A Blog of My Own

One of the nice surprises of the TV season is that Chevy Chase has finally found his funny again. On Community, he plays a business magnate returning to community college to continue his education, and the most recent episode gave him a couple of comedic bits that proved he still “has it.” One was a digression by his character on the different kinds of sneezes and how each can play a role in establishing dominance in a situation, and the other was a bit of physical comedy in the background of a scene as he attempted to get into his mouth a floppy-crusted pizza slice.

For about 28 years, it seemed the comedic genius who was Chevy Chase had drowned in a tsunami of ego. The brilliance he showed in the first season-and-a-half of Saturday Night Live, and which he’d displayed before that in the revolutionary improv-based seventies sketch comedy of the National Lampoon Radio Hour and Groove Tube, seemed to vanish. He hosted an ill-advised late night talk show on Fox in the early nineties that died a merciful early death. His movies were lame and lamer. One kept reading stories of abusive behavior toward colleagues. A turning point for him seems to have been the Comedy Central Roast he endured in 2002. I remember watching it, and thinking that savage as most of these roasts were, this one seemed as if everyone meant it. I assumed nevertheless that he brushed it off — but this Entertainment Weekly article reveals that he didn’t. It was the occasion for some genuine soul-searching.

The problem with genuine soul-searching, though, is that even when it leads an artist to see the error of his ways and to reform his relations with his fellow human beings, it doesn’t always lead to a reignition of the genius that burnt out along the way. More often, what got burnt out stays burnt out. But with Chevy, it looks, from the evidence of Community, that he found his way back to his special place. He’s Chevy Chase and we’re not. It is to be celebrated.

The director John Hughes, who just died at 59, was a copywriter at the same international ad agency as I during my first decade there. I knew him a little — not well. He was a quiet, funny guy who could always be counted on to amuse in a storyboard presentation. His low-key manner of presentation was funny, and his work was funny.

Unless my recollection is wrong, he didn’t sell a whole lot of work. I don’t recall any campaigns he was known for at the time. Rather, he was a beneficiary of those fat times in advertising when you could afford to keep talented writers on the payroll just for their ability to amuse you in meetings. And that wasn’t a negligible or valueless skill. Even if the agency’s recommendation to the client was someone else’s campaign, it helped to soften the client up with some yucks from John and his campaign as an amuse-bouche before the main course. Of course, no agency could thrive without coming up with the goods for clients, but it seemed back then that clients were paying agencies to make them laugh in meetings as much as they were paying them to reach consumers; and that agencies were paying some writers primarily to be court jesters in their own internal meetings, which could be difficult to get through without a substantial leavening of humor. Also, you never knew — some crazy, hilarious idea John came up with just might work.

I remember one that didn’t, but which did crack us all up at the time. Several creative teams were working on a freeze-dried instant coffee (freeze-drying was new technology in the seventies), the claim of which was that it was indistinguishable from ground roast. John’s campaign depicted people who inexplicably didn’t know this about our coffee, and who therefore, naturally, went around wearing dunce caps. Schoolboy dunce caps in 1979 were already so antiquated that there was a wonderfully absurd and somehow sick quality to the humor of the idea. In my memory, I actually see people doing spit takes around the room as he unveiled it, and guffawing. There wasn’t a chance in hell the idea would make it to the client; that didn’t matter.

It occurs to me now that the theme of “school” which was present in that idea informed most of his great movie work that came later. Perhaps it was also present in the National Lampoon magazine pieces he was writing at the time he was at the agency. I remember all of us being jealous that he was getting those pieces published while holding down the same job we did, but also holding him in awe for the energy and industry required by his double life.

When you say “there’s something funny about that guy,” you usually don’t mean he makes you laugh. You mean there’s something wrong with him. The word “funny” means two very different things in our language — or so it seems. The brilliance of Judd Apatow’s new film Funny People is that it raises the possibility that the meanings aren’t different, after all. He makes the link between comedy and pathology.

