The Goode Family

The show's got a good start. Mike Judge has a really keen eye for all of the little indignities and petty intimidations of mid-level, white collar life, and addressing it to a family trying to be as ecologically moral within their limited means offers some promise. Most of the jokes were spot-on: I really liked the sequence in the supermarket, with expensive degrees of locally-farmed pesticide-free organic produce, and the electronic board showing the decimation of the rain forest in real time. 

Downsides were few. The son, an overweight blond 16 year old of limited vocal skills, reminded me too much of Chris from _Family Guy_, and the daughter's not too different from the daughter of _American Dad_. The vegetarian dog joke's as old as tofu, but decently done here, and there was only one joke that just clunked on the floor: the housewife fretting "WWAGD-- What Would Al Gore Do?" The canvas shopping bag labelled "An Inconvenient Bag" was better. 

I liked the more subtle, pointed moments. For example, the fact that the Goodes are hovering just above lower-middle-class existence, and their lifestyle choices force them beyond their means. And that they make the choices on the basis of public appearances and guilt and intimidation from their equally-proper neighbors. Or, one neighbor at the checkout lane reminding Mrs. Goode that Mr. Goode works _for_ her husband, not _with_; that's a joke that's a little more incisive than simply making fun of the oddballs. 

Fans of the show ought to go look up a book that I'm certain _none_ of you have ever read. Cyra McFadden's 1977 novel _The Serial_ told a year-long story of Kate and Harvey, two residents of Marin County during the growth of what was the "human potential" movement, where yoga, est, Reiki, body integration, TM, rebirthing and the like were exploding in the upper-middle-class regions around Esalen, and combining with a fuzzy-minded fascination with alternate cultures and one's own spiritual growth. McFadden's voice was a Sahara-dry approximation of Marin-speak. 

The only online excerpts of _The Serial_ I was able to find were on a blogsite (http://draust.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/marin-ated-in-woo/). Here, a kid named Che is sent to a summer camp run by Marinites:

“When [Che]… broke out into a rash, envisioning himself brought to a rolling boil in the hot tub, his Surrogate Parent for the session made him drink a lot of lemon-grass tea. “Listen, Che,” said [his surrogate parent], “you’ve just made a conscious decision. You’re the one that decides to get sick or stay healthy. Listen, you want your body to call the shots?”

Che just wanted the camp to call [his mother] and tell her he’d forgotten his cortisone ointment. Maybe she’d come and bring it to him and he could hide out in the trunk of the Rover. Otherwise he was in for two more weeks of unstructured freedom that stopped short of “pharmaceuticals”…

Glumly, he consulted the bulletin board, listing the afternoon’s activities, posted outside the communal yurt: belly dancing, spear fishing and herbal medicine. Che didn’t know what herbal medicine was but suspected lemon-grass tea was part of it.”

Note that the kid in this 1977 book, and the dog in _The Goode Family_, are both named Che by their owners. Which makes me wonder why _The Serial_ isn't as well-known as it should be. It's a bit of a period piece, but the period and place has expanded to the rest of the country, and it's not difficult to read 1970s fads and substitute more modern ones. (Okay, they _did_ make a bad movie of the book, written by mid-1970s sitcom veterans, offering us the spectacle of Christopher Lee as the leader of a gay biker gang. That'd kill a good book.) 

So, if you're in a good used book store, look under McF for _The Serial_ and enjoy. And if not, let's see how Mike Judge works what's still a pretty fertile field.

Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I usually like Ron Rosenbaum's essays. His column at the New York Observer was called "The Edgy Enthusiast" for a good reason; I like his energy, and his willingness to pursue a subject into some rare and odd realms. He's able to do a piece on, say, Yale's Skull and Bones society, speculate on what its odd legend does to the members who eventually run a lot of the country, and avoid falling into conspiracy-theory bullshit. He seems to enjoy writing about _other_ enthusiasts, and two of his books, _Explaining Hitler_ and _The Shakespeare Wars_, are more about the history of scholarship about those men. (He's also been instrmental in getting Dimitri Nabokov to publish the index cards containing his father Vladimir's notes for his last novel.) 

He's got a piece at _Slate_ discussing what he sees as a new wave of "nuke porn," novels and stories about nuclear war and its aftermath. "The new nuke porn is hard-core, more graphic and full-frontal than the Cold War version of the genre. Instead of the anticipatory excitement (Fail-Safe, Strangelove) or the post-coital tristesse (On the Beach) of First Era nuke porn, we get real-time blast-burns and melting flesh. There was always an erotic component to apocalyptic literature—those end-of-the-world sects were notorious for their doom-fueled orgiastic behavior—but I always wondered why most nuke porn was about looking forward to the approaching act or looking back on its consummation but rarely about looking directly at it..."

