The Haunting

A recent joke has haunted me, a tiny evil poltergeist rattling the dishes in the cupboards of my mind, creaking across my cerebellum when I'm sure nobody is there.

It is one of Peter Serafinowicz's tweet jokes. You know the ones: he offers up a theme, his tweet-mates tweet him a question hashed with PSQA, he gives the punchline. It's an awesome display of comic virtuosity. One of my favourite twists is when somebody tweets him a familiar one-liner and he responds to it, taking a comic form that is supposed to be self-sustained, where the comedy is based in part on the finality and closure of the line, and then he improves upon it. Someone sent him Steven Wright's "What's another word for the thesaurus?" and Serafinowicz promptly answers: "Anothersaurus." (It has the same deflating quality as the scene in the Simpsons where a Zen monk on a mountaintop asks Bart, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" and Bart says, "This," and then flaps his fingers against his palm - try it, it works; it's the sound of one hand clapping.) Another person offered up the teenage delight of "Is masturbation incest?" to which Serafinowicz responds, "No, masturbation is nicest." A simple switch of letters turns an adolescent joke into a lesson on the pleasure of life.

Creak.

Rattle.

It's that darned poltergeist again. So, let's bring it into the light. Here's the joke:

RT @AndyD1893: #PSQA What comes after death?? A pervert.

This may be the best joke. Ever. Linger with it for a moment before going on.

Immediately, I see three interpretations, three ways of getting the joke:

1) In the tragic mode of comedy. Some poor self-asphyxiator dies, and then ejaculates.

2) In the sick mode. A person murders somebody and then jacks off.

3) In the metaphysical mode. A death-obsessed pervert stalks the figure of death, quite possibly ejaculating onto the annoyed figure of the Grim Reaper, whose cloak now looks as if a flock of birds has crapped down it.

Obviously, there are different readings of "pervert" here. In the tragic mode, the pervert is not much more perverted than your average Tory backbencher; in the sick mode, the pervert is more perverted than your average Tory backbencher; in the metaphysical mode, the figure of identification is really Death itself, limping along with its scythe, trying to do its business while some creep follows it around wanking on it.

Schadenfreude is the key to the tragic mode here: there is a moment in which you relate to the pervert before the pervert's hubris causes his fall; you take some pleasure in the notion that he cannot enjoy himself as his final pleasure shudders through his corpse, and you stand in judgement, just as you stand in judgement of the morally virtuous politician caught with a noose around his neck, his trousers around his ankles. Alienation is the key to the sick mode: you are alienated from judgement as you countenance the horror, allowing the pervert his pleasure without repudiation, without damnation; your link to the pervert is not one of identification except insofar as through the joke you share a contempt for judgement itself. In the metaphysical mode, you are operating at a much more sympathetic register but switching allegiances: incongruity is the key here, as the incongruity in the conjured image reflects the incongruity of sympathising with death.

So, a non-comic answer to the question "What comes after death?" would be "Judgement", or perhaps a psychospatial proxy for judgement, "Heaven" or "Hell". Serafinowicz pounces on this and puts a figure, the pervert, where we would put an act (of judgment), but that figure is, of course, acting in relation to that act - by ejaculating. It's perverse; but then, judgement is perverse. And that's the point.

By the way, I checked in on Brett Easton Ellis's tweets, which are admirably cross-eyed with petulance and enthusiasm: anyway, it's clear he reads this blog because his recent subjects have included Weiner, 70s movies, and Tracey Morgan. Glad to know he's a fan.

Whither Dr Peter Thraft

As you will have noticed, my post on Dr Peter Thraft was taken down and for several days my site has not been accessible for comments (I myself have been unable to access it at all; it's like being locked out of your apartment at three in the morning, and you're sure you can hear romantic groans coming from inside, but no matter how hard you knock, no matter how many times you check your pockets for the keys, you can't get back in). This was not, apparently, a Thraftian hack, but rather the host of this blog, Blogger, shut down the entire service and removed all posts written after a certain time on Wednesday. I have been intensely paranoid that Dr Peter Thraft, though a neophyte on "twotter", was actually a brilliant computer hacker and had found my blog, broken into it, stolen my post, and virtually pissed in my blog before making his escape; but it sounds like he is innocent of this, at least. My best guess is that Blogger, who runs these blogs, is used by Al Qaeda, and the CIA swooped in to take charge for a few days, sorting through reams of blogs about comedy, dog hair, whut-i-did-last-night, contemporary politics, and nineteenth-century battleship design in order to discover bin Laden's location. UPDATE: Apparently bin Laden was found? When? How didn't I hear about that? Now I get all those cartoons I posted about a few days ago.

