Nanette, or the Fulfillment of Comedy, or What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been
Part One: My History with Comedy
I never really got into listening to stand-up comedy until around 2007, when a friend from youth group, Kyle, let me listen to his iPod on the way down to Panama City Beach, where our summer camp retreat was. I had heard about this comedian Mitch Hedberg mostly from my own curiosity regarding my favorite soft drink at the time, Mr. Pibb, and what its history was. I mean, I knew it was a Dr Pepper knockoff, but what spurred the Coca-Cola Company to create such a niche competitor? Why make a 23-flavor soda with more cherry and cinnamon than usual? Why was it still a competitor despite being a joke whenever it was mentioned? And by the way, who in the hell was this Mitch Hedberg and is there anything else to that Mr. Pibb college degree joke?
Kyle had an admirable selection of music on his iPod - music that would later shape my own tastes regarding post-hardcore, Christian rock, and classic rock; stuff that I recognized from another person's iPod, albeit they were from life-insurance camp (i.e. Showbread, Five Iron Frenzy, Thousand Foot Krutch) - but what really piqued my interest was the fact that he had Mitch Hedberg on his iPod. Both albums that he released when he was alive - Strategic Grill Locations and Mitch All Together. I decided to take a gander, specially at the track containing the joke regarding Mr. Pibb's academic credentials.
I didn't expect Mitch All Together to be an increasingly absurd selection of one-liners and surreal set-ups. To me, the oddball stuff that he was saying - for example, ducks forcing their way into Subway in order to get free sandwiches all because Mitch was inspired to buy some bread at Subway to feed to a duck, only to find out that Subway would give him the bare-minimum sandwich for free due to its intended usage; or opening up a midday bed-and-breakfast equivalent dubbed a chair-and-lunch/dinner due to the exclusionary directness of "bed-and-breakfast"; or comparing smoking clove cigarettes with Peter Frampton with smoking marijuana with a similar-looking middle-aged hippie - was more than enough for me to request to Kyle that he burn me a copy of the album, albeit with a couple of songs I really attached to during the bus rides to and fro ("Rawkfist" by Thousand Foot Krutch and "Rockin' the Suburbs" by Ben Folds). This was comedy that spoke to me - comedy that best captured my oddball thought process. It helped me get over the pain of my rocky relationship with one of my friends cutting off all ties with me.
Around that time, I also inherited my aunt's record collection - at least the records I wanted from it. There are some I wish I had kept in hindsight, but you can't take back the past, as they say. You can only learn from your mistakes. Regardless, I found this record by Cheech and Chong - who I had remembered from my childhood observations of the record collection (my cousin kept it in his room as decoration) due to the presence of the Up in Smoke soundtrack. Of course, I wasn't allowed to watch Up in Smoke - I wasn't allowed to engage in the comedy of Cheech and Chong, despite hearing their voices in animated movies and TV shows all my life. With this Big Bang to my record collection, I obtained a copy of Los Cochinos, a highly underrated sketch comedy album with the 13-minute skit "Pedro and Man at the Drive-Inn." This skit introduced me to their signature characters: Pedro de Pacas (Cheech Marin) and Anthony "Man" Stoner (Tommy Chong) and their pot-soaked misadventures.
In this skit, Pedro and Man go to the drive-in theater and attempt to sneak in a couple of their friends through the trunk so they can save some money at the ticket stand. When they try to let their friends out, Man ends up breaking the key to the trunk and walks off to the snack bar in order to get something to pry the trunk open. After an entire movie - including a trailer for Buggery on the High Seas, i.e. an extended gay joke - Man comes back with a bunch of concessions but no crowbar. Flustered, Pedro checks the trunk - nobody seems to be moving inside. He chalks their suspicious silence to them giving him and Man the "silent treatment" before vowing to spend the rest of the night trying to find that damn crowbar (only to get sidetracked by visiting all their friends and dropping Man off at his mom's place).
The joke is that the two guys in the trunk are more than likely either passed out due to lack of oxygen or dead from asphyxiation. Either way, Pedro and Man's stupidity and frugality lead these two guys to possibly die.
Come on! It's dark comedy! In real life, marijuana doesn't make you that absent-minded! We all know that!
The funny thing is that my history with comedy actually predates Mitch Hedberg and Cheech & Chong by roughly a year. I remember finding things on TV and finding them funny, but to me, I'd always watch The Simpsons because I liked escaping into Springfield for what seemed like forever every school night. I liked how wacky and dense the entire town was - and I thought the character designs were amusing. Some gags did make me laugh - for example, in one of my favorite so-called "zombie Simpsons" episodes "Last Tap Dance in Springfield," there's this amazing slapstick gag where Professor Frink manipulates a weazel ball to be a lethal weapon, only for it to go loose during the aftermath of Lisa's augmented tap dancing shoes going haywire and Homer proceeding to pick it up. However, we don't see Homer actually hold the weazel ball. We see a credits end title with the sounds of Homer being electrocuted by the weazel ball. Thinking about that joke still makes me laugh to this day.
But that wasn't what I was gonna talk about though. I was going to talk about Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I had heard about it for the first time by the friend I mentioned earlier - not Kyle; the one I had that really bad falling out with. Her name was Rachel [name changed] and for the longest time, I proudly called her my girlfriend like her existence was a badge of honor to me. Even though at most we were just friends - and I'd constantly talk to her on the phone because we weren't in the same school, much less the same county, together after my 6th grade. One of these phone conversations, she starts mentioning this movie she just watched - Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Or rather, the scene where King Arthur, Brother Maynard, and Sirs Belvedere, Lancelot, Galahad, and Robin discover an inscription by Joseph of Arimathea written on a cave wall, stating that the resting place for the Holy Grail itself was the Castle Aarrgh. The implication was that Joseph was attacked by something when his assistant was dictating the inscription - the Cave Beast of [fill-in-the-blank]. Of course Rachel loved this scene - she loved the entire film and recommended that I see it.
However, I didn't get around to seeing it until, spurred out by several of my friends referencing scenes from the movie, they brought the DVD along with them on this class trip we made to Washington, D.C., Gettysburg, and Charlottesville. A trip I'd like to revisit one day, but the memories are alright, if a bit on the rose-colored side. After our history teacher Mr. Carver (R.I.P.) stopped the playback of Friday Night Lights, one of my friends - I don't remember who it was that brought along the Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD - recommended it since it was PG and mostly family-friendly. And so we watched it. I didn't know what in the hell was going on - I thought "oh, boy, Mr. Carver just put on one of his favorite movies" before those titles popped up. The rest, they say, is history.
But at the same time, everybody likes Monty Python. They're relatively inoffensive - nerds, both of the Suffixgate conservative-but-in-name persuasion and of the lock-stock-and-barrel variety, quote Holy Grail incessantly to the point where dungeon masters have a rule allowing them to shush anybody wanting to quote (or sneak in quotes from) the movie during the campaign so that people don't interrupt the game just to quote the entire script. Hell, it's even the entire climax to the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - when Parzival, Aech, Daito, and Sho storm the castle and Sorrento nukes everybody's avatar much to the chagrin of everybody, Parzival notices that the last step between him and Halliday's Easter egg is a trap that'll only subside unless he quotes the entirely of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I, having been a fan of the film for 12 years, cannot do that. I can quote the big scenes and some of the funnier bits - "the power inherent in the system HELP HELP I'M BEING REPRESSED" - but don't view that as a symbol of my superiority.
Annie Hall is another one of those formative comedies that shaped how I view the world. I've heard about Woody Allen for years and somehow didn't stumble upon information regarding the sex scandal, his relationship with Mia Farrow, and how exactly Soon-yi Previn was related to him. I just knew he was a funny Jewish man who made jokes. And I had noticed the film on the TCM on-demand cable channel - I vowed that I was gonna watch it, but by the time I got enough free time to do so, it was gone. Luckily, our family used to go the library so we could check out books-on-tape for long car rides during vacations - and I stumbled upon a VHS copy of Annie Hall. In 2009. I wasn't expecting not only one of the funniest films I had ever watched to that date, but something that actually spoke to me. Something that made me feel not only for Woody Allen self-insert no. 71519 Alvy Singer, but for Diane Keaton's electrifying and similarly-witty titular character as well. I too felt like the both of them - like nobody got me, like nobody understood where I was coming from. People at school would tease me about the things I liked, unless if I were reading things that people were interested in - i.e. Watchmen and V for Vendetta. And given my own mistakes regarding how I utterly destroyed my relationship with Rachel, friendship or otherwise, I felt that scene when Alvy and Annie are fighting in the parking lot of the Source. Alvy being controlling, like I had been to Rachel. Annie being fed up, like Rachel had been to me. Annie being fed up, like I had been to other people. I felt so burned by the relationship that, even though Woody went out of his way to say that Alvy and Annie reconciled and became just friends after their failed romantic pursuit, I called bullshit on his optimism.
