Comedy And The Implied Author As Window-Dressing

I don't know if you read Emily Nussbaum's piece in the New Yorker a few months ago about comedy and modern politics, but one of the things she talks about is how the distinction between acting like a Nazi for "lulz" and and being an actual Nazi is breaking down, and how crucial the idea of "but it's just a joke!" has become to our cultural interactions.

Though her focus is more on politics, one of the things her analysis made me think of was the idea of an "implied author." I know this concept from reading about it in Martha Nussbaum's work on objectification, but it's really an idea from literary theory. The idea is that while the story or the narrator might present a certain thing one way, the normative stance toward that thing conveyed by the work of art might be something else entirely. For example, in Henry James's work, the characters use and "objectify" one another for various things like status and money. But the book as a whole seems to subject those actions to critical scrutiny rather than celebrating them.

It's obviously not an idea without complexities, since saying anything about an implied author requires interpretation and and interpretations can vary. But I'd also say that some texts are better suited to the idea of an implied author than others. And, of course, you can intentionally try to subvert the idea through ambiguity, and that's something that's gone on for a long time.

But I feel like there's a thing now that isn't ambiguity but that's more like a cynical attempt to allow people to enjoy and participate in something bad while holding on to the soothing cover of an "implied author" -- to kind of hold in reserve that the point isn't to celebrate something but rather to mock it or "comment" on it.

One example in the New Yorker piece is a story line from South Park, in which a megalomaniac presidential candidate goes on stage as a standup comedian intending to offend his fans. He starts with a joke about how awful it is to have to stand in line because of "all the freakin' Muslims," and then he moves on to how all the black TSA agents look like "thugs" from the inner city, and when he just gets bigger and bigger laughs, he finally starts talking about putting his fingers into women's butts and pussies. Finally, some white women walk out, and the candidate says "You’ve been O.K. with the ‘Fuck ’Em All to Death’ and all the Mexican and Muslim shit, but fingers in the ass did it for you. Cool. Just wanted to see where your line was."

"I just wanted to see where your line was." It's easy to make an argument that the implied author of this bit is making a joke about the entrenched racism of American culture -- that a large bunch of people are happy to tolerate and engage in offensive racist remarks and attitudes.

But I couldn't help but wonder if there was also an audience was that was enjoying those very same jokes, and perhaps inattentive to the possibility of this other implied author. In fact, you could read the whole thing the other way around, that the candidate is making a fearlessly politically incorrect speech (hey, free speech everyone!) and then making fun of the women who walk out for being "unable to take a joke."

The bit can work on both levels. In fact, the more outrageous the candidate's speech is, the more it's likely to work on both levels: the person wants to engage in racism can enjoy the speech and ignore any complexities.

And where I think the whole thing gets maximally creepy is that because of the way the entertainment industry works, shows almost have to work on multiple levels: shows cost a fortune to make, and they have to appeal to a massively wide range of people, sometimes a globally massively wide range of people.

You can do that by being action-adventure-bland, of course. But if you're going to be funny or edgy or whatever, you can only do it by working all the levels. Islamophobic and racist jokes that work for the islamphobes and racists, and an "implied author" the creators can point to to justify that they're not really doing the thing, they're not really participating in it. But, of course, in a sense they are.

If this is right, the whole breakdown of distinctions like "Nazi-for-lulz" and "actual Nazi" isn't really a bug, but more of a feature. It may have started with 4chan or whatever. But it's a great move, capitalism-wise. Working all the levels at the same time makes for bigger audiences, more money, all the things a complex and hyper-competitive industry needs to keep going.

Funny Not Mean?

The Three Stooges

I like funny.  When it comes to lightening the mood, I'm never one for positive thinking or a sunshiny point of view.  I regard life as ridiculously short and full of stupidity.  If you tell me things are grand, I'll look at you with suspicion.

But if you tell me things are funny -- well, yes.  It's almost a tautology.  What could be more essentially humorous than the condition of humanity?  Trapped between the godlike ability to create the internet and the insane fragility of being laid low by a hangnail?  We are in a paradigmatically comedic situation.

