Say what?

Not having bothered to blog in a while (during which time, this blog escaped and went feral, submitting posts under its own name on bizarre astronomical and eskimo-porn web-sites; I wrangled it back this morning with the promise of cookies, and then subdued it with a benzodiazapene-spiced cracker), I had no real inclination to blog today. If I didn't have anything to say, why say it?

That was obviously not the motivating question for the syndicated cartoonists in the Sunday Newspapers, who today banded together for the first time since they met up during lunchbreak in the maths classroom, played Dungeons and Dragons, and wondered what girls were, a few dozen years ago. And that includes the girls. Anyway, they put out a collective commemoration, in which they pretty much had nothing to say, and said it en masse.

Making a Good Expression

A very alert reader e-mailed me this, asking "Why are impressions funny? Don't they show us things we already know?" And I was all like "Are you e-mailin' me? Are you e-mailin' me? 'Cause I don't see nobody else in your 'sent to' line" and then I was all like [in gravelly voice:] "Ith a wery intuhwesthing quethun. [stroke chin with back of forefingers] Makel, what do you think? Thud we ask Fweddoh?" and then I left work, wondering what is so funny about impressions, and was almost hit by a car in the street, and I was all like "I'm walkin' here, I'm walkin' here", and then I took the train home and it was running late but I did eventually get home.

[That last bit should be read as though it was being said by George from Gilbert and George.]

The Hangover, Part One, Part Two: Tyson

In last week's final post, I mentioned that it was not clear to me what The Hangover was targeting in its comedy about pedophilia. Christopher Morris satirises media hysteria and public outrage; The Simpsons is in a twenty-year dialogue with television culture; but The Hangover? Anything? Bueller? Bueller? Sometimes jokes do not have much heft, and that's okay.

One of the more interesting things in The Hangover is Mike Tyson's crucial cameo; in a film that refrains from connecting with the real and the consequential, having somebody play himself is enormously satisfying, an anchor into the world. Apparently, during their renegade night of safe-white-male-terrorism, the wolf-pack stole Mike Tyson's tiger. CCTV footage leads Tyson to the men and he insists they bring the tiger back; eventually they do so, not without some adventure.

Up until the final moment, Tyson is a mesmerising figure. When he first appears, he lashes a punch that knocks out Alan. Violent but sensitive, Tyson peers out in a half-squint as if unsure what is expected of him. He is a figure of athleticism and strange delicacy, a reservoir of brutal power but also etiquette not unlike, perhaps, a house-trained tiger. At least twice he is addressed as “Champ”, an honourary term he occupies without irony or condescension – despite the multitude of scandals, he is one of the greatest boxers in history. When he first appears in the hotel room, he is shadow-drumming along with a Phil Collins song. It would be a mistake to see this only as a joke about a burly black athlete being a fan of the definitively white, 1980s chartbuster. Collins is also a point of reference, consistent precisely with that admixture of violence and sensitivity, contextualising Tyson as a particular modern American archetype, the alienated male whose violences are not entirely unforgiven, whose self-justifications are not entirely unheard: he is bound in the reference to Phil Collins with Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman and Eminem’s Stan.

But then at the end of the film, there’s a joke. One of the wolf-pack has commented apologetically about bad behaviour the night before. Tyson laughs it off, saying that one cannot be held responsible for what one does when drunk. The men around him onscreen laugh. On the one hand, Tyson is being generous: he forgives the debaucheries that these men have committed against him, his property, his tiger, and, indeed, all of Las Vegas. The figure of always-possibly forgiven violence becomes a figure of forgiveness; the Phil Collins reference is not so jarring. On the other hand, the line is still also a reference to Tyson’s own behaviour – and, irrevocably, to the charge of rape for which he went to prison. In a role that rehabilitates Tyson as wiser, self-parodic, and, insistently, as a man who deserves the title Champ, and in a film where Tyson is one of the few intersections with consequence and reality, this last line, which earns the onscreen laughter of the men around him, suggests a glib rehabilitation and easy forgiveness, one in which the easy-to-forgive debaucheries of fictional characters in a mock-up of Las Vegas are blended with something real, something uncertain, but something very dark. And just to make sure we know, the men laugh. This is the internal laughter that runs throughout The Hangover, the laugh track that lets us know what is supposed to be funny and what is not. It also runs throughout The Hangover, Part Two, as we shall see in a week of posts, I kid you not, dedicated to The Hangover oeuvre.