Anyway, back to Dr Peter Thraft. My post is not yet back up; it may never go back up. That depends on Blogger. But having spent more time on Thraft's twotter account, I'm now beginning to think only in Thraftisms. I'm sure my significant other will be delighted to learn of this.

Look your partner in the eye and whisper sweet nothings before going to work.

Men, remember, the withdrawal method only works if you withdraw b4 ejaculation.

Orgies can be beautiful, but only when everybody sticks to agreed-upon boundaries.

Elizabethans called it the little death, the French Le Petit Mort. Kill your partner tonight.

Time's tide will smother you

A very alert reader buzzed me about this particular column in Time Out New York. The Hot Seat is a standard format, back-page Q&A for celebrities touting their latest book/movie/spouse/bleaching, and in it, there is usually some effort made to address, or at least allude to, some recent scandal involving that celebrity and a biographer/movie/spouse/bleaching. This week, it's Gilbert Gottfried, and the alert reader wondered if this wasn't "a propos".

The first thing this interview does is address something that, terrible dictu, happened before this blog started: Gottfried tweeted jokes about the tsunami in Japan as it was happening. I'm so glad that the alert reader let me know about this TONY column, because it always seemed to me that the real tragedy of the tsunami and Gottfried's jokes was that they happened before this blog got started. It was as if the Gods of Nature and the Gods of Comedy conspired against me. (But what do you think I'll get another chance?)

So, the first question posed to the shrill memoir-shilling comedian:

You tweeted some shocking jokes about Japan. Are there any topics that are off limits for you?
Evidently not. When martians land on this planet, years from now, and dig up our civilization, they’ll see my name and picture and the tsunami and figure, Well, this guy caused the tsunami.

Clever answer. Without exactly saying it, he's tossing the comedian's Get Out Of Jail Free card onto the table and shrugging smugly: he actually didn't cause the tsunami, he just joked about it. He goes on to point out that the media coverage of the tsunami was soon dropped from the front pages and television news for more celebrity outrages, which just goes to show how contrived and phony the "scandal" was; and he's pretty much right.

The next answer is really just your typical celebrity reach-around:

Was there anyone you were particularly proud of offending?
I heard Dr. Laura was very offended. And also Perez Hilton. He takes photos and draws penises on them and accuses everyone of being gay, but he was morally offended. And my favorite was I beat out Charlie Sheen as the most provocative celebrity of the week onShowbiz Tonight. And the expert to give the final comment on why it was wrong was Kelsey Grammer’s ex-wife Camille—to let you know that the universe has officially come to an end.

Celebrities critiquing celebrities critiquing celebrities. It's a bit sad that the phrase "accuses . . . of being gay" is still in circulation, but, anyway, as I said (accusing everybody of being gay), it's just your typical celebrity reach-around.

And then things get interesting:

Is there is a waiting period for joking about tragic events?
There is that old saying, tragedy plus time equals comedy. Although I realize that’s true, I also think that is so hypocritical. Because why should you [wait]? If it is wrong before, why should it be allowed afterwards? Somebody tweeted me recently and said, “I just looked at the calendar. I am going to wait another 17 days till I can laugh at Gilbert’s Japan joke.”

I'm deeply impressed that Gottfried takes the moral highground (perhaps a useful place to be when a tsunami of moral approbation is bearing down on you?) With utter disregard for the convention of apology, he says that people who complain about his jokes as having come at the wrong time or too soon are the hypocrites, the moral wretches. He's spotted something deeply obvious: that the moral issue at stake is (largely) the same, whether or not the comment comes a few minutes, an hour, a week, or a month later: it is laughter as a response to suffering.

Now, hold on, you might say. Grab that floating piece of car, pull yourself onto that roof, let's take stock of the situation. What is not funny at the time can often becomefunny later, when the pain and terror and fear diminishes, when the healing has begun.

We know this from our own lives.

