I was just watching a program on C-SPAN (no jokes, please; I was surfing), a video of a conference on political humor held at the University of Virginia on 4/15 of this year (it could've been 2002). The panelists were: Jim Downey of SNL; Matt Cooper, late of Talk Magazine; the EIC of The Daily Howler, and two political cartoonists.



Rather predictably, I heard something that made my blood pressure spike, and since nobody wants me to have a heart attack, I thought I would blog my thoughts instead. A rather grizzled audience member--an adult with the scruffiness of a student (just the type of malcontent who would break the pleasant decorum with a question like this) asked, in a rather fuzzy and roundabout way: in what way, if any, corporate ownership of things like SNL influenced the comedy that was produced.



The response was predictable: "Oh, no (hurrmph, hurrmph) as long as I've been working for (insert name of subsidiary of corporation here) nobody's come up to me and said, 'You can't run that.' All that (insert name of parent corporation) is interested in, is whether the ratings are good or not." Well, of course they haven't called you on to the carpet--that's not how it works, and anybody on the inside of these things knows it. (Except when the parent company loses its mind for a second and actually DOES censor you, as with GE's pulling of a cartoon by Robert Smigel several years ago. But of course the reason was that "it wasn't very funny." Listen, if GE pulled everything on SNL that wasn't very funny...but I digress.)



Whenever you write for a show, the goal is to get as much material on air as possible; in magazines, articles printed. To get on air/printed, your material has to go through one or more gatekeepers--editors or segment producers, or what have you. Usually, there's much more material than air time/page space, so the gatekeepers habitually look for reasons to exclude material, not include it. Stuff that is likely to draw the attention--not even necessarily piss off, just draw the attention--of somebody in the parent company is the first to get cut. "That's Writer's Room stuff" is the line I've heard--funny, but too raw for the general public. So what gets on the air is the stuff that's the funniest, with an important caveat: it's also the least likely to cause trouble. This is not some conspiracy theory, it's simply how people keep their jobs; the gatekeepers at big time magazines and TV shows are paid very nicely, and they won't imperil their six-figure salaries--and perhaps everybody else's--for the sake of one pointed joke. Furthermore, the way you get the gatekeeper job in the first place is by having a finely tuned ear for what is funny, yes, but just as importantly, what is the right kind of funny, the funny that won't get us into trouble with the people who can fire us.



Here's a glimpse from the trenches: in 1998 or '99, Jon and I wrote a piece for The New Yorker lampooning then-Secretary of the Treasury now-Harvard President Larry Summers. After the magazine published it, we heard that Mr. Summers froze the magazine out for several months--no interviews, quotes, nothing. Was it worth it to The New Yorker to incur the ire of such a powerful and useful guy, for the sake of a somewhat amusing 800 word humor piece? Did they come out ahead on that trade? No. Every bigtime media outlet is constantly doing this kind of algebra, and nobody should be surprised that they are. It's one of the things that keeps them in business, year in and year out. But we as audience members shouldn't be so naive to forget that part of getting, and keeping, the job of running Weekend Update (as Mr. Downey did for a long time), or the regular gig at Vanity Fair, or even a spot doing a political cartoon for AOL, is showing that you can be trusted not to screw everything up, simply for the sake of a funny joke.



This is a rant, sure, but this issue is coming to a head, my friends. As more and more of our daily life is being shaped by what big corporations like and don't like, do and don't do, understand and don't understand, it's becoming a fatter and fatter comedic target. And a more necessary one. But don't look to SNL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GE, to talk about that. They have no obligation to tell the truth, only to make people laugh in a harmless way, and if we want different--better--it's up to us to create it, or find and support it. It's not fair to hold them to a standard they don't agree with. But don't you believe them either when they say that who owns the company doesn't change the comedy. It does, and their blindness or truth-shaving is exactly why they're in the position they're in. Del Close never ran Weekend Update.

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...has been interesting to you, I found an interview that sets out the facts at issue in RFK's death. This gentleman runs an archive on the murder for the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

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I saw the last half of a show on the RFK assassination last night and I had a thought--it's not such a brilliant one, but I never hear anybody say it, and so it falls to yours truly, Idiot Humorist.



American Liberalism of the Rooseveltian type didn't die, as the Reaganauts would have you believe. It was murdered. The cumulative effect of the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X--not to mention Medgar Evers and surely some people I'm forgetting--weakened American liberalism in two ways. First, it changed the standard-bearers.There's a difference between Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey--and just because charisma is difficult to quantify, that doesn't mean it can't make the difference in politics. All of those men were less than 50, too; so they would've been prominent leaders for at least another 15 years, and probably more. Who knows what solutions they would've offered? Second, the assassinations sent a powerful message to the country as a whole: change will get you killed. The assassinations vastly ratcheted up the role of fear in American politics, and a fearful population is a more conservative one.



