The Comic Event: Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present 9781501335723, 9781501335754, 9781501335747

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prolegomenon: “A Pert Challenge Flung at Philosophic Speculation”
Bit I. “At First Mere Improvisation”
Bit II. Reverberations: The Joke of the Joke
Bit III. Repetition and the Exquisite Seriesness of Series
Bit IV. “Play It Again, Sheldon”: Nothing in Comedy Ever Only Happens Once
Bit V. The Comic Uncanny; or The Character of Caricature
Bit VI. Breaking Stacks and Cutting Layers: The Self-Conscious Comedy of Comedy
Bit VII. Doubling Down on the Mise en Abyme : The Comic Contexts of Comedy
Bit VIII. Ouroboros
Bit IX. Ouroboroboroboros; or, When Parody Takes Itself On
Bit X. The Long and Winding Road
Bit XI. One More Time: The Aristocratic Apparatus
Bit XII. And . . . The Time——ing Is Right: The Politics of Delay
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Comic Event

The Comic Event Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present Judith Roof

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Judith Roof, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Avni Patel / www.avnipatel.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roof, Judith, 1951- author. Title: The comic event : comedic performance from the 1950s to the present / Judith Roof. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017042702 (print) | LCCN 2018038464 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501335747 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501335730 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501335723 (hardback :alk. paper) | ISBN 2017042702(ePub) | ISBN 9781501335747(ePDF) Subjects: LCSH: Comedy–History and criticism–Theory, etc. | Comic, The. Classification: LCC PN1922 (ebook) | LCC PN1922 .R66 2018 (print) | DDC 809/.917–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042702 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3572-3 PB: 978-1-5013-5488-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3574-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-3573-0 Typeset by Deanta Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Andrew Robert “Ando the Great” Holzapfel (1983–2011) “The Dude Abides”

Contents Acknowledgments Prolegomenon: “A Pert Challenge Flung at Philosophic Speculation”

Bit I Bit II Bit III Bit IV

“At First Mere Improvisation” Reverberations: The Joke of the Joke Repetition and the Exquisite Seriesness of Series “Play It Again, Sheldon”: Nothing in Comedy Ever Only Happens Once Bit V The Comic Uncanny; or The Character of Caricature Bit VI Breaking Stacks and Cutting Layers: The Self-Conscious Comedy of Comedy Bit VII Doubling Down on the Mise en Abyme: The Comic Contexts of Comedy Bit VIII Ouroboros Bit IX Ouroboroboroboros; or, When Parody Takes Itself On Bit X The Long and Winding Road Bit XI One More Time: The Aristocratic Apparatus Bit XII And . . . The Time——ing Is Right: The Politics of Delay Notes Bibliography Index

viii 1 39 47 57 69 75 95 107 117 125 143 165 169 181 219 226

Acknowledgments The comic always owes other comics and so, too, does a book on the comic event, so I thank those whose comic events offered both material for this book and the inspiration to write it: Brian Holcomb for first raising the whole question of comedy in his project on wit. And there has been no more insistent comic presence than the inveterate joke-teller, Tom Byers, who most earnestly and continually thrust comedy into academic existence. One of Tom’s oft-repeated jokes (the only one I can ever remember) appears in this book’s Prolegomenon. When people learn that one is writing a book on comedy, everyone has a favorite example, so I have many friends to thank for material included in this book: Aaron Jaffe, Tim Morton, Michael Miller, Dennis Allen, Alanna Beroiza, Seth Morton, Jonathan Eburne, Charles Tung, Abby Goode, Lance Norman, Matt Bowman, Melissa Fore, Laura K. Richardson, Cary Wolfe, Joe Campana, Joe Carson, Roderigo Martini-Paula, Clint Wilson, Christian Johnson, Marley Foster, Daniel Crumbo, and Riley Smith. For the resulting script, I would like to thank various readers and commentators, including Katherine Burkman, Lynda Zwinger, Ray Ryan, and those who reviewed the manuscript for the press. I also deeply appreciate the care and insight of Bloomsbury editors, Mary Al-Sayed and Katie Gallof. The text wouldn’t have emerged if it had not been for Jake Levens, who worked as my research assistant for this project, and Alex Adkins and Hannah Biggs, who helped prepare the manuscript. And I am most grateful to Melissa Bailar, who put up with the process of writing this book. Sections of “Bit III” have been adapted from previously published articles: “Sketchy Counterculture,” Preserving the Sixties: Britain and the “Decade of Protest,” eds. Trevor Harris and Molly O’Brien Castro, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 144–159, and “‘Aaa, aaa, aaa:’ Repetition/Compulsion, and Queer Comedy in Little Britain,” Frames 22, no. 22 (2009): 16–30.

Prolegomenon: “A Pert Challenge Flung at Philosophic Speculation”

Nell: (without lowering her voice): Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But— Nagg (shocked): Oh! Nell: Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 18–19 This book will always have been too late, too after the fact. The thing has already spread its waves. The jostling and gathering and exploding are already past. Retelling is never an option because there can never be the same wave twice. We try anyway. We tell and retell and every time those waves spread away and hit one another and make more waves. Containing this surf is like holding fireworks next to a lit match in a fireworks factory. They can only explode and explode again and again, maybe with different colors or patterns, or maybe in new directions with new reverberation, or maybe, eventually, slightly less ambitiously. Or finally, maybe, inevitably fizzle. The next hundred or so pages offer a theory of comedy and of the comic, aping the structure of stand-up, but beginning by rehearsing the conceptual necessities required for building a theory—the subject texts, a notion of the comic as a dynamic, the dynamic’s contributing elements, issues of genre, and the impossibilities of describing the comic without simultaneously destroying it. And after this, the endnotes offer another scene (as all comedy is a scene about another scene), this one critical, sometimes challenging, sometimes a tribute to voices that have already offered their insights. This study focuses on comedy as an “event,” a set of circumstances arranged (or that arrange themselves) to gather to a “cut,” a moment of perception, to a conscious or even unconscious

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The Comic Event

recognition of something, or to something that maybe even sneaks up and produces an effect—a grin, laughter, a knowing shake of the head—without anyone exactly knowing the cause. The comic event is a set of dynamics by which the apparently incommensurate gathers, holds for a moment or . . . more (timing is all), finally explodes, opens up, proliferates, refers back to itself, begins to gather again. This notion of a comic event is both connected to and contrasts with the generic category of comedy/the comic, which is a register, a tonality, a holistic realm variously defined as everything from a friendly disposition to a happy ending. Despite the slightly fuzzy distinction between the comic event and comedy/comic, what follows will collapse the two unabashedly. There is no point in continuing the distinction. They are unruly. Exemplars of the comic event I consider will be comic performances that have been recorded and preserved and are currently available in digital media. These include sitcoms, skit shows from the United States and the United Kingdom, parody films, recorded stand-up routines, comic exchanges from talk shows, etc., from the past 60 years. The problem, of course, is that as recordings, all of these examples lack the complexities of presence, feedback, and ambiance that characterize, according to Philip Auslander, the live comic performance itself.1 Recordings are shadows, pale copies, but good evidence of the discussion nonetheless. The comic event focuses on the concatenation of acts, discourses, audiences, repetition, seriality, self-consciousness, and feedback that occur in performance (telling, enacting, observing), gathering momentum, delaying, accruing to the right moment to condense, cut, break apart, recombine. In this sense, the comic event is always a performance of sorts (even if only retrospectively) and usually self-conscious of itself as comedy. Jokers always know they are joking and generally we know, too, even if we think we don’t know or believe ourselves to have been taken in. When we laugh at apparent accidents, we laugh at them because we instantly review the elements of the occurrence as constituting a comic event retrospectively. The comic event, thus, may be both or either deliberate or accidental jokes, bits, skits, caricatures, routines, sketches, happenings, routines, etc. As part of its dynamic of gathering, the comic event engages multiple perspectives—a teller or actor or more than one, an observer, listener, recipient, a consciousness of the comic tenor of the situation, a shared environment of some sort. It is also always a scene about another scene, opening out and folding in sometimes infinitely as a mise en abyme. As a performance broadly speaking, the comic event is not a phenomenon occurring generally

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in novels whose comedy, though arguably similar, lacks the event’s communal environment, multiple perspectives, coherent self-identity, and timing.2 As a dynamic that engages a range of “other scenes” deriving from any sociocultural source—everything from momentary accident and coincidence to the history of comedy, linguistic play, caricatures and impersonations, social circumstances, political conditions, individual relationships, immediate circumstances—the comic event builds, gathering self-conscious serial repetitions, delaying, arresting, and addressing multiple audiences, until at some moment this gathering suddenly congeals, cuts to one or even several among a plethora of hovering possibilities that retrospectively re-“trope” what has gathered. What has to that point been an unformed set of possibilities (even though we usually already know it is being formed) coheres as a separable event in time that nonetheless repeats, continues, going forward and backward at the same time. The comic event’s dynamic is also akin to the operations of psychical/ media organizations denominated “apparatus” that engage processes that range from the social to unconscious responses and everything in between (see more on this later). Although participants in a comic event may know something is coming and may even know what that is, the dynamic of accruing operates anyway, always offering a focal point from which perspective the entirety of the gathering suddenly takes on one (or usually several) epiphanies (to hijack a loftier result), which then become fodder for new gatherings. So, this book is not a philosophy of comedy as so many accounts of comedy have been, but more a theory of the ways multiple dynamics from multiple sites engage multiple scenes and audiences in producing a phenomenon that goes forward and backward, reduces and expands all at the same time.3 Neither comedy nor the comic are the kinds of phenomena, thus, that philosophy, theory, or criticism can reduce to a singular cause or fold into their many erections. Nor does this book offer a theory of laughter or of why we laugh. Comedy, the comic, and laughter are all different things; yet all represent a mood, register, type where laughter is one of several possible reactions.4 As Andrew Stott suggests, “‘Comedy’ is a term that can refer equally to a genre, a tone, and a series of effects that manifest themselves in diverse environments” (2).5 Even though the comic event may be one of a number of comic manifestations, I deploy the terms “comedy” and “the comic event” interchangeably, partly because the term “comedy” itself refers both to a mood and a type of performance, and partly because it may well be that any incident of comedy takes on some aspects of the comic event’s dynamics.

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The comic event hovers around the prospective, or something we might be inclined to think of as both a surface and a future, even if this “future” is actually retrospective. The comic event is first of all a manner, a form of address that somehow signals a shift from the mundane to a consciousness of comic enactment. As you can already probably tell, this manner will turn out not to be superficial at all, but more the crux of the matter in so far as we understand rhetoric and performance, argument and enactment as ideally entwined. The comic event inclines this entwinement in certain directions, feigning sincerity, for example, or performing the pretense that what is to follow is not comic at all. The problem is that one cannot successfully venture the reverse—that is, even if comedy can pretend to be serious, one cannot pretend to be serious about it. And, perhaps, more important, one can never pretend to be comic. Pretending to be comic (or looking as if one is trying) tends to be pathetic, inspiring pity and disdain. As one might discern already from the need to list, include, extend, and otherwise elaborate comedy of all of the genres—or is it a field? A practice? A mood? Or one of Northrop Frye’s archetypes?—comedy is the most difficult to pin down and that could be because pinning down is antithetical to any sort of comic spirit, which doesn’t pin down but opens out.6 The discourses by which critics, theorists, and philosophers try to define and characterize comedy try to control all of this adumbration from the start, upholstering the comic in a highly antithetical, often reductive or simplifying drag. Commenting on comedy is anything but comic, even in terms of that broad ending-in-marriage definition we were taught when studying Shakespeare. Comic plots may terminate in marriage, but analyses of the comic usually involve a protracted divorce of style and substance. For many topics this incommensurability wouldn’t exactly be tragic, especially for tragedy which one always writes about tragically. (Note: Think about it. The point of writing about tragedy is to arrive at a catharsis about its catharsis. No such process is possible in comedy). So as critics and philosophers have amply illustrated, writing about comedy is a perilous endeavor if we somehow want to match subject and style.7 The mood of critical writing is a comic buzz kill. Most critical writing edges onto the dour, which makes it perfect for writing about tragic things, and anyway when don’t we understand the critical task as a serious and often tragic one? In our time, criticism and analysis have taken on a veneer of the serieux in the French meaning of the word as “painstaking” and “trustworthy.” What we learn from critical writing is that for something to be serious we must be serious about it, which just doesn’t work with comedy.

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But isn’t comedy itself a mode of analysis and critique?8 I could proliferate comic examples (or comically proliferate examples), and so could you. The problem is that we cannot paraphrase the thing we think is comic and have it remain comic in the same way. This is because comedy is indeed the perfect marriage of matter and performance, if we can even think of it as a marriage at all in so far as the elements of comedy never exist as separate elements in the first place. Comedy is möbius; it is like Aristophanes’s doubled beings (cited by Plato) whose threat resides not in their redundancy, but in their inseparability (even though they were eventually separated, which might, hence, produce not only the parable of sexes and genders, but also the comic demise of the comic itself).9 Comedy, like almost everything except digital code, is impossible to iterate. But comedy’s impossible re-rendition differs from other species of iteration in that citing comedy tends to parse and relocate it—to separate matter from performance, disabling its quintessential (and distinguishing) enactive aspects, even as its re-rendition might enact a new comedy. Any discussion of comedy requires what can ever only be a partial iteration, which, alas, displaces the comic, inadvertently alienating comedy from itself. The only way to talk about the comic event without wrecking it is, thus, comically, a challenge for the critical writer. Successful comics can be funny when they are trying to be funny, but most critics can’t. Not only does the mood of critical discourse render deliberate comedy at best a vanity, at worst an embarrassment, it rarely provides any opportunity for comedy at all except in the potentially witty and disavowedly clever stylistic choices that nimble critics can occasionally wield, but which can never seem to be deliberate without also feeling forced, awkward—generally trying too hard. But anyway . . . Retelling the joke I heard last night: I was in a place called “The Black Hole” with these two guys I work with. One colleague with the still prominent remnants of a Carolina accent told a joke that went kind of as follows: “A guy walks into his house carrying a duck. He says, ‘Here’s the pig I was fucking.’ His housemate says, ‘But that’s not a pig.’ The guy responds, ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’ ”

You see the problems here. The first is the presentation of this joke (perhaps the ur-form of a comic event) as already a repetition, as an attempted re-rendition which confesses its secondary quality from the start. Oh, I might have tried to render the accent in the dialogue, but whose dialogue and which accent? The accent of the joke’s characters or the accent of the teller? And, why hedge this

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The Comic Event

joke so much? I could simply have rendered it here, as if for the first time. Maybe I wanted to insulate myself from the joke’s potential misogyny; maybe I wanted to signal that I certainly would not have come up with this joke even if I very well might have. After all, it is only a case of insulting mistaken reference. Why provide the name of the little gathering place where we had gathered? Does the name of the place shift the comedy? Augment it? Set the tone? (By the way, it is a real place—there is a Black Hole in Houston). Does the place name, factual or not, inadvertently signal something about the joke to come? And why even mention a third person, a second recipient? Am I now alluding to Freud’s notion of the joke scenario in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious as an occasion that best works with three?10 It is all too complicated to reproduce, and at the same time, the reproduction adds its own complications, most of which are not comic at all, but insulating and apologetic. Out of context, some jokes end up being embarrassing, not for the original teller, but for the person who tries to repeat them. Recapture always says more about the transmitter than the joke. The joke itself points to the central problem of address. To what extent is the comic event the perpetuated enlargement of ambiguous reference that begins with the joke, exponentializing with every retelling? In any case, attempts to reproduce any comic event are always too late. You can’t go back. You can’t recapture. Comedy has no Proustian edge. Iteration marks a transformational difference in time as well as the despair of citation which displaces one performance in the name of another. We render these temporal differences metaphorically as space whose evocation of distance stands in for a time, but never for timing—a crucial (and generally unreproduceable) element of a joke’s performance. Most jokes are retellings that never recapture, but which produce the thing again in the present, always differently, perhaps better, perhaps more faintly. Is my telling above as good as last night’s Black Hole version? I can’t tell, though I don’t think it is. And why not? Partly the print context is just wrong (like the novel, no environment, no feedback, no presence, no actual timing). The occasion is no longer propitious. The print version leaves behind the first event’s performative aspects. In addition, singling out a joke as an exemplar puts a lot of pressure on the joke to deliver something like a lesson and most jokes just can’t live up to that. Their recontextualization makes them cough up a paradigmatic quality that was only potential in the first telling, which of course was not the first telling at all, but only the first telling in that specific context at that point in time with that audience. The poor joke gets retroactively resignified as a parable

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of the impossibility of iteration and the mechanisms of ambiguity. Are jokes still jokes when they become parables of themselves? The joke might still be funny and we might sort of chuckle in that suspicious way we have when a critical writer reaches for an illustrative moment. And we can laugh more than once at the same joke. We can laugh again at the same joke without recalling the last time we heard it. There are some jokes of which one never tires. So what is the difference between a joke and the analysis of a joke? Something like two hundred pages. The analogy of distance intrinsic to iteration is part of an extended metaphor that pervades most critical work. But the comic event eschews this notion of distance in favor of engagement, presence, the present and anticipations. Stylistic infelicity, hence, is the inevitable hallmark of work that undertakes the task of unwinding the comic. If Kant, Kierkegaard, et al., are correct, then this stylistic incongruity should be funny. But alas. The styles of philosophers and critics stick to the styles of philosophers and critics. How, then, can I write about comedy in a way that preserves the enactive aspect of the subject matter? The existing theories of comedy do not provide much instruction.11 There is the work of various philosophers and the psychoanalytic musings of Sigmund Freud and there are collections of interviews with working comics. There is, obviously, a large space in between, occupied at this point by a slim taxonomic tome by Andrew Stott, Rick Desrochers’s analysis of the work of contemporary comics in relation to vaudeville, Philip Auslander’s study of media, comedy, and political commentary, and an analysis of stand-up comedy by John Limon, and of course the twelve thousand five hundred and fifty-seven entries about comedy in literature and film in the MLA Bibliography since 1983, which include discussions of specific texts and practices, most often based on the work of— (wait for it)—philosophers. I could take as my tutors those very philosophers who have undertaken comedy qua comedy’s unraveling, but I am always distracted by another question: “Why philosophers particularly?” Why do philosophers want to write about comedy and why do most theories of comedy come from philosophers? Why do literary and cultural critics writing about comedy always look to philosophers for definitions, patterns, analogies? Are philosophers intent on defining comedy because Aristotle didn’t leave much more than a couple of hints in the Poetics? Are they fervid because comedy in se evades analysis especially in so far as it is itself an impenetrable mode of analysis and therefore fascinating precisely because no critical distance is possible? Do philosophers even realize this?

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The Comic Event

Well, they do, or at least Henri Bergson does, as he begins his treatise, Laughter, with the following: “The greatest thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled the little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation” (61). This is perhaps the liveliest writing about comedy we will encounter, its “pert” bobbings approaching something akin to pornography. In fact, the previous quote is a demure translation. In Bergson’s original French version, comedy is not only grammatically feminine, it behaves like a strumpet, always sliding, becoming loose, a little provocative and impertinent challenger to our speculations—or perhaps spectations. Bergson’s scene renders comedy a stripper to be ogled, a little thought-teaser who always manages to get away. There it is: the low phallic comedy of the temptress evading conquest. In light of the fact that Aristotle defined comedy as both “low” and “phallic,” Bergson’s asides bear out the idea that philosophers’ engagement with comedy itself enacts a phallic comedy in which philosophizing becomes both prosthesis and defense. Philosophy’s philosophizing of comedy is compensatory in so far as it never gets the girl—and never can—which makes this all seem a little more pathetic than mere speculative slumming. Apart from Bergson’s passing hints at comedy’s evident titillations, philosophers’ motives are finally less important than their mode of execution, a term aptly applied. But how philosophers unman themselves in the face of comedy is instructive. Philosophers are inevitably reductive. Their mode generally has been to try and distill comedy into its primal and necessary common denominators—to find a structure that by its very nature is bound to an ethos or comic “essence,” and by which they can account for all comedy. Some—Bergson, Peter Berger and Simon Critchley—are taxonomic; they present specimens of comedy—jokes, characters, tropes—then try to sort these specimens into types so as ultimately to find an “essence” or single relation that would define every comic incident. Accompanying this classification is an examination of the taxonomic variables that might define the comic “field” or conditions that enable comic possibility. These typologies, then, simultaneously constitute the subject of inquiry and provide the range of incidents from which these philosophers discern common traits. Bergson symptomatically asks: “What method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume?” (61) Here again are the asides, this time flapping out a telling olfactory metaphor that connotes simultaneously proximity and distance, stink and seduction, or perhaps just wishful thinking.

