...Jack Silbert forwarded me this funny piece he wrote recently.

Mikegerber.com: your one-stop shop for assassination humor.

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Excellent, just excellent. Go there.

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In the wake of my umpteenth viewing of Stardust Memories, I read Andrew Sarris' reviewof Woody Allen's latest in The New York Observer. (It's the second one, after Chambrol.) I was struck by this paragraph:

The suspicion persists among many critics that when one of Mr. Allen’s films fails, it is because he isn’t really trying: He doesn’t spend enough time rewriting, he doesn’t do enough retakes, etc. One can be tempted to believe that Woody is the prisoner of his own reputation. After all, why does a genius have to do retakes or rewrite his own spontaneous wit? One can also suspect that talent diminishes with age, but where does that leave us aging critics? Perhaps the ability to make people laugh fits into a special category. As Chaplin got older, he was widely thought to have lost his comic gifts. With beloved aging performers, the question becomes more and more complex. Did people really laugh with exuberant surprise when Jimmy Durante performed the same shtick for the thousandth time the same way he’d performed it 999 times before? Or was something more complex at work, something like nostalgia or shared survival? The problem is that Woody never asked us to love him: His humor was more sharply edged than that, and now the edge is gone. Or is it? I ask because I do not know.

I don't know, either. I do know that there is something really complicated--and more than a little sad--going on between Woody and his audience. For years, I delighted in Woody Allen's work, and was more than willing to forgive him his flaws and indulgences. Now, he inspires in me a real feeling of loss.

I would disagree with Sarris that Woody never asked us to love us--his early material (the schlemiel persona, the references) is an enjoyable, but very calculated, attempt to give the people who he respected the kind of comedy he thought they'd respond to. Then, having done what he set out to do, Woody began to look around. He didn't like what he saw, either in himself ("I'm dishonest, this persona isn't real, I'm manipulating them...") or us ("...and they lap it up."). When a self-hating performer becomes successful, the audience becomes a target of his/her self-hatred. "If I'm worthless, and they love me, they must be idiots."

With every laugh I think Woody despises us all a little more, throwing out one-liners like fish to a trained seal. Maybe he hates us for continuing to laugh while in a world Allen finds absurd, vile, repugnant. That we see the suffering of the world and want more jokes is, perhaps, an indictable offense--but a famous comedian isn't the person to scold us for it. After all, that was Woody's reaction to the world, too. He may have since discovered that "comedy as palliative" doesn't work, but audiences would naturally feel angry, even cheated, to hear him say that.

A comedian engages in a simple transaction with the audience; an artist's transaction is more complicated, and for better and worse, Woody Allen's become much more of an artist than a comedian. But what he's been attempting for the last 25 years feels very unhappy and thwarted to me. I feel bad when I watch his movies. Whether they are entertaining or not, I feel like I'm watching a desperate, unsuccessful attempt to escape.

Anyway...

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I'm a hard-bitten comedy hombre, and bow to no man in my inability to be callously unimpressed by things that everybody else thinks are hysterical. "Derivative," I'll say. "Seen it before." Or perhaps I'll snip, "They didn't go far enough." Or, if I'm really reaching, trying to badmouth something obviously a million times better than anything I've ever done, I'll dismiss it with, "I can see why people would think that was funny."

Understand, these are just a few of my favorites. I've been practicing for years.

But sometimes even I can't find anything wrong with a bit. This segment from The Daily Show hits it out of the park. Bravo, folks--I give you the cupcake from my lunch.

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Reviews, I'm here to tell you, suck. When they're good, they're never quite good enough, and when they're bad, you're convinced that they've just ended your career.

Humor writing is particularly ill-starred in this regard (as it is in every regard save making readers laugh). Nothing is more subjective and personal than somebody's sense of humor, and a mismatch can entice the most reserved reviewer to new heights of disdainful venom. And if you're actually trying to do something new or difficult, treading new ground or combining things that haven't been combined before, you're just asking to get creamed. I don't try to do new things on purpose--I know it's no way to get rich or popular--but I can't help myself. I get bored. You'd get bored, too, if you had to read my stuff as much as I do. Hell, maybe you get bored already.

As a rule, I ask all my publishers not to pass along reviews. This, plus the fact that humor tends not to get reviewed in the first place, keeps me in a barely manageable state of self-loathing. I may well suck as hard as I suspect, but as long as I don't know it for sure, I can scrounge up the optimism to keep trying. Things are better, of course, when you have a runaway hit; after you've made the bestseller lists, you might get a mention, but it's usually of the sniffy "people will buy anything" variety. But that's easy to take when you know actual people--not just publishing volk--are reading and liking your work.

Still, it's freakin' AWESOME when somebody actually gets it, and no more so than with a unique beast like Freshman. Here's what my new favorite publication, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, said about Freshman:

"...That's the plot, but mayhem and hijinks are the story in this parody that blends Animal House antics with tony Jeeves and Wooster sensibilities. The sometimes bawdy, sometimes sophisticated comedy takes on the absurdities of the very rich and their pretentious traditions with sunny alacrity and an acerbic bite...The real audience for this is the twenty-something crowd, either in the midst of or just over their own college daze--for them the guffaws are loud, constant, and gut-shaking as Gerber delivers his over-the-top send-up of the freaks, geeks, and other creatures of the night that thrive on or around college campuses.—KC"

Thank you, KC, whoever you are! You just made my day!

By the way, when I was poking around the Bulletin's website, I found this amusing bit of humor.

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Dennis Perrin takes a break from the troubles of the world, here. In reading Dennis' post, I was moved to find out a little more about someone he mentioned: Peter Ivers, the brilliant but ultimately somewhat troubled songwriter/performer/New Wave impresario.

Ivers belonged to the coterie of folks who haunted Harvard in the late 60s, who believed that they were destined to conquer/transform the creative world. This is a classic undergraduate fantasy--"our group is SPECIAL"--but given where they were and when, it must've been even more seductive. Some did prevail, albeit only temporarily: National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney, for example. But for the others, the dream ended as it always does, smashed against the rocks of adulthood, biology, commerce, happenstance. The one thing you can't see from college is the role of seredipity; the world is not one big campus, to be grabbed and bent to your will. It's much, much bigger than that, and has its own imperatives to achieve. That's both great and terrible, but some people who cut a figure at a high-falutin' school never get over the big drop into the soup. God knows it took me a bit--assuming that I have!

Unlike Kenney, Ivers never found (or refused to seek) mainstream success; he scuffled along doing interesting, but difficult, projects until his murder in 1983. Like Kenney, he seemed totally committed to inhabiting a personal myth. And like Kenney, this strategy worked splendidly in college, but less and less so as he got older. Here's an interesting (though hard to read!) obituary/appreciation clipped from New York magazine. There's also a nice song Ivers wrote at the bottom of the page. Hail and farewell to another interesting person that I never met.

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Sure, I'm a little late to the party, since it's been about 48 hours since Joe-mentum was revealed as faux-mentum (blame this next parody I'm working on). Still, I thought you might enjoy The Daily Show's take on it. (Lieberman, not my manuscript.)

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