So: you don't have to be a Kennedy-worshipper (which I am not) or a misty-eyed Boomer or a rapid conspiracy nut to see this: American liberalism was murdered; 1933-1968, R.I.P. We can quibble over the details and get lost in the personalities, but much of what we have now in this country, politically speaking, is the hateful, selfish, slime that moved into the vacuum the assassinations left.

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The Washington Post talks about the dueling versions of John F. Kennedy, currently for sale on American newsstands. In The Atlantic, Robert Dallek suggests that, had JFK lived, he would have reestablished relations with Castro and withdrawn from Vietnam. In Playboy, Frank Sinatra's valet reveals some bad behavior from JFK involving hookers and cocaine. Forty years on, the only mischief we don't know about is his penchant for farting in public. (I'm working on the definitive book on that.)



The Washington Post roused my ire--watch out!--by calling Oliver Stone "a nutjob" for his movie "JFK." I find it highly odd that the newspaper that broke the story about Watergate would dismiss Stone's movie--actually 30 years' worth of theories collected under the clunky-but-necessary device of the Garrison investigation--so out of hand. I want my journalists, particularly the ones covering the government, to assume the worst and look for it, not gobble finger food at Georgetown parties, thinking only the best about their hosts. It's completely IMPOSSIBLE that people in positions of power, both in the government and outside it, wanted JFK dead, isn't it? That only happens in other, less important countries. Americans are much too virtuous for that...and we don't rig elections, either.



JFK is a movie, not a comprehensive brief on the most plausible theories regarding a conspiracy to assassinate the President. The Washington Post--and everybody else--knows the difference, but has no stomach to report what probably happened that day in Dallas. Can I give you the Social Security numbers of the gunmen? No--but since when are individual citizens expected to do the work of the the US Justice Department? What were we paying J. Edgar Hoover for? (Oh, sorry--he was busy wiretapping Martin Luther King and denying the existence of the Mafia.) 75% of what we know about the JFK assassination was uncovered by individual citizens. At what point does it become the government's responsibility to clear up this bit of unfinished business, and when can they be called to account for not doing it? Power corrupts on American soil just as effectively as everywhere else.



Here's all you need to know about the JFK assassination: the stated, current policy of the U.S. government is that there was a 95% chance that there were two or more people shooting at the President. Thus, conspiracy. The Warren Report of 1964 has been superceded by the report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, which came to the above conclusion. So the truth that I think people ought to carry around with them is this: even the government thinks there was a conspiracy, but since it benefits nobody in power to find the killer(s), we'll never know.



That's not Oliver Stone's fault. And he's not a "nutjob" for suspecting that disinterest in solving the assassination may signal some degree of involvement in it. Here's what I took away from JFK, flaws and all: to not know who killed the President is to show the ultimate disrespect for democracy. Assassination is the ultimate undemocratic act. And to not investigate, properly and fully, who did it is to show utter contempt for truth. I'm no Kennedy-worshipper, but there's something to be said for the opinion that American democracy has been withering ever since November 22, 1963. George II--the Patriot Act--the War on Iraq--all these are the latest fruits of the tree planted then.

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Those of you irritated by my constant carping about The New Yorker magazine, might take a look at this essay by Daniel Lazare in The Nation. For those pressed for time, I'll simply reprint the last two paragraphs of the essay below:



"...The New Yorker may be just one example of a magazine that has lost its bearings, but, given its journalistic track record, its massive circulation (nearly a million) and the remarkable hold it still has on a major chunk of the reading public, it's an unusually important one. Where once it used its institutional heft to help broaden American politics, now it is helping to narrow them. When The New Yorker runs a clever and amusing profile of a colorful character like the Slovenian social theorist Slavoj Zizek, as it recently did, the main purpose is to give an appearance of openness while assuring readers that such radical critics remain safely marginalized. Meanwhile, it seems highly unlikely that the magazine would publish articles by the likes of Hannah Arendt or Pauline Kael, hard-hitting intellectual warriors whose goal was to challenge conventional wisdom head-on. People like that couldn't have cared less about respectability. The idea that we should put aside all doubts and take people like Rumsfeld or Woolsey at their word would have left them incredulous.



