King George

The most provocative moment in the new HBO special “George Carlin’s American Dream” comes—improbably enough—from Jerry Seinfeld.  Addressing the conventional idea that great comedians can serve as a lens through which to view the wider world, Seinfeld sneers, “I’ve never heard a comedian say something that changed my mind about anything.”

It’s a bold statement to make in the middle of a two-part, four-hour retrospective of a comic who has been dead for nearly 14 years but is nonetheless quoted like an oracle on social media whenever some seismic cultural controversy or other flares up.

To be sure, there is a difference between having your mind changed and seeing your vague, preexisting leanings articulated in a memorable, clever and thereby self-reinforcing manner.  Indeed, it probably goes without saying that anyone who has ever posted an old video of George Carlin railing about war or environmentalism or abortion was in complete, longstanding agreement with the general sentiments thereof and was using Carlin merely as a vessel for expressing them in the most pungent possible way.

Then again:  Where do those views come from in the first place?  Why does each of us believe what we believe and what’s stopping us from believing the opposite?  Notwithstanding the myth of the self-made man or woman—an actual example of which has yet to be found—aren’t we all a product of our physical and sociological environments from birth onward?  Can’t all of our perspectives on how the world works be traced back to our parents, our teachers and every other person whom we encountered along the way?

Assuming this is the case (which it obviously is), why should comedians be exempt from this sprawling field of influence?  If one’s deepest convictions can be forged by, say, a cable news host or a gaggle of anonymous social media trolls—as we are told they can be—who’s to say a passionate, well-spoken humorist can’t have the same effect?

In the end—as with so much else—it’s all a matter of timing.  The question isn’t what manner of person imbued you with what manner of ideas, but rather to whom you happened to gravitate at the most impressionable and open-minded moments in your life.

In my own case, those moments very much included a handful of stand-up comics, George Carlin chief among them—particularly during the period spanning the end of high school and the beginning of college.

Undeniably, for instance, Carlin’s longstanding defense of unadulterated free expression—espoused most famously (but by no means exclusively) in his “Seven words you can never say on television” bit—impressed upon me the essential nature of the First Amendment more indelibly than any high school civics lesson.  His 1992 peroration, “The planet is fine,” illustrated how the modern environmentalist movement is a selfish, hubristic enterprise more clearly and damningly than any independent blogger ever could.  And his late-career full-bore cynicism about the entire American experiment—in particular, its unholy takeover by corporations and plutocrats at the expense of middle-class working stiffs—has long served as an invaluable check and balance against my otherwise dewy, patriotic feelings toward The Greatest Country on Earth.

Was my mid-2000s exposure to Carlin’s comedy determinative in shaping my overall sensibility about American society and culture in the years that followed?  Would I be a fundamentally different person today had I not discovered—and endlessly re-watched—his collected work when I did?

I’m tempted to answer “yes” to both questions.  While imagining alternative timelines to one’s own life is inherently fraught—not to say silly and futile—I frankly can’t picture the trajectory of my intellectual evolution without George Carlin as a regular—if often peripheral—presence, as he continues to be to this day.

Sure, I could (and do) say much the same about various writers, pundits and personal acquaintances who occupied my head space around the same time, several of whom likely played a more profound and direct role in molding me into the person I am today.  Each of us is the sum total of our experiences as a human being, and it’s probably a fool’s errand to try to retrospectively untangle all the strands in order to make sense of it all.  (Notwithstanding that the job of a good historian is to do exactly that.)

What differentiates comics from everyone else is the lack of any agenda or pretense other than telling some kind of truth about human nature and doing so in an entertaining and intelligent manner.  Audiences can smell bullshit from a mile away, and in time it becomes quite easy to distinguish the true artists from the hacks.

This is not to say that all professional comedians should (or do) regard themselves as cultural revolutionaries or free speech martyrs in service to a cause greater than themselves.  A current favorite of mine, Kathleen Madigan, has made it clear on her podcast that, so far as she’s concerned, the only job of a comedian is to keep getting booked.  Further, she argues, the majority of stand-ups who try to be deliberately provocative and “tell it like it is” are repellent, unfunny, egotistical jackasses. 

No argument here on both counts.  As with so much else, Carlin was the exception who proved the rule.  And like David McCullough once said about presidents, the thing about exceptions is that they’re exceptional.

George Carlin was exceptional, and—as a partial concession to Jerry Seinfeld—maybe there’s no other humorist whom I would count as a major influence on my sociopolitical outlook. (If there is, it would be Lewis Black.)

This is not to say I am—or ever was—in ideological accord with the entirety of Carlin’s oeuvre.  His “Why I don’t vote” rant from the 1996 HBO special “Back in Town” is both logically and morally repulsive, arguing, as it did, that our political system is so irretrievably corrupt there is no point in participating in the democratic process at all.  As well, his periodic late-career attacks on religion—while clever and amusing, as ever—come across today as uncharitable and crass—the sort of cheap, lazy snark one can easily find at 2 a.m. in grubby comedy clubs from coast to coast.

