January 24,2009
I've been watching MAKE 'EM LAUGH on PBS. The documentary starts off well but soon bogs down in the big muddy of Political Seriousness and the defense of the indefensable.
Tony Hendra wrote in FATHER JOE that comedians are miserable sons of bitches. Angry, deluded, despairing and, like old movie stars, insistently denying the passage of time. (He mentions a famous comedian who wears a girdle, dyes his hair, and only dates women decades younger than he is.) Hendra wasn't interviewed by the makers of MAKE 'EM LAUGH. This is a lulling and somnolent narrative and the Brit presented contraindications to the treatment.
At the heart of the narrative is Comedian as First Amendment Warrior and Counterculture Hero. George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, Mae West. Causes worth dying with a needle-in-your arm for.
At the end of the film, host Billy Crystal walks through a jail with cardboard replicas of dangerous and courageous comedians who were jailed or "might have been" (which is most of them, at least on Constitutional grounds). Crystal is then placed behind bars for saying crap -- not played as a joke, but a "warning." A serious Billy Crystal is always a bad sign. If only he had shown up earlier...
There's no doubt that Pryor and Sahl were geniunely funny. But Sahl, like Bruce, became obsessed with conspiracies (for him, the Warren Report). Bruce, as portrayed in LENNY, spent his stage time preaching from his court transcripts. Bruce was never funny, of course. Unless you think funny is pressing your nose in the face a black man in the audience and spitting the word "n---r" several times. Did Bruce really hate white America's bigotry or just himself? The smack starts to make sense... Mae West's sex farces look shabby and embarassing now. Although everyone under 40 looks young to me these days, West -- already pushing 50 -- looks like an aging child molester next to a young Cary Grant. She confuses her sexual availability with attractiveness. Billy Wilder must have had her in mind when he wrote SUNSET BLVD. But I suspect he wanted the movie touching and horrifying, not a farce.
Years ago friends and I went to see Dustin Hoffman in LENNY. The film ends with the now famous photo of Bruce dead on his bathroom floor of a heroine overdose. As we left the theatre I joked, "No more Disney movies." Well, I thought I was joking. Now Bruce and Carlin and Pryor are foul-mouthed cartoon characters for the generation that grew up on Mickey and Donald. Not real, because to accept the reality would overwhelm the thesis. Not wholesome either, but definitely overrated contributors to Constitutional guarantees of free speech and the vitality of our civic culture. Curiously, no clips from LENNY are shown. No images Pryor in a wheelchair or his sad and strange appearance on the Tonight Show when Steve Martin hosted
Carlin was funny, then he wasn't. Pryor breaks your heart as his health declines. The years of drug indulgence gouged out his life. Late in life and before entering rehab, Carlin screamed on stage and, according to Dennis Miller, often raged at homeless men on the street. Pryor's unhappy childhood and, unlike so many black entertainers, unwillingness to exchange victimhood for his wild success, is depicted in MAKE 'EM LAUGH as grounds for legitimate black rage and a thirst for justice. If only Pryor had been content, like so many well-off Black Americans, with the sentimental anger of President Obama and his accolytes even as they abandoned the black poor to institutional ignorance and despair.
A day or so ago, I tried to explain to a woman that the growing ranks of fatherless children in this country was a cultural phenomenon that we couldn't continue to appease. Her response -- there are bad fathers. Yes there are. I've seen them. But it is ironic that when discussing an obvious and pervasive pathology, the left reverts to the evils of individual behavior. Group identity instantly,if temporarily, suspended for the purposes of winning an argument and retreating from the squalor they just may have contributed to. I have seen father hunger in small children, and only recently. Pryor's fatherless and unhappy childhood was probably singular then, less so now. Dysfunction has become just another opportunity to batter tradition and family values and the Church's struggle to maintain them.
As one talking head acknowledged, Pryor's four-week old NBC show wasn't cancelled for First Amendment challenges, but because Pryor was too coked to function.
In many ways, Pryor was what comedians in general were and are, stereotypes of stereotypes. Jumping, jiving, conniving, distorting for laughs. Dirty words for effect. Deluded that the n-word was liberating (at least Pryor came to understand that lie). Desperate for attention. Not challening conventions, but painfully envious of them. As Conan O'Brian warned at the Oscars a few years ago: "I don't want anyone wasting time thanking their moms and dads. If you had normal families you wouldn't be working in Hollywood."
Of course, there's Bob Newhart, Don Rickles (close friends by the way), the underrated Ray Romano, Andy Griffith. Funny but centered. Detached to see around them, but still intimate with family and a small circle of friends -- the only kind there are.
There is no talk or clips of what comedy and television has become. On TWO AND A HALF MEN, Charlie Harper tells a women he's just met that her ability to breathe underwater will come in handy later in the evening. Blowjob jokes in primetime. Where's the consorship of evil corporate-owned networks? No mention either of HBO and its nightly filth fest. Your average Berlanti Production always starts off well, but soon shrivels into bedhopping and attacks on Republicans and Catholics. On EVERWOOD, a devout Catholic doctor performs an abortion to prove some unstated principle. On SISTERS AND BROTHERS, all the women in the family have a night of sex with strangers. I can't wait to see what they do with the Green Lantern movie. Well I can, because I won't see it.
Comedians encounter no censorship or sex or language standards because there are none. There are, however, political and religious broadcast standards. Republicans and Christians and the Boy Scouts, when not frontally attacked, are subjected to what poorly educated writers think of as irony or satire or accusations of hypocrisy. Or worse -- the buffoonizing of pedophile priests and scoutmasters and the moralizers who attempt to protect children from them. (Sexual deviants tend to be hetero dads or moms on cop shows these days.) It's not only all good. It's also all bad. No values. No worries. Only obstacles to license.
MAKE 'EM LAUGH doesn't address another issue. The drifting away of television and movie audiences. They intuitively know the difference between rights and license; speaking Truth-to-Power and contempt.
And, of course, if this is Cool, then they would rather live the years intended for them. The seamless shroud of progressivism leads to an early grave.
Sam Macomb
