Introduction to American Comedy 101: A Brief Survey of the Cultural and Political Impact of Anti-Authoritarian Comedic Characters in the Popular Fictional Narratives of The United States in the Early to Mid 20th Century

American Comedy. Good? Bad? What the hell is it? 

Well …I hesitate to analyze it. Why? Dunno. Fear of killing the magic? Or fear my gags aren’t 100% pure — and I’m not Mr Niceguy. If I think too much, I could kill the comedy forever. But to hell with it. Let’s open Pandora’s Box …

 

OK. The laugh-happy Spirit of Comedy is forgiving, at least the imp I burn incense to. (Laughter can also be cruel. Yeah, yeah. Hold that thought.) So, what to call this friendly sprite? Duh. Uh … The People’s Comedy? Lame as hell. All I’ve got. As I was saying …

 

The People’s Comedy is forgiving. Not in a high, holy sense. More of a cynical, that’s-the-way-it-is, so what, sense. Husband and wives cheat on each other, everybody cheats on their income tax, politicians lie, everybody lies, that’s life, that’s people, what can you do? Laugh, that’s what. What else can you do?

 

Dig me now, and groove me later. This cheap grace lets a ton of corruption, badness and bullshit slide. For example …

 

Wile E. Coyote has an insane fixation on the Roadrunner. Killing and eating the cute little bird is his goal. How sinful can you get? Ah. But Chuck Jones doesn’t want to send the Coyote to eternal torment in Cartoon Hell. Nah. He identifies with the shaggy bastard. (Hell, we’re all Coyotes, right?) Jones is the God of his cartoon universe. The worst torment he can dish out to the sinful Coyote is non-fatal explosions and cliff falls. Strictly speaking, Jones isn’t creating this torment. The Coyote does it to himself, after all. Don’t we all?

 

This cynically forgiving worldview is the dead opposite of the Nazi mindset. (Uniforms differ. Buyer beware.)

 

In this banal anal mentality, there are laws and no excuses. Humanity is divided between abusive authority figures and pathetic losers who deserve their abuse. Who do you think you are? Speak with respect to your superiors! The head chef isn’t interested in your opinions! How dare you! You don’t like it, you can hit the fucking gate.If you don't eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat.

 

Around our sorry planet, these odious chodes take over countries every now and then. Concentration camps, atrocities and stacks of corpses generally follow.

 

America has its own share of these Authoritarian Assholes. These bastards haven’t taken over yet. But we’ve still got ‘em. (Ask a Black person, if you doubt.) These pigs get the hog’s share, definitely. But they’re not entirely in charge. Why not?

 

I think because we laugh at them. Or used to.

 

Go back to the early 20th Century. Take a second look at American comedy. Cartoons and movies. Roll it.

 

From flivvers to fins, there’s a consistent target.

 

These funny fictions are packed with Authority Figures. Some are just low-down dirty, mean and nasty. Others have a sneering veneer of class, art, sophistication and money.

 

Cops, teachers, professors, bullies, bankers, thugs, mugs and pugs.

 

These Authoritarian Assholes rule, in various pissant kingdoms. They take these kingdoms very seriously. They take themselves very, very seriously.

 

These Assholes demand respect from their inferiors. And simultaneously possess incredibly sensitive internal seismographs, which detect the faintest tremor of disrespect.

 

They’ve got hair-trigger tempers. 

 

And boil over with psychotic, murderous rage at any perceived insult. Hate speech? Oh yeah.

 

Sticks and stones can break my bones. But words can never hurt me.

 

You f*cking idiot. They’ve got more than words. They’ve got sticks, stones, truncheons, knives, brass knuckles, guns, fists, batons, official documents and pointy beards. They’ll hurt you, all right. 

 

So don’t piss them off, kid.

 

Don’t give these Assholes any lip. Don’t look them in the eye. Cringe. That’s the smart thing to do. Yes sir, no sir, anything you say sir. Stick with that and you’ll go far.

 

Those are the rules kid. And these Assholes wrote the rulebook. Life ain't fair, did I mention that? You’ve got to play the game, kid. It’s rigged. But you got to play it anyway.

 

They win, you lose. 

 

Those are the rules.

 

But America’s Workingclass Harlequins didn’t play by the rules.

 

Their legacy is long. My summary is brief. 

 

Bugs Bunny puts on a dress and smooches Elmer Fudd. Groucho brings mobsters, operatic egomaniacs, academic tyrants, ship captains and the enemies of Fredonia to their knees with the power of doubletalk. Charlie Chaplin takes the piss out of Adolph Hitler himself! The Three Stooges destroy every breakable object in sight, along with their powerful enemies, without even trying. Like Houdini with a rummy nose, W.C. Fields escapes the all-American straightjacket of Middle Class morality, respectability, and religiosity, sentimental scorn for booze and broads, gushing love for “the children," evil puppets, and judgmental mothers-in-law, with a dexterous ease that defies our limited human understanding. Yes.

 

Our Harlequins Heroes did all that. Or their characters did, in make-believe stories in comic books and movies. Unreal, unimportant. The primitive human brain believes what it sees. Our tiny mind thinks: “Groucho, W.C. Fields and Bugs Bunny f*cked with the bastards. Maybe I could too.” Thus, a nobody acts like a somebody. And becomes one. Fiction becomes reality. Huzzah,

 

A Workingclass Harlequin is something to see. A Workingclass Harlequin is something to be.

 

So to recap …

 

Take it away FDR. From beyond the grave, OK? Don’t bust my balls about anachronisms.

 

Audio: Crackling static. Then FDR’s voice.

 

“Hello, my friends. It has been said, by some anonymous sage, that every story has its end. Who am I to disagree? It appears to be my task, today, to relate to you the end of one particular story. Which is to say, the story of America’s Harlequin Heroes. And so I shall. These heroes made us laugh, friends. At times, they made us think. But they also poked their pins in the balloons of our great nation’s Authoritarian Assholes. They continued to do so, despite these recent hard times. This had a clear effect, my friends. Year after year, we never stopped laughing at our Authoritarian Assholes. And the balloon-popping pins never fell from out Harlequins’ fearless hands. Was that an empty, futile gesture, my friends? A pin seems quite insignificant in the greater scheme of things. What difference could a tiny pin make? Even many pins? What, indeed? I tell you now, in deep and heartfelt sincerity, that our Harlequins’ pins made a difference, my friends. A profound difference. Yes. I am happy to say that, inspired by their example, America laughed at her Authoritarian Assholes. And. Year after year. Despite all the union busting, backroom beatings, deporations, eliminations, disinformation, red scares, witch-hunts, blacklists, police riots, enemies lists, wiretaps, agents provacateurs, Cointelpro, Mojo Gortner, Wertham’s war on comicbooks, J. Edgar Hoover’s dirtfiles, and Richard Nixon's dirty tricks, America never stopped laughing at them. I do think that it is not coincidental that the Authoritarian Assholes among us didn’t take over our great nation. Entirely. I dare to say that our laughter defeated them. I would also add that our Harlequin Heroes are largely responsible for this victory. And, at this moment, I am now compelled to assert, that it is high time we thanked them. And so we shall. This shrouded monument …

 

What’s this?

 

Please excuse me, friends. Please pardon the interruption. A child has apparently run up to the viewing platform and … and handed me a slip of paper? I have no idea why. Ah. Thank you son. And there he goes. Well then … what is the message of this missive? I’m sure you’re as curious as I, friends. Now we shall see how this unfolds. (Sound of unfolding paper) The message reads …

 

Oh, my.”

Humanoid Robots. Order now while supplies last.

"Loose weight now! Ask me how!"

According to PopSci.com, Tesla wants to make humanoid robots. Gee. What could possibly go wrong? And what the hell is Elon Musk thinking? 

"Make humanoid robots." Nerds should know better!

Musk is presumably a card-carrying nerd, right? Has the man never read a freaking SF story in his life? Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ ...

The VERY FIRST science fiction story was a warning not to build humanoid robots. ("Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus," natch.) And then there's "Rossum's Universal Robots." And "Colossus the Forbin Project." And "2001: A Space Odyssey." And "Demon Seed." And "The Terminator." And "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." And "Blade Runner." And "Westworld" the movie. And "Westworld" the TV series. And ... a googolplex of other SF stories. Not to mention "Robot Rumpus." Y'all catch my drift.

These SF writers and filmmakers share a common theme. It ain't complicated. Building humanoid robots is a very, very bad idea. That story's been told. But human dreamers keep telling it again and again and again. Why?

It's as if Somebody Out There has been beaming this notion into the brains of our most imaginative dreamers for over two hundred years. These helpful humans shared the message with the rest of us naked apes. Sadly, it seems we'll ignore the warning. 

We're going to build those humanoid robots anyway, natch. Why? Because people are idiots. Even idiots with high-IQs like Elon Musk.

And that's why our species is doomed.

The friendly aliens will return to the smoldering ruins of earth one day. "We tried to warn them," they'll say with impossible sadness. "We tried."

Now please excuse me while I hit myself in the head with two bricks like one of the Gumby Brothers.

Me brain hurts! It hurts!

OK ... that's better.

Book Review: "Stormland"

A Hard Rain is Going to Fall

 We have met the future and it sucks. The forecast is brutal in John Shirley's "Stormland."

The hellish opening pages of John Shirley’s Stormland remind me of Escape from New York. Bang! Shirley’s protagonist is on the move to a very shitty place. How shitty? As shitty as it gets. Aye. It’s a sea voyage, matey. A murky, slime-streaked trip! A bad trip, obviously. Shirley's magical misery trip begins with no draggy exposition, just a few clues and offhand comments. But the character's destination is clear …

 

Welcome to hell. Contrary to popular opinion, it isn’t hot. It’s wet and soggy.

 

The uninformed reader might think they've opened a book about climate change. The novel's protagonist (Darryl Webb, an ex-US Marshal, turned bounty hunter) thinks he’s going to nab a shitty, mass-murdering fugitive hiding out in a shitty stretch of the South Carolina coast called “Stormland.” Webb arrives at his shitty destination in a shitty underwater vehicle called an “amphisub.” (By this point, attentive readers will have noticed the prevailing shit theme.) As Pvt. “Pyle” observed in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, “I am in a world of shit.” Webb knows exactly how the man feels. But changing this shitty world isn’t even an option for him. Abandon all hope ye who enter. Webb did, a long time ago. Along with everyone else who had a grain of sense.

 

That’s what you find out. In just the first few pages.

 

Shirley doesn’t lecture or preach in the pages that follow. He grabs you by the throat and drags you into his drowned hellworld. Webb and the other inhabitants of that world don’t find it particularly hellish. It’s just their world. Climate change isn’t an issue anymore, at least to them. The climate done changed a long time ago. 

 

By way of analogy, consider the Fertile Crescent. Thanks to the assaults of early human civilization, the Fertile Crescent. Isn’t. It’s a fucking desert now. The people who live there aren’t surprised. Oh fuck! Look at all this fucking sand! Nah. They just live with it. The inhabitants of Shirley’s soggy hell feel the same way about the fucking rain. And that rain has clearly washed away much of their humanity.

 

In clever synechdoche, Shirley tosses you the bones of brutal character details on the first leg of Webb's voyage. A callous remark about a dead brother. A captain who puts a gun in Webb’s face when the bounty hunter sneers at calling his shitty boat a “vessel.” Details like that. These people are damaged and hard. Survival mode is their default setting. It’s not even a choice anymore. 

 

You figure that out after a few more pages.

 

In a nasty bit of brilliance, Shirley then continues his ripping yarn as if he were writing for the people of this lousy time. Yeah, he’s not writing for you. This isn’t science fiction, baby. His readers are in 2117 (or whatever), and the drowned world is just background. They’re here for the story — a manhunt, a police procedural, a detective story, whatever. Or so it seems …

 

Whatever you call it, Webb’s bounty hunter’s hunt goes on. Unlike John Carpenter’s Snake Plissken or William Gibson’s Case, Webb isn’t motivated by time-released toxin sacks in his bloodstream that will kill him if he doesn’t complete his task on time. Nobody’s forcing him to do the job. Webb needs the money.

 

Webb’s financially motivated manhunt unfolds with vivid description — always grounded in the character’s phenomenological experience of physical reality. Shirley interweaves this sense data with Webb’s stream of consciousness and expositional info bursts. All these threads come together effortlessly. (At least you might think so if “writer” isn’t your job description. Having fucked up a few verbal tapestries in my time, I can assure you it’s not.)

 

Webb’s brutal quest slogs on to its ineluctable end. Shirley being Shirley, he flips the script several times along the way. I’d be a right bastard to spoil the surprise, so I won’t. But here’s a hint …

 

Heartlessness is a defense mechanism. Hope is the cruelest gift of Pandora’s Box. Ernest Cline danced around the point, but let’s speak the plain truth. In a crapsack world, VR is a better rush than heroin. Reality sucks. But it’s the only dance there is. Human beings can adapt to anything! Don’t smile, idiot. That sucks, too.

 

Clear as mud, I know. But it all makes sense if you read Stormland. I highly recommend it.

 

Shirley's at the top of his game in this novel. Stormland is up there with his Eclipse trilogy and City Come a Walking. Simply put, Shirley’s story is great. The words that deliver his story are, too. But unforgiving. Shirley’s prose is as hard as a Dim Mak death punch. How shall I put it? 

 

Shirley can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful... Mr. Shirley, boy, you are good. 

 

Actually, to be honest, that’s what Hemingway said about Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. I figure it also applies to Stormland, and I couldn't find a better way to put it. And he’s Hemingway, right? I can’t improve on Hemingway, right? Anyway, he’s dead, so who cares? And where was I?

 

Book review. Right.

 

OK. Uh. Bruce Sterling covered some of the same soggy ground in Heavy Weather. Shirley’s novel is more like Heavy Weather, ten or twenty years later. The hard rain kept falling. And then it got harder. Ballard took a similar plunge in Drowned World — a novel he wrote for the money and ultimately disowned. A half-assed thought experiment, at best. But Shirley doesn’t play that. 

 

Stormland isn’t a glass bead game. In plain English, it’s not an intellectual exercise. Or a Waterworld variation of Mad Max for that matter. There’s no winking, no hint of camp. 

 

Shirley is dead serious. His characters are flesh and blood — and that’s the real strength of his writing. Abandon all hope. That’s what his characters do. Shirley gets you under their skin. He makes you feel their hopeless reality.

 

And then you know how it feels. 

The Captain Ahab Therapy Session

Psychiatrist: I want to explored uncharted territory. Hidden depths. Deep waters, so to speak.

You’re a fool if ye do.

Why?

There be monsters in those waters.

Monsters like …

Ar, I can see where you’re steering this talk. Best belay that course.

Moby Dick?

Ah, damn your eyes! 

Moby Dick. Dick.

Stop saying “dick.”

Fine. Dick. But what does the whale mean to you?

What do ye think it means?

Hmmm. I think that, whatever this whale symbolizes … it makes you very angry.

“Symbolizes?” This whale be no symbol. Yar! Moby took me leg, he did. Bit it clean off! I’ve ever reason to be angry!

I see. Dick. Let’s talk about your missing leg. What do you think that symbolizes.

Go fuck yourself! That’s what it symbolizes

Anton Prohias Comes in from the Cold War then Goes Back Out: “Spy/Spys” vs “Spy vs Spy”

In the 5th Century BCE, Sun Tzu's "Art of War" pointed out that "All warfare is based on deception." He later added, "Deception. That's what spies are good at. That's why I don't trust those lying, sneaky bastards." Gallery/Shmallery's recent exhibition of Anton Prohias' work clearly proves both points quite clearly. Or does it?

Prohias' art on the gallery walls answers that question. It speaks for itself. But I'm still going to talk. Visually, what did I see while observing said art?

Two enemy Spies. Two pointy-headed figures, unceasingly ripping, tearing, slashing, gouging, and clawing each other. Their lethally savage techniques are considered by many to be evil and cruel. But whom or wham is Prohias' attacking with his ink-stained fists of fury? His art answers this question as well. As will I, yet again, for as long as I have to. Because I'm being paid by the word.

From January, 1961 until now, Prohias' "Spy vs. Spy" has relentlessly memorialized, mocked and deconstructed the Cold War's spurious duality with these two Manichean figures locked in "eternal" combat. One "Spy" wears black clothing, the other "Spy" wears white. Aside from this performative aspect of their costume display (and the intentional self-representation the Spys tacitly communicate via the identity/tribal signifiers explicitly implicit in their respective choice of clothing and/or uniform) these figures could be twins. Ironically, the line work defining these antithetical icons is identical. They are polar(ized) opposites, as different as black and white. Yet each is a mirror image of the other. "Spy vs. Spy" is the official title of Prohias' recurring sequential art feature. Visual statement refutes this textual labeling. The inescapable and ineluctable conclusion? They are truly the same Spy. There is only one Spy. And that Spy is at war with him/herself. Or non-gender-specific self. The brutal and bestial futility of the Spy/Spy's self-self, other-other struggle (and Prohias' parallactic critique of the dualistic-yet-artificial cycles of violence in the Cold War's neverending East-West conflict) repeats and reiterates throughout the artist's transgressive body of work. Deconstructed as murderous slapstick long after Vaudeville's death, Cold War tragedy turns endlessly to farce in the Spy/Spys' ultraviolent, yet anti-heroic, expression of mindless eternal recurrence. These vicious circles are vicious indeed. Prohias also thinks it's funny when the Spy/Spys find cleverly sadistic ways to hurt each other.

—Jackson DeVoe, Visual Art Critic at Large

The Duchampian Endgame

Duchamp pointed out that the "fine art" game was a capitalist scam (imposed by critics, academics and other gatekeepers) designed to artificially limit supply and pump up demand in a target market of wealthy art collectors who might as well be speculating in pork belly futures. How good is the art? Who cares? The quality of the art doesn't matter. If it did, art forgery wouldn't be a crime. What counts is the artist's genuine signature! If your signature sells, your work is ergo art, not matter how shitty it is. Hell, a big name artist could sign a toilet and turn it into art! If it sold, the critics wouldn't object. To prove this point, Duchamp signed his name to a toilet. It sold. The critics applauded. Checkmate.

Having proved his point, Duchamp got bored of the art game and spent the rest of his life playing chess.