Last night I had the great good fortune to see Eddie Izzard, currently in the midst of his 27-country Force Majeure tour.
Izzard, to my mind fits in that special category I reserve for the five or six greatest practicing comedians. Watching him I was struck by his similarity to the late Robin Williams, both in terms of his manic improvisational skills and his actual delivery (though – and I say this after a great deal of soul searching – Izzard’s comic mind may be even faster than Williams’s was). He told jokes within jokes within jokes; characters seemed to stream out of him at a mile a minute; by the end he created one long riff full of references that had been absolutely buried in his stream of consciousness an hour and a half earlier. At one point during a bit about moles – a silly piece of nonsense that really went nowhere – he tossed in a reference to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape that took me at least thirty seconds to sort out (Izzard, of course, had moved through at least three more riffs by the time I got it). (I certainly don’t want to give any spoilers, but as context for those of you who might not be familiar with his work, I offer up one of his best routines, now almost fifteen years old, a cult favorite about life on the Death Star…) I suppose comedy can serve a variety of purposes, but I’ve never really gotten beyond something one of my undergraduate professors said in 1991: “Stand-up comedy is where most of the really important social commentary takes place today.” In fact, comedy may always have served this purpose better than any other medium (not only Bob Newhart and Don Rickles, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor, but Shakespeare, and Swift, and Twain). Certainly in the twenty-five years since he said it I’ve never had occasion to disagree. Whether my professor knew it or not, his comment echoed the sentiments of Robin Williams’s Adrian Cronaur from 1987’s Good Morning Vietnam. Cronaur arrives in Saigon in 1965 as a DJ for the Armed Forces Radio Service. His brand of lightning-quick comedy, a bit of George Carlin’s political ire covered by a veneer of Williams himself is tailor-made for the 1960s. Of course, he quickly finds himself in trouble with the station’s CO because of his eagerness to take on pressing political issues, including the war itself, in his broadcast routines. Lt. Steven Hauk, played by the wonderful Bruno Kirby, takes Cronaur sternly to task, and ultimately takes his place in the sound booth with tired one-liners stolen straight from the heyday of the Catskills. Hauk’s jokes, of course, fail miserably (his staff begs him not to go on air). Hauk’s awful delivery accounts for a great deal of this failure. However, the much larger problem is that his humor is too far removed from reality to be funny, and that’s because it’s too far removed from reality to be urgent. The best comedy pushes social and political buttons, and the very highest levels of stand-up push those buttons hardest and most urgently. There’s a reason why so few conservative comics succeed (I can think of none – past or present – whose work might be considered “genius”). It’s right there in the ideological terminology: what does “progressive” mean if not to push the boundaries? Shakespeare, Swift, Dryden, Twain, Thurber, Silverman, Fey: not a conservative among them. And Dennis Miller was far funnier as a critic of the Reagan administration than he’s ever been as an apologist. Izzard’s humor is more layered than anyone I can think of, and so it’s not always easy to ferret out the ways in which he pushes social buttons. There’s his iconic status as a cross-dresser, of course, and I would be remiss if I didn’t credit him for bringing a show like his to a rural town like Rapid City (we sit in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore, after all, a kind of magnet for right-wing American patriotism). He is particularly adept at making his lifestyle so matter-of-fact that it simply ceases to merit comment. But to label him a socially conscious comic because he happens to be a transvestite would be grossly dismissive. The true aim of his show, as he began to note more and more as he neared the end of it, is to discover small enclaves of what he termed “wise” people. He points out we used to be able to identify those people because they smoked pipes; what he doesn’t say, but which comes across clearly, is that these days, attending one of his concerts serves much the same purpose as owning the pipe once did. As an audience, you must work to follow him – through Steve McQueen references, but also through hysterical pieces built out of no less an academic subject than “invasive languages.” Izzard pushes you to keep up intellectually, he demands it. He knows we are wise, and he honors that wisdom. All of which put me in mind of another of those “greatest living comics,” Louis C.K., a comedian who pushes us in other ways (Entertainment Weekly’s cover in June 2012 declared him “the greatest living comedian”). Louis hosted the season finale of Saturday Night Live this past weekend and generated a good deal of controversy with bits on racism and pedophilia (“How do you think I feel?” he noted as the crowd laughed, “this is my last show probably”).
But anyone who pays attention to Louis, who follows his stand-up or watches his FX TV show, knows that he made an important decision midway through his career, to push comedy to the very limits of social commentary. His routines treat subjects no normal person would consider bringing up in conversation – incest, pedophilia, child abuse, racism, misogyny (A typical line from one of his stand-up specials: “The other kid we have, she’s four, and she’s also a fucking asshole”). His willingness to do so opens him up to criticism from both the left and the right.
