7 days, 7 jokes

[imomus]

A Spoken Word Exhibition at New York's Swiss Institute ends today -- though the Performa Biennial it's part of continues -- so I've just emailed the gallery staff the last of the seven Bob Newart jokes they're being asked to whisper to visitors. Here's the complete set. As happens in Chinese Whispers-type games, these jokes sometimes got garbled in the telling (and they were garbled enough to begin with!). A spy I sent to the gallery told me, for instance, that the three bulls in Friday's joke became, for her, three bows. Mistakes are a way of generating the new... or sometimes just uneasy laughter.



Thursday November 1st
A man walked into a doctor's waiting room and the room blew down. "I thought you were a waiter", said the man. "I lost patients," said the room.

Friday November 2nd
There were three bulls, legging it across a field. One of them was a green bull, one of them a blue bull, and the other had to look in the mirror.

Saturday November 3rd
A mutilator was humiliating in a haystack. "Stop!" cried the resultant children.

Sunday November 4th
A king walked into a McDonalds. "Give me two women," he said to the man behind the counter. "Keep your voice down," said the man, "I'm scared too".

Monday November 5th
"Who's that seedy comedian -- the one who takes his clothes off in the gallery?"
"Acconci?"
"No, Bob Newart."

Tuesday November 6th
There were three black dwarves who lived in a tall white cylindrical house on the cliffs. One stormy night an icy winter gale whipped up and howled. The three dwarves climbed the spiral staircase to bed and switched off the light. Next morning, several hundred bodies were found on the beach. They were lighthouse keepers.

Wednesday November 7th
An English, an Irish and a Scottish pussy cat were asked their favourite prey. "Dumplings," said the Irishman.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

He comes out of what happened during my last two major shows, the Zach Feuer one in 2005 (making up stories from scratch daily in the gallery) and the Unreliable Tour Guide at the Whitney. As those three months at the Whitney went on, I found the character of Bob Newart, a comedian, emerging from somewhere inside me and taking over the tours. I decided to "give him his own show". That show still hasn't happened -- I was originally going to appear at Performa as Bob Newart, in person. But what eventually happened was this phoned-in version, which is really a kind of pre-publicity for the real Bob Newart Show: a kind of John the Baptist to his dying-for-us-onstage Christ.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, but why are you interested in a dying-for-us-onstage Christ? Is he some kind of Beckettian absurdist character?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

First, death is a fascinating subject. So is unsuccess. A comedian "dying" on stage (failing to connect with his audience) is -- for me, anyway -- vastly more interesting than a comedian succeeding and winning the crowd over.

A bad comedian is an incredibly eloquent and economical way to communicate the ideas of death and unsuccess. There's lots of emotion on both sides. We feel awful for him, he feels awful about the whole thing.

But there's a whole other side -- for me the most fascinating part -- which goes back to the Feuer piece I did, and to Saul Bellow's phrase "the primitive prompter". Bob Newart will have no "material". His jokes come ab nihilo, out of nothing. He makes them up (as I made the stories up at Feuer) on the spur of the moment. And this is the "Christ"'s miraculous side. He can produce -- not loaves and fish, but words and phrases -- out of nothing. The "primitive prompter" allows him to do it. Sure, he can't make funny jokes, he can't make people laugh, he can't quite communicate (though he can't quite not-communicate either -- all words mean something). But he can do this, and for that reason he's not dead yet. And yes, the Beckett comparison is totally apt for that reason. While we speak, we aren't dead yet.

[(Anonymous)]

Christ, writing your own press releases?

You'll be pleased to know that 'Beckettian' just about trumps 'Sisyphean' so far as misunderstood/overused cliches go in this field.

[(Anonymous)]

He tried to get Christ to write his press release - but He was hung up at the time.