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The logical difficulty here, as you might have discerned, is how one knows some event is comic in the first place. If one does not understand how comedy operates and if one’s task is to figure that out, then producing a taxonomy as a first step would seem to rely on an already-completed analysis. How do you know what the comic is unless you know what it is? This might sound suspiciously like the problem of inseparability I have already adumbrated. Bergson intuits this problem before he begins his arduous categorization. Protesting that he is not aiming “at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition” (a plaint most theorists of the comic offer before they set out to handcuff their subject matter), Bergson wants to see it grow and expand and at the end, he declares, “Maybe we may gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something more flexible than an abstract definition—a practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from long companionship” (61). There is that sex thing again. But despite this incipient insight or wishful fantasy, Bergson laboriously taxonomizes comedy in terms of what we might think of as protocols—“The Comic Element in Movements,” “The Comic Element in Situations,” “The Comic Element in Words,” “The Comic Element in Character.” And imagine—he finds the same relation in each. He continues: “We shall only have, then, to turn to the opposite characteristics, in order to discover the abstract formula, this time a general and complete one, for every real and possible method of comedy” (118). Bergson, thus, comes to that which he had already come to: an abstract formula: Comedy is “something mechanical encrusted on the living” (84). Or as he restates it, “some rigidity or other applied to the mobility of life” (85). Like philosophy. Or low phallic . . . The elasticity of this formulation of inelasticity enables Bergson to apply his theory to almost anything—the literal meets the moral, for example, or a person in disguise, or someone falls down, or a cat talks. Bergson’s theory characterizes such pratfall-fests as America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFV) or Jackass perfectly.12 In so far as both of these comedy anthologies showcase repetitive series of misadventures, they embody not the living as the mechanical—not Bergson’s illustrative Charlie Chaplin—but the perpetual threat of the mechanics of living when confronted by those who either cannot proactively imagine a series of cause/effect relations or who can and want precisely to fall victim to them. In either case, the comedy of these collections of pain and embarrassment is not only the discomfort of threatened dehumanization, it derives as well from the fact that the audience always knows what the victims either do not foresee or ignore.13 The comic event is just as much about imbalances of knowledge,

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serial duplicities, and the effects of multiple enframings, context, and timing as it is about any intrinsic comparison between the human and the mechanical. The comic event gathers, multiplies, explodes, engages the unexpected and the expected, galvanizes connections and unseemly possibilities. In so far as the seriatum misadventures of AFV reenact an uncontrollable chain of reactions that already illustrate the relations among knowledge, multiple framings, and persistent returns, the show is an anatomy of a certain species of comedy, a physical comedy that generally occurs without language captured in the planned vicissitudes of home video. The misadventure of televised comic peril occurs within a context of uneven anticipations that gather and push multidirectionally to encompass everything and everyone present in the comic scene, the studio audience, the mediating host, the television audience, some of whom turn around to produce their own little video misadventures for consumption. The occasion of comedy is carefully staged within the framing discourses of the shows themselves, which not only provide yet another layer to the event, but also enact again the same duplicitous relation between unawareness and victimhood. Bergson’s theory of comedy, however, cannot be reduced to AFV (or vice versa). Instead, to be comic any misadventure must be framed as a misadventure, must gather every possible association, billow outward while operating within a framing matrix which stutters out the disavowals—the “I know but all the same’s”—that produce an imbalance in the apprehension of effects in the first place.14 What seems to be a simple and repetitive collection of “rigidities applied to the mobility of life” sited on a television show as reallife-captured-by-camera is actually a multiply mediated, outwardly ranging, accruing assemblage of videotaped incidents whose apparent common denominator becomes less and less common the more one moves away from the event—the television show—which has organized it. If, as has occasionally been the case (and more often than we might expect), we see a video of a baby blowing a noodle out of its nose, what appears to be a manifestation of Bergsonian rigidity (food replaces typical emanation from nostril, baby works nose like bellows, noodle appears and disappears) elaborates first into an entry on the show, then into a recontextualized and re-narrated bit in a series, then into a potential prize-winning video, then into the general baby category, then into a mystery (how did the noodle get there in the first place?), then into an entire series of nasal comparisons which were always latent in any case. In the end, the noodle-nosed baby, like any of these small, apparently Bergsonian,

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incidents is neither simple nor primarily a comparison between the living and the mechanical, but is rather an ever-enlarging matrix of discourses that operate in and through repetition, multiple, layered framings, selfconsciousness of the incident as the comic-to-be, and disavowal. We know, we forget, we laugh again. Given the breadth of his terms, almost anything can be reduced to Bergson’s formula, including much that isn’t comic at all, like car accidents. I am being a bit reductive about Bergson’s endeavor, although if you read it you will find him returning again and again to this formula which he fashions out of the first of his examples and then finds in every comic circumstance that follows. This suggests that his method is both inductive and structuralist, though in its careful mapping of taxonomy it tries to appear deductive and expansive. Bergson has many instructive insights about comedy, but curiously, he often delivers these often vaguely salacious characterizations as side comments or afterthoughts, which in itself enacts comedy as the other scene to its own theory, the comedy of the comedy.

By Indirections Find Directions Out How does the enactive quality of Bergson’s side comments itself provide another potentially fruitful suggestion about how comedy operates? A side comment is what one slips in as an aside, and in theater, at least, asides work partly because they alter the imaginary distance between performance and audience and in so doing produce the illusion of depth in an incipient meta-theatrical mise en abyme. Asides are complex insertions that simultaneously appear to break one layer of performance by introducing a different address, while they make visible the theatrical apparatus itself as an apparatus. Although they seem to come from some metaphorical “outside,” they actually emerge from an “inside” understood as spontaneous and irrepressible. And just as they are from the inside out, they enact proximity as they appear to distance. You are probably familiar with asides from Shakespeare’s plays and if so, you know they often exist in tragedies—Hamlet’s comments, for example—“A little more than kin and less than kind” (I, ii, l.65)—a statement that reveals Hamlet’s insincere filiality, his critical distance, and his heartfelt dismay, all in passing and addressed to no one in particular—to himself, perhaps or to some unseen Other. Hamlet’s asides do not bring the play vehicle itself into question, although the play within the

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play and Hamlet’s later comments on theater might. Another example—this one from Beckett’s Endgame—might make the point clearer. Hamm: Did anyone ever have pity on me? Clov: What? (Pause) Is it me you are referring to? Hamm: An aside, ape! Did you never hear an aside before? (Pause) I’m warming up for my last soliloquy (77–78).15

Hamm’s evocation of theatrical processes—the aside as an aside, the soliloquy as a speech—produces a sudden meta-theatrical expansion of the moment, which produces simultaneously a distancing and an ersatz confession, an outer and an inner as precisely outer and inner yet wound together. The evocation enacts a complex set of relations that are impossible to parse because their parsing produces more things to parse. The comic always explodes infinitely and endlessly all directions. In so far as it positions an aside as the center, Endgame already confounds the whole point of an aside which might finally be the point: in enacting an aside as an aside, Endgame anatomizes what cannot be anatomized, not by anatomizing it but by enacting it out of place. In so doing, the not-so-aside aside explodes all of the contributing discourses and systems that intersect at that point— theater, theater history, the play, the notion of the aside in the play, the actor, etc.—revealing them all simultaneously, along with the analogies and structures that string them together. This opens out into a suddenly apprehendable array of manifestations that disappear almost as soon as they burst forth, engaging theater, play, characters, and audience on multiple levels simultaneously. Any notion of a critical function or distance gives way to another order of insight that cannot be quantified in any binary or structural scheme or through spatial or visual metaphors. The aside enacts analysis without the imagined benefit of distance. It might be an enactment of an analysis of comedy if this excerpt from Endgame were more obviously a comic moment, but the character of its comedy is very subtle and not so immediately apparent. (Hint: How can Clov who is a character in the play hear the aside?). Rhetorically, it is not wise to employ examples of comedy one has to explain. But I will back up. I just gave you in a side analysis of an enactive aside a bit of a theory of comedy in a non-enactive, non-comedic form, which may have been instructive or may have been more koan-like or may have been just gibberish. This aside was a slight detour from my comment that Bergson’s asides may offer a clue to how one might write about comedy. But I think I was wrong in so

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far as what Bergson’s asides do is enact a kind of textual unconscious which is more about the philosopher’s relation to his subject matter than about the subject matter itself. In Bergson’s case the asides suggest that the philosopher regards the subject matter as a little teasing temptress to be recontained within his taxonomic theater. The sex comedy here reproduces Bergson’s main comic examples, many of which come from Molière’s sometimes covertly salacious productions in the first place. So Bergson’s asides reveal some underlying angst about the project. Or maybe simply alibied prurience. Or maybe an inadvertent insight linked to Aristotle’s definition of the comic as “low” and “phallic” in so far as in pursuing the comic strumpet, the phallic can only be frustrated, truncated, and denied. Comedy has no single point, but many unexpected ramifications that give us no single point of entry. We can analyze it, but we cannot restrain, predict, or pin it down. Every pattern we deduce is at best only partial and misleading in so far as comedy is not a pattern at all, but the sudden explosion of momentarily analogous patterns into a cascade of elements we may not have known were there, or we knew were operating, but had disavowed or had long ceased continued to remember.

Fountainheads Question: What do you call a guy who steps on his own dick? Answer: Well hung? (wrong) Answer: Short-legged? (wrong) Right Answer: A low phallic joke.

In a more direct assertion of the indirect, Bergson declares: “Absentmindedness, indeed, is not perhaps the actual fountain-head of the comic, but surely it is contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows straight from the fountain-head” (68). Something flows here, a “stream” from a head, comedy, perhaps, from a head that is not all there, is absent, disavowed. But what is the difference between absentmindedness and disavowal? Bergson’s extended example of what he envisions as a “natural” form of absentmindedness is, yet again, the man in heat—he who “has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry” (68). As a result, this man turns into a “somnambulist. His actions are distractions” (68). In contrast, disavowal means that the absentminded know what is going on, but all the same don’t know or desire not

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to know they know. Both are manifestations of a species of unconscious; such absentmindedness is either the unconscious repression of material or the zealous pursuit of one theme as a way simultaneously to repress and express another. Disavowal’s temporary ignorance represents an unconscious desire to have it both ways—the woman and the phallus in the traditional fetish formation, for example, or simultaneously believing in a filmic diegesis and knowing a film is a film. As Bergson elaborates the value of the absentminded to the comic, what he represses (and expresses) again becomes apparent: “Still more laughable will be the absentmindedness we have seen springing up and growing before our very eyes, with whose origin we are acquainted and whose life-history we can reconstruct” (68). This pop-up absentmindedness (like the earlier “pert bobbings”), “systematic and organised around one central idea,” points to the repressed centrality of the dribbling head that stands in for the low phallic character of comedy seeping out of the side in language, or in this case that “streams from a head” in the potential double entendres of Bergson’s modes of characterization (the double entendres are not so clear in French, though still suggested, for example, “Avec la distraction, en effet, on n’est peut-être pas à la source même du comique, mais on est sûrement dans un certain courant de faits et d’idées qui vient tout droit de la source. On est sur une des grandes pentes naturelles du rire” and “Plus risible sera la distraction que nous aurons vue naître et grandir sous nos yeux, dont nous connaîtrons l’origine et dont nous pourrons reconstituer l’histoire” [13–4]).16 This absentmindedness—this repression/expression—is evident even in openly low phallic jokes (such as supra) in so far as the set-up line depends upon the forgetfulness of the joke’s generously endowed protagonist. As a direct route to the side and simultaneously as the asides’ enactment of the relation between unconscious, repressed, merely suggested, or forgotten content and its clever erective revelation, Bergson’s absentminded performance of the dynamic of comic unrepression unrepresses the very terms of the theme about which Bergson himself continues to be absentminded. Sigmund Freud, whose Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious followed Bergson’s Laughter by five years, also ascribes to the theory that jokes “must bring forward something that is concealed or hidden” (11). Quoting the work of his predecessor K. Fischer, Freud works toward the idea that jokes come about as the effect of what happens when two disparate elements “are brought into connection with each other and submitted to the peculiar process of condensation and fusion that a joke emerges” (23). Condensation, a concept

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Freud borrows from his work on dreams, is essentially the cramming of a number of different manifestations of an element or wish into a single act, figure, or word—metaphor in Roman Jakobsen’s terms. In this sense, the comic event is the sudden unpacking of the complexities of a metaphor, a falling apart of a figural cohesion. The joke above, for example, packs suggestions of size, absentmindedness, implications of virility, foot-size, clumsiness, stupidity, any potential meaning for the word “dick” (i.e., detective), and problems of comic movement into one simple question. This condensation is an economy by which the operative and significant elements clot together in multiply representative figures. Double entendres and word play are simple examples of condensation (such joke names as Richard Head, Dick Trickle, Rod Long, etc.). Another way to understand condensation is as the incipient and always already potential coexistence of multiple discourses, emphases, ideas, investments, and registers whose sudden de-condensation reveals both their persistent collaborations and their productive infelicitous connections. As Freud comments, “The comic arises in the first instance as an unintended discovery derived from human social relations” (234).17 Although Freud’s location of the unintended comic discovery in the field of human social relations is both completely inclusive and a bit restrictive (depending on how one defines “social relations”), comedy’s “unintended discovery,” like the experiences of Bergson’s imaginary absentminded protagonist, shares in the process of unrepressing repressed material, or the sudden exposure of the unconscious. Jerry Aline Flieger suggests that Freud considers the joke a “diversion in the workings of the psychic apparatus” (57) 18 As she summarizes it, “Freud suggests that the joking process performs its function of wish fulfillment by outwitting conscious censorship and hence providing an outlet for inhibited conscious desire” (57). The comic event, however, does not always function only as the unrepression of individual hidden desires and censored unconscious wishes, but might also operate at the level of “social relations,” as an apparatus that reveals hidden, occult, unthought (i.e., absentmindedly ignored), unlikely, infelicitous yet obvious connections among disparate linked discourses, systems, and registers. The joke above engages discourses of virility, the body, medicine, literary theory, and comedy itself, spatial and social systems, and such registers as scale and proportion. The revelation of the multiple links among these various associations, though they may well work on multiple levels—as a part of an individual

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The Comic Event

psychical performance, as a hostile act, as an observation or commentary, as part of the operation of multiple intersecting social systems—are comic only in so far as they show the sudden (and often preexisting) affinities of what we might have thought were disparate phenomena, the insight of connection that rapidly fades to the one choice that retrospectively retriggers the entire collision for one illuminating moment—the “low phallic joke” of above, or the merely oscillating sprinkles of the double entendre.

All This Aside; or the Comic Catachresis; or When We Refer to Comedy We Are Never Referring to Comedy as Comedy Would Tell Us “However, the fact remains that humor is a nicely impossible object for a philosopher.” Simon Critchley, On Humour (2) While philosophers tend toward reductive accounts of comedy, what insights might comedians offer? Maybe they can write more insightfully, more intimately, about comedy. The intimacy is certainly present in so far as the other major mode of writing about comedy qua comedy currently in vogue is collections of interviews with comedians, whose experiential accounts tend toward the mundane. When asked how he would describe his “performing style,” George Carlin responds: “It’s just like being in a living room telling an anecdote to a bunch of friends. I got a good piece of advice when I was working in radio, which was to act like you were talking to one person at a time” (86).19 To be fair, almost all of these collections are in an interview format which does not allow much comic expansion or even conceptual sophistication. But one might expect something a little more “pert.” Chris Rock perhaps says it best. When presented with the fact that “a lot of comedians are doing books: Carlin, Cosby, Seinfeld, Reiser, Sinbad,” Rock responds: “Yeah, but I’m competing with them in a medium that they’re not even strong in. I mean, none of us is really strong in it” (181).20 Obviously better at telling jokes than writing about telling them, comedians’ craft testimonies offer yet another “other” scene of comic commentary that is something akin to the Endnotes of this book. Writing a joke or writing about telling them is not the same as telling them, which, of course, is something all comic performers know. Inscribed, the joke loses the many attributes of live

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performance, which comprise a substantial portion of the joke itself. A joke exists as much if not more in the telling. So here is another joke (inscribed instead of performed). Imagine this told by a big bearded guy with just the slightest Louisville, Kentucky twang. This guy enjoys telling jokes; they are an intrinsic part of his sociality. He prides himself on his joke-telling ability and he has a prodigious memory for them. I say this because you must understand the joke as being one in a long series of jokes, that the joke is neither unusual nor singular, but rather an anticipated part of being around this guy. It is also almost the only joke I can remember. He told it to me, along with a bunch of jokes about college deans, thirty years ago while we were walking down a street in Tallahassee, Florida, These latter details are irrelevant to the joke, but are a part of its associative system for me and an important part of any argument about comedy as an arrangement of signifiers that gathers, condenses, moves outwardly—that provokes and enlivens associative systems just as it produces associations. Comedy is a chain reaction that never stops. No joke never exists on its own. Even before I heard this joke for the first time, it was already extending its nexus of associations. Although we might argue that this extending quality is an aspect of any repeated set of signifiers, comedy capitalizes on these associations by constantly reworking them. Comedy is the iterative form par excellence in so far as it must evoke all other versions of any given joke from the start. Comedy accrues and depends upon those accruals (Imagine a “knock-knock” joke without other “knock-knock” jokes). A joke, a prank, a bit can be repeated and yet never go back. There is no originary joke, only versions that refer simultaneously backward and forward, constantly revising their own histories, enlarging their sets of associations, impinging on additional discourses, infecting new realms. I’ll come back to this. The previous paragraph with its extenuated account is a part of a delay, a timing trick which increases anticipation for the joke. Tellers of jokes deploy apology, or a brief history of the joke they are about to tell, or other scene-setting tropes to do this. But they almost always put the joke off, gathering context, information, anticipation, readying their audience, garnering as much attention as possible. This delay is an intrinsic part of the “comic event.” The joke is not quite an “event” in Alain Badiou’s terms—the “point at which the ontological (i.e., mathematical) field is detotalized or caught in an impasse” (98).21 Badiou’s “event” is a major shift in the assumptions and modes of thought—something like Einstein’s theory of relativity. The comic “event” is a reduction of this scale

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The Comic Event

to a minor and quotidian occurrence that nonetheless parallels the “event’s” dynamic of shifting the terms and bases for belief and thought. “Like everything that is,” Badiou continues, “the event is a multiplicity (its elements are those of the site, plus itself). Nevertheless, this multiplicity surges up as such beyond every count. It fulminates the situation from which it has been wrested as a fragment” (98). The comic event occurs not as Badiou’s “impasse” usually, but as both part of and as commentary on the disruptive shift it produces or extends. Even the comic accident is only comic in retrospect. We anticipate most comedy, even that which seems to emerge as a surprise, if only retrospectively, but in the end what we see looking back is what counts. Comedy is an “event” in so far as it constitutes an accruing set of signifiers based on an accepted set of logics and relationships that, via a cut (punch line, quip, action) shift suddenly to another set of assumptions and conditions. The comic event offers the dynamic around which signifiers, experience, memory, other jokes continue to gather, not only as bits and joke repeat (which they inevitably will), but also as the event’s patterns, bits, and characters are cannibalized for other jokes, appear in other contexts, continue to evoke comparisons with widely disparate discourses, provoking comedy yet again, both renewed and new. The comic event is that which disrupts itself as the condition of its operation. But I’ll show you. There is a guy sitting at a bar in a small town. The guy is new in town and he is just beginning to get his bearings and see what is what. He looks around the bar and sees only pathetic ruffians and farmers. So he says to the bartender, “Looks like I’m the baddest man in town.” The bartender, wiping down the bar, looks at him, and says, “Well, you may be, but first you’ll have to prove it.” The guy says, “Okay. What do I have to do?” The bartender nods his head towards a man drowsing over his bottle of beer. “See that guy over there?” The newcomer nods. “Well, first you have to beat him up in a fair fight, because right now he’s the baddest man in town.” The newcomer looks the guy over, thinks that trouncing him will be a piece of cake. He shrugs with confidence and starts to get up. “No, problem.” “Now wait,” the bartender cautions him. “That’s not all.” The guy stops, sits back down. “What else?” The bartender inclines his head towards the back of the bar. “Out back there’s a big, mean, nasty ol’ sow. This sow has a bad tooth. You have to go out back and pull that sow’s tooth.” The guy peers out back, shrugs, decides this will not be insurmountable. He starts to get up. “Now wait,” the bartender warns again. “There’s one more thing.” The guy sits back down. “Okay, lay it on me.” “Well,” the bartender says, “Upstairs, there’s ol’ Nellie. She’s been

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the town prostitute for twenty years and ain’t no man’s ever been able to satisfy her. You gotta go up and make it memorable for her.” The guy expands his chest, smiles, and says, “A pleasure.”22 Already this joke has been about multiple delays. Every time the newcomer moves toward some kind of closure, the bartender stops him with another task. Although this is the joke’s set-up, it already works as a putting off, an extended foreplay that actually increases both anticipation and the need for a satisfactory payoff. The delay puts pressure on the joke. Nellie will have to be satisfied. Bergson flirts with his whore. “Is that all?” the newcomer asks. “Go to it,” the bartender says. So the guy gets up, rubs his hands together, goes over to the current “baddest man,” pokes him in the shoulder and says, “I’m the baddest man in town.” The guy suddenly wakes up, throws a punch, gets up, picks up his chair, breaks it over the newcomer’s head, And if I stop here, we might think that this joke is heavy with irony. The newcomer doesn’t even get to first base? The possibility is there, intrinsic to the logic of this joke. The question is what logic this might be. Is this Bergson’s notion of the inelastic? Probably not. It is, however, some notion of irony, of the backfire of braggadocio, a possibility the joke itself extends as it describes the fight at some length (or can do so). Some versions might truncate this fight, stating merely that the newcomer beats the previous “baddest man” handily. But that is not what happens here. It is a matter of timing. So there is a-crunching, and a-tearing, and punching, and broken bottles, and a guy landing on and breaking a table, and the other patrons scattering, and finally the newcomer throws his predecessor to the ground and puts up his arms in victory. The bartender points to the back. The newcomer heads to the pig sty. Soon there is a screamin’ and a hollerin’ and the squealin’ of the sow, and crashin’ and bangin’ and the sounds of breaking wood, and the slosh of water and then silence. A moment now of anticipation. All has led up to this. What do we expect? For what reasons do we expect it? Do we expect the sow to enter victorious? That would fit with the joke’s potentially ironic cast. Do we expect the newcomer to enter victorious and head up the stairs? All is suspended. Timing. So the newcomer comes back in with a bloody nose, covered in mud, his shirt torn, and he rubs his hands again and says, “Now where’s that old whore with the bad tooth?” Ah, the cut, payoff. The joke is not irony after all, but another case of fallacious reference, of a confusion of signifiers, of misplaced cause and effect. Bergson’s asides predict part of this; the joke depends upon the man’s displaced potency. It

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is a “low phallic” joke. But, as in Bergson’s analysis, that the newcomer’s prowess with the pig is on the way is something the joke makes us go back to—in a sense an aside. The punch line retroactively resignifies the penultimate episode in the back, retroactively resignifies the unconscious of our newcomer who perhaps didn’t mishear the bartender, but misinterpreted according to his own lights. The joke exposes an unconscious structured as an unconscious, a bestial delight brought to light only after the fact, making us unknowing voyeurs whose voyeurism emerges only in an act of revision, of repetition and reinterpretation. If we want to read it this way. We could read it in other ways as well—as class commentary, humorous mistake, bad memory, etc. The joke expands outwardly as its plentiful potentials come to light, not as something that functions openly during the telling, but as possibilities that emerge only after as the joke expands to incorporate a growing host of associations. It would be a paradox to distill the comic event to that which explodes outwardly, drawing in multiple associations, discourses, systems as it goes. What makes the comic event do this? This is the question that has motivated philosophers to try to find a common denominator. This is what enables Freud to think of the joke as the temporary revelation of the unconscious in a disavowable form. Unconscious content emerges momentarily, disappears. Comedy is the wink of something else—a cut—the sudden emergence of a momentary connection and insight, but not always the unconscious, or repressed material or feelings of superiority or inanimation upon the animate or . . .

Sweet Damn All!: The Risus Purus NAGG: Our Father which art— HAMM: Silence! In silence! Where are your manners? (Pause.) Off we go. (Attitudes of prayer. Silence. Abandoning his attitude, discouraged.) Well? CLOV: (abandoning his attitude): What a hope! And you? HAMM: Sweet damn all! (To Nagg.) And you? NAGG: Wait! (Pause. Abandoning his attitude.)

