Bob NewArt slays and dies nightly

[imomus]

So, there's this guy, right. He walks into an art show in New York. It's his own art show, at a place called Zach Feuer on West 26th Street. Five years later, I swear, he walks into another art show in the same gallery -- but it's on a different street. A couple of years after that this Zach guy contacts the man -- his name's Nick -- and says "Perhaps we can apply to do something as part of Performa". That's, you know, the second non-profit performance biennial, scheduled for November 2007.

So Nick has to come up with a concept quick, because the deadline for applications is, like, yesterday. Nick's been thinking a lot recently about jokes. He wants to write a book about jokes, going really seriously into the stories behind them, making tragedy out of comedy. Plus, he's done this act at the Whitney Biennial, right, that's turned, over its three month span, into a sort of comedy job. The Unreliable Tour Guide has evolved, as he's worked the crowds in the museum's halls with his slick patter, into "the Bob Newhart of new art".

So Nick says "I want to be a stand-up comedian at Performa. Bob NewArt." And he does this outline for the Performa people. In the comedic jargon, Bob both slays and dies nightly, standing up in his sleazy wig and pink tie, there on the mic. Nothing to do with Bob Newhart, by the way, except that he's deadpan, like Bob. But, whereas Newhart has "a button-down mind", NewArt is off the rails. His conscious mind is out of control. He's handed his act over to the "primitive prompter".

NewArt's jokes have the structure of jokes, but they go nowhere. Shaggy dog style. Or they're hilarious, but for all the wrong reasons. There's a set-up and a punchline and so on, but it's all like what happens in your head as you're falling asleep, it doesn't quite add up, it turns surprising corners. It's like your worst nightmare of being a standup comedian, but forgetting all your lines and just trying to make it up right there in the spotlight. And, you know, you just say the first thing that comes into your head, and some of it ends up being funny, and some just bizarre.

So please put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen... HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERE'S, um, Bob. He's going to just, you know, slay you.

Comments

[atarashi.livejournal.com]

a little like Mitch Hedberg (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mitch_Hedberg), perhaps?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, his jokes make way too much sense.

A Bob NewArt joke (off the cuff):

There are 30,000 Irishmen and one Englishman. The Englishman is a pig. Or at least that's what the Irishmen are mumbling to each other as he rides by on his camel. They decide to do away with him. Custard will be the means. There's a cauldron of the stuff on the ramparts. Everything unfolds quite quickly, the custard grumbles at a job well done, and the Englishman is served in a tart in Kilkerry. The old lady who buys it at the bakery says: "You wouldn't have a small boy?"

[heliumflash.livejournal.com]

it's going to be fabulous, darlink. love the pic :)

i like the idea of what youre doing. the off the cuff joke above is taking comedy to a truly surreal level, beyond chris morris. without wanting to sound arty farty its almost like dada comedy.

my long time hero is lenny bruce. i read albert goldman's ladies and gentlemen, lenny bruce, (bruce's biography) when i was 17, and it changed the direction of my life.

my partner's favourite joke is this:

a man goes into a pet shop and asks the owner, "how much are your wasps?"

the owner says, "i'm sorry, sir, we don't sell wasps."

the man says "well you've got some in the window."


...whenever he makes a stupid joke or comment now (frequently) i glare at him and say "wasp" disapprovingly. ha ha ha! :)

i don't like the wasp joke. maybe i don't have a sense of humour.

[(Anonymous)]

One of my favourite jokes at school was:

Me: "What's the tallest mountain in the world?"
Interlocutor: "Mount Everest"
Me: "Now tell me about the hair on your head."



Haunting.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Nothing to do with Bob Newhart, by the way, except that he's deadpan, like Bob.

So you're not going to use the fake telephone?

What's that? You say Custard will be the means?

[vinylboy20.livejournal.com]

There's a part in John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise which contains Jokes That Have Never Produced Laughter that sound kind of like that.

An Irishman, an Englishman, and an Indian chief go fishing together in a large rowboat in a medium-sized lake. Everyone has good luck: two or three big fish each. They stay out in the middle of the lake until sunset. On the way back to shore, as the sky purples and turns to night, they all sing a song.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I really like mechanically-generated jokes. The Brunching Shuttlecocks (http://www.brunching.com/generator-datearchive.html) had a random bar jokes generator (it seems to be down now) which used joke templates and random input to produce absurdist jokes like this:

A king walks into a McDonald's.
Says the king, “Give me two women please.”
Says the guy behind the counter, “Only if you lower your voice!”
Says the king, “Oh, that’s fine, I’m scared, too.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Too bad it's down - the random joke you supplied here is really very funny.

Hell is for Heroes

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

I think that joke was reported "missing in action!"

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe you could use a manual laugh-track machine. Some little sampler. Or just your computer. You step over, kind of matter-of-factly, every once and a while and press a button to trigger the little milk-toast laugh-track. preferably sampled from some very old sitcom maybe. I imagine you doing it after saying "You wouldn`t have a small boy?" or after custard will be the means.

[(Anonymous)]

You look a lot like Helge Schneider on that picture.

http://www.star-channel.de/images/groups/helge-schneider.jpg


Robert

[(Anonymous)]

Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Why not use the opportunity to do some actual funny material? Conceptual art be a bit wearing as it is.
mixu62

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think some of it will be funny. The thing is, there's no point doing something that might really be a stand-up act in the real comedy world. Someone's sure to have been there, and done it better. To be a comedian in the art world means to use art's license to be difficult, strange, incomprehensible. Art is allowed to not-make-sense. It's allowed to wander and even bore us. These are essential liberties in an age where everything is supposed to make instant impact, and appeal on sight. It's crucial to use them. However, I know that if I just make stuff up, some of it will be funny, almost despite me. This is something I can do. I know that because I tell my girlfriend stories in bed. She can just say "Something about lemons and paper" and I can reel off a story in real time which, usually, turns out to be very funny. It's quite surprising, because the cupboard seems to be empty, one seems to have nothing prepared. But the brain is there, ready to come up with these amazing narratives, just like it does when you're asleep and dreaming. It's that I've been tapping into in my performance art shows at Zach Feuer and the Whitney, and I know I'm onto a good thing. It just works. Somebody in my family, long ago, kissed the Blarney Stone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blarney_Stone).

[thebigcroute.livejournal.com]

When I visited the Blarney Stone I not only kissed it, but accidentally thumped my head on it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's like Obelix falling into the magic potion cauldron when he was small!

Desperate but not serious

[(Anonymous)]

If I were kind and adoring
How would that be?
Very boring

just as music can make no sense

[rroland.livejournal.com]

http://www.conceptbureau.org/mp3/curtismuenze.mp3

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

I'd LOVE to see this. Although, I immediately think of these two conceptual comedy antecedents...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Clifton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Hamburger

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ah, the anxiety of (non)-influence! Should I click those?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hmm, sample Neil Hamburger joke: "Why did the farmer form a punk rock band? Because he was tired of haulin' oats / Hall and Oates." They do get better (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW22Kv9N0mE), though. "Why did Michael Jackson dangle his son out of the window? He was punishing him for refusing to finish his plate of sperm."

With respect to these comedians, they aren't really listening to their primitive prompters. They have too much to lose if people don't laugh.

There's a comedy routine in the brilliant film "The American Astronaut" which is a lot closer to what I have in mind:

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[(Anonymous)]

That's wonderful! That scene is unbridled genius, and exactly what came to mind when I read your post. I'm also very fond of the chicken joke from McAbee's The Ketchup and Mustard Man, which does a similar job of creating comedic dissonance through the inappropriate laughter of an on-screen audience and the cramming of random, depressing content into a joke structure. The idea of doing a similar performance live is really intriguing, given how much the effect of the piece might end up arising from the interaction between the comedian and the audience.

- Caroline

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

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[jammypack.livejournal.com]

That's funny, the first thing that sprung to mind when reading this entry was Neil Hamburger. Not necessarily because I think Bob NewArt is similar in style, but because I would enjoy seeing the two on the same bill, opening for Gilbert Gottfried spouting horribly dated material in a horribly dated Boris Karloff impression. Understood they are both different from NewArt in their reliance on the ba-dap-bomp splash dynamic, but all three embrace absurdist methods to obtain (or vacuum away) laughs.

I hesitate to click the American Astronaut vid, as that's been a movie in my queue of thousands for a a couple years now. I don't tend to like to know much if anything about the movies I'm about to watch. Perhaps this entry will propell that disc to the top, overtaking Ken Loach, Sogo Ishii and/or Douglas Sirk for pole position.

Neil Hamburger and Tenacious D

[(Anonymous)]

Anyone who opens for Tenacious D better be strange and off the wall or there's going to be an Igor Stravinsky sized riot in the Dance Hall. But there's no doubt you will be DIFFERENT from Neil Hamburger.

Neil Hamburger

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.americasfunnyman.com/
http://www.americasfunnyman.com/
http://www.americasfunnyman.com/
http://www.americasfunnyman.com/
http://www.americasfunnyman.com/
http://www.americasfunnyman.com/

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Some of your "gags", your "wisecracks", come over like the late Scottish raconteur Chic Murray. He who had a mynah bird in the hall of his hotel in Edinburgh to greet customers. Other comedians would corpse in incredulity at his non-comedy.

Comedy or standup has needed a punk rock for a while. Someone to destroy it in its Year Zero.

Remember, William S.Burroughs always compared his literary works to "routines".
That word gets deeper the more you look at it and the further off track you walk with it.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Of course where Eddie Izzard's detournement is classic buffoonery, Chris Morris comes dangerously close to the bone with his predator's smile.

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

sold!
i'd shure love to see that act.

and: is the book on jokes meant to replace the imaginary composers, or are you working on two books?
(i just got commissioned to write and draw a self-help book aiming for the dysfunctional and catastrophe - a bit hinting to things like bataille's economics of waste. the whole books going to be a joke. and, sort of, a quite "objective" look on reality, real economics, rituals and life stories)

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

i'd like to recommend you two masters of jokes for your research:
mark newgarden's carreer retrospective book "we all die alone" is a fantastic meditation on anonymous "cheap laff" cartoons:
http://www.amazon.com/All-Die-Alone-Mark-Newgarden/dp/1560976616

another master of conceptual humor is french comic artist and scientist specialising in artificial intelligence, daniel goossens. an absurdist/satirical "storyteller" who chases the reader from one cliché gotten wrong to the next, sense leaving right at the first turn. his drawings are very precise, but the extraordinary thing is his extreme command of all "falsenesses" in a "langage" turned meaningless ( i know your french is good).
my favorite is his series "georges et louis" (esp. the first volume), a supposedly gay couple of elderly would-be novelists, or his "encyclopédie des bébés".
http://www.danielgoossens.com/

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

the link to the google search for "primitive prompter" is right on.

primitive prompter?:

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Re: primitive prompter?:

[(Anonymous)]

this is fucking hilarious. it's also funny that it's taken the name similar to that of a form or massage therapy. (the previous sentence sounds like a person from the video, too).

good idea, also, momus-san. have fun with that performance-art-piece-thing-happening-event.
wish i could attend, but, alas, i'm stuck here in northern california with 70 degree weather.

michael

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure art you need to explain before hand. Is really art.
Just me?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You should ask zazie_metro, she's a student there.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

making tragedy out of comedy.

Please tell me you're not going goth!

Really, I'd positively LOVE to see you doing an artsy stand-up comedy routine!

[opticalit.livejournal.com]

I love Neil Hamburger; he's really good to watch live. His jokes are "good" but it's all about his persona, which has actually evolved from something more eager and deliberately poor to (as a true bad comedian might) something drunken and bitterly miserable. Spilling drinks, clearing his throat every 15 seconds or less, milking his randomly-utilized "trademark catchphrases" such as "but thaaaat's my life!" and "all in a day's work for NEEEeeeeeeeiiIIILL HAAAAMburger!!" ... and pleading to the audience in such ways as, "Oh, come on, open your hearts, ladies and gentlemen, for a young comedian named Neil Hamburger" or calling himself "the world's youngest comedian." And, of course, hurling horrible insults at hecklers (and the audience in general, though nobody buys it when it's a general one).

I think Neil's wonderful, but there's definitely room for you both! I can't wait to possibly witness some of this performance on this very site...

Is Momus "Ginger Joe"?

[(Anonymous)]

I was watching the UKs latest rap moguls - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uja3W-ibifc - when i noticed that one of the remixes features what looks like a bewigged Momus- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ieo_Zr5crs0&mode=related&search=

Is this the REAL Momus?