Being Frank

Richard Brody contributes a short piece on Frank Tashlin's The Lieutenant Wore Skirts

Stabbing at jokes, at some current comedy.

by Ryland Walker Knight

[My friend Miriam Bale asked me to write something about comedy for her Comedy Versus Criticism week a while ago. I just gabbed up some notes about some things not quite near and dear to me, but intriguing nonetheless. This is more like a long jotting, a prompt almost, perhaps a prelude to more like everything on this blog. Maybe you can holler at me in the comments, tell me I'm wrong or tell me I'm right or tell me something new I've forgotten. I should also say that I don't simply dislike Apatow, but I'm kind of puzzled by him. In any case, thanks for reading, and sharing any thoughts. Maybe some jokes? Yes, please! Also, I'll probably go back and add in some links as the week goes on. Just wanted to get the text out there tonight.]

Writing about comedy is tough. Though some, like Phelps, can theorize and sound really smart and convincing (helps to be super smart), more often it's tough to make an argument about jokes while making jokes and still come off sounding intelligent, not flip. That play between serious and nonserious is a real see-saw. That's why somebody like Nietzsche is so important (to me, for sure): he's got that incisive wit that doesn't pitch low, but isn't so pretentious that it deflates itself. Another part of the problem is how varied our senses of humor can be, and how comedy, maybe more than drama, requires a really peculiar navigation of one's taste. You have to argue from your taste always, but the arrogance of that seems so much more on display when saying, say, that Funny People isn't funny enough, or serious enough, to really work.

Funny People is a weird movie: despite a lot of "plot" and a lot of "jokes" not much happens and not many of the one-liners linger. A bigger problem for me, though, is that it's not all that cinematic. Yes, there's a self-referentiality, a nod to the indexical—and no stronger than in this new one (it's all about its makers)—but everything in an Apatow picture lives to serve the punchline: he covers every scene endlessly, he saps up scenes with music, and hardly anything feels crucial. The camera rarely does anything besides observe, but this isn't some Hou Hsiao-hsien patience; it's television's pragmatism. The picture's got the same body as Sandler, pushing out and sloppy, satisfied. And I couldn't shake this since I wasn't laughing much. Now, some of this may be where I'm at and how I saw the movie (alone, mostly), but, even with a crowd of friendlies I'm doubting how much I would dig the self-congratulatory pats on the back and casual antagonism. However, the funniest bits to me were the ones with Jonah Hill taking up the asshole role and plain running with it—saying "fuck you" to everything—but, even with all the dark jokes about nearing death that Sandler's George Simmons cracks during his faux "farewell tour," Apatow can't commit to the vulgar. This definitely helped develop sympathy for The 40 Year Old Virgin, but here it gets treacly. Nobody's especially "good" here, and if that's part of the point, then, well, I'm way off base and the idea that we don't grow but just amass problems is downright tragic. Yet it's literally a sunny movie! The revelation of Simmons' remission is filmed with all kinds of lens flare emanating from behind (and around) that arbitrarily German doctor's head. It's a fantasy first and foremost but without any modesty.

More vulgar and more chaste at the same time, and maybe less overtly funny, and maybe not even all that funny except in a chuckling way, is I Love You, Man. Talk about a modest movie. The romance is set—sure there's a hiccup, but there's a point made about its triviality—and the real conflict is whether a friendship can survive, let alone blossom. It's easier than Funny People, no doubt. As Danny Kasman mused to me, it's more akin to something out of the studio heyday when you'd see a set of actors appear in about four films a year and every once in a while the film would congeal into something lovely. It may not be quite lovely, but it's easily endearing, and more than competently put together. Mostly, I dig the spirit, say the moral center, of I Love You, Man. Again, this may be due to my current needs and desires from art, but, at bottom, it's a tighter picture with more honest goals than Funny People—and it meets those goals. Also, way fewer montages. Though, of course, there is a bonding montage. Again, it's mostly a pragmatic visual style in service of capturing jokes with everything lit for clarity's sake, but it gets the rhythms of talk thanks to its casual geniality. If anything, it is brisk. But its true cinematic worth is measured in performance, in revealing a person to himself. Paul Rudd has never been more charming—more cute, really—and despite his lumpy wannabe tough act, Jason Segal is largely winning. Segal may instigate some self-awareness, but it's a classic new dawn kind of picture where Rudd's man finds layers within, about how to don the mask that smiles. After all, it's a film about honesty.

