Fraud (11 page)

There was a time when comics like him were less of a mainstream rarity. By today’s standards he is a little dark, a little highbrow: in a word, “downtown.” Memories of an age when a Maron could be a prime-time star come flooding back at the Smothers Brothers tribute. All the major tributes take place in the Red Brick Community Center auditorium. Perhaps the discomfort of the plastic folding chairs has been contrived as a means of reinforcing the flesh-mortifying seriousness of learning and academic rigor of these important evenings. The floor is sodden from everyone’s wet boots, there is no room for coats, and the prime center aisle of seats has been reserved for industry people.

Bill Maher moderates a discussion with Tom and Dick and three of the writers from their show, Steve Martin, Mason Williams, and the offputtingly loquacious and combative Bob Einstein (a.k.a. Super Dave Osborne, a.k.a. the real-life brother of Albert Brooks).

It’s a fractious and gemütlich reunion. The brothers and their writers talk over one another, finish each other’s sentences, bicker, and reminisce in the noisy manner of people who have known each other forever. During a brief and rare moment of silence, the preternaturally mild Dick says almost mournfully, “This is just like a lot of forums I see on television, that nobody ever finishes a thought.” Everyone in the audience laughs at this unwitting slam of Maher’s own show,
Politically Incorrect,
which is more often than not a cacophonous free-for-all screaming match between celebrity dunderheads.

Even in real life, it seems, straight man Dick Smothers doesn’t get the good lines. It’s quite clear that Tom, despite his having played the dim brother, was the driving force behind the act as well as the television show. Whatever talk there is of the risks taken, censors faced down, writers protected, and so on, it is always spoken of as having been by Tom’s agency. Even the years seem to have been kinder to Tom. It might just be a healthy après-ski glow, but Tom, always a pleasant enough looking fellow, has become in his late middle age what can only be described as beautiful. His skin has been burnished, his bone structure tuned up by a team of German engineers, accented at the corners of his eyes and sides of his mouth with a tracery of fine golden pleats.

Dick looks fine.

The years fall away from both of them when the lights go down and the footage of
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
starts to play. I’m a sucker for funny agitprop, and it’s hard not to get nostalgic watching clips of the boys in their twenties take on race, drugs, Vietnam, and censorship with such unself-conscious temerity. It still seems fairly groundbreaking and risky even by today’s supposedly wiser, hipper standards. Tom, officiating a wedding between a black man and a white woman, pronounces them man and wife and then, looking off camera, says, “The rope, please.” A montage of the late Pat Paulsen’s repeated presidential bids, played poker straight, shows him getting off the campaign plane in different states, professing to feel as if he’s finally home while maligning the state from which he’s just come. It could be news footage from the recent election. This was all so subversive back in
1969
that the boys were fired from their own show by no less a power than Richard Nixon via Bill Paley. Tom laments the near total lack of prime-time political satire on television today. There is the collective regret up on stage that television is no longer a medium for ideas. “It’s not even a medium for entertainment,” adds moderator Bill Maher in an insight bizarrely lacking in self-awareness. “It’s an advertising medium that inadvertently presents some entertainment once in a while.” This isn’t entirely true, thankfully. For clever political satire, we still have Jon Stewart, possibly the great wit of his generation.

Stewart aside, however, Smothers and Maher are largely correct. Where the more gimlet-eyed humor of the past was meant to galvanize us to action, comedy in these more solipsistic times is designed as therapy. Laughter, we are told, is good for us, a means of social redress. Behold Sturges’s monsters. As Sturges described it, humor was a kind of noble salve to our national malaise. But this is a very different America from that of
Sullivan’s Travels,
when the widespread destitution of the Depression was still fresh in the minds of a nation at war. One wonders what exactly the national malaise might be in this, the longest economic boom in history. If anything, it’s a personal and baronial one, like gout. In our extreme comfort, laughter is something we use not to escape circumstance, but to create circumstance, something to wake us up out of our privileged torpor, to make us feel we’ve done something good just by showing up. Think no further (if you can remotely stomach it) than Roberto Benigni and his Holocaust romp,
Life Is Beautiful,
the most loathsome example of a belief in the curative powers of levity: his recasting as fable the chilling efficiency of the Nazi killing machine; his rendering of a death camp as a budget resort low on blankets; but above all the vile disrespect evidenced by the film’s equation that those who perished were, I suppose, just not funny enough to turn those frowns upside down and survive. . . . Well, I just can’t say enough bad things about him. Even his buffoonish appearance at the Academy Awards, where he didn’t even have the decency to throw a bone to the millions who died in order to give him such great material by calling for that shameless yet requisite moment of silence: a vile, vile, morally reprehensible, shitty film! One wonders how Benigni might make some of the twentieth century’s other geopolitical tragedies more palatable:
A Fish Called Rwanda; The Stop-It-You’re-Killing-Me Fields; To Serb with Love,
perhaps?

