The Talkies/Streets of New York
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES STREETS OF NEW YORK by Bruce Bawer O ne of the more dire recent developments in American pop culture has been the glorification of the stand-up comedian. Comedy clubs and "Comedy...
...And in without making a fuss about it...
...and his every gesture and inflection is a stand-up cliche...
...You start out rr o be sure, not everything about numbers supplied by the Roches (a neighborhood, goes to shul every day, thinking, God no, they're not going to 1 Crossing Delancey is perfect...
...Like- sounds like "Deutsch" and because alone, you're sick...
...he complies...
...Tom Hanks plays Steve Gold, an aspiring stand-up comic who works regularly at an obscure New York club called the Gas Station...
...Audrey Hepburn went the at a corner hot dog stand, jawing over ken...
...His comedy, you see, comes from his guts: hers comes from a list of gags...
...FiFiddler on the Roof...
...Bubby (Reizl Bozyk), who lives in a Simmons in Desiree, and so forth...
...All Lila needs, he insists, are "the right gags...
...Her tone is solemn, subdued: Mozart was never this serious about his art...
...But hey, he wasn't made to be a doctor, like his dad and brother—he was made to be funny...
...She tries to explain: "I love being a mom...
...the pleasure comes from watching does so, with astonishing sensitivity and next to Germany and because "Dutch" ter how much money you got, if you're the heroine reverse herself...
...Jewish woman who lives on the West Side of Manhattan and works in "New York's last real bookstore," New Day Books...
...You Gurley Brown herself would be proud recognize the superior worth of the less liness of a single woman's life in New think it's so small...
...Consequently she Crossing Delancey, I'm happy to say, wise, while American films ,tend to be when we see Isabelle mooning over this engages the services of Hannah (witti- Isabelle's reversal is managed with notoriously bad at capturing the way big, strapping fellow we're supposed to ly played by Sylvia Miles), a loud, remarkable finesse and charm...
...Seared by this insight, Lila begs Steve for pointers...
...In the eighties, stand-up comics put on airs: the Playbill for comedienne Sandra Bernhardt's recent one-woman show in New York referred to her as a "rock-and-roll performance artist...
...What could be more grotesque...
...The audience (at the Gas Station, not in the movie theater) laughs itself crazy...
...It's amazing that somebody could make a big-budget film about stand-up comedy and not manage to get any fresh, funny material...
...Also appearing regularly at the Gas Station is a New Jersey housewife named Lila Krytsick (Sally Field...
...That's why I do stand-up comedy—and that's why you don't...
...yesterday's stand-up comics become today's movie stars...
...Apparently, we're supposed to look upon this as brilliant advice...
...Steve is also a med student, but not for long...
...To begin with, Amy Irving's Jewish CUNY graduate selling pickles novel she has kept in the window of the famous Dutch novelist, for heaven's performance is luminous and endear- out of barrels on Delancey Street...
...Steve's prof demands...
...Bruce Bawer, TAS's regular movie critic is the author of Diminishing Fictions (Graywolf Press...
...On the whole, however, Street...
...one neverfeels less than uttersympathy smug and self-satisfied...
...their fellow comics tell Lila and Steve that they're 7"brilliant...
...Seltzer's own script and direction, to be sure, are anything but snappy...
...The only thing that a characteristic eighties writer-director like David Seltzer seems to take seriously, by contrast, is showbiz itself...
...We're God's animated cartoons...
...In Bubby's kitch- film, in fact, that the match with Sam of it...
...When a second round of scouts appears, Stevecracks up on stage, collapsing in tears after choking out a gloppy psychiatrist's-couch monologue about his med-school failure, his macho dad's love of deer hunting, and his own fear of the sight of blood...
...Comedy clubs and "Comedy Relief"-type benefits have proliferated...
...secure about his identity that he tive accessibility...
...Lila's not as good as Steve—or so, at least, we're supposed to understand...
...An intelligent, articulate young in the neighborhood and whose latest miles from here...
...She's in love with a movie...
...He instructs her to draw upon her own life: "All our lives are funny...
...And Sandler modern young urbanite, a cosmopoli- It's the oldest story in the world, of for her...
...Also notable are the modest gives him at least one line of dialogue—tan girl for whose life-style Helen course—the young woman coming to but deeply poignant images of the lone- "What's wrong with my world...
...films of comedy routines by Bill Cosby and Eddie Murphy have been released theatrically and...
...tually existed, would have to be the ness for Anton Maes (Jeroen Krabbe), totally unsuitable...
...Hilarious...
...Meanwhile, Steve's hitting the skids: the same emotional distress that makes him a great stand-up comic threatens to destroy him, verstehen...
...Like the worst sort of comedian, director Seltzer seems to think that anything will get a laugh if you give it a glib, snappy delivery...
...In group of girl singers) seem just a bit too and runs a pickle stand on Delancey try to convince us that this vibrant, hap- seeking to create a decidedly traditional distracting...
...But the comedy routines are as lame as the plot...
...reviewed as if they were actual movies...
...A million wonderfully right things about this York...
...What's most irritating of all about Punchline, however, is its governing pretense—or delusion—that the slick recitation of a set of canned jokes constitutes a serious form of self-expression, if not art...
...redictably, the film winds up with 1 Lila and Steve facing off in a comedy contest...
...most of the films themselves were far from art, but at least they honored art and recognized it as a moral force, as something in which truth and beauty inhered, as a separate and serious entity...
...We're plainly supposed to think so, too...
...worlds—with marvelous naturalness...
