800 Words: Bee Movie - Jerry Grows Up

(a rerun from early 2009, and a blog I'd forgotten I'd had)

The final two seasons of Seinfeld were supposed to make the working relationship of its creators crystal clear. Larry David was the volcanically productive genius who with Curb Your Enthusiasm continued to mine existence for its minutia in an eternally darkening palette of existential triviality. Whereas Jerry Seinfeld served merely as a socially acceptable face for an anti-social genius, the very affability and tastefulness of his cynicism-lite serving as the perfect ringmaster for a cast of freaks.

Let's face it, it's partially true. Listening to Seinfeld's standup by itself is a bit like looking at expertly crafted wallpaper. Word by word, rhythm by rhythm, the delivery is impeccable and can render flat jokes funnier than they have any right to be. Yet taken out of the support structure of a stand-up routine, the jokes crumble like six-month old matzoh.

In real life, it's probable that Jerry Seinfeld is exactly as he is rendered on his show - an A student arrested emotionally at the age of 16 - the seeming ease with which life carries him masking a profound bundle of neuroses he makes visible only to people too neurotic themselves to care about them.

Perhaps this is why it's so unsurprising that while Larry David keeps mining their mountain, Seinfeld has largely retreated into smug silence. Seinfeld, once widely touted as Johnny Carson's heir for the Tonight Show, is a natural mouthpiece to showcase the greater talents of others. As it was on the show, he is the sympathetic face and ear for other people.

This is what makes his animated film, Bee Movie, so surprising. Seinfeld claimed to be a show about nothing, and for Jerry it probably was nothing more than a review of his weightless early adult years. But what made it possible was that for many others involved, the show was weightily, painfully about themselves. Larry David and a host of writers mined every angle of their personal experiences to create it.

It should follow that someone as seemingly unaffected as Jerry Seinfeld, the only appropriate following act would be a retreat into silence. He's made his money, and now needn't do anything but enjoy the time he has with it. Instead, Seinfeld has begun to make a series of increasingly self-revealing movies. It's as if middle-age, wealth, leisure and family life have halted Seinfeld's seemingly unshakable belief that there is no more to life than Superman and cereal.

First, a documentary about the craft of comedy called Comedian. An all-too-loving, fawning, almost hagiographic tribute to the heroic efforts of a profession supposed to be the first to dispense with heroism. In this documentary you can feel Seinfeld wrestling with limitations which the show seemed to assure us he never cared about. Learning and hugging was rampant. The world's most nonchalant comedian was assuring us that appearing nonchalant was sheer agony.

And then comes Bee Movie. A children's picture as self-revealing as any divorce episode on Curb. 90 minutes exposing the inside world of a beehive: populated with industrious workers whose entire identities are bound up within their careers, which every bee has to flippantly decide upon the day he graduates from larva school. Bees who practice 'Beeism' (woe betide the Bee who dates a Wasp) are all-too-accustomed to the casual anti-sebeetic abuse of the world outside the hive, and base their lives on routines so stultifying that any young 'Bee' with half an imagination would do anything to get the hell out of the hive forever and experience New York City in all its glory. And so he does, and through a mixture of charm and flinty grit, he gives back by achieving eminence and (Marxist) justice for 'Bees' around the world, only for the bee colony to become beset by inertia and apathy due to his efforts (what must a Seder be like at the Seinfeld's?). There's then the obligatory save the day heroics and by the end of the movie, Barry B. Benson Insect-At-Law has a mid-town practice whose property he shares with his human friend Vanessa, whose banter with him has a certain suggestive sting (you knew that was coming...).

It's difficult not to read too much into this, particularly in how quickly his satire has dated. In 2007 nobody has the same career for more than a decade and surely there must be a more diverse breed of shiksect for him to date. But there is no doubt that these bees are not 2007 bees. This beedungsroman (sorry) is the bee world of Great Neck, Morristown, Paramus and Yonkers a generation ago. White collar bees whose ancestors flew across the ocean, fleeing pogroms perpetrated by bears jealous of their honey-making abilities.