It’s not as if we haven’t given our beloved comedy stars precisely such license. Those who take on the comic-as-social-worker mantle seem to do so only after achieving a certain amount of acclaim. It is an affliction that strikes the overly adored and hyperaccoladed. Much like you-know-who. Four days and counting until his gala evening.

In the meantime, for Benigni-esque messianism, admittedly on a smaller scale, there is always Dan Castellaneta’s execrable one-man show,
Where Did Vincent Van Gogh?
I go in a fan; Homer Simpson is a character of complete genius with which any actor could justify an entire life’s work. I am not alone, either; this is an audience of Castellaneta fans, including
Simpsons
creator Matt Groening. As with most audiences when there is a live celebrity on stage, our laughter is performative, disproportionate, and noncontextual: a semaphoric ass kiss across the footlights. Here we are, famous person! We get you!

Where Did Vincent Van Gogh?
is an ethereal and sanctimonious snooze involving an alien, played by Castellaneta, sent on a Diogenes-like quest to find seven noble characters, each of whom he morphs into by fritzing and popping like a television changing channels. We’ve seen them all before: the snotty waiter, the gay drag performer, the Indian cabdriver, a bit as a ventriloquist’s dummy meditating on who’s actually the dummy and who’s controlling who (get it?), Sister Wendy Beckett as a randy nun desperate for ravishing defrockment at the painted hands of a naked Tintoretto saint, and so on. In an Icarus-like moment of hubris, Castellaneta says, “I don’t do characters, they do me.” Wrong both times.

The nebulous, New Age-y notion of the show is that all these sterling souls are being gathered to restore our faith in some unnamed thing (presumably not one-person theater). It’s a bad sign when I start counting the unused props on stage. Only two wigs, one stool, an easel, and a dropcloth to go. I begin to pray to an unfeeling God to please make Castellaneta multitask. The damnably overdue conclusion, a we-are-all-one-and-you-are-me-and-I-am-the-alien bit of jetsam, is vacuity dressed up as depth. If I were sixteen and stoned, my world would be rocked. (Ecstatically, I am no longer either.) Castellaneta takes his curtain call with the earnest face and noble purpose of one who has been called to Teach.

Still, he is Homer Simpson, and stardom will out. “It’s just so great to be able to be made to laugh again,” says a woman outside the theater, her hand against her chest. Her voice is suffused with the relief of a patient whose fever has just broken or whose boil has been lanced.

I roll my eyes in “get her” disgust at an acquaintance I met my first time here. “Weren’t
you
thinking of doing a one-man show?” he says to me.

“Oh, no. I’m a writer now,” I protest, hammering my index fingers up and down in make-believe hunt-and-peck.

Trying to lance my own boil of rancor, I decide to go with the Aspen flow by swimming in the outdoor superheated lap pool at my hotel. It snows huge flakes, the accumulation of which has greatly improved the dun-colored mountain dotted with celebrity megahomes facing me. Now, turning white, I begin to understand a little bit better the attraction of such a place as this. But there is no oxygen here, and after four laps I am wheezing like a midcoital Nelson Rockefeller. Fed up with the salubrious “Smell that air!” heartiness of the place, I opt instead for taking up smoking again, having kicked my two-pack-a-day habit some eight years previously.

Better even than tobacco, however, is that evening’s tribute to Nichols and May. Mike Nichols, while largely unchanged, was always a bit soft, but Elaine May remains the beauty she was, looking startlingly good and trim in cigarette pants and a tight silver-white shirt. They are greeted with thunderous applause when Steve Martin introduces them at the Red Brick. May’s microphone isn’t working, and Nichols and Martin look on in amusement as a young technician comes out and fumbles with her chest. Looking up at him, sloe-eyed and mock nervous, she says, her voice vaguely suggestive, “I don’t know who you are, but . . .”

