discovery Channel survival shows those guys are lucky to get a moldy snail and some dandelion greens, which they have to boil twice. What if you were incredibly lucky caught a deer (ever see a deer run away)? Could you even eat a raw deer? And what if you broke your ankle or got a rotten tooth or got cancer? Hi, you’re fucked. That’s how it’s been for 100,000 years.

But what about the future? Futureman will recoil in horror that we had to endure having the roofs of our mouths scraped by Captain Crunch. Or that we had to go pee really bad.