Here's an article in the NY Times, addressing the influence and enduring popularity of National Lampoon's Animal House.



Perhaps the best--certainly the most thoughtful--take on Animal House can be found in Tony Hendra's book, Going Too Far. Here's a snippet for you:



"To hear the press tell it, it was all about a gang of eternally childish slobs cavorting in a playpen of permissiveness...But in screen time, these scenes were perhaps five minutes of a ninety-minute movie chock-ablock with event, conflict, surgically observed characters, and some of the best satirical writing since Dr. Strangelove.



You would never have guessed it, though, from the reputation makers. The secret of Animal House's phenomenal success, according to them, was its grossness, its tastelessness, its willingness to go all the way, especially when it came to the Big One, sex. All the rest was edited out of the conventional wisdom. Animal House became a gross movie, built around the embodiment of grossness, Belushi (who was rarely gross and certainly not the center of the movie), and furthermore a youth movie, because (a) youth likes grossness, not being old enough to know any better, and (b) because since it had a lot of young people in it, it must be for young people."



Now, me: So, twenty five years later, you get Old School--a funny movie, but flimsy, where the only carefully observed parts are the gross-out gags. Because it's not the story or the characters or the observation or the PRECISION, it's the puking. Not that I, like Landis is the Times article, "have anything against projectile-vomiting." It's just not enough for a movie.



Do I need to tell you to buy Going Too Far?

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Here's a recent interview with satirist Mort Sahl, still pissed off at age 76. He's always been right on the beam about the Kennedy assassination, the canary in the coal mine; I'm not talking specifics, I'm talking about knowing that something was fishy and politicized and "spun." And it wasn't simply JFK-worship, either: He got blackballed by the Kennedys--that's when his previously spectacular career started to tail, after 1961 when Kennedy got elected. That business with the Warren Report, only gave people a reason to continue not booking him. He calls George W. Bush "the first President in history who enjoys hanging out with his father's friends." The young King plays polo and looks Royal, while his ministers, old hands all, run the show.

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You know, I have to be honest. In the past, I've kinda considered Bill Maher a lightweight, a fairly standard comedian slotting himself into the mode of political satirist, sort of a lefty Dennis Miller. But after reading this transcript of the guy on CNN, I think I might have been too hasty. When he talks about what he knows best, Hollywood, I think he's right on the money.

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Folks, I'm working so hard on my college novel that my brain is melting, but last night I saw a wonderful, excellent movie: American Splendor, the movie of the comic of the life of Harvey Pekar. Go see it. Really. I actually clapped at the end.



Also, a week ago, I saw a movie called Little Voice, starring Jane Horrocks. You might know her as "Bubbles" from AbFab. It's a very funny, very sweet movie.



The article about Harvard's President, Larry Summers, in today's New York Times Magazine, is very interesting.



AND: I just got Al Franken's new book. Good, so far--and it's really nice to see the Media Thugs of the Right take their lumps! I've put a link to it below. Buy it, it helps pay for the blog, and will encourage publishers to take on more thugs.

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FOX's suit versus Al Franken's new book got exactly the treatment it deserved today. One hopes that it was expensive enough a lesson in First Amendment law that FOX will stop filing frivolous lawsuits against obviously satirical products.



Also: it's business as usual at the Harvard Lampoon. Have fun, young 'uns! Interestingly enough, Al Franken is one of the few Harvard folks in comedy who wasn't a Poonie.

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There's a new JFK assassination book coming out. It claims that LBJ put a hit out on his predecessor. Ho-hum; Paul Krassner (The Realist) has been saying that for years.



And here's Jonathan Yardley's fascinating examination of a fascinating book, The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius. Penguin has a great update by Roman historian Michael Grant, of Robert Graves 50s-era translation. Gotta get it!

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...here's a nice little interview he did with Ain't It Cool News.

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Whilst trolling the internet (instead of editing a particularly difficult chapter of my next book), I found this wonderful appreciation of the peerless British comedian, Spike Milligan. It appeared in the NY Times' yearend People Who Died issue in 2002. Enjoy!