Which isn't to say Funny People is dishonest, or only portrays dishonesty—though it's kind of half-assed about its "argument" (is there one?) for living with the web of responsibilities that life presents us with—but its best jokes come from that crass cut-throat dynamic between the roommate-rivals played by Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman. As evidenced by the opening credits, Apatow knows all about living with comedians (he and Sandler were roommates) and, as any aspiring young dude does, he knows that close quarters bring out boys' competitive nature all the worse. There's a great movie in there somewhere, a really dark one about these idiots back stabbing one another to get a leg up in the rat-fame racket. That is, if Apatow made the anti-I Love You, Man. (Except, that's already been done, for the most part, with Peep Show, a BBC sitcom for the ages about two "best friends" who constantly undercut one another but can't quit the friendship out of a shared misanthropic combination of fear and apathy. It's really great stuff, full of terrible choices and worse behavior. One dude does crack, just a bit of crack, because he can; his name is Super Hans.) What makes the Rudd-Segal dynamic so ingratiating is the pure generosity of their budding friendship: they really want to see each other happy, and they like to jam. It's rare. It's also rare that this works. It's tough to talk about without sounding a sap. (It also flies in the face of loving something like Peep Show.) As with Role Models, it's not good cinema, but it's got good values. There's something about Paul Rudd, something in that self-deprication that carries over. He's no Cary Grant (I know, duh), but he's still a comedic force that stamps every picture he's in and that's got to count for something. Comedy, or this kind of comedy we're experiencing now, is so much about payoffs (as opposed to something like hysteria and absurdity) that all kinds of things set up jokes, including personae. This is, in essence, the premise for Funny People: we can't shuck ourselves.


———


The best movie of all these recent comedy hits, for my money, is Superbad. It straddles that line between dick jokes and sensitivity really well—and it looks good, too. Framing makes jokes, and spacing makes sense. Greg Mottola followed that up this year with a pet project, of sorts: his everybody's-got-one bildungsroman, Adventureland. It's not as outright funny as Superbad, and it's kind of a same-old-same-old young love story, but, again, it's got some cinematic gusto to go along with its poignancy and its ball-punching. For instance, Mottola punctuates a number of scenes with black outs, effectively working like chapter breaks, and he'll hold on a scene/shot for longer than expected to allow his actors extra beats of performance. He's got a rhythm that Apatow can't match. Further, he's a better storyteller: these two films are so tight they get myopic. They're as miniature as a short story, built on bits of nuance. Adventureland, more than Superbad, relies on its leads signifying with subtlety—the play of postures.

As befits adolescence, the soundtrack (often doubled on t-shirts) matters. The Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" plays twice in Adventureland, in different contexts, and it reminds you of just how great a great pop song is—how it can apply to so many emotions, and how we often access many at once. (It helps that the song is about that, too.) Every detail in these Mottola movies adds to the feeling of the endeavor and remind us, focused as these two films are, that we hinge so many hopes on details in our youth. The focused energy only helps this kind of comedy. If Funny People had the balls to really meander into absurdity, its formless route back to the start—things don't quite progress so much as accumulate—might yield better jokes.

The closest to that in this modern pack of comedians comes from those Will Farrell movies, specifically Anchorman, which is just one gag after another, a supreme product of whimsy on set and in the editing. There's really no rules in that movie. It's tiring, but often hilarious; the irreverent won't (can't!) quit. That's the brilliance of Tex Avery: the pile-on. That's the brilliance of Tim and Eric, too: the absurd amplifying absurdity to an absurd pitch of cacophony, or the stymied inadequacy of a blank idiot stare and gaping mouth. Basically, though, all these forms point to a punchline of disbelief. Or exasperation. You have to laugh to keep going. That's probably my baseline taste, too: something that forces me to release because it's so much. It's just that I Love You, Man flips that disbelief on the project of honesty, taking up that stand-up "it's so true" impetus that kills a lot of the Funny People comedy for me, where I'm laughing at a mirror, a parody of my desires. The laughs I liked best in Funny People are parodies of my fears, I suppose. And it seems that this revelation of the hidden is exactly what film offers comedy. The inappropriate is given a voice, and a face. Too bad giving that voice a new voice in criticism is such a self-defeating project; classification is hardly hilarious. Dewey Decimal just sounds funny.

—For Your Health!

the summer of love is now at macy's

by David Phelps

Man is a creature of habit, and the task of the artist is to try to break these habits.”— Jean Renoir

My friend Miriam has graciously asked me for some words on comedy as part of some margin notes to her programming of Artists and Models, maybe, a film I haven't seen beyond the opening 5 minutes of the Walsh version, and Ishtar, a childhood favorite. Research curtailed by a stolen laptop and aimlessness, thoughts tentative as always, whatever follows was written in appreciation of having something to do, and entirely for my benefit in writing it. And possibly one day reading it.