Imagine you're attacked by a pit bull. It jumps up, clamps its jaws down hard on your hand, and with a drooling snap, it bites your middle finger off; it then staggers back while you stare at the bleeding stump; the pit bull looks up at you, swallows your finger dramatically, pauses for effect, and then vomits out your finger, right there, at your feet. You're probably not laughing. But four years later, as you tell the tale in the pub, it's a great story, and everybody laughs. Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

But wait: that's because it happened to you. Therefore you need the time to get over the pain, to become accustomed to typing without that finger, to go outside without wetting yourself every time you see a dog. So, let's imagine we're all walking back home, late at night, a big group of us, drunk and happy. It's after a long evening of, say, karaoke. Our voices are hoarse, our crotches damp, our feet sore, and if we hear Coldplay one more time, we're going to fucking hit something. And along comes a pitbull. It jumps up clamps its jaws down hard on somebody else's hand, and with a drooling snap, it bites that person's middle finger off; it then staggers back while everybody stares at the bleeding stump; the pit bull looks up, swallows the finger dramatically, pauses for effect, and then vomits out the finger, right there, at our feet. I still think that the laughter would come later. I still think that we would be screaming, calling for help, traumatically dissociating and mumbling the words to The Scientist, and not laughing. So, the rule stands: Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

But, of course, as a rule, it's also rubbish. Countless are the times when, once the moment has passed, once the fire has dimmed, once the tide has turned, that jokeisn't funny anymore. So what about Gottfried's tweet-jokes? How do they stand the test of time? Are they any better or worse now that some so-called "time" has passed? Here are the "worst ten" of the twelve he tweeted. I should defer on judging them, because this is the second time I saw them, but, as I've discovered, because I'm writing this blog, I don't actually have to defer to anybody. So, here's my "judgement": on the day, I thought that one or two were quite funny, though most of them were shudderingly bad. But the one or two I thought were quite funny on the day don't seem so funny now. Hmm. Time's tricks are a mystery.

So, what is the relationship between a joke, tragedy, and time? If there is to be a rule, it would probably involve something like Tragedy plus timing equals comedy: the time of the joke relative to the tragedy, the relationship of the joker and the audience to the time of the joke relative to the tragedy, but also its rhythms, its patter, and, perhaps the real twist, the real problem, how much comic bang you get for the tragic buck. In other words, how we judge the timing depends in part on how good the joke is, while the quality of the joke is affected by the timing.

In any case, this passing scandal involved the usual chest-thumping and shock, horror, outrage, and lots of reader polls about whether or not the jokes were funny. Gottfriend had to share the stage, though, with a somewhat more impressive figure.50 Cent also started cracking jokes about the Tsunami on the day, and so the chest-thumping and shock, horror, outrage was distributed amongst the celebrities. (I honestly think that more journalists troll twitter for something to write about than report on what is happening outside the twitterverse; everyday and in every way, we're getting closer and closer to having our entire lives mediated by celebrities).

So why do we tell sick jokes? This post runs through some of the most famous reasons: coping, hostility, fear, and -- full credit to the author -- dismisses these explanations (or at least problematises them); it's worth reading for the jokes included therein, including ones about Japan. They are far better than Gottfried's tweets. And maybe, today, instead of asking about why "we" tell these jokes, perhaps we should end this meditation on why Gottfried tells jokes like this. He has an answer, and he cites his source.

Vive le différence

I was invited by an alert reader to compare the difference in tweeting styles between Steve Martin and Peter Serafinowicz, a task for which I am doubly grateful: not only is the comparison a rich one, but I had never thought to check out Serafinowicz's tweets.

With Steve Martin, it's like you're a guest of a friend at a friend in the afterhours bar of an exclusive jazz club and just happen to be sitting next to Steve Martin; for most of the time, he's turned away, holding court, discussing art and music and LA, but every once in a while he turns to you and deadpans a funny line, which is by no means great in and of itself, but it's Steve Martin, you're next to him, you're a bit drunk, and you love him, so the joke makes you warm and happy. You know that if you repeat it the next day, you'll get a patient smile in response, but it doesn't matter.

Peter Serafinowicz, however, approaches you in the harsh glare of broad daylight in the middle of a crowded pavement, comes up to you - no, looms over you, and says with Pinterian menace in his brass baritone, "I'm going to make you laugh seven times today." And you think, "Well, a) that's impossible, and b) you've not exactly put me in the mood," and then he makes you laugh seven times, and, even better, after the first couple, you're completely on his side.