"But, then, irreverence, independence, intellectual daring--such things have been suspended for the foreseeable future. We must swallow our skepticism and fall into line. Criticism must be constructive, which is to say it must not call into question the premises of the War on Terrorism, or the good intentions of those conducting it. One is reminded of the old Dwight Macdonald line about The New Yorker existing to make us "laugh and lie down," except for two things. Rather than passivity and enervation, the goal now is loyalty and mobilization. And as for making us laugh--well, maybe it's the sour mood we find ourselves in nowadays, but The New Yorker no longer seems quite as funny."



Now, me. It's the matter of a moment to dismiss the current timidity of The New Yorker as a temporary thing--perhaps it is, I hope it is. But given the tremendous institutional pressures that any big magazine faces--how much advertising did they lose after Susan Sontag's infamous post-9/11 editorial?--I expect that freedom, once given up, evaporates for good.



And while we're cruising The Nation, here's an amusing discussion of The Daily Show. The last paragraph, however, insists that I bring up (and paraphrase) Peter Cook's comment regarding the effectiveness of political satire: "...and we all know what a splendid job those German cabarets did in preventing Herr Hitler."

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Giving the lie to the old chestnut about an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, a recent experiment revealed that, far from creeping towards Shakespeare, our simian siblings were all about "defecating and urinating all over the keyboard." So we must revise the saying--"Shakespeare" should be changed to "parodies of children's books." Or perhaps those monkeys were agents?

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In These Times has excerpted a wonderful speech Kurt Vonnegut recently gave at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. I want to be Mark Twain when I grow up, and I am tempted to say that all of you should, too.



By the way, the Harvard Lampoon is at it again. Crazy kids.

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This site is rapidly becoming your one-stop destination for all things Andy Borowitz. This morning a correspondent wrote: "Minor correction for your website--Andy Borowitz was Harvard class of '80.So we're talking moments before Reagan was elected." Which fits even more snugly with my whole "product of the Disco Generation" or however you want to characterize that train of thought. This came a few days after an email from the man himself, who said the following on the subject: "...I thought the WSJ piece, while extremely flattering, may have been a little misleading on this issue of anger, or the lack of it, in my comedy. It's true that I'm not an angry GUY -- given the incredible good luck I've had in life, that would be fairly uncalled for. But as for the seeming lack of anger in my comedy, that's more an issue of style than of substance.



"I think that the genial, cheery surface of my writing is more likely to be subversive, inviting the reader in, than if I were writing angry rants, as seems to be the preference of some other writers these days. But it would be hard, if not impossible, to write satire without a barbed point of view under that surface. Who Moved My Soap? [AB's new book--MG] is probably a good example of a silly-seeming book for which rage is the engine, but if you read it you'll judge for yourself." Our subsequent chat revealed Andy to be a cordial and interesting guy.



In non-Borowitz news, I just finished an interview for El Pais, Spain's biggest newspaper. Barry Trotter 1 is coming out there in June. In the next day or two, I'll put the English text up for any of you having trouble sleeping...

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After Mailer wrote an editorial in The London Times suggesting that the war in Iraq was undertaken to pump up the pride of Americans in general and white males in particular (I'm gleaning this, I didn't read it the first time around), Dennis Miller wrote a truly nasty response on the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal. Mailer's response was on Page Six.



Two things occurred to me immediately:

1) Mailer is a veteran.

2) Mailer writes his own material.



That's not to say that Mailer isn't daffy, he often is. But at least we can judge his arguments, because he makes them. Assuming that Miller actually sat down and wrote the Op-Ed, just him and the page (as opposed to him, a dictaphone, the page, and a couple of the usual crew brought in for punch-up) it's still somewhat troubling that the best he can do is call Mailer a has-been. This from a man whose crowning achievement was a truly fine stint on Weekend Update--which IS an accomplishment, I'm not being bitchy, but let's all agree it ain't no Pulitzer.



Here's what sticks in my craw about this, and Miller in general: sprinkling cultural references all over your stuff like some sort of magpie with a year or two of JuCo and a jones for autodidactry doesn't make what you say any smarter. It's not satire, it's Robin Williams with "Wordpower" tapes. (See how easy this is? Blech--there's a difference between satire and ad hominem, and Miller's gift is for the latter, not the former.)



Over his career, Mailer's been often outrageous, often intemperate, and often wrong, but at least he's forthright and trying to communicate. Is Miller? I don't think so--I suspect he's looking to get paid; stay hot; increase the visibility of the brand; keep up with Michael Moore and Bill Maher--"I got it! I'll be the PRO-war political satirist!" Now that it's all over but the attrition, of course. As Dennis might say, "O tempora! O mores!"