A short-stood theory of comedy, or a type: a logic that makes perfect sense when it never should. Inevitably, as in tragedy, one man's intentions are at odds with the world around him. A man trips on a banana by setting up one logic--a swarthy businessman hoofing down the street--to have it broken by the physical laws of the world conspiring against him unknowingly. And the joke works because the audience expects it as much as the businessman (or Sturges hero), who means to walk like he owns the world and turns out to be its pawn, doesn't.

Likewise, the joke's always on those who try to explain it; the idea of defining comedy is funny. Cary Grant's face in The Awful Truth is, as always in McCarey's domestic picaresques, given ample time to react, and is funny; ascribing logic to him would be illogical except that what's so preposterous about his expressions isn't their total preposterousness, but also their logic--perfectly logical reactions brought to their breaking point. What's really funny is that the audience knows why he looks why he does, as if there could be any reason to look ridiculous. But eventually everything looks ridiculous.

Tati's comedies, like Keaton's and Bresson's (L'Argent a desperately funny film, down to the gangster's hand reaching in frame to slap his girlfriend's centered ass, as they do in movies), are established in mechanical ballets, logical systems that show up sense--and in Playtime, all of civilization with its rules and rulered space--as nonsense. Tati jumps up to grab some restaurant decoration nobody else can reach and gets it by pulling down the ceiling; Buster Keaton, in The General, sets off a cannonball at completely the wrong moment and hits an enemy train anyway as it turns a curve straight into the explosion; the kids in Mon Oncle who lob people into poles just by whistling; a hand in Pickpocket reaching for a purse (or holding it?) only for another hand--the law's--to grab it as it would grab the money; the map by the elevator in Playtime that shows a series of color-coded lines criss-crossed in every direction: What's funny in all these cases is the world going to hell as logically and efficiently as possible.

Pickpocket's ingenious heist-as-waltz is funny because, as a friend puts it, "it doesn't show what's natural but necessary," in typical Bresson style--and because as a waltz, half the dancers don't know they're dancing. The gag where a thief replaces a woman's bag with a newspaper could be out of Chaplin, Bresson's hero, based as it is in one person knowing a total stranger so perfectly in their movements--Bresson's characters, like Chaplin's, are human machines, totally deliberate and expressive in the smallest motions--that their every gesture can be exploited. And the simple motion of a hand reaching in frame and fucking with a girl whose activities in a train station are as much routine as the thieves', indicates an entire thought process of the thief, never articulated, but filmed diagrammatically as a textbook guide. What's funny, beyond an unlikely event shown matter-of-factly as clockwork, is that it exists almost purely as a signifier, not what's natural, but essential: signifying an entire train of thought, signifying a particular event in the Platonic form of a manual guide and operating as smoothly as the tracking shot that follows the bag passed among thieves into one's coat at the back of the line. Signifiers, inevitably, are funny, for being as precise (the connotation of a signifying detail, a cigar or a fanny pack) as they are abstract (standing in for an entire type), as meaningful (a light-switch switched-off in The Smiling Lieutenant signaling sex) as they are reductive (but just sex--Lubitsch, like Bresson, uses such small gestures as language to be decoded).

Lubitsch built an entire form out of the sly innuendo of synecdoche; a slack, sunken fat man with a camera slung to his belly for decoration who plods on-screen in Playtime and stares at the camera like some actual tourist popping by the movie set to see what it's for, is funny, not for doing anything, but for doing nothing--he's a type, precisely a schlub in every wrinkle of his clothes and lumpen face--and a type of schlub that's impossibly funny: swollen and collapsed, inflated and deflated, grandiose and totally pathetic, every schlub and this schlub, who couldn't be anyone else but himself. Tati, who always finds uninteresting people really interesting, clearly likes him for being both unassuming and completely, obliviously distinctive in an anonymous city--another man's intentions unknowingly at odds with the world around him. His costume, with clothes for five more schlubs, says everything anyone could possibly know about him, a fat man whittled down to form.

Signifiers, and types, pigeonholing standard personalities and philosophies into preposterous patterns of dress and comportment--carrying the logic of a man's beliefs to totally illogical ends--leave, at the same time, everything to the viewer's imagination to anticipate ridiculous scenes. Standard schools of comedy say that comedy is surprise--but, as when Keaton's train track leaves a train nowhere to go but its own doom, comedy forces viewers to expect the absolute absurd.

One smartass hillbilly jig--

Thought it was happy every after
When it all begun
Wife askin' if I loved her
And if I'd seen the films of Bergman

--isn't enough without a tradition:

Loved women, booze, and cows
And skippin' to the loo
Yes everything was happy
Till I read Albert Camus

What's funny isn't even a hick bomb defuser--deflected expectations, irony and hypocrisy, Rita Hayworth made to make out with a turtle by virtue of rear projection, in both senses--as Marxist farmers--confirming hopes that art and theory be applied to life.