"December 29, 2002

Insanely Funny

By MARSHALL SELLA





The best comedy is a science, a rigorously structured subversion of logic. Absurdist humor lost its greatest illogician this year, though most Americans didn't notice. Spike Milligan, who died of kidney failure in February at 83, wrote and performed ''The Goon Show,'' a BBC radio program that was broadcast from 1951 to 1960. It generally had a cast numbering only

three -- Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe -- but the trio played dozens of roles, ranging from witless vagrants to witless ministers of Parliament. The Goons' influence has long outlived its radio years. Troupes like Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python, by their own admission, were the Goons' clear descendants; some would even argue that their work was

derivative of Milligan's anarchic style.



''The Goon Show'' never caught fire on this side of the Atlantic. With its fast pace, difficult accents and very English in-jokes, it sounded like a foreign language to American audiences. In the States, radio has long been regarded as a crippled form of TV, but Milligan brilliantly exploited every virtue of the form. That you could not see the action was the entire point.

In one episode, Milligan, playing his central role of a toothless idiot named Eccles, inexplicably falls in love with one of Peter Sellers's characters. ''My little darling, I want you to have these,'' Milligan drawls, arriving at Sellers's door. ''I picked these for you. I grew them

myself.'' Sellers tries to be gracious. ''A handful of hair!'' he responds. ''How sweet. Butler! Put these in a jar of hair oil.''



Shows were created and performed within a single week, like ''Saturday Night Live'' -- but without a separate writing staff. And unlike that show, each episode offered a completely self-contained story line. You'd hear titles like ''The Phantom Head Shaver'' and ''The Great String Robberies,'' all punctuated with deliberately off-key trumpet tah-dahs after the worst jokes.

The plots were ostentatiously silly. One episode recounted a bold effort to climb Mount Everest from the inside.



''Goon'' comedy was in equal parts the harmless violence of Warner Brothers cartoons, the wordplay of James Joyce and the lowbrow japes of the English music hall. Presiding over the chaos, Milligan suffered 12 nervous breakdowns in his life. [Egad!--MG] His troubles, he liked to say, only began with being wounded and shellshocked in World War II; it was ''The Goon Show'' that shoved him over the edge. Once, when the BBC protested the late delivery of

his weekly scripts, Milligan seized a knife and tried to break into Sellers's apartment. ''I was so mad,'' he later said, ''I thought that if I killed Peter, it would come right. I think I just wanted them to lock me up.'' Milligan landed in an asylum, confined for a time in a straitjacket, before returning to write more scripts and laugh onstage with his friends.



If violence and confusion were Milligan's private demons, they also drove his comedy. The Goons' disorder and subversive punning (often sneaking filthy jokes past BBC censors) were a direct result of Spike and his pals' antipathy for the regimentation they endured in the war. The basis of the Goons' humor, Milligan once said, ''is one man shouting gibberish in the

face of authority, and proving by fabricated insanity that nothing could be as mad as what passes for ordinary living.''



Milligan was the quintessential British eccentric, and never missed a chance to rail against (in no particular order) smoking, overpopulation, noise, abortion, animal cruelty and tardiness. He was also an ardent advocate for the conservation of Victorian lampposts. And although ''The Goon Show'' made him famous, his career hardly ended in radio. Among Milligan's other works

were ''The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film,'' directed by Richard Lester in 1959. The concept of that 11-minute film -- which is pretty much what it sounds like -- would ring bells for anyone who ever laughed at a 1964 movie directed by Lester, ''A Hard Day's Night.'' What we recall as classic early-Beatles humor was often pure Spike. When John Lennon, on his

first tour of the States, was asked how he found America and quipped, ''Turn left at Greenland,'' Americans howled; English people fondly remembered the Goons.



To the end of his life, Milligan remained irreverent and prolific. He wrote more than 50 books, including ''Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall.'' He heralded the birth of surrealist TV comedy with his 1956 series, ''A Show Called Fred.'' His experimental 1969 show, ''Q5,'' appeared just as the Monty Python gang was writing its first series. ''When we first saw 'Q5,''' John Cleese once said, ''we were very depressed, because we thought it was what we wanted to do, and Milligan was doing it brilliantly.'' Terry Jones has called Milligan ''the father of Monty Python''; Cleese called him the ''great god of us all.''



