by David Rakoff
It’s not as if we haven’t given our beloved comedy stars precisely such license. Those who take on the comic-as-social-worker mantle seem to do so only after achieving a certain amount of acclaim. It is an affliction that strikes the overly adored and hyperaccoladed. Much like you-know-who. Four days and counting until his gala evening.
In the meantime, for Benigni-esque messianism, admittedly on a smaller scale, there is always Dan Castellaneta’s execrable one-man show, Where Did Vincent Van Gogh? I go in a fan; Homer Simpson is a character of complete genius with which any actor could justify an entire life’s work. I am not alone, either; this is an audience of Castellaneta fans, including Simpsons creator Matt Groening. As with most audiences when there is a live celebrity on stage, our laughter is performative, disproportionate, and noncontextual: a semaphoric ass kiss across the footlights. Here we are, famous person! We get you!
Where Did Vincent Van Gogh? is an ethereal and sanctimonious snooze involving an alien, played by Castellaneta, sent on a Diogenes-like quest to find seven noble characters, each of whom he morphs into by fritzing and popping like a television changing channels. We’ve seen them all before: the snotty waiter, the gay drag performer, the Indian cabdriver, a bit as a ventriloquist’s dummy meditating on who’s actually the dummy and who’s controlling who (get it?), Sister Wendy Beckett as a randy nun desperate for ravishing defrockment at the painted hands of a naked Tintoretto saint, and so on. In an Icarus-like moment of hubris, Castellaneta says, “I don’t do characters, they do me.” Wrong both times.
The nebulous, New Age-y notion of the show is that all these sterling souls are being gathered to restore our faith in some unnamed thing (presumably not one-person theater). It’s a bad sign when I start counting the unused props on stage. Only two wigs, one stool, an easel, and a dropcloth to go. I begin to pray to an unfeeling God to please make Castellaneta multitask. The damnably overdue conclusion, a we-are-all-one-and-you-are-me-and-I-am-the-alien bit of jetsam, is vacuity dressed up as depth. If I were sixteen and stoned, my world would be rocked. (Ecstatically, I am no longer either.) Castellaneta takes his curtain call with the earnest face and noble purpose of one who has been called to Teach.
Still, he is Homer Simpson, and stardom will out. “It’s just so great to be able to be made to laugh again,” says a woman outside the theater, her hand against her chest. Her voice is suffused with the relief of a patient whose fever has just broken or whose boil has been lanced.
I roll my eyes in “get her” disgust at an acquaintance I met my first time here. “Weren’t you thinking of doing a one-man show?” he says to me.
“Oh, no. I’m a writer now,” I protest, hammering my index fingers up and down in make-believe hunt-and-peck.
Trying to lance my own boil of rancor, I decide to go with the Aspen flow by swimming in the outdoor superheated lap pool at my hotel. It snows huge flakes, the accumulation of which has greatly improved the dun-colored mountain dotted with celebrity megahomes facing me. Now, turning white, I begin to understand a little bit better the attraction of such a place as this. But there is no oxygen here, and after four laps I am wheezing like a midcoital Nelson Rockefeller. Fed up with the salubrious “Smell that air!” heartiness of the place, I opt instead for taking up smoking again, having kicked my two-pack-a-day habit some eight years previously.
Better even than tobacco, however, is that evening’s tribute to Nichols and May. Mike Nichols, while largely unchanged, was always a bit soft, but Elaine May remains the beauty she was, looking startlingly good and trim in cigarette pants and a tight silver-white shirt. They are greeted with thunderous applause when Steve Martin introduces them at the Red Brick. May’s microphone isn’t working, and Nichols and Martin look on in amusement as a young technician comes out and fumbles with her chest. Looking up at him, sloe-eyed and mock nervous, she says, her voice vaguely suggestive, “I don’t know who you are, but . . .”
Like the Smothers Brothers evening, we are treated to clips of their classic material. Even after decades—many of the routines are older than I am—it all looks newly minted. A phone conversation between a Jewish mother and her infantilized son is the Platonic ideal of what, in other hands, has become a cultural cliché. Its nuance, interaction, and depth of character haven’t been improved upon since.
Aspen is crawling with comic celebrities, but it can be safely said that Nichols and May are the only people at the festival who actually effected a paradigm shift in the culture. As charter members while at the University of Chicago of the Compass, which later became the Second City, they invented improvisational comedy. Talk about honoring perspective in painting; everyone working in comedy today is indebted to this innovation (including, almost especially, what’s-his-name. T minus two days). Nichols and May are almost dismissive of their contribution, portraying themselves as nothing more than two smart-ass undergraduates, the logical product of place and time.
“The thing about the University of Chicago,” says Nichols, “is that it was the most referential place I think that I’ve ever been in. You could say Dostoyevsky and get a big laugh.”
“We started doing scenes in a bar. So everybody else in the bar was drunk and from the University of Chicago,” says May, shrugging. “We just did what they did.”
There’s nothing false about these twin displays of modesty. The two aren’t even overly invested in talking about themselves. Nichols simply up and ambushes the proceedings about halfway through the evening. Turning to us conspiratorially, he produces a copy of a speech given by Martin some weeks prior at the American Comedy Awards in Los Angeles, which he proceeds to read aloud, while May kills herself laughing and Martin curls in on himself, a thrilled and embarrassed cocktail shrimp.
“When I was told I had won this award, I spent the next three weeks trying to, well, care. As I look into the audience, I see familiar faces. Some unfamiliar. . . . Many I may meet and then forget that I met. . . . Some I will not meet, think I have, and say, ‘Haven’t we met?’ Some of you are wearing lacy white cotton panties. Some of you are in boxer shorts. But we’re here because of a common love: me.”
It is brilliant vintage Martin, with its skewering of self-importance and oh-little-me unctuousness. Its underlying indictment of awards shows and self-complacent festivals like the USCAF itself is largely lost on the audience. Wresting control of the evening once more, Martin asks Nichols to explain what he meant when he said, many years previously, “A laugh is like an orgasm.”
Nichols is not entirely sure. “I think I may have meant that, like an orgasm, a laugh has no politics,” he says. “You know we’re all being beaten to death with correctness, so I’m obsessed with correctness and the harm it’s done.” This last statement garners spontaneous applause. “I don’t know . . . I’m not talking about cruelty . . . because that’s not funny. But if something is really funny, then it’s sort of cleansed itself. . . . If it seems funny to you, then by and large, it’s okay.”
I bridle a bit at this professed standard of objectivity because, fan though I may be, Nichols directed and May wrote The Birdcage, a retrograde, hateful, and archaic film in which, it must be said, both the laughs and the orgasms have politics. It is that mutual exclusivity Nichols posits between funny and cruel—that if something is funny, then it necessarily follows that it becomes intrinsically good—that just doesn’t hold water for me. Vitriol does not reflexively turn to nectar when it’s funny. If that were true, everyone would win the clean mouth award, heaven help us. Didn’t Nichols see South Park? Proof that a funny, cruel joke can stay beautifully and brilliantly both.
What seems to distinguish a lot of the cruelty of today—from the Farrelly Brothers to the egalitarian humiliations of American Pie—is its winking acknowledgment of the politics it is flouting. Nowhere is this veneer of knowing recuperation more apparent than when Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel, co-hosts of The Man Show, take the stage at the festival’s Advertising Age magazine award for the funniest commercial of 1999
. Carolla and Kimmel are the It Boys of the postpolitical. Their program with its beer-and-babes aesthetic has made loutishness hip once again, only this time for a generation barely into its twenties. The demographic in the room is decidedly young and evenly divided among men and women. I have landed in MTV’s Winter Break. I can feel my ever more visible scalp prickling with age.
“Are those goddamn 10-10-220 people here?” asks Carolla. “Dennis Miller wants his credibility back.” The audience reacts with a mock-scared “whoah,” thrilled to finally smell blood in the water. Carolla’s dis clearly isn’t merely about the fact that the Dennis Miller spots are wincingly unfunny, nor is it because a colleague has sullied himself by making commercials—The Man Show boys make spots for beer and 1-800-COLLECT themselves, after all. The difference between them and Miller comes down to the fact that Miller posits himself as a humorous Cassandra, exposing the lies at the very heart of our society. Carolla and Kimmel don’t purport to stand for anything but having a good time.
The commercials are very funny, and the winner, a spot for Ameritrade, is hilarious. But they are, simply stated, commercials. There was a time when there would be something a little eggheady about watching compilations like this. One was either in the advertising biz or at the very least a weekend McLuhanite; either way, you had to go to some lecture hall or broadcasting museum to see them. In this epoch where science continues to assiduously study Center Square Whoopi Goldberg to see if there is a product she will not endorse, there is no sense here in the audience that the medium might have something to do with the message. That at the end of the day, something is being sold. But who am I to argue with the sheer joy and paroxysms of delight of the people around me as they laugh at all of this dot comedy? They might as well be a chain gang watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon.
Hours later I chance upon the Antero Room at the St. Regis—American Eagle HQ. Looking inside, I see none other than Dick Smothers, sitting in a director’s chair, earnestly talking to a rapt audience of three sportswear publicists about when he bought his first piece of microfiber. The remaining shards of my illusions are ground down into dust.
At least I witnessed this only on the last day of the festival, the evening of which will finally lead me to my prey and the closing-night gala, the American Film Institute tribute to Robin Williams. It is the festival’s most prized ticket and very hard to get. In the press room the transcribers are worrying aloud how they will ever be able to write down the torrent of words that will invariably pour out of Williams. He is spoken of in the awed, reverent, and vaguely terrified tones usually reserved for an approaching hurricane. As mere mortals, we are powerless in the path of the Williams juggernaut. He is considered a priori brilliant, and the task of simply keeping up would be task enough, even if he weren’t so funny!
I have yet to meet anyone outside of the press room, however, who does not actively revile Robin Williams. “Can’t people see through that shit?” asks one comic rhetorically when the subject comes up. The evening is set up as a one-on-one interview between Williams and Monty Python alumnus Eric Idle. It will presumably involve a serious discussion of Williams’s film work, but there is the widespread and chuckling expectation that Williams can be trusted to riff with his usual frenetic abandon. I am aghast to find that the stage has been set up with shelves of props, dwarfing Castellaneta’s modest selection of dramatic aids. Tonight we will observe, it is assumed slack jawed with amazement, the catalyzing of comic jewel after comic jewel to be hurled forth for our wonderment and delectation.
AFI director and CEO Jean Picker Firstenberg opens the floodgates of smarm as she kicks off the evening: “Comedy is cherished by those of us who love movies, and I believe it is vital to the national well-being. But all of us know that funny movies are . . . often snubbed by the cultural intelligentsia. The time has come for funny films to have the last laugh.”
It strikes me that with Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler commanding $20 million a movie, funny films are already having the last laugh, and quite a few of the laughs prior to the last laugh. Moreover, I don’t know of a single film studies intellectual who wouldn’t rank the work of Buster Keaton on par with that of Ingmar Bergman. So what precisely is Picker Firstenberg talking about? It is in that phrase vital to the national well-being. Is the lack of an Oscar nomination for, say, Big Daddy really a miscarriage of justice, a wound to the Republic on par with the suppression of the Pentagon Papers? And while she may well have been given a limited time to speak, it seems ridiculous that the head of the American Film Institute cannot come up with a broader continuum of cinematic comedians than Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and “the man we are here to honor tonight.” She talks about Williams as if he were penicillin or the polio vaccine: “You have made this world a better place. Regardless of the delivery system, your creative impulses are uncontainable.”
Once again the clips begin, interspersed with footage of Williams’s stand-up over the years. Watching his live act over almost two decades—the endless reel of cocaine jokes and spoofs of Valley-speak—drives home two little-acknowledged facts: First, Robin Williams is a really good, competent actor when he shuts up, which is never. And this is too bad because, second, Robin Williams isn’t actually all that funny. He is the Billy Joel of comedy, accessibly catchy in the initial moment, but with the shelf life of yogurt.
From the moment the interview begins, Williams is off. There is the theory among some psychologists that spontaneity is really nothing more than overlearned skill. Certainly Williams’s rapid-fire delivery and shifts of accent attest to this. The tropes and shamanistic visitations feel tinny. The feng shui consultant (a trend, it must be said, already a few creaky years past) who minces around the stage expounding on energy flow and open space is precisely what we have come to expect from him; ditto generic Black Guy. A pirate’s tricorner hat becomes his means of accessing the seafaring persona of his own penis, “Har har har!”; picking up a photograph of Al Gore, he utters the predictable “Please don’t listen to my speeches and operate heavy machinery”; George W. Bush’s alleged drug use is trotted out. It feels warmed over and dated even as the words leave his mouth. Never has spontaneity seemed so practiced, the very opposite of fresh. The overtested child who knows all too well that the mirror is really an observation window.
To his credit—and the detriment of my evil purposes—Williams comes off fairly well and keeps his dewy-eyed Angel of Laughter in check. Surprisingly, the evening’s allotment of treacle comes from Eric Idle, who opines, “They are the finest people in the world, aren’t they, comedians?” Yes, not like those pushy, conceited Doctors Without Borders, and don’t get me started on that bitch Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. He then follows it up with the self-aggrandizing, “It’s not a normal thing to do, is it, to be funny?” Even the disingenuous Idle must know that being funny, or at least the attempt thereof, is arguably the most normal human impulse there is (aside, perhaps, from our need for the quick and convenient fresh breath provided by Listerine PocketPaks!).
I had arrived here thinking of that oft told urban myth of the man who, newly diagnosed with cancer, checks himself into a hotel room for the weekend with videotapes of his favorite funny movies, only to emerge days later with the carcinoma beaten into remission by a flood of levity-induced endorphins. There’s really no arguing with Preston Sturges. It does seem wholly preferable to try to weather the vicissitudes of this cockeyed caravan through levity rather than through tears, but it bears repeating that even though laughter may well be “the best medicine,” it is not, in point of fact, actual medicine. One needs more than laughter to round out and sustain life.
On my last morning I eat a ridiculously extravagant breakfast of salted pork products and eggs, washed down with a gallon each of coffee and orange juice. Not the smartest meal to have before boarding the notoriously bumpy ride to Denver, affectionately referred to by locals as “the vomit comet.” But I do not care; I am entering the hypomanic state born of the prospect of my imminent
departure. I emerge from the hotel to smoke my last cigarette only to find the sky gray with the ominous promise of flight-canceling snow, lowering down onto the surrounding mountains like the lid slowly closing on a lobster pot.
I’m suddenly reminded of that legendary medieval torture wherein infidels and malefactors, their chests constricted by tight leather straps, have salt poured on their feet. Goats are then brought in to lick the salt off and the victims expire in horrible, suffocating guffaws, unable to escape or draw their next breath.
I panic at the prospect of being trapped in this chic mountain enclave, awaiting the thaw. I see the icy months before me, still trying desperately to clamber up on stage, trapped in the audience in a circle of leather-tanned ski bunnies, listening to ceaseless routines, our throats ragged and the skin of our faces chapped and cracking open from the never-ending laughter.