You may say that art ain't real
When yar out there with yar corn
But try not having a hard-on
When yar watchin' hardcore porn

A man falls on a banana peel and his basic intention of walking is countermined by colder intentions of the universe. But Tex Avery cartoons are funny in reverse--the characters' intentions made physically manifest at the cost of every physical law. In Avery, the logic that makes perfect sense barring habitual expectations can be internal--a wolf's phallic contortions, or a prison-suit's lines jumping off the prisoner--as in Rubens, a glance carrying physical properties (a spot-light in King-Size Canary); or structural--Northwest Hounded Police's impossible premise setting the internal logic of the film that Droopy, like God but boreder, will appear wherever a wolf goes, as grandma does in Red Hot Riding Hood. But the logic can also be purely graphic--the long shots of an erected canon in Blitz Wolf and an endless free-fall in Heckling Hare making tedium of grandiosity and terror--a wolf running off the celluloid frame, or around a title car into the forest and back in Swing Shift Cinderella--a cat piling two blocks on top of each other in rapid succession to scale a window ledge; or musical, as in Deputy Droopy, in which every hoot and holler is nearly precipitated by the soundtrack.

Played-at anarchists like Bruce Conner, the Marx Brothers, Howard Hawks, and Frank Tashlin--Hobbesians--speculate unbridled instinct as apocalyptic freedom from codes of decency and reason and, in Tashlin's case, society's branding human roles like soup cans (the ending of The Disorderly Orderly)--while Hawks famously takes his dramas to see how these codes can be implemented and obeyed. Kubrick finds instinct and reason equally proposterous for taking the guise of the other. The funniest characters are always the most moral and the least, because anybody can recognize themselves in either; Tati's target's reason; Avery's is instinct.



Dialectics and distinctions are essential to comedy; Avery as much as Tati is the master of the type, whittled down to form just so. The ultimate joke of Avery's masterpiece Little Rural Riding Hood is that after all the preposterous oppositions--the innocent fairy tale with a bunch of hick actors who just want to get laid; the hick wolf lead then sent to a nightclub metropolis where sex is in the air, and air only, as the debonair innuendo of curling mustaches and sinuous legs; the sinuous legs of the rather titular chanteuse matched with the hick in overalls trying to keep his eyeballs in his head, leaping erect in every direction, and pummeling himself in the head with a sledgehammer as if to keep from going crazy by going insane--the ultimate joke's that all these dialectics, all these internal logics brought to preposterous, and completely understandable, conclusions, all just offer two forms of expressing the same sensations. Fear and desire are expressed in identical foot-stomping hoots of rage (the wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood looking the same chasing skirt as he does running from her sexpot grandma); the chanteuse's snaking dance and the hick's bent-metal responses both meaning sex; the urban wolf's violent and nonchalant safeguarding of his cousin more or less the same as his cousin's self-directed rages that lead him to need safeguarding; the urban wolf being one expression of pure sex, wrapped in leather and mink, as the rural wolf's another, wrapped in nothing: and all these characters being parodies of parodic stereotypes, and complete celebrations of them. What's funniest in Little Rural Riding Hood, as in Shakespeare's sex comedies, is that it's impossible not to sympathize with any of the idiots on display, not for their ridiculously precise and precisely ridiculous forms, but for the fact that they've all got their all-too familiar reasons.

In comedy, everyone's got their reducto ad absurdum reasons; Wallace Stevens' "the civillest of odours" with which a girl hopes to win an evil giant's heart, is funny for nailing poetry's reasons as beauty and decency (fairness vs. fairness) and meaning as not only florid impossibilities, but irreconcilable florid impossibilities; the old rush poster proclaiming "Still a virgin? JOIN SAE" is funny for offering all the same frat-reasons in exactly the wrongest way.