Prince Charles, who had done Goons impressions as a boy (to the courtly, seething dismay of his family), was perhaps Milligan's biggest fan and the patron of the Goon Show Preservation Society. Spike repaid the compliment as only Spike would. During a live TV broadcast of a lifetime-achievement award in 1994, he was read an adoring letter from the prince, and responded by describing Charles as ''a groveling little bastard.'' Charles alone appreciated the joke.



Milligan was the last Goon to die, following Sellers in 1980 and Secombe in 2001. He had always wanted his epitaph to read ''I told you I was ill'' -- so his funeral was anything but staid. Mourners arrived at his memorial greeted by the sound of wedding bells.



Ask a Briton over 40, and he'll tick off any number of lines that prove the immortality of the Goons. In one show, Sellers and Secombe cautiously lower a boat into the Amazon. When they reach land, Milligan is already standing there. ''How did you get ashore?'' he is asked. Milligan answers proudly, ''I came across on that log.'' The other two are baffled. They shoot back: ''Log? That's an alligator!'' ''Ohhh,'' Milligan dimly explains. ''I wondered why I kept getting shorter.''

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As my Cards fight it out against the (hated) Cubs and (ho-hum) Astros in a three-way snarl atop the NL Central, I thought I'd post this rating of dear old Busch Stadium, the site of my earliest baseball memories. It's no Wrigley Field--the only thing decent about the Cubs, besides their fans--but the Beatles did play Busch in '66. And as Casey Stengel said, it DOES hold the heat well. You should've felt it back in the old artificial turf days. 110 on the field, all summer long...

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According to young Simon, this book is a parody of the Russian Harry Potteroid book, Tanya Grotter. Or maybe it's a parody of Harry Potter? I don't know. The whole thing is very complicated, isn't it?



As I think I said earlier, the UK's Guardian newspaper is investigating doing a U.S. weekly. Eric Alterman suggests that it's about time.

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I'm here in Chicago, so it didn't get us, but after reading this article in The New York Times, about the interconnectedness of electric power grids, their vulnerability, our dependence, and the absurd impossibility of protecting them, I had a vision of the future.



Since the infrastructure of the First World (for lack of a better term) is incredibly advanced, but fragile, our only option for long-term stability is to extend that infrastructure everywhere. Whether they want it or not. Only mutual, complete (inter)dependence can possibly prevent individuals from bringing it all down on our heads.



Does this scare me? Yes, it does, because I think there are a lot of people who don't WANT to live like the First World does. But unless the entire world becomes the First World, how else can we exist?



In happier news, Kate and I went to Beatlefest last night. Great fun! No Sgt. Pepper in mono, however. (Here's an article about that, in case you wonder why I care.)



In still happier news, before heading out to the convention, I finished the first complete draft of my college comedy novel. Now the fun part begins--the revisions!

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Those of you unaccountably unable to get enough via this blog are encouraged to check out a small interview on this HP fan site. If you like it, send the Webmaster/Impresario Alan a note--he's a good fella.

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Here's a quickie we did for the Village Voice. Pass it on!

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...some of you might have noticed that I take comedy, especially written comedy, really seriously, perhaps too seriously, and as a consequence hold the people who do it to an extremely high standard. This is either a character flaw or something admirable, I can't tell which. But I seem unable to stop doing it; maybe because I am an a-hole, or maybe because I really had to sweat and starve to be able to carve out a niche for myself. And when you're sitting there at 3 am, working on a piece that nobody will likely see, even if you do eventually make $50 from it, you have moments that force you to either love what you're doing or quit and go to law school. In those moments the curtain falls and you realize that you are spending some of your painfully finite life doing this, and you had better love it and give all you've got to it, or quit and make room for somebody else who will do those essential things.



People who haven't been forced to make this kind of decision have a lack of committment in their comedy, in my opinion, which makes it less sharp and personal and true and (ultimately) valuable. Since they have no other concern other than the utility of what they're doing, ie "what can I write that will make me rise in the field, or make me lots of money, or whatever" they DO rise, and they DO make lots of money, and generally turn comedy into something other than a haven for people who really, truly can't do anything else, can't help but do it.



So if I seem overcritical, that's why. It's nothing personal.