But he accomplishes so much for us, does so much of the psychological work we are unwilling to do ourselves. He says what’s in our minds. Maybe his thoughts are extreme versions of our own (maybe not), and few of us might ever be willing to admit to having them, but there they are all the same. What he dredges up is ugly. Ugly in the way Twain’s repeated use of the word “nigger” in Huck Finn is ugly. Many well-meaning teachers like to defend Twain’s work by arguing the time period in which he wrote excuses his use of this term, but I prefer to believe Twain knew exactly what he was doing. Twain, like Louis (and Bruce, and Pryor, and Carlin, and Silverman, and Izzard) seems to understand that if we don’t look at the ugliness directly, if we refuse to acknowledge it exists, even within ourselves, the wound will only ever heal badly. Louis C.K. Honors George Carlin
MK Adkins has a Ph.D in English that he occasionally uses to think about literature, but more often uses to think about television, music and film. Adkins is the author of two popular culture books as well as numerous articles and reviews. Until recently, he worked as a college professor but made the decision to devote himself full-time to writing and podcasting in January 2019.
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Mark Bittman’s article, “Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?” which originally appeared as a New York Times op-ed piece in 2011 (and was more recently reprinted in the composition textbook Everything’s an Argument), makes a compelling case for replacing fast food with healthier, home-cooked alternatives. Among other evidence, Bittman demonstrates that feeding a family of four at McDonald’s runs to around $28 while you might make “a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk” in your own kitchen for just about half that. On the whole I find myself in sympathy with Mr. Bittman (though I will admit I don’t always make the best choices in my own diet). Really, who could argue with the notion that we as a society would be vastly healthier if we all chose to eat out less or (gasp!) not at all? But while I don’t disagree with Bittman’s central thesis, I have some trouble with a paragraph that appears later in his essay: Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s, you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.) For the sake of time, I’ll pass over the snobbish “regardless of weekly earnings” and focus on the big picture. Simply put, when will we stop thinking of television (or film, or video games, or popular music) as a “time-waster”? The Kardashians? Ok, maybe. Real Housewives? Very probably (though even these shows have their value as sociological artifacts). But Walking Dead? The Blacklist? Game of Thrones? Justified? I say unapologetically, and as someone whose life has been devoted to Dickens and Joyce and Faulkner: these shows rank among the great works in the history of literature. Suppose Bittman’s parenthetical aside had read “In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, read a novel for no less than an hour and a half a day.” Instead of nodding our heads sagely and agreeing, “Yes, we all have time to cook good meals if only we would learn to use our time more wisely,” I suspect we might be congratulating ourselves on our intellectual progress as a society. I could, of course, list out all the arguments for television’s value, or perhaps talk about Shakespeare’s plays or the novel, both of which were initially dismissed by cultural critics as cheap, mindless, time-wasting entertainment. But David Bianculli’s excellent Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously laid out all the important arguments on this score nearly twenty years ago, and so here I’ll simply recommend his study to anyone who might wish to consider these arguments at greater length. What most bothers me about Bittman’s comment is its seeming innocuousness. This isn’t Allan Bloom or Neil Postman railing against the danger that TV (or any other form of popular entertainment) poses a threat to our very cultural survival. No: we’ve taken their misguided opinions so to heart, allowed them to become so engrained – particularly in our education system (“television will rot your brain” my eighth grade English teacher would intone), that we might very well pass over a passage like this one without thinking twice about it. On the one hand, this attitude does a disservice to the work being produced today in these vital artistic fields. On the other hand, it teaches us to be lazy, to ignore the real depth in the shows we watch and instead merely float along on their surface. Ironically, while the mainstream views pop culture largely only as a source of entertainment (even while it continues to gobble up that entertainment in ever greater quantities), many corners of academia now acknowledge the artistic merit of pop culture artifacts from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Taylor Swift. It is this academic attention I want to bring to pop culture here. There are plenty of blogs out there (hundreds?) that explore popular culture from every conceivable vantage point, from sites that supply the latest Hollywood gossip to sites devoted to cataloguing every film mistake in the 125 years of cinema history. All noble pursuits. My goal with this blog, though, is to bring an academic lens to popular culture, not because this is the only or even the best lens through which to examine it, but because I believe Breaking Bad and The Talking Heads and The Matrix and Jim Gaffigan’s standup and Family Guy and Psycho and Phil Collins deserve serious attention. MK Adkins has a Ph.D in English that he occasionally uses to think about literature, but more often uses to think about television, music and film. Adkins is the author of two popular culture books as well as numerous articles and reviews. Until recently, he worked as a college professor but made the decision to devote himself full-time to writing and podcasting in January 2019.
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