Can somebody help me?

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.