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Recently, I've received several thoughtful, interesting emails from those of you doing penance via this blog. Ed Page, who works for the humor site The Big Jewel, took issue a bit with my analysis of Katherine Hepburn. He pointed me to a Malcolm Gladwell article on the murky matter of "nature vs. nurture," which I haven't read. Malcolm Gladwell never gives me the "aha" moment that he seems to give others, but I am perfectly willing to attribute this to flaws in me, and not his writing. Anyway, after you're finished with that, here's a piece of Ed's from McSweeney's.



Anyway, with lively intelligent people like that reading the blog, what do I serve up? The Village Voice's review of "Freddy Vs. Jason." It goes without saying that I'm going to see it; I was a teenager in the 80s.

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...Jon Schwarz sent in this poem, "This Be the Verse" by Philip Larkin:



They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.



But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another's throats.



Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don't have any kids yourself.

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Sad news to report: one of our two family dogs, a big bear of a black lab named Ziggy, died today quite suddenly. He was only eight. I'm sure he's galloping and snuffling on better beaches now, but we'll still miss him. Sorry I didn't scratch you more, fella--I didn't know you wouldn't be staying long.

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And Newsweek's noticed. There's not much to the article, but it is nice to read that used bookstores are thriving in this grim publishing environment. I threaten Kate with starting one every so often.

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Take it from me: the more you know about alcoholism and codependence, the more you see it around you, and the more willfully perverse our culture's blind eye to it appears. My Spidey-sense tingled constantly throughout Claudia Roth Pierpont's measured appreciation of Katherine Hepburn in the July 21st issue of The New Yorker. I say "measured" because the author seems, well, resentful that Hepburn wasn't the person modern feminists might want her to be. (The idea that sex roles are nothing if not fluid, and that current feminist imperatives might someday appear as dated and restrictive as the mores of the Thirties is never considered; but hell, there's no need for The New Yorker to give its writers a dash of historical perspective, if the rest of the culture doesn't have any, either.)



Putting down her axe to grind and picking up my own: after reading the article, my suspicion is that Hepburn was the product of an alcoholic family. Her lineage was dotted with suicides; Roth Pierpont writes: "The family was so immoderately strong and fearless and happy that there was never any need to mention the suicide of Mrs. Hepburn's father or of her father's brother or even of Dr. Hepburn's own oldest brother.." Or, at 15, Katherine's older brother Tom. Happy, huh? When Hepburn is quoted as saying, "They simply did not believe in moaning about anything," I hear "There was simply nothing they couldn't deny."



Suicide is a terrible (and terrifying) thing for the survivors, and in that era it would've been the most natural thing to find comfort--to try to regulate mood swings apparently strong enough to send some of them to the morgue--via alcohol. Which came first? God knows, and it doesn't matter. But the kicker for me was Hepburn's relationship with Spencer Tracy, who, if the article is any guide, was a terrible, committed, life-long alcoholic. Certainly the life he offered Hepburn was less than any partner deserves, a mock-marriage to a demanding philanderer, the opportunity to care for a perpetual infant. Why would Hepburn choose that? Family patterns?



The author says that Hepburn's brother Bob thought Tracy "was sort of a younger edition of her father, in her mind." Pierpont Roth says that "Dr. Hepburn was an authoritarian in his domestic demands and in his harsh (some in the family said overharsh) corporal punishment of his children." It all sounds codependent as hell to me, screwed-up family patterns being set up and played out ad infinitum, bequeathing misery to generation after generation.



The author's annoyance with Hepburn's dissonances--the feminist heroine who was never happier than when she was subordinate to a (messed-up) man, the movies that always had Hepburn's coltish character slipping her head into the mare's yoke at the end--give the article a nice spice, and are worth thinking about. But having finished the piece, I thought it was a shame, not that Kate Hepburn wasn't the super-strong, utterly self-directed, me-first icon that feminists could revere without reservation, but somebody with unresolved family stuff that made her life kind of a drag. If the root cause--depression? codependence?--had been addressed, it seems certain that Hepburn could've been less thwarted in her personal life, and maybe even more of what the author wanted her to be.



I believe that in this difficult place, we each deserve the happiest lives we can create for ourselves. I'm sure Hepburn did her best, and perhaps she thought of her life as a perfect triumph. She'd have a right, and her opinion's the only one that really counted, anyway. it's just interesting to think about. I have a lot of opinions about the lives of celebrities, all available upon request!

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This website was pretty neat. "Cheap-labor conservatives"...I like the sound of that.

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