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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
I think anyone who's been disappointed by Steve Martins latest movies should check out his collection of plays, Picasso at the Lapin Agile and other plays. The others in the collection are up and down, mostly minor stuff, but the title play is really amazing. I remember being warmly surprised by how good it was. He strikes just the right tone-- funny, not taking himself too seriously, but at the same time letting the plot take him into meditations of pretty serious stuff. The books about the 20th century, and its about genius and its different forms. And I think one of the best things about it is the recognition that the ridiculous and the sublime are tied up in one another, and that you can achieve the former without losing the latter.
Seriously, check it out.
To me, there is no greater comedic tragedy than what's happened to Eddie Murphy. This is a man who defined comedy, and yet who now makes crappy kids' movies. That's sad.
I think Stephanie Zacharek hit the nail on the head more than she knew when she described comedy as "precarious." Maybe it's unrealistic of us to expect even the best comedians to churn out hit after hit, brilliant performance after brilliant performance. It may be that even Steve Martin and Albert Brooks don't exactly know what makes some things work and other things flop -- there is a delicate magic at work in comedy that I would guess remains somewhat mysterious even to comedians themselves. Let's be grateful for their moments of genius and allow for the fluctuations inherent in that very genius.
Comedians become unfunny as they age. Young people delight at discovering life's absurdities, but when you're middle-aged, you lose your edge. Absurdity is no longer new or funny, it's just a pain in the fucking ass that you have to deal with day after day, with no end in sight. Like everyone else, and maybe even moreso, comedians have relationships that break up, kids who take up their time and patience, more relationships that break up, alimony, agents... they get jaded. And they get rich. After a decade or so of being rich, life isn't the same as it was when you were a young, edgy person trying to kill at comedy clubs.
I remember watching comedians who'd been funny to my parents generation. Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Milton Berle. These guys had clearly seen better days. I went "Wha?" when I was expected to laugh. When I saw some early sketches of Steve Allen's on a retrospective, I was surprised at how funny they were, since I had only known Steve Allen as an utter bore who was glued to a piano seat behind his strangely flame-haired wife. It must have been a John-Yoko kind of relationship because Jane Meadows was as talented as a hatrack and nothing her once-famous husband said or did made either one of them memorable as anything other than an obnoxiously self-involved couple. Sid Caesar was another comedian who seemed funny in his old clips, but I was most familiar with him in his incarnation as a deadly unfunny pontificator on the philosophy of humor. There's nothing less funny than a comedian who starts going around defining what's funny.
It happens to all of us. Life gets predictable, we start taking the path of least resistance. To famous comedians, the least resistant path is picking up a huge paycheck for very little effort. Hey, at least they get the huge paycheck. Most of us who age out have nothing at the end of our path but Social Security. It happens to songwriters, too. Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder... great pop songwriters of yore who continue to churn out musical glop thirty years after their last decent song saw the light of day. It's always noted that Irving Berlin wrote tons of songs, but never mentioned how godawful those songs were after he reached a certain age. And directors.. Alfred Hitchcock put horse-drawn carts in "Frenzy" in the 1970s.
The songwriters continue to get recording contracts and the comedians continue to get movie backing because the entertainment industry knows these guys have a long-time audience who will buy anything of theirs, no matter how crappy it is.
Honestly, when was the last time a brilliantly funny 60 year old comedian was discovered? Rodney Dangerfield is the oldest "newly discovered" comedian I can think of and he was in his 40s when he achieved fame.
The 50s are a comedy killer.
I mean part of the genius of the Office (the original BBC one) was that it lasted only two 8-episode seasons. So it didn't have time to become terrible. The Simpsons is my pick for funniest show ever, and seasons 2-8 are just transcendent. But after that you have ten years, literally ten years, of dreck. You just can't keep pumping them out. I'm not very fond of Arrested Development but maybe in the long run getting cancelled was the best thing for the show.
When I saw 30 seconds or so of tv ads/trailers for the new Panther it was immediately obvious that it would be unfunny. The very fact that Kevin Kline, who is infinitely funnier than Martin, was cast in a supporting role immediately demonstrates how unaware the moviemakers were.
Martin was funny in the Jerk and in the original SNL, but that was a very long time ago, and he's been coasting on half a dozen or so tired mannerisms for at least the past 15 years, maybe 20. Comedians don't get bad so much as they get lazy, especially when they look around and realize that they'll sometimes get adulation even when it's no longer earned.
Like someone who posted earlier, the first trailer I saw for The Pink Panther told me it was going to be awful, and I *like* Steve Martin. All it did, in fact, was make me want to go and rent the original immediately--which, when you get right down to it, can't be a bad thing.
I do wish the studios would catch on to the idea of doing re-releases for old films instead of remaking them. Think of it: whole generations introduced to film noir, to movie musicals, to great classics, all for a fraction of the price of remaking movies. A modest advertising budget and who knows, studios might find they've got an old hit on their hands.
-C.E. Murphy
The Wasilla soap opera just gets weirder as Palin complains critics are "picking apart a good point guard"
The media outlet's use of Bush euphemisms sparks a much-needed debate on journalistic standards.
And so are his Fox News pals, who lambasted Sen. Al Franken's "stolen election"
An inflexible right wing is allowing the Golden State to drown in debt. But it's not alone
Thanks for sharing, Governor. Now please take a cue from Norm Coleman, and go away
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