Is that how you see it?

UPDATE: Typo in title; sigh.

Author, Author

One of the most extraordinary things that happened in the decade after the turn of the millenium, perhaps the signature event of this epoch, was Tina Fey leaving Saturday Night Live to create 30 Rock.

Slavishly adored and critically and commercially successful for its unparalleled run of mediocrity, Saturday Night Live, or as it is often called, no doubt in emulation of that other overgreased, high-calorie but low-content, substandard staple of American life, Kentucky Fried Chicken aka KFC, SNL was reaching a nadir of critical acclaim and joyless comedy in the early part of the new millenium, with Fey overseeing a corpsing cast that included Will Ferrell doing the same loudmouth routine, Tracy Morgan doing the same loudmouth routine, and Jimmy Fallon doing the same smirk week after week, interrupted by Darrell Hammond or Chris Parnell using wigs to identify whomever they were impersonating and Rachel Dratch screeching. The show has never been as radical and lively and as barbed as it might have been for a few early seasons, if it even was then, but at the turn of the millenium, despite good notices, SNL skirted on total irrelevance. As one person put it to me, they think they're surfing the zeitgeist, but they're only boogie-boarding in the cultural kiddie pool.

So I did not have high hopes for 30 Rock. And you don't need to know much, which is probably the case if you're following this blog, to know where this is heading. Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan are brilliant, Jenna is luscious, Chris Parnell's Dr Leo Spaceman (a child psychiatrist, no less) is pure joy, and Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy is the funniest character on television in decades, possibly ever (pipping Will Arnett's Gob Bluth to the post?) And I haven't even mentioned Kenneth. Or the crew of writers. Or Griz and Dot Com. Or Will Arnett as Devon Banks. Or the fact that the best actor alive, Matt Damon, has a recurring role as Carol Burnett; or that the second best actor alive, Jon Hamm, has a recurring role as Dr Drew Baird; or that the third best actor alive, Michael Sheen, has a recurring role as Wesley Snipes.

The best way to think of Fey is as someone who got in advance the props she was due, and then got the props she was due again, on time. That's nice. In the part of New York where I live, people would say "Good for her!" And it was deeply refreshing to see her pay amusing tribute to Lorne Michaels in a recent New Yorker piece, not only because it was a much funnier homage from disciple to master than, say, Cogito and The History of Madness, but because people like me are tempted to blame Lorne Michaels for SNL and to say that Fey could only become the proprietor, godmother, and author of 30 Rock once she escaped his clutches.

Now, obviously, Fey has a gang of writers - including, apparently, Donald Glover for several years! - and more Talent than Britain. But it is her show and with it, she has extracted and resituated her SNL stars, bringing a bunch of clown-faced comedic lazaruses back to life. A case in point: one of the best cameos on a show full of inspired cameos comes from none other than Will Ferrell, as the star of the ill-fated show Bitch Hunter.

The other night, I was in the queue waiting to get into the theatre to see the new Stephen Ady Guirgis play, and the friend I was with flipped open his Impressive Technological Device, chuckled to himself, and showed me the message he had received:

New Will Ferrel tweet: I want to have 3 kids and name them Ctl, Alt, and Del. If they F Up, I'll hit them all at once.

What a joke! And what an amazing world: I explained to my friend how technology allows us to share a joke across continents as soon as they're cracked, and that with twitter and modern technology, it doesn't matter where we are: we're can still be part of an audience for stand-up comedy. So, anyway, we went into the theatre, squeezed into our ridiculously overpriced Broadway seats, and had to endure countless old people startled by a blast of strangely often quite current ringtone music from their own fucking phones going off during the show and then fumbling for the nearest younger relative to help them turn the thing off. I mean, what is it with old people and technology?

So, anyway, it was an amazing play, I went home, chuckled a bit more about Will Ferrell's tweet about destroying misbehaving children en masse with one sweetly-choreographed click and how annoying old people are because they're useless with technology, and, lo and behold, with a few more clicks on the computer, I discovered that the tweet was not from Will Ferrell, but is an old(ish) joke, sent perhaps from some fake twitter account? Life's bullshit, man. You can't win.