And so Jerry Seinfeld, the most effortlessly casual celebrity of his generation, has willfully allowed us to watch him perspire in an effort to make us see him as more than just the front man. It is often said that in Noel Coward's effort to seem like the most effortless creator of his time, nobody worked harder. No doubt the idea has occurred to Jerry that the expense of fame and fortune is to be viewed as everyone's favorite lightweight manchild. So expect a lot more Jerry projects, perhaps even a few exhibiting a grown-up version of himself, before he's done.

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800 Words: The Age of Louis CK (part 1)

About a month ago, people in my band (Orchester Prazevica) and I were discussing scheduling over email and bandying about youtube clips when one of our drummers said ‘I’ll be Huck Finn to your Tom Sawyer’ in response to a call for a gig that only he and the bandleader could do. When he sent that email, I was sitting on the toilet and watching Patton Oswalt clips (you'd be surprised how often that happens...). One of the side links to the clip I was watching called ‘Louis CK - Tom Sawyer vs. Huck Finn.’ Now I had never heard this clip, but it was Louis CK, and he was discussing precisely the matter at hand. So I sent the clip - figuring that it couldn’t possibly be anything but a home run. After I send the clip, I listen to it....


(Tom Sawyer vs. Huck Finn)

Now my band’s other drummer is black - a great musician and a nice guy who’s always a delight to work with. I should have absolutely figured what ‘word’ would be said over and over again in this clip, but for reasons passing my understanding, it never occurred to me before I sent it out. I quickly emailed what amounted to a self-deprecating non-apology apology to the band, it said ‘Yeah...wow...I sent that without listening to the content first. So....I’m a total idiot...not that you didn’t know that already. I should have known much, much better.’ Of course, there were many problems with this apology. Firstly, the fact that I didn’t actually apologize - not only because I was irresponsible, but because by not stating the offense outright I thought maybe he wouldn’t see it and I could sweep it under the rug. I’m not just a coward, I’m a manipulative coward. I still don’t know if he saw it or what he thought of it, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be a little nervous about it for the next few years. Secondly, whom among people who know me is ever going to believe that I sent this clip without looking at it first? Anybody who’s gotten to know me in the last year-and-a-half knows that I can’t get through a ten-minute conversation without bringing up Louis CK.

The next day I saw some (white) bandmates, I mentioned the apology and the clip. They didn’t understand why I sent the apology - they thought the clip was hilarious and clearly takes an anti-racism stand. If they were in my position, I probably would have said the same thing to them. Not because I believed it, but because it’s not something worth making any more of a fuss over. What clearly bothered me about this clip is not the use of the word ‘nigger,’ but the fact that I managed to bring up racism at all and all the taboos associated with it. I managed to remind this guy that he’s black, and the rest of us are white. I don’t like being reminded in a room full of goyim that I’m Jewish, so I can only imagine what that’s like for black people. And even by recounting this incident, I worry that I run still more risk of making this person feel more of an ‘other’ than perhaps I’ve already made him feel. And so it goes with the idiotically neurotic conundrums of white privilege...


(Louie on the N-word)

But Louis CK is a far braver, more heroic, person than I. And the irony is that neurotic entanglements like the one I’ve gotten myself into with this Louis CK clip illustrate precisely why comedy like Louis CK’s is so absolutely necessary. Louis CK has managed to take all the issues that delineate our society into separate, unmergeable groups, and by discussing these issues so honestly, he brings us together in appreciation of the problems’ messiness, their intractability, and precisely why they cut so deeply to the core of our society’s hurt. And whether or not it’s his intention (probably not), he’s doing more than nearly any figure in America in any line of work to drain us of our sepsis. What Louie is doing is so absolutely necessary and effective for America that I would go as far as to make this sweeping declaration:

The two people in Contemporary America who are the greatest forces for progress are Barack Obama and Louis CK.


(Or maybe not...Louie on the word ‘Faggot’)

For the moment, let’s leave aside that he may be the greatest standup comic since Carlin and Pryor, and let’s leave aside that he might be making the greatest TV show since The Simpsons and Seinfeld; let’s leave aside that in 2005 he was only #98 in Comedy Central’s top 100 standup comics, and let’s leave aside that as late as November 2009, the Onion AV felt the need to warn potential listeners that “he isn’t for everyone.” Let’s just focus on how this heretofore marginal standup comic has completely revolutionized the way we think and talk about one another.


(Louis CK on ‘backlash’ - ...and Aaron Sorkin.)