Personally, I'm almost always up for something to laugh about.  I remember years and years ago when I had been seeing this one guy for a long time, and then he was seeing someone else on the side, and then for complicated reasons we happened to be standing next to this other person's car having a fight and shouting and swearing ... suddenly something on the seat of the car caught our eye.  "She's reading the Quran?" we said in unison.  For some reason, this made us hysterical.  Fight over, time to go home, tomorrow is another day, yada yada yada. 

I used to assume everyone shared my taste for the comedic.  But not so.  I remember when I working at this bookstore in my early twenties, and we were allowed to read books on break, and I would often take a book of comics and humor writing to look at with my coffee.  Norma, right?  Doesn't everyone treat the ills of minimum wage with a little Thurber, Kliban, and Doonesbury?

Anyway, one day this very serious-minded but friendly young male employee, who was just above me in the hierarchy, looked at me in a very serious-minded but friendly way, and said, "So, you like humor?"  I wanted to say, "Yes, idiot, who doesn't like humor?  Are you stupid?"  But it's a good thing I didn't.  Because no, not everyone likes humor.  It's not even close.  I don't know what's wrong with all those people, but there it is. 

Because I like funny, I enjoy making people laugh.  I would do it more if I knew how but it's not always that easy.  The big stumbling block, for me, is the difficulty of being funny without being mean.

A lot of funny is kind of mean.  If you make fun of someone, it can be very funny, but it can also be very mean.  A lot of people seem to get great pleasure -- and great laughs -- out of seeing others suffer.  My own father, as I understand it, was a fan of the Three Stooges.  Isn't that just laughing at other people getting fingers popped into their eyes?  Gross. 

But I've often thought:  I'm not into mean.  I'm into nice.  Funny and nice -- it's not always an easy combination. 

One way to be funny without being mean is with goofiness, like slipping on banana peels and making funny faces.  But that's not for me.  If you know me, you won't be surprised to hear me say that, for whatever reason, I'm constitutionally incapable of being goofy.  I can't say I regard it as a great loss.

It's OK to be funny and mean if you're picking on someone your own size.  When The Onion runs a headline quoting God as saying,  "At Times It Felt Like The Pope Had One Foot Out The Door,"  that is funny, and in the world we live in, picking on the Catholic church is in no way bullying the defenseless.  Mean, but in an entirely appropriate way. 

In my quest to become funnier, I've been considering taking a humor writing class.  Someone suggested the Gotham Writers Workshop classes, and I found there's one on humor writing.  On the syllabus for week 3, we have 

People – Finding the stupidity in people. Round and flat characters. Showing vs. Telling. Methods for showing characters. Ridiculing groups of people.

That is awesome.  The idea of studying how to find the stupidity in people and then how to ridicule them effectively in groups made me laugh out loud and actually made me kind of happy for the rest of the afternoon. 

I take this to show that maybe I'm not all that above mean after all.  Maybe getting touch with my inner funny requires getting in touch with my inner mean. 

I don't know, but I'll let you know how it goes.

Bertie Wooster, Unsung Hero Of Our Modern Times

It's a matter of some embarrassment to me that in my past I was not a fan of P. G. Wodehouse.  But it's true.  You might go so far as to say I was an anti-fan.   I found the books silly, misogynist, even a little mean-spirited. 

But I was wrong.  As I've discussed before, once I heard Jonathan Cecil read the books with his quiet but omnipresent ironic detachment I was able to see the light.  I've never looked back.

In the Wodehouse canon, my special love is for Bertie Wooster. 

Now it is going to be my assertion in this post that Bertie, poor lamb, has gotten a bad rap and is massively under-appreciated as a kind of hero of our times. 

Even if you've never read the books you've probably heard many negative character descriptions.   Bertie is a "foppish" aristocrat who can't manage the simplest tasks without assistance (usually from the famous Jeeves, his genius valet), a silly young man who refuses to settle down or take anything seriously (which enrages his aunt Agatha), and a layabout who favors smoking, drinking and gambling.

But look beyond the surface, and Bertie exemplifies, with no effort at all, certain ideals many of us strive to attain.

1.  Bertie is happy with the simplest of pleasures.

Give Bertie Wooster a cocktail on the lawn, a nicely fried egg, a friend with whom to hash over old times, and Bertie is a contented man.  Bertie does not need the latest technology and gadgets; he does not need to feel he is achieving things and being better than other people and getting noticed; he is not bored sitting around doing nothing.  Bertie is made happy by what he has, and is not endlessly seeking novelty.

He is off the hedonic treadmill. 

2.  Bertie truly lives in the moment.

People think mindfulness and they think meditation and eastern philosophy and effortful practice aimed at the reduction of worry and the appreciation for what is happening right now.  But Bertie has mindfulness naturally and effortlessly. 

Bertie having his morning tea is a man thinking about tea.  He actually has to be reminded to worry about things.

3.  Bertie doesn't have annoying masculinity issues.

Although it is true that true that he can be harsh in his feeling toward women, whom he often suspects of being out to control him and force him to do thing he does not want to do, Bertie is not competitive or athletic and he does not mind being made a fool of. 

He is a bit ruffled when Jeeves refers to him as "mentally negligible," but only for a moment (see #2, above).  In virtually every story he agrees to do something unpleasant (be thought insane, go briefly to jail, etc.) in order to spare his friends some hardship.  Being thought to be a nice guy pleases Bertie, and he doesn't worry about being seen as a chump. 

Even setting aside the interesting interpretation in which Bertie and Jeeves are actually lovers, it is easy to imagine Bertie as gay.  And when Bertie asks, in a moment of crisis, "What do ties matter, Jeeves, at at time like this?"  Jeeves replies, "There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter."  Bertie takes the point.

4.  Bertie is always full of the life force.

I don't know how he does it, but Bertie is always seeing the comic side, making a joke, trying to lighten the mood.  Bertie doesn't have serious problems like being unable to pay the grocery bill, but like a lot of people, he has a lot of other, small problems. 

Sometimes people expect things of him he does not want to do.  Sometimes his friends are in a jam.  Sometimes his friends are -- justly or not -- angry with him.  Bertie, you'll notice, is never angry with them.  And he is never in a bad mood.  Extraordinary.   

Faced with the pompous, bossy, annoying people of life, Bertie typically tries to make light conversation.  When that fails he is philosophical.  No matter what the difficulties, at the end of the day a cocktail and a cigar and some chit chat restores Bertie's good cheer and faith in humanity. 

Given my fondness and even admiration, it amused me to learn on Wikipedia that

"Bertie's foppish foolishness was not popular with everyone. Papers released by the Public Record Office have disclosed that when Wodehouse was recommended for a Companion of Honour in 1967, Sir Patrick Dean, British ambassador in Washington, argued that it 'would also give currency to a Bertie Wooster image of the British character, which we are doing our best to eradicate'."

Silly Sir Patrick Dean.

So, next time life gets you down, just ask yourself, What Would Bertie Do? 

Is Anger, Like, So Over? Or, What Happened To Generation X?

Remember Nirvana?  The band?  "Smells Like Teen Spirit?"  "Heart-Shaped Box?" 

It's only been about twenty years since their massive popularity hit its peak, but in some ways their era and their music feels more foreign and far away than that of less recent musical artists.  Exhibit A:  The Talking Heads.  See also Cyndi Lauper, Prince, and Michael Jackson's "Thriller."  All feel very much "of our time."

If you go to the gym, or shop, or hang around cafes, you can hear music from pretty much every decade since the 60s.  How often have you been out and said to your friend or to yourself, "Oh my god, remember that song?"

But when's the last time you heard Nirvana?  I don't think I've heard a Nirvana song since I last listened to one of their CDs in around 1997.  Where is the love, people?


I have a theory about why you never hear Nirvana these days.  My theory is that Nirvana was a genuinely angry, angry band.  And something weird is going on with anger.  Something frightening.  Anger is disappearing.  Or, rather, its being co-opted.  It's disappearing among the youth, and being taking over by white middle-aged men who feel like they deserve better and want someone to blame.  Old resentment is on the rise; youth anger is on the wane. 

Obviously I don't mean private anger, like when you're enraged at your family, friends, and lovers for buying the wrong kind of cookies or ignoring you or posting your secrets on Facebook.  That kind of anger will always be with us.

I mean public anger.  The anger of rebellion, of why should I play by your stupid rules, of everyone's a goddamn hypocrite, of looking at adults and thinking, how could you people fuck up the world so completely? What the fuck is wrong with you?

I've had occasion to think about this off and on for years, since as a university professor I spend a lot of time with 18-22 year-olds.  I'm often surprised by their lack of anger -- at their lack of rebellious rage at their parents, at their institutions, at the world in which they find themselves.  Generally, I find today's young people to be temperamentally pretty kind, quite cooperative, and mostly constructively interested in making the world a better place. 

Those are all excellent qualities.  You could have them and also be angry at the same time.  But that's not the feeling I get.  The feeling I get is that it would seem stupid, naive, and childish these days to get all riled up and pissed off, to wear crazy punk rock clothes, to raise hell for no reasons, to create a band like The Sex Pistols. 

Speaking of which, and as if to prove my point, the Wikipedia entry for The Sex Pistols says that they in 2006 the surviving members refused to attend a ceremony inducting the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, quote, "calling the museum 'a piss stain,'" unquote.

I was reminded of the anger situation this morning as I was thinking about the late, great but short-lived Spy Magazine and how there really isn't anything like it any more.  Spy was a mix of satire, goofiness, ironic detachment, mean-spirited attacks, vicious take-downs, and actual journalism.  I wasn't surprised to learn that the editors cited as an inspiration H. L. Mencken, who personified public anger at pretty much every stage of his life.

When did comedy leave behind "Log-Rolling In Our Time," a regular Spy feature that showcased actual examples of authors giving one another lame mutually adoring blurbs for one another's books, and become Hangover 2?


What do you think the story is?  Clearly there's plenty of stuff to be angry about. 

Is it that the stuff these days is so overwhelming that it transcends anger, turns in on itself, and becomes anxiety and depression, and that's why there's so many young people on psycho-pharmaceuticals?   

Is it that the world has become so frightening and risky -- so stratified, so winner-take-all -- that sheer survival leaves no mental room for anger?

Is it that young people are angry, but anger is too hard to express in their world, in which the internet and social networking make every gesture and every word open to the analysis of everyone on the planet?

Is it all of the above?

So you can see, my theory is that you don't hear Nirvana because Nirvana doesn't fit with our new no-anger youth ethos.  I was amused to read today on Wikipedia that Nirvana was considered the "flagship band" of Generation X, of which I am a proud member. 

Maybe you remember, we Gen-Xers were supposed to be the great slackers of the world. Everyone was enraged by the way we wanted to just sit around coffeeshops all day (before the internet! we brought books, and paper and pens!), wearing our Doc Martins and smoking cigarettes and talking and shooting the shit, instead of respectably hauling our asses of to McDonalds to get a crappy job. 

I've always thought that insofar as this portrait of Gen X was accurate, it actually showed we had good values.  We wanted to talk about things; we thought it was an outrage that we'd be paid minimum wage to make crappy burgers for some megachain; and we were willing to have roommates and to live without creature comforts like cars and TVs because we didn't have any money. 

It makes me miss the world in which all that was possible.  It makes me miss Spy Magazine.  And it makes me miss Nirvana.

Why Isn't Shouts and Murmurs Funny? Or, My LTR With The New Yorker

The New Yorker and I are definitely in what you might call a Long Term Relationship (LTR).  This is no one night stand, and it's no casual fling.  It's not an on-again-off-again thing.  It's not a case of FWB.  We're committed.

This relationship started when I was about nine years old.  The New Yorker had always been around our home when I was a kid, and for years I had regarded it the same way I'd regarded Masterpiece Theater, the Watergate hearings, and the Phil Donahue show:  something clearly for grownups, something probably boring, something I hoped I wouldn't have time for in my future life as a rock star or rock-star-equivalent.

That slight disdain changed one day when I picked it up in a moment of having nothing else to do, and I found Ved Mehta.  My eye just happened to land right in the middle of his memoir about being a young blind boy in India, living away from his parents at a special school. 

I was immediately gripped and fascinated.  Living away from one's parents as a young child?  Having to relearn how to do everything without sight?  Having to use braille for the simple act of reading?  These were challenges I could barely fathom.  And Mehta wrote about them with the heartfelt simplicity that engages both the New York literati (or so we can imagine, this being The New Yorker) and me, a nine year old girl living comfortably in the bland American suburbs.  I was hooked. 

There were certainly phases during my youth in which I was inattentive, but I'd say over the last fifteen years or so I've barely missed an issue.  There have been times when I've been tempted to regard The New Yorker in the light of a life saver.  I seldom feel "at home" in a place, and I've lived a lot of places where I felt like a freak.  This can be seriously discouraging.  But I could always come home, uncork a bottle of wine, and open The New Yorker, and feel at home in the world through the powerful reminder:  there are, in fact, other people like me.

There are other people who want to read long articles about Chinese race car drivers, Dickens camp, the cutting edge of food technology, and therapy trends among the Hollywood glitterati.  There are other people who care about the politics of apple branding (the fruit, not the computer).  Wanting to know more about the state of soccer mania in Turkey does not make me impossibly strange.

It's because The New Yorker and I have an LTR and not a casual friendship that I got disturbed by the following problem:  Why isn't Shouts and Murmurs Funny?  If you don't know, Shouts and Murmurs is the humor part of The New Yorker.  Obviously many articles in The New Yorker are funny in their various ways.  But Shouts and Murmurs is supposed to be The Funny Page.  Sometimes it's funny.  But often, it's not.

I like funny.  Don't I like funny?  And as we now know, I love The New Yorker.  So how could I not like The Funny Page of The New Yorker?

I thought the problem might just be stylistic.  The writing in Shouts and Murmurs tends to take a single joke and make a page of writing about it.  I don't really go for that.  Once you see the joke, in the first paragraph, you're like OK, kinda funny.  But there's still a lot left to read.

But I was talking the matter over with my friend, and he said he didn't think it was stylistic at all. He said that the problem with Shouts and Murmurs is part of a deep problem with the whole New Yorker, and with its whole way of seeing and writing about the world. 

Shouts and Murmurs, he said, is almost always a kind of mini-parody of something, or a little riff on a familiarity, poking a gentle bit of fun.  Like this week it mocks the escalation of high-end-restaurant-waiter-palaver.  That's very typical.  What it doesn't do is take any kind of stand, for or against something.  But that's The New Yorker all around.  Always safe, always middle of the road, never fired up with indignation and rage.

I was a little shocked.  I defended The New Yorker.  I pointed out that Elizabeth Kolbert often presents highly opinionated views of her own, written up in a style sure to piss some people off.  Her review of Stephen Pinker's book about violence was one of the only reviews I saw that wasn't largely ass-kissing fluff.  I said that sometimes you don't want opinionated ranting, indignation and rage.  Like when you're reading about Chinese race car drivers, or cutting edge trends among the Hollywood glitterati, or the politics of apple branding.  Those articles have points of view but they also try to just tell you some stuff, some stuff you didn't know, that you may find interesting.  I really go for that.

Eventually we agreed that while Elizabeth Kolbert was often highly opinionated, that wasn't the characteristic style of The New Yorker, and that in certain contexts, like politics, that could be a problem.  But we also agreed that in a world that is all political indignation all the time, telling you some stuff you didn't know was important too.  The rest of is a matter of taste.  I have enough indignation going on inside me all the time.  Encountering it in my reading can be too too much.  Evidently, I really like to just be told some stuff I didn't know, some stuff I may find interesting. 

I had to agree with my friend about Shouts and Murmurs, though.  He's right.  Comedy can't be mush.  It has to take a stand, or tell the truth, or be really personal, or surprise you somehow, to be really funny.  The mini-parodies, the riffs, the gentle bit of fun of Shouts and Murmurs mostly don't do any of those things.