Sometimes authorship just seems right; the text or show in question just seems to belong to an author, even if it doesn't; and when authorship is stripped, when the text is a naked little scrawl of letters, it's remarkable how shrivelled it can become, as if authorship is a thick swathe of white fluffy wool around a scrawny pink like lamb. (This is one example, where the text was often originally cited as having been written by Kurt Vonnegut - how much better would it be if it actually were?) Who is telling the joke matters.

UPDATE:

Thanks for notifying me of this, regarding yesterday's post. I hope the link works.

Taking the twit out of twitter

Twitter demands a new style of reading--at least for me as I somewhat belatedly try to learn how to follow the stuttered cascade of references and slap-and-forth responses; it's even harder to follow because I'm still a little starstruck: not only do I get a dribble of insight into my favourite star's minds as they jot down their thoughts, but they actually talk to each other across twitter, so it's like I'm sitting next to Bruce Willis at a restaurant and watching him lean over to the next table to say "Thanks for the concern, my Mom's better now" to Thom Yorke.

As I begin to accustom myself to the churning text of Twitter, I come across a problem far from unique to twitter: what do you do when you're not sure something is a joke? Of course, you get some clearly great comic material on twitter - the flood of one-liners from Colbert, the occasional splash-in-the-face from Steve Martin or Jimmy Carr. But what about those lines that are not . . . quite . . . right.

Bret Easton Ellis asks if Susan Boyle really understands her version of Lou Reed's Perfect Day but then says he guesses it doesn't matter because it's the best cover version of the song he's ever heard. But her version is not better than this; it's not better than this; and face it, it's not better than this, which might actually be shite. Boyle's version sounds like something cut from a mid-1980s Andrew Lloyd Weber play. But here's the rub: if ever there were a song that really doesn't need to be "understood", it's Perfect Day. It's not like Boyle has invested time and energy into Legendary Heart but not cottoned onto the fact that at least one of the lines comes from Shakespeare; she hasn't taken on Halloween Parade, without quite realizing that it is not really an elegy for trick-or-treating or apple-bobbing (unless by trick-or-treating and apple-bobbing one means something we can presume is not what Simon Cowell ever wants to discover is something Susan Boyle is fond of); it's not like Boyle has a version of I Wanna be Black or has tried to cover Metal Machine Music. It's Perfect Day. Everybody understands Perfect Day. So is Ellis saying Susan Boyle has such a cud-chewing, bovine intellect she doesn't understand Perfect Day? Or is he saying that she has done something so subtly astounding and yet so revolutionary to Perfect Day she couldn't possibly understand what she has done? Or is the tweet just a chance to say a really snotty thing to say about Susan Boyle (which is about as hard as throwing darts out of a window and hoping they'll hit the ground)? Or maybe it was a way of saying that she's so uncool she doesn't even realize when she accidentally does something cool, and he wants to admire the latter accidental coolness? I don't know.

You might say: it's just a tweet. You can't take these things seriously. Sure, some people are taking twitter too seriously (Sarah Palin has learned that journalists will report her tweets, so her half-formed thoughts can be immediately channeled into the national discourse) but they're usually the fools for it. So, get over it; give the man a break; tweets aren't lines in a novel, they aren't performed on stage, they're a bit like e-mail messages where you have to hit Send before you can even begin to consider finishing the thought. So, forget about it. Go to bed.

Fine. I can do that.

But . . . but then what do we do when we can't just shrug something off the way we can with the Boyle-Ellis-Reed tweet-incident; what do we do when the marginal ceases to be marginal and, the more you look at it, the marginal strikes you as quite possibly central?

In other words, what are we supposed to do with Kanye West? Now, I'm no fan of Kanye West. Fans are wimpy little bitches who buy records and want signatures; no, I'm a student of Kanye West. I'm at the back of his classroom, scared to raise my hand but watching wide-eyed as he drops mad science from the blackboard up front.

When it comes to Twitter, he's operating on some metatextualist level, constantly re-thinking his own voice, obliquely but insistently critiquing twitter at its essence; all of this is fair enough. But there is also a steady stream of jawdroppingly almost-one-liners, and suddenly the marginal becomes central: is Kanye West parodying the entire world or is he the most damningly earnest product of that world? Not knowing whether or not something is a joke can be of no importance whatsoever, but it can also be a dizzying misunderstanding of, or inability to understand, the world.