Jerry Lewis, by any of these standards, doesn't qualify as funny, but something else: installation art? Where funny people have their logic and reasons, Lewis has almost none, except to act exactly the opposite as he should. The opening of The Ladies Man finds Jerry running in fright from gorgeous women trying to seduce him, the joke being that everyone's acting nonsensically for no real reason, or perhaps that Lewis likes any excuse, even a film he's making, to get beautiful girls to chase him down. What follows is a series of nonsequiturs and, as usual, deliberate inconsistencies and incongruities, from goon-Jerry to cherub-Jerry, scenes of inexplicable embarrassments and even more inexplicable wish-fulfillments (a typical pattern for his films). Where the Looney Toons animators, including Tashlin, make a mockery of their form by showing characters who live in painted frames and montages, Lewis' best gags (as director) don't so much break the fourth wall as establish it: the repeated joke in The Bellboy of rituals performed impossibly fast between a cut to somewhere else; the dollhouse in The Ladies Man; the microphone gag in the same film that leaves a crown of angry sycophants yelling silently at the camera; the final joke in The Pansy that he's Jerry Lewis and didn't get hurt and is standing in a film set for The Pansy; the casual tracking shot down to a free-range airplane's lower deck where an ancient army is rowing through the air in Cracking Up--all these gags work not by insisting on viewer complicity by revealing it, as in Avery, but in insisting on a strict division (which Avery always crossed) between the real world and the inexplicable one on-screen. As parodies, they play like parodies of the modern condition, a man caged and stranded for an audience and struggling to express himself when there's nothing but physical laws to express--if that--a la Beckett or Francis Bacon.

Which is Jerry's genius--the most expressive man in history never able to express himself, flailing to a patient camera and patient admirers in the room around him as they wait--as in Laurel and Hardy's Big Business--for him to finish a performance piece without end. In his way, Lewis is closer to contemporary Tsai-Ming Liang than any other filmmaker, their films both about people in closed spaces trying to find anything, hallucinated or real, any way, to connect to in ritual. The closest corrollary for the long shot of Jerry trying to fit a man's hat on his head is the almost identical shot in Tsai's new Visage of a model blinking and waiting as make-up's applied to her (rather titular) face.

Obviously, I haven't seen many Jerry Lewis movies.

Not very funny, but somehow great comedy despite everything--as if Lear's fool got a play of his own with the Lear family congratulating him between monologues--Lewis speaks sentences like Charlie Parker plays melodies--only Shakespeare could probably weave such webs of total nonsense from the simplest prompts. The real butt of Jerry's joke definitely isn't Jerry, but normality, never seen, except, perhaps, in the peasant-faced lovers he struggles to impress long after they've hinted he's their one true love.

Lancelot du Lac will never be funny, but in the right mood, it's perfectly comic: a parade of clashing armor, deadly skirmishes fought by knight-suits with only a colored flag to suggest an entire personality. The comedy is humanity having to express itself (the noblest aims and basest jealousies) so inhumanely on every level. Inevitably, the comic view is cosmic: being able to abstract familiar things to types and patterns and blatant inconsistencies. Renoir's and Lubitsch's and Ophuls' films are just as despairing as Bresson's, maybe more so because the jokes don't alleviate the despair. Orson Welles, who over and over posited the artist's work as a comedian's--hijacks and hijinks--went out insisting on parody as the highest form of art--or the only form of art. Pound called himself a satirist (taking a beat from Dante); Joyce said he just wanted readers to find Ulysses "damn funny." Silence, exile, and punning. Metempsychosis: and one thing, punned, is everything else. There aren't dialectics and distinctions but those people invent on farms and cities. Probably everything's funny, among, and usually with, other qualities.

David Felt, Victoria, Canada, Aug. 2009.

SFMOMA Dialogues: On Elaine May

by Julian Myers [from SFMOMA's Open Space]

Earlier this summer Miriam Bale asked if I might contribute to a weeklong compendium of comedy criticism under the title Comedy v. Criticism—this leading towards a screening of Elaine May’s film Ishtar at DCTV in New York on August 31st. (Richard Brody’s blurb on it here.) Miriam and I have talked about May for years, and this seemed a good moment to say something more. Knowing that Jill Dawsey had also done some thinking about comedy—at the end of Rachel Harrison’s lecture at SFMOMA in 2004, she screened a section of Blazing Saddles (1976)—I asked her to talk through May’s career with me. We watched Ishtar and The Heartbreak Kid, listened to recordings of her comedy duo with Mike Nichols, and read some reviews—in particular, a few by Pauline Kael. What follows is our exchange. Jill is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Utah Museum of Fine Art; from 2003-2006 she was curatorial associate in Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA.