The There There

When there is a there there

Last Friday night, Noah Baumbach introduced Brian De Palma's Sisters at BAM. Standing with a microphone in front of the screen, Baumbach, who looked like he'd been hit by a truck and then changed his clothes and washed and styled his beautiful long floppy hair, mumbled in Fantastic Mr Fox-fashion about how he is friends with De Palma and about how he first approached him twenty years ago and drunkenly tried to insist that a scene in one of his films was indebted to some French New Wave film. Apparently, De Palma was really unimpressed. We've all been there. Well, not quite there; we weren't a young Noah Baumbach trying to impress Brian De Palma. But you know the feeling: young, over-eager, drink-disinhibited accolyte trying to strut his stuff with old master who is far wiser and far less excitable (and probably far more drunk).

The thing is, with De Palma's movies, we're always still there: watching his films is like being in a drunken argument with the screen about how scenes are references to other films, they're obviously references to other films, and yet the entire film treats those observations with a sort of disdain, and just goes on about its business. In other words, just because you get it, just because you get the reference, you aren't in a better position to understand the movie or speak about the movie, and, even worse, you feel like you're left in the position of stating the obvious while missing the point. It's a peculiar, disorienting feeling. And, what's worst of all, getting a sneaky reference and being able to lean over to your date to whisper, "Remind me, I'll explain it after the movie", is one of those things that makes being a man worth it. But with de Palma's films, the references are so obvious; there's nothing subtle about it. If your date had seen the movie being referred to, then your date would get it; if not, not. Saying "That's scene was right out of Psycho or Vertigo or Rear Window" is then answered with, "Okay, and?" and you're left saying, "Yes, but, it's right out of that film!"

I am not a De Palma critic; I suspect that I've been flailing towards something that smart people have thought a lot about and handled much more elegantly: how de Palma is and is not an original film-maker; how he watches other films and other oeuvres very closely, and makes use of what he knows, loves, is impressed or moved by, in order to tell a story of his own.

But what excited me about this particular perspective is that it undermines the expectation that reference is richness, that intertextuality enlivens your understanding; I wonder if de Palma is not using reference in a much more clinical, if you will, way, not to make the film more "profound" but to manipulate the audience ("So, you think you know what will come next . . . do you?") Reference is no longer a gift to the audience, a gesture of indebtedness, a desire to make your work deeper: it's a way of telling a story. There is no there there, it's all here.

When there's no there there

This has been coming up in an extraordinary way with the quasi-Presidential run being announced by Donald Trump. So far, he has gained the most traction in the press by insinuating that he is a birther.

Like so many businessmen and corporatists when it comes to politics, he's a concern-troll:

Trump insisted he didn't introduce the citizenship issue, but he isn't letting go of it either. Since he was asked about it during an interview several weeks ago, the real estate executive said, he's looked into it and now believes "there is a big possibility" Obama may have violated the Constitution.

"I'd like to have him show his birth certificate," Trump said. "And to be honest with you, I hope he can."

He's not just a concern troll about Obama:

Asked in the interview how genuine his presidential ambition is, Trump said, "I always take things seriously, but I've never taken it seriously like this. I wish I didn't have to do it."

"I wish this was the greatest place in the world," Trump said. But he said the United States is losing respect in the world at a time when jobs at home are vanishing. He accused Obama of giving the country "a terrible presidency."

And he's very serious about running:

Of Obama, he said, "I want him to do well. ... I love this country, but this country is going to hell. ... The world laughs at us. They won't be laughing if I'm elected president."

Okay, so that last line really made me laugh. Trump comes off like a hand-wringing villain threatening to rain down the fires of hell across the people of the world. "They won't be laughing then! You're all fired!" (Plus, it reminded me of Bob Monkhouse's great line: "People used to laugh at me when I said I was going to be a comedian. Well they're not laughing now." Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.)

Trump really isn't really wishing for or hoping for the things he's saying he wishes and hopes for; it's a perfect example of the concern-troll language of corporatists who have to pretend they're playing by the game, but want to make it clear that they're barely making any effort. They'll do it for as long as they're bothered.

When it comes to the entire phony birther narrative that has Trump so perplexed, about which he is so deeply concerned, there is no there there. It is, instead, an obliquely-deflected racism posing as constitutionality; a way of engendering and maintaining a background thrum of pervasive distrust for everything Obama; and a fuck-you to everybody for whom the last President of the United States was dubiously promoted to the office by Republican members of the Supreme Court and then, by way of Swift Boats and Diebold, dubiously maintained there. Just because there's no there there doesn't mean there's not a there here.

