Media
McConnell, Frank
PERFECT FOOLS LENNY, GEORGE, RICHARD & FRANK I've always wanted to write a short story with the title "Inside Room 101." Remember Orwell's 1984, when Big Brother's guys have caught Winston Smith...
...Any Niggers here tonight...
...FRANK McCONNELL...
...But, after decades of the elegantly irrelevant Benny and the contemptibly chauvinistic Hope, Lenny left his mark...
...And we need that...
...I want to urge upon you the raw terror of doing standup, among other reasons so that you'll never again, if you catch a bad comic or even a good comic on an off-night, have anything but the most profound and painful empathy for him/her...
...And you think, fervently, "Jesus, take me now...
...We need a member of the tribe to take the risk, for which we will reward him richly, not just of describing the void inside us—that is mere satire—but of being that void, acting it out so that we can't help but watch and see it in ourselves...
...And you finish, drenched and impotent, but still smiling, and tell them what a great audience they've been and strut off, thinking about the bottle you're going to buy...
...A musician can screw up the chord changes and get hopelessly lost...
...Jazz players have "fake books": collections of phrases and whole choruses that can fit into any solo when inspiration fails...
...And there are the HBO comedy specials, and there's the Comedy Network, and like that...
...You are the gig, and the pacing and the subject and the delivery are all yours to play out, and—here comes the bad part—if you don't get the spontaneous blessing of laughter from The House at least every two minutes, then, old sport, You...
...A dancer can fall on his butt...
...Okay, they don't think of it that way: what they want is a gig on Arsenio or Letterman or a speaking part in the next Police Academy...
...He was, and remains, everything that spotlights the full malice of the Pat Buchanans of our republic...
...A&E's "Evening at the Improv," especially, features, every time out, four or five young comics, ranging all the way from the brilliant to the dire...
...As the America of George Bush and his paymasters grows more and more repressive, puritanical, and odor-iferously "value-oriented," these kids (and most of them are kids) take the stage night after night to keep the shaman's cleansing flame alight...
...And as anyone who has read Enid Wellsford's great book of sixty years ago, The Fool, will understand, that is a rank of officially sanctioned chaos...
...Failed...
...Christ, that has to work...
...you ask...
...And you start to sweat, because you've got to finish your ten or twenty minutes, and you know The House can see you sweating...
...And it was scary when he did it in 1965 and it's scary now...
...Remember Orwell's 1984, when Big Brother's guys have caught Winston Smith and they're about to sear his brain by taking him into Room 101, and Winston asks what's in Room 101, and they tell him, everybody knows what's in Room 101, what's in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world...
...somebody will keep up the dialogue: there's somewhere, for God's sake, to go...
...And it's great...
...Nothing...
...And comics have "schtick": verbal fakes, routines, and business to fill the holes in a not-going-well set...
...The point of Lenny's bit was to take all the names we hurt one another with—nigger, spick, kike, wop, mick, etc.—and weave them into the dark fugue of cruelty that is the hidden theme song of at least half our kinder, gentler nation...
...Well, / know what's in Room 101...
...But the two arts tug in opposite—primordially opposite— directions...
...You could, already, just walk onto the freeway...
...So you reach back into memory for the dirty stuff, but even your queer jokes don't get enough of a rise (omigod, are some of these guys gay...
...That's okay...
...and in the older games, he was the universal trump, overturning, in any suit, the hierarchy of Ace (God), King, Queen, and Jack (Prince): a laughing Grendel, the sublime gatecrasher: Groucho...
...No standup comic— and, I'd argue seriously, no American novelist—since his prime in the sixties has been able fully to step out from under his angry, hilarious, manic shadow...
...It is the lineage of the Court Fool...
...The simple answer is that it isn't always like the nightmare I've described, and when it isn't, when everything is working, when you've got them and they're laughing with Commonweal you, wanting you to be even funnier—and laughter is a blessing, a shared holy thing—the updraft, the grace, okay, the rush, is like nothing else you will ever know...
...Standup as we know it is actually a young art—no older than jazz...
...Look...
...the band keeps playing...
...A jazz solo begins in "chaos"—departure from the standard theme—and moves, in its own self-consistency, toward a reestablished and better order...
...Not many comics since him—maybe, sometimes, George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy—have gone as far or as self-destructively as Lenny Bruce did toward making themselves into the Perfect Fool—that's the Fool who just might not be able to come back from his incarnation of disorder...
...As the shaman, the holy madman of archaic religion, as the slave who whispered in the ear of Roman generals in their triumphs, "Remember: you too will die," or as the mocking and reaffirming truth-tellers of Shakespearean comedy and of the unapproachable King Lear, the Fool's sacred function has always been to be a carrier of chaos: the incarnation of the disorderly—hence the fool's motley, Robin Williams's baggy pants, Richard Pry or's crimson suit—that reminds us on what a razor's edge our civilized order is balanced...
...It's doing standup comedy...
...The great genius of the Marx Brothers, in fact, was to take the lunatic, near anarchic spontaneity of the "club act" and translate it back into the older, stodgier world of the Broadway play...
...Levi-Strauss, in Structural Anthropology, tells about the tribal skeptic who learned all the tricks of psychic healing from the shaman in order to debunk him and then, because he saw that the tricks worked to help people, became a shaman himself: that's standup...
...But the dance goes on...
...Not with standup...
...The classic Fool still survives as the Joker in every deck of cards...
...So you get grosser: something's got to work, you don't care how vile you are, they have to laugh, damn them...
...And how about Dan Quayle...
...and mainly they want not to die on stage...
...A standup act begins with the "normal"—"Hey, I was in K-Mart this morning"—and coasts as dangerously close as it can come to the complete inversion of the norm, flirting with the very entropic abyss the music keeps exorcising...
...That's the beginning of one of the most famous routines of Lenny Bruce—who is to standup what the charismatic Charlie Parker is to standup's Apollonian twin, jazz...
...Or, maybe more to the point, why would anybody subject himself to this level of risk...
...Have...
...And, as with jazz performance, a lot less is really spontaneous than you want to think...
...But they're in the tradition...
...Of course, it's also showbiz: not all standups burn with the shamanic flame, by a long chalk...
...It was in the 1910s, when New York impresarios (i.e., machers) got the idea of importing the European model of the "cabaret"—a dining and drinking place with a small and intimate stage or no stage at all—that the half-improvised comic monologue with frequent audience interplay became possible...
...Why do you think they call it "dying on stage...
...Thanks to the cable revolution, you can now catch standup comedy in the comfort of your home virtually any night of the week...
...Politics...
...Not even a giggle, waiting for the payoff...
...Only by laughter," said Rabelais, "will the world be saved...
...An actress can blow her line...
...It's the illusion—cancel that, the myth—of improv, of the un-prepro-grammed, that sustains us...
...The Prophets Jonah and Jeremiah hold union cards here, too...
...There's you, and that's all there is...
...They're not The House anymore, they're The Beast, they're what's in Room 101, and they' re feasting on the carcass of your ego, and you hope they all die in horrible pain...
...But, from Bert Lahr and Ed Wynn through Bob Hope and Jack Benny to Robin Williams and Bob "The Bobcat" Goldthwaite, the art has a secret, hierophantic lineage...
...The more complicated answer is—more complicated...
Vol. 119 • October 1992 • No. 18