It’s not that no one ever noticed that comedians tend to be screwed up. But not until Funny People has there been a movie that connected the dots. To be a good comedian, to produce over a career’s time a steady stream of life observations that have the fresh surprise we call humor, means continuously to be observing life rather than living it. That takes a toll. You can see that this is what has led the fabulously successful main character, played by Adam Sandler, to the miserable state he’s in, and you can see the struggling young comedian characters in the film, played by Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Aubrey Plaza and Jason Schwartzman, well on their way to that hell. What the film doesn’t resolve is what’s the chicken and what’s the egg. Do people who are so disconnected from themselves and others that they are borderline-autistic find their way into standup comedy because it’s the one way they can turn their mental illness into a living? Or does choosing a life of comedy, with the commitment it entails always to be an observer, always to be at a remove from life and other people, make one over time into an alienated, depressed and anxiety-stricken creature? Or is it simply that getting up in front of people and trying to make them laugh will turn anyone into a nervous wreck?

Whichever it is, Apatow has found a way to make you guffaw and feel miserable at the same time. The film is a 130-minute anxiety attack, and it doesn’t send you out of the theater feeling good, but it makes a journey into hell as much laughs as a journey into hell can possibly be. Funny, that.

The devolution of the mockumentary in shows like The Office, and now Parks and Recreation, interests me.

The fake-reality comedy form has become, through audience familiarity, simply another film-style choice. The premise that The Office and Parks and Recreation are documentaries — well, that faded long ago into the audience’s unconscious. There are a million things in both P&R and The Office that would never happen in front of a documentary film crew; people would never say or do those things when they knew they were being filmed, and a camera would never be around to capture them in the unlikely event they wanted to. Not to mention that if The Office (now at the end of its fifth year) were the product of a documentary shoot, it would be the longest and most expensive single shoot in the history of film. But that’s OK.

Back in the fifties, George Burns talked to the camera in The Burns and Allen Show. Nobody asked, “Hey, how can he be a character in a situation comedy and still know he’s in a situation comedy?” Today’s mockumentary shows are not different from that — they’ve added a shaky camera, that’s all.

But that’s everything, since the shaky-cam updates the tradition — an ancient one, going back to Shakespeare’s asides; the gloss of modernity may be what we need in order to believe in characters we otherwise, in this cynical time, might not. It breaks through our defenses.

Speaking of character, the complexities of P&R lead character Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), mid-level Pawnee, IN municipal government bureaucrat, continue to fascinate. Sympathetic figure, or complete buffoon? Both! Her failure to carry out the blackmail of the zoning commissioner last night was sheer, pathetic ineptitude (she ended up with a glass of water thrown in her face, while she poured out a torrent of apologies) — but it was also a sign of innate goodness. When she later says to friend and confederate Ann, as if it were a confirmation of her moral fiber and not merely of her incompetence, “I didn’t have it in me to do that,” she’s actually speaking the truth. She wanted to do it, and that sucks, but it’s also true that her ineptitude in the situation was a direct result of a core decency. She’s not cut out for politics, and part of the reason is that she’s not a horrible enough person to be cut out for politics. So Leslie is a floor wax and a dessert topping — and I find that believable, and unusually layered for a situation comedy. That’s the real reality.

R.I.P., Dom DeLuise.

There are two kinds of unreal book store. One is Amazon, a fine virtual source, and the other is Borders, which is to books as spray cheese is to food.

The test of a real book store is, will you ever come across in it a book you never knew existed but now need to have? Amazon is great for books you already know exist. Borders is great for best-sellers. But in neither place are you likely to discover through pure accident a book that nobody is writing about, or to which your attention hasn’t already been drawn through other channels, and which you now must possess.

In Unabridged Books in Chicago — a great, real bookstore in the East Lakeview neighborhood — I found a new memoir by Tom Davis — of the erstwhile comedy team Franken and Davis — titled Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There. I haven’t even opened the book and I know how much I love it. There is no way I would know about it if I hadn’t happened to wander into Unabridged, and if Unabridged weren’t run by smart people who think a little like me and know that somebody like me is going to walk in and need that book. I haven’t seen the book written about anywhere. (Some guy named Al Franken gets most of the press these days.)

While I always knew that Franken was responsible for much of the twisted brilliance the pair contributed to the first five years of Saturday Night Live (as performers and as writers), it was also quite clear at the time that Davis had a sick genius of his own. But unlike Franken, he never “took off” as a solo and I never knew what became of him after that. I’m about to find out.