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I just received Tragically I Was An Only Twin, a collection of material from Peter Cook. I'm just dipping into it, but in the meantime, here's a review from The Guardian.

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I just read Adam Gopnik's piece on the antiestablishment comics of the 50s and 60s in the current New Yorker, and I swear I couldn't make much of it. Opinions? Can anybody out there help? It's a book review, and I'm buying the book today. Meanwhile, forgive me while I try to figure out what I think through blogging.



Whenever you drag in Falstaff and Aristophanes to a discussion of modern comedy, as Gopnik does, my eyes start to glaze. Sure, the equations of comedy, the broadest types and techniques, don't really change--but it always strikes me as terribly beside the point. Too often it's a way to address the topic that doesn't enlighten the reader, as much as protect the commentator from criticism by erecting a high-culture smokescreen. We all have opinions--and a lot of specific knowledge--about current American culture, but who can challenge a reviewer on his Aristophanes?



Looking at comedy just ain't that complicated, but you have to use History, not Literature. Sahl and Bruce and the whole improv movement--they were/are a product of their time and place. (As was Beyond the Fringe in England.) Cultural vogues like Freud and Abstract Expressionism and the Beats--and politico-psychological facts of life like the Cold War, mutually assured destruction, and Holocaust guilt--all that is more germane than Shakespeare. That's obfuscatory claptrap, and while some editor should've called him on it, I'm not surprised nobody did; the New Yorker loves its tony references. The comedy of the 50s led directly to the hippie movement of the 60s, and the self-actualization of the 70s, and the 12-step movements of the 80s and 90s--that's what it wrought, not Seinfeld. In the 50s, comedy didn't change from wit to humor, but from entertainment to group therapy. Suggesting that the current analogue is Seinfeld or anything like it denies the power of what took place then. Gopnik brushes off the "why" of our journey from Tom Lehrer to Mark Russell. This suggests that Gopnik doesn't get the lasting appeal--much less the initial popularity--of Bruce, Sahl, improv, all that.



Here's Gopnik, slapping a bell jar on it all: "Comedy is a criticism not of ideas, or even of life, but of the space between an idea and life." True, but it's not just a philosophical exercise. Comedy exists in the time and place where it's created--that's why it usually ages so poorly. If you criticize the space between the idea and life--in Bruce's words, what oughta be and what is--that automatically contains a critique of reality. Picking an example out of the air: Tom Lehrer on Werner von Braun. True, it's an expression of dismay about the idea of von Braun as an upstanding scientist next to the idea of von Braun as a war criminal, but it's also about the realities of von Braun's war crimes, AND the realities of the US government's cynical utilitarian whitewash.



These guys weren't philosophers applying Shakespeare and Aristophanes to the passing scene. They were pissed off, and scared, and being as honest as they could manage in dishonest, frightening times. Gopnik's tracing of liberal mores from Woody Allen to Seinfeld may have merit, but it strips that comic generation of its anger and pity and honesty and bleakness. Making it all about the pretentions and buzz words of Adlai-lovers may fit well with the Clintonian liberal aspects of the current New Yorker, but it's not why Lenny Bruce inspired Carlin, or Richard Pryor, or Bill Hicks. It's not why people recognized this type of comedy was special as soon as it appeared, on both sides of the Atlantic. And it's not why people are still writing books about it now. Gopnik should've read Going Too Far before putting pen to paper--I'd be more interested in his analysis then.

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After surviving its round of bashing by all the predictable sources, "The Devil Wears Prada" is finally getting some good ink. As someone who has counselled members of the women's service magazine community, I'm glad to see the book thrive. Maybe editors will treat their underlings with a little more kindness and a little less under-medicated psychosis....Most assuredly they won't, but at least somebody got their own back.



Also, as the child of an alcoholic, I don't know what I think about Modern Drunkard, the magazine's that's profiled here. Oh, what the hell, it sounds funny, too.

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I only got a chance to see the last part of the last episode, but this PBS reality series about life in an Edwardian-era great home looks pretty fascinating. The website is here.

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The WSJ has a rather bland, inoffensive article on Andy Borowitz's web site, The Borowitz Report. Once, when I was interviewing Henry Beard and Ron Barrett, I asked Henry if he thought there was another Robert Benchley out there. What I was getting at was how the economics of the business today encourage anonymous sitcom/latenight/H'wood hackery at the expense of prose humor. He said something like, "If there is one, it's Andy Borowitz." I don't visit The Borowitz Report regularly--as with The Onion, I can't have somebody else's jokes bouncing around in my subconscious--but the excerpts suggest that Henry could be right.



