Comedy versus art
Aug. 7th, 2008 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThe first thing I did this morning was read some dispatches, on the Guardian site, from the Festival Fringe, currently turning my home town of Edinburgh carnivalesque. I read the elderly and irritating Clive James -- who, like many mainstream media personalities, got his start in Edinburgh -- pimping his solo show with lines of slick self-deprecation like "There are veteran quinces with more magnetism. But it won't matter as long as I can still talk." The leering, drawling James had some advice to impart: "pack the line... as on the page, what you say on stage should give value for money, bringing a lot in."
I then watched comedian Richard Herring -- who, like James, is looking about fifty years older than he used to -- guiding us, with painful affability and the same patter of slick self-deprecation, through this year's Fringe comedy acts at the Pleasance. Herring's video reminded me just how aesthetically offensive I find Edinburgh Festival comedy, and how glad I am not to be there right now. Why is Herring posing so ostentatiously in front of that horrible Virgin logo in the video? Because it's a fitness centre, and fitness / unfitness is one of the central structuring dialectics of comedy -- you're unfit, generally, because you're drunk and hung over (as Herring himself professes to be in the vid). The other major, central structuring dialectic is self-deprecation / self-glorification.
Comedians have to invest a lot of money in their Edinburgh shows these days (facing, Herring tells us, losses of £20,000 rather than the £2000 or so it used to cost if they flopped). They're desperate to be liked, desperate to be able to launch profitable media careers and become household names. Yet they're aware that their self-promotional efforts make them very annoying. The self-deprecation (an inverted form of arrogance, especially in the hands of the English) is the alkaline they mix with the acid of their ambition. It also reflects, perhaps, the bipolar personality of a lot of comics, who love and loathe themselves in equal measure, and swing between jubilation and desperation. Like rock critics, comics seem to be deeply aware of their own shortcomings, and to incorporate them into their work like a row of double A Duracells powered by vanity masquerading as self-contempt.
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I have been to comedy on the Edinburgh Festival, as recently as 2005. I went to see Demitri Martin, and found him quite funny and clever -- perhaps because he's less Anglo-Saxon -- no boasts of being wasted or a failure for him, just clever concepts. I wrote about my 2005 festival experience for Wired, but, being me, ended the piece on a high of quite a different kind: the experience of a work of art (Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden).
This morning the same thing happened -- nauseated by this glimpse of the Festival Fringe (jokes about getting your wedding sponsored by T-Mobile -- "shit service, no reception", Herring's feeble autobiographical piece about being the headmaster's son), I escaped to the quieter, higher pastures of art video, selecting from my MeFeedia art videos feed a piece called Eyeballing by Rosalind Nashashibi.
Nothing could be simpler or more universal than Nashashibi's film. People from any culture could understand and appreciate it. Babies could respond. It's about the benign paranoia which makes us see human faces in any shape containing something to represent two eyes and something to represent a mouth. Compared with the comedy sketches reported in the Guardian, you immediately notice something about this video. It's quieter (just the sound of the streets, no commentary), slower, more confident, more winning. It doesn't fill the frame with an irritating showbiz personality with a poorly-chosen wardrobe. It doesn't demand -- via self-deprecation -- to be liked. And it doesn't assume that your attention will wander if it fails to "pack the line" (in Clive James' formula). In fact, it unpacks the line.
It also appeals to a different part of the brain. If comedy makes a concerted rush for the verbal-logical left brain, visual art heads for our primitive, intuitive right brain, a place of pictures, desires, reflexes and instincts. Looking at Nashashibi's faces, I quickly get a sense of aesthetic pleasure which goes back to my childhood, to views of mother leaning over the cot, to tales of anthropomorphised animals, to fear (there's a face in the wall!) and the imagination that fuels it. My collecting instinct is stirred, my inner designer is invoked, but humour isn't absent either: these faces, after all, are visual puns. I watch them accumulate with delight, I recognise the mindset that would want to collect them and the mindset that would want to exhibit them. I don't feel dirty or cheapened or used after the film is finished, and I don't have a hangover to bore my friends describing the next morning, under garish cartoons of dopey-looking people in the Pleasance courtyard.
If you're in Edinburgh, then, I'd recommend giving the Pleasance a miss and heading, instead, to the Annuale 08 art festival. You'll feel much better about yourself in the morning.
I then watched comedian Richard Herring -- who, like James, is looking about fifty years older than he used to -- guiding us, with painful affability and the same patter of slick self-deprecation, through this year's Fringe comedy acts at the Pleasance. Herring's video reminded me just how aesthetically offensive I find Edinburgh Festival comedy, and how glad I am not to be there right now. Why is Herring posing so ostentatiously in front of that horrible Virgin logo in the video? Because it's a fitness centre, and fitness / unfitness is one of the central structuring dialectics of comedy -- you're unfit, generally, because you're drunk and hung over (as Herring himself professes to be in the vid). The other major, central structuring dialectic is self-deprecation / self-glorification.
Comedians have to invest a lot of money in their Edinburgh shows these days (facing, Herring tells us, losses of £20,000 rather than the £2000 or so it used to cost if they flopped). They're desperate to be liked, desperate to be able to launch profitable media careers and become household names. Yet they're aware that their self-promotional efforts make them very annoying. The self-deprecation (an inverted form of arrogance, especially in the hands of the English) is the alkaline they mix with the acid of their ambition. It also reflects, perhaps, the bipolar personality of a lot of comics, who love and loathe themselves in equal measure, and swing between jubilation and desperation. Like rock critics, comics seem to be deeply aware of their own shortcomings, and to incorporate them into their work like a row of double A Duracells powered by vanity masquerading as self-contempt.
[Error: unknown template video]
I have been to comedy on the Edinburgh Festival, as recently as 2005. I went to see Demitri Martin, and found him quite funny and clever -- perhaps because he's less Anglo-Saxon -- no boasts of being wasted or a failure for him, just clever concepts. I wrote about my 2005 festival experience for Wired, but, being me, ended the piece on a high of quite a different kind: the experience of a work of art (Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden).
This morning the same thing happened -- nauseated by this glimpse of the Festival Fringe (jokes about getting your wedding sponsored by T-Mobile -- "shit service, no reception", Herring's feeble autobiographical piece about being the headmaster's son), I escaped to the quieter, higher pastures of art video, selecting from my MeFeedia art videos feed a piece called Eyeballing by Rosalind Nashashibi.
Nothing could be simpler or more universal than Nashashibi's film. People from any culture could understand and appreciate it. Babies could respond. It's about the benign paranoia which makes us see human faces in any shape containing something to represent two eyes and something to represent a mouth. Compared with the comedy sketches reported in the Guardian, you immediately notice something about this video. It's quieter (just the sound of the streets, no commentary), slower, more confident, more winning. It doesn't fill the frame with an irritating showbiz personality with a poorly-chosen wardrobe. It doesn't demand -- via self-deprecation -- to be liked. And it doesn't assume that your attention will wander if it fails to "pack the line" (in Clive James' formula). In fact, it unpacks the line.
It also appeals to a different part of the brain. If comedy makes a concerted rush for the verbal-logical left brain, visual art heads for our primitive, intuitive right brain, a place of pictures, desires, reflexes and instincts. Looking at Nashashibi's faces, I quickly get a sense of aesthetic pleasure which goes back to my childhood, to views of mother leaning over the cot, to tales of anthropomorphised animals, to fear (there's a face in the wall!) and the imagination that fuels it. My collecting instinct is stirred, my inner designer is invoked, but humour isn't absent either: these faces, after all, are visual puns. I watch them accumulate with delight, I recognise the mindset that would want to collect them and the mindset that would want to exhibit them. I don't feel dirty or cheapened or used after the film is finished, and I don't have a hangover to bore my friends describing the next morning, under garish cartoons of dopey-looking people in the Pleasance courtyard.
If you're in Edinburgh, then, I'd recommend giving the Pleasance a miss and heading, instead, to the Annuale 08 art festival. You'll feel much better about yourself in the morning.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 10:32 am (UTC)It's a truism that comedy doesn't travel, so I guess as a self-hating Anglo-Saxon you're never going to get along with British comedy. Unless you were one of those seventies teenagers who were endlessly quoting Monty Python? After all, Python was genteel, university-educated stuff, wasn't it? Not like the garish chav stuff about drinking and hangovers you get these days...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 10:44 am (UTC)Yes, visual art is relatively universal, as I know very well -- my visual art career is basically as a comedian, I use the English language in my performances and therefore I only really have a career in New York and London. I've limited myself by focusing on words.
I guess as a self-hating Anglo-Saxon you're never going to get along with British comedy.
But that's exactly who should be getting along with British comedy! That's its target market! The reason it fails is because I'm an introvert, an aesthete, a narcissist, and because I was bored stiff, as a student, with that typical student atmosphere of beer and talking about beer (while wearing bad clothes).
I liked Python as a teenager, but didn't quote it. I got into it more when I lived in Tokyo, for some reason. Even now, I only like about half the sketches (the philosophical-absurdist ones, the "don't mention mattresses" one, the management training one) and squirm at the other half. And I can't stand Terry fucking Gilliam!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 10:58 am (UTC)You're a strange one though, Momus. There are some people who are culturally slippery, you can't always tell where they come from, and they don't always "act" their class and nationality. But you're unambiguously what you are. For all your talk of "third culture", your every sentence and gesture says "I am a middle-class, privately-educated British man brought up in the sixties and seventies". Even your horror of the British drinking culture is really quite British. And yet you seem to hate the place you come from, even as you embody it. Even as you theorise on the impossibility of removing oneself from one's society, you're removing yourself from your society.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 11:19 am (UTC)Actually, one theme I wanted to blog about this week is a question I asked Joe and Emma: How German do you think I've become over the course of five years living here? I think the answer is "Quite a bit". I love coming home to Berlin after trips to the UK, I scoff at pricey, watery British beer, I deplore their tawdry over-capitalist economy, their inability to stop working, their acceptance of high prices and poor services, their body horror (we Berliners swim naked!) etc. Maybe I'll do that piece (How German Is He?) tomorrow.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 11:30 am (UTC)And so they prefer bad UK policies to enlightened EU ones (they let governments which are supposed to protect their interests opt out of the EU social charter, for instance, which would give them much firmer rights and a nicer working week), and they're prepared to pay lots of money to see the Sex Pistols reform -- a malady band par excellence, a band utterly wedded to Britishness even while slurring the queen -- but no money at all to see PiL reform -- a remedy band, a band which wedded Jamaica to Cologne, and presented a way out of the horrible ultra-nationalist music punk had by that time become (Oi!).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 11:32 am (UTC)I think all European cultures have this self-hating side. You're just more culturally attuned to the British version. The French certainly have it, so do the Germans. The myth that success isn't encouraged and you have to leave home to achieve it is one that pervades a lot of cultures.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 12:45 pm (UTC)The Germanness of one's way of thinking and feeling shouldn't be mixed up with speaking German or making Anglo-Saxon references. It's whether how one thinks and feels and sees is changed by the experience of living in another country that I'm interested in. And while language has some effect on how one thinks, feels and sees, I think it's equally a question of perceptions and opinions which could be expressed in any language.
I'd be interested in whether anyone has researched how the Turks in Germany express German attitudes in Turkish, for instance.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 01:12 pm (UTC)Personally, on the evidence of your albums, blog and interviews on youtube, you seem quintessentially British to me. Not any kind of Briton, of course, but a specific middle-class, growing-up-in-the-seventies aesthete type of British person, of whom I've met many. I think you've built up this self-serving narrative of Britain about how brutish and anti-intellectual and anti-art it is, which is an incredibly partial story. How do you account for London's preeminence in the art world of the past 20 years, Momus?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 01:17 pm (UTC)Bleedin' foreigners, innit?
I want a list of all these middle class, growing-up-in-the-seventies people. Do you think we can all be mates, and sit there agreeing with each other? Or would we hate each other?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 01:30 pm (UTC)As for all the middle-class growing-up-in-the-seventies people, just wander around the gentrified bits of Hackney or something, you'll bump into enough of them!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 01:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 10:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 10:15 pm (UTC)I am Nordic myself and I can identify with every damn thing said.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 11:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 11:21 am (UTC)HOW GERMAN IS HE???
Date: 2008-08-07 11:43 am (UTC)BUT HE'S CALLED DIMITRI AND THEREFORE IS TOTALLY NOT A CRACKER
Date: 2008-08-07 11:45 am (UTC)Soon you'll be able to compete with Sylvia and his super-imposed breasts!
Re: BUT HE'S CALLED DIMITRI AND THEREFORE IS TOTALLY NOT A CRACKER
Date: 2008-08-07 11:54 am (UTC)WHEN THE PIMP'S IN THE CRIB, MA, DROP IT LIKE IT'S HOT
Date: 2008-08-07 12:34 pm (UTC)IN THE BACKROOM: DA CLUBS AND BITCHES REMIX
Date: 2008-08-07 12:36 pm (UTC)LOL ICING HIS KNEES
Date: 2008-08-07 12:59 pm (UTC)Re: LOL ICING HIS KNEES
Date: 2008-08-07 01:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 12:38 pm (UTC)Last "comedian" I saw in the Fringe was Mark Thomas.
I didn't win any of the Nazi Coca Cola paintings in his raffle much to my dismay.
Richard Herring
Date: 2008-08-07 12:44 pm (UTC)As someone who has, it contains very little self-depreciating humour and actually a sincere, thoughtful and heartwarming piece of work about the distance between teenagers and their parents.
And I believe Richard has played Momus records as Intro music (http://dickonedwards.co.uk/diary/index.php/archive/talking-cock-corner/) before!
(erm.. this isn't supposed to be an anonymous dig - I just felt the need to stick up for someone whose work I really enjoy)
Re: Richard Herring
Date: 2008-08-07 01:07 pm (UTC)Sorry, Mr Herring, your show is probably not feeble at all! In fact, it's probably excellent!
Re: Richard Herring
Date: 2008-08-07 01:09 pm (UTC)more comedy, less theory.
Date: 2008-08-07 02:11 pm (UTC)But to make blanket pronouncements about comedy is like talking about the current state of "music." There's a lot of good stuff out there. Demetri Martin probably isn't even in the top rank of the current batch (zach galifianakis and the UCB theater people in LA).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 04:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 05:15 pm (UTC)self depreciating
Date: 2008-08-07 06:47 pm (UTC)Re: self depreciating
Date: 2008-08-07 06:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 10:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 07:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 07:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 07:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 07:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 07:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-08 05:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-07 07:25 pm (UTC)Camo-depp
Date: 2008-08-07 10:02 pm (UTC)This got me thinking. As bad as the self-deprecation thing may be, its evil twin would have to be the pseudo-pomposity which in itself is actually a spin on the old-school self-depp (feel free to use that abbreviation at school tomorrow). This is where, instead of saying that you are "a bit crap in bed actually", you go "I will have you know that I am actually quite fabulous in bed and my grape-fruit-sized balls are heavy with the most potent of male ejaculum". By exaggerating past a certain point you make it obvious that you are actually wielding a sharp slice of self-depp in camo (here forth known as camo-depp) and not just being bombastic and horrible. Of course this all comes down to the same thing; simply avoid passing any kind of judgment on your own character, good or bad.