Then again, that I would even bother to evaluate his material as if he were a public intellectual rather than a vulgar circus clown serves to underline the broader point—namely, that the overall quality of his output through the decades should be taken seriously (if not necessarily literally) alongside the work of great American wits in more “legitimate” professions such as novel-writing or journalism. He might not have been a latter-day Twain or Mencken. Then again, maybe he was.

The existence of this new four-hour HBO treatment of Carlin’s life and times is strong evidence that I’m not alone in this view, even as it reminds us of the equally important truth that—from one end of his career to the other—Carlin’s genius owed in no small measure to his ability to deliver a perfectly-crafted fart joke.

Not All Clowns Are Sad

Dying is easy.  Comedy is hard.

This quip, or some variation thereof, has been attributed to just about every great comedian who has ever died.  Few doubt that it’s true—particularly the second part—although even fewer understand how very true it is.

Of course, the only people who can fully appreciate the singular challenges of stand-up comedy are those who have actually done it.  We who haven’t can only use our imaginations.

In light of the recent suicide of Robin Williams, our culture has come to conflate humor with sadness and dysfunction.  As a rule, America’s funniest citizens are also its most insecure, owing either to a traumatic childhood (and/or adulthood) or some mental illness that cannot quite be accounted for.

“While I don’t know what percentage of funny people suffer from depression, from a rough survey of the ones I know and work with, I’d say it’s approximately all of them,” wrote David Wong of Cracked.com.  “Comedy, of any sort, is usually a byproduct of a tumor that grows on the human soul.”

Reading such things, both before and after Williams took his own life, I could not help but think, “Thank God I’m not funny.”  The gift of comedy might allow one to bring joy to millions, but if it also requires—and is a direct consequence of—incalculable misery within oneself, I would just as well do without.  I understand the notion of “suffering for one’s art,” but personally, I’d prefer not to suffer and not be called an artist.  Seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.

However, many folks are unwilling or unable to settle for a life of comfort and risk-aversion—they’re just too damned funny—and last week we lost another such specimen in the person of Joan Rivers.

Watching Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the 2010 documentary that follows its subject for a year and also serves as a career retrospective, we find a natural-born comedienne afflicted with all sorts of personal and familial quirks, but depression was not necessarily among them.

Rather, what the documentary portrays above all is a woman who achieved great fame and success as a comedic performer through good old-fashioned hard work.  In so doing, it shows stand-up comedy itself to be not just a calling—something either you have or you don’t—but as a job like any other, requiring perseverance and resolve, raw talent and the understanding that you could be rejected a thousand times in spite of it, as Rivers most assuredly was.

There is one moment in particular in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work that brings the preeminence of a strong work ethic into sharp relief.  It comes when Rivers directs us to an old filing cabinet in her Upper East Side penthouse—a set of drawers much like those one used to find in a library—and we are informed that it contains every joke that Rivers has ever written, organized alphabetically by subject matter.

In other words, Rivers didn’t become a comedy legend because she was depressed.  She became a comedy legend because she harnessed every iota of comedic potential in her politically incorrect brain, wrote it down, worked it out, and never took a day off.

Certainly, one can do those things and also be depressed.  One can also be a brilliant improvisational star, as Robin Williams was, without doing any particular prep work.  No two comics work in exactly the same way.

What Rivers demonstrated, in any case, is that sometimes the secret to comedy is not as dark as we are often led to believe.  Sometimes a clever mind, a strong constitution and a little bit of luck is all it takes.

The scene with Rivers’ filing cabinet put me in mind of an equally hard-working contemporary of hers, George Carlin.  Known above all as a zany anarchist on stage, Carlin could easily give the impression of improvising on the spot.  In fact, Carlin, who died in 2008, was a meticulous craftsman and wordsmith who spent months composing, revising and fine-tuning his act on paper before trying it out in front of an audience.  He was as much a writer as a performer.  It’s a testament to his skill at both that you would never know it from watching him.

Carlin was one other thing, too: happy.  Raised by a single mother, he had a fairly typical childhood in an agreeable middle-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan.  While he regularly went after the Catholic Church in his routines (along with every other religion), he insisted that his actual Catholic school experience was utterly benign and sometimes outright enjoyable.  He was married to the same woman for 36 years (until her death), and then to another woman for 10 years (until his death).  While he more than dabbled in every illicit substance he could get his hands on, his drug use never seemed to have a deleterious effect on his life or his career.

Perhaps Carlin is simply an anomaly in this respect, as he is in most other respects.  Or perhaps he had demons like everyone else and was just really good at concealing them.  We’ll never know for sure.