One of the things that's made clear in the article--which Henry also made clear--was that AB has already made enough money in Hollywood so that he doesn't have to write anything if he doesn't want to. This mega income may contribute to AB's lack of a angry attitude towards the world. Believe it or not, I think this is good--there's plenty of angry humor in the world, and there's room for bemused, relaxed, stuff that's simply designed to produce a harmless, freeing laugh.



But there's a danger to this, which is writing a lot but not saying much. Once again to bring up Henry Beard--who, after all, was Borowitz's mentor and sometime writing partner (must be something about guys from Ohio)--in another interview, Henry's said that while he may have a certain gift for saying things, he doesn't really have much to say. I don't believe this. I think he's got a lot to say, but for whatever reason doesn't feel like saying it through his humor. And that's a shame, precisely because he's so gifted, and so many less gifted humorists seem compelled to say things constantly.



One thing about Benchley, or Perelman, or Thurber, or Wodehouse--all those humorists before the Age of Anger--while you knew they would stay firmly within the bounds of decorum, there was no doubt that they were trying to communicate a very definite, very personal idea: a view of the world which was their own (and inherently critical, gently or roughly so). You can't polish a mirror without grit, and that's why so much of the "comedy" produced by Big Media reflects so poorly on everybody involved. It may be lucrative but it isn't worth anything.



Would "Young Frankenstein" have been so funny, without Mel Brooks' obvious personal attachment to the subject? YF isn't angry, but Brooks' personal investment encourages us to love those old movies, too. The same could be said about pre-Annie Hall Woody Allen. There is a generosity there, and a committment to precision, that is essential. It's fine to create disposable comedy--and by fine, I mean, not punishable in a court of law--but if you had the type of skills that Beard or Borowitz have, WHY?



I've always thought that Beard has a bit of grit in his work, simply due to the generation he belongs to. You can't have worked with the people he did for as long as he did, in the times that he did, and not have some anger seep in--it comes out primarily as a sharpness. Borowitz isn't so lucky, I think; Beard is Harvard '67, Borowitz is Harvard '78, and the difference between those two micro-eras is perhaps the difference between the writers.



It is one thing to be a sunny person who writes humor, but it's quite another to refrain from using it as a means of communication, simply out of the habit of pleasing a large corporation's preconceptions. So I would hope that both Beard and Borowitz--precisely because they can write whatever they like--would occasionally reveal themselves, and their anger, in their work. I have a feeling it would produce some really spectacular stuff.

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I watched Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita last night, and as usual found it to be an incredibly rich experience. Every damn time I watch it, I come up with one or more insights into my own life--things to do, not to do, patterns recognized, temptations resisted or embraced and the consequences of each...This, along with 8 1/2, are probably my two favorite movies, and have been since I first saw them as a callow youth at the Yale University Film Society. I doubt they're still showing films like this--sometime around 1990, I noticed that they had switched to more crowd-pleasing stuff like The Matrix, where the audience can experience thrills, chills, and the Great American Sport of nostalgia all at once...Actually, come to think of it, they never showed movies like La Dolce Vita at YUFS--I saw it courtesy of the Berkeley People's Free Film Society, a sputtering relic of the Cahiers du Cinema-era that had somehow survived to the Fall of 1987. By Christmas it had bitten the dust, finally killed off when the undergrad running it emptied its coffers and never came back after Xmas Break...



Roger Ebert has some perceptive things to say about La Dolce Vita, so instead of nattering on, I'll link to his review.

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As somebody who meditates (though not as often as I should), I was particularly interested in this Op-Ed by the Dalai Lama in the New York Times. He describes how meditation--specifically to cultivate a sense of "mindfulness"--is being shown in the lab to help improve impulse control and lessen negative mental states like fear, sadness and anger. Anybody out there who has the least glimmer of interest in meditation, I would encourage them to investigate it without hesitation. (I also like Zen philosophy, too--deeply funny stuff.)



And while the Yale I remember was not as clothing-optional as this gentleman's apparently was, I think they might be onto something. Back in W's day, that sort of thing was confined to the Senior Societies (like Skull and Bones); but now everybody's doing it. Smells like progress--or maybe somebody simply needs a shower...

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I don't watch it regularly--done my time in the news-comedy mines, thanks--but I just ran across their recent segment where President Bush debates Governor Bush over foreign policy. Excellent point, excellently demonstrated! (And very funny, too.)

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