There there

One of the problems with seeing a De Palma film like Sisters in a large audience is that the audience is going to laugh at some of the grotequeries, the B-movie touches, the big thrilling references; one of the problems Trump is facing is that nobody is really taking his run seriously - something he addresses in a very non-serious way about him being a man who takes "everything seriously", which has no credibility, then adding he's never "taken it seriously like this" (I don't actually know what that means).

The "serious" is a guarantor, an anchor in reality, an insistence that there is a there there: my words out there mean something, speech acts affect the world; the comedic is exceptional not because it is the opposite (the comedic means something, pace Channel 4's implication about "absurdist satire") but because the guarantee is not quite made, it can thrive on the implication that there is no there there - and it doesn't matter. When faced with something that might be serious or it might not, like a gaudy scene in Sisters (which, Baumbach observed, can seem so campy . . . and yet he's sure that De Palma was not intending anything camp) or Trump's run for the Presidency, you've reached a crisis: the serious denounces its twin; the comedic does not: so is Gertrude Stein right that there is no there there, or is there a there there? Choose an answer at your own peril.

The Post-Empire Strikes Back

The Warlock, on his Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is not an Option tour, had a bad opening night in Detroit. Apparently, he recovered for Chicago, revamping his show, which suggests that this tour is very much the calibrated work of an entertainer and not simply the cultural facilitation and financial exploitation of one man's madness.

In reviewing the Detroit show, Ryhs Blakely of The Australian, writes appreciatively of a pair of Sheen's lines (not from the show):

Yes, his recent interviews have shown that he possesses a genius for diatribe, a gift for frenzied verbal invention that touches the sublime when he hits attack mode. And no, he doesn't seem to give a damn.

His claim that his adventures with drink, drugs and porn actresses would have made "(Errol) Flynn, (Mick) Jagger and (Keith) Richards look like droopy-eyed armless children", will live with us forever. I, for one, sniggered out loud when I read how he had called a radio station to tell listeners not dabble with crack "unless you can manage it socially".

I love the crack joke. I kind of think it's the type of thing either Robin Williams or Bret Easton Ellis might have wished they had said. But it's the other joke I want to think about for a moment.

"Droopy-eyed armless children" is exquisitely lurid, wildly imaginative, and, one might add, rather upsetting if you stop to think about the image sans the benefit of imagining Flynn, Jagger, and Richards as cartoonishly dopey lovelorn toddlers. "Droopy-eyed" is no particularly barrier to love, as any real lothario can attest. "Armless" seems inept and weird, perhaps vindictive towards the swashbucklers he's evoked? (I've occasioned the thought that he was channeling Johnny Depp's tribute to Richards and originally said "'armless"?) And "children" has a somewhat sweet air about it, with Sheen taking on a paternal role towards these naive juvenile offenders.

What intrigues me, though, is the quality of the detail. There's a pleasure to be had in the exuberance and the excess of the image; the mind races to make sense of the image, and yet, at the very same time, its brilliance is that one does not have to make sense of it in any logical, cognitively consistent way to be bowled over by the power. The detail is at once utterly crucial and utterly pointless; it's poetry, but only in the most aesthetic sense of language doing something evocative and sensual. You can dig through to work at it, to try to pin it down, but . . . why?

But the other end of the line, the front end of the line, is also impressively detailed, going with the now-distant Hollywood glamour of a mid-century studio Star along with two gawky, filthy, scrawny Rock geniuses. I'm not sure that any of them deserves to namechecked for their use of drink, drugs, and porn stars, but a libel lawsuit would probably be ill-advised.

So, how and why does detail matter in comedy?

References

In an episode of South Park, there's a brilliantly catty assault on the writers of Family Guy. Wandering into the studio where Family Guy is produced, Cartman discovers the writers' secret: in a vast tub filled with water and white balls, on each of which is written a cultural reference or a noun or verb, manatees use their noses to bobble the balls up out of the water into a chute. Family Guy writers then simply put the balls together to make a gag. In effect, they have created an elaborate random cultural reference generator using lovable water-based mammals.