But so far as we can reasonably surmise, he was a normal, healthy guy who conquered the world of stand-up comedy through sheer determination and uncommon intellect, and without the supposedly necessary baggage of depression and perpetual discontent.

Much like Joan Rivers.

The Unhappy Anarchist

I had never seen Dead Poets Society before, so I figured the death of Robin Williams was as good an occasion as any to catch up. Better 25 years late than never, as they say.

As most people already know, the movie is about an English teacher at a prestigious and extremely conservative prep school who causes all hell to break loose by introducing such heretical concepts as thinking for oneself and pursuing one’s own happiness, which he does through such exercises as reciting poetry and standing on his desk.

I must say I was slightly underwhelmed by the film, owing largely to the fact that every adult character other than the teacher is a one-dimensional scoundrel, from the principal who extols “tradition” at all costs to the father who thunderously forbids his son from pursing his dream of being an actor. On the question of whether unbridled individuality is a sin or a virtue, you might say Dead Poets Society stacks the deck.

Nonetheless, it is quite easy to understand why John Keating, the teacher, is among Williams’ most beloved movie creations, and why the principles he espouses are still so widely quoted today.

In an imperfect movie, Keating is perhaps the quintessential Williams character, insomuch as he reflects the credo by which Williams himself conducted his public life. In keeping with the film’s signature proverb, he was a man who, in every conceivable manner, seized the day.

Well, that’s a bit of an understatement. He didn’t seize the day so much as grab it by the scruff of the throat and throttle it to within an inch of its life.

Robin Williams was a comedic anarchist, and oftentimes the world didn’t quite know what to do with him. That he was so widely admired all through his career is a credit first to his singular abilities as a performer, and second to the sensibilities of his audience.

The secret to Williams’ appeal is the same as that of Groucho Marx, Mel Brooks, George Carlin and Zach Galifianakis. It’s the ability and the willingness to purposefully break the rules, and to not be afraid of authority figures who might stand in your way. To violate every taboo in the book, if only for its own sake, knowing that no joke is funnier than the one that is not supposed to be told.

All comedy is subversive, but Williams’ comedy had the added virtue of being utterly uninhibited. Once his mind started churning and his lips started flapping, there was no way to stop him. He was in his own world. A natural force.

He became most widely known through his movie career, but stand-up was always and forever his natural habitat. It was the place where he could let loose with absolutely no restraints. On an empty stage, a comic has no particular limits on time, subject matter or taste. As much as anyone can, he can say and do whatever the hell he wants. In Williams’ case, the results were often sublime.

In his movies, not so much.

For all the joy his best comedic film performances brought—Mrs. Doubtfire, The Birdcage and Aladdin must be included on any such list—there was ultimately something incompatible between Williams’ act and the film medium itself.

With exceptions (I’ll come to the biggest one in a moment), Williams’ singular wit did not explode into full metal funny on screen the way it did on stage.

The most succinct explanation for this, as I suggested at the top, is that few writers and directors were able to keep up with him. He was far cleverer than they were, and in practice this meant one of two things. First, that he was saddled with mediocre scripts that he was forced to plod his way through; or second, that he was given free rein to improvise and do his own thing, often resulting in an implausible or disjointed narrative. (To wit: How terribly convenient that he always managed to play someone who had a gift for impersonation, regardless of whether it had anything to do with the plot.)

Movies are ultimately about story and character, and no-holds-barred stand-up comedy does not naturally lend itself to either. Williams was the most enjoyable when he was totally unrestrained, and yet movies, by their nature, require restraint at least some of the time. (Even a handful of Marx Brothers movies were polluted by irrelevant romantic subplots.)

The one time Williams managed to square the circle—that is to say, the one time his talents were put on full display without being compromised—was in Good Morning, Vietnam. Directed by Barry Levinson in 1987, the movie is about an American radio DJ in Saigon who dares to introduce irreverence and rock ‘n’ roll onto military airwaves. Naturally, this leads to his being regularly harangued by his superiors, who would love nothing more than to yank him off the air, except that he is just too bloody popular.

If that sounds like the perfect Robin Williams role, that’s because it was. It gave him carte blanche in his choice of stand-up material—a radio show is pretty darned close to an empty stage—and it provided the authority figures for him to push back against.

However, Good Morning, Vietnam went even deeper than that, by following Williams’ character, Adrian Cronauer, beyond the radio booth and into the war itself, suggesting in the process that, for all his confidence and bluster on the air, he is actually a far sadder and more compassionate person than he would ever wish to let on. In a key scene deep into the film, he finds himself yukking it up with a group of soldiers, addressing them one-by-one as if they’re guests on his program, and we realize that his mighty grin is a mask. That the welling in his eyes are not necessarily tears of joy.

Cronauer was, in the end, probably the closest Williams ever came to playing himself.  It’s a tragedy that this should be so, but it sure was fun while it lasted.