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Nothing doing! HAMM: The bastard! He doesn’t exist! CLOV: Not yet. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (55)

Jokes are waiting for the most part, suspension, anticipation, (wait, wait), then “Aha!” retrospective resignification piqued by one link among a possible plethora that sparks the elements together. If the above passage from Beckett’s Endgame is humor, then its humor exists in its enactive comparison of humor and faith—and more important in the way that failing one, the other appears, but only as a comment on the process’s expectations, either God or humor, or both. This is an example of the risus purus Beckett’s Watt evokes: “the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—silence please—at that which is unhappy” (207).23 This notion of the risus purus is itself a contrary joke, producing/enabling/enacting the unhappy as ultimately happy, as worthy of a laugh, a scaling outwardly to envision and contain. Even this passage from Watt enacts its own discrete version of timing in the interjected “silence please,” which, like HAMM’s similar command, delays the enactment of the straining for that which characterizes both prayers and jokes, both reverence and humor. The potential shift from one to the other—from prayer to joke, from hope to laughter, or for that matter to any of a number of tones, discourses, possibilities—simultaneously flashes connections and retroactively resignifies the dynamics of the preceding performance. This shift turns on the comic event’s ability to turn on: to turn on a common element, to capitalize a common link among multiple possibilities, to recast everything with one torque of meaning as well as to turn on multiple meanings simultaneously. This bit of Endgame turns on its context as do so many of the performance games the characters play as part of making time pass. It also enacts what seems to be the tradition of the characters’ search for some kind of meaning or satisfaction or even sexual pleasure in the routines of a past life now evacuated of meaning. This particular episode turns on the temporal shift enacted by Clov’s comment—a shift that brings the entire dialogical game into question, at least in so far as what these characters might hope to gain from the ritual. All of the possibilities emerge at once. Even if everything is not apparent to everyone who sees/reads the passage, many different potential connections flash at one time or another that resignify

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The Comic Event

the event as simultaneously an unhappy failure and a sophisticated, wry joke. As Bergson comments in the second paragraph of his essay on laughter: Our excuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible gradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we may gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something more flexible than an abstract definition—a practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship.” (61)

Although Bergson cannot get away from the “growing,” “expanding,” “metamorphosing” thing that “springs from long companionship,” this hypothetical approach to the problem of laughter proposes something quite profound: that whatever causes laughter is “living,” that it “grows” and “metamorphoses” and is somehow never still. This lack of stillness—this living quality—is intrinsic to the ways comedy enacts the potential for persistent change, shifting, sorting, iterating, archiving, exploding, illuminating, revealing, and never doing quite the same thing again in quite the same way. On the other hand, a growing, expanding thing that “springs from a long companionship”? Aristotle was right.

“Don’t We Laugh?” HAMM: No phone calls? (pause.) Don’t we laugh? CLOV (after reflection): I don’t feel like it. HAMM: (after reflection): Nor I. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, (10-11).

There is a difference, too, between comedy and laughter. Not all comedy results in laughter and not all laughter is a response to the comic. As Wylie Sypher declares, “Comedy may, in fact, not bring laughter at all; and, certain tragedies may make us laugh hysterically” (205). And James Kincaid insists, “The first step toward a workable theory of laughter seems to me to be a necessary distinction

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between laughter and comedy. Though the two are often closely related, there is apparently no necessary or absolute tie between the genre and the effect” (9).24 Because the comic event is more than a “genre,” because it is a formation that can occur in almost any circumstance and in any medium, then what ideas of the comic confuse or conflate is something more like one possible cause—comedy— and one possible reaction—laughter. If we think of this relation as a Venn diagram, the overlap of comedy and laughter neither correlates with nor accounts for either phenomenon. This raises the question of why so many theorists (Bergson, Freud) focus on laughter, which seems ephemeral and responsive, instead of on comedy, which may at least leave traces of its production. Laughter may be (but is not necessarily) a part of comedy; what is a necessary part of comedy is a reaction of some sort—a laugh, giggle, snort, groan, mental note—some performance of recognition, some feedback, that marks comedy’s turn back to itself in its enactment of a retroactive recognition of its own elements. The risus purus of Beckett’s Watt, for example, the “laugh at the laugh” at the “unhappy,” is not an analysis of laughter, but an analysis of a comic apparatus as a doubled or meta-reaction in a formation that involves at least two “scenes,” one scene functioning as the scene’s “other scene.” One scene—the laugh— comments on the other scene—the laugh, which is already a response to yet another scene—unhappiness. The comic event emerges as an apparatus of layered, multiply signifying, associative and self-conscious scenes and elements that invoke a performance—a “laugh” scene, perhaps, or a groan, or another joke—as reactive commentary on another “scene” —Watt’s “laugh at the laugh” which is a form of commentary on a third scene: “the unhappy.” The “unhappy” is not itself a catalyst, but a turning point, a ricochet that forces comedy back through its layered scenes to consider itself retrospectively, not as a commentary on unhappiness (though as NELL says, “There is nothing funnier than unhappiness”), but as a commentary on the laugh as a reaction to unhappiness, the juxtaposition of the two exploding the momentary revelation of the complex link between laughter, laughing at laughter, and the simultaneously brave and resigned responses to the “unhappy.” The concept of the “apparatus” derives from Jacques Lacan’s account of the subject as adapted by such film theorists as Christian Metz and treated especially in Jean-Louis Baudry’s mid-1970s essays, “The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (1974) and “The Apparatus” (1976).25 Baudry’s concept of the apparatus is a dynamic arrangement that deploys discourses, formations, and mechanisms ranging from the social (ideology, reception theories,

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The Comic Event

the history of images, etc.) to the mechanical (cameras, projectors, film practice, modes of transduction), the circumstantial (i.e., the scenes of the spectacle, the position of the audience) and the psychological (the mechanisms of the subject [projections, identifications, voyeurism, fetishism] in its relation to projected images). This apparatus does not define film, but rather enlists the elements by which film signifies and the arrangements by which film produces some of its effects. As Metz notes, elements of this enlistment duplicate or analogize one another (51). The perceiving/receiving film subject/viewer functions in a way similar to the seeing/receiving camera/screen. The effect is of a scene of seeing that observes and participates in another scene (the screen image) which itself generally involves the seeing of yet other scenes of seeing (the imaginary of film production, diegetic characters watching other characters, etc.). Like Baudry’s cinematic apparatus, the comic event consists of both a layering of multiple elements (cultural context, performance context, the history of the joke and teller, timing, psychological responses) and their flexive interactions. In addition, the comic event requires a sense of self-consciousness typically omitted from accounts of the cinematic apparatus (although that selfconsciousness—of the screen, of the viewing, of reactions—may well play a part). Nothing is set; apparatuses are dynamic. There are nearly infinite possibilities. But what is characteristic of both the cinematic apparatus and comedy is: (1) the sense of the scene about another scene (the movie theater scene gazing at another scene on the screen which evokes perhaps a mental scene and a real world scene simultaneously, or a joke scene always about another scene about another scene); and (2) the capacity for repeatability, both in immediate retrospection (i.e., the signifier has to be re-seen immediately in retrospect to be seen at all) and as an iterable text, capable of repetition, but likely to alter (at least in reception) every time. Thinking of comedy as an apparatus is, like all analogies, both a benefit and a limit. Any comic apparatus must be elastic; all of the elements one might ascribe need not be operating for a comic event to exist and there would exist elements, particularly elements of performance such as timing, tone of voice, inflections, and context, that would be impossible to render in any kind of formula. In one sense comedy’s scenic re-layerings seem potentially infinite (to the point of producing a mise en abyme), especially if they consist of the perpetual retellings of jokes and their variations. But these retellings always alter part of the apparatus—the context, the teller, the telling, the fact that someone has heard the joke before, resetting the scene that reproduces the other scene.

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Psychoanalytically, this comic “other” scene consists of material from the unconscious, fantasy, imaginary scenarios. Any self-conscious critical distance on this process, as in the retelling of a joke to anatomize it, shifts the relationships among elements, makes some of the unconscious content suddenly conscious while introducing new unconscious material, redirecting attention away from comedy’s precipitate—some of the “cut” of insight—to the mechanisms by which such insight appears. The attempt to parse meaning out of a completed comic occasion imports a different relation and kind of consciousness to the scene as scene. This is one reason attempts to define, philosophize, or even psychoanalyze the comic always miss the comic. They scrutinize the wrong thing—the product (the joke, laughter) instead of the process, the payoff (all of the multifarious unconscious motives for humor) instead of the eruptions—the cuts that make everything visible and risible at once. For the purposes of analysis, comedy is always a fait accompli. And yet the comic event is never finished; it perpetually chains. Nor is the analogy of an apparatus any sort of solution. The apparatus analogy is a tool to refocus attention on the infinitely complex circumstance of the comic event, on its coming-into-being. Evoking apparatus is a pretext, a kind of flexible, unlimited set of performance practices whose arrangement optimizes comedy’s tendency to explode insights about unlikely connections. These comic practices, unlike cinema, can happen anywhere and treat anything; their apparent improvisational quality—or at least the potential for that—unsettling what seem to be the set and reduplicative relations among cinema’s various scenes. If cinema works because it engages both conscious and unconscious material and spectatorial desires through its various transpositions and circumstances, the comic event works in so far as it engages other conscious and unconscious elements, meanings, and motives in a formation that makes itself felt more as an “event” with a precipitating “cut” as the event’s explosion into illuminating links springs from the nearly instantaneous collision of an almost uncountable number of vectors, discourses, sets, systems. Comedy always stops short of explanation. And there is always an aside.

“I’m F*cking Matt Damon”: The Evental Comic Cut In the mid-2000s, Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a late-night talk show, began a fake feud with actor, Matt Damon, with the line, “I want

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The Comic Event

to apologize to Matt Damon. We ran out of time.” Snatched out of the air, the improvisational line became a running joke to the point that even on Kimmel’s 2006 prime time special, Kimmel takes so long to introduce Damon that, again, he runs out of time. As Kimmel comments in an NPR interview: “The legs on this bit are unbelievable to me. I mean, people laugh every time I say it. . . . Repeating the same joke every night, you’d think eventually people would get tired of it, but they don’t.”26 In 2008, Kimmel’s then girlfriend, Sarah Silverman, joined Matt Damon to produce a video “message”-spoof parody as commentary, “I’m Fucking Matt Damon.”27 As a guest on the Kimmel show, Silverman introduced the video in a parody of the kind of personal confession that occurs occasionally on late-night talk shows. She begins the introduction by commenting on her own hirsute body. Telling Kimmel that he had suggested that her hairiness was evidence of the presence of testosterone which made her “like sex,” Silverman helpfully suggests to Jimmy that he might want to date those with the most testosterone: men. As a part of the introduction, Silverman also tries to explain the ways in which the clip to follow appears at the wrong time, put off as it was by several circumstances, but that there may never have been a good time for it. All of this discussion of timing, of course, produces precisely the delays that enact good comic timing—a performative anticipation both of bad timing and of timing itself. When it finally appears, the “clip” is a “Dear John” parody of a music video that opens with Silverman casually strumming a guitar in a brightly lit anonymous hotel room, her manner vaguely . . . apologetic. With feigned reluctance and a close-up on her right hand as it assaults the guitar, Silverman begins the fasterpaced anthem of the video: “I’m F*cking Matt Damon,” whose lyrics begin, “I’m f*cking Matt Damon.” Matt Damon, the video costar, joins her, singing, “She’s f*cking Matt Damon.” Throughout the video the word “f*ck” is always bleeped, which, of course, is less about objectionable content than it is a comment on simplistic television censorship. The video caricatures a series of various modes of music video romance: black and white mirror image sequences to a quieter section about the “good times” Silverman had with Kimmel (which involved Kimmel “puking” in the bucket of fish they had caught), a worksuit rap dance scene that commences with a “knock-knock” joke, a more contemplative scene of Silverman and Damon crawling across a bar toward one another, a series of television quotes involving The Insider’s Pat O’Brien, a “Remember When” section where Silverman describes activities she had with Jimmy during which she was f*cking Matt Damon, ending with a pillow fight. The spoof returns to the

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opening hotel room scenario and the quiet guitar where Silverman tells Jimmy she hopes she was clear and if he has any questions to please call her publicist (name and number then flashed on the screen). Finally, Matt Damon stops her, addresses Jimmy and tells him that “Jimmy, we are out of time. Sorry.” Sarah and Matt leave the set to go “f*ck Matt Damon.” Symptomatically, this extended comic event stops itself in a species of aside where it considers its own comedy (which is, of course, not its comedy at all, but a comment on its comedy). After the first short section, the video music stops as Matt Damon challenges Kimmel in a literalized double entendre. Pointing to Silverman’s breasts, he asks, “Hey Jimmy, how do you like them apples?” Damon then tries to explain the joke in an aside, pointing out the metaphor of apples for breasts—“Get it?” he says, “It’s um, uh, like I’m talking about her breasts?”28 The video itself seems to come to a halt as Sarah agrees half-heartedly that Damon’s joke was funny. The relation of this failed joke and its associated aside to the trajectory of the video supplies yet another scene to the romantic “other” scenes (Silverman and Damon, Silverman and Kimmel) the video already provides. Seeming to break out of what might pass for music video diegesis and even out of its own caricature, the video’s sophistication breaks down with Damon’s thin attempt at a joke, the apples-for-breasts comparison pointing to its genesis first in the film Good Will Hunting, then in Kimmel’s perpetuated improvisational, then repeated aside delaying Matt Damon. Using Damon’s delay as a signifier for a premature closure which actually constitutes closure subtends the entire series’ archived iterations. Like Bergson, whose persistent, often figurative return to low (or pumped up) phallic humor points to the underlying figure haunting his theory, so the pause produced by Damon’s lame comparison sneaks in the underlying trope of this comedy: the closure brought by premature explanation, the trade of the mundane for the sexy, the premature punch line which is never premature at all, but which is right on time, a statement about delay providing closure, the end of not ending, the comparison of apples for breasts, of fruit for seduction, the doubly intended implication of vengeance that can never be vengeance from the moment Damon tries to explain it. Parsing the joke enacts a false closure that points back to the performative character of the “we’re out of time” punch line itself: it enacts a literal “cut.” Kimmel’s first enactive cut that literally cut out Damon’s appearance on his show offers a contrast between the comic event’s logic of continued accrual and integration with more traditionally philosophical logics of comic resolution in reductions to single mechanisms, motives, or founding metaphors. On the one

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The Comic Event

hand Kimmel can enact a cut by announcing a delay caused by the end of a time period, which nonetheless persists in proliferating iterations that become the basis of a joke. The stop never stops; the cut becomes the center of comedy. On the other hand, Damon can stop all action by shifting the dynamics of the video caricature from its on-going accruing system to the suddenly inflexible edifice of a simile—human parts are like fruit, the human is like the inanimate. Damon’s attempt at comedy draws attention to Kimmel and Silverman’s dynamics of circulation and iteration in so far as Damon’s joke introduces something stiff and alien. Low phallic humor. Kimmel’s initial “out of time” cut is quite literal (even if it proliferates and suggests that there would have been more). This naïve version of what Jacques Lacan would call “the cut,” as an intrinsic part of what Badiou calls “the event” (even though the latter two are not quite the same) nonetheless produces an effect similar to the cut in the register of conscious performance.29 Both Lacan and Badiou credit this point of discontinuity and/or sudden concatenation of meanings with instigating a set of instant changes, including a sudden immersion in history and a complete change of perspective and/or circumstances. The comic event’s “cut” requires a ground perceived as undifferentiated, which, as the retroactive effect of a cut, becomes marked and differentiated as always having been an “event.” Kimmel’s improvisational “no time for Damon” produces his entire program retrospectively as a temporal ground in contrast with its sudden termination. The character of the cut, which seems to halt circulation, retrospectively redefines the ground as a ground awaiting this cut. Hence, it is difficult to imagine (and the ground is always imaginary) a cutless, eventless ground. Translated into comedy, this means that any condition from which a joke emerges retrospectively becomes ground then to be imagined as the preliminary condition for the change in condition—the cut—to come. Like Kimmel, who pretends to cut Damon off as a way to provide closure in terms of delay, so the “cut” marks a difference between the endless time before the cut and the new role of the absent subject—Damon in the first instance, Kimmel in Silverman’s video—as that which marks the change between before and after, between the undifferentiated (undifferentiated in the sense that we do not know which materials will precipitate as operative in the cut itself) grounding lead-up to the cut that appears both to cause the precipitation of material that constitutes the joke and ensues from that precipitation. A joke is the effect of this change from imperceptible disorganized occurrences to a perceptible ground of possibility to the selective visibility of elements that reveal and explode both anticipated and

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unlooked-for links. Looking back, comedy’s second glance re-conceives ground as already marked, already preparing for what follows. As you might have noticed, describing and analyzing Silverman’s joke video is nowhere close to the character of the video. This inevitable appeal to structure and analysis is more in line with Matt Damon’s attempt to explain the bad joke. In so far as this is like Damon’s explanation—his attempt to provide closure in a scene where the last word is always about putting the last word off, then this account is, like Damon’s fruitless (well, okay maybe fruitful) explanation, the false step that makes visible part of the joke’s larger dynamic. Or so one might hope. But there is an even better chance that, like Damon’s aside, this interlude will pass as an embarrassing misstep in light of the entire unreproducible whole, so if you have not seen the video, you might look at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eSfoF6MhgLA.

“I’m F*cking Ben Affleck”: The Event Continues The joke, bit, sketch in which elements precipitate is always the ground for another joke, bit, sketch. The comic is always a scene about another scene. That which began with Kimmel’s improvisational Damon comment, itself iterated, then played out as part of the ground for Silverman’s “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” becomes the ground for Kimmel’s response, “I’m F*cking Ben Affleck.”30 Introducing his video, Jimmy Kimmel recounts its previous “ground”: the joke of “bumping” Matt Damon. He then replays the portion of Silverman’s video where she announces “I’m f*cking Matt Damon” up to the point before the music stops and Damon begins his breasts/apples joke, commenting that Silverman’s video has been seen by eight million people and is bigger than the video of “That fat kid with the light saber.” Kimmel confesses his humiliation and characterizes his video as a “revenge” piece: “Matt, Sarah. This is for you.” His video, “I’m F*cking Ben Affleck,” sets itself up on an additional comic ground: the long association of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Picking up on Silverman’s introductory comment that perhaps he might prefer men, Kimmel deploys the same hotel-room-confessional-set-up as Silverman—a parody of a parody. He uses the same music, the same guitar strumming opening and nearly the same script. His video varies slightly, however, as he introduces photographs of Silverman and Damon with insulting titles. Then, in a reference to the other scene of Silverman’s video, he announces he’s “f*cking Ben Affleck,”

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The Comic Event

as he and Ben Affleck appear behind a tropical gay bar. The video continues with grotesquely parodied scenes of Kimmel and Affleck doing each other’s hair, painting their toe nails, culminating in Affleck’s comment that Kimmel’s “got bigger tits.” The parody here is not only an iteration of Silverman’s video and Damon’s clumsy joke, but a satire of hackneyed conceptions of gay male culture itself as feminine. This move, which appears homophobic, is also a commentary on the homophobia of feminizing conceptions of gay men. Kimmel’s video tops Silverman’s by engaging a gang of celebrities in his revenge/response/celebration. Brad Pitt, dressed as a Fed-Ex delivery person, announces he has a package for whoever is “f*cking Ben Affleck,” which turns out to be a cake with lit candles and the iced inscription “Congratulations on F*cking Ben Affleck.” After Kimmel blows out the candles, Pitt asks him what he wished for and the video shifts to a different song (“I’m F*cking Ben Affleck”) in a more romantic ambiance, including a face-to-face duet between Kimmel and Affleck that opens up to an entire gospel choir with a number of famous soloists who sing the new song, with most of the lyrics (and accompanying gestures) bleated out. These soloists include Don Cheadle, Macy Gray, Robin Williams, Cameron Diaz, Joan Jett, Huey Lewis, Meat Loaf, Lance Bass, and the still serious Josh Groban. In an inset scene, Harrison Ford drives by in a car, gives Kimmel and Affleck the high sign, and as he drives away they honk in response to a bumper sticker on Ford’s car that reads “Honk if you’re F*cking Ben Affleck.” The video ends with the line: “Dedicated to the memory of Norman Mailer.” This final fillip may mean nothing other than to signify a parodic pretension or it may refer to a notion of revenge (as Mailer was reputed to beat his girlfriends occasionally) or it may be yet another parodic commentary as Mailer was a considered a homophobe. Or, of course, all three. Demonstrating comedy’s reliance on comedy as the ground for comedy as well as for its iterative praxis, the Kimmel/Damon incidents don’t stop here. Matt Damon took over Kimmel’s show and Damon explains Jimmy’s disfavor by showing that Kimmel has ambitions as an actor, but that he lost every part to Damon. Kimmel does a spoof of Damon’s film The Bourne Ultimatum by adding a fictional encounter with Kimmel’s sidekick Guillermo.31 Sooner or later, however, the original event fades, no longer sustaining iterations, reduced either to a catch-phrase (Dana Carvey’s Church Lady’s “Isn’t that special?”) or a trope (as in “knock-knock” or “dumb blond” jokes) or playing out into increasingly tepid and meaningless echoes. Both the reverberations of a past event and the final synecdoche of its precipitation, these fading echoes

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retrospectively raise a question about whether comedy ever has any meaning that outlasts its event. What, finally, does the comic event mean? Is its meaning that sudden insight, the cut, that brings associations together in a precipitate set of connections that were always potential, but become inert the moment after they have become kinetic? In suddenly expanding, does comedy prick something and do we label as “meaning” all of that which it pricks, which enacts, suddenly, at one moment an interruption in the state of affairs, an event, which is itself cut? And what kind of meaning does an event, a cut, a comic prick produce that wasn’t there before, other than making its gathering ground visible as such? Lacan sees “a profound link between this cut and the function as such of the subject, of the subject in its constituent relation to the signifier itself.” (43). A signifier stands in for some signifier somewhere else (a scene that stands for another scene). The subject—the psychical apparatus brought into being as a “subject” as an effect of the cut—is structured around a lack, around an absence represented by the presence of something (a signifier) that refers to something that is forever somewhere else. Like Matt Damon. Infinite deferral. Deferral, defference, difference. This difference is the installation of representation as a coding that stands in for presence—as a coding that in the absence of the signified—enables a recognition of being qua being and via this recognition, meaning as that which emerges momentarily as it flees. Comedy, however, is not Lacan’s originary “cut,” but instead a second cutlike moment, a repetition of a cut, which gathers, layers, accrues all modes of signification so as to explode them in a cut-like event that reveals some meaning—not the meaning of the subject, but the momentary insight of the connection of the unlikely, the arcane, of some minor aspects of ground that have escaped notice or have not emerged as meaningful at all. As the Jimmy Kimmel Live! series of iterations suggests, comedy is a self-wound phenomenon that is itself a sort of explosion. Kimmel’s perpetual delay of Damon becomes a joke in its iteration as it accrues, enmeshes, and repeats cultural tropes and truisms: the talk show that runs out of time, Hollywood celebrity, questions of desire and sexuality, music videos, the film industry, etc. At a certain point in the successive iterations of the Damon joke, nothing more can be accrued; the joke dissipates, splits back into its elements like spent fireworks falling to the ground. The comic event, thus, is not a set of discrete occurrences, but as arrangements of layered performative scenes (deliberate or not) that instantly and rapidly mobilize across and through multiple systems, sets of associations,

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The Comic Event

discourses, serendipities. It is like fireworks, except that its arcing reach engages, unpredictably, associations from unanticipated vectors, galvanizes connections in unlooked-for analogies, pushes against fragile ethical erections, and for a moment, collapses it all into a universe of its own. In this, comedy is neither singular nor discrete, but iterative, its scenes of other scenes accruing, operating on their own retrospections and retroactive resignifications. The comic cut is the joy of sudden connection, of seeing for a moment an insight across normative parameters. It is the utter pleasure of recognition; it is the liberating ecstasy of transgression, the one on the way to the other. Comedy is a sudden conceptual shortcut, repeated, gaining its imprimatur by forcing a look backward to compare the incommensurate with its happy collision. And there is no way to predict what comedy’s meshings will be or what they will become, as comedy is never singular, but always already an iteration that keeps on iterating, reverberating, resonating, jittering through discourses, events, associations long after its telling performance is past. Comedy does not stop. It might wear out, exhaust itself, but it never stops. Not only are jokes retold, but their contexts constantly shift, if only because the joke has already appeared once. New contexts produce the same joke differently, because the context of its telling is an integral part of any joke. There would, for example, be a difference between the “Baddest Man in Town Joke” told by, say, academics at an academic conference and the same joke told in a bar frequented by working class southerners, especially since part of the joke is at the expense of what might be imagined, from the point of view of some academics, a working class southerner. The references, values, associations instantly change. The joke culls different discourses, meshes with different systems, deploys different elements of performance: impersonation, timing, address, context. The teller might employ a Southern accent or the haughty tone of the wealthy. The elements of the joke might be delayed as they are in the rendition, supra, above, or tumble out in immediate sequence.

Bobbing Up Again: The “Froth” of Laughter It [laughter] indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It instantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance. It, also, is a froth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the aftertaste bitter. Henri Bergson, Laughter, 190

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Ending, thus, his thoughts on laughter by comparing the socius to an ocean and laughter to the action of a wave that leaves behind a “remnant of foam,” Henri Bergson envisions laughter’s possible revolt as superficial, frothy, and a little bitter. The underlying collision of larger movements as well as the gathering of multiple and mixed forces betrays the simplicity of the evanescent shred of foam upon which the philosopher places his tongue. Despite his ending with a “saline” remnant cum sparkling “gaiety,” Bergson’s wave simile suggests a much more complex understanding of comedy (as opposed to frothy laughter): it is a “revolt” produced by “changing forms of a disturbance”—the action of waves as they slosh against one another, gathering undefinable and unpredictable elements, coming to a head, moving back into another on-coming wave. As an analogy for the dynamic of the comic event these waves are like jokes, bits, the perpetuated repetition of the comic pretext that continues until it wears itself out on a sandy shore perhaps as “foam,” or maybe simply the impressed wave lines in the sand that trace one over the other. Implicit in Bergson’s evocation of bitterness as well as in his mention of “slight revolt” is a hint of something political (perhaps in its broadest sense), some critique or commentary, some backsplash on “the surface of social life.” Despite Bergson’s oceanic finale, there is something disturbing about comedy, something of what he terms earlier, “the truceless warfare of the waves on the surface of the sea” (189). Although he envisions this wavy warfare as again merely superficial (“profound peace reigns in the depths below” [189]), the model of wave action in its utter complexity, iteration, collisions, connections, infinite variables, and yes, even froth, comes close to intuiting the complexities—and disturbing aspects—of the comic. Comedy, like waves, gathers, moves, collides, and explodes repeatedly outwardly. Like the ocean, the comic has almost infinite depth and uncountable variables. These include not only aspects of context and audience, but also variations in performance that range from tone of voice, accent, and gesture to such elements of timing as speed of delivery, interruption, elaboration, and pauses. Timing is itself context dependent, a product of discerning the inclinations and degree of anticipation of auditors, of marking the right moment, of a cybernetic relation to the joke’s audience. Like waves that each depend on the ebbing of previous waves, comedy is cybernetic in so far as the teller constantly alters the telling in relation to his listeners’ responses. Comedy is something like a valve that momentarily gathers and condenses, arranges and times an event that evokes much more than it seems to present. More, especially, than that product of all of Bergson’s “pert bobbings,” and

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The Comic Event

“fountainheads”—more than mere salty “foam,” unless we see comedy’s entire drama as working toward the end of frothy saline expenditure. And like the wave always gathering and yet always seemingly there, “comedy,” Aristotle declares, “has had no history.” It still has no history in the sense that every comic event seems to arise untraceably, even as it also emerges from the depths of materials already present. A comic event only has a “history” once it has become a comic event in so far as comic events inveigle retrospective resignifications of their own coming-into-being. Comedy’s lack of history and its apparent surface manifestations correlate with its absence of “pain,” a notion that derives equally from Bergson’s foamy laughter and Aristotle’s notion of the comic as “an ugly and distorted mask” which does not cause “pain” (330). An apparently painless derivation from nowhere, the comic event’s supposed superficiality, however, runs counter to what comedy can do: cut deeply, show incommensurate logics, track folly, and produce, perhaps as asides, commentary on matters that can no longer be approached directly. The comic event is the dynamic that shows that perhaps the notion of “surface/depth” is itself an illusion. In the comic event everything is already there to be mustered, exposed, overturned. Whatever in a joke seems superficial—a pun, for example, or mimetic repetition—draws many other systems, registers, associations, logics, and discourses from the illusory “depths.” If a comic tells a joke about a political figure, making fun of her as, say, linguistically challenged, naïve, uninformed, or stupid, the joke is also a joke commenting on anti-intellectualism in America, politicians’ lack of character and substance, the artificial quality of the political process itself, the narrow-mindedness and ignorance of whatever sector of the American populace one disagrees with, the superficiality of media coverage, the image-driven character of opinion, etc. How do we classify any of this as either surface or depth? What seems trivial is funny partly because it elicits larger issues and vice versa.

In Pertinence “Earlier today, Governor Sarah Palin held a meeting with several leaders from other countries to showcase her foreign policy expertise. That’s right, yeah. Experts say the meeting took 90 seconds.”' —Conan O’Brien32

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“The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin’s word ‘refudiate’ to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to ‘dismangle’ the English language.” —Conan O’Brien33 “Bristol Palin is continuing her campaign about teen pregnancy. It’s funny that she's going around telling kids not to get pregnant when her mom is telling people, ‘Drill, baby, drill.’” —Jimmy Kimmel34 “Sarah Palin got an iPad and she was complaining that it’s not really that absorbent.” —Bill Maher35 “I find it strange that Sarah Palin would be shopping a reality show considering the fact that she hasn't shown much interest in reality.” —Jimmy Kimmel36 Today, the comic has become one of the only means of trenchant political and social commentary still available in the contemporary United States. Comedy short-circuits what Charles Pierce calls “Idiot America,” the unreasoned and generally unfounded media-supported belief systems of an increasingly uneducated, unthinking, and closed-minded nation.37 In this context, comedy is one of the last bastions of the thinking person, a mode of performance in which the serious hypocrisy of taking evident silliness as fact can be exposed for the silliness it is—as well as the way such silliness serves all kinds of interests that are not in the interest of much of anyone who is not a multimillionaire. Foam it might be, but its bitterness has become unmistakable. This is not to say that comedy has become the exclusive province of some version of intelligentsia. Everyone participates in something comic; something is funny to everyone. The problem becomes how to discuss comedy as a phenomenon without having already reduced what we are discussing to an effect of selecting an example or making certain assumptions about what counts as comedy or defining some cultural manifestations and not others. This last is, alas, unavoidable because I can’t talk about everything and I cannot pretend that what I say in relation to one species of comedy works for all of the others or that I will select examples to everyone’s taste. The best I can hope for is the suggestion of a kind of complex, self-reflexive, cybernetic account that might serve as the

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The Comic Event

basis for a reconsideration of how we think about genre—and which does not in itself reduce any manifestation of comedy to a rote formula. This book also isn’t just about comedy or about looking at comic phenomena in a different way. It also offers a way of thinking about any text or representational process (such as narrative) that requires an element of performance and that has as its basis a net of multiple possibilities from which conscious and unconscious choices are made. It is about shifting from the distillation of reductive structural modes of analysis to a recognition of comedy’s explosive complexities, or the comic event as the explosion of complexities understood as systems, regimes, discourses, intertwined conventions, occasions, and performances, enwrapping, joggling, clashing, resignifying, and repeating. To approach this phenomenon, what follows begins with the simplest elements, or “bits” (which are themselves actually fairly complicated), building, bit by bit, to increasing combination: jokes, series of jokes, repetitions, layerings caricatures, sketches, framing, selfconsciousness, and finally stand-up as itself a structured combination of all of this. Despite this linear build, single bits do not exist in a hierarchical structure. Instead, all of this coexists, jostling, playing, merging, shifting, coalescing as recognizable tactics in a comic event: in the gathering, timing, performative process that results finally in a cut, a break that for a moment reveals an insightful link among the accrued elements. This book, thus, investigates the dynamics and operation of recorded comedy performances as a way to think about comedy differently. Because one hypothesis is that the comic cannot be separated from its performance, only performances available on digital media are the subject of analysis. Even these are already out of their context and can never be understood simply within that context again. They have already garnered multiple histories and iterations for which it is nearly impossible to account. We can view them multiple times and they lack the infinite cures and feedback of “liveness,” which also makes recordings differ from a live performance.38 Repeated viewings make it much easier to track these recorded events’ engagement of multiple discourses and systems, something that is nearly impossible in the time between the delivery of a joke and its response. And, of course, the incidents I have chosen to analyze are partially a matter of my own taste, which I guess reveals something (I don’t know what) about me. Or about what appears to support this hypothesis. Or what is manageable in an analytical framework. As for a “pert challenge”? It is too early to tell.

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Perhaps the only way to speak about comedy without wrecking it is via side comments. Perhaps comedy is like a peripheral vision of the stars, which as the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders on the Rue Morgue” suggests, one can only apprehend and speak of indirectly, as if from the side. “To look at a star by glances—to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly—is to have the best appreciation of its lustre—a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it” (119).39

Bit I

“At First Mere Improvisation”

It certainly began in improvisations—as did also Comedy; the one originating with the authors of the Dithyramb, the other with those of the phallic songs, which still survives as institutions in many of our cities Aristotle, Poetics Aristotle’s sense that comedy has a sketchy, if urban, history is, as perhaps Kimmel’s Matt Damon improv showed, often the case for series of comic bits, so much like Bergson’s oceanic swells. If we continue with Bergson’s pelagic metaphors, then comedy might begin with a very small eruption—a whitehead—that “propagates itself through a medium,” “deforming” it temporarily before the medium returns to its previous unruffled state.1 Beginning with an explosive moment seemingly coming from nowhere, the comic event, like the wave, produces its own history out of this apparent lack of one, a history inscribed in the equally temporary oscillations and collisions produced by the spread of comic energy through, well, this “medium,” whatever that might be. Comedy’s originary “medium” for Aristotle was those “phallic songs,” featured in phallika or penis parades that were part of Dionysian celebrations and rituals. At the plays associated with these Dionysian festivals, drunken men bearing or wearing phalli jeered at the theater, becoming, according to one account, confused with the ivy-wearing participants who recited iambic verse, and resulting in the conflation of iambic recitation, jeering, and the comic comedy of those bearing phalli. The “low”ness of the phalli may have derived from the phallus bearers’ display of flaccid as opposed to the erect accessories borne by Dionysian satyrs.2 This up-and-down play around a ritualized moment of deflation (reminiscent of Bergson’s appeal to the “growing,” “expanding,” “metamorphosing” thing that “springs from long companionship”) appends an alternative notion of history to comedy’s apparent lack of history. This new

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The Comic Event

version of “history” situates the comic event as a dynamic of tumescence and detumescence analogous to the dynamic of the wave, growing, spreading, subsiding, its catalyst ultimately unknown. Unknown perhaps, but let’s hypothesize that this comic wave dynamic serves as its own catalyst where the phallus becomes its own object, its own “growing, spreading, subsiding.” In this context, what might “improvisation,” as the first “mere” comic practice, look like? In what “medium” (other than the phallus itself) might it operate? Most definitions of “improvise” understand the term as referring to a performance without preparation or planning. This performance seems to spring from within, from some unknown source, and play with the available elements of a medium—in a modern context, music, language, dance, comic sketches, and perhaps even food. The improvisations of the Dionysian phallus bearers were jeers at theatrical spectacle—at performance. The jeers themselves were performance. Hence the “medium” of comic improvisation is performance itself—the scene of jeering at the other scene on stage, which itself represents yet another scene. And if the “other scene” ritual of Dionysus is replayed on a yearly basis, then comedy’s improv origins already bind to the repetitions of ritual. Improv’s medium is already an “other” scene. Comedy’s improv, then, is a ritualistic jeering at the “other” scene of a ritual that itself may have once been improv. Matt Damon. But if improvisation is the originary core of comedy and if this improvisation itself is anaclitic—dependent upon another scene—why does Aristotle dub it “mere”? It would seem, to the contrary, that improvisation is everything, at least in so far as the term might refer to (and mask) the impetus that causes all of the gathering energy of the waving tumescence to explode. Even if most jokes are repeated, their catalyst—the wavy whitehead—inaugurates disturbances through a medium that is always another, preexisting scene. This means that “mere” improvisation is never “mere” at all, but already a formation, one performance layered upon others. The “mere”ness of comedy’s improv does not exist in the sudden advent of perturbing energy out of nowhere, but instead exists in the torquing of elements of scenes and performances already present—a torquing that produces a sudden (but already potential, comprehended, and incipient) shift in significance and perspective, a performance making visible what has already been gathered, but has not yet been perceived—like waves that always arise from the action of other waves.

“At First Mere Improvisation”

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Mingo But let us look back to look ahead to look back (a wavy dynamic in its own right). On The Tonight Show of April 29, 1965, Ed Ames, a tall, lanky, and modest crooner turned actor, who played the part of the Native American “Mingo” on the Daniel Boone television show, gave a demonstration of tomahawk throwing.3 The live television set was equipped for this event with a target on the wall stage left, consisting of the outline of a cowboy, complete with hat and sheriff ’s badge. For the demonstration, Ames gets up from his guest’s seat next to Carson, who is sitting at his host desk upstage right. Accompanied by the show’s orchestra’s strains of hackneyed Native American music, Ames stands downstage right in front of Carson’s desk. He then rehearses his tomahawk-throwing technique with a few overhead swings of the right arm, explaining to Carson that one extends the arm (and, he says as an aside, “hits the microphone” as the ax nearly swipes the boom mike hovering nearby) in an overhead throw with one revolution. “Once around” echoes Johnny. After a few more preliminary (and delaying) wrist flexings, Ames throws the tomahawk, which lands on the target right below the outline’s crotch with the tomahawk handle sticking up at a distinctly erect angle. Ames jumps in a double take and begins an embarrassed laugh. After a second, the audience begins to howl in laughter. Ames laughs, not knowing exactly what to do, finally making a move toward the target to remove the tomahawk. Carson, who had got up from his desk, restrains him, then studiously pretends to sharpen one of the extra tomahawks with another, intent on his task, not laughing but smiling, working his lips in an attempt to stifle a laugh, distinctly honing something. Carson waits before saying anything, during which time the ambiguity of the tomahawk throw continues to elaborate in repeated recursion. Is this event comic because the handle of the tomahawk looks like an erection? Because the tomahawk’s landing site looks like a castration? Because if he had tried, Ames could not have landed the tomahawk in a more awkward spot? Because of the very ambiguity of these possibilities? Is it comic because of the unlikely but fortuitous occurrence of this particular landing on live television? Comic because in the Native American/cowboy politics of the demonstration set-up the ersatz Native American triumphs (or comically doesn’t)? All of these possibilities, suggested, in abeyance, poised in the scenic aftermath of Ames’s demonstration, circulate not only as they may have been suggested by the rich result of the demonstration, but also because of three additional, improvisational elements of the performance: the shifting of the two studio

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The Comic Event

cameras managed by the show’s director, Dick Carson, which cut repeatedly from Ames to an image of the assaulted cowboy cut-out to Carson and back; Carson’s improvisational facial expressions and tomahawk sharpening; and Carson’s exquisite extension of the time between the tomahawk throw and his first comment. The entire bit lasts one minute and forty-one seconds. The set-up, which includes Carson’s introduction of the demonstration and Ames’ explanation of tomahawk-throwing technique, takes thirty-one seconds. After the throw, there are forty-five seconds of audience laughter as Carson moves from behind his desk to the space in front and stands with Ames as the camera cuts back and forth from the two men to the cut-out figure. This forty-five seconds constituted one of the longest periods of live audience laughter in the history of television.4 After the forty-five seconds of laughter, during which Carson whittled with the tomahawks and visibly tried repressing his glee, he pauses and finally says, “And I didn’t even know you were Jewish.” Renewed howls of audience laughter prolonged for twelve seconds. Ames nearly doubles over. Johnny, trying to contain his own laughter, finally says, “Welcome to frontier bris.” More laughter. Although the tomahawk throw “bit” was planned, its result was not. The improvisational moment, which occurred forty-five seconds after, was Carson’s commentary on the “other” scene. What was improvisational was Carson’s selection of perhaps one of the least likely of all of the possible comments the hatchet’s landing had already implied. Improvisation requires not only another scene, but also a torquing of expectation, a perturbing that stirs up even those presumptive punch lines that have already been circulating. Any comment about either castration or erection (any really low phallic comedy) would not have been particularly comic because either would merely have adumbrated the obvious, reconfirmed what would have been reduced thereby to a slightly burlesque accident. The improvisational quality of Carson’s comment comes from his making visible something that is there among the gathering possibilities but hovering somewhere at the side, an aside, perhaps unlooked-for, which torques the event and forces a retroactive resignification of everything that had already happened. And it turns out that Ed Ames is, in fact, Jewish. This process of retrospection was encouraged by Dick Carson’s camera direction, which replays visually the string of relations among the various stage locales (a process the studio audience itself would not have witnessed unless it was watching studio monitors). Johnny Carson’s long delay also encourages the mustering of as many potential punch lines as possible. That Carson then

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chooses the one line no one is likely to expect wrenches the scenario from the mere rehearsal of, well, low phallic comedy to low phallic comedy augmented by a more elaborate set of ethnic discourses, some of which are already in play and which in fact had already been introduced even before the set-up in Ed Ames’s curious layering of subject positions—he is a Jewish white male singer who plays a Native American character on television demonstrating to another white man how to throw a tomahawk at the outline of a (presumably WASP-y) cowboy. The resulting ambiguous metaphor circulates, evokes, and recalls all of these layerings, wrapping various ironies, and terminating with Carson’s canny return to the origin of the bit’s plays on ethnicity in an indirect reference to Ames’s Jewishness that may or may not have been generally known by the bit’s audiences. The bit, thus, plays on the collision of such discourses as ethnicity, religion, masculinity, American history, television, all retrospectively evoked, brought out in Carson’s improvisational selection of the comment that would make them all apparent at once. The intersections of these discourses are stacked, layered, delayed, simultaneous not with one another, but with the constant recursions and gatherings of retrospective resignification, a process with no beginning, and judging by the number of websites featuring this little bit from 1965, no end in sight. It continues and what continues is the timing, which repeatedly and quite literally replayed, never ceases to work and never works the same way twice.5

The Ouroboric Cut Bits circle and cycle, and their commentary—the cut that turns an event from one thing into another—becomes ritual in its own right. Jimmy Kimmel’s Matt Damon line, the cut of the literal cut, becomes such a ritual. Some bits become infinitely self-reflexive, producing a comic mise en abyme that waves simultaneously outwardly and inwardly. Most bits begin to refer to themselves when they become ritualized, marking their own history in a series of selfreferential gambits. Some bits enact the self-referentiality of the comic cut from the start as well as the dynamic that incites the cut’s constant repetition—its production as something like a wave that periodically perpetuates outwardly until its energy depletes. An enactment of such a self-cycling cut occurs in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), a film about the character Brian, who, born on the same day in the

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The Comic Event

stable next door, spends his life being confused for Jesus.6 In one “bit” Brian is addressing a large crowd from a window above a town square: Brian (Graham Chapman): Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals. Group (in unison): Yes, we’re all individuals Brian: You're all different. Group (in unison): Yes, we’re all different. Single voice: I’m not. Another voice: Shhh.

Although the entire film is a caricature of religion (its parallel set-up providing the occasion for its uncanny comparisons), this bit enacts the ways the film’s caricature generates a series of performative gambits through an enframed series of ironic reversals nested in a central, enactive paradox that itself depends on the entire scene’s comparison to another scene—the scene of the “other” charismatic speaker. In their parallels to the “other” scene, these gambits provide a running critique of the relations among charisma, religions, crowds, and culture, not as these more abstract comments provide any intrinsic element of comedy, but as the fodder, “set-up,” or “medium” for the series of plays on the tropes of the mindless crowd that ensue. In the opening gambit (or “set-up”) of the series, the crowd follows the wrong person, mistaking Brian for the “right” person. A satirical comment on the bovine propensities of a credulous populace and the irresistible nature of charisma, the scenario links the cultural truisms of crowds to what kind of looks like a religious context, thus caricaturing religion itself as a practice mesmerized by mistaken charisma. In the second gambit, Brian tells the crowd to do exactly the opposite of what we expect a charismatic figure to tell a crowd: he exhorts them not to follow him, but to go their own ways. The crowd’s response enacts another paradoxical reversal, ironically responding to Brian’s exhortations by doing exactly the opposite: answering in unison. Brian turns out to be simultaneously both a very effective speaker and a completely ineffective speaker, as the crowd, though imitating his words, does exactly the opposite of what he commands. This second set of paradoxes enacts its reversal by saying one thing as a way to do the opposite. The bit gets to its reverberating cut when the crowd’s framing univocity is finally breached by a single person who responds to Brian’s observation that everyone is “different” by denying that he is different, enacting in a perpetual

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loop the very difference that his statement refuses. The cut—the denial that in denying produces the opposite status its statement asserts—returns to the cut, reverberating forward and backward, spinning the bit into itself as quintessentially a moment in which two opposites can coexist. This Chinese box of paradoxes, thus, appears simultaneously to close in and open out and at the same time draw further and further away from its caricatured medium into a set of enframed contradictions that end up reproducing Brian’s own status as “not different” from the crowd to which he speaks. The “end” of this joke is both the joke’s inside and its outside, its end and its beginning, reflecting and returning to its frame, linking caricature, circumstance, paradox, and repetition in a wormy enactment of the impossibility of individuality at the very moment someone finally, perversely, enacts it in denying it. In this small “bit,” the unseen and contingent parallels existing among discourses—religion, history, charisma, group psychology, conformity, individuality, paradox—are suddenly made visible all at once. This epiphany of sorts suddenly illuminates all sorts of tangled, conflicting, and aligned relations, revealing a sudden and instant complexity. Most of the sparking connections—Brian and Jesus, all analogies to the crowd, the dilemma of the weak speaker—fade quickly, reduced to a few truly outstanding links—the perversity of the individual in a crowd, the perversity of the crowd, the caricature’s insights on crowd behavior and charisma, the ouroboric marvel of the paradoxical cut. It is difficult to recount this moment. Attempting to summarize it shifts the operation of the enframed reversals, removing the joke from performance to second-hand description that focuses on the innermost paradox. The joke works only by looking back from its innermost reversal; it retrospectively resignifies. Only after we come to see what the circumstantial layering was all about, do all of the layers come suddenly into momentary perspective. This retroactive resignification may well be one reason why comedy is so amenable to repetition (but not to description). It was always already a repetition of sorts, a bringing into view associations that had we seen them, we would already have known were there.

Bit II

Reverberations: The Joke of the Joke

A priest, a rabbi, and a giraffe walk into a bar. The bartender looks up, and says “So what is this, some kind of a joke?”1 The wavily extended comic bit is a dynamic set of relations consisting of a repeated gathering or “set-up” side and a “cut” that enacts a “payoff,” neither of which may ever be discretely binary, separate, or even discernable. Sometimes the cut becomes the setup for the next bit. Sometimes the gatherings repeat with a different cut. Conventionally, these two “sides” combine to make a “joke,” a discernably completed, hopefully comic moment. A priest, a rabbi, and a giraffe walk into a bar. A gathering. Do we know yet? The bartender looks up, and says “So what is this, some kind of a joke?” A cut. Isn’t the gathering already the cut? Don’t we already know this is a joke, which is of course the payoff: the joke of the joke that isn’t a joke which becomes a joke because it plays on the idea of joke? But as Matt Damon’s apples/breasts “joke” cautioned: don’t try to explain a joke.2 The “bit” is a comic event. A joke is one species of bit. Both work through the comic event’s dynamics—the cut between setup and payoff, the way the setup is already inflected by the payoff, the gathering, the sudden shift to an insight or a new sense or a different register altogether. While a “bit” is a more inclusive term for the setup/payoff, a joke is a more clearly defined, self-conscious gambit or genre that generally announces itself as such. A priest, a rabbi, and a giraffe walk into a bar. Bits might consist of a joke or a series of jokes or might also play with less defined practices such as improvisation, parody, impersonation, caricature, or other arrangements. We know a joke. Knock knock. We don’t always know a bit until it is over. Even if jokes enact the dynamic of the comic event, the comic event cannot be reduced to the joke as a basic grammatical element. The comic event’s gathering “setup” culls miscellaneous elements into a “medium.” The cut makes suddenly visible this broad, multi-discursive involvement. A priest, a rabbi, and a giraffe; religion, species, the history of jokes, the anticipations of mixed discourses embodied by the figures, the

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imaginary of visual comedy, etc. The set-up dynamic includes an accruing array of circumstances, discourses, possibilities, and anticipations; the history of the set-up itself; timing; context; audience; and a suspended ambiguity (an ambiguity always already suspected and poised in abeyance). The payoff comes with the cut, the appearance of the expected unexpected referent that stops accruings, makes evident multiple instantaneous links among discourses, instigates a retroactive resignification, and a wavy set of repetitions and reverberations. So what is this, some kind of a joke? The bit’s retroactive resignification is both a sudden expansion and a focusing connection that momentarily collides multiple contributing discourses and elements to end in the reductive evaporation of almost everything except the punch line. Of course, these dynamics occur in different ways in various manifestations. Their complex interaction is not formulaic; the comic event’s expansions, contractions, and momentary cut to insight or shift to the unexpected or change of register (even if, or maybe especially if, such sudden condensations are really frivolous) also depend upon the performance’s timing, delay, context, and repetitions. Even if a bit or a joke might look like some sort of cresting wave, nothing divides neatly. Jokes, for example, might be extended or miniscule, momentary, and even inserted suddenly from outside a context. And like any comic event, jokes are always about another scene. They may not “jeer,” as Aristotle suggests, but retry, revise, remix. Despite their self-announcement, jokes are not like parts of language or structures; nor are they basic grammatical or structural elements of the comic, as Sigmund Freud implies in Jokes.3 Like many others who have considered the question of the comic or of laughter, Freud, too, sets out to find the simplest formula for the enjoyment afforded by the comic by analyzing the role of jokes, seeking the minimum requirements for a joke by scanning the work of previous thinkers, and producing a brief joke typology based on method: The criteria and characteristics of jokes brought up by these authors and collected above—activity, relation to the content of our thoughts, the characteristics of playful judgement, the coupling of dissimilar things, contrasting ideas, “sense in nonsense”, the succession of bewilderment and enlightenment, the bringing forward of what is hidden, and the peculiar brevity of wit—all this, it is true, seems at first sight so very much to the point and so easily confirmed by instances that we cannot be in any danger of underrating such views. (11)

But in the end, Freud rejects all of these hypotheses, calling them “disjecta membra,” and vows in his project “to endeavor to penetrate further by increased attention and deeper interest” (11, 12). This further “penetration” consists of a

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three-part inquiry—“Analytic Part,” “Synthetic Part,” and “Theoretic Part”—into the nature of jokes, which he observes are “ordinarily regarded as a sub-species of the comic” (224). In the “Analytic Part,” Freud, much like the predecessors he rejects, penetrates into the “Technique of Jokes,” not as performances, but in the same formulaic endeavor as has been the practice, and into “The Purpose of Jokes,” which takes up the implied social functions of the formulae he has outlined. The “Synthetic Part” explores the ways jokes may be both sources of and motivated by the pleasures deriving from psychic processes as well as again the ways jokes function as a part of social interactions. In the “Theoretic Part” Freud examines the parallels he has already unearthed between the joke process and dream process, most notably condensation. What he arrives at is a theory of the joke as occurring when “a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision and the outcome of this is at once grasped by conscious perception” (205). The joke process links pleasures rooted in the psychical processes of the unconscious to the pleasures and motives of social processes (i.e., caricature, critique, humiliation, aggression, hostility), engaging not simply the unconscious of the teller, but that of the target of the joke as well as a thirdparty audience. Freud, thus, sets up what might appear to be a performance scenario involving an audience, two participants, and an “other” unconscious scene, noting as well in a passing comment on the nature of prolonged analogy that the joke “is a case of unification, the making of an unsuspected connection” (99). The “scene” of that “making” for Freud is the unconscious, particularly, as the site where the links represented by processes of condensation are effected. But most of Freud’s “penetrations” by-pass both the joke and the comic, as Freud is ultimately preoccupied with finding out how his suspected analogy between jokes and dreams work might provide an analysis of the joke not as a species of comedy, but as a mode of psychical unrepression in the context of social functions. Freud’s analysis of jokes focuses on the motives for jokes and their psychical effects, not on the dynamic of the joke itself. Because he looks past the joke—and the examples of jokes he offers are pretty terrible (e.g., “Heine introduces the delightful figure of the lottery-agent and extractor of corns, Hirsch-Hyacinth of Hamburg, who boasts to the poet of his relations with the wealthy Baron Rothschild, and finally says, ‘And, as true God shall grant me all good things, Doctor, I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal—quite famillionairely’”[14])—he misses the import of some of his own asides, which like the “disjecta membra” cited, supra, may be much more to the point, especially in so far as Bergson has already demonstrated, the point

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is always beside the point, an aside, comedy is a “strumpet,” and penetrations always miss their mark. Low phallic comedy.

“The Classified Materials Turbulence” From The Big Bang Theory Season 2, Episode 22 (aired May 4, 2009): Howard (Simon Helberg): Deploy the Wolowitz Zero Gravity Waste Disposal System. Raj (Kunal Nayyar): Get over yourself. It’s a high tech toilet. Leonard (Johnny Galecki): Just think. Thanks to your hard work, an international crew of astronauts will boldly go where no man has gone before. Howard: Is that supposed to be funny? Sheldon (Jim Parsons): I believe it is. The combination of the Star Trek reference and the play on words involving the double meaning of the verb “to go” suggests that Leonard is humorously mocking your efforts at space plumbing.

... Later in the same episode. The four characters sit at a table in the cafeteria. Howard announces that there is a flaw in the toilet design. Raj begins to poke fun: Howard: I think you said you were going to be supportive. Raj: I’m trying . . . . You have to admit this is pretty damn funny. Sheldon: I agree. It’s the juxtaposition of the high tech nature of space exploration against the banality of a malfunctioning toilet that provides the comic fodder here (brief laugh).

... Later in the same episode, in Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment: Howard: Nothing but this to reinforce this so the waste material avoids the spinning turbine. Raj: You mean, so it doesn’t hit the fan? Sheldon: You know, I have to say, I thought the toilet humor would get less funny with repetition. (He nods a negative). Apparently, there is no law of diminishing returns with space poop.

... Later in the same episode, still in Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment: Sheldon: I don’t see why I have to worry. My career is not hanging in the balance. (He smiles). That was a joke. It’s funny . . . because it’s true.

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A series of waves emanating from word play around a malfunctioning space toilet, these sequences enact the joke as a multiply tripartite affair: There are always at least three participants, one functioning as audience; three “scenes”: the malfunctioning toilet, joking commentary on the malfunctioning toilet, and commentary on the jokes; and three spates of the same genre of joke, repeated like waves across the episode. As we discern from the final “cut,” the three episodes of space toilet jokes with accompanying analysis turn out not to have been the point, but instead all serve as part of the set-up, part of the accruing, repeated instances of joke/commentary on the joke that leads to the cut that retroactively resignifies all of the spates as not about the toilet at all, but as about Sheldon’s commentary. Sheldon’s analysis, which seems to parse the way the jokes work on the level of content, does not finally enable him to formulate his own joke. Instead, the cut performed by Sheldon’s “joke”/analysis enacts a paradox— that in fashioning a joke which is no joke at all, then analyzing the non-joke, Sheldon reveals his total lack of comic apprehension. The cut enacted by this final misinterpretation which initially appears to be the same as the first series of three comments, recycles the waves of joke/analysis, retroactively resignifying Sheldon’s analytical moments as misunderstandings instead of understandings, even if they appear to be reasonable analyses at the time. The series replays again the ways the dynamic of the joke works even with non- and meta-jokes, which are jokes in so far as they are not funny at all, but instead ironic. As Sheldon’s compulsive commentary suggests again, talking about or analyzing humor drops inevitably into the serious, the mundane, and the boring, redounding to a character comedy of the speaker who is the pathetic one who would, like Matt Damon, try to explain a joke.4 In retrospect, Sheldon is attempting to analyze a phenomenon of which he has no intrinsic understanding at all. If Freud is correct about the psychogenetic bases of jokes in the unconscious, does this mean that Sheldon has no unconscious? Or does it simply signal Sheldon’s inability to comprehend the function of jokes as a social medium? Or both? In the reverberation of the space toilet jokes, Sheldon’s joke analysis is clearly a third scene dependent on a second jeering scene itself dependent on a third scene of waste disposal mistakes (which, arguably, is itself dependent on a fourth scene of presumed space toilet function). In the end, Sheldon’s misunderstanding returns to the initial space toilet mistake. Just as the equipment flings deposits back at users after a certain number of deployments, so Sheldon flings a malfunctioning joke back at the audience after a series of apparently successful attempts at digestion. In these series of three, suggested by

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The Comic Events

Freud and enacted in this repeated bit, three is not about any magical character or arrangement of three qua three; three is the signifier for series in general. Three means many. This reverberative series also enacts the way jokes are always more than simple unrepression; they provide comic meta-commentary as an intrinsic part of the comic event itself. Jokes not only always comment on another “scene,” but also engage in self-reflective meta-commentary, even if such commentary derives from the joke’s own history of repetition (e.g., knock-knock jokes are always meta-jokes in the sense that they refer to all other knock-knock jokes). In so far as the “cut” retroactively resignifies their entire set-ups, jokes’ dynamics always already provide self-conscious revision, even if that revision is fleeting. The doubled (or tripled or multiplied) scenarios of caricature and satire are also already self-conscious of their relation to the “other” scene they reduplicate, as they draw attention to their modes of conscious reflection. This self-reflexive, self-reflective quality is one part of the comic event’s reverberative quality; repetition, self-reference, and recursion are intrinsic to the material accrued as set-up and made evident in the payoff. Self-reference is also a part of the material that the comic links suddenly and epiphanically, for while jokes and the comic always accrue and arrange material, part of that material is always their own dynamic. The comic event is always the comic squared.

Three = Series A Bit of Fry and Laurie In 1987’s first season “Pilot” episode of the sketch compendium, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie perform a parody of television pundit commentary.5 The bit contains three interdependent scenes of commentary in which two critics sit at either side of a television screen upon which is an image of another scene of two critics discussing another scene. This mise en abyme of critical scenes appears to scale out, each scene commenting on the previous. The mode of commentary is caricature and parody; the entire mise en abyme, repeated three times, is, as we already know, a set-up for the cut that will follow. The opening scenario of the three is a talk show titled “Argue and Toss” where Fry and Laurie parody the kinds of pretentious terminology used by critics. When Laurie suggests that a scene worked on “two” levels, and Fry queries “only two?” Laurie excuses himself for being “simplistic” and amends his comment to

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“nine levels.” Fry then rejoins, “I thought it was twelve.” Enacting critical oneupmanship as well as satirizing the silliness of pretension, the first part of this sketch also commences its own self-analysis. Everything Fry and Laurie say about the frozen scene on the television might also apply to the scene they are performing. Criticism of criticism begets a consciousness of criticism.6 The bit shifts to a second scenario. The first scene of Fry and Laurie as critics becomes the frozen image in the television of the second part, titled “Up the Arts.” Again performing as two (yet different) critics, Fry and Laurie enact an even more caricatured commentary on the previous commentary, Fry talking so quickly that he is difficult to understand and each critic offering conclusions in a single word. “Sterile,” says one. “Fertile” expostulates the other. Although these terms mean completely opposite things, they wave away such discord as “Hardly different.” This second bit shifts to a third, where again the critics of the previous bit become the frozen image on the centered television screen. But after just a few moments of the third part, titled “On No, Not Another One,” Laurie changes the television channel to a prolonged sequence of a man spraying deodorant into his arm pit. This literal “cut” also refers back to the dynamic equating very different things as “hardly different.” The prolonged deodorant spraying accompanied by a notably serious consideration of the relative values of spray deodorants enacts what perhaps first appears as an absurd and silly interruption—a wrong channel. But the deodorant sequence’s accompanying commentary also applies to the criticism in the preceding two bits as so much “deodorant,” sprayed, as in this sequence, to the point of over-penetration. The cut retroactively emphasizes not only the silliness of the critics’ commentary, but also the ways comedy enacts its own analysis in the sequences’ commentary on commentary, the entire sketch retrospectively performing a meta-comic commentary on the silly necessity of commentary on comedy in comedy. What both The Big Bang Theory and A Bit of Fry and Laurie’s bits demonstrate is not only the necessity of series in the comic event, but that such series are often repetitions of the same dynamic, with the “cut” offering a change in dynamic that reveals that what was being repeated was yet again something different than we might have thought. Sheldon’s misapprehension of comedy only becomes apparent as an effect of the episode’s final cut. In The Big Bang Theory sequence the character of the genre “joke” is itself at issue. The joke of the joke is not only the result of the plays on words and double entendres Sheldon is capable of identifying, it is also the joke manqué, the possibility that a joke can and will

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fail—that Sheldon does not get the jokeness of the joke at all. The show’s final cut retrospectively encompasses both the larger field of the joke and the repeated bits’ comparisons of comedy and waste disposal. Fry and Laurie’s extended joke, too, appears to fail, falls flat, deviates in its cut to documentary deodorizing. But it also enacts a deodorizing self-reflexivity in the crass comparison between pretentious meta-commentary and the blurry twenty-second black-and-white film sequence. Relying on series’ repetitions as the dynamic enabling its own en-nested set-up, this prophylactic deodorizing becomes retrospectively another episode in the series’ repetitions. Comic metacommentary is itself deodorizing, poised simultaneously as an intrinsic part of the comic event as a way to delay and pretend to prevent the redistributions of the event’s cut. Like Sheldon’s terminal misunderstanding, the turn toward another kind of metaphor at the end of Fry and Laurie’s series is the joke on the joke. But the concept of deodorizing itself means several things simultaneously: commenting on (the mise en abyme commentary stinks), defending against, cleaning up, covering over. In The Big Bang Theory series of jokes about jokes, Sheldon’s analyses are also defenses against the very jokes he analyzes in order to enjoy, while at the same time those analyses turn out to have been the accruing waves of a dynamic that cuts to reveal his total lack of comprehension of comedy, which in turn points back to the comedy Sheldon’s analyses both hit and miss. Sheldon’s cleansing over-rationality makes evident the comic dynamic of both repetition and the cut, while enacting, by way of his analyses, the impossibility of any analysis. In Fry and Laurie’s sketch, the repeated parody commentary that perpetuates the bit also enacts a defensive rhetoric that simultaneously produces and deflects the humor it critiques while it pointedly avoids conflict—“Hardly different”. Although this parody also comments on the cowardly, careless, egomaniacal, or sloppy character of critical discourse, it also becomes the set-up for the cut which enacts something which is really different, yet just the same as the two previous bits.

Black “I really believe, uh, that it would be in the best interest of everyone if you could lower your expectations,” opens Lewis Black in Stark Raving Black (2009).7 “Yeah . . . yeah . . . YES. About 20%. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. No. I’m serious.

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The way the . . . the . . . the U.S. economy is down about 20% and I believe we should live our lives accordingly. That doesn’t mean you don’t wake up without a positive attitude. You do. You wake up every morning. You say it’s going to be a great day . . . Less 20%.” Here Black comments both on the stand-up routine to follow and on the state of the US economy, linking them in one comparative cut set-up by Black’s own reputation as an angry political commentator. Beginning with a cut not only offers a mock defense if the following routine fails to satisfy, but also enacts an opening gambit to the routine’s set-up by comparing the US economy to a comedy routine, an analogy that, never made directly again, nonetheless sets out the major premise of Black’s performance which is a scathing critique of US politics. Meta-commentary and defensive analyses define the comic event by enacting as comedy what comedy is not—yet again a paradox. All at once, the comic event enables critique and disarms it, fails to define the comedy it enacts in failing to define it; or defines the comic in failing to define it. Or both. The comic event gathers its momentum in part through the perpetually circulating physics of paradox.

Bit III

Repetition and the Exquisite Seriesness of Series

Jane, you ignorant slut. Dan Ackroyd, Saturday Night Live Repetition. Our present problem no longer deals, like the preceding one, with a word or a sentence repeated by an individual, but rather with a situation, that is, a combination of circumstances which recurs several times in its original form and this contrasts with the changing stream of life. Henri Bergson, Laughter, 119 From 1968 to 1972 bit-comedy series Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In repeatedly deployed a set of catch-phrases—“Here Comes the Judge,” “Sock it to Me,” “Is this the person to whom I am speaking?” “Very Interesting . . . But stupid.”1 As they reappeared, these phrases stood in for entire bits, becoming a condensation of the jokes in which they had previously featured. Their repetition became a way of evoking the bits: burlesque courtroom scenes featuring a large African American judge, episodes of celebrities repeating “Sock it to Me” then being hit, the smug practical joker telephone operator Ernestine (Lily Tomlin) addressing telephone clients, and a German soldier (Arte Johnson) commenting on previous bits with his “Very interesting . . . but stupid.” The return of these catchphrases in repeated bits throughout the show's four years established both the bits (which varied some, but little) and their associated phrases as in se funny. Saturday Night Live (1975–) also deploys the same kind of recognizable catchphrase: “Land shark.”2 As does Jimmy Kimmel: “Matt Damon.” The repetition of catch-phrases as silly elements (silly in the sense that they either represent a cut and/or comic paradox, seem absurd and gratuitous, and only function because of their repetition) enacts an ouroboros in which a line, even one that represents nonsense, can signal a complex comic set-up if it is persistently

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repeated in similarly absurd contexts. Repetition produces repetition which signals a comedy already produced through its own repetition. Debbie Downer: “Wah, waah.” Comic events deploy series—multiple versions or episodes of similar material—as part of their gatherings. These series also include the layers of scenes—one scene’s comment upon another scene somewhere else, itself often framed by a self-conscious commentary—upon which comic events build. Bits repeat variations of both internal series and layering to constitute larger series: Monty Python’s serial nesting of bits, Big Bang’s four segments featuring Sheldon’s attempts to understand jokes, Fry and Laurie’s multilayered mise en abyme of comic commentary, the multiple reverberations of Jimmy Kimmel’s preemption of Matt Damon. These series, in turn, simultaneously build on repeated phrases and proliferate the phrases, often returning to an earlier phrase to torque its meaning as a cut. Repeating the phrases from bit to bit transforms the phrases into catch-phrases that economically encode a comic event’s gatherings and cuts as a condensed shorthand that both refers to the original joke and deploys it as part of another gathering. Repetition is, thus, an integral part of the comic event’s already integral series. Series are the gathered versions comprising set-ups; repetition works as an encodement that transfers this gathering from one version or series to another. Layering accrues bit, commentary, and variations as part of the comic event’s increasingly complex operations. “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger.” It probably doesn’t make any difference whether the bits that gather in a comic event are a repetition or a series even if we can somewhat laboriously distinguish between the two. What is important is that comic event’s gatherings seem to require both the layering of scenes that constitute bits’ multiple “other” scenes and accruing versions of the bit itself. These accruing versions both return to some imaginary aboriginal scene (i.e., Kimmel’s Matt Damon line) and carry that dynamic forward precisely as a repetition, as a deliberate evocation of yet another scene, another bit, another comic event, at another time. Repeating the catch-phrases accrues bits and their scenes, times, occasions, associations, building each event’s gatherings. These accruals can occur either as repetitions (as happened in Laugh-In’s bits) or as overt layerings (as in the Kimmel/Damon phenomenon, Fry and Laurie’s metacommentaries, or, as we will see, in Little Britain’s and Catherine Tate’s serial variations). The effect of this layering and repetition is a performance that is simultaneously in the present and the past, in one place and in many others all at the same time, growing increasingly complex

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the more the bit is evoked, reiterated, and reworked. The phenomenon is, thus, anything but linear, growing like a rolled snowball that travels in a circle.

“And now a man with three buttocks”: Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Counter-Cultural Impetus of the Serial Bit The bit (as an element that accrues in the comic event) arranged among Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam’s famous collage sequences, sketches, and repeated oneliners such as “And now for something completely different,” depends upon the dynamic of the particular bit, making its dynamic as bit apparent as such, and using a familiarity with the bit’s dynamic as the point of the bit as well as a mode of political commentary. Monty Python’s bits have a consistent countercultural impetus in their persistent illustration of the ways cultural forms themselves—such as the comic bit, and the joke’s set-up and payoff structures— reflect social inequities. By focusing on the stubbornly serial conventions of the bit, Monty Python’s comic events expose the absurdity of conventional political assumptions, modes of their dissemination, and the way these are inextricably linked.3 Because Python’s bits involving cultural jokes already refer to themselves, they can be turned on their heads, becoming bits about the power of bits, which become bits about power. This serialization of the bit qua power bit potentially enacts a counter-cultural impetus in so far as a comic event organizes bits about power as themselves a source of cultural power. Monty Python’s “Lethal Joke” event, featured in the very first episode of the show in 1969, is a good example of the comic event’s self-referential layering. The premise of the event is a joke so funny that recipients die laughing, including its own authors. Jokester Ernest Scribbler pens the “funniest joke in the world” causing him to laugh so hard he expires. The voiceover comments that “It was obvious that this joke was lethal. No one could read it and live.” When Scribbler’s wife comes upon her deceased spouse, she finds the joke, reads it, and also dies of laughter. Repetition. The next scene opens outside the Scribbler’s home where a contemporary news announcer is talking about “sudden, violent comedy,” as Scotland Yard attempts to defuse the joke to the offsetting effects of sad music and lamenting police. The attempt to defuse the joke ploy fails, the inspector, too, expires, and the gathering event

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relocates to the army which has become interested in the joke’s military potential. Killing all of the Allied Commanders, the joke impresses the Top Brass, who test its effective range. The accruing comic event (now an extended sketch) abruptly shifts to an officer who takes over as announcer, describing the development of a German language edition produced under “joke-proof conditions,” in which all parts of the joke were isolated from one another to increase safety. The military deployed a German version of the joke, which the English could not understand, in the Ardennes. Trapped soldiers declaimed the joke within earshot of their foes who laughed themselves to death. “Over 60 thousand times more powerful than Britain’s great pre-war joke,” the joke is an effective weapon. Joke escalation ensues as the Germans attempt to invent their own lethal joke, then continues with bits about Allied deployment of the joke. Using interrogation, the Germans attempt to capture the joke by torturing a captive soldier with a feather. The soldier recounts the joke, which is again deadly. The event continues with more German efforts, as the Gestapo executes all of the failures. Finally deploying their own joke, the Germans broadcast it via radio, which fails. The event then moves to postwar 1945. They lay the joke to rest, never to be told again. This is a comic event, then, about jokes—and in this event a joke about the power of a joke that is never actually told in English. Each bit leads to another, accruing, taking approximately ten minutes of air time. The joke of the joke is that there is no joke and that despite the sketch’s ten-minute, elaborated tale of joke warfare with the Germans, the joke ends up in the “Tomb of the Unknown Joke.” The “Lethal Joke” sketch occupies the last third of the very first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, offering the template for its counter-cultural comic method, which is to produce comedy by not producing it—to produce comedy by pointing to the absurdity of the comic itself where “absurdity” means the momentary breakdown of all available logics. Via the repeated use of the metajoke, Python not only reflects on the joke as joke and the role of the joke, but also uses that joke of the joke as the pretext for parody and satire about cultural forms and their expectations which eventually—as jokes do—reveal, in the collision of systems, what is at stake in the comic event itself: the absurdity of the cultural forms that bear it. This absurdity, already the stuff of satire, is not merely a commentary about the abuses of power, but also an obiter dictum on the intrinsic absurdity of the forms such power might take. But is this too subtle an approach? How insidious are the complexities of form?

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The comic event as an accruing series of repetitions in multiple contexts also founds Python’s development of the comic event as gathering the progressive revelations of the layered meta-bit—the bit that comments on the bit that comments on the bit. The second episode of the Python series begins with a regional joke about a farmer who watches as his sheep attempt to fly. A laconic farmer and a city gentleman, who are leaning on the fence, ask the farmer why his sheep are in the trees. The farmer explains that his sheep “are under the misapprehension that they are birds” and that they are, thus, nesting; he points to the sheep walking about on their hind legs, and plummeting as they fail to fly from tree to tree. The farmer finally notes that sheep generally are ill-adapted “for aviation,” though they are “too dim” to realize it. When the gent asks why the sheep are even attempting to fly, the farmer points to his “clever” sheep, “ringleader” Harold. When asked why he doesn’t simply dispose of Harold, the farmer responds: “Because of the enormous commercial possibilities if he succeeds.” Two stereotypically dressed Frenchmen (striped shirts, berets) in lab coats in front of a diagram of a sheep interrupt the rural scene at this point. Explaining the mechanisms of flying sheep in a commercial setting as they enact a travesty of stereotypical French mannerisms and infomercials, the French scientists run around their lab baa-ing. Four British housewives in a grocery store commenting on the literary and philosophical contributions of French culture interrupt the French scientists, stacking class-based and nationalistic jokes upon class-based and nationalistic jokes. The class satire of the rural joke becomes a nationalistic joke which backfires, finally making fun of a British blindness to the possibilities both the farmer and French science envision. The event simultaneously travesties the opportunistic tendencies of French scientists as well as the British stereotype of the French, accruing into a hyperbolic performance of stereotype. In the end, the layering seriality of the event’s bits exposes the intransigency of class and national attitudes, transforming a satire on the French to a satire about British stereotypes about the French which translates into a satire of British ignorance, all around the loaded and allegorical character of sheep. The event’s layering finally refers back to its original set-up—that British sheep ultimately fail at flying. The French try to capitalize on the failed flying sheep, and the housewives discuss French intellectual tradition. This accruing finally enacts a catachresis in the way signifiers shift meaning from context to context, as well as on the inevitability of cultural misunderstanding itself.

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Many Monty Python sketches critique the class system in Britain, the most renowned of which is the extended bit, “The 127th Upper Class Twit of the Year Show,” which appeared on the twelfth episode of the first series. Focused on upper class “twits,” the bit features Twits ineptly trying to walk straight lines, jump three-inch hurdles, beat beggars, run over old ladies, wake neighbors, insult waiters, kill rabbits, and finally shoot themselves in the head. The Twits all fail miserably, as Twits cannot negotiate these tasks successfully, offering a commentary on the talents of the upper class (although the fact that the twits all appeared to have some form of palsy made Finnish television pull the series from further broadcast).4 This sketch, like the flying sheep bits, offers several follow-up commentaries. The first features a letter by a major Twit who praises the event: “How splendid it is to see the flower of British manhood wiping itself out with such pluck and tenacity. Britain need have no fear with leaders of this caliber. If only a few of the so-called working classes would destroy themselves so sportingly.” This bit is followed by a collage of a soldier who can only fall to pieces. Monty Python’s sketches, its comic events, constantly repeat and accrue bits. Shifting from bit to bit as part of the dynamic of the comic event also recalibrates the illusion of distance on bits by affording both a sustained reconsideration and a constant process of rediscovery of the bit’s perpetual perspectival ramifications. The joke of the travesty or the travesty of the joke comment upon both joke and meta-commentary—an inward spiral spiraling outwardly. Python multiplies the jocosity of its bits through this meta-bit dynamic established in the very first episode and developed and repeated in the “sketches” that comprise substantial portions of the series. This accruing meta-bit is always a commentary both on the bit form itself and on what the bit is joking about. This doubled commentary constitutes Python’s “revolutionary” comedy so that when a Python sketch is counter-cultural, its self-reflexive “meta” dynamic draws attention to the ways it enacts political critique. Satire and parody obviously operate as self-reflexive and “meta”-forms as they are already self-reflexive. But Monty Python perfects metacommentary in its accruing of meta-bits that comment both upon themselves and one another. And now for something completely different—a man with three buttocks. The serial strategies of Monty Python’s comic events offer counter-cultural commentary as they reflect on the joke of the joke and the bit of the bit as insightful, both about the state of affairs and about the possibility of their apprehension via the same media as those deployed and parodied by Python

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itself. We never actually need to go beyond the event’s set-up. We need no more than the proposition of a man with three buttocks. We never see him. All we need is the premise, and the commentary on the premise. And the commentary on the commentary. We, thus, see how we see. The comic event’s impetus toward change aims at the ways we think as themselves the root of the problem.

Bits Exponentialized Following Monty Python (1969–74), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989–95), Little Britain (television 2003–05), and The Catherine Tate Show (2004–07) all deploy comic events comprising this serial accrual of comic bits as the basis for their comedy.5 Like Monty Python, Fry and Laurie tend to repeat and layer their bits, offering a sketch, then a commentary on the sketch, or even commentary on the sketch within the sketch. Little Britain and Catherine Tate deploy both caricature and irony as ways to build short, repetitive bits that quickly cut and accrue to build toward larger and increasingly paradoxical cuts as the series of repetitions continues. Already playing on the notion of the “bit” as both a short piece of comedy and a fragment, A Bit of Fry and Laurie’s title sets up the team’s comic method of playing on ambiguous or mistaken referents; capitalizing on linguistic duplicity; exploiting the comic potentials inherent in the inevitability of misunderstanding; and enacting stylistic mismatches, genre parody (and caricatures of parody), and persistent pervasive self-reflexivity. They repeat bits with variation, letting the absurdity of language and the performance of caricature produce both set-ups and cuts. Not only do their bits often employ self-consciousness of their “bit”ness as a part of their gathering, they also play on the obviousness of their ambiguity, adding dramatic irony to the mix. In a similar fashion, the accrued bits’ cuts are also often self-conscious, sometimes even literally cutting by shifting scenes, referents, premises, or even moving instantly from one bit to another. The first year’s opening title sequence even plays on the meaning of the word “bit,” using cards bearing fragmented images of Fry, Laurie, skeletons, national monuments, etc., as “bits” of Fry and Laurie. Episode 5 of the first season of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, for example, begins with the following exchange: Fry: Lavatories. Love them or loathe them, they’re here to stay. We use them, we lavish out affection on them, we clean them, polish them. Some of us spend up

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The Comic Event to half our lives in them. We read specialist lavatory magazines, spend money on the latest models with air conditioning, stereos, and two-speed wipers. Some of us even race them. Laurie: (running on stage) No, no, no, no, no, no . . . Cars. You mean cars. Not lavatories. Fry: (laughs). Sorry. Cars. How much do we know about them? We sit in them once a day and trust them to carry our effluent away safely . . . A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Season 1, Episode 5, 1989

In this dynamic of linguistic misapprehension, Fry persistently mislabels the descriptions he reads, going from lavatory to car to refrigerator to estate agents, each time interrupted and corrected by Laurie. The simple juxtaposition of a noun with a description that clearly belongs to something else yet which bears a certain uncanny and comic relation to what Fry describes and layers as mistaken referents. As Fry describes lavatories with descriptions of cars and cars with descriptions of lavatories, these mismatched descriptions of other scenes constitute a scene that itself is framed by another scene: Laurie interrupting and correcting Fry. At the end of the sketch, as Fry likens estate agents to boils—a catachresis to which Laurie finally, in an ironic reversal (which is yet again completely apt) assents—the entire sequence is framed by another scene of Fry and Laurie as critics slouching in arm chairs critiquing the catenation that immediately preceded. Calling the bits, their targets, and even the language (English) “predictable,” the two critics end this meta-sketch by predicting the next bit—“a parody of Treasure Island bound to be,” remarks Fry. The next bit is not, however, a parody of Treasure Island, but is instead a parody of a court room cross examination (again a scene about another scene) in which a defense lawyer (Stephen Fry) viciously tries to discredit a female witness via extreme metonymy: by linking her to lesbianism via an association with the works of Gertrude Stein assumed to come from the witness’s close proximity to a bookstore that sold Stein’s books and the witness’s membership in a church congregation located close to houses that might harbor those preferring “lesboid love.” In the meantime, the judge (Hugh Laurie) chastizes the barrister with a series of male homosexual double entendres. The barrister completes his examination by damning the witness as a “bull dyke”; the judge excuses her, and she asks the barrister if he will be “home to tea.” He responds, “Certainly, Mother.” This bit, like the first, is again followed by the two slouching critics, who, even further down in their easy chairs, dub the bit “predictable” and “squib”—“spoof,

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guying take-off, pastiche, parody”—and commence a critique of critics: “Well, you know how critics are,” Fry observes. “What do they know about the work we do?” A couple of other bits follow, themselves separated by Fry and Laurie’s signature “person on the street” responses enacted by each performer in the guise of several different quotidian characters. These interview bits frame each episode, have no apparent relation to anything else in the program, and become themselves akin to catch-phrases, not so much in what the characters say, but in the personae of the characters themselves—Fry as a cheery house wife, a pimpled teenager, a harried business man; Laurie as a fresh girl on the street, a bearded rural denizen, a chav youth. These interview responses enframe yet another bit in which two men talk over a desk at an interview of some kind (which kind never becomes clear). Laurie, the interviewee, suddenly breaks character to commence a meta-commentary on the sketch in progress, which he dubs enthusiastically “my absolute favorite of all time.” He continues to overextol the sketch, whose mundanity becomes clearer in the face of the metacommentary. As a part of an episode already replete with framing commentary, the self-consciousness of the bit in progress seems to collapse bit and critique to the point that the critique precedes and then overtakes the bit. Laurie, in fact, prematurely announces the excellence of an upcoming line three times, then comments that Fry’s performance of the line (which was itself completely unremarkable) was not up to his usual standard. And as the third time is the charm, the self-conscious bit is again followed by the critics, lolling against their chairs on the floor. At this point they have nothing to say and begin fabricating commentary by describing the qualities of the furniture and the floor which “doesn’t work for me,” Laurie exclaims. “And it falls into the trap of being self-referential.” The entire program constitutes a comic event full of comic events, which, in seeming to end, picks up on itself again. The whole series circles around itself, building self-referentially on self-consciousness and vice versa. This perpetuated layering is not only an element of performance in so far as both Fry and Laurie launch double entendres with doubled intention—an intention made visible (or audible) through tone of voice and the increasing multiplication of their double entendre targets from a single bit to multiple bits as well as the preceding critical commentary bits. Their performance as critics parodies critics and criticism through the performers’ rapid speech, condescending manner and such rhetorical excesses as acyrologia, metalepsis,

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and periphrasis. At the same time, their repetitive commentary, though it follows specific bits, does not apply except most generally to any specific bit; instead, the commentary constitutes a parody of all commentary and even meta-commentary as Fry and Laurie caricature critics as, slouching, dismissive, and contentless.

“Aaa, Aaa, Aaa” “I am the only gay in the village,” Dafydd Thomas (Matt Lucas) emphatically announces in each of the Little Britain sketches set in the small Welsh mining village of Llandewi Breffi. Wearing vinyl short shorts and belly-restraining t-shirts, the chubby Dafydd rehearses his conviction that his home town is homophobic. Although evidence accrues very much to the contrary, Dafydd persistently voices his mantra of oppressed singularity. Little Britain’s episodes entirely comprise repeated versions of an array of perverse reversing bits from Dafydd Thomas to Lou (David Walliams) and the wheelchair-bound Andy (who can walk); Ann, the “Aaa, aaa, aaa”-uttering mental patient (who is not mentally ill); the classrooms of Kelsey Grammar School (which engage in silly assignments); fast-talking chav, Vickie Pollard (who gabbles in circles); Marjorie Dawes, the chubby fatphobic “Fat Fighter” leader; Sebastian, the gay assistant to the prime minister; Emily Howard, the “I’m a lady” transvestite (who keeps mustache); tubby Bubbles Devere, former Olympic gymnast; a pint-sized “Dennis Waterman” who demands that he sing the theme song in every show in which he appears; Ting Tong Macadangdang, who seduces the reluctant, not-so-reluctant importing husband, Dudley; Carol, the rude bank teller and travel agent; and Harvey, the upper-class adult breast-feeder. Every repeated bit involves not only the repetition of catchphrase set-ups, but also the iteration of a particular narrative dynamic which locates the bits’ cuts as short-circuiting stutters that circle back obsessively to expose the pretense of the set-up’s assumptions. This pattern is itself a paradox, an ouroboros in which the set-up’s pretext—“the only gay,” faked wheelchair disability, bogus mental disability, classroom propriety, class disadvantage, kindly diet guide, devoted secretary, passing transvestite, obese sexual prowess, beside-the-point singing, successful immigrant manipulator, competent small businessman, helpful employee, and expectations about the adult behavior of the upper classes—undoes itself to reveal not only the characters’ pretense,

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but the bits’ pretenses as well. The bits’ abbreviated gathering dissolves via the cut which undoes the set-up, produced by and producing paradox, irony, and cultural commentary. Repeatedly.6 Like Fry and Laurie’s comedy, whose cuts depend partly on the exposure of its layerings, Little Britain’s cuts expose the pretense of the cultural categories upon which their set-ups depend. Little Britain’s repetitions are, however, far more serial than Fry and Laurie’s, occurring in each episode with obsessive regularity, as each bit involves the revelation and undoing of some species of compulsion. The bits’ set-ups both define and push back against compulsion in its many meanings—as institutional force (the Kelsey Grammar School, FatFighters, government, banks, mental institutions, small business), psychological necessity (Emily Howard, Andy, Dafydd, Sebastian, Dennis Waterman), or social mores (Vicky Pollard, Dafydd, Harvey, Ting Tong, Bubbles). Each repeated bit depends upon stereotypes already in place that demand a certain kind of cultural reverence precisely in the form of compulsions against certain kinds of assumptions. It is socially unacceptable (at least among more liberal elements) to make fun of disabled, fat, non-Western, lower class, gay characters. The bits’ undoing of their own set-ups requires simultaneously both appropriative (i.e., the bits depend on cultural assumptions) and rebellious responses that produce ironic reversals. Andy is not really handicapped, Anne is not really crazy, Dafydd is one among many gays in the village; and everyone takes Emily at face value. Vicky’s discursive alibis never succeed; Carol’s hostile tics signal the petty possibilities of working class rebellion; Bubbles manages everyone with her well-upholstered body. The narratives deploy the characters’ self-definitions as a set-up, redefining the persistence of obsessive characters as both a compulsive repetition and a repetition compulsion, the series apparently repeating the characters’ repetition compulsions compulsively. As set-ups, the characters’ sundry off-beat compulsions seem to aim toward satisfaction. The bits’ cuts undo the bases of these compulsions as themselves another species of compulsion. Compelled to declare his gayness, for example, Dafydd is equally compelled to shy away from ever acting upon it. Behavior betrays identity, undoing not only the claims that ground the set-up but the notion of “identity” itself as grounded in selected attributes. Andy, who appears to be disabled and who compulsively sticks to the wrong choices when Lou asks him to choose, also compulsively leaves his wheel chair when Lou is not looking. He does what he wants and returns before Lou notices he is gone. The stubbornly faithful Lou, who may see evidence that Andy has been elsewhere,

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never questions Andy’s disability or his role as caretaker. Crazy Anne, who seems compelled to disrupt and destroy her immediate environment, is equally compelled to answer her cell phone in a normal male voice. Marjorie Dawes cannot stop her compulsion to belittle the people whose compulsive eating she is trying to help control. Chav Vicky, who compulsively situates herself in compromising situations, compulsively (and unsuccessfully) enacts a verbal barrage of lies and irrelevancies to try and talk her way out of trouble. Even the bits themselves are compulsive, repeating in nearly the same form in every episode. Like catch-phrases that carry comic bits forward, Little Britain’s repetitions deploy the same paradox and the same ironic self-reversals, each version repeating and layering onto all previous versions producing what appears to be a creeping progress, the bits moving from the ironic absurdities of stereotype and compulsion into even more brazen revelations of the absurdities of compulsive behaviors that are never entirely idiosyncratic, but are instead very much the product of social formations. The repeated bits that always torque after their obsessive set-ups, always stick to both the short-circuit created by the cuts’ ironic exposure of the characters’ frauds and the pretense attaching to their cultural stereotypes and associated assumptions. The repetition of these compulsions becomes meaningful not because the skits suggest any change in the status quo, but because the repetition itself renders the unusual familiar. Repetition renders compulsion mundane. Comedy’s repetitions expose the compulsions that may provide part of comedy’s own ground. The bits’ repetitions of stalled scenarios reverse the bits’ initial power relations, enacting the significant interpersonal power of persons thought to be culturally powerless, a reversal that exposes the social itself as reductive, hypocritical, and thoughtless. Serial repetition replays this dynamic as both pleasure and commentary. And all of this is again redoubled by the fact that Matt Lucas and David Walliams play almost all of the roles, their performances themselves becoming self-conscious in their repetition as well as in both actors’ amazing ability to transform themselves into multiple caricatures.

Bit IV

“Play It Again, Sheldon”: Nothing in Comedy Ever Only Happens Once

But then again, repetition itself produces a comic metaconsciousness. Repetition not only generates both series and layers, but the bit’s pattern also repeats multiply, as each bit repeats fractally in a larger pattern which itself enacts the same pattern. This repetition is, in the end if not from the beginning, a repetition stuck on itself—on a stuttering dynamic that undergirds one way comic events produce comic events. Penny has landed a bit part in an episode of NCIS. The four male friends are at a table at the Cheesecake Factory where Penny works. Raj is discussing his difficulty talking to women he meets, quoting a source that said it was easier to meet women when a young man is walking a dog. His friends make fun of him about Raj letting his dog lick peanut butter off of his tongue. Howard: If you’re really desperate to meet women and like food eaten out of your mouth, I can set you up with my mom. (general laughter from the group) Sheldon: Why is that funny? That’s just unhygienic. Leonard: It’s a joke. Sheldon: I don’t think so. I believe that a joke is a brief oral narrative with a climactic humorous twist. For example, Wolowitz’s mother is so fat that she decided to go on a diet or exercise. Or both. (He laughs) Well, you know, you see, the twist is that people don’t usually change. (He laughs) Well, they don’t. . . . Later Sheldon: Leonard, do you think I am funny? Leonard: Noooo. (pause). Do you? Sheldon: I think I’m hysterical. Leonard: I take it back. That was funny.

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The Comic Event Sheldon: The philosopher Henri Bergson says it’s funny when a human being behaves like an object. Leonard: I bet that killed at the Chuckle Hut. Sheldon: Oh, he didn’t perform stand-up comedy, he was a philosopher. Leonard: I think we’re zeroing in on your problem. Sheldon: Perhaps I’ll spend some time developing a unified theory of comedy which will allow me to elicit laughter from anyone at any time . . . unless they’re German, 'cause that’s a tough crowd. Leonard: Are you set on people laughing with you because if you’re cool with at you . . . (He shakes his head and nods) (Pause. Sheldon considers) Sheldon: I don’t get it. The Big Bang Theory, “The Hesitation Ramification”, January 2, 2014

The Second Longest Laugh on Live Television; or Breaking Apart = Cracking Up = Comic Events Squared The Carol Burnett Show (CBS 1967–78) became known for its players’ inability to keep a straight face during sketches, particularly after Tim Conway joined the ensemble in the 1975–76 season.1 One protracted parodic sketch, “Went with the Wind” from 1976, purportedly scored the second longest laugh in live television history not only because of its “cut” line, but mostly because the players had difficulty keeping a straight face. If you would like to see the sketch, it is available on DVD; for now, alas, I must offer a clumsy recital. Set on “Terra Plantation,” the parodical bit features Carol Burnett as “Starlett,” Vicki Lawrence as the over-excitable “Sissy,” Tim Conway as “Brashley Wilkes,” guest star Dinah Shore as his cousin, “Melody,” and Harvey Korman as “Captain Rat Butler.” At the beginning of the scene, which opens with Sissy’s excited announcement of an impending visit from Brashley, Starlett excitedly answers the door, admits Brashley, then closes the door on the accompanying Melody with Melody’s hand sticking through the flimsy set. Finally letting her enter, Starlett suggests to the ever-obliging Melody that she “stick her head in the punchbowl” because she could “use a little more sugar,” which Melody obligingly does. Starlett then repeatedly professes love to Brashley, who informs Starlett that he had just married Melody that morning. This revelation motivates Starlett to tell Brashley that she hates him. Again repeatedly. She

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finally throws a vase at him, just as Rat Butler enters. Rat announces that he has arrived at Terra by way “of a streetcar named desire,” and immediately professes love for Starlett. Sissy interrupts, screaming that they had “just declared war,” and the crowds milling about Terra all run hurriedly out (to which Starlett responds, “Well, fiddle-dee-dee”). Rat and Brashley leave for the war, after Rat, having asked Starlett for something he could remember her by, receives a solid punch in the gut. Starlett comments on the fact that three women are left to defend Terra, when Melody contradicts her, revealing that she is pregnant and Sissy reassures them, saying she “knows everything about birthin’ babies.” Melody immediately announces that she is in labor and, of course, Sissy responds by saying she knows “nothing about birthin’ babies.” As has become the routine of this bit, events continue to accelerate. A union soldier knocks on the door and asks for a match; Starlett notices that they are burning Atlanta. As Melody is giving birth, Starlett goes into a melodramatic rendition of Scarlett O’Hara’s speech about surviving all circumstances, while Sissy walks around her vocalizing the high-pitched dramatic music that typifies dramatic moments in 1930s films. Burnett breaks character to glare at her. The scene shifts to a year later. The Terra set is in shambles. Sissy enters in rags, still screaming excitedly, to announce that the war is over and also that a Yankee soldier is approaching with a gun. There to collect taxes, the soldier sits down while Starlett pretends to get her purse so she can hit him with a chair. Sissy announces the approach of another soldier who turns out to be Brashley. As he tries to hug his wife, Starlett gets between them, even as Melody declares that she and Brashley will “never let anything come between us.” While Melody tries to tell Brashley about Brashley, Jr., Starlett asks him for money to pay the back taxes. Starlett: Could you help me pay up the note? Brashley: Well, I’d love to. Melody: Oh, you sweet, generous, darling man, you’ve always been so good. Brashley: Yeah, but you see, my money is gone. Starkett: Gone? Gone where? Brashley: It went with the wind. Starlett: What wind? (At this point the scene is interrupted by the theme song from Gone With the Wind) Starlett: Well, that’s pretty, but it doesn’t answer my question.

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As Melody leads Brashley upstairs to see his son, she suggests that Starlett ask Captain Butler, who will soon arrive, for the back taxes. As Starlett denounces Butler, Brashley informs her that Butler has become a millionaire and Starlett changes her tune. Realizing she is dressed in rags, Starlett elicits aid from Sissy to come up with a suitable dress in which to greet (and hopefully seduce) Captain Butler. As Butler approaches in his carriage, Sissy suggests that Starlett “hide behind the drapes,” which gives Starlett an idea. Starlett removes the drapes, and telling Sissy to keep Rat occupied, retires to the second story to make a dress. Gazing around at the wreckage, Butler comments, “I really like what you’ve done with the place.” Going off on a soliloquy about war, Butler ends up mouthing the lyrics to “Dixie” as dialogue. After, Sissy says: Sissy: You know, that’s real catchy. You ought to set that to music, Captain. Butler: I just woke up to it, Sissy. It, like my dreams, have went with the wind. Sissy: What wind? (The theme music from Gone with the Wind plays again) Sissy: That’s real pretty, but that don’t answer my question.

At this point, Starlett emerges at the top of the staircase, wearing the gown she has fashioned from the drapes, curtain rod extending from each shoulder. Starlett: What brings you to Terra? Butler: You do, you vixen you. Starlett, I love you. That . . . that gown is gorgeous! Starlett: Thank you. I saw it in the window and I just couldn’t resist it. Butler: Starlett . . . I’m sorry maybe it isn’t Starlett . . . yes it is Starlett . . . Starlett: Yes. Butler: Will you marry me? Starlett: Marry you? Why you’re the scum of the ocean and the chicken of the sea. The Carol Burnett Show, Season 10, Episode 8, aired November 13, 1976

Both of these events, extended as they are—and extended precisely because they engage multiple, serial versions—embody the ways repetition simultaneously builds and draws attention to the comic event. The first time Sheldon explores the character of a joke intellectually, the bit works as a comic event because its gathering of elements and material is simultaneously an unmaking, its punch line about diet and exercise the punch line of an antithetical punch line, funny because it isn’t funny (and as this book illustrates, this isn’t the first time the show itself has offered that bit). Already completely self-conscious (i.e., a joke about making jokes), the bit makes a joke by self-consciously layering a failed joke upon a joke about failing to understand jokes. The Burnett event, a protracted

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parody sketch, consists of a series of smaller bits whose payoffs depend upon the repetition of a previous line deployed in a slightly different context—Sissy’s antithetical version of the “birthin’ babies” line, itself cribbed from the film Gone With the Wind, repetition of the line, “it went with the wind,” the playing of the theme music from the film every time that line is uttered, and the repetition of the line: “That’s real pretty, but it doesn’t answer my question.” In both events, repetition is an integral part of a set-up that is itself a set-up/ payoff bit. The repetition of the lines and structures of the bits with slight modifications condense these bits and carry them forward, layering them into the newer bits in the same way that catch-phrases carry entire bits forward. But in so far as both of these events are self-conscious and self-referential (as parody itself is always both a repetition and multiply self-referential), they anatomize the ways repetition, self-consciousness of comedy and the repetition of that self-consciousness produce accruing layers which, in repeating, build smaller bits into a larger payoff. On The Big Bang Theory, the payoff is the final utterly absurd combination of science and comedy that deploys recognizable elements of hackneyed jokes to produce what is, in the end, a final anti-joke. (In the last “bit” of the episode, Penny proposes to Leonard, who realizing she is depressed, equivocates. Penny gets mad, recants her proposal, and starts to leave. Sheldon, entering, interrupts) Sheldon: Who’s in the mood to laugh? Leonard: Really not a good time. Sheldon: But I used science to construct the perfect joke. Penny: I'm going to go. Leonard: Penny, don’t. Penny: I just need to be alone. Sheldon: So, a sandwich, a rabbi, and Yo Momma walk into a bar . . . (Leonard walks away) Where are you going? Leonard: To my room. Sheldon: Should I follow you? Leonard: No. Sheldon: Leonard, wait. Leonard: What? Sheldon: I forgot to tell you. The sandwich is promiscuous . . .

In Went with the Wind, the iteration of punch lines in pairs of two build toward the sketch’s ultimate double entendre—“I saw it in the window and I just couldn’t

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resist it,” a line that echoes earlier conversation about the drapes, but which also reinterprets and represents a crucial moment in the film Gone With the Wind itself. Comic events are a gathering of diverse multiple elements, associations, registers, systems of knowledge, cultural materials, and the self-referential practices of other comic events, but they also engage condensations of material that derive from repetitions in the form of repeated cuts, payoff lines, and catch-phrases. Comedy, in other words, plays on itself and that playing requires repetition, layering, and seriality. The comic event also plays on a consciousness of another scene, both within the bits’ repetitions and as the allusion upon which the event builds. Parody depends entirely on knowledge of this other scene. In The Big Bang Theory’s series, the “other” scene is both the series’ history of Sheldon’s inability to understand comedy and the extension of the bit through the sitcom episode. “Went with the Wind” plays obviously on the film, but also on the sketch’s own bits as they recur. This means that both reference and repetition provide a portion of the accruing material that provides the event’s set-up, not only by gathering multiple referents across culture and history, but also by gathering and recycling its own internal elements.

Bit V

The Comic Uncanny; or The Character of Caricature

Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type— not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain. Aristotle, Poetics, Part V . . . no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. Aristotle, Poetics, Part IV We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. However regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it.” Henri Bergson, Laughter, 77 I can say in advance that both these courses lead to the same conclusion—that the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.” Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 124 “Isn’t that special!” Dana Carvey, “The Church Lady” Imitation. Hyperbole. Caricature is, like the catch-phrase, an event in itself, a shorthand comic set-up/cut. Caricatures repeat in so far as imitation is itself

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a form of repetition, and they repeat another scene—in fact depend upon our knowledge of that scene to set-up their commentary. But caricatures do not repeat their referents exactly. They select elements for repetition. This selection is both an interpretation and a performance, whether that performance is on stage, in film, or in print, whether it is an “imitation of an action,” a cartoon, or an impression. Caricature layers a familiar referent and an interpretation of the referent in a single performance. It is, as Freud might suggest, a form of condensation.1 Comic impressions are characters; impersonations where the goal is to perform an uncanny likeness, are not. In colliding a referent and an interpretation of that referent, performed caricatures present the comic event as a layered comparison. Selecting traits, mannerisms, and characteristics to imitate, caricatures implicitly compare three contributing fields: (1) the figure (the other scene) whom the caricature interprets, imitates, and performs; (2) the caricaturist her- or himself as a persona and in relation to other caricatures the caricaturist has performed; (3) the “distorted”— that is, selective, hyperbolized, stylized, mannered—performance itself. These three layers also draw a cascading number of associations—the contexts of the performer and of the figure caricatured, the histories of both. The caricature offers all of this gathered material simultaneously as the event which then cuts at the moment the caricature performance arrives at a familiar, signature trait whose emphasis (or even citation) in the caricature produces a sudden revisioning apprehension about both the original figure and the nature/quality of the performance. This apprehension is also a shorthand: a speech pattern, accent, gesture, phrase, manner that reveals insights about character, type, performance, and context via metonymy and synecdoche. Functioning like a catch-phrase, caricature’s condensation and immediate revelation of a new aspect or interpretation of the original figure explodes the original to replace it with a catch-phrase distortion often connected to actual catch-phrases—“I did not have sex with that woman,” “Isn’t that special.” Condensation cuts to insight, also suggesting that the performer’s insight is part of what produces the condensation that results in a good caricature.

Caricatural Perspicacity; or The Way Around Leads Directly To Caricatures’ condensations enact cultural commentary both directly and indirectly, the ambiguity of the performance not inhibiting the stridency of

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the commentary in any way. Unlike impersonations, which feign someone (or sometimes some things) else so as to fool people into believing the feigner is that someone else or at least an uncanny likeness thereof, caricatures always indicate that they are caricatures. Caricatures have what Jean Genet might have called a “false detail,” some aspect, manner, feature, tic, or speech pattern understood to belong to the original person or type that a caricature deliberately alienates, foregrounds, and/or exaggerates (50).2 No caricature ever tries to pass as its referent. In fashioning caricature performances, however, performers can feature qualities that serve more than one purpose (i.e., exactly the definition of condensation), especially in so far as caricatures simultaneously afford comedy and social commentary. Any selection of a specific trait is already a commentary; emphasizing certain traits itself enacts a commentary on a commentary. While a “character” enacted by many pioneering film and television comedians (who often got their start as stand-up performers) is a persona undertaken as their stage signature—for example, Mae West, Jack Benny, Rodney Dangerfield, Don Rickles, and Buddy Hackett—in fact most stand-up comedians—other comic performers such as Nick Kroll, Tyler Perry, Dana Carvey, Gilda Radner, Catherine Tate, Matt Lucas, and David Walliams undertake caricatures that interpret and exploit personalities and stereotypes. These performances combine caricatures with contexts that together offer both commentary and comedy as an effect of the apparent absurdity of caricature’s exaggerations. Early forms of caricatured character comedy involved ethnic types (the Irish, Jews, Germans, or other immigrant groups) or Blackface.3 Blackface is a kind of caricature commentary that itself became a mode of performance (minstrelsy) that licensed a certain species of racist jokes, music, and manners. Although Blackface’s commentary depends upon the performance, we tend to see it as a racial demeanment, except when African American performers employ it as they did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in all-black minstrel shows, where it often operated as a species of selfparody.4 Some contemporary comic racial commentary goes the other direction; Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle perform “Whiteface,” caricaturing white people. Pryor was uncannily capable of shifting from type to type, using speech patterns and very subtle mannerisms. For example, in Live on the Sunset Strip performed in New Orleans August 9, 1983, Pryor begins an observational bit about racial speech patterns in New Orleans: This is a strange place, though, New Orleans, ‘cause you can’t tell what no muthafucker is down here. No, cause you muthafuckers look white and be black,

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The Comic Event so, and then the black ones talk that funny kinda shit, you know, you talk to ‘em and say, “bomp,” ’n they say (in New Orleans accent), “Whad’ yah sayn? whhad’ yah want, you come bye, you come bye, you like me, yeah?” And the girls say (again in New Orleans accent), “You gonna fuck me for true?” (laughter) Shit like that. You know it’s shit. See, you gonna learn, white folks don’t know what to do dat, you know what I’m sayin’. (In white accent) Well, it’s a different kind. They must be from Brazil somewhere.5

Able to shift seamlessly from accent to accent, Pryor’s caricatures condense multiple commentaries into a rapid set of examples: the New Orleans blacks are cool, lackadaisical, yet eager; the whites are anthropological tourist buffoons who miss the sexy nuances of New Orleans culture. In performing his racial and cultural typology, Pryor also enacts a sexual typology, doing an improvisational (and uncannily accurate) caricature of a male audience member’s walk (complete with diagnoses of personality type); and representing black female New Orleans denizens via a speech pattern distinct from that of black male New Orleans types. Pryor does nothing more here than imitate with emphasis—caricature—speech patterns, skimming a long tradition of males comically impersonating females that extends from A Midsummer Night’s Dream onward. The combination of racial and sexual caricature tends to go one direction starting from black male comic performers who are free to caricature everyone else. Pryor was a frequent guest on The Flip Wilson Show (1970–74) where he and host Flip Wilson, a stand-up comic known for his black female impersonations, performed comic bits focused on caricatures.6 Wilson’s “Geraldine” caricature capitalized on the aggressively sexual, devil-may-care attributes stereotypically assigned to younger black females, condensed in Geraldine’s catch-phrase, “What you see is what you get.” In one episode, in a bit costarring Harry Belafonte, Geraldine shows her typical caricatural attributes: (Geraldine enters a tropical set, dressed in a revealing dress and swinging a purse.) Geraldine: I’ve got some cash and I know I’m clean, watch out Trinidad, here’s Geraldine Native Woman: Souvenirs? Native jewelry? Geraldine: Honey, I don’t want any of that tourist junk, I’m looking for the local color Native Woman: Local color? Oh, you got it. (Harry Belafonte enters, carrying a stem of bananas on his shoulder and singing “Day-O, The Banana Boat Song.” He stops beside Geraldine, who is swinging her hips and snapping her fingers)

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Geraldine: Uh, uh, uh. Well, at least she sent you home singing. (Belafonte begins singing more “Day-O” ending with the lyrics “Stack banana till the morning comes.”) Geraldine: Say, Big boy, Belafonte: Mmm? Geraldine: You know, bananas ain’t the only thing around here that look well stacked to me (looking openly at his crotch). Oh my goodness! If it wasn’t for Killer (her boyfriend) you could be the top banana in my bunch. Belafonte: You come from America, right? Geraldine: That’s right, honey. Belafonte: What part? Geraldine: All a’ me. Season 4, Episode 4 (October 25, 1973)

Wilson’s Geraldine caricature offers a version of black femininity as sexually daring, unashamed, and voracious, a presentation that might have garnered feminist critiques, but which Wilson performed using assertive (rather than suggestive) body language and a straightforward, openly decoded sexual innuendo (itself perhaps oxymoronic, but Wilson’s performance is both overt and subtle at the same time).7 His sassy swishings and swayings were a bit hyperbolic, but layered onto and seen in concert with the persona of Wilson, the caricature also becomes a comment on drag itself as a performance that is always hyperbolic, wishful, gleeful, stylized, and self-conscious. Wilson was also famous for his caricature of the Reverend Leroy of “The Church of What’s Happening Now,” a figure who aggressively commented on religious hypocrisy.8 Wilson’s show also showcased the caricatures of Lily Tomlin (who appeared on at least four episodes: October 1, 1970 Season 1, Episode 3, also Season 1, Episode 25, Season 1, Episode 17 (January 21, 1971), S2, E8 (November 4, 1971)). Tomlin, of Laugh-In fame, was a stand-up comedian whose bits always involved caricatured characters: sage child Edith Ann; telephone operator Ernestine; housewife, Mrs. Judith Beasley; Tess/Trudy, the homeless woman; manly working-class Rick, nightclub singer Tommy Velour, and black R&B singer, Pervis Hawkins. Just as Wilson’s caricatures commented both on a certain species of black femininity and on the nature of drag itself, so Tomlin, in a much rarer kind of performance, comments both on a particular species of “nightclub singer” masculinity, and performs a commentary on the celebrity of celebrity. As the “swinging star who put the ‘man’ in romance,” Tomlin’s Tommy Velour made a guest appearance on Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration of Life in 1997.9 Strutting down stairs stage right, Tommy Velour sings a medley of songs à la Bobby Darin whose lyrics are intended

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to describe Taylor, who is sitting in the very front of the audience with Michael Jackson beside her. Dressed in a tux with a ruffled shirt, a giant belt buckle, and sporting short coiffed hair and a mustache, Tomlin’s Velour deploys every Vegas crooner’s corny hypermasculine trick, including strutting, pointing, nodding his head, flirting (in a manly way), and performing exaggerated chivalry (he offers Taylor a giant diamond ring)—and even singing rather badly. At one point he reveals a fuzzy chest full of hair to Taylor and at another, he layers an impersonation of Michael Jackson onto Velour, moon walking and grabbing his crotch, commenting afterward, “Hey, I didn’t mind that,” then grabbing his crotch again. Tomlin’s caricatural layering is even more complex than Flip Wilson’s, as it is a caricature of a performer (which is already a caricature) layered onto a performer whose persona layers over the somewhat “open” secret of Tomlin’s sexual orientation which then, in rebound, makes the Velour act also a travesty of butchness. Her uncanny presentation of the gestures and mannerisms of lounge singers, despite (or because of) the visibility of the female persona, anatomizes a Sammy Davis, Jr., Bobby Darin, Wayne Newton conglomerate of cheap masculine ploys. Because cross-sex caricatures rarely happen from female to male, Tomlin’s caricature seems particularly uncanny—seems to capture uncannily accurately a species of performance attributed to the cool masculinity of a generation of male crooners: the “Rat Pack” and its wannabes. Just as Flip Wilson performs a caricature of the sexy sassy black woman and Lily Tomlin reveals the cheap mannerisms of Vegas masculinity, Tyler Perry performs another version of the black woman in his repeated enactment of the character, “Madea” in a series of films centered on Madea’s capacious home in Atlanta: Madea’s Family Reunion (2002), Madea’s Class Reunion (2003), Madea Goes to Jail (2006), Madea’s Big Happy Family (2011), Madea’s Witness Protection (2012), Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas (2013), Madea Gets a Job (2013), and Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Neighbors From Hell (2014).10 In contrast to Wilson’s and Tomlin’s overt caricatures of types, Madea is a caricatured character (much like Tomlin’s characters Ernestine and Edith Ann) with a set of speech patterns, mannerisms, and body language that both deploy and exaggerate stereotypes of older, strong black women. Perry’s character is a caricature especially in so far as it exaggerates Madea’s size, brashness, daring-do, and common-sense, domineering speech patterns. The fact that the performance is a performance is also evident throughout the films, not only because of the hyperbolic nature of Madea’s character, but also because Perry appears in the films as other characters: the older man, Joe, the young lawyer, Brian.

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Perry’s caricatures are themselves part of a larger tradition; Perry’s predecessor, Eddie Murphy, undertook seven different roles in the 1996 Nutty Professor, including two women—“Mama Klump” and “Grandma Klump.”11 These modes of black caricature that take on what are already cultural stereotypes have not gone without their critics. In so far as caricatures are also commentary, these figures may well become the objects of multiple, conflicting interpretations. Spike Lee, for example, linked Perry’s work to “coonery.”12

Impersonations While caricatures are interpretations layered onto performers’ personae, impersonations constitute another kind of performance which is much less about commentary or layering and more about the precision with which a performer may embody another recognizable figure. Caricatures’ layering of the performer, the performer's personae, and the figure or stereotype of someone else is a comic event in which the gathering and cut occur simultaneously, selected features revealing some sudden insight about the celebrity, figure or type. In so far as caricatures are also a type of impersonation, they share in impersonation’s uncanny doubling qualities. While the point of a caricature is to produce a likeness that is recognizable but nonetheless skewed by interpretation—by the emphasis or exaggeration of one or more of the imitated personage’s mannerisms or appearance—impersonations are not necessarily comic events, unless the impersonation becomes part of a larger bit—stand-up comedy, perhaps, or a sketch. The point of impersonations is to produce an uncanny likeness to a familiar figure, and often involves someone who already looks superficially like that figure. There are Elvis impersonators, Obama impersonators, Madonna impersonators, all of whom look a lot like their namesakes. Alex Baldwin’s Saturday Night Live Trump performance is a caricature.13 Despite the distinctions between these modes of enactment, something uncanny undergirds comic events that rely primarily on imitation. The uncanny, according to Freud, is frightening, so how can caricatures be comic? The uncanny’s eerie qualities derive, Freud theorizes in The Uncanny, from “something that has been repressed and now returns” (147).14 This repressed material often appears in concert both with doubles and as an effect of repetition (or a doubling of events). Uncanny doubling, according to Freud, “is a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development, a phase that we have surmounted” (143).

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Given that a caricature is a deliberate doubling, what is the difference between the frightening and eerie qualities of an uncanny provoked by the repetition of doubled figures and the sudden comic insights provoked by caricature? Is the comedy of caricature the flip side of the uncanny? Is the difference finally the distinction between the uncanny’s unconscious and unintended conditions and the caricature’s intentional repetition as a deliberate interpretive commentary? It may well be that caricatures carry the force they do not only because they are familiar imitations, as Aristotle suggests, but also because they make visible characteristics we may have noticed, but never much heeded. And these characteristics are not simply random: they synecdochize aspects of character that link to larger social types and cultural positions. Caricatures are diagnostically familiar, singling out the hypertrophied absurdities of any cultural typology. As an event in itself, gathering, culling, displaying, and ultimately enacting a cut of unexpected insight, the caricature is a self-contained ouroboric whirl. Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” from Saturday Night Live is one example of a caricature that not only performs the combination of caricature and catchphrase, but also in its distorted doubling makes visible underlying typologies, links the original figure to an enlarging series of types, values, assumptions, and biases, and at the same time enacts an idiosyncrasy—a phrase, gesture, tone of voice, expression whose appearance effects the cut.15 The original “church lady” referent is no specific individual, but already a type—one that Johnny Carson caricatured on The Tonight Show (1962–92) as “Aunt Blabby” (with all of the propriety but none of the religion).16 Carvey’s doubling caricature emphasizes both the Church Lady’s spectacularly awkward plainness and her condescending, chiding, no-nonsense way of speaking. The performance coexists resonantly with Carvey’s own often slightly acerbic character. The effect is to signal the Church Lady’s insincerity while she (as a performed caricature) is already herself performing sincerity. The insincere performance of sincerity produces the sudden insight that this performed sincerity was always an insincerity. This insight then opens out into a critique of the Church Lady type as always already insincere in her capacity as arbiter of morals and clean thinking. The caricature’s deployment of the phrase, “Isn’t that special” to describe any phenomenon of which the Church Lady disapproves simultaneously exposes the biases of the selfprofessed righteous and comments upon such groups’ persistent re-purposing of popular culture to more conservative and restrictive ends. The double repeats what is already familiar, as the caricature’s repetition makes evident an irony of which we may not have been aware that we were aware.

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Carvey’s caricature of the religious right via the synecdoche of the Church Lady quite effectively exposes that “other” scene of right wing conservative religious posturing, especially as such posturings become identical to political positions. Caricature deftly effects cultural and political commentary precisely by means of its re-rendition of the familiar as both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. This condensed evocation of culturally repressed (yet still-evident material) is spectacularly apparent in Tina Fey’s and Amy Poehler’s Saturday Night Live bit in which they caricature Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton discussing the perils of sexism. In “A Nonpartisan Message from Governor Sarah Palin and Senator Hillary Clinton,” the two enact different styles of caricature.17 Fey presents an almost-perfect uncanny imitation of Palin’s accent, body language and dress, while mouthing the species of inane comments for which Palin was famous. Fey’s caricature layers selected traits upon what audiences know as Palin’s public persona in a doubling of Palin with Palin. The familiar quality of some aspects of the imitation—especially Palin’s accent and mode of commentary— seems to repeat Palin’s idiosyncrasies in a pleasurable manner. But the caricature also links the familiar with far broader conservative tropes, rendering Palin’s own phrases even more absurd than they had been in their original context. By defamiliarizing the familiar and by drawing some of Palin’s previous remarks back into public consciousness, Fey’s caricature of Palin emphasizes Palin’s idiosyncrasies, transforming them into symptoms of a much larger conservative, dismissive attitude about knowledge, while extolling willed ignorance quite visibly as a species of common-sense populist folk belief. Poehler’s overtly caricatured Clinton depends far more upon Hillary’s frustrated reactions to both Palin’s comments and the sexist comments leveled at her: Hilary: I believe that diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy. Sarah: And I can see Russia from my house. Hilary: I believe global warming is caused by man. Sarah: And I believe it’s just God hugging us closer. Hilary: I don’t agree with the Bush doctrine. Sarah: (shaking her head and giggling) I don’t know what that is.

Doublings doubled—Palin on Palin on Fey, Clinton on Poehler, the two women together—the comic event makes visible the ways caricature depends upon doubling, and ultimately repetition, as Fey iterated her Palin impression six times, winning an Emmy. In a particularly symptomatic moment of comic

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doubling, Sarah Palin herself joined Fey doing her Palin impression on the October 18, 2008 SNL episode.

The Ironic Uncanny In its series of repeated stutterings, Little Britain depends upon the caricature of cultural types as an intrinsic part of its set-up. These are not caricatured impersonations or doublings of political figures, but are more akin to Carvey’s caricatures of types. Both Matt Lucas and David Walliams are master performers of caricature. Lucas, who plays Andy, Marjorie, Dafydd, Bubbles, Vicky Pollard, Ting Tong, and Mr. Roy among others, deploys both speech patterns and select details of feature and clothing to shorthand the caricatures as types. Lucas distills the caricatures from collections of hypertrophied traits: speech patterns and catch-phrases, dress and carriage, and because he is alopecic—hair. Instead of being closer to a doubling impersonation of specific individuals, Lucas’s caricatures push toward set-ups comprising very short-handed codes that link to types already typified by some constitutional irony. These caricatures push obstreperously back against the obvious—against their own interests, stereotypes, attitudes—and by doing so make visible and evident the cultural attitudes that persist around such types as the disabled, the overweight, gays, lower-class teenage girls, mail-order brides, and transvestites.18 These types operate less as political commentary than they make evident the contradictions that underwrite identity politics, notions of sexual transgression, and the dysfunctionality of consumer culture. Unlike the uncanny double of Palin enacted by Fey, there barely seems to be a persona we might identify as Matt Lucas—except that underwriting every caricature is something very Matt Lucas. In contrast to Lucas’s caricatures, David Walliams, who plays Sebastian, Anne, Lou, Emily Howard, Carol, and Harvey, tends to deploy evidence of himself as a part of the caricature, producing a three-layered caricature like Carvey’s. His female caricatures always reveal their status as impersonation, especially when he is playing characters who are already impersonators, such as Emily Howard and Anne, or who are unsuccessfully hiding desires, such as Sebastian, the gay political aide, and Harvey, the wealthy breast-feeder. Walliams’s caricatures simultaneously double the type and the governing dynamic of the type, again playing on irony as a mode of making visible cultural assumptions about stereotypes. What the caricatures try to hide is that which is also most

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immediately evident. Walliams’s performances’ self-conscious elements— consciousness of the performance as performance—echo the performative hypocrisies of his characters while drawing attention to the performance of caricature itself. This layering ultimately exposes the contradictory and ironic character of stereotypes themselves as they play against type, expectation, and even their own interests. Walliams’s ironic caricatures, like Lucas’s, are themselves complex, appearing at first glance to perform homophobic, sexist, racist versions of cultural types. This potentially offensive veneer works as a part of the event’s dynamic, which plays upon the tensions produced by the contradictions between stereotype and behavior, which ultimately reveal the stereotype as precisely what it is: another caricature. The caricatures’ initial set-up telegraphs the cultural type so recognizably that it propels this gathering toward its ironic reversal almost immediately. Emily Howard’s declaration that she is “a lady” is simultaneously contradicted by her appearance. While caricature events also work toward the desires and motivations we associate with stereotypes, they inevitably short-circuit, revealing the ironic “other scene” of the stereotype, a much more complicated scenario in which each caricature manufactures itself as a type. This unveiling of the stereotype as already ersatz undercuts and comments upon the shorthand, approximate nature of any stereotype and the cultural earnestness attached thereto. Lucas’s and Walliams’s caricatures’ comic repetitions usually occur in the form of a repetition of a caricature’s catch-phrase: Daffyd’s “I’m the only gay in the village”; Emily Howard’s “I’m a lady!”; Vicki’s “Yeah but no but yeah”; Anne’s “Aaah, aah, aah”; Andy’s “Yeah, I know.” This repetition defamiliarizes the phrase which also begins to work against the stereotype as such, revealing some contrary capability, desire, or agenda operating in the caricature: anti-homophobic Daffyd’s homophobia; Emily Howard’s obvious masculinity; Anne’s feigned craziness; wheelchair-bound Andy’s ability to walk. Sebastian’s pretended secretarial obeisance barely hides the cagey lengths to which he will go to cop a ministerial feel. Carol’s “service” always ends with a disdainful cough on the customer. These perverse undoings carry through repeated bits, irony building on irony.

Ironic Metaconsciousness In contrast to the perverse ironies of Little Britain’s caricatures, Fry and Laurie’s repeated caricatural bits deploy both hyperbole and ironic self-consciousness

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to layer irony upon irony. They produce this irony primarily through the selfconscious performance of the exaggerated manner linked to specific types, or by enacting the exaggerated manners associated with one type in the rendition of another type (i.e., prelates acting like businessmen, spies acting like Sunday school teachers). Their performance of caricature, like that of Dana Carvey, openly layers an interpretation of type on the still-evident personae of Fry and Laurie. This not only produces a self-conscious layering which is also conscious of itself as a performance of caricature (an already-doubled self-consciousness), but also a sense of caricature itself as a performance intrinsic to the types they caricature. Part of their caricature of businessmen, for example, is the caricatures’ consciousness of their own playing of the robust roles of businessmen, which businessmen, as such, already play. Fry and Laurie self-consciously enact the ways caricature is already both a shortcut set-up that accrues toward the bit’s cut, but is also itself a self-contained comic event, set-up and cut together enwrapped in its own whirling performance. As highly melodramatic businessmen, for example, Peter (Laurie) and John (Fry), expostulate about their strategy for control of a business against an arch-rival “Marjorie,” apparently John’s ex-wife. As they strut around their office, pouring themselves ample slugs of whiskey, they declaim the truisms of imaginary corporate boardrooms: John: Damn it, Peter, I want answers and I want them fast! Peter: Answers? A bit late for all that, don’t you think! John: What the hell’s happened to you, Peter? You know as well as I do there’s no such word as “it’s a bit late for all that, don’t you think?” Peter: It’s over, I tell you. Marjorie’s won and she hasn’t even fired a shot. John: Listen to me, Peter. Marjorie may have won the war, but she hasn’t won the battle. Peter: Dammit, John, you’re up to something!! I’ve seen that look before. John: You’re damn right I’m up to something. Peter: What are you up to? John: Something. I’m up to something. Peter: I thought so. John: I want you on my side for this, Peter. Peter: I’m yours, John, you know that. John: I haven’t finished yet. It’s absolutely man-DA-tory that you buy into MY way of working. Things could get a little hairy over the next 48. Peter: You know me, John. Hairy is as hairy does. Season 1, Episode 2

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Enacting the triteness of business metaphors, the corporate caricatures’ melodramatic bellicosity both sets up the thin, compensatory masculinity of corporate endeavor and undoes (or cuts) their imaginary effectiveness via self-defeating contradictions. Bellowing lines from motivational business quote posters, Peter and John play at playing corporate studs, strategizing with meaningless platitudes. Their caricatures expose business and businessmen as more attitude than intelligence, more puff than substance, the mixture of cartoonic masculine chest beating and empty threats both exposing the emptiness at the heart of their endeavor and demonstrating the ways such imaginary business squabbles have taken the place of wars’ proof of courage and masculine challenge. Again, the caricatures as self-contained comic events both set-up and provide the bits’ cuts as implicit in the ways caricatures qua caricature enact irony—as the visible contradiction between manner and substance, situation and strategy. “You know me, John. Hairy is as hairy does.” Fry and Laurie’s melodramatic caricatures never erase the performers’ personae, but enact additional set-ups layered upon what the two have already presented as their own roles in the show. Neither persona exhibits the rutting infantilism of the business caricature, and thus the caricatures accrue a layer constituted by the self-conscious critique of two intellectual comics poking fun at blustering and empty-headed corporate types. This additional ironic layer also augments the caricatures’ self-conscious quality, the one scene—business strategy—providing the “other” scene of Fry and Laurie’s rendition, which itself becomes the other scene of Fry and Laurie’s (as Fry and Laurie) quoting the hapless quotes of business “wisdom.” Each business truism, thus, also enacts a cut that exposes the entire set-up—type, business philosophy, business itself— enacting the caricature’s critique in all its layers. This same caricatural layering operates slightly differently in their repeated bit about the British “Secret Service” featuring Fry as “Control” and Laurie as agent “Tony.” As boring and mundane as Peter and John are dramatic, these caricatures rely upon an ironic mismatch between the supposed high drama of spy work and the characters’ placid manner. Instead of a debonair Bondian sophistication, the two spies behave like high school actors self-consciously repeating the badly written lines of an amateur script with exaggerated politeness and flat affect. This suggests less a caricature of the profession at stake (as with Peter and John), and more a parody of spy dramas: Tony: (opening the door and peeking in): Hello, Control. Control: Oh, hello, Tony. How are you today?

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The Comic Event Tony: Very well, thank you, as it happens, Control. Control: Good. Tony: Yes. Control: So, what can I do you for? Tony: (holding out a paper): Well, this just came through FLASH from Berlin, sir. I thought perhaps you might like to take a look at it. Control: FLASH from Berlin, eh? Yes, perhaps I better had. We have quite a lot of important agents in Berlin, haven’t we, so it might be something quite urgent, I expect. Tony: Yes. Control: (taking paper): I see Valerie has decoded it for me. That’s very kind of her. Saves me quite a lot of work. I must remember to thank her. Tony: That would certainly be a nice gesture, sir. Control: Well, I don’t know if you had a chance to glance at this before thoughtfully bringing it in to me, Tony, but it’s quite an urgent communication from Firefly, our network chief in Berlin. Tony: Yes, I did just have time to glance at the code name. Firefly under deep cover. Has something important happened to make him break it? Control: Yes, I’m afraid it has. It seems as if the entire network has been penetrated by an enemy agent. Tony: Oh, no. Control: I’m afraid so. It seems that Glow Worm was shot trying to escape into the west . . . um, Firefly himself is holed up in a safe house somewhere towards the east of that city. Tony: So, the whole network’s been blown. Control: Yeah, I’m afraid so. It’s a thundering nuisance. Tony: It certainly is. Thundering. Control: Yes. I’m severely vexed, I don’t mind telling you. Season 1, Episode 2

Fry and Laurie’s completely understated approach to a crucial national security emergency works in a way similar to their hyperbolic approach to the trivialities of business. The clash of performance style and understated script with the apparent import of the circumstances enacts the same three scenes and layers of set-up/performance: the understated script and flat manner play against Fry and Laurie’s more inflected and enthusiastic personae, their caricature itself commenting on the overly polite and boring other scene at intelligence headquarters, which itself runs against (instead of with, as in the John and Peter bit) any cultural imaginary of the exciting charisma of James Bond types.

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Both of these caricatured bits repeat from episode to episode, which, as in Little Britain’s compulsive repetition of bits, suggests the intrinsic relation between caricature and repetition. Like the catch-phrase, these repeated bits build on the shorthand of the caricature, which having been established, carries its commentary (and complexly layered scenes) forward. That these characters are familiar already imports the pleasures of repetition; but that they repeat the same frustrating scenario in which there is never progress (nor, in the case of Control and Tony, any sense of urgency, excitement, or emergency) performs an ironic mismatch between caricature and type, either through hyperbole or understatement. This lack of match produces more irony which produces a species of ironic irony—the sense of two scenes operating at once, wrapping around one another as simultaneously set-up and cut.

Repetition’s Uncanny Irony If we understand irony as the subtle yet apparent contrast of two opposing attitudes, caricatures are always ironic. In so far as caricatures select traits, exaggerate them, and implicitly layer the skewed (or as Aristotle says, “distorted”) version of a culturally familiar type with the performers’ personae which survive to various extents, caricature is a complexly layered, complexly ironic performance. In so far as these caricatures repeat themselves, reappearing to make evident obvious but unremarked traits, they resemble something like the uncanny. What, then, is the relation between caricatural irony and the uncanny? What difference might that relation make in the ways we conceive of the comic? As caricatures layer interpretations over cultural knowledge of a figure or stereotype, the difference between the two marks some overlooked trait producing an instant shift in perception, a cut. This cut also reveals the caricature’s typological and/or idiosyncratic irony: we know what these figures are, but we also already know they are never what they seem to be. The doubled character of caricatures is itself doubled in comic events’ tendency to repeat caricatures. Like the uncanny, these repetitions produce an affective response that cuts below both intellect and consciousness. The response, however, is the pleasure of recognition and imitation instead of the fright associated with the uncanny. Does this make the uncanny the flip side of comedy? Do irony and its associated layers of knowledge rescue caricature from its eeriness?

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Such performers as Lucas, Walliams, Fry, Laurie, Catherine Tate, and Dave Chappelle present repeated caricatures that deploy both the shortcut of layering and ironic enactment as the gathering dynamic of the comic event. When caricatures repeat, as in these shows they do, they function like catch-phrases, carrying forward not only their condensed ironic comparisons, but the history of their previous appearances’ cuts and foibles. One caricature performance is a comment made by one scene upon another upon another. A series of repeated caricatures triggers expectations and persistently revives an accruing series of caricatural twists, ironies, and comedy a shade away from unheimlich frisson. The Catherine Tate Show (2004–09) features repeated series of Catherine Tate’s caricatures, which in their appeal to the creepier possibilities of human behavior, come closest to merging comedy and the uncanny.19 These caricatures, like those in Little Britain, are condensed layerings of type that capitalize upon a catch-phrase, or the enlargement of a single idiosyncrasy, but specifically upon neurotic aspects of human behavior. Tate’s characters are even identified by a torqued “tic” that grounds them—“Frightened Woman” who screams at any noise, “Fly Girl” who, even if wrong, won’t take “shit” from anybody, the “Old Woman,” a Cockney version of the traditional (and generally paranoid) selfcontradictory whinging of the aging, “Aga Saga Woman,” a hyperbolic version of an overly pampered, middle class British mother, “Paul & Sam,” a couple who laugh uproariously over the most minimally amusing anecdotes, “How Much/How Many,” a woman who persistently challenges coworkers to guess the answers to annoying questions, and “New Parents,” a couple with a fitful baby who, driving around in their car, will do anything to keep the baby asleep. As in Little Britain, these bits reappear in each episode, becoming familiar, producing via repetition instant set-up for the ironies the caricatures enact. “Fly Girl,” for example mistakenly calls jewelry “Bing Bing” instead of Bling, causing her companions to laugh at her. Her response is to become hostile, saying she’s “bovvered,” and becoming overly defensive. “Aga Saga Woman’s” child drops the soft-boiled egg topper on the floor before his sister is able to top her egg, causing Aga Saga woman to telephone her maid who is out shopping to rush home and wash it. These bits identify and hyperbolize key aspects of the characters’ neuroses as symptomatic of social types, producing in their ab absurdum mannerisms not so much irony but comments upon excess, perhaps as much satire as irony, as well as a vague uncomfortable uncanniness associated with the slightly creepy neuroses the caricatures make visible. Tate’s caricatures do not necessarily expose

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contradictions or oppositions, but rather play on absurd consistencies—on characters sticking to traits whose absurdity becomes increasingly apparent as repetition makes the traits increasingly hyperbolic. The edge of Tate’s caricatures is neither parody nor irony, but a discomfort that makes evident the link between the comic and the creepy. This species of more “uncanny” caricature, exacerbated through repetition, is similarly evident in several of Kristen Wiig’s characters from Saturday Night Live. An accomplished impersonator (Drew Barrymore, Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Jamie Lee Curtis, Madonna, and Paula Deen), Wiig also performs a character with very small doll hands. This figure, “Dooneese” who appears as one of the Lenin sisters in an SNL spoof of The Lawrence Welk Show and as one of the Von Trapp family children in SNL’s “Condensed Sound of Music,” not only has creepily small hands, she also persistently behaves indecorously, making up dirty lyrics to “Do Re Mi,” sneaking her hands into the singing love duet couple’s mouths, and tooting Captain Von Trapp’s whistle out her derrière. The character’s uncannily small hands are creepy enough in themselves (the effect of hypobole instead of hyperbole), but combined with the mischievous wish-fulfillments, the character comes very close to combining comedy with something far more uncanny—a character who is comic because she is uncanny. Other of Wiig’s characters similarly combine caricature and gross aspects that edge into the creepy and bizarre: Gilly, the mischievous schoolgirl, Shanna, the seriously over-sexed to the point of gross-out story teller; and the overly excitable Sue.20

“White Face” The line between the comic and the uncanny (if there is one) is also not so clear in some of Dave Chappelle’s caricatures. Dave Chappelle’s Chappelle’s Show often featured Chappelle’s caricature characters: Tyrone Biggums, the crack addict, and Chuck Taylor, the white news anchor. Chappelle’s method of caricature is to enact his impression by exploiting the attribute most associated with the figures he is caricaturing as itself the style of the caricature. Tyrone Biggums is a dirty, disheveled, ex-con crack addict with white powder sticking to his lips and a goatee. Speaking to a class of elementary school students on Drug Awareness Day, Tyrone, of course, extols the drugs he pretends to speak against. The caricature exploits crack excess in the excess of the Tyrone caricature, doubling

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down on excess as the method of impersonation, even as Tyrone’s excesses are often understated or taken for granted. Like Wiig’s Dooneese, Chappelle’s Tyrone goes beyond caricature into creepy excess, unrepressing what are perhaps preoedipal longings in Tyrone’s exorbitant appetite for drugs, uncontrolled infantile mannerisms, and especially the turd he leaves in the alleyway.21 Although never making infantile desires visible, Chappelle’s caricature of white news anchor, Chuck Taylor, plays with the exhibition of inhibitions and the repression of repression, ironically making both visible as such. Reproducing exactly (in an uncanny flash back to Richard Pryor) both the tight accent and conservative manner of white news anchors, Chappelle’s Chuck doubles the emotionless character of news anchors both by playing the anchor as emotionless, but also by playing up the contrast between the black Chappelle and the “white” traits—smooth colorless hair, washed out face, toneless voice, mid-western accent—that characterize white news anchors in general. Chuck’s zombie-like quality (especially in his creepy white make-up) provides a hint of the uncanny along with the easy recognition of the repressions of a familiar “type.”

Impressionism The impression, another stock talent of some stand-up performers, is, like impersonations and caricatures, dependent on its uncanny doubling of something familiar. It condenses an entire comic apparatus into a single gesture comprising layers of imitation, self-consciousness, ironic commentary, and a revelatory cut of emphasis. And like the performance of both other modes of imitation, a successful impression requires both a context and seriality. Famous impressionists such as Rich Little, Frank Caliendo, or impressionist of female singers, Christina Bianco, repeatedly deliver imitative impressions, which, unlike caricatures, generally deploy several characteristics of the “other scene” of the public persona they reproduce.22 Impressionist performances, unlike impersonation or caricature, are interpretations of voice and speech mannerisms. Performers may accompany their voice imitations with significant gestures, and generally deploy the impressioned person’s catch-phrases and signal vocal traits. As a comic event, the impression depends almