The New Comedy

It occurred to me the other day while we were flying across the desolation of southern Utah or maybe northern New Mexico that there has been an important shift in comedy in the last 10 years or so. Basically, I was reading Premiere magazine, which I never read, but bought because I was hurting for a magazine to read on the plane to the East Coast and it had Steve Carrell on the cover. After 40-Year-Old Virgin and watching this last season of The Office, I’ll pretty much watch whatever the guy is in. Anyway, this particular edition of Premiere magazine was entitled (either explicitly or by obvious implication) The Comedy Issue. It had a big article about Mr. Carrell and also an oral history of comedy through the movie ages.

In reading these materials, it struck me that something has really changed in comedy since my comedic perspective developed. Basically, in high school, my friends and I were total smart asses, largely because the comedy that we liked revolved around smart-ass behavior, this idea of finding humor in the belief that you are smarter than just about everyone else. Now every 15-year-old boy thinks that he is smarter than everyone else. But I think that there was more to it than that.

We were basically the first generation of teenagers who had come up simply marinated in the early glory years of Saturday Night Live. Yeah, yeah, those 1975-1980 years of SNL were the first time that baby boomer humor was released to roam free, but that little group of comedians really set the entire tone for what came after in comedy for, I don’t know, 15 years. Basically, even when that group was being out-and-out stupid – see Samurai Deli, the Killer Bees, “it’s a dessert topping and a floor wax,” Bass-o-matic – it was with the underlying theme that they were smarter than everyone else. This theme then played out in a ungodly number of comedic contexts over the nest couple of decades. You watch Blues Brothers and that whole movie has the feel that Joliet Jake and Elwood have got it figured out and everyone else basically is stupid. Carrie Fisher (ah, Princess Leia, post-Star Wars, pre-gold bikini) blows up their apartment building, Belushi and Ackroyd just dust themselves off and continue on their mission from God. Even in Animal House, when Belushi is behaving basically like the Tasmanian Devil, he is doing so with this arched eyebrow, like he knows he is going to get away with all of it. Seven years of college down the drain? No problem. He still gets the hottest sorority babe and is a U.S. Senator at the end. More than just SNL alums bought in on this vibe. Without this vibe, there is no David Letterman, no Stupid Pet Tricks, no throwing melons off of roofs, no Alka-Seltzer dunk tank, no Larry Bud Melman, no Biff Henderson in a pencil suit and certainly no jumping against a Velcro wall in a Velcro wall to see if you stick. Perhaps most importantly to my particular consciousness, there is no: (1) Bruce Willis in Moonlighting (at the end of this post if my recollection of the ever-classic “man with a mole on his nose” scene from about Moonlighting 1987); and (2) Bill Murray in Caddyshack (“this Cinderella story about to win the Masters, oh, it’s in the hole, it’s in the hole!”).

But, in the last 10 years or so, something changed. As one of the Premiere articles put it, “Ben Stiller and Will Farrell are the next generation’s comedy icons.” And it is undoubtedly true. I will still: (1) watch everything Bill Murray does; (2) mourn the premature loss of John Belushi; and (3) stare in horror as Bruce Willis buries what could have been a brilliant comedic career under lots of put-upon, regular-guy-being-the-noble-action-hero roles. However, the big laughs these days are with the guys who commit, totally, completely, to a character without ever winking, no matter how humiliating or ridiculous the situation. Beans and franks in There’s Something About Mary? (The funniest movie of the last 15 years.) No problem, Ben Stiller is there. Running down the street butt naked (literally) in Old School? Will Farrell is your man. Behaving like an elf for two hours in Elf? Farrell again. The entire two hours plus of ridiculous behavior in 40-Year-Old Virgin (runner-up to There’s Something About Mary in the last 15 years) and behaving like a self-delusional butt every week on The Office? Let me introduce you to Steve Carrell.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, the dominant form of humor shifted from the “we’re smarter than everyone” mojo that my friends and I completely bought in the mid-80’s (when people asked us if we knew some guy, we would say things like “you mean the one with the eyes?”) to complete commitment to humiliation.

Why did this happen? Is it a natural consequence of having Presidents say things like “that depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” and “people misunderestimate me”? I mean when the big bosses are saying things like that, what is the point in trying to show that you are smarter than others? Are we now focusing on humiliation as humor because that is the best way to get attention in an infinite media source kind of world? (Check out MXC on Spike TV.) Don’t get me wrong, I find Stiller, Farrell and Carrell really, really funny – particularly Carrell – but will my brothers Intensio and Guitar Guy be able to remember snappy wordplay like the following 20 years after it was on TV:

David Addison (Bruce Willis): “We’re looking for a man with a mole on his nose.”

Secret Service guy: “A mole on his nose?”

DA: “A mole on his nose.”

SSG: “What kind of clothes?”

DA: “What kind of clothes
do you suppose?”

SSG: “What kind of clothes
do I suppose
would be worn by a man
with a mole on this nose?
Who knows?”

DA: “Did I happen to mention that I vowed to disclose
that this man that we’re seeking with a mole on his nose,
I’m not sure of clothes
or anything else,
except he’s Chinese, a big clue in itself?”

SSG: “I’m sorry to say
I’m sad to report
I haven’t seen anyone of that sort
No Chinese with a mole on his nose
With some kind of clothes
That you can’t suppose
So get out of this door and leave this place
Before I have to hurt you,
Put my foot in your face.”

Things That Bug Me

I have resisted the stereotypical list of things that bug me on this blog up until now, but the time has come and here it is:

(1) White golf gloves. Every freakin’ golf glove in every freakin’ golf shop is white. Why is this? Golf definitely needs to present itself as the type of sport that can only be played when you’re dressed like a butler. Every time that I go to try to buy a new golf glove, I feel like I am shopping for handwear for a cotillion to be held between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Jeez, give us some options, golf people.

(2) The World Cup. This is a little bit of a misnomer. The World Cup per se doesn’t bother me. I think that it is interesting and exciting that the whole world except the U.S. – and even more and more of the U.S. – gets all worked up over a sport every four years. What gets me is that, every four years, I start to get a little worked up about this and then – I actually try to watch some of one of the games. Oh my God, soccer is boring. I like to watch soccer the way my dad used to say that he liked to watch all sports – in the highlights at the end of the day. I just can’t, can’t, can’t watch guys going back and forth across this big field for hours on end in the faint hope that one, maybe two – if the planets align just right – goals will get scored. This may make me an ugly American and I guess that I just have to live with that. Damn.

(3) The Pacific Ocean at the California coast. Don’t get me wrong, it is beautiful and occupies a large place in my soul, right in there with baseball, brilliantly stupid comedic movies and sports cars. But, God, why is it so cold??? The Atlantic Ocean isn’t so freakin’ cold right at the coast. The Pacific Ocean is warm and wonderful in Hawaii. Why is the closest ocean to my place of residence something that induces hypothermia with very little exposure.

(4) Traffic. Now I share this annoyance with everyone else in the U.S., but my commute involves one particularly mystifying stretch of traffic. Every work day, I drive across a causeway that spans what may be the world’s largest intentionally created flood passage area. Basically, when it rains in buckets, they open weirs on the relevant rivers and large portions of said rivers pour out into this leveed plain to rush less harmfully to the sea. Due to this area’s unique function, the causeway across it has no on-ramps or off-ramps. Basically, once you are on the causeway, no cars are entering or leaving the road. It has always seemed to me that traffic thus should flow smoothly and rapidly from one side to the other. “But,” in the immortal words of John Belushi, “nooooooo!” Somehow this thing still backs up. Even on days when the be-exited-and-onramped highway on either side of the causeway is flowing smoothly, the causeway itself will back up. Why, why, why?

(5) TV coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court. Whatever you think of the Court’s decisions, it is undoubtedly true that you are working with nine very (usually) smart people who are dealing with very complicated and usually important issues. Moreover, sometimes when you read the decisions, it is little like reading a synopsis of a soap opera about the Justices’ personal interactions. (Go read the Court’s recent decision about the Clean Water Act in the Rapanos case.) TV coverage of the Court, however, seems to be focused mainly on: (1) distilling its decisions down into five-word summaries that can run on news crawls; and (2) discussing whether those decisions’ political implications. To paraphrase Jon Stewart, in doing this TV news is hurting the country. The part of such coverage that really bugs me is the coverage of cases that the Court doesn’t take (i.e., cases in which it “denies cert” by denying petitions for writs of certiorari). TV coverage always makes a big deal out of the fact that the Court “refused to hear” – that’s about how they always say it – some case that involves a hot-button political issue. Well, the Court denies cert in at least 95% of the cases presented to it. The fact that the Court denied cert in some abortion case or some freedom of religion case doesn’t mean that the Justices have decided that some state’s law on those subjects is OK. It just means that they didn’t think that the case’s facts were sufficiently general to make a good statement of law or that the lower courts have all decided pretty consistently (minimizing the need for the Supreme Court to step in) or just that the Court already has too many cases on its calendar for that year.

(6) Chris O’Donnell. Duh. I saw some picture of him recently where he had grown his hair out and was wearing a weak beard. Unfortunately, those things do not equal talent. Have I mentioned how much it irritates me that this no-talent guy gets to play in the AT&T golf tournament at Pebble Beach?

Stuff I Like

Now that I have bored you with my list of current pet peeves, I will bore you with some things that currently please me. Now I’m going to avoid the obvious stuff like The Muse, Mermaid, Enthusio, chocolate ice cream and vacations. So here goes:

(1) Tennis on TV. Every year around this time, I get into Wimbledon. The setting is awesome, like they’re playing tennis in Fenway Park. And the grass court surface lends itself to really great tennis where the players are flying around and, in particular, playing some serve-and-volley tennis where someone is right up at the net hitting pure reaction shots. Even more impressive is when someone is rushing up to the net and the other player whacks the ball right at the on-rushing player’s feet and he or she chips it back on the run (which I believe is called a half-volley). The athleticism involved there is something else, kind of like a point guard throwing a wicked behind-the-back pass on the dead run on a fast break. Moreover, tennis just fits beautifully on a TV screen. You pretty much can see all of the action in one steady shot. There really isn’t any other sport that I can think of that works that well on TV. Basketball is pretty good, but the TV only really covers half the court and you can’t keep your eye on every player all the time. So, anyway pretty much every early July, I get into tennis, watch the Wimbledon finals, then watch some of the U.S. Open in August and September and then forget that tennis exists until the next July.

(2) Pixar movies. The kids and I just went to see Cars the other day, after many requests by Enthusio. We had to go to Maryland (from Delaware). The kids thought that was kind of weird, to go to another state to see a movie. Hey, man, you know what they say: variety is the spice of life. But, anyway, I pretty much consider Pixar’s collection of movies to be one of the great cultural achievements of the last 25 years or so. What you are talking about is the marriage of really fabulous technology – I don’t think that there had been anything like the first Toy Story before it came out and the technology has gotten better and better over the years – with great storytelling. To me, three of the Pixar movies are flat-out great Films: (1) Toy Story; (2) Toy Story 2; and (3) The Incredibles (my personal favorite). Two are, to my mind, Film Minuses: (1) Monsters, Inc.; and (2) Finding Nemo. The last two, Cars and A Bug’s Life, are Movies. Not one stinking Doogal or Shark’s Tale in the bunch. Not one where I walked out thinking, “There’s 90 minutes of my life I won’t get back.” Among other computer-animated movies, only the two Shrek movies are comparable and even that is giving a break to Shrek 2 by letting really excessive pop culture references slide (Princess Fiona’s Matrix fighting in the first Shrek was funny, incorporating Starbucks as a major plot device in Shrek 2 was a bit much). So, Steve Jobs and John Lassetter, I salute you.

(3) Trees. It is very easy to take trees for granted. They’re there. They’re frequently green. In places that I have never lived, they turn colors in the fall (the second most common complaint about California from non-Californians – other than “there’s earthquakes there” – seems to be “the trees don’t turn in the fall” – yes, but you can frequently wear shorts until Thanksgiving). I often hit them with misstruck golf balls. Nonetheless, you can’t do without them, either physiologically or aesthetically. In the Central Valley, they are essential for shade in the summer (the Sacramento area supposedly has the world’s second-largest urban forest after Paris). My sister TFON once sent me one of those e-mail lists that, in this case, was entitled “You Might Have Grown Up In The Central Valley If:” and one of the two items that I remember was: “You believe that shade is the world’s most precious natural resource.” True that. (The other item that I remember on the list was “You always keep a pair of oven mitts in your car in the summer so you can touch the steering wheel.” Double true.) More than that, though, trees really almost make a city themselves. When the Muse and I were moving back to where we now live after an absence of several years, the thing that struck us both was how pretty the streets with overhanging trees are. During the years that we were gone, the dominant image that always arose in my mind about the place was driving down one particular street with overhanging trees. We just stayed in Maryland for a few days and the biggest thing that struck was how trees were everywhere. It was quite pretty. Trees, they’re good.

(4) Henry Winkler. Sitting here working on this post on American Airlines, looking up at the little tiny TV screens on which they play only CBS material, I see that the show that had Henry Winkler on it this last year is on. (They were promising me Letterman and then only showed a Top Ten List. It was a funny one, but that was bad form.) This show had a good cast: Mr Winkler, the lovely Paula Marshall, the amazing Stockard Channing (who still appears to be in her mid-30’s, just like she did in 1978 in Grease) and this pretty good actor whose name I don’t know who used to be the Ducky-type guy on this show “Popular” that The Muse used to watch. Despite the good case, the show apparently stunk, badly, and was cancelled. Nonetheless, seeing it reminded me how much I like Henry Winkler. Now here is a guy who is an icon to people my age – he was The Fonz. The coolest guy, possibly ever. Turned on the jukebox by smacking it just right. Said “ehhhhh” all the time. Immortalized in Pulp Fiction’s climatic scene. (“Do you know Fonzie? Yeah, I know Fonzie. And what was Fonzie? He was cool. That’s right Fonzie was cool, so we’re gonna be just like Fonzie and be cool.”) Now, given Mr. Winkler’s status as an icon, he easily could have slipped into a career of only wanting to be the coolest guy in everything. You know, sort of the way that Michael Douglas apparently views himself as the put-on American male – despite his having grown up the child of a Hollywood star and having been given the money to produce One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at about 13 – and will only play that part now. But, no, the Fonz is willing to play all kinds of things and he does it really well. He was pretty brilliant in Night Shift as the put-on schlub who finds his spine. He was quite brilliant as the totally incompetent, more than a little weird family attorney on Arrested Development. And we saw him as a recurring character on The Practice as a guy with a bug crush fetish that eventually resulted in his son killing someone, but he confessed to doing it and went to prison. So you have to give it up for Henry Winkler. He could have been David Caruso. Thank God he’s not.