The parallels between Louis CK and Obama are actually rather striking. Until five years ago, they were both rather obscure figures in their respective fields. They were both born to multi-ethnic, multi-religious families and partially raised in foreign countries to speak foreign languages that they’ve since forgotten (Obama in Indonesia, Louis CK in Mexico). Both’s parents were divorced intellectuals who met at university and whose fathers left them at an early age. Both of them seemed to fall ‘off the rails’ as teenagers with burgeoning drug problems and street-tough attitudes. Both of them spent their early twenties embracing in the radical avant-garde of their respective fields before age made them realize that more mainstream approaches would be more effective. Both of them can rivet the attention span for an hour at a time, using a virtuoso command of language to deftly couch brutal, cold truths within a velvet glove; and both do so to a greater purpose. In the work of both President Obama and Louis CK, we see a burning desire to bridge different worlds and fuse them together with greater understanding. In the same way which Barack Obama has became the greatest unifying force in American politics in generations, Louis CK is causing the same earthquake in American culture.  



Just like President Obama, Louis CK is not for everybody - but he should be. The formula for Louis CK’s success is all the more devastatingly effective for being deceptively simple: go into those uncomfortable spaces of our lives which none of us want to talk about - the words we’re not supposed to say, the thoughts we’re not supposed to utter, the situations we’re not supposed to discuss publicly, the humiliations we don’t want anybody to know about. And bring those dark crevasses of human experience into the blinding noonday light. Suddenly, all of those terrible fears we have as people, as social groups, as a society no longer seem all that threatening because we’ve found a way to talk about them - and people are still listening.


(Louis CK on rape)

George Carlin used to talk about dragging an audience by the scruff of their collective neck to those fearful places they least wanted to go, and by doing so, making the audience glad he took them there. Carlin was a man of the 1970’s, and the 70’s were a golden age (perhaps THE golden age) of comedy. The idealism of the 60’s had shattered and in its wake lay the dark, angry realities of the Nixon era and the oil crisis. The idealism of the 1960’s was expressed through music. The anger of the 1970’s was expressed through comedy.

All great music is a kind of hypnosis which takes us out of our own minds. In order to receptive to great music, we need to be willing to divorce ourselves from control of our own mental state. The 1960’s, with both its idealism and its experimentation, was the perfect time for music to inflame America. But comedy has no such hypnosis - the very process of comedy is a primitive reflex that takes us back to cavemen’s expression of superiority and submission. Yet at the same time, comedy appeals to reason in the same way that music appeals to the heart. Music takes us out of ourselves, but comedy makes us more ourselves than ever. Comedy brings all of our anxieties to the forefront, and by making them ridiculous, it shows us that we need not be so anxious. Most great music makes us forget our worries, but most great comedy shows us why we should calm the fuck down.

The 1970s was the era of the Comedy Club. Comics were no longer received as borscht belt entertainers who owed it to their audience to charm them, the great comics weren’t even thought of as artists; they were thought of as old testament prophets, received by their audiences with fear and awe amid increasingly uncomfortable laughter. The comics owed us nothing, it was we who owed them. And our parents happily gave them their attention and allegiance. Beginning with Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trials in the late 60’s, comedy took on all the danger, the meaning, and the similarity to religious rites which Rock Music possessed just five years earlier. By the mid-70’s, comedy had fully replaced music as America’s engine of liberation. The old guard was still there, but it was comedy, not music, which best represented the generation gap. It was Richard Pryor, not Marvin Gaye or Red Foxx, who forced a discussion of American racism’s obscene hypocrisy into modern discourse. It was Joan Rivers, not Joni Mitchell or Phyllis Diller, who made women’s issues something which men could not ignore. It was Andy Kauffman and Steve Martin, not Lou Reed and Frank Zappa or Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar, who delivered the most avant-garde conceptual performances to the largest imaginable audience. Mel Brooks was making movies that skewered the prejudices of every American. Woody Allen made movies which demonstrated that comedy and intellect could go hand-in-hand. Monty Python and Fawlty Towers showed that English were just as willing to breach good taste. And it was a decade dominated by Saturday Night Live, not the Smothers Brothers.