JM: Some history first. Mike Nichols and Elaine May meet at the University of Chicago, two young American Jews who “loathed each other on sight.” Both studied the Stanislavski Method, and were part of The Compass, a nightclub group that pioneered sketch improv comedy in the mid-1950s. (The Compass would later become The Second City, a crucible for many of the actors on Saturday Night Live, Strangers with Candy, The Daily Show etc.) In 1957 Nichols and May split off and become immensely successful, quickly getting spots on TV and then on Broadway, releasing records, and so on. Then in 1962 they break up. And there is an ambition, on both of their parts, to bring their style of comedy to Hollywood. Nichols makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), which wins awards, and The Graduate (1967), which is a huge commercial success. May writes plays and enters cinema a bit later, as a writer and actress. She’s perhaps less instantly successful, but eventually starts directing too; her films are A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976), and the notorious Ishtar (1987). For her part, critic Pauline Kael deplores the influence their style of comedy has on movies in the late 1960s. “Nichols-and-May” becomes a kind of shorthand for her, for a “crackling, whacking style [that] is always telling you that things are funnier than you see them to be.” (from Reeling, 1976)

JD: I am wondering about this. Kael seems primarily to oppose revue-style comedy because it relies so heavily on nuances of tone, of voice, and rhythm: things that don’t translate well to the big screen. So is this an issue of medium specificity: that the filmic close-up gives us the nuances of the face, but the nuances of voice are best conveyed on stage or record?

JM: She describes it as a “rhythm of clichés, defenses, and little verbal aggressions, (which) depends on the pulse and the intuition of the performers.” I think her argument was about timing—that montage carves up time too much. This sort of comedy relies on theatrical subtleties of rhythm and inflection that are trampled by “grotesque” cutting back and forth, and a “mechanical, overemphatic style.”

JD: I understand this, yes. Montage is about condensing time, whereas part of what is compelling about Nichols and May are all the extra pauses and gaps. Kael’s references to Harold Pinter make sense in this context.

JM: Does this change in May’s films? Ishtar has these great yawning, empty passages, where nothing much is going on—though somehow I’m still entertained.

JD: I loved Ishtar, but even so I found it both chaotic and tedious. There are, as you say, empty passages—like the desert itself, one of the film’s settings and motifs—in which you find yourself quite bored. At the same time there is a very hectic quality to some of the editing.

JM: Whenever they turn to music the edits get clipped and abbreviated. Almost as if to lampoon their style of schmaltzy cabaret act by filming it in a frantic manner. The songs are actually a slightly different brand of schmaltz (interesting that both kitsch and schmaltz are Yiddish terms). Paul Williams, with whom May wrote these songs, is something like a 70s Max Martin or Linda Perry. He wrote “Rainy Days and Mondays,” and “The Rainbow Connection.” Which is to say that he’d perfected a certain kind of massive, ultra-memorable sentimental pop, which puts a bizarre spin on the songs in Ishtar. He and May obviously worked overtime to write songs that are unbearable.



JD: Another Carpenters song plays a vital role in The Heartbreak Kid: a brilliant, ironic use of “Close To You.” Having watched Ishtar last night, their song “Dangerous Business” is stuck in my head, despite how awful it is.

JM: The songs are atrocious but they’re earworms. So, I have a theory about why critics found Ishtar so intolerable. It has to do with Top Gun, in whose wake Ishtar is meant to be a blockbuster, and Ishtar is among other things a military espionage film with requisite 1980s missiles and helicopters. And of course Top Gun was populated by these new, healthy, phallic, charged military characters. And here are Beatty and Hoffman, these big stars, are playing talentless schmucks (here’s more Yiddish—and indeed there is a hysterical riff in Ishtar on the word ‘schmuck,’ which Beatty’s character, like Beatty a gentile, can’t pronounce properly). It drove people crazy.

JD: Of course we read several of the excoriating reviews of the film. I had to laugh when the review from the Washington Post complained that Beatty had “emasculated” himself. Whereas that was what I liked about his performance! It was just right (because it was wrong) for the Reagan 80s, as you are suggesting.

JM: Elaine May convinced them all to come down this path with her. There’s a great moment early on, when Hoffman is on the ledge considering suicide. His girlfriend, played by Carol Kane, has just left him, with the killer line, “If you never see me again, it’ll only be one time less a week than you see me now!” Beatty’s character comes out to save him, and consoles him by saying, “Hey, it takes a lot of nerve to have nothing at your age.”

JD: And then they are in each other’s arms. That is a brilliant moment. And you know, it does take a lot of nerve. That’s a true thing.

JM: It’s true, but its also very funny and puzzling. What kind of a pep talk is this? And are their values being made fun of, advocated, or what? It backhands its own backhandedness.

JD: This is the existential dilemma of the film: why should you go on if you are totally mediocre? Well, at least we can be mediocre together. Somehow this made a lot of sense to me. I also think of the moment when the camel won’t move.

JM: Janet Maslin singles out this moment in her New York Times review. "He’d rather just sit there, than move when you ask him; he’d rather get shot!” Mr. Hoffman cries in exasperation… ”Actually, I kind of admire that,” says Mr. Beatty. Mr. Hoffman considers that for a moment, then acknowledges, ”Me, too.” It’s oddly valorized.

JD: Other critics hated this though.

JM: Maybe it is frustrating because it’s half-allegorical. This camel has a toothache; it seems Hollywood-symbolic, but then it doesn’t achieve its “proper” meaning. And this is what is funny.

JD: Does the Isabelle Adjani character function in a similar, if less funny way?

JM: She is more a device than a symbol. Didn’t one review complain because her clothes were loose fitting? She’s beautiful, and it’s the 80s, so she should wear something more revealing.

JD: She’s always in drag, actually - although this enables some adolescent jokes involving her breasts. Adjani is half Algerian, and she discussed it publicly—not that she was ever hiding it—not long before Ishtar was made. So that even though, to Americans, she is a French movie star, her Algerian identity allows her to stand in for Ishtar itself. The casting of Adjani in that role seems self-conscious.

JM: You see what Kael meant when she said (in reference to A New Leaf) that May’s casting, even early on, is “dazzling lunacy.” Beatty and Hoffman are a very strange duo, a debased Hall and Oates; the Adjani choice too is highly self-aware. Beatty in particular is doing something very strange by this point: a soft, mannered, shambolic, clueless persona - even his haircut is implausible. (Compare this wandering quality to the phallic directedness of Cruise or Kilmer.)

JD: This is what reviewers couldn’t abide. But movie stars on this level can’t help but bring their pasts along with them. I like that the beauty is played by a French, half-Algerian woman, who does not show off her body. And that Beatty and Hoffman play their own opposites, in an artificial or affected way, and in contrast to the macho stars of the day. I appreciate the paradoxes the actors are made to embody—Charles Grodin too, as the hapless CIA agent. I loved him in The Great Muppet Caper.

JM: I’d have thought you would have disliked him in The Heartbreak Kid.

JD: I started out hating The Heartbreak Kid, but it grew on me. I found myself constantly reevaluating how I felt about the characters. I was initially appalled at May’s treatment of her daughter, Jeannie Berlin, who stars in the movie. It seemed cruel: Lenny (Grodin) marries the sweet, quirky Lila (Berlin) and then deserts her, on their honeymoon, for a shiksa? It turns out the movie is an indictment of what a vapid jerk Lenny is, and upon understanding this I felt more sympathetic. Berlin’s obviously in on the joke, but her Lila is so abject (for example, the scene in which she gets egg salad all over her chin while eating a sandwich, to Lenny’s horror). But despite what a jerk Lenny is, I could identify with him too on some level.

JM: Kael really likes Berlin in it. “She looks so much like Elaine May that it’s as if we’re seeing the Elaine May comic mask but with real blood coursing through her—revue acting with temperament, revue brought to voluptuous, giddy life.” (Reeling, again.) Again she criticizes “revue” comedy and early May; she thinks it’s bloodless, a “comic mask.” But she thinks something goes right in The Heartbreak Kid and moments of Ishtar.

JD: I’m still not clear what turns Kael off, except that she doesn’t think that their pacing translates to film. I find that it does. Not perfectly, but…

JM: Here’s Kael again on “revue.” “We laugh at being nailed by these actors who are cartoons of us, all too easy to understand, and though there’s a comic discomfort in listening to what our personal and social rituals might sound like if they were overheard, it’s a comfortable form of theater—the disheveled American’s form of light domestic comedy.” But Kael might agree that this isn’t what happens in May’s films: The frumpy botanist May plays in A New Leaf, who dreams of discovering a new kind of fern? The abjectly voluptuous Lila? These are cartoons, but they’re not familiar “types.”

JD: I was uncomfortable with the fact that everything is seen through Lenny’s lens and not Lila’s. Our empathy with the latter is just empathy on our parts, and not the movie’s. And we have no entrance into Kelly’s—the blond coed, played by Cybill Shepherd—world.

JM: She’s just an image, for us and for Lenny—maybe for herself. So tell me more about this book you’ve imagined on women in comedy. I think you mentioned it at the Rachel Harrison talk at SFMOMA.

Rachel Harrison, Blazing Saddles, 2003; wood, styrofoam, parex, acrylic, framed photograph, cardboard box, 72 × 22 × 19 1/2″

JD: I keep coming back to key figures. Lily Tomlin (who seems influenced by May), Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Burnett, Bea Arthur, Madeline Kahn, Gilda Radner: women of the 70s who employed comedy toward feminist ends. I began thinking about this a few years ago, when I saw a sculpture by Rachel Harrison called Blazing Saddles (2003) that included a photo of Lucille Ball. Harrison’s sculptures have an improvisational, comedic tone to them, and I started to think about this as a feminist strategy, without an overtly “didactic” (for lack of a better word) feminist message.