Out of context, this joke might itself seem to be randomly generated: Volleyballs + Family Guy + Manatees . . . Hey, the writers for Family Guy get their ideas from volleyballs selected by Manatees! However, in the context of a two-part episode about the art of cartoons and censorship, the joke doubles back on itself: one defence of comedy is that it is exempt from moral opprobrium and deserves to be judged lightly if at all because comedy is about the accidental, the frivolous, the wild and witty and rapid and excessive connection of things that are not usually (or ought not be) connected, and so cannot be held entirely responsible for its hubris, its exaggerations, and so on.

As an attack on Family Guy, though, the point is clear: the show's script is simply reference masked as comedy. And it's a solid criticism, one that might be levelled elsewhere (I seem to remember thinking that the second Shrek film was nothing but what was at the time contemporary references to popular icons - although I'm not entirely sure I saw the second Shrek film). But what is the relationship between reference and comedy? That's the question I'm curious about here.

First, Categorical Distinction: a reference is to something that is (for a moment at least) categorically distinct as a concept; that is, a reference evokes something that is understood, in that moment at least, to be whole and meaningful and boundaried. Herman Melville, Family Guy, Conrad, Al Pacino, Don Corleone, Don Draper, Lassie, Sarah Palin, Jesus; or voodoo, skyscraper, pawn; or genius, tree-huggers, Dylan fans, etc. . . . A reference, on its own, may evoke any number of different and misleading agreements about a unique meaning, and simply throwing a reference out there - Henry IV, Ronan Keating, chastity - confers no guarantee that the visceral, even stereotyped or archetypal sense that the reference generates is shared; but whatever subsequent connotations, uncertainties, confusions might occur, there is a moment when we (think we) agree upon a unique meaning, the quiddity of the reference. In comedy, quiddity is not enough: there must be a twist where the impersonation brings someone to life in unexpected ways; the gag twists and toys with our expectations about that person or that type of person; parody sticks a rubber dagger deep into the quiddity (cue Craig Brown's parody of Martin which begins - and might as well end - with "I am a serious.") Reference alone is not enough: the essence, the quiddity of the reference must be rattled, transformed, skewered or exploded.

Second, you have to Get The Reference. A reference is something that needs to be caught: metaphorically (and sometimes literally), the name must have a face, the place must have a geography. Similarly, something is always unspoken or submerged in a joke, which is why one gets the joke, doing the silent but active work of getting it (and this is why a simple explanation of the joke, which contains all the same material, tends not to be funny). And both getting the reference and getting the joke can be accompanied by laughter. When I laugh at a joke as part of an audience, I can only assume that the other members of the audience and I are laughing at the same thing, that we have agreed upon the passing of a reference and are enjoying the witty way in which the reference has functioned in the comic context. But the fact that others are laughing suggests only that they know there has been a reference. (You know this laughter, maybe you've laughed in this way - it's a public signal that you have spotted a reference embedded in what someone has said). And, of course, there are social conventions around this laughter of recognition: we might laugh because other people are laughing, or we might laugh because we think there's been a reference which we might have missed and we don't want to look like the buffoons who missed it. Laughter's ambiguity clouds the distinction between a reference per se and a comic reference: in both cases, a mental line has been drawn between those partaking in the present act of communication and an Other, encapsulated in the reference; the laugh of recognition and the laugh of comic appreciation cannot be easily disentangled. Anyone who has laughed at a reference that wasn't supposed to be funny, or who has laughed because other people are laughing, will be aware of how isolating and confusing the distinction can be. The point here is not a normative one: I am not trying to distinguish how we should laugh or when we should laugh. Rather, it's to highlight that one of the most extraordinarily potent features of comedy, the intimately detailed and ecstatically brilliant use of reference (in impersonation; in jokes, whether about blondes or Obama or Moses or porn stars; in parody and satire; in caricature), fundamentally relies upon a subjective response in the audience, getting it, that cannot be wholly distinguished from any other form of reference.

So we can look at South Park's attack on Family Guy and say "oh snap!"; we can engage in a debate about the use of cultural references in 30 Rock vs Community (I have not read the link because I have not yet seen the 30 Rock episode, though I have no doubt it will be better than the Community episode; I actually enjoy Community, but don't think it has ever ascended to the sustained, snow-capped ridge of genius that 30 Rock has planted its flag in and commandeered for the past few years); but we are put into an awkward position: on the one hand, a reference is a categorical distinction, and, furthermore, comic reference is a distinct contextual manipulation of reference; on the other hand, these two domains (reference and comic reference) are not necessarily categorically distinct and, furthermore, the manipulation occurs, at least in part, but necessarily, in the audience.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about this.

[Edited to remove "The" from Family Guy - sigh]