Like the Smothers Brothers evening, we are treated to clips of their classic material. Even after decades—many of the routines are older than I am—it all looks newly minted. A phone conversation between a Jewish mother and her infantilized son is the Platonic ideal of what, in other hands, has become a cultural cliché. Its nuance, interaction, and depth of character haven’t been improved upon since.

Aspen is crawling with comic celebrities, but it can be safely said that Nichols and May are the only people at the festival who actually effected a paradigm shift in the culture. As charter members while at the University of Chicago of the Compass, which later became the Second City, they invented improvisational comedy. Talk about honoring perspective in painting; everyone working in comedy today is indebted to this innovation (including, almost especially, what’s-his-name. T minus two days). Nichols and May are almost dismissive of their contribution, portraying themselves as nothing more than two smart-ass undergraduates, the logical product of place and time.

“The thing about the University of Chicago,” says Nichols, “is that it was the most referential place I think that I’ve ever been in. You could say Dostoyevsky and get a big laugh.”

“We started doing scenes in a bar. So everybody else in the bar was drunk and from the University of Chicago,” says May, shrugging. “We just did what they did.”

There’s nothing false about these twin displays of modesty. The two aren’t even overly invested in talking about themselves. Nichols simply up and ambushes the proceedings about halfway through the evening. Turning to us conspiratorially, he produces a copy of a speech given by Martin some weeks prior at the American Comedy Awards in Los Angeles, which he proceeds to read aloud, while May kills herself laughing and Martin curls in on himself, a thrilled and embarrassed cocktail shrimp.

“When I was told I had won this award, I spent the next three weeks trying to, well, care. As I look into the audience, I see familiar faces. Some unfamiliar. . . . Many I may meet and then forget that I met. . . . Some I will not meet, think I have, and say, ‘Haven’t we met?’ Some of you are wearing lacy white cotton panties. Some of you are in boxer shorts. But we’re here because of a common love: me.”

It is brilliant vintage Martin, with its skewering of self-importance and oh-little-me unctuousness. Its underlying indictment of awards shows and self-complacent festivals like the USCAF itself is largely lost on the audience. Wresting control of the evening once more, Martin asks Nichols to explain what he meant when he said, many years previously, “A laugh is like an orgasm.”

Nichols is not entirely sure. “I think I may have meant that, like an orgasm, a laugh has no politics,” he says. “You know we’re all being beaten to death with correctness, so I’m obsessed with correctness and the harm it’s done.” This last statement garners spontaneous applause. “I don’t know . . . I’m not talking about cruelty . . . because that’s not funny. But if something is really funny, then it’s sort of cleansed itself. . . . If it seems funny to you, then by and large, it’s okay.”

I bridle a bit at this professed standard of objectivity because, fan though I may be, Nichols directed and May wrote
The Birdcage,
a retrograde, hateful, and archaic film in which, it must be said, both the laughs and the orgasms have politics. It is that mutual exclusivity Nichols posits between funny and cruel—that if something is funny, then it necessarily follows that it becomes intrinsically good—that just doesn’t hold water for me. Vitriol does not reflexively turn to nectar when it’s funny. If that were true, everyone would win the clean mouth award, heaven help us. Didn’t Nichols see
South Park?
Proof that a funny, cruel joke can stay beautifully and brilliantly both.

What seems to distinguish a lot of the cruelty of today—from the Farrelly Brothers to the egalitarian humiliations of
American Pie
—is its winking acknowledgment of the politics it is flouting. Nowhere is this veneer of knowing recuperation more apparent than when Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel, co-hosts of
The Man Show,
take the stage at the festival’s
Advertising Age
magazine award for the funniest commercial of
1999
. Carolla and Kimmel are the It Boys of the postpolitical. Their program with its beer-and-babes aesthetic has made loutishness hip once again, only this time for a generation barely into its twenties. The demographic in the room is decidedly young and evenly divided among men and women. I have landed in MTV’s Winter Break. I can feel my ever more visible scalp prickling with age.