And it was during this period that virtually every comic whom we’ve fed on for the last thirty years got his start: Jay Leno, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, Richard Lewis, Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Paul Reiser, Robert Klein, Stephen Wright, Lewis Black (though technically a comic playwright then), Richard Belzer, Garry Shandling, Tim Allen, Whoopi Goldberg, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay, and Eddie Murphy were all beginners during the 70’s. This was the era when the most powerful man in America was whichever comedian last got invited to sit on Johnny Carson’s couch.

But the righteous anger of the 70’s gave way to the complacent denial of the 80’s. Standup comedy had once again become something domesticated. Sure, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay and Eddie Murphy could sell out stadiums. But in order to retain the visceral thrill of Carlin and Pryor in their primes, they needed to reach so far into anti-social rhetoric that their comedy was drained of any humanity. The shocks of ‘Seven Dirty Words’ still feel liberating, but the shocks of ‘Dice Man Cometh’ simply feel mean and pathetic. True comic greats of the 80’s like Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks were only able to do so on a relatively small scale, and for a brief period before early deaths brought on by fast living. The only ‘80s comedian who came close to that level of edgy humanity while still maintaining a large audience was Robin Williams. And Robin Williams paid for that ability by killing his comic genius in dozens of movies that are completely unworthy of his talent. The defining comedian of the 80’s was probably Billy Crystal, who turned the experience of the Comedy Club back into something resembling a borscht belt vaudeville house.

Were things really so dire in America that we were scared of speaking honestly to one another? In the Reagan presidency we were lead for eight years by a consummate actor ready to show up to work for every carefully scripted public occasion. As the Cold War drew to its close, America began to be fed a daily diet of policy propaganda worthy of anything issued by the Politburo. We had the ‘Reagan Revolution’, the ‘Reagan Doctrine,’ ‘Reaganomics,’ the ‘War on Drugs,’ ‘Peace Through Strength,’ ‘Star Wars,’ and ‘START-I.’

The 1980’s was a time when we embraced false comforts, feared the truth, and feared people who might tell it to us. The incomes of the upper-class among us grew ever richer, while the incomes of the middle and lower classes stayed the same - at best. The suburbs were thriving, yet the inner cities fell into ever-increasing disrepair. Black celebrities like Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby were allowed into the mainstream of American life, yet they were allowed because they watered down their original talents to sell themselves to Middle America. In so many ways, White America turned a blind eye to Black America, and white comedy turned a blind eye to black comedy.

The 1980’s was no more or less despairing a decade than the 70’s. It was not an American golden era, it was a gold-spray-can on rusty tin. Even to rebel, you had to sell a piece of your humanity. Kids could once shock their parents with Beatles and Ray Charles - and by listening to such spiritually meaningful music, kids knew that they were on the side of enlightenment. But if you wanted to rebel against the manufactured pop of the 80’s, you generally had to retreat to bands in the Heavy Metal or Punk or Hip-Hop scenes who (at the time) were too interested in shock and disturbance to be bothered with writing something that could heal and soothe their listeners. In academia, the culture-wars were in full swing. It was no longer sufficient to do research for its own sake, it had to subscribe to an overarching theory. And any statement, even an off-handed one made in good intentions, that could offend one of the many special interest groups who took refuge on college campuses, was a potential career killer. The great movies of the 70's were character studies based around genuine actors and writers which managed to take on the entire American experience within them. But Jaws and Star Wars showed movies that greater money could be made without worrying about the movie's character development. And thus Hollywood producers had the only reason it needed to back away from projects which told the uncomfortable truths about our country. Thanks to Star Wars, Hollywood will never again make movies like Bonnie and Clyde, Network, Chinatown, M*A*S*H, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Blazing Saddles, Serpico, Deliverance, The Godfather, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter, which tell truths all too unpleasant about the country and era which made them. Instead, viewers can be treated special-effects ladden entertainment whose story can hopefully be told with some wit and charm, but not enough of either to distract from the machines that run our movies. Meanwhile, American-funded dictators were squeezing every political freedom out of Latin America and the Middle East, and civil wars were fought around the African continent with either side backed by the US or the USSR. The US lived in perpetual fear of the USSR overtaking them as the #1 military powerhouse, and lived in fear no less grand that Japan would eventually defeat America as the world's #1 economic powerhouse.