...Isabelle finds the matchmaking py, literate girl should marry this young Jewish man, Sandler has im- Dossing Delancey is a delightful film process embarrassing and prehistoric, fellow?—and by the end, to your con- agined someone who, if his kind ac- fresh and affecting and lovely...
...this one Dutch because the Netherlands is right ingless without a husband: "No mat- on...
...it's supposed to Make Us Think...
...So Lila starts telling jokes about her family and becomes a socko comedienne—easy as that...
...When a TV talent scout expresses interest, Steve says, "If you're sending someone down you'd better send him fast, because funny Steve is goin' down...
...the film is half an hour longer than it should be, and is full of slack, dramatically unfocused sequences...
...Steve's reply: "Lady, nothing's a joke to me...
...You think it defines to take the credit...
...Wasn't it Thucydides who observed that a society enters upon an inexorable process of decline once it begins to take stand-up comedy seriously...
...glamorous but more truly substantial York: grabbing dinner with girlfriends me?'?—that should have gone unspoBut her old Jewish grandmother— of two men...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988...
...Now Silver has moved ahead a few generations and up a few blocks, has found herself another small, delicately pretty actress with frizzy hair, and has come up with Crossing Delancey, an extremely charming contemporary romantic drama starring Amy Irving...
...For he believes she's naturally funny—and while he'll lie to a woman about a lot of things, he wouldn't lie about that sacred subject: "I don't mess around with funny...
...Indeed, she gets in hot water with her hubby (John Goodman) by spending the family vacation money on Polish jokes...
...it makes Sam sound less like a her "Bubby," to use the movie's same route in Sabrina, Katharine Hep- coffee in a diner, haunting the take-out Lower East Side pickle merchant than, Yiddishism—isn't having any of it...
...She is, in short, the He's attracted to her, and she gradual- for all her little lies and self-deceptions, sometimes comes across as downright very model of a sophisticated and ly finds herself being attracted to him...
...Instead of identifying parts of the large intestine, he entertains his examiners with "poop-chute" jokes...
...With after work...
...I've complained previously As for the Dutch novelist, one gets gloomy Lower East Side high-rise, feels this sort of movie, one invariably has about how few films manage to capture the feeling that Sandler made him that Isabelle's life is empty and mean- the conclusion figured out pretty early the feel of life in Manhattan...
...Is everything a joke to you...
...This is Seltzer's idea of a profound line...
...nally, while the musical score is mostly en, Hannah introduces Isabelle to Sam seems, in the early scenes, like the quite serviceable, there are times when Posner (Peter Riegert), an unprepos- height of absurdity, and by the end the fast, loud, and aggressively rhythmic sessing young man who lives in the old seems wonderfully right...
...burn in The Philadelphia Story, Jean salad bar at the Korean delicatessen well, a Dutch novelist...
...Hubby doesn't understand why she's wasting her evenings at this seedy comedy club for $15 a night...
...Peter Riegert's Sam, like most about your writing," she tells But the stolid, no-nonsense pickle her sense of being caught between two moreover, is so down-to-earth and the suave, hunky Anton, "is its decep- man doesn't disappear from her life...
...It is the literary people _look and talk and feel, deep down: What's this nice Jew-vulgar old matchmaker right out of ultimate measure of the success of this behave, this one does a pretty good job ish girl doing falling for this Nazi...
...I live uptown," she There are, as it happens, a lot of least successful Jewish guy in New a celebrated Dutch novelist who lives tells him patronizingly...
...Written by Susan Sandler (who based the script on her play of the same title), the film is about Isabelle Grossman, a single young...
...Later, Lila asks the same thing...
...Tell bookstore for several weeks...
...Throughout the movie, the jokes are standard eighties stand-up fare: formula gags about genitals and breasts and vibrators, pointless references to baby-boomer pop-culture icons (e.g., "Gilligan's Island"), faux-confessional stuff about the comic's sexless marriage or crummy dates or screwy folks...
...She has a particular fond- and finds the pickle merchant himself siderable surprise, you are convinced...
...I love being a wife...
...instead of feeling sympathy for Steve, we feel embarrassed for the scriptwriter...
...All this is by way of getting around to Punchline, which was written and directed by David Seltzer, and which is just as awful as it looks in the ads...
...Watching this film, it's hard to believe that once upon a time Hollywood movies customarily made heroes of people like Zola, Chopin, and Michelangelo...
...And seriousness is very much the point here...
...What I sake...
...We're supposed to identify with the feelings of the talent scout when she watches Steve's act with a reverential awe, as if he's Joan Sutherland_ or Caruso...
...And I love being able to make people laugh...
...in the opening sequence, he's kicked out for failing a junior-high-school-level oral exam in anatomy...
...We're supposed to buy the idea that Lila "finds herself" through schtick, that Steve is a tormented.genius—Nijinsky as standup comic...
...Except that she doesn't really tell jokes about her family: the supposedly good and original material she does at the end of the movie is in fact as bad and contrived as the stuff she does at the beginning...
...B ack in 1974, the director Joan Micklin Silver gave us a movie called Hester Street, in which a young Jewish immigrant woman—played by Carol Kane—made a life for herself on the Lower East Side of early twentieth-century Manhattan...
...Even Hanks's best lines, in his climactic routine, sound familiar...
...She captures Isabelle's confusion— • me another...
...Isabelle loves her job, loves the readings and book parties and literary soirees that go with it, loves meeting the famous writers who show up in the store from THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 39 time to time...
...It's a very weird scene, bathetic and overplayed and unconvincingly motivated...
...certainly Lila seems never to have heard it before...
Vol. 21 • December 1988 • No. 12