Later on, ther's a comment about post-apock cannibalism, which Rosenbaum sees as a particular aspect of new nuke-porn, as in Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_ and William Fortschen's _One Second After:

"One of the things they come upon—and you know it's coming and dread its coming; there's almost a kind of pornographic buildup to this unbearable money shot—is an act of cannibalism so horrific I refuse to describe it further. [...] But then two years later, cannibalism showed up again in [One Second After], and it occurred to me that cannibalism may be a unifying theme of the new nuke porn. Like The Road, One Second After envisions the time after a blast, though by contrast it offers a "happy" ending. (Only 80 percent of the residents in the post-nuclear community he focuses on die.) [...] In this case, the crippled government's failure to secure the food supply in a post-EMP situation results in a descent into savagery by many across the ravaged countryside, and despite the attempts of ordinary folk to do the right thing for the sake of the whole, the peaceful home-folks are menaced by a rampaging mob that kills and eats all humans in its path. 

Why cannibalism here and in McCarthy? I think it has something to do with self-consumption: We did this to ourselves. Our appetite for power is what caused us to create the equations for the nuclear weapons that will consume us. We consumed ourselves."

I think Rosenbaum misses a few things in favor of continuing a "literary" association of fiery nuclear death, porn, "money shots," and the "poetic" interpretation of "we consumed ourselves." Not that these are wrong, or are misleading. It's just that I come away with other ideas. 

I've said this before, but I've always seen apocalypse and post-apocalypse stories as a kind of wish-fulfillment. Nobody reads these things and thinks that they're going to be one of the people who _die_; we read them because we want to see a lot of our everyday bullshit swept away, so we can have lives of adventure while still getting to use all the stuff we have right now: cars, buildings, weapons, and all the rest. Every decision we make will be _important_ in the way that our current everyday decisions _aren't_, and of course, we want to think of ourselves as competent, capable, intelligent, skilled campers. Or in post-Rapture religious novels, as participants in the biggest morality play of all time. Or in survivalist fiction, as ultraviolent badasses who don't struggle with that "morality" stuff. 

You could probably create a revealing psychological taxonomy with apocalypse fiction. _On the Beach_ seemed to appeal to Puritans who felt that self-flagellation over collective guilt was only right and just. Stephen King once said that _The Stand_ was like _Lord of the Rings_ in an American setting, and he's right, but he had to wipe out 99.9% of the world to create that particular crusade. The Zombie Apocalypse is pretty self-aware of itself; George Romero's _Dawn of the Dead_ played the thirst for adventure for laughs, and it was pretty overt in showing how its characters got off on _owning a mall_. 

Okay, cannibalism. It's been a marker of primitiveness (all those cartoons of boiled missionaries, the scummy rednecks of _The Texas Chainsaw Massacre_) and of extreme deprivation under horrible circumstances (the Donner Party and the Franklin Expedition in Dan Simmons' _The Terror_), or as an easy satire on conquest, or power, savagery under a facade, or just not being a vegetarian (_Ravenous_, _Parents_). The pseudo-cleverness of "consuming ourselves" is nice, but really, it's mainly the marker for how much civilization has been wiped away, and how desperate people are to survive. That's pretty much how McCarthy uses it in _The Road_, which can be read as a "cautionary tale," as a bleak existentialist tragedy, or as an adventure novel. 

On the other hand, Fortschen (who's collaborated with Newt Gingrich on a novel or two) comes out of the Jerry Pournelle/Tom Clancy school, which are "cautionary tales" only in the sense that they're encouraging us to want it all to happen. So he's going to be focused not only on the nuts and bolts, but the prestressed concrete, the cell-phone scramble algorithms, the technological capabilities of particular terrorist groups, their internal structures, interrogation techniques, the phenomenal training of elite military units, tough guys joking about rag-heads and how liberals can't run civilization... and this is where we get those interesting mixes of technological expertise mixed with fantasy xenophobia. Yes, Tom Clancy really did name a character "Ali bin Sheik," and Pournelle's _Lucifer's Hammer_ has black soldiers embracing cannibalism within a few months of a few comet strikes. Maybe ethnology's a tougher subject than engineering for some people. 

(And being _eaten_ is one of those fears that hits certain unique buttons about one's ego. It's not just a fear of dying or even if violent death: being reduced to food negates everything _else_ about you. I mean, here you are, an intelligent, educated person, you care about your family, you've got this neat skill-set and a career and you want to _matter_ to people... isn't it more than bleak to wind up as, basically, _food_ for something else? If we're going to imagine someone who treats us like cattle, who consumes us literally or metaphorically, we don't want to think it'll be grubby inbred rural fuckwits, or grubby vulgar rich people of the Leona Helmsley sort. If we're going to be consumed, it had better be by someone with all the "superior" signifiers, like glamour and court intrigue and supernatural intelligence and refinement and nobility and good taste in wines. Like vampires, a guild of lycanthropes, or Hannibal Lecter-- you know, verifiably superior Apex Predators. So we don't look like _easy_ prey.)

So while Rosenbaum sees these themes as something new, I really don't; they've always been there, and maybe they're getting more emphasis these days.

Why Dane Cook is a bad comedian

There's a consensus that Dane Cook just isn't a funny comedian, which is belied by the fact that he sells out stadiums to crowds who cheer wildly at nearly every sentence that comes out of his mouth. There aren't many comics who can fill a big hall like that: last one I recall was Steve Martin's mid-70's period, and Richard Pryor in his prime. And the guy works his Internet fan base really, really well, and I'll give him credit for that.

But he just is't very funny, and since you all know me, then you know what's next-- several paragraphs working out _why_ I don't think he's funny. 

First of all, the guy directing this show is a moron-- he cuts between camera angles every half-sentence. And when the camera angles aren't very different, the whole thing is jittery and clippy, as though a film had been sliced into foot-long segments and tapes back together. 

I'll focus on two routines Dane Cook did in the show I'm watching. And yeah, my paraphrases aren;t going to try to capture his performance, which involves a lot of arm-waving and gesticulating. One was a riff on Oprah Winfrey, who's not exactly unplowed comic territory. He says there are two kinds of Oprah shows. The first is the happy show, where she gives away things, "Everybody gets a _school_!" You get a school! You get a school!" The second is the serious one about pedophiles. 

Now, in this routine, Cook had a couple of lines that could have been funny. Parodying Oprah's gifts can be done neatly by having her give out almost surreal gifts, like schools. Good choice on Cook's part. As for the Oprah-pedophile show, he had a line about being diddled by your uncle in a closet, and how you'd focus on the board games on the shelves which _commented on the situation_, like "Sorry!" and "Risk" and "Candyland." 

These are actually good lines, and could be very, very funny... but Cook's delivery is _awful_. He spouts them off quickly and frenetically, when he could have gotten a lot of mileage out of a slower, calibrated, properly _timed_ delivery. And you have to wonder; since everyone understands that standup comedy requires careful delivery and timing, why doesn't Cook work on this even with good material? I think I know, but I'll use another example to lead up to it.

Cook also did a routine about those late-night commercials showing starving children in some African shithole. He mentioned the Burl Ivesish fellow who steps in and pleads for fifteen cents a day to send these kids to Oxford. And he suggests that, maybe, they should get as a spokeman some tough-looking biker who yells at the viewer, "What is wrong with you? Fifteen cents a day? Get two friends with nickels!" Etc., etc. 

Okay, so Cook tends to go for easy, well-worn targets; faithless girlfriends, late-night commercials, Oprah's gifts. But this routine _begs_ for a comparison with the late Sam Kinison's routine, one version of which is below.



In case you can't see or play the video, Kinison's routine is _really_ aggressive: he demands to know why starving people don't _move to where the food is_. In the version on one of his alvbums, he pantomines yanking a starving African over to look at the ground. "See this?" he says, in a patronizing, angry voice. "This is _sand_. You know nothing can _grow_ in this shit? nothing's GONNA grow here. You live in a FUCKING DESERT." And it's one of the funniest routines I've _ever_ heard. 

And heres where I think Dane Cook might never become a good comedian. He projects himself, and perhaps _needs_ to project himself, as a _nice, normal guy_. One who makes the occasional sick joke, or who plays a bit of a goofus, or capable of doing something craven to his girlfriend, but he'll _never_ do a joke that puts him in the position of possibly being a really awful human being. With Kinison, you _embraced_ the chance to laugh at some genuinely _awful_ thoughts; he came at you without any fear of what you'd think, batter down any moralism you had, and have you laughing at things you knew you _should_ be shocked at. 

And if a comedian has to say something awful or evil or offensive for a joke, he _shouldn't care_ if people thought less of them. Take Bill Hicks, who had the following opener: "Speaking of Satan, I was listening ro Rush Limbaugh the other day.... Doesn't Rush Limbaugh remind you of one of those gay guys who likes to sit in a tub and have other men pee on him?" WONDERFUL line. Hilarious, shocking, offensive, _accurate_, and nastier than anything the Oxycontin King could come up with. And Hicks simply didn't _care_ if you thought it was homophobic or disgusting. It was _funny_. Comedy is NOT about being _nice_.

And it's not just being a _nice_ guy, but a nice _normal_ guy. The better standups-- Pryor, Tomlin, Carlin, and others-- have _not_ come from the mainstream culture. Pryor came from shitty Peoria, Carlin was an Irish street kid and hippie, Tomlin was an intelligent woman. You watch people like Mitch Hedberg or David Cross, and you know that they're just not like most of the thuds you deal with in the office cube farm every day. Hedberg had a wonderfully surreal imagination, and Cross is a fiercely intelligent crank. (He's brilliant, by the way.) I hate to resort to glib terms like "outsiders," but comics have always worked best as an "outsider" of some sort or another. Comedy is also NOT about being _normal_. 

Dane Cook's stage presence, his dress, jokes, mannerisms, delivery, persona in movie comedies-- are all pretty much that of a fairly average twentysomething. And his audience likes him because he's, well, just like one of them, and like a lot of people they know. This alone doesn't make him a bad comedian-- Seth Rogen plays average guys too, and he's fine-- but Dane Cook's way with a joke indicates that he does _not_ want to risk having people _dislike_ him. Which is sort of a guarantee that he could have the biggest crowds a comoedian's ever had, and still never become better than the mediocre comic he is now.