I was in pre-cringe mode — ready to run out of the room if necessary — when Jerry Lewis came out to accept his Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars. I happen to think Jerry Lewis is a genius, as a performer, scenarist and director (the French are not always wrong), but his public pronouncements in the role of Jerry Lewis have tended to give egomaniacal narcissism a bad name. To my relief his speech was brief and gracious.

The child-man hybrid that Lewis created in his nightclub performances and movie roles (with Dean Martin and without) did not come out of nowhere — you see the precedent for it whenever you see Lou Costello. But Lewis took it to the next level, a level both more exquisitely funny and discomforting. It couldn’t be the first without being the second. Watching Costello, you laugh at someone else. Watching Lewis in character, your gaze turns inward, to see the child within you that never quite grew up, the child you never quite left behind — you remember the loneliness, you remember the desperate need for acceptance, you remember the sexual longings you didn’t know what to do with; it all comes rushing back, in a manner that whispers to you in a voice you don’t necessarily want to hear that it never went away. When Lewis goes into his manic “conducting the swing band, dancing wildly” mode, he is every child alone in his room, living out a private fantasy of happiness. The Lewis movie-role persona is a character unique in all of film, and yes, it does deserve recognition as genius.

For an appreciation of Lewis the artist — an appreciation with which I am in sympathy — read this essay, “Jerry Lewis Wins an Oscar at Last,” by Time movie critic Richard Corliss. He makes the case that Lewis deserves not just the Humanitarian award for his good works, but a Life Achievement award for his good work.

Albert Brooks can do no wrong.

Case in point: his funny column about Sarah Palin in The Huffington Post.

Another example: his 2005 movie Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. Hardly anybody saw it. Even on video. (It took in less than $900,000 at the box office and peaked at #36 in video rentals before rapidly falling off the charts.) So practically nobody knows that it marked a real return to form for him, and is one of the three or four funniest films he’s made. But it is. The scene involving the Taj Mahal — and I say this without fear of contradiction from anyone who’s seen it — is one of the classic comedy moments in all of cinema history, up there with Chaplin and Keaton.

All the hullabaloo over Tropic Thunder (well-deserved, by the way—it’s a sensation, which elevates Ben Stiller to a new level of movie stardom, and ought to earn Oscar nominations for Stiller in the direction and screenwriting categories, and best-supporting-actor nominations for Jack Black and Robert Downey, Jr.) reminds me to mention a very good movie I netflixed recently.

Zero Effect, from 1998, was Jake Kasdan’s first directorial effort (which is why I rented it—I’m an admirer of his screenwriting and directing work), and stars Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero, a kind of modern-day Sherlock Holmes with very bad OCD. Stiller is his Watson, and Kim Dickens (Joanie from the Bella Union in Deadwood) rounds out the excellent leading cast. If you remember Cutter’s Way (1981) with fondness, I think you’ll like Zero Effect. Zero is lighter and funnier, somewhere between a modern comedy and a film noir, but (thanks be praised) it is not a “send-up” of any genre. It wants to be its own movie, and it is. While you are never far away from the next laugh, smile, or brain-tickle, a river of melancholy runs through it that lends the movie emotional weight. Stiller gives a good, nuanced performance, not at all a “high concept comedy” performance. The movie is an interesting hybrid, and, if not 100% artistically successful, is good enough to be worth your time. I’d place it near the top of all I’ve rented in the last year.

I’m a devotee of the first 5 seasons of Saturday Night Live–the golden age, as I think of it–and have acquired the first 3 seasons on DVD. (Of course, I haven’t actually watched any of the DVDs yet. At the rate I’m going, I figure I’ll watch all the DVDs I own and haven’t watched yet, and listen to all the CDs I own and haven’t listened to yet, by the year 2016. Sadly, the literal truth is that I’ll probably die with some of them still in shrink wrap.)

This morning I came across a fun web page by Kara Kovalchik that lists, and describes, “5 Awful Saturday Night Live Hosts” from these first 5 seasons. (If you’re curious, they’re Milton Berle, Louise Lasser, Frank Zappa, Jodie Foster, and Chevy Chase–but I recommend going to the page and reading it to find out just why.)