And from time to time, especially after I screwed up my second chance at being friends with Rachel - all of which were my fault - I still felt like that. Even going back to the reasons why, I realized that I wasn't so much Annie, the person who's just not that compatible nor patient to be with somebody like Alvy, but more like Alvy himself. I was forcing my taste upon Rachel. I forced her to be what I wanted her to be. I misread her interests and saw them as an avenue to talk about how great this band I just heard was and making her listen to "R.E.S." in hopes that she, too, would reciprocate and be in a relationship with me again. Me through Woody Allen through me derailed a semi-decent friendship. And I have to suffer the consequences. No third chances with Rachel.
Annie Hall taught me the wrong lessons. Those weren't designed as such by Woody, nor by newer coverage of the sex scandal influencing how I saw his movies. But I read Alvy Singer not as an idiot to learn how NOT TO carry on an intimate relationship, much less a friendship, but as a how-to guide on how to conduct myself. He just seemed so cool, with his defense of Marshall McLuhan and Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman and all of the people I had only heard about from cinephile communities. His hatred of rock music rubbed me the wrong way, but I didn't think of it as anything more than Woody being upset that he was forced by his producers to put in the Lovin' Spoonful as the music scorers for What's Up, Tiger Lily? Again, Alvy's the butt of the joke - it's the Woody Allen tradition to make the overcompensating nerd as toxic as the materialistic Chads that came before and after. But maybe, just maybe, Woody Allen was trying to mask his own toxicity through self-depreciation. And maybe, just maybe, the comedy has to be so ambiguous that whatever point it's trying to make is watered down by how loveable Alvy Singer is. What's supposed to be a critique of Alvy's character as he engages in a relationship with Annie is shot in the foot because Alvy, by proxy of being the lead and by that nebbish Woody Allen charm, is just so goofy that you can't help but to love him.
There's a term for that disconnect from the intentions of comedy and how it connects with the audience: the satire paradox. The main example Malcolm Gladwell uses in his Revisionist History episode of the same name is that of Harry Enfield, the "Loadsamoney" guy. Intended for Loadsamoney to be the absolute worst, embodying the selfishness of capitalism and how sudden (if temporary) wealth made this absolutely terrible person even more insufferable, he connected with his intended audience as what he was meant to be read as: a critique of Thatcher-era capitalism. Partially because Enfield had to make the character so over-the-top so that he could fit the parameters of an evening sketch comedy show and because it's tradition to make a satirical character embody characteristics of hard parody, Loadsamoney became loveable in his own skewered way. Maybe even a little too much, considering that the same people Enfield meant to make uncomfortable through his satire were actually flattered. And this was at the height of his popularity.
Put yourself in Enfield's shoes: what do you do when your satire hits the mark, but simultaneously misses it? What do you do when people understand your intentionally obnoxious and greedy plasterer as a dig on Thatcher's utter embrace of profits over people but on a personal level, but the plasterers who care more about money than they do about the well-being of their fellow working men actually embrace the character? Simple: you kill off Loadsamoney during a Comic Relief fundraiser. Even with that said, people still associate Loadsamoney not with how braggart-like Thatcher's exploitation of housing and banking bubbles was, but with big loot paydays in Killing Floor 2.
Tom Lehrer realized this in the mid-'70s when he returned to academia. After making a killing from his catchy little satirical tunes, even going as far as composing music for the American version of That Was the Week That Was and having his private-press albums from the '50s be distributed widely by Reprise/Warner Bros., he realized that him singing in excruciating detail about how the atom bomb will kill EVERYBODY wasn't doing much to stop brinkmanship and the Cold War as much as the German cabarets of the 1930s didn't do much to stop the rise of the Nazis. People just knew him as the dude who sang jaunty little ditties about killing the annoying pigeons that beg you for bread crumbs and seed and how easy New Mathematics is once you actually get the hang of what they want you to do and the Periodic Table of Elements. So what do you do when satire fails to do what you want it to do - that people embrace his joking nihilism not as a call to action to make things better but as another quirk of our stupid little world? He quit satire.
And no, it wasn't because Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize for getting us into the Vietnam War.
Steve Martin realized this sometime in 1977. A young stand-up comedian in the '70s, he represented a new form of stand-up comedy in the sense that he'd deconstruct the stage mannerisms of every comedian that came before and after him, from the people at amateur hour to the rich comedians who make their money from 50-year-olds who just want to hear the greatest hits. By deliberately divorcing his bits from their intended visual context while giving us the cliche of the try-hard comedian with the bunny ears, the arrow through the head, and the Groucho Marx glasses, Martin's debut Let's Get Small acted as a deconstruction of comedy up to that point. His more memorable bits, such as the intentionally-comfortable song-turned-correction-turned-rant-turned-ego-trip-turned-joke "Excuse Me," often piled on the layers to say something not only about the comedians who'll interrupt their tight five just to rant about how the mood lighting looks wrong and ends up not only insulting the working-class stagehands who have to deal with this guy's shit but also the audience for being lower than he (since he's "the only one who knows a thing or two about show business"). The joke is not only on asshole comedians who destroy the integrity of their character and their set just to complain about some minor detail to people who just don't care, but on us, the listener. We're expecting a simple joke - maybe a funny little banjo song where Steve Martin will sing about some thing and maybe reference where there's an arrow sticking out of his head, but he interrupts his song just to give us this rant that feels all too real. He makes it feel like he's the asshole comedian - and we're witnessing this breakdown on stage. We can't call it a mental breakdown because the dude's fully aware of what he's doing - he's exerting his power onto us. Similarly, we can't call it a bit since the joke flows so organically that it feels exactly like Martin is screaming at us and the stagehands because he can do so. After all, he knows a thing or two about show business.
People have been ragging on asshole comedians for years, but at most, the jokes are about the character themselves and not about what they do to us. Like Enfield and Loadsamoney, the joke is about how boisterous the character is, which ends up endearing us to that character. Similarly, a lot of the asshole comedians began embracing their assholishness as an extension of their character - simply mocking them would not take them down a peg. A lot of legacy comedians who went into blue humor just to insult audiences are guilty of this exact same thing. But to Martin and the Rich Comedian, the joke is about what he does to us. The joke will not communicate properly if he just rags on this rich comedian for whining at the stagehands to give him a slightly different shade of yellow. But it will communicate to us DIRECTLY if he becomes the Rich Comedian organically - not gets into a costume or anything like that, he's already in the bunny ears and fake arrow, but as Martin himself segueing from one bit to another - and carries on the bit as if he were actually ranting at us.
What do you do when you realize that your satirical target embraces what you're trying to say? By doing what they do to everybody, but ultimately framing it as the joke. Now there's a three-act structure in comedy - Martin can finally communicate his bit in the way he intended. All it took was for a different way to approach comedy - one that involved making the audience uncomfortable in order to make a point. If the Rich Comedian can abuse and then gaslight you into his control, what does that say about our society if men do that on a regular basis?
In that case, why is Hannah Gadsby's Nanette the first mainstream stand-up special in close to 40 years to really exploit that avenue of uncomfortability?
The joke is that the two guys in the trunk are more than likely either passed out due to lack of oxygen or dead from asphyxiation. Either way, Pedro and Man's stupidity and frugality lead these two guys to possibly die.
Come on! It's dark comedy! In real life, marijuana doesn't make you that absent-minded! We all know that!
The funny thing is that my history with comedy actually predates Mitch Hedberg and Cheech & Chong by roughly a year. I remember finding things on TV and finding them funny, but to me, I'd always watch The Simpsons because I liked escaping into Springfield for what seemed like forever every school night. I liked how wacky and dense the entire town was - and I thought the character designs were amusing. Some gags did make me laugh - for example, in one of my favorite so-called "zombie Simpsons" episodes "Last Tap Dance in Springfield," there's this amazing slapstick gag where Professor Frink manipulates a weazel ball to be a lethal weapon, only for it to go loose during the aftermath of Lisa's augmented tap dancing shoes going haywire and Homer proceeding to pick it up. However, we don't see Homer actually hold the weazel ball. We see a credits end title with the sounds of Homer being electrocuted by the weazel ball. Thinking about that joke still makes me laugh to this day.
But that wasn't what I was gonna talk about though. I was going to talk about Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I had heard about it for the first time by the friend I mentioned earlier - not Kyle; the one I had that really bad falling out with. Her name was Rachel [name changed] and for the longest time, I proudly called her my girlfriend like her existence was a badge of honor to me. Even though at most we were just friends - and I'd constantly talk to her on the phone because we weren't in the same school, much less the same county, together after my 6th grade. One of these phone conversations, she starts mentioning this movie she just watched - Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Or rather, the scene where King Arthur, Brother Maynard, and Sirs Belvedere, Lancelot, Galahad, and Robin discover an inscription by Joseph of Arimathea written on a cave wall, stating that the resting place for the Holy Grail itself was the Castle Aarrgh. The implication was that Joseph was attacked by something when his assistant was dictating the inscription - the Cave Beast of [fill-in-the-blank]. Of course Rachel loved this scene - she loved the entire film and recommended that I see it.
