by David Rakoff
On my first trip back to Canada after getting the card, the official at the airport fed it through the small computer at her desk. My identity whirred out of the slot on the other side.
“I also have my Canadian passport, if you’d like to see it,” I said.
“That won’t be necessary,” she said.
Necessary or not, at that moment I would have liked nothing more than for her to have said to me, as I had been raised to say, “Oh, yes, please, Mr. Rakoff.”
THE BEST MEDICINE
If anybody’s responsible for my being on this flight, it’s that damn Preston Sturges, who started it all in his classic film, Sullivan’s Travels, when he had Joel McCrea say, “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.” Sullivan, a successful movie director of comedies tired of his own lightweight artistry, yearns to make a grand, Odets-like homage to the workingman, working title O Brother Where Art Thou? In his zeal for hardscrabble firsthand knowledge and street cred, he takes to the open road of Depression-era America along with the sublime Veronica Lake—she of the peekaboo hair and diner coffee voice. Sullivan gets what he’s looking for as his good luck dissipates almost immediately. Separated from Lake, taken for dead by his friends back in Hollywood, he ends up on a chain gang in the bayou. One evening, when the prisoners are given the treat of attending movie night in the local one-room church, Sullivan sits in manacles and watches as the men around him are transformed and transported by a Mickey Mouse cartoon. He comes to realize the importance of his chosen genre.
Sullivan’s now canonical epiphany has been taken up as the battle cry of the comedy industry. Clownliness is next to godliness! And so I am bound for Colorado and five days of laughter, laughter, laughter, at the Sixth Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival.
I have not rented a headset, but even silent, the predicament being mutely acted out on the in-seat TV screen is one I cannot fail to recognize. Three women stand around an hors d’oeuvres table at a wedding. The Cute One with Kooky Hair is ranting, presumably about marriage as an outdated ritual for which she has no time. We already know that she doth protest too much, which will prove quite funny when she later falls head over heels in love with the fellow she now professes to loathe. Her diatribe is adorable, her antic ringlets bounce and fly about like the springs of a cartoon clock gone kerflooey. The bride arrives and throws her arms out in greeting. The Short One—and, therefore, the least attractive and consequently the one with the best lines—moves forward with her own arms outstretched as the bride runs right past her. Chagrin! (Grin.) All of it, the frozen stances indicating pauses for laughs, the cadence of line-line-joke, line-line-joke, the facial expressions, all serve to construct a narrative all-too-easily gleaned. Dialogue would almost seem like overkill.
Certainly dialogue would interrupt my reading, because at the same time I am plowing through Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious as fast as I can. This is my vain attempt to attain some erudition about the nature of funny in the few hours remaining before my arrival in Aspen. Somewhere over Iowa, I read that jokes, like dreams, can serve as releases of anxiety or as a palatable means of transmitting unsuitable impulses, like hostility. Or smut, which Freud says is “directed to a particular person by whom one is sexually excited and who, on hearing it, is expected to become aware of the speaker’s excitement and as a result to become sexually excited in turn.”
Theory becomes practice at thirty-three thousand feet when, not forty minutes later, the man in front of me asks the very attractive woman beside him if she has seen American Pie.
“What? You think I can’t get myself off?” she responds in kind, quoting back to him a line from the movie about a girl who masturbates herself with her flute.
The meaning and mechanics of humor have been on my mind the last few weeks, not for the least reason that I’ve been fielding calls from the festival’s corporate sponsors. Initially I thought I had won a lottery for which I hadn’t even bought a ticket, given the jubilation of the woman’s voice on my answering machine. “Hi!” she cheers, her voice impossibly happy and upbeat, her high spirits having relieved her of the need to breathe between words. “I’m calling for Listerine PocketPaks, and we really hope you’ll report on our ‘Clean Up Your Mouth’ Award, given to a comic at the festival not just for his or her talent, but for their clean mouth approach to comedy! See you in Aspen!”
Hers was not the first such call. She was beaten to it by a pert young thing from American Eagle sportswear—official outfitter of the Aspen comedy festival. They will be taking celebrities “shopping,” which means giving them free clothing in exchange for “some style-related quips.” She, too, hopes I’ll want to write something about it. The festival’s publicists have given out the phone numbers of all the journalists attending.
Actually, I’m not really here as a legitimate journalist (what else is new?). I’m here because I’ve been here before. I attended the very first USCAF in 1995 as a performer (or “artist,” as my laminated ID badge said), acting in a play written by my friend David. In its maiden year, it was a somewhat smaller and woollier affair, still redolent with the fantasy of the Young Upstart loaded with gumption, plucked from obscurity, flown to the Rockies, where he wows the network brass and walks away less than a week later with an HBO special or a sitcom deal.
This was not our dream, since not one of us in the play had overwhelming television aspirations. In fact, I remember us as feeling fairly miserable and out of place in Aspen, a fact that was confirmed for me when I ran into a producer I had met five years previously. “What are you doing here?” she asked, looking at me as if I were a ghost.
Where once the USCAF was the Sundance of struggling comics, now it has become, well, the Sundance of struggling comics. The whippersnappers already arrive with deals intact, like One-Hit Wonder, for instance, a disconcertingly milk-fed group of seven Oklahomans in their early twenties. The tale of their career trajectory as told in the festival program is a romantic one: it all started when the boys were discovered in Austin and set up with an industry showcase where “they met and fell in love with several CAA agents.”
Now, disencumbered of the rude mechanics of the star-maker machinery, the festival can concern itself with its cultural mission: to elevate comedy to a state of grace it has never known before. It’s an exhausting whirl of five days of films, stand-up, performance, and tributes to various stars of comedy, like director Barry Levinson and icon de la République Jerry Lewis.
It’s not that the desire to be taken seriously is an unfamiliar or inappropriate impulse, even among comedians. After all, nobody wants to be told they don’t matter, even as they play a rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” in armpit farts. But the question remains of how, or even whether, to honor in one place something that comprises not only the likes of Groucho Marx and Jacques Tati, but also the spit take and the banana peel slip, not to mention the unleashing upon an innocent and unsuspecting public of a Pauly Shore or a Gallagher. It’s a fairly broad field, a bit like having a festival in celebration of perspective in painting. Yet such are the noble goals of the Comedy Arts Festival. The “Arts” says it all, or would very much like to.
The USCAF is the bastard love child of Sturges’s epiphany. This is the comedy industry’s attempt to battle its own inferiority complex, to confirm and ratify the cultural importance and nobility of clowning, and to not just elevate it on par with its more sober cousin, drama, but take it one step further and ratchet it to the status of moral virtue.
And what better place to serve as the Olympus for all this high-minded cavorting than Aspen? Almost anywhere else, as it turns out. With its population of nine thousand swelling to upward of seventy-five thousand at peak season, Aspen is very beautiful, let no one tell you otherwise. Sitting in a bowl of majestic mountains, the air is positively minty with coniferous freshness. The snow, which falls softly and
almost constantly, blankets everything in a dazzling, magical whiteness. But as is the case with most enclaves that exist solely for the pleasure of the rich, Aspen is ridiculous. Like a weakly chromosomed Hapsburg or an ornamental dog bred through generations to conform to a tortured and rarefied aesthetic, what has resulted is something of a skittish and monstrous character: indolent, useless, and mean-spirited. Shop after shop sells moose antler chandeliers, armoires resembling rustic mountain cabins, and sundry other bits of faux frontier chic. In Aspen, if you want to buy a framed Dubonnet poster from the 1920s, a T-shirt that reads “Warning: I have gas and I know how to use it,” or washable silk skiwear with a Navajo blanket pattern rendered in sequins on the back, you’re in luck. If, on the other hand, you find yourself with a staph infection and in need of a pharmacy, I’m afraid I have some bad news.
Moreover, it seems a decidedly strange choice to stage a festival devoted to an art form that requires lung capacity—either for the telling of jokes or for the cardiovascular exigencies of the pratfall—in a place with a decidedly thin atmosphere. When I acted here, I promptly lost my voice and had to resort to breathing from an oxygen tank before the performance.
To its credit, the USCAF is no free-for-all. Much of what I end up seeing over the next five days ranges from the very funny to the inspired. But even this gives rise to another central tenet, attendant to the Comedy Is Good myth: Comedy Is Hard. Certainly well-rendered comedy is hard. All things done well require practice and work. But for most funny people, being funny is as inevitable as being double-jointed; it is a worldview formed long before words. One is born funny. The adage, as is, is incomplete. It should be Comedy is hard . . . if you’re not funny. Pirouettes are almost impossible . . . without legs. Jokes can be honed, made better, tighter, and cleaner, and people can even be made funnier. But you can’t really make someone funny who isn’t.
This is not as awful as it sounds. It’s not an etched-in-stone dichotomy, for starters; everyone has their moments. But more important, if being funny is not a moral virtue, as the USCAF would have us believe, then neither is being unfunny a moral failing.
This brings up yet another, far more important misconception: that being comically generative and having a sense of humor are one and the same thing. The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is among the most. One is a handy social tool, the other an integral component of human survival. It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.
A digression: I haven’t been forthcoming about two things so far. The first is the why, the nut of this story, the underlying reason I have been sent to Aspen. All stories are assigned and embarked on with a secret agenda. The one given to me (another lie! the one I wholeheartedly posited to my editor of my own accord) was this: I have come to Aspen to flay Robin Williams—who is to be the subject of a tribute here. I have been entrusted with the task of exposing the rainbow-suspendered-Patch-Adams-Jakob-the-Liar-Twinkling-Elf as the personification of everything that is wrong and normative and middlebrow in our culture: the walking representation of the USCAF’s taking itself too seriously. I have come here as a hatchet man. By week’s end, my stated target will have proved less deserving of attack than I had hoped, alas.
My other obfuscation is a personal one. Where I purport to care not one jot for a life of treading the boards, that my presence here as a reporter is role and reward enough, that I have no lingering yearning to perform, I am not entirely telling the truth. I walk around with a touch of the broken impotence of the octogenarian at the college stadium, both dreading and yearning for someone to ask him about the final moments of the big game of ’37. When a woman does come up to me in line at an event and not only remembers my performance from five years before, but asks me why on earth I’ve given it up, as if giving it up had been a choice of mine, I want to die of shame. “I’m a writer now,” I tell her, my voice upbeat, making a can-we-get-the-check scribbling motion with my hand.
“If The Vagina Monologues takes all my audience, I will be really pissed,” comedian Marc Maron worries aloud. He has come to do his one-man show, Jerusalem Syndrome: an exegesis of his life, including stints in Hollywood, where he subsisted on “sleep deprivation and cocaine” (“I began to feel like I had clairvoyant powers and that unseen psychic tendrils were emanating from my head and I could feel the souls of buildings and read the minds of people coming towards me; I began to feel like I was working for some unseen mystical force and I was assigned Hollywood to understand the evil that resided there”), and a trip to Israel with his wife and an exploration of the prophet-like fervor, Jerusalem syndrome, that afflicts so many pilgrims to the Holy Land.
Maron is blazingly smart, rapid-fire, and very funny, and his show is a brilliant and relentless screed. It begins with a photograph of a ten-year-old Maron against a science-fiction background of deep space. The voice-over is the disembodied female voice of benign and meaningless authority. The kind of voice that usually tells you to try your call again or fasten your seat belt, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Jerusalem Syndrome is brought to you by . . .” and thus unfurls a long litany of the factors of Maron’s existence and character, including “a faulty diaphragm, Eastern Europe, Crest, Similac, Boston University class of ’85, and bacon.”
There was a time when comics like him were less of a mainstream rarity. By today’s standards he is a little dark, a little highbrow: in a word, “downtown.” Memories of an age when a Maron could be a prime-time star come flooding back at the Smothers Brothers tribute. All the major tributes take place in the Red Brick Community Center auditorium. Perhaps the discomfort of the plastic folding chairs has been contrived as a means of reinforcing the flesh-mortifying seriousness of learning and academic rigor of these important evenings. The floor is sodden from everyone’s wet boots, there is no room for coats, and the prime center aisle of seats has been reserved for industry people.
Bill Maher moderates a discussion with Tom and Dick and three of the writers from their show, Steve Martin, Mason Williams, and the offputtingly loquacious and combative Bob Einstein (a.k.a. Super Dave Osborne, a.k.a. the real-life brother of Albert Brooks).
It’s a fractious and gemütlich reunion. The brothers and their writers talk over one another, finish each other’s sentences, bicker, and reminisce in the noisy manner of people who have known each other forever. During a brief and rare moment of silence, the preternaturally mild Dick says almost mournfully, “This is just like a lot of forums I see on television, that nobody ever finishes a thought.” Everyone in the audience laughs at this unwitting slam of Maher’s own show, Politically Incorrect, which is more often than not a cacophonous free-for-all screaming match between celebrity dunderheads.
Even in real life, it seems, straight man Dick Smothers doesn’t get the good lines. It’s quite clear that Tom, despite his having played the dim brother, was the driving force behind the act as well as the television show. Whatever talk there is of the risks taken, censors faced down, writers protected, and so on, it is always spoken of as having been by Tom’s agency. Even the years seem to have been kinder to Tom. It might just be a healthy après-ski glow, but Tom, always a pleasant enough looking fellow, has become in his late middle age what can only be described as beautiful. His skin has been burnished, his bone structure tuned up by a team of German engineers, accented at the corners of his eyes and sides of his mouth with a tracery of fine golden pleats.
Dick looks fine.
The years fall away from both of them when the lights go down and the footage of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour starts to play. I’m a sucker for funny agitprop, and it’s hard not to get nostalgic watching clips of the boys in their twenties take on race, drugs, Vietnam, and censorship with such unself-conscious temerity. It still seems fairly groundbreaking and risky even by today’s supposedly wiser, hipper standards. Tom, officiating a wedding between a black man and a white woman, pronounces them man and wife a
nd then, looking off camera, says, “The rope, please.” A montage of the late Pat Paulsen’s repeated presidential bids, played poker straight, shows him getting off the campaign plane in different states, professing to feel as if he’s finally home while maligning the state from which he’s just come. It could be news footage from the recent election. This was all so subversive back in 1969 that the boys were fired from their own show by no less a power than Richard Nixon via Bill Paley. Tom laments the near total lack of prime-time political satire on television today. There is the collective regret up on stage that television is no longer a medium for ideas. “It’s not even a medium for entertainment,” adds moderator Bill Maher in an insight bizarrely lacking in self-awareness. “It’s an advertising medium that inadvertently presents some entertainment once in a while.” This isn’t entirely true, thankfully. For clever political satire, we still have Jon Stewart, possibly the great wit of his generation.
Stewart aside, however, Smothers and Maher are largely correct. Where the more gimlet-eyed humor of the past was meant to galvanize us to action, comedy in these more solipsistic times is designed as therapy. Laughter, we are told, is good for us, a means of social redress. Behold Sturges’s monsters. As Sturges described it, humor was a kind of noble salve to our national malaise. But this is a very different America from that of Sullivan’s Travels, when the widespread destitution of the Depression was still fresh in the minds of a nation at war. One wonders what exactly the national malaise might be in this, the longest economic boom in history. If anything, it’s a personal and baronial one, like gout. In our extreme comfort, laughter is something we use not to escape circumstance, but to create circumstance, something to wake us up out of our privileged torpor, to make us feel we’ve done something good just by showing up. Think no further (if you can remotely stomach it) than Roberto Benigni and his Holocaust romp, Life Is Beautiful, the most loathsome example of a belief in the curative powers of levity: his recasting as fable the chilling efficiency of the Nazi killing machine; his rendering of a death camp as a budget resort low on blankets; but above all the vile disrespect evidenced by the film’s equation that those who perished were, I suppose, just not funny enough to turn those frowns upside down and survive. . . . Well, I just can’t say enough bad things about him. Even his buffoonish appearance at the Academy Awards, where he didn’t even have the decency to throw a bone to the millions who died in order to give him such great material by calling for that shameless yet requisite moment of silence: a vile, vile, morally reprehensible, shitty film! One wonders how Benigni might make some of the twentieth century’s other geopolitical tragedies more palatable: A Fish Called Rwanda; The Stop-It-You’re-Killing-Me Fields; To Serb with Love, perhaps?