The 1980’s was an era when people were afraid of telling the truth. The 80’s managed to cover up the broken limbs of the past two decades with a band-aid. Anybody with enough money and privilege could ignore all the social decay around them without fear of retribution.

No wonder their comedy sucked...


(Louie on why it’s ok to hate your children)

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800 Words: Boss Lear (Part 1_)

It’s easy to forget how good an actor Kelsey Grammer is. How can somebody who acts with such gravitas be such a joke in real life?  With the cocaine, the DUI, the insane right-wing pronouncements, the bimbo wives, and the sex tape (!) – it all sounds like a life that should more be lived by Sylvester Stallone than a Great American Actor. And yet this is the same guy who could play Frasier Crane for twenty years. Lest anybody condescend to Frasier and think it’s wrong to put such an accolade on Grammer, allow me to differ. Frasier was an extremely hard part to play, and only a truly great actor could have played him well. For two decades, this actor embodied America’s image of the two things all Americans hate most: pomposity and pretension. And yet he made the character not only hilariously funny, but also regularly brought a level of pathos and caring to the character. While so many other comedies of Cheers and Frasier’s vintage had pathos that felt like utter sap (Friends anyone?), Frasier’s problems felt real. For all his pretensions, he was not unlike the rest of us.

Other comedies of Frasier’s time have held up much better. Frasier was far from perfect show, and like so many 90’s comedies, it feels utterly ridiculous compared to the later sitcoms; the laugh track, the redundant plots and jokes, the idea that Frasier could continuously court stunning women, the ridiculous caricatures of intellectuals; it was all a product of its time. Later comedies like The Office, How I Met Your Mother, and Everybody Loves Raymond, all did the pathos thing too – and each of them felt more earned than Frasier. Later comedies like Arrested Development, Community, and South Park featured actual intellectual concerns instead of caricatures of them. But what is amazing is how in spite of so many faults, Frasier still holds up so well.

The success of Frasier boils down to two matters. One was that at its best, the writing was amazingly sharp. Frasier at its best was not satire, nor was there anything truly tragicomic about it. Frasier is farce, and amazingly well-executed farce. The other factor is the acting. Not all the stars of Frasier were equally good – the women on Frasier were not particularly distinguished, and the writers never figured out how to write to the actresses’ strengths. And John Mahoney felt a little wasted as Frasier’s father. What made Frasier unforgettable was the chemistry between the two brothers – Frasier and Niles Crane.  Whichever writer came up with the idea to give Frasier a brother more foppish, more pretentious, more ridiculous than him should get an Emmy just for that. Thanks to Niles, Frasier seemed human and in touch with reality.

But what ultimately made Frasier work was the unbelievable chemistry between Grammer and his newfound acting partner, David Hyde Pierce. I suppose what the right-wing, womanizing Grammer and the monogamously gay same-sex-marriage activist Pierce actually thought of each other was anybody’s guess. But there was more in common than first met the eye: both dropped out of piano study at high-level institutions (Grammer at Julliard, Pierce at Yale), and both had mid-level theater careers that didn’t go much of anywhere before they came to television.  But whatever their dynamic off-camera, the onstage result was amazing. They looked and sounded almost exactly alike and they seemed to play on the same wavelength every time they shared scenes.

After Frasier, Grammer had a number of failed sitcoms – none of which I’ve ever seen and I’d venture no one else has either. Their failures were not surprising. It was frankly amazing that a heavy like Kelsey Grammer ever succeeded in comedy.  He’s a larger-than-life actor who arrived a generation too late for his acting style. Had he been born twenty years earlier, he might have become one of the greats in the last generation for whom stage was more important than film along with George C. Scott, Jason Robards, James Earl Jones, Hume Cronyn, Hal Holbrook, Sidney Poitier, Zero Mostel, Stacy Keach, Frank Langella and Raul Julia. His acting style is far less natural than most actors we see today. It’s acting of a different time; an old English style, the classically trained style of acting that dominated before the world became in thrall to Marlon Brando’s naturalism. It may strike us as overacting, but it ensures that the stage is dominated and never dull. It’s acting for theater, not film. For outsize drama, it’s usually preferable.

This is why Boss is the perfect show for an actor like Kelsey Grammer. 

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