However, I didn't get around to seeing it until, spurred out by several of my friends referencing scenes from the movie, they brought the DVD along with them on this class trip we made to Washington, D.C., Gettysburg, and Charlottesville. A trip I'd like to revisit one day, but the memories are alright, if a bit on the rose-colored side. After our history teacher Mr. Carver (R.I.P.) stopped the playback of Friday Night Lights, one of my friends - I don't remember who it was that brought along the Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD - recommended it since it was PG and mostly family-friendly. And so we watched it. I didn't know what in the hell was going on - I thought "oh, boy, Mr. Carver just put on one of his favorite movies" before those titles popped up. The rest, they say, is history.
But at the same time, everybody likes Monty Python. They're relatively inoffensive - nerds, both of the Suffixgate conservative-but-in-name persuasion and of the lock-stock-and-barrel variety, quote Holy Grail incessantly to the point where dungeon masters have a rule allowing them to shush anybody wanting to quote (or sneak in quotes from) the movie during the campaign so that people don't interrupt the game just to quote the entire script. Hell, it's even the entire climax to the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline - when Parzival, Aech, Daito, and Sho storm the castle and Sorrento nukes everybody's avatar much to the chagrin of everybody, Parzival notices that the last step between him and Halliday's Easter egg is a trap that'll only subside unless he quotes the entirely of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I, having been a fan of the film for 12 years, cannot do that. I can quote the big scenes and some of the funnier bits - "the power inherent in the system HELP HELP I'M BEING REPRESSED" - but don't view that as a symbol of my superiority.
Annie Hall is another one of those formative comedies that shaped how I view the world. I've heard about Woody Allen for years and somehow didn't stumble upon information regarding the sex scandal, his relationship with Mia Farrow, and how exactly Soon-yi Previn was related to him. I just knew he was a funny Jewish man who made jokes. And I had noticed the film on the TCM on-demand cable channel - I vowed that I was gonna watch it, but by the time I got enough free time to do so, it was gone. Luckily, our family used to go the library so we could check out books-on-tape for long car rides during vacations - and I stumbled upon a VHS copy of Annie Hall. In 2009. I wasn't expecting not only one of the funniest films I had ever watched to that date, but something that actually spoke to me. Something that made me feel not only for Woody Allen self-insert no. 71519 Alvy Singer, but for Diane Keaton's electrifying and similarly-witty titular character as well. I too felt like the both of them - like nobody got me, like nobody understood where I was coming from. People at school would tease me about the things I liked, unless if I were reading things that people were interested in - i.e. Watchmen and V for Vendetta. And given my own mistakes regarding how I utterly destroyed my relationship with Rachel, friendship or otherwise, I felt that scene when Alvy and Annie are fighting in the parking lot of the Source. Alvy being controlling, like I had been to Rachel. Annie being fed up, like Rachel had been to me. Annie being fed up, like I had been to other people. I felt so burned by the relationship that, even though Woody went out of his way to say that Alvy and Annie reconciled and became just friends after their failed romantic pursuit, I called bullshit on his optimism.
And from time to time, especially after I screwed up my second chance at being friends with Rachel - all of which were my fault - I still felt like that. Even going back to the reasons why, I realized that I wasn't so much Annie, the person who's just not that compatible nor patient to be with somebody like Alvy, but more like Alvy himself. I was forcing my taste upon Rachel. I forced her to be what I wanted her to be. I misread her interests and saw them as an avenue to talk about how great this band I just heard was and making her listen to "R.E.S." in hopes that she, too, would reciprocate and be in a relationship with me again. Me through Woody Allen through me derailed a semi-decent friendship. And I have to suffer the consequences. No third chances with Rachel.
Annie Hall taught me the wrong lessons. Those weren't designed as such by Woody, nor by newer coverage of the sex scandal influencing how I saw his movies. But I read Alvy Singer not as an idiot to learn how NOT TO carry on an intimate relationship, much less a friendship, but as a how-to guide on how to conduct myself. He just seemed so cool, with his defense of Marshall McLuhan and Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman and all of the people I had only heard about from cinephile communities. His hatred of rock music rubbed me the wrong way, but I didn't think of it as anything more than Woody being upset that he was forced by his producers to put in the Lovin' Spoonful as the music scorers for What's Up, Tiger Lily? Again, Alvy's the butt of the joke - it's the Woody Allen tradition to make the overcompensating nerd as toxic as the materialistic Chads that came before and after. But maybe, just maybe, Woody Allen was trying to mask his own toxicity through self-depreciation. And maybe, just maybe, the comedy has to be so ambiguous that whatever point it's trying to make is watered down by how loveable Alvy Singer is. What's supposed to be a critique of Alvy's character as he engages in a relationship with Annie is shot in the foot because Alvy, by proxy of being the lead and by that nebbish Woody Allen charm, is just so goofy that you can't help but to love him.
There's a term for that disconnect from the intentions of comedy and how it connects with the audience: the satire paradox. The main example Malcolm Gladwell uses in his Revisionist History episode of the same name is that of Harry Enfield, the "Loadsamoney" guy. Intended for Loadsamoney to be the absolute worst, embodying the selfishness of capitalism and how sudden (if temporary) wealth made this absolutely terrible person even more insufferable, he connected with his intended audience as what he was meant to be read as: a critique of Thatcher-era capitalism. Partially because Enfield had to make the character so over-the-top so that he could fit the parameters of an evening sketch comedy show and because it's tradition to make a satirical character embody characteristics of hard parody, Loadsamoney became loveable in his own skewered way. Maybe even a little too much, considering that the same people Enfield meant to make uncomfortable through his satire were actually flattered. And this was at the height of his popularity.
Put yourself in Enfield's shoes: what do you do when your satire hits the mark, but simultaneously misses it? What do you do when people understand your intentionally obnoxious and greedy plasterer as a dig on Thatcher's utter embrace of profits over people but on a personal level, but the plasterers who care more about money than they do about the well-being of their fellow working men actually embrace the character? Simple: you kill off Loadsamoney during a Comic Relief fundraiser. Even with that said, people still associate Loadsamoney not with how braggart-like Thatcher's exploitation of housing and banking bubbles was, but with big loot paydays in Killing Floor 2.
Tom Lehrer realized this in the mid-'70s when he returned to academia. After making a killing from his catchy little satirical tunes, even going as far as composing music for the American version of That Was the Week That Was and having his private-press albums from the '50s be distributed widely by Reprise/Warner Bros., he realized that him singing in excruciating detail about how the atom bomb will kill EVERYBODY wasn't doing much to stop brinkmanship and the Cold War as much as the German cabarets of the 1930s didn't do much to stop the rise of the Nazis. People just knew him as the dude who sang jaunty little ditties about killing the annoying pigeons that beg you for bread crumbs and seed and how easy New Mathematics is once you actually get the hang of what they want you to do and the Periodic Table of Elements. So what do you do when satire fails to do what you want it to do - that people embrace his joking nihilism not as a call to action to make things better but as another quirk of our stupid little world? He quit satire.
And no, it wasn't because Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize for getting us into the Vietnam War.
Steve Martin realized this sometime in 1977. A young stand-up comedian in the '70s, he represented a new form of stand-up comedy in the sense that he'd deconstruct the stage mannerisms of every comedian that came before and after him, from the people at amateur hour to the rich comedians who make their money from 50-year-olds who just want to hear the greatest hits. By deliberately divorcing his bits from their intended visual context while giving us the cliche of the try-hard comedian with the bunny ears, the arrow through the head, and the Groucho Marx glasses, Martin's debut Let's Get Small acted as a deconstruction of comedy up to that point. His more memorable bits, such as the intentionally-comfortable song-turned-correction-turned-rant-turned-ego-trip-turned-joke "Excuse Me," often piled on the layers to say something not only about the comedians who'll interrupt their tight five just to rant about how the mood lighting looks wrong and ends up not only insulting the working-class stagehands who have to deal with this guy's shit but also the audience for being lower than he (since he's "the only one who knows a thing or two about show business"). The joke is not only on asshole comedians who destroy the integrity of their character and their set just to complain about some minor detail to people who just don't care, but on us, the listener. We're expecting a simple joke - maybe a funny little banjo song where Steve Martin will sing about some thing and maybe reference where there's an arrow sticking out of his head, but he interrupts his song just to give us this rant that feels all too real. He makes it feel like he's the asshole comedian - and we're witnessing this breakdown on stage. We can't call it a mental breakdown because the dude's fully aware of what he's doing - he's exerting his power onto us. Similarly, we can't call it a bit since the joke flows so organically that it feels exactly like Martin is screaming at us and the stagehands because he can do so. After all, he knows a thing or two about show business.
People have been ragging on asshole comedians for years, but at most, the jokes are about the character themselves and not about what they do to us. Like Enfield and Loadsamoney, the joke is about how boisterous the character is, which ends up endearing us to that character. Similarly, a lot of the asshole comedians began embracing their assholishness as an extension of their character - simply mocking them would not take them down a peg. A lot of legacy comedians who went into blue humor just to insult audiences are guilty of this exact same thing. But to Martin and the Rich Comedian, the joke is about what he does to us. The joke will not communicate properly if he just rags on this rich comedian for whining at the stagehands to give him a slightly different shade of yellow. But it will communicate to us DIRECTLY if he becomes the Rich Comedian organically - not gets into a costume or anything like that, he's already in the bunny ears and fake arrow, but as Martin himself segueing from one bit to another - and carries on the bit as if he were actually ranting at us.
What do you do when you realize that your satirical target embraces what you're trying to say? By doing what they do to everybody, but ultimately framing it as the joke. Now there's a three-act structure in comedy - Martin can finally communicate his bit in the way he intended. All it took was for a different way to approach comedy - one that involved making the audience uncomfortable in order to make a point. If the Rich Comedian can abuse and then gaslight you into his control, what does that say about our society if men do that on a regular basis?
In that case, why is Hannah Gadsby's Nanette the first mainstream stand-up special in close to 40 years to really exploit that avenue of uncomfortability?
Part Two: Comedy Has to Say Something
"I'm seriously thinking about quitting comedy," Hannah repeats to herself throughout the special, eventually becoming utterly meaningless. After all, if she wants to quit comedy, why is she continuing her stand-up special? Is the point that she's continuing her special because she's slowly realizing that, through recalling her life and how she's approached her humor vs. how people expect her to approach her humor, she can use comedy as a tool for positivity?
Actually, no. The satire paradox is way too powerful for her to even see that as a possibility. Rather than come to the conclusion that her jokes made people feel better, she comes to the realization that her jokes have done nothing more than to depower people like her and empower people like that man who beat her up at the bus stop because he thought she was flirting with his girlfriend. What do you do when the jokesters focus on Monica Lewinsky sucking Bill Clinton's dick and not Bill Clinton cheating on Hillary and raping this staff member just to make himself feel like he has power over his employees? What do you do when Bill Clinton embraces the joke? What do you do when the only people willing to listen to Lewinsky's side of the story don't actually care about her story, but instead try to disenfranchise the Democratic Party because they just don't like liberals and those few leftists who feel compelled to vote Democrat despite our two-party system being right-wing?
Chances are you'd want to give up comedy. After all, Woody Allen post-sex scandal hasn't exactly explored how Alvy Singer and Isaac Davis and Miles Monroe might be read as really bad role models (as was the case for me), but doubling down on the Woody Allen in-house style. His characters have become insufferably neurotic. His promotion of the things he likes and damnation of the things he doesn't care for (namely rock music and people who are intellectual in a casual sense) has only increased. His plots have become repeats of the plots he explored from the '70s to the early '90s. His women have become copy-pastes of Annie Hall-types. He's become a total joke of an auteur - and why? Because rather than explore what has poisoned him, he's instead embraced the poison. Thy drugs are quick. This approach sure doesn't make him look good in front of Mia, Dylan and Ronan Farrow, but instead cowardly. Like rather than own up to his faults in the sex scandal, he's instead embracing his faults in hopes that people see him as good again. Eventually. It's not working. Hell, I haven't felt comfortable enough with my history with Woody Allen and the sex scandal for me to resume watching his films. And I keep hearing The Purple Rose of Cairo is really, really good.
Hannah's early comedy, from what's she's described in Nanette, is a mix of LGBT-centric observational humor and art history gags - a mix of her two favorite things: being a gender-not-normal and being an art historian. Some of her LGBT-centric jokes revolved around her being this willing trickster figure, especially with this joke about the bus stop guy. Instead of getting beat up by him and not turning him in due to how the culture in Australia circa 1994-95 made her feel like she was utterly worthless and too sick to even bring this man to justice, she instead outwits the guy by telling him that she's not a feminine-looking man flirting with his girlfriend but rather a butch woman. And he leaves confused. Bringing back in the actual conclusion to this whole thing wouldn't make for an affirmative joke, but would make for a really dark bit that could make the audience uncomfortable - but at the same time, Hannah doesn't want to paint this traumatic moment as a joke to be read as such by the audience. That would be missing the point of her assault and how she felt at the time. She'd be doing herself and every other LGBT person in comedy a disservice if she played this assault for a mere subversion of the trickster trope.
After all, she had been raped by men before, so by turning her assault into dark comedy, she'd be prompted to turn those assaults into dark comedy. It'd not only make her into a mere try-hard comedian who thinks all dark humor is just the comic subject being beaten to a pulp just to make us feel like we're witnessing the end of the world, but into way too much of a victim than she'd want you to believe. After all, the rest of her act is mostly art history gags and how some canonized artists in art history are either flagrantly misread as "they're good BECAUSE they were nutso!" or "Picasso was a total saint, he did nothing wrong" because of a shallow reading of artists thanks to a little thing known as the auteur theory, so to insert those jokes about being assaulted and raped as dark humor to make people uncomfortable would be read by the audience as "woe is me, I got hurt." Not exactly the right thing to do early on in her career. It'd be an inappropriate usage of her lesbian content, which apparently she doesn't have enough of according to that one critic.
By putting in this account of her four or so assaults, she's effectively boiled down the LGBT experience into that of constant hardship - that by being a member of one of the more put-down groups in modern Western society, she's experienced more pain than most people have in their entire lives. And her frustration with comedy is reasonable: why should she have to stick to the exact same standards that every other comedian has done if all it's done is just give people like her abuser power? All Woody Allen has to do is slightly reference the sex scandal, either by way of him engaging in another May-December romance or reference a messy custody case similar to the one between him and Mia Farrow, and people are quick to support him in theaters. He hasn't made a good movie on the regular since 1992 - with brief blips in 1999, 2011, and (from what I hear) 2013 - but he's been on the apology tour as long as I've been on Earth. Why engage with comedy if it keeps giving Woody Allen a career past his prime and past a scandal that should've stopped his career, even if for a short bit?
Something's up with comedy. Either it's all just been power dynamics from the start or people have lost their way. And while Hannah does entertain the idea of it being power dynamics, especially when mentioning the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton double standard, she kinda comes to the latter. Comedy isn't effective anymore because it's been pigeonholed into being laugh-a-minute zingers with tons of self-depreciation that seems to do nothing to fix our society. Again, it kinda goes into Malcolm Gladwell's satire paradox - the same problem that plagued Harry Enfield and Tom Lehrer now plagues Hannah Gadsby. And like they before her, she had to find a way out. Why not have a comedy show whose entire joke is on us, but we're not laughing at all? She's found an out that's similar to how Steve Martin went in - his entrance could be her exit. Or it could be her new entrance into a new form of comedy - a comedy that actually takes comedy back to being weighty and having satire that can really hit you where it hurts.
Remember: the people at the Troubadour were utterly uncomfortable with "Excuse Me" as it was playing out. They were uncomfortable with the jerkass persona Martin would play in his routines. He presented his scenarios as if they were happening in real time. All Hannah's doing is replacing the exaggeration with reality - and honestly, given that LGBT people do experience some hardcore discrimination, especially in very religious areas ruled by a moral majority, her admission that the bus stop out-witting didn't exactly end at her out-witting the man but with herself getting beat up works on the same angle Martin's jokes do on Let's Get Small. It's just, by her own choice, she gets rid of any hamming it up. Martin gives us a cue to laugh when he belts out his exasperated "WELL, EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" - at that point, he's gone into parody. Another element of being the Wild and Crazy Guy himself - he can randomly go into routines without your consent.
While Hannah's deconstruction of her own jokes work on the same way Martin's anti-humor does, to have a similar moment of melodramatic exasperation would not only destroy her own point, but give into the biases of the (there's no better word for this) Straight White Men (TM) in the audience. She'd be giving into them - and her show's about rising above that. About being more that what people, critics, monsters at bus stops that even Sgt. Frank Butterman and Volgin would shake their heads at, the men in her life who used and abused her because she was too weird or too gender-not-normal or too much lesbian content, etc. define her as. As she states at the end of the show, "I'm not a victim. I'm a survivor" - and she'd be painting herself as a victim if she just gave the audience a moment to uncomfortably laugh off her own testimony. After all, she'd still be dwelling in the thing. It's not that she's an idiot for leaving out that moment of decompression - she's rather smart for doing such a thing. That way, her point still gets across to people and they have to think about how they've contributed to that.
There's this really great movie I just want to talk about: A Face in the Crowd. It's this goofy showbiz satire starring Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal (who's not just Roald Dahl's wife) that every political writer busts out every few years to talk about how Glenn Beck or Alex Jones or Ben Shapiro or Donald Trump is Exactly Like Lonesome Larry Rhodes (TM) because of the second half of the film (where Lonesome himself starts trying to rebrand this stuffy conservative politician, Worthington Fuller, into somebody a bit more folksy in the Will Rogers sense so he can clinch better political seats). But everybody's talked to death about the politics of the film - how does the film approach its satire? Well, it's similar to Nanette: it starts out with funny jokes about wannabe celebrities and early television pioneers, even down to the pitch black (Lonesome Rhodes marrying a baton twirler who's in high school, only to have to divorce his first wife just to get the marriage license processed, only then to get into a fight with Marcia Jeffries about him cheating her out of her pay just to pay his ex-wife alimony). The first two acts are just this really, really goofy black comedy with dramatic elements about a guy who shouldn't be famous becoming famous because he says words we like on national television.
But the third act - let's say from Lonesome barging into Marcia's apartment and ranting about how he's gonna be the "Secretary for National Morale" once he gets Fuller in the Oval Office to the end - is sparsely funny. There's the gag where Lonesome rides down his studio elevator as his popularity dies in real time, but any jokes in the third act have punchlines that make you so uncomfortable that you kinda squirm in your seat even watching them. Lonesome ranting and raving about his ruined dinner party to his black servants, only to shoo them away like they were dogs, is deeply uncomfortable, especially considering that Lonesome himself is a Southerner (like me) and he's been established earlier as somebody who kinda-cynically-kinda-not uses the plight of poverty-stricken minorities in order to boost his local market share (and also to help out this family). Similar to Marcia turning up the studio mic on Lonesome as his sound technicians try to pull her away and she's crying because she's just realizing how deep his monstrous nature goes - that he's saying all of this condescending bullshit about his viewers in front of their very eyes. The laugh is there, but like with the servants, it's pretty damn uncomfortable.
It all climaxes when Marcia and head writer Mel, played by Walter Matthau at his wittiest, confront Lonesome at his penthouse as he's getting his servant to play this canned laughter/applause generator just to replicate the audience he has lost in only a couple of hours. This sequence isn't played for laughs, nor is its set-up - Lonesome threatens suicide (as he does a bit in the second half of the movie) to get Marcia to come over, only for her to complete sever any relationship they've had (business or personal) in front of his eyes. Even Mel's parting words to Lonesome are as barbed as they are prescient - sure, his career's dead temporarily, but people want that sort of guy again and Lonesome will come back. Yeah, he won't be as popular and he won't have the same command that he had over the politicians and advertisers because of his live remarks, but he'll still be there, he'll still rake in tons of money, and he'll always be a shadow of his former self. What Mel says is really damn witty, but it's wit designed not to be funny. It's not Guybrush Threepwood sword-fighting you, but rather similar to how Doug Walker got utterly pissed off at how Michael Bay carried out the Battle of Pearl Harbor in Pearl Harbor. There's elements that would be funny if you put them somewhere else - like how Mel dismisses Lonesome's contribution to the medium of television as merely expanding the wasteland with a "oh, what's his name? Lonesome something-or-another" - but put together as a whole, it's not funny. Because it's not meant to be.
Because simply by having Mel give zinger after zinger to Lonesome just to chew the man out would destroy the impact of the third act. It'd make the ending, where Marcia and Mel walk away from the skyscraper as Lonesome's screaming out empty threats of suicide, unearned. It'd destroy whatever emotional and satirical impact the film would have on its audience. It'd be a lesser Elia Kazan/Budd Schulberg collaboration - a great movie with good observations ruined by a subpar ending. But Budd, Elia, Andy, Patricia, and Walter go for the jugular here - how do you end your darkly humorous satire? By playing it straight. Show that it's not just fun and games if all of this happens - and especially in the case of Arthur Godfrey, it did happen. That there's real-life consequences to the shenanigans you saw on screen. If this happened, people would be hurt, sometimes irreparably. It deconstructs the comedy you just saw - all the funny bits with the burning mattresses and the crazed ad salesmen trying to be president and the cartoon pigs taking snake oil to get better implied boners - to make its point.
Hannah Gadsby did the same thing in Nanette. The first two-thirds are full of zingers, not only on the stand-up scene in Australia, but on her experiences as a lesbian in Australia, her art history knowledge allowing her to overcorrect people on simple statements like "man, Vincent van Gogh painted awesome art because he was so crazy that he cut off his own ear!" and "Pablo Picasso is a literal saint #literalsaint," and how quirky her familiar relationships are. But it's the third act - let's say, the end of the Picasso routine ("oh, he painted from all sorts of perspectives? none of those perspectives were from a woman's") to where she explains exactly why she keeps telling people about why she wants to quit comedy - that gets dead serious. There are jokes, but they are deeply uncomfortable jokes - even stuff you can turn into a joke from a distance (i.e. her finishing the bus stop routine as how it actually happened) is so deeply uncomfortable that you feel like an asshole for laughing at her wallowing in her total misery as she can't bring herself to bring this man to justice despite DOING NOTHING WRONG or you don't laugh and wonder why she advertised this as a stand-up special.
Well, no, she's called it "a one-woman show with jokes." She's told from the start that the jokes aren't the most important part of Nanette - it's the story that counts. It's Netflix that called it a stand-up special for categorization purposes. And hell, if some of my favorite satires can have serious third acts, why can't Hannah Gadsby? If the excellent 700 Sundays by Billy Crystal can have moments of dead seriousness despite it being a mostly funny-if-heartwarming-and-nostalgic recollection of his childhood, why can't Hannah Gadsby do the exact same with Nanette? Why does she still get reviled by people who think they know what's funny?
By putting in this account of her four or so assaults, she's effectively boiled down the LGBT experience into that of constant hardship - that by being a member of one of the more put-down groups in modern Western society, she's experienced more pain than most people have in their entire lives. And her frustration with comedy is reasonable: why should she have to stick to the exact same standards that every other comedian has done if all it's done is just give people like her abuser power? All Woody Allen has to do is slightly reference the sex scandal, either by way of him engaging in another May-December romance or reference a messy custody case similar to the one between him and Mia Farrow, and people are quick to support him in theaters. He hasn't made a good movie on the regular since 1992 - with brief blips in 1999, 2011, and (from what I hear) 2013 - but he's been on the apology tour as long as I've been on Earth. Why engage with comedy if it keeps giving Woody Allen a career past his prime and past a scandal that should've stopped his career, even if for a short bit?
Something's up with comedy. Either it's all just been power dynamics from the start or people have lost their way. And while Hannah does entertain the idea of it being power dynamics, especially when mentioning the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton double standard, she kinda comes to the latter. Comedy isn't effective anymore because it's been pigeonholed into being laugh-a-minute zingers with tons of self-depreciation that seems to do nothing to fix our society. Again, it kinda goes into Malcolm Gladwell's satire paradox - the same problem that plagued Harry Enfield and Tom Lehrer now plagues Hannah Gadsby. And like they before her, she had to find a way out. Why not have a comedy show whose entire joke is on us, but we're not laughing at all? She's found an out that's similar to how Steve Martin went in - his entrance could be her exit. Or it could be her new entrance into a new form of comedy - a comedy that actually takes comedy back to being weighty and having satire that can really hit you where it hurts.
Remember: the people at the Troubadour were utterly uncomfortable with "Excuse Me" as it was playing out. They were uncomfortable with the jerkass persona Martin would play in his routines. He presented his scenarios as if they were happening in real time. All Hannah's doing is replacing the exaggeration with reality - and honestly, given that LGBT people do experience some hardcore discrimination, especially in very religious areas ruled by a moral majority, her admission that the bus stop out-witting didn't exactly end at her out-witting the man but with herself getting beat up works on the same angle Martin's jokes do on Let's Get Small. It's just, by her own choice, she gets rid of any hamming it up. Martin gives us a cue to laugh when he belts out his exasperated "WELL, EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" - at that point, he's gone into parody. Another element of being the Wild and Crazy Guy himself - he can randomly go into routines without your consent.
While Hannah's deconstruction of her own jokes work on the same way Martin's anti-humor does, to have a similar moment of melodramatic exasperation would not only destroy her own point, but give into the biases of the (there's no better word for this) Straight White Men (TM) in the audience. She'd be giving into them - and her show's about rising above that. About being more that what people, critics, monsters at bus stops that even Sgt. Frank Butterman and Volgin would shake their heads at, the men in her life who used and abused her because she was too weird or too gender-not-normal or too much lesbian content, etc. define her as. As she states at the end of the show, "I'm not a victim. I'm a survivor" - and she'd be painting herself as a victim if she just gave the audience a moment to uncomfortably laugh off her own testimony. After all, she'd still be dwelling in the thing. It's not that she's an idiot for leaving out that moment of decompression - she's rather smart for doing such a thing. That way, her point still gets across to people and they have to think about how they've contributed to that.
Sub-episode: A Face in the Crowd and the Serious Third Act
There's this really great movie I just want to talk about: A Face in the Crowd. It's this goofy showbiz satire starring Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal (who's not just Roald Dahl's wife) that every political writer busts out every few years to talk about how Glenn Beck or Alex Jones or Ben Shapiro or Donald Trump is Exactly Like Lonesome Larry Rhodes (TM) because of the second half of the film (where Lonesome himself starts trying to rebrand this stuffy conservative politician, Worthington Fuller, into somebody a bit more folksy in the Will Rogers sense so he can clinch better political seats). But everybody's talked to death about the politics of the film - how does the film approach its satire? Well, it's similar to Nanette: it starts out with funny jokes about wannabe celebrities and early television pioneers, even down to the pitch black (Lonesome Rhodes marrying a baton twirler who's in high school, only to have to divorce his first wife just to get the marriage license processed, only then to get into a fight with Marcia Jeffries about him cheating her out of her pay just to pay his ex-wife alimony). The first two acts are just this really, really goofy black comedy with dramatic elements about a guy who shouldn't be famous becoming famous because he says words we like on national television.
But the third act - let's say from Lonesome barging into Marcia's apartment and ranting about how he's gonna be the "Secretary for National Morale" once he gets Fuller in the Oval Office to the end - is sparsely funny. There's the gag where Lonesome rides down his studio elevator as his popularity dies in real time, but any jokes in the third act have punchlines that make you so uncomfortable that you kinda squirm in your seat even watching them. Lonesome ranting and raving about his ruined dinner party to his black servants, only to shoo them away like they were dogs, is deeply uncomfortable, especially considering that Lonesome himself is a Southerner (like me) and he's been established earlier as somebody who kinda-cynically-kinda-not uses the plight of poverty-stricken minorities in order to boost his local market share (and also to help out this family). Similar to Marcia turning up the studio mic on Lonesome as his sound technicians try to pull her away and she's crying because she's just realizing how deep his monstrous nature goes - that he's saying all of this condescending bullshit about his viewers in front of their very eyes. The laugh is there, but like with the servants, it's pretty damn uncomfortable.
It all climaxes when Marcia and head writer Mel, played by Walter Matthau at his wittiest, confront Lonesome at his penthouse as he's getting his servant to play this canned laughter/applause generator just to replicate the audience he has lost in only a couple of hours. This sequence isn't played for laughs, nor is its set-up - Lonesome threatens suicide (as he does a bit in the second half of the movie) to get Marcia to come over, only for her to complete sever any relationship they've had (business or personal) in front of his eyes. Even Mel's parting words to Lonesome are as barbed as they are prescient - sure, his career's dead temporarily, but people want that sort of guy again and Lonesome will come back. Yeah, he won't be as popular and he won't have the same command that he had over the politicians and advertisers because of his live remarks, but he'll still be there, he'll still rake in tons of money, and he'll always be a shadow of his former self. What Mel says is really damn witty, but it's wit designed not to be funny. It's not Guybrush Threepwood sword-fighting you, but rather similar to how Doug Walker got utterly pissed off at how Michael Bay carried out the Battle of Pearl Harbor in Pearl Harbor. There's elements that would be funny if you put them somewhere else - like how Mel dismisses Lonesome's contribution to the medium of television as merely expanding the wasteland with a "oh, what's his name? Lonesome something-or-another" - but put together as a whole, it's not funny. Because it's not meant to be.
Because simply by having Mel give zinger after zinger to Lonesome just to chew the man out would destroy the impact of the third act. It'd make the ending, where Marcia and Mel walk away from the skyscraper as Lonesome's screaming out empty threats of suicide, unearned. It'd destroy whatever emotional and satirical impact the film would have on its audience. It'd be a lesser Elia Kazan/Budd Schulberg collaboration - a great movie with good observations ruined by a subpar ending. But Budd, Elia, Andy, Patricia, and Walter go for the jugular here - how do you end your darkly humorous satire? By playing it straight. Show that it's not just fun and games if all of this happens - and especially in the case of Arthur Godfrey, it did happen. That there's real-life consequences to the shenanigans you saw on screen. If this happened, people would be hurt, sometimes irreparably. It deconstructs the comedy you just saw - all the funny bits with the burning mattresses and the crazed ad salesmen trying to be president and the cartoon pigs taking snake oil to get better implied boners - to make its point.
Hannah Gadsby did the same thing in Nanette. The first two-thirds are full of zingers, not only on the stand-up scene in Australia, but on her experiences as a lesbian in Australia, her art history knowledge allowing her to overcorrect people on simple statements like "man, Vincent van Gogh painted awesome art because he was so crazy that he cut off his own ear!" and "Pablo Picasso is a literal saint #literalsaint," and how quirky her familiar relationships are. But it's the third act - let's say, the end of the Picasso routine ("oh, he painted from all sorts of perspectives? none of those perspectives were from a woman's") to where she explains exactly why she keeps telling people about why she wants to quit comedy - that gets dead serious. There are jokes, but they are deeply uncomfortable jokes - even stuff you can turn into a joke from a distance (i.e. her finishing the bus stop routine as how it actually happened) is so deeply uncomfortable that you feel like an asshole for laughing at her wallowing in her total misery as she can't bring herself to bring this man to justice despite DOING NOTHING WRONG or you don't laugh and wonder why she advertised this as a stand-up special.
Well, no, she's called it "a one-woman show with jokes." She's told from the start that the jokes aren't the most important part of Nanette - it's the story that counts. It's Netflix that called it a stand-up special for categorization purposes. And hell, if some of my favorite satires can have serious third acts, why can't Hannah Gadsby? If the excellent 700 Sundays by Billy Crystal can have moments of dead seriousness despite it being a mostly funny-if-heartwarming-and-nostalgic recollection of his childhood, why can't Hannah Gadsby do the exact same with Nanette? Why does she still get reviled by people who think they know what's funny?
Part Three: Why in the Hell Do People Hate Hannah Gadsby?
Because people are sexist and don't get that she's doing a Steve Martin-meets-George Carlin sort of thing, instead seeing her as "angry SJW lesbian who definitely deserves a 200-page thread on Kiwi Farms" - as if just applying the skillset of Carlin and Martin instantly makes you into an eccentric disconnected from reality. Same shallow reading of the Beatles that Scaruffi did, where he ignores their direct influence on the bands that he champions as better than they in order to dickride Gene Clark because, goddamn it, he wrote "Feel a Whole Lot Better" and that was better than what the Fab Four were shitting out at the time, so that must mean EVERY contribution they've done
Because people are sexist and homophobic/transphobic and still rag on Courtney Love for everything wrong with rock, even going as far as blaming her and Cali Thornhill DeWitt for "murdering" Kurt Cobain with a mixture of heroin and that shotgun that the dude from drone doom metal band Earth owned because a private investigator didn't like the way Courtney acted in his taped interviews and a drunk punk rocker said that he knew the dude who was initially hired to kill Cobain. Because Cali cross-dressed on the CD art for In Utero and Courtney's angered more alt-rockers than most people have, even to the point of driving Gwen Stefani to teach us how to spell "bananas," that's why people think they killed one of my favorite musicians? One of my favorite songwriters? One of the people who, along with Glen Phillips and co., Lee/Lifeson/Peart, the Man in Black himself, and Kim Gordon and her unfaithful ex-husband, were some of the first people whose songs I learned how to play on guitar? Like, way before I even decided to try playing Lennon-McCartney tunes!
Because people just want the bare minimum from comedians - they want jokes and that's it. And I get it - a comedian is supposed to be good-time entertainment for everybody. But with all of these comedians doing the same shit over and over and over, Maximus' question from Gladiator still remains: are you not entertained? I get enough people telling their tight five at an open-mic night. I don't need established comedians doing the same thing over and over.
Sub-episode: Why I Stan for Bill Engvall
So I've watched Ron White's new Netflix special If You Quit Listening, I'll Shut Up recently and eh.
Ron White's early material - say, Drunk in Public and You Can't Fix Stupid - have this vitality about them that still drive me to listen to bits from them. I still high-key enjoy the Tire College bit - the one where the tire fitter at Sears does such a bang-up job on Ron's van that the left rear wheel falls off when he pulls out of the parking lot. It falls off. It falls the FUUUUUUUCK off - and, like most people raised on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour boys, I still fall over in laughter every time I hear the Tater Salad/drunk-in-public bit. And why not? His humor was bluer and edgier than the others in the roster - like Larry the Cable Guy if he knew what he were doing half the time. And don't get me wrong - some of Larry's stuff could be funny, especially his "Lord, I apologize" bit where he'd lampshade how over-the-line one of his jokes got - but I always saw Larry as the weak link. Well, him and Ron.
As I got older, I got more into Ron - I could actually listen to comedy albums with bad language words now that I heard Mitch Hedberg emphatically tell you that you're "not sleepin' in the fuckin' chair" at the chair-and-lunch/dinner because you're not cheating, so I watched You Can't Fix Stupid and loved it. I mean, in the sense that it was bluer than any of the bits I heard prior, but it had its share of inspiration. And then I saw A Little Unprofessional when Netflix put it on - and I was slightly disappointed, mostly because he was relying on the same jokes he'd been telling for years, but with 40% more slice-of-life stuff surrounding him and his then-girlfriend Margo Rey. It was pretty heartfelt - sure, he relied on the dick jokes and the shock of him being the Blue Collar Comedy Tour guy who said "fuck" a lot, but his heart for Margo was in the right place.
And then I saw his new special. He's really bitter in it. Sometimes, the bitterness works - like, him always being in the position of this permanently jealous husband kinda works in bits where he finds out that Margo (who he keeps calling his wife - I'm not entire sure if he actually divorced her or their fight was THAT petty) built an entire recording studio in his house while pretending she's just making it a practice space for her band (she's popular in the adult contemporary scene), but in other bits where he's talking about how she's the worst person, it just rubs me the wrong way. Overall, it felt like the same old, same old. Except for one bit, which got to the heart of why I loved Ron White to begin with: it's the closing one, where he's recalling an embarrassing story that happened to him when good friend (and Golden Corral spokesperson) Jeff Foxworthy invited him to be a support act on his comedy tour (around the same time mutual friend Bill Engvall got to be really popular) and they were in Vegas. Ron got super drunk with the two of them and, rather than wake up his then-wife to ask her to have sex, masturbates with what he ends up discovering too late is a bottle of tan lotion.
But the other strong link in the Blue Collar Comedy Tour lineup was Bill Engvall. I didn't expect much out of him outside of maybe being a carbon copy of Jeff Foxworthy (since they're cousins and all), but when I first heard his greatest hits in the second Blue Collar special, I fell in love immediately. I loved his penchant for story-telling, I loved his use of exaggeration to help really drive the story in, I loved how his "here's your sign" bit could be applied to any situation and not just the actions of Southerners, I loved his little slice-of-life stuff he told about his family. It just felt organic - like, yeah, the dude was a smidge more risque than Jeff Foxworthy who, at the time, was forgoing saying "testicles" and "condoms" just to make his act that squeaky clean on an otherwise TV-14 special, but he took Jeff's approach for being a comedian that families could enjoy and actually ran with it. He didn't see himself as a paradigm of conservative action like Brad Stine nor pigeonhole himself into novelty like Jeff, but rather told jokes that make you feel. They were jokes - they always made you laugh - but unlike Jeff giving you enough distance between you and him or Ron being so bitter that your mileage ends up varying or Larry just being an insult comedian with a funny voice, Bill made you feel like you were part of the family.
There's one bit that Bill did in his Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again greatest hits package that I still really enjoy: "Deer Hunting." So Bill, in his infinite wisdom, decides to bring his wife deer hunting. Granted he does have a bit of a battle-of-the-sexes thing going on with some of his bits, but he usually makes it so that his wife's usually the victor because, honestly, she's the wittier or the funnier one. Bill is often the punchline himself. So, back to the bit: Bill takes his wife deer hunting and he slowly realizes that she's not into it as much as he is, to put it lightly. She's in a jogging suit, he's fully decked out in camo, and they're sitting in a tree stand, waiting for a deer to come out at six in the morning...
...only for his wife to start commenting on the deer, comparing him to Bambi's dad, and freaking out when Bill starts to aim his gun. And Bill is the joke - the deer laughs at him, Bill freaks out so hard that in the Rides Again variant he pushes his wife out of the tree stand, and he has the worst time of his life on a whale watching trip his wife drags him to. Unlike Ron, who'd make himself the victim but blame his ex-wives or Margo or the police officer he acts like a smart-ass to, Bill makes it clear that he deserves it. And not in a generally "I hate myself" sort of way, but in a "I'm grateful that my ego's been torn down just a bit" way. His comedy expresses humility through his set-ups and punchlines - and he rarely gets mean-spirited. He always shows himself in the wrong. He even gives himself a few signs when he sees himself asking dumb questions to anybody.
That's why I still genuinely enjoy Bill to this very day. Sure, he may have been Reba McIntyre's support comedian, but given that Reba in real life is a very witty person and knows a thing or two about good humor, she made a damn good choice with the dude who hands out metaphorical signs to people asking the most inane questions. And props to Jeff for helping champion him early on in his career.
But you can kinda see why Nanette couldn't do what Bill Engvall did on Dorkfish or 15 Degrees Off Cool or Aged and Confused. Hannah's not only aiming for a different aesthetic - one more grounded in satire - but her stuff is a lot more pointed than Bill's. Bill is a good-time comedian and he's probably the best example of one still working to this day, but he's not exactly what I'd call a satirical mastermind. He doesn't really do satire. Hannah does, ultimately. It was one of her goals in Nanette.
Also, self-depreciation works when the stakes aren't as high as you potentially getting beaten up at a bus stop, but as small as you not getting a kill during a deer hunting trip because your wife pointed out the absurdity of what you're doing. You know, just one of those things.
Back to Our Regularly-Scheduled Program
Because people think they know what's funny and pigeonhole comedians into little boxes where they can't innovate or do anything new or perfect their craft. And those who do either get shoved to the wayside - Bill Engvall - or get called unfunny - Hannah Gadsby. It's gotten to the point where the only way out for a comedian is to call it quits or to go into an entirely different medium altogether.
Say it with me: an entirely different medium.
Steve Martin went into movies when he was starting to become the stand-up comedian that he despised. He didn't like playing in arenas, where his bits couldn't connect with audiences, but he had to because he was so popular. He didn't like how people didn't get "King Tut" and how it mocked our cynical marketing of museum exhibits regarding Tutankhamun, but instead focused on the SNL bit where he tried to make that clear (complete with Lou Marini stumbling out of a sarcophagus blazing on his saxophone). People didn't get his jokes - and they didn't want to. He was just another quirky comedian to them. But since The Jerk and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid were turning him into a film comedian to be respected, with box-offices successes and all, he decided to get into film full-time. And for that I love him - because if it weren't for his films, if it weren't for his family films and L.A. Story and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, I wouldn't be here talking about this to you. I wouldn't have any frame of reference outside of "wild and crazy guy" regarding the dude. Hell, I'd probably be on the bandwagon hating on Nanette along with 50% of the Internet.
But I'm grateful Martin did stand-up comedy for as long as he did because I love his still-fresh approach to humor. And if Martin ever reads this (and corrects me on details regarding the arena shows and how people reacted to "King Tut"), I just want him to know that I'm grateful for everything he's done. He's an innovator who's not celebrated enough. Certainly better than Picasso, who mostly painted all the women he's slept with, whined about them not liking him, and about ruined Cubism for Hannah Gadsby.
Part Four: I Never Thought You'd Be a Comedian Because the Tortured Artist Effect is So Passé
There's a part in Nanette where fans of the special really got into it.
Monica Lewinsky's part, according to an interview she did with Hannah herself, was where Hannah pointed out the double standards regarding how humorists in 1998 approached the one thing people won't stop talking to Monica about: that time that Bill Clinton raped her. Comedians painted Clinton as a lovable horndog while assassinating Monica as a horny intern trying to ruin the president's life. That's pretty fucked up, don't you think? And, according to Monica, she cried because of course it's somebody finally getting why she doesn't really like talking about that thing that happened. If all people are gonna do to the former White House intern is crack wise about how President Clitorisse didn't have sexual relations with that woman, then why even talk about it? People sure like to believe victims/survivors until they're given actual situations in which to give them humanity. Hell, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford has to constantly move from town to town, unable to go back to teaching at Palo Alto University, because people keep giving her shit about the whole Brett Kavanaugh thing. And she only testified one fucking month ago. That's disgusting. I don't care if you think that the Dems could've gotten Kavanaugh on his support for surveillance legislation but decided to pursue the Dr. Ford allegation in one of their more misfired decisions - what people are still doing to Dr. Ford to make her regret that she dare speak about what Kavanaugh did to her, even if it wasn't the best thing to nail him on, is FUCKED UP. I can't mince words. It's sick, that's what it is.
But there's another issue that Hannah touches upon that drew me into the special - and that's how we exploit the tortured-artist effect to justify why we like an artist. The specific example she gave was Vincent van Gogh - the guy who painted the sunflowers. People will say - and I've seen them say this; hell, I've said it myself - that Van Gogh was only good because he was so mentally ill. His illness made his a great painter. His illness made him paint those sunflowers so vividly - and all of those gorgeous swirls in "Starry Night." And segue Impressionism into Fauvism. So all Michael Bay needs to do is to go to the mental disorder factory, order him a bunch of bipolar disorder pills, and BAM! He's like the new Orson Welles now!
But nope - that's not how it actually goes in real life. Vincent van Gogh was heavily treated for his bipolar - they didn't know what was wrong with him, so they gave him medicine made out of sunflowers. One of the side effects of said medicine was an increased vividness of color perception - which you can see a lot of in his work. And to pay tribute to the doctors who were trying their darndest just to get this guy "normal," he often painted the sunflowers that made up the medicine that he wanted to work. Well, that and to impress his brother Theo and his good friend Paul Gauguin. Nothing gets more respect than still lifes of sunflowers.
Also, Van Gogh didn't cut off his ear because he wanted to be an edgy artist. He cut his ear off because he was having a hard year and had become unstable, especially with his fraying friendship with Gauguin.
You know what this reminds me of? Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers. The "Kevin Carter" band. Love those dudes. Well, Richey suffered from mental illnesses, which resulted in him disappearing (although I believe he killed himself) right before the band were to tour the US in support of their new album The Holy Bible. Because of his death, they ended up delaying the American release of that album for a good 10-15 years, but that's not what I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to discuss the "4REAL" thing Richey did during an interview. So, a journalist was calling Richie fake and all, so Richey cuts "4REAL" on his arm. And people called that a publicity stunt - for what, I dunno. To get more Americans to listen to "Motorcycle Emptiness"? I'm still not a big fan of that song. To sell copies of The Holy Bible when that finally gets released? Well, if that were the case, Richey's disappearance-but-it's-obviously-a-suicide would've been gold for Columbia Records to exploit for a release of said album over here, especially that they've spent money remixing the thing.
But they held off - and why? Because Columbia knew something was off. They knew that Richey had been ill for quite some time - and to exploit that would be in poor taste, if there is any taste in this tasteless action. So, yeah, Columbia did a good thing and withheld releasing Richie's most personal statement in the band until they saw it fit.
Don't tell that to the Richey Edwards fans who only call him great because he had all the mental illnesses and "totally disappeared, he didn't kill himself." They might as well call the "4REAL" incident a publicity stunt, like every other critic did pre-disappearance, but not in the way that the critics intended for it to be (calling Richey Edwards a hack since he was their lyricist and didn't play guitar all that good). I mean a publicity stunt showing how tortured he is and how real of an artist he is, not his utter despondence during an interview.
The ever-present tortured artist effect, as Todd Rundgren sarcastically calls it, is when an artist is only good when they're under stress - that their stress, not their talent or ability, is what makes them great. It's the same rationale behind thinking why pot makes you into a better creator or why psychologically traumatizing Shelley Duvall is why Stanley Kubrick got a great performance out of her in The Shining. It couldn't be that Richey was a great lyricist who happened to rely on Nicky and James for tightening up what little bits and pieces he could write for the music - that he was taught how to write poetry and engage with art on a deeper level. It couldn't be that the Beatles were well-skilled to write pop songs, even those with experimental forms, that when they began to smoke all the pot, they could get all of those fractured ideas and organize them into a song. It couldn't be that Shelley Duvall was a really great actress and knew how to get into the head of Wendy Torrance, making a lot of Kubrick's abuse of her unnecessary. No, it's because pain that they gave us good stuff.
Are you not entertained? Well, if I hit myself on the head with a hammer hard enough, maybe you'll be!
Same thing applies to outsider art and music. Most people analyzing the aesthetics of outsider art and music seem to be under the impression that the outsiders are often not trained, so they have to have that creative knack through willpower and (often) mental illnesses alone. To me, who cares if Howard Finster had schizophrenia or whatever? He knew how to use his imagery not only to create unique Christian folk art, he made a killing doing album art because he just loved it. Who cares if BJ Snowden isn't classically trained? She knows how to play the piano, she knows how to write a song - her weak link is her weak vocal skill. Who cares if R. Stevie Moore is like your punk grandpa? He wouldn't be who he is without his instrumental skill nor his ability to write a song. When did outsider art and music become "unskilled person makes cool stuff"? Because Finster, Snowden, Moore, etc. are all skilled. They're not skilled in the way you want.
Also, for anybody cataloging outsider music, please do not include Harry Partch in your lists. Doing so is rooted in some nasty homophobia and musical elitism. And I mean it. Apparently you're outsider if you write microtonal music and you're a former hobo who's gay. If that's the case, throw in the late Hardy Fox. But you won't because the Residents are mainstream. Everybody knows the eyeballs. Also, "Barstow" and "Castor and Pollux" are bangers, screw you.
Kinda see why Hannah Gadsby wouldn't be down for that? It's kinda continuing the prioritization of self-depreciation as a means to "legitimize" your struggle. It gives power to the oppressors, the agents, the Scaruffis talking out of their asses, the idiots who think they know what real art is, the stalwarts who just won't retire, Woody Allen, etc.
No wonder why she wants to quit comedy. You'd want to too if you were forced to stick to the script because everything else is stacked up against you, even the way we talk about mentally ill artists and outsiders.
And with that proclamation, Hannah does what no other comedian had done in quite some time: she finally fulfills the art form. She brought back the bite to comedy - the bite we need. The bite I'd been starving for.
Epilogue
The reason why I used the Grateful Dead quote as the tertiary title for the essay is because, in a way, comprehending Nanette, from watching it back in July to finishing this essay I started all the way back in August, is like going through my history with comedy. It fulfills what I think comedy was initially set out to do when the ancient Greeks wanted to write dramatic stories with happy endings: mockery that critiques you, that critiques society, makes you laugh if it's a bit broader with the joke-writing, but ultimately wants you to try to fix the world. When Aristophanes wrote his comic plays, he wanted to fix society - sure, he could get a lot of mileage out of women protesting over a useless war by not sleeping with their soldier men or making a mockery of contemporary Athenian politics, but whether or not it was through something as blunt as Lysistrata or as absurd as The Frogs, but he wanted people to get inspired and try to fix society.
A jester is doing a good job when he can successfully communicate to the king that his policies aren't working - in a way where the king fully understands what he's saying, but doesn't consider him treasonous. A jester would be terrible if they'd just run in and say "yeah, you suck." That's partially the reason why that rap group with the clown makeup and the magnets and the cheap Michigan soda is the way they are - they're just so cornball and goofy that you kinda get what they're trying to say. There's a reason why Juggalos are now teaming up with antifascist protesters to stop neo-Nazis from screaming about how they wanna kill your Jewish neighbors and gathering an angry mob. Regardless of what you think of the quality of Insane Clown Posse's music - and I can see why people would hate it; it's very hit-or-miss - they get out the message of harmony between everybody and caring for one another deeply by showing us these macabre and comic tales about hatchets and body parts and the Death. They use humor to get across their message.
Comedy has the ability to fix the world. And comedy is more than just lighthearted goofy slapstick - it can also be really damn dark, especially in times of trouble. Going back to the ICP example, ever wonder why they really amp up the cornball horrorcore shtick? Our world kinda demands it - and it usually punches down the abusers, the exploiters, the evil, the wicked, etc. The people who helped create the poverty in Detroit - the kind of poverty Bruce and Utsler were raised in. That's why ragging on Juggalos as deluded isn't that funny to me anymore - they're using humor in their own unique way to try to fix the world.
Bill Engvall is using humor to fix the world, even if it goes by the old adage of "laughter is the best medicine." If he can admit, even through mere implication, that he was in the wrong in these scenarios and that maybe he can be so much of an egocentric moron that he thinks he can ride an F-16 without screaming for his mom and vomiting shortly after landing, then why can't Jerry Seinfeld or Dave Chappelle admit that maybe they're in the wrong at times? Why can't Jerry understand why colleges don't want him to perform? It's not because he's not funny or anything - Seinfeld and Comedians Getting Coffee in Cars are really solid - but because maybe after scaremongering about college campuses being too squeaky clean except for the Gays (TM) and the Trans (TM) and women, they don't want to entertain that inherently elitist of an idea.
Hannah Gadsby doesn't think laughter is the best medicine - it is a medicine and it can work, but in some cases, you need something bitter to mix with the laughter. Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg knew this. Steve Martin knew this. Hell, even Harry Enfield and Tom Lehrer knew this - but in their case, they should've mixed in a bit more Robitussin so that people don't think they're actually for braggart plasterers obsessed with their fat wads of banknotes or the inherent nihilism in celebrating our eventual deaths at the hands of atomic bombs. Not to say they weren't effective - we wouldn't be talking about them if they weren't - but they're weren't effective to their maximum. You need that tension - to really get people to think. If that means giving you the reality of one of Hannah's most celebrated routines or songs like "Hall of Illusions" or making Walter Matthau say witty things that are organized in such a manner to the point where they're made humorless by design, then so be it. Either way, you've made people laugh at everything else - why not make them eat their vegetables?
Hannah Gadsby didn't quit comedy. She fulfilled it.
A+
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