JM: Tomlin’s feminism is overt, if not didactic. The marriage-phantasmagoria in her 1972 TV special is pure Womanhouse. May, I don’t know, though. There’s the awkward moment when she’s asked about gender in her 2006 Lincoln Center interview.

JD: May is the perhaps the wrong generation for feminism: she comes of age in the 50s. What is amazing is that she was on such equal footing with Nichols—and they both deserve credit for that. It’s this moment before second wave feminism, when one might imagine that femininity, with all its tics, might simply be dropped, or turned into comedy (as they do in the doctor sketches).

JD: Yes, they do seem to have an active, equal collaboration in the 50s, though I wonder why the crackup in the early 60s. It’s clear that Nichols was more visible afterward, and certainly had more of a chance to develop a directorial voice for better or worse. Her career has to be cobbled together and imagined from these inadequate representations. What if May, rather than Woody Allen, had been making dozens of movies since the 60s? They’re of the same generation, and have similar sensibilities in some ways. Yet it seems like the studio system betrayed her at almost every turn.

JD: When I mentioned Nichols and May to my mother, she thought that they had been married to each other—a common misperception. It’s as if their partnership had to be normalized in some way. As for May’s relative lack of success: One cannot escape patriarchy entirely. Perhaps briefly, in a comedy sketch, but not in the institutions of Hollywood. May’s career suffered because she is a woman. As she says in the Lincoln Center interview, she wanted to appear “nice” and “pleasant,” even as she was, in her words, “just as rotten as any guy.” This imperative seems more entrenched today than ever. What if it had been her rather than Woody Allen? He’s not exactly a perfectionist. He releases good movies and bad movies, one every year. But she can’t get over the details. Or so she was portrayed.

JM: She does seem to be very stringent. And yet she doesn’t always get it right. Kael has a point when she says “the element of uncertainty results in a shambles when she isn’t on top of the situation as a director.” It may be a thoroughly, magnetically weird, funny shambles, but it is a shambles.

JD: Yeah, and that’s okay. If only she’d had the chance to get it right more often. If only we were allowed to be in shambles more, to fail more, we might all produce a body of work that has a lot of good stuff in it—even if people dismiss some of our shambles as the biggest catastrophes in movie history.

Pauline Kael on "Revue Humor"

From an article on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)

"During the past three or four years, many directors have tried to put revue humor on film, and except for some of the early comedy sequences in The Graduate, it has failed, painfully - as in Luv, The Tiger Makes Out, The Eleanor Bron-William Daniels bits of Two for the Road, parts of Bedazzled, the Elaine May role in Enter Laughing, The President's Analyst, and so on. Revue theatre is a form of actor's theatre; even when it is written by a Murray Schisgal (or, in England, transformed into more serious drama by Harold Pinter) -- the meaning comes from the rhythm of clichés, defenses, and little verbal aggressions, and this depends on the pulse and the intuition of the performers. It would be as difficult to write down as dance notation. Typically, as in Nichols and May routines, the satire is thin and the thinness is the essence of the joke. We laugh at the tiny, almost imperceptible hostilities that suddenly explode, because we recognize that we're tied up in knots about small issues more than about big ones, and that we don't lose our pretensions even when (or especially when) we are concerned about big ones.

The style developed here (and in England) in the fifties, when college actors went on working together in cabarets, continuing and developing sophomoric humor. That word isn't used perjoratively; I like sophomoric college-revue humor, and one has only to contrast its topicality and freshness with the Joe Miller Joke Book world to understand why it swept the country. In revue, the very latest in interpersonal relations - the newest clichés and courtship rites and seduction techniques - could be polished to the point of satire almost overnight. Mort Sahl and the stand-up comics might satirize the political them, but cabaret, with its interacting couples, satirized us. We laugh at being nailed by these actors who are cartoons of us, all too easy to understand, and though there's a comic discomfort in listening to what our personal and social rituals might sound like if they were overheard, it's a comfortable form of theatre - the dishevelled American's form of light domestic comedy.

But it didn't work in the movies."

The Ladies Man

Kevin Lee has kindly sent over an exhaustive collection of reviews on The Ladies Man. It's a wonderful work of scholarship, but really I'm not sure that any of this analysis quite describes the awesome horror of this:

Paula Prentiss Unfiltered

How do you describe the great screen comedienne Paula Prentiss? Joon Lee writes, "that noise that comes out of her mouth and sinus simultaneously verges sublimely between animal and human..."

PP from Howard Hawks' Man's Favorite Sport:



And a bizarre youtube clip with non-sync sound, the better to watch her gasp, scrunch and wiggle: