Margaret Cho

Margaret Cho played in D.C. this weekend. We saw her 8:00 show on Saturday night at the Improv. She is, as one might imagine, great fun to see live. Who knew she had lost a bunch of weight, though, and looks even more beautiful than ever. Wow. She came onstage in what seemed to be a pair of black tights over a pair of black underwear and some red and black striped thigh-highs, with a belt on top of all that, and then a skimpy shirt and some red lacy gloves that came all the way up her arms. The first thing she said was "Sorry about the gloves. I just saw Prince in concert." She went into a joke about him, saying that Prince always has his cock in one hand and the Bible in the other, you know, like, "Oh yeah, baby, do it like that....thank you, Jesus!"

I can see that recreating Cho's act on paper is nearly impossible. I hadn't really thought of it before that so much of her humor is based on impressions. I had heard her impressions of her mother, which really are so funny. The Korean accent is so funny to me because I've worked with so many students who sound EXACTLY like the accent she does. But Cho also does a lot of what might be called imaginary impression. In one part of her act, she talks about having gone on an Atlantis cruise (a gay cruise), where there was a reading room. Then she does a whole riff on the idea of the reading room, that it couldn't possibly be a place where people sat and read books. All of a sudden Cho transforms herself, voice and stance, into this kind of ghetto drag-queen, saying "R-E-A-D," defining it as, "What you do when you decide you don't like someone. You look them up and down and then you stare at something you don't like." Pick, for example, their close-set eyes. "Do you have to get special glasses made? Maybe you could go to Lens Crafters. I hear they can make them in just about an hour." You're probably not laughing if you're reading this without ever having heard this act, because the whole joke is in the inflection.

So I said before that I knew she did impressions of her mother and that her audience awaits those impressions because they are funny. I can see that, too, as an artifact of her Korean-ness, her Other-ness, if you will, a sort of acknowledgement of being on this imaginary border. At any rate, I expected to see this in her comedy. But what I didn't expect is the inflection that I am finding it so hard to explain. I found that most of her jokes, including the drag queen above, were delivered in the hip-hop/ghetto/urban vernacular or accent. How do we explain this?

For one thing, young, hip people try to dress and sound black these days. I have to look up a great New York Times essay I read about that last year. The Dave Chapelle Show did a great skit about a blind black man who was a white supremacist. In one scene, his friends are driving him to a White power rally. At a stoplight, the pickup truck he is in pulls up to a car full of teenage (white) boys playing loud rap music. The Black White supremacist yells at them about their music, calling them, "Niggers!" The boys look at each other with horror for a second and then high-five each other because they think it's so cool to have been called that. Margaret Cho is clearly a part of this phenomenon. She seems to adapt a ghetto persona every time she means to deliver a punch line.

So is that because Black culture is cool? Does Cho, as a person who treads so many borders, feel equally comfortable among any of these marginalized cultures? How does it work?

Throw Throw Momma From the Train, From
the Train

I'm not exactly sure why Wes Gehring includes Throw Momma From the Train in his discussion about dark comedies. I guess it loosely fits his definition, since it laughs at death. The premise of the movie is that Danny DeVito's character seems to murder Billy Crystal's wife, thinking that is what Crystal wanted and he thinks that Crystal will murder his mother in return. Of course, things get really, really ridiculous and we're supposed to laugh a lot. The movie had a little more charm than I anticipated, frankly. I'm not a big Danny DeVito fan, nor have I cared much for Billy Crystal after he played the gay character on Soap, lo these many years ago. Both actors are unappealing for the same reason: they play every character completely over the top. There never seems to be much reality attached to their characters; the behavior is always extreme so it takes a lot of effort to suspend my disbelief--too much effort, in fact for me to care about them.

But so there are some good things to be said for the movie. The first half shows DeVito's character in his misguided way trying to please his writing professor (Crystal). He fumblingly tries to kill the ex-wife, ultimately relying on luck to propel him, since he really isn't a murderer. Crystal, no matter how much he hates that ex-wife (who gained national fame by stealing his novel and publishing it under her name), realizes as a result of DeVito's actions, that he wouldn't really kill his wife and doesn't really want her dead. When DeVito tells Crystal he is expected to kill the mother, at first Crystal is the voice of reason, saying he would never kill a person. In fact, he even tries to warn her. The comic twist happens when there comes to be a wonderful parallel to the plot in the first half of the movie. Crystal begins to want to kill the mother, against his better judgment, but he too is too skittish and relies on luck when he almost throws her off the train. Meanwhile, DeVito changes his mind and tries to stop him. In other words, we laugh because we see the supposedly morally superior Crystal stoop to DeVito's level while DeVito rises to Crystal's level.

Ultimately, of course, all is resolved to everyone's satisfaction. But what I really hate about the movie is that feeling I get that I want my two hours back. This is where I ask, what was the point of the story? Why should I care about this comedy? I don't mean to say that every movie should have some deep undercurrent that carries one to a high moral ground. This could never be true for someone who enjoys the comedies of Jim Carrey or even Curb Your Enthusiasm. Let me think for a second about what distinguishes this silly movie from those other silly movies and shows.

Well, let's take Ace Ventura, Pet Detective as a for instance. The real appeal there is Jim Carrey, of course. His character is so outlandish that he's funny. "Re-he-he-he-he-he-ly???" he says, eating sunflower seeds the way a parrot would, or he spins the car around in the parking lot, winding up miraculously parked in a space, saying, "Llllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiike a glove!" He's a caricature of a hokey detective and his overacting silliness is pleasing. Then at the end of the film there is the parody of The Crying Game (see? there's intertextuality even in the basest of postmodern films!). So when I ask myself why I watched it, I think that it was clever in a few ways that I don't see in Throw Momma...

And then there's the absurd comedy of Curb Your Enthusiasm. This kind of comedy is character-based as well. I watch because I want to see what kind of a mess Larry David will make this time. I want to see him say the things one shouldn't say in polite company, the kinds of things I think, but would be too afraid to say. Then, I laugh at the consequences of his lack of self-control from the comfortable standpoint of a person who can't step out of bounds the way David does. Now THAT's a reason to see a comedy.

So Throw Momma... certainly has characters, but they're over the top and stupid, and I don't care about them. It's heavy on plot, but light on artfulness. I say no to including it in the class I'll be teaching.

Network

"I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

I don't remember why we walked out of Network when it was in the theater, or even what I was doing watching it. I would have been twelve years old when Network was released in 1976. There's a good chance I just didn't understand this satire of the television industry. What's interesting to me about it now, having seen it several times as an adult, is that I don't find it especially funny. Satire is an interesting arm of comedy, I think, because it really isn't very funny. The part that is supposed to be humorous is really only sort of intellectually recognized. "Oh, I see that exaggerated tendency," an audience member might say to himself. Or, "If they don't class up the news, it really end up this way." But there's nothing in Network or in other types of biting satire that bring up a real belly laugh. It's cerebral to the point that it's almost
extra-cerebral.

So Network is about a newsman who grows so disillusioned with the way the news becomes sensationalized that he dares to tell the truth about how he feels. He's the one that says the famous line from the film (above). At first the network fires him in embarrassment, but then they realize that his apparent mental illness is a ratings-grabber. They rehire him as a sort of mad prophet with a message. The viewing public buys his message and the network recognizes its marketability. The result is a chaotic spectacle of this man's decline. The man's only protector, Max Schumacher, the boss who fired him and who was later fired for not bringing him back, is marginalized and used by the new leadership, network executive, Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway). Diana plays a wonderful satire of the typical Type A executive...down to her sexual proclivity. She tells Max that she climaxes early and falls asleep quickly afterwards, an easy parody of the typical male lover.

The basic message of the film is that television networks will do absolutely anything for ratings. To the 2004 audience, this is not news. A few years ago, it might have seemed prescient, but at this point such knowledge has become a cliché. So, it isn't just that it isn't particularly funny, but it is also that I don't see any real insight in this movie. Those are two good reasons why I don't want to include it in my dark comedy film course. It doesn't have as many layers as the others, not enough to discuss in terms of comedy.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

We know this is a film of the modern era from the first moment because of its disclaimer in a crawl that slides up the screen before we see anything else:

It is the stated position of the United States Air Force that their safeguards would prevent the occurrence of such events as are depicted in this film. Furthermore, it should be noted that none of the characters portrayed in this film are meant to represent any real persons living or dead.

In the present day, I would take such a warning as a parody of the litigious age we live in, but in 1964 when the film was made, it was no joke. The Bay of Pigs crisis had just passed; in fact, the delay of the film itself was delayed by Kennedy's assassination. The Air Force felt like it NEEDED a disclaimer because a nuclear accident did not seem far-fetched enough to risk. That alone should be proof enough for the development of dark comedy.

The basic storyline goes like this: the airmen who patrol the American skies regularly (as they do today, post-terrorist attack) are without warning given an order to attack the Russians. The colonel of the base is shown shutting it down according to the instructions given for an emergency attack by the Russian enemy. These instructions require the base to be sealed with no outside communication possible and for the soldiers to shoot at anyone--enemy or apparently friendly--who approaches the base. The only person who holds the secret code for communicating with (and potentially stopping) the airmen with the neutron bombs is the colonel, and he seems to have gone completely crazy and ordered the attack for no reason other than to provoke a war. The only person who is able to determine the colonel's state of mind is Mandrake, a British officer (played by Peter Sellers). Unfortunately, Mandrake can neither trick the secret code out of Colonel Ripper nor subdue him. So it becomes a comic drama of the mad American hell-bent on destroying the world. This film is eerily clairvoyant, and while the technology is evidently out of date, the senseless bureaucracy and decision-making based on idiocy is extremely timely.

The film then flips among frantic scenes of the U.S. President (also played by Sellers) and his advisory council in the basement of the Pentagon frantically negotiating with a drunken Russian prime minister, trying not to start the war; as well as the General and his girlfriend (the only woman in the film, who is blissfully unaware of the danger); and Mandrake and the colonel locked away on the base. It's a nail-biter as we watch the moments tick away. If they do not believe the Americans are attacking only by accident, then the Russians will use the Doomsday Machine, which will blow everyone up.

The advisory council asks for the input of weapons expert, Dr. Strangelove (also played by Sellers), who is a thinly disguised Nazi who enjoys the torture and killing people, who keeps slipping up and referring to the president as "Mein Fuhrer!" With the aid of his poor advise, as well as the bad advice of Dr. Kong and the general incompetence of the president and others, the result is a surprise: A mushroom cloud at the end, with an unlikely soundtrack of "We'll Meet Again Someday..." in the background, an "incongruous juxtaposition," according to one reviewer.

The humor here is on a broader scale than it was on Catch 22, even though the subject is the same. The humor, to my mind, is larger in Dr. Strangelove, because it requires us to look at the whole picture of war as foolish, as an overgrowth of the potential in testosterone. Kubrick communicates this idea of folly from the beginning, where the sights of missiles we get are so obviously phallic, and by the names of the characters, who so clearly refer to farcical things (like Colonel Jack D. Ripper, named after the infamous...or of Buck Turgidson, referring to the stiffness of a certain manly organ...or of Merkin Muffly, the shapely young woman whose both first and last names refer to the female anatomy). The names are sexualized in a silly way to seem to imply that the things surrounding war seem to be part of a testosterone party and not part of any serious thought or consideration--the very thing we all fear.

This is an unsettling message. On the International Movies Database, a few people posted angrily that this movie was anti-American and that the director should have gone ahead and burned some flags while he was at it. Then, just like now, calling into question the integrity of the government called into question one's loyalty to the country.

We see other elements of humor as well: the silly incongruity of Merkin, the general's girlfriend, calling him in the war room to see when he can come and crawl back in bed with her is funny because we know such a thing shouldn't or couldn't happen. The same goes for the entire existence of Dr. Strangelove. It's so wrong, it's funny. Ultimately, I don't find this movie as entertaining as Catch 22, although I am finding it hard to articulate why. For one, Catch 22 has a protagonist we can relate to, one we are meant to relate to. We see the pain he is caused by having to drop bombs on people and we want it to stop. On the other hand, with Dr. Strangelove, I don't feel the same sympathy for any character, except maybe Mandrake, who is the only one who seems to realize the whole war thing is nonsense, but even he is not a sympathetic enough character to really care about. In addition, while in Catch 22 we see real suffering and some attempt to show things in a realistic light, Strangelove has characters that are over-the-top types, the kinds one finds in a movie that is set on making a point.

There's nothing wrong with making a point, mind you. Dr. Strangelove is probably worth seeing just to see Sellers in his three comic roles (and to try to imagine him playing General Kong as well, who he would have played as well, had he been able to master the Texan accent). It's the kind of movie that makes one wonder how much has really changed in the last 40 years.

Catch-22

I can't imagine writing a line that so infiltrates the nation's consciousness that everyone knows what it means, even if they never read or saw the referent.

I'm talking about when Yossarian the bombardier wants the doctor to excuse him from flying more World War II missions. His defense? They're awful. They kill people. He's terrified. And besides, everyone agrees that he's crazy. The doctor won't do it, though. He can't, because according to Army regulations, anyone who would ask not to fly more missions by definition couldn't be crazy. It's a Catch-22.

“That's some catch," says Yossarian. "It's the best there is," agrees the doctor.

This movie, based on Joseph Heller's 1961 novel, uses the humorous techniques of irony and reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate the foolishness of war. One early scene is a perfect example. Minderbinder is pitching his idea of the trading syndicate, M & M Enterprises, to Colonel Cathcart, explaining how he will trade surplus items on hand with other military units for profit. So rapt are the two in conversation that as they drive away from the airbase down the runway, they completely ignore a plane that flies right past them and crashes and burns on landing. It's ironic because of course we expect these two human beings to react to this certain death with grief and concern; instead they react with the opposite, utter disregard. I found myself -- in this scene and many others -- gasping with disbelief that the characters could act the way they did.

The larger purpose of the humor, though, most certainly involves what Gerald Mast talks about in his discussion of film theory: reductio ad absurdum, in which a social question is magnified and brought to the absurd both for humorous results and of course to raise the larger social question. Here the question is disregard for human life in war. Heller and Mike Nichols, the director, point out this futility of human life by using repetition. The whole M & M Enterprises subplot, I believe, exists to demonstrate just how little human life matters in the face of the machine of war and profit. Several times we hear Minderbinder say, "What's good for M & M Enterprises will be good for the country." Minderbinder creates his business by trading silk, silk that he harvests by stealing the parachutes from all the flyers, who don't find out until they're on a bombing mission that the parachutes are gone and replaced with a single share of M & M Enterprises stock. A little later, when we see Yossarian trying to comfort Snowdon after the airplane has been shot at, Yossarian tries to administer a dose of morphine from the first aid kit only to discover it, too, is gone, replaced by a share of stock. These scenes are so absurd, they're both funny and disturbing.

Of course Heller meant them to be disturbing. What disturbed me still more was trying to predict student reactions to the film when I teach a class. Will they be as disturbed as I was? I fear that they will not. The genesis of dark or black comedy, set sometime in the 1960s, coincided with the horror of the realization that we all could, at any moment, blow ourselves up thousands of times over with nuclear bombs. In my childhood, this scenario was presented as a likelihood. Most theorists I've read, particularly Wes Gehring, assign a cause-effect relationship between the supposed likelihood of a nuclear holocaust and the genesis of dark humor. This kind of humor had to come about because of the mind's perception of a sort of Catch-22. We can't go on living in the face of an almost certain death, but we do. What other choice do we have but to develop a very sick sense of humor?

To many of my students, this stuff is old news, though. The threat of nuclear holocaust has, in theory, passed. I am not sure I believe that, but at least grade school kids aren't prepared for the inevitable death and, at least as I understand it, high school students don't any longer discuss being within the bull's eye that will turn to dust around the Nation's Capital. Things are maybe even more absurd in the face of this crazy terrorism and suicide bombing and the like. Somehow, though, perhaps with the advent of twenty-four hour news/entertainment television, the seriousness of the situation has lost its frightening edge and instead it's taken on a kind of circus atmosphere, replacing what was once horror with a feeling of strange entertainment. The result is that I don't think anyone is horrified anymore, even though the threat exists. Maybe it's impossible to sustain horror for very long at anything, even if the horror persists. I remember the people I knew in Georgia who lived downwind from a paper plant. If you know anything about paper plants, you know that they emit the most noxious smell, sort of like sewage. At the height of summer, it's absolutely the worst. The folks downwind from the plant, though, just got sort of used to it and forgot about it, even in August. One's smell preceptors, it seems, become overloaded and blocked eventually.

So anyway, I fear that my students' horror preceptors are overloaded and blocked and the significance of Catch-22 will sail right past them.

The Goldrush

Now it may seem like I’m jumping around here, moving from L.A. to a silent film by Charlie Chaplin. That is the very nature of my program at this moment, however fortunate or unfortunate.

For those of you just tuning in, I've just passed the one-year mark and have begun my third semester. I'm taking twelve credits, among which are two courses in preparing for doctoral dissertation research, another in writing a course in dark comedy film for my internship, as well as preparing for a seminar on Dante (I have two peer days to deal with, but I'll worry about those later). So, as this semester starts out, I'm trying to dip my toes in each pool, so to speak, to get the feel of the water. Today it is the internship pool, and the water is fine.

I watched Charlie Chaplin's 1925 silent film this weekend. It's a classic that I know I had to have seen at one time or another because parts of it seemed familiar. Maybe it was in the History of Film undergraduate course I took. The odd thing about those movies that become cultural icons is that one has
heard and read so much about them that it is impossible to know whether or not one's familiarity is genuine. Do I remember the scene where he shovels
snow, or did I just read in a few places about the fact that it was funny?

I know that I must have seen parts of Chaplin films as a kid because, the depressed little soul that I was never much saw the humor in him. I gathered early on that he never gets the girl, or he always gets sort of less of her than he wants. In The Goldrush, he falls in love with Georgia, a dancehall girl who seems not to take him seriously. He invites her and her girlfriends over to his house (in one of the numerous subplots) and falls for her; later he invites all of them for dinner on New Year's Eve, an invitation they accept but with obviously no intention of coming. Meanwhile, the little tramp works very hard to earn the money to buy a nice dinner and presents for each woman. Of course they don't show up, and there's this lovely dream sequence where he falls asleep at the dinner table, dreaming of how happy he will be when they get there. It's so painfully sad, the kind of thing that would have made it impossible for me to watch as a kid. As luck would have it in this one, the little tramp gets rich and does end up with Georgia, who by this time has apologized and proves her love miraculously before she learns he is a millionaire.

The little tramp is not so lucky in The Circus, a 1929 silent film I saw a few weeks ago. I TIVOed it from some late-night showing somewhere. In that one, which is far more political, he's in love with the exploitative circus-owner's daughter, but she loves the trapeze artist, so he sadly sees that the two get together happily while her father takes advantage of him. It has some slapstick moments, but it really is a melancholy film that leaves one wistful.

Anyway, back to the The Goldrush (sorry to ramble so). It's an interesting film for a number of reasons. For one thing, at the time, films were much shorter. The impression in the industry was that the general audience couldn't sit still for a long film, but at 69 minutes, I think this one was long for its time. Chaplin segmented the story, then, probably in response to fears that the attention of the audience would wane. So there's a beginning section where Chaplin scales the mountainside, followed by a bear. Those slapstick moments are followed by his time in the snowstorm in the cabin with the big bully, Black Larsen, where they get so hungry, they cook and eat Chaplin's boot, and Larsen begins to hallucinate that Chaplin is a giant chicken. It's quite funny.

Big Jim McKay, meanwhile, has been sent off to try to find food, but he is knocked unconscious and loses his memory. He gets to town, wherever that is, and all he can remember is that he discovered gold someplace out there, where ever it was that he left his cabin. Finally, he encounters the little tramp in town, and the little tramp can lead him to the cabin. The get to the cabin and sleep there overnight, while a terrible snowstorm blows so hard that it blows the house nearly off a cliff. Only the smallest of ropes that has become wedged between two boulders is keeping the house from falling off the cliff. There's a hilarious slapstick scene after the two wake up, where they walk to opposite ends of the house, Big Jim and the Little Tramp, doing a balancing act, while the house teeters in the balance. It's enough to make this jaded humor reviewer gufffaw out loud. Anyway, indeed the two find and share their fortune here, which is how they become millionaires.

By today's standards, The Goldrush is entirely too segmented and disjointed to make much sense, but it evidently made a lot of sense to the early Twentieth-Century audience. Saying this reminds me of what has often been said about the original film audiences who ran away at the sight of a locomotive coming towards them on screen; humor could be and was unsophisticated at the time. They didn't have to have the intricacy in the jokes or even the sight gags that they do in even today's most unsophisticated comedies. The audience was just so much less experienced, so much less jaded. If setting is a factor of place and time, then maybe a consideration of regionalism should add the consideration of the era as well as a sort of unavoidable, package element of the setting. The Philadelphia of the 1950s was not the same place as the Philadelphia of the 1980s.

No wonder they call it La-la land!

I can’t believe anyone wants to leave Hollywood EVER. Every day is more exquisitely beautiful than the last; the ocean is an impossibly aquamarine color and the air smells like hyacinths everywhere. We spent last week in Hollywood, California, a series of perfect days, of crazy cultural differences and kooky sights. On the first day, for example, we went walking on Melrose Avenue, off to the left from La Cienega (I never did learn where the accent was – it seemed to me like it should be over that final e, but the natives seemed to accent the first e for some reason). On this street are designer stores like Dolce & Gabbana and Fred Segal and others, but then further down, it becomes rougher, more goth…more piercings. Down there the crowds were nuts, like furious currents of people who moved at such a pace that it felt like we might be trampled if we stopped even for a second to eye a pair of boots or a t-shirt. It was more crowded even than NYC or certain parts of DC, strange, really. I’m not sure how one could possibly stop and look in such a crowd. The point seemed to be just to move, just to keep our place in the crowd, rather than really to shop or take in any sights. I wondered how the stores stay in business. Anyway, it was in this throng that we saw this guy, a white guy probably a little younger than me, who was holding a sign in magic marker written on cardboard, “KICK ME IN THE ASS $1.” I blame the crowd, then, for our not being able to stop and pay him a buck at least to take his picture. I didn’t really want to kick him, though I would have liked to see someone else do it. Margie observed that he would have to call it quits by about eight or so every night, since by the time people stopped drinking, things would almost certainly get out of hand. I was pretty sure he was a performance artist who was testing those limits. But who knows?

There’s so much to say about the place, about the way it looks. They say that when the Santa Ana winds are blowing, people act strange. I was always intrigued by that, that a certain wind might change one’s mind, an ill wind would blow no good. Indeed the winds did blow when we were there. I would think that the landscape alone might create a certain mindset, that great stretch of flat faced with the wall of mountains. Just the Hollywood hills, harrowing hills really, full of hairpin turns, roads with fatal turns. Everything about it is exclusive, temporary. Those houses built against gravity on the hills reminded me of the news stories one always hears of late spring in California when whole houses wash down cliffs. I have always thought those home owners foolish—why build a house on shifting sands, right? But then the sight of those hills made me think if I had a few million to spare, I would simply have to have one of those tile-roofed plaster villas with the manicured lawns and the exotic trees and the tennis court that juts out over a cliff, a horrific precipice looming over another exquisite paradise of a house below it. The very fact that it could wash away tomorrow makes it all the more appealing, really, because it’s so disposable, so wasteful. And the very road up there tempts fate. It is the kind of road that poor people can’t afford to live on. There would be too many late night deaths. This is the kind of road that no one drives home on tired. As I drove around on a glorious Sunday morning, I thought that the people who live here must have a driver who brings them home late after a play. Or if they drive themselves, they must not be so tired or distracted. These are not shopgirls who drive home drunk after a happy hour. That is one way the landscape can be exclusive. The very turns in the road can add up, like the sounds of a cash register at each spin of the steering wheel, where danger compounds interest in the bank account.

One funny cultural observation about L.A.: We met up with Margie’s old college friend there, who said over dinner that she thought East Coast people were just too intellectual for her, too intent on proving how smart they were. She had a degree in something called spiritual psychology but could never tell me what that was. The best example of the California intellectual aesthetic, though, was on the morning news, when the anchor commented to the woman doing the weather, “Well, this weather sure is like spring. Is it spring, yet, Debbie?” Then Debbie just stands there and says, “Uh…..” She finally said she just wasn’t sure yet. We just cracked up. Never, not even after a commercial, did they ever bother to cut in with the fact about March 20th. We kept saying that, had it been Washington, D.C., meteorologist Bob Ryan would surely have known it off the top of his head, and even more so after the next commercial he would have been back with the precise nanosecond that it would turn spring. In California, the attitude was sort of like, look man, tomorrow is going to be just as beautiful as today; why are you getting so excited? The speed and purpose of thought, I gather, are a factor of culture.

I didn’t expect to like the place so much, actually. While we were there we saw the taping of a sitcom with Andy Dick in it, Less Than Perfect—The show was forgettable, really, for the sitcom itself, but the interesting part for me was to see the rewrites of the jokes that went over badly on the audience (I might have suggested more rewrites, but they didn’t ask me). What you don’t know about sitcoms is how long they take or how many people they employ. For one, a comedian is hired to serve as the M.C., who narrates the activity onstage and keep the audience “fluffed.” Also, there’s a DJ, who plays music at top decibel when the comedian seems to be tired. Further, the taping of a thirty-minute show takes about five hours. At LEAST. According to the comedian, some perfectionistic shows (like Friends) take as much as ten hours. We got sick of it after about three hours and left. The problem was that the comedian kept saying that prizes were in store for the audience members who screamed and clapped and laughed the loudest. To my mind, it began to seem like a clapping monkey thing. I really, really wanted to hang out with Andy Dick, because I’m a big fan, but there was a big tour group of girls from Bryn Mawr, who were completely obnoxious, and also completely fantasy-land material for all the stage guys, including Andy Dick, so gigglng and screaming for this nearly 40 year-old lummox was futile.

We also saw a Steve Martin adaptation of a German play, The Underpants, which was entertaining, though sort of pre-production, and, to my mind, in need of much more adaptation. I wonder whether the mainstream audience would appreciate it more than I did; I am not often fond of the standard period piece. Somehow the jokes based on old morals just don’t send me giggling and holding my sides all over the place. This was no exception. On the other hand, the actors were very good. The cast was Dan Castallenta, who does the voice of Homer Simpson, among a good many other things. The blind guy from Curb Your Enthusiasm was there as well as Jeff Garlin’s wife from the same show. It was very funny and fun to see those actors In particular, the wife from Curb Your Enthusiasm played a completely different character, so different I didn’t even remember it was her until I saw The Apprentice later on.

Most of the rest of the trip was just driving around and exploring. I kept joking that I was a native; I could find my way around L.A. as though I had lived there before. It was positively uncanny, like I had lived in L.A. in another life and I knew just what to do. One thing is for sure, traveling across the country to L.A. is like going to another country. It is just far enough and strange enough to foreign, like another planet.

Moving Forward

As you may note from the dates, it's been a while since I've posted. So much for the commitment to journal each day. I don't like to devote a lot of time to bitching and whining, but if I want to write about what it's like to be a fulltime graduate student and a fulltime teacher, it's probably not such a bad thing to spend a couple of minutes here talking about how hard that is. I've been in my program since March 2003, not even a year yet, and I have yet to be certified, which is a Union Institute sort of half-way milestone. Well, maybe not even half-way, but it will mean that my dissertation proposal is accepted and I can proceed with specific papers and classes and research. By no means am I off schedule. In fact, I am more on schedule than some of my peers. The deadline is coming up, though.

No laundry list of obstacles here, but I do want to philosophize a little about the larger meaning of getting a Ph.D. When someone has a doctorate, people consider him or her to be smart, an expert in a narrow topic (and sometimes, by mistake, in lots of things). I don't think earning a Ph.D. is as much a measure of one's expertise in that tiny, narrow corner of knowledge as it is a measure of tenacity, of staying with something that is impossibly difficult, that just should not be able to be done. As I write this, I think that maybe I don't respect the lucky people who do their doctoral work on a straight shot, right out of undergrad, with no financial worries. Those people don't have as many concerns as I do, I guess. I am talking about the majority of people who get the doctorate, who have to work at the same time, who have to finesse paying for it. For those of us in the struggling camp, this is all about tenacity.

I have the sense that my life lesson here is that no matter how stress-free I try to make my life, how hard I work to make it all fit in, obstacles will arise....CONSTANTLY. If it isn't a sinus infection, it's a work crisis. If it isn't a work crisis, it's an existential one. My mom had probably the best advice. She said, "Look, get used to it: getting a Ph.D. is hard. If it wasn't, every idiot would have one." That's true. If it were any easier, it wouldn't have its appeal, right? So I'm not bitching, but I am saying to you that this February, as my first year ends, I am lettering in strife, earning my stripes in the form of wrinkles, bitten nails, gnashed teeth, and gray hairs (lovingly covered by Loreal in extra-light ash blonde). And while I know it doesn't offer much in the way of money, power, or glory, I'm moving forward, if only to prove something to myself.

Arthur Asa Berger's Basic Techniques of Humor

I'm finishing up on that semiotics peer day. Having a hard time letting it go, actually. Learners keep sending in their essays, and I can't seem to stop reading Arthur Asa Berger. He illustrates his own book with these delightful little comic drawings, like the ones that pun on the word "con." You have to see them to understand. But today I came to the part I that made my hair stand on end. I said, "Holy Shit! This could be, like, the total framework for my program." Let me explain.

I'm talking about Berger's book Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics (2nd Edition), where mentions "Signs that Lie." He gets on the topic of parody as a "technique of humor (as contrasted to a form of humor, such as the joke or riddle)" (102). Okay, so that might only be exciting to me. But on the next page of the book is the table I reproduced above, where he classifies these various techniques of humor. I read these columns vertically. The first column on language struck me, maybe not 100%, but in great share, as New York humor. Then, the second column, Logic, struck me as the more subtle Midwest humor. I saw elements of both the South and Hollywood in both Identity and Action. But I wondered if there was some heuristic of classification possible here, some dissertation work. I have to think more about this, but it seems like a big, important idea.

Picture Freud's drawing of the iceberg, the one he used to connote the topography of consciousness. Most of the berg is underwater, but, say, a third sticks out. This is where I am with semiotics, treading water, but mostly submerged. Luckily, I am a strong swimmer. I like this semiotics, even though it is intimidating. I guess I find the terminology the most difficult, the most weighty. I was drowning among the signs and symbols and images and icons...it's so confusing.

I find myself afloat, though, when I consider that signs and images and symbols are all around us. We use and interpret them all the time, less than consciously most often. For the peer day in semiotics, one of the books I am reading is Arthur Asa Berger's Signs in Contemporary Culture: An Introduction to Semiotics, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about the topic. It's told in incredibly accessible language with fun examples and funny line-drawings, and it's written by someone who is respected in the field. I gather that this isn't dumbed-down. It's just told smartly and simply.

But let's get back to the water. It's sleeting today in Arlington, Virginia. A wedge of warm air in the atmosphere above us is causing rain to fall onto cold, cold earth. It forms white sheaths over the finer branches of trees, like they are wearing these impossible white glassy sweaters. This ice is falling atop yesterday's snow...it's been a merciful four-day weekend of semiotics immersion, a gift to this graduate student. I'm using Berger's book to try to understand the movie Monster's Ball, which is part of the topic of our peer day. Another source is Barthes's book on Semiotics, which is less easy to understand. Barthes isn't as bad to read as the French feminists, but I have to admit that after a few pages I find my chin hitting my chest, which is like a personal drowse alarm going off...

Anyway, this winter-y, wet exterior is perfect for navigating this iceberg of semiotics. My big problem in decoding Monster's Ball was not finding semiotic elements but just labeling the ones I did find. Herbert, the peer day convener, chose a good film in that it is so rife with signs, symbols, whatever, that one would have to be asleep to miss them. The issue for me, though, was deciding what they were. I'm starting to realize that in doing literary analysis, I have already been doing semiotic analysis, by another name. Paradigmatic analysis, for example, comes very naturally to me. According to my understanding at least, paradigmatic analysis is looking at oppositions within the story to try to derive meaning. The oppositions stood out to me first.

I saw that two sons were beaten. Two sons died. Two people were incarcerated, albeit differently (Lawrence was jailed, and Buck was put in a nursing home against his will). These were significant. The element that each of these oppositions had in common was some idea of racism. While both Hank and Leticia beat their sons, Hank beat his son because he interfered with an execution. But Leticia beat her son because she wanted to protect him from racism. Hank's son shot himself because Hank said he didn't love him. Leticia's son died because he was hit by a car and no investigation would be done because he was Black. Lawrence was executed, and we don't know why; Buck is put in a nursing home because he makes a racist comment to Leticia. So the paradigmatic analysis of these oppositions yields a result: race is a critical issue here. I won't belabor this or reprint my paper here, other than to say I was excited about how that worked.

The rest of the analysis wasn't so easy. By the time the movie ended, I had the idea that maybe the filmmaker wanted us to see Buck as the emblematic racist, the epitome of racism, but I wasn't sure which term to apply. It seemed to me that metonymy might be right, but when I reread the definition, I wasn't sure. I decided to call him the iconic racist. Then Leticia would be the iconic African American and Hank as the iconic racist who must decide to atone). The cool thing about this peer day has been the online discussion, where we could post these ideas and try out the terminology. Last night, I got to test the waters a little bit. I learned that metonymy was the right term. So this morning I finished my paper and sent it in.

There was more online discussion than that, where people were throwing around the ideas of syntagmatic analysis (not to mention some pretty important ideas which prove me wrong on the whole idea I have about Hank as the rescuer of Leticia)--which I understand as the analysis of the narrative structure--and the analysis of the index (signs with a causal relationship). Another whole question exists for tonight and tomorrow about the ethics of the semiotics of film. I am not sure I can stay afloat for that one. Sink or swim, as they say.

Students, Semiotics, and The Spiral of Learning

Today I want to comment on the grand scheme of what I am learning. I should say by way of explanation that this weekend my focus is a peer day on the semiotic analysis of film. For those of you who don't know what a peer day is, click here to go to the Union Institute's website and find out. It came along at just the right moment. I've been reading about criticism, and I've read my share about formalism, structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism. What I know now is just enough to be dangerous.

These are terms I have been exposed to before and I have a surface-level memory of the terms, the kind of memory one would have after studying for a terminology quiz. And now, hopefully, my understanding deepens. The problem is that now I'm having to operationalize my understanding of the terms. In other words, in order to write a paper, I have to start really applying the terms. Here is where the paralysis sets in: With my new-found appreciation for the complexity of criticism in general and semiotics specifically, I know just enough to know that I am probably not applying what I know precisely enough. I feel self-conscious and hyper-aware of the risk one takes by putting one's learning into writing. I'm starting to have new and deeper sympathy for my students. We ask students to do this all the time.

This self-consciousness,I think, is particularly evident in college students at all levels, and it's one of the key factors in writer's block. College students are for the first time dealing with incredibly abstract concepts. At the same time, they are learning that the complexity is beyond them. Then, we ask them to write papers and apply these concepts. It's the only way to help someone learn to do so. I just want to acknowledge that difficulty, since I'm teetering at the edge of that paralysis.

I can give a very basic example. In working on my Learning Agreement, I have had to define my methodology for my disseration before I really understand what a methodology is (other than at a very surface level). So, I submitted an early draft to John T., my core advisor, a few days ago, and now as I drive down the road and wonder about his response, I cringe every few miles at how I must have revealed my substantial ignorance by wielding these terms indiscriminately and incorrectly. When I talked about using the bricolage of structuralism, did I fool anybody, or just sound like a fool? It's the same feeling you get when you remember something stupid you said to someone over and over again, cringing each time.

No wonder my students panic. I'm not sure what the cure is for this, other than repeated exposure to the pain. Dewey's idea of the spiral of learning applies here. I remember in my first turn through graduate school reading Walker Percy's writings about semiotics with almost no comprehension. The ideas were so dense, they were impermeable. I didn't come back to those ideas until recently, and even though more than ten years had passed, I had sort of a foundation for understanding, and I'm a tiny bit better.

So today I'm working on semiotics again for that peer day. The first exercise has been to look at an advertisement and determine the signifier, signified, and meaning. Then, we had to look at a scene from the film we'll be analyzing Monster's Ball, and do the same thing. Here's what I came up with:

Exercise #1

Find an advertisement for a product or service that you may be thinking of buying, or may have bought. Analyze the advertisement in terms of signifier, signified and overall sign. Chart your analysis as follows:
Overall Sign

Signifier Signified
Various Hondas People who look like their cars

Meaning: We are our cars, or our cars define our appearance

Now write a brief narrative explanation of the meaning of this advertisement:

The advertisement, “It Must Be Love,” is for Honda as a brand. We see a black screen with two same-size rectangles in the center. On the left appears the signifier, a Honda—say the SUV—and on the right appears the signified, a person who “looks like” the vehicle. Then, as the music plays, the pictures of cars and their owners cycle through, and we see the association between the profile of the car and the lateral profile of the face, or we see the ears sticking out and the open doors of the car. (The ad is available online at: http://love.honda.com/tvspot.asp?bhcp=1). The message to us is: You are your car. Your car is so important that it defines you as a person.

Exercise #2

Choose your favorite or least favorite scene from the film Monsters Ball, or from your favorite television show, or from a social situation you experience, and analyze it in terms of signifier, signified and overall sign. Write it out as follows:

1.) First, write a brief narrative description of the scene:

At the end of the scene where Leticia and Tyrell go to visit Lawrence in jail for the last time, Lawrence apologizes to Leticia at the end. “I’m sorry for all the pain I caused you,” he says, and then he is led away towards us with a guard on either arm. Another guard tries to help Leticia out at the rear of the screen. Crying, she says, “I know my way out.” We are left with the image of the empty room, and in the right-hand rear corner are two plants close together, both alive, but with straggly green leaves. A little closer to us on the right is a single plant, mostly dead, in a black pot. That image stays on the screen for a few seconds before the transition to the next scene.

2.) Second, chart the scene’s signifier, signified and overall sign as follows:

Overall Sign

Signifier Signified
Three plants Leticia, Tyrell, and Lawrence

Meaning: Leticia and Tyrell will persist

3.) Third, now write a brief sentence that summarizes the meaning of this scene:

The filmmaker shows us with this sign that Leticia and Tyrell, though like the two straggly plants they may not seem hardy, will live on and have each other, while Lawrence will die—is in effect already dead—alone.

I'm getting ready to send it in, but I'm antsy, wondering if I really got the picture with the signified and the signifier, especially in exercise #2. Did I really choose a sign, or is it an symbol? I decided it probably isn't a symbol, because I don't need any cultural frame of reference or previous understanding to understand the meaning. But I'm not sure whether I'm blurring the terminology or not. This is the plight of the student.

It's just before eight in the morning and I'm trying to get a little schoolwork done before I go to work-school. I just finished a quick scan/read of the Atlas of the New West. I was hoping it would give me some ideas about the Hollywood humor section of my dissertation (at Union , those are called PDEs). William Riebsame, who edited the book, chose to define the new west as the western half of the country, excluding the West Coast. So, it ended up not being that much help. In fact, as happens several times a day now, it made me question the validity, worth, value, etc. of my ideas. But even Riebsame admits that the definition of the west has shifted around over time. He says that at one point it was all the land beyond the Alleghenies. It shifted from there to everything west of the Mississippi . That was my understanding, sort of. But now he defines the interior west as "the old-style frontier" which stretches "from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to the crests of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges" (46).

If I were to choose this Interior West region, it would be entirely different humor and literature--but it would follow the rural theme that I chose in the South and the Midwest . I don't see any real definitive humor here, at least any that is distinguishable from just bland, rural humor. So it wouldn't make sense for me to have a chapter here.

Anyway, the only other thing that I really wanted to record from this book was a Candace Bushnell quote comparing regions (from a later chapter). She said: "People blame New York when their relationships don't work out. They think if they just lived someplace else it would be better. But they don't want to go to Iowa . They want to go to Colorado ...It's so beautiful It's like Shangri-La. It's a place to go where people never age" (155). So that book can go back to the library now.

I’m in a sea of books…one on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor looks good…and Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place. The more I read, the more I know I need to read.

It makes me think of someone Diane R. knew in her doctoral program, a woman who when Diane started had already been in the program for ten years. She could never finish because she kept finding ONE MORE THING for her lit review. Aggggggggghhhhhhhhh….

This is my first post. I want to record my thoughts as I work on my doctoral program at the Union Institute, where I am studying Humor, so I should probably tell a joke. This one is my favorite:

These two rednecks are sitting on the porch, looking out in the yard where they see a dog licking himself.

"I wish I could do that," said the one.

"I reckon you could, if you pet 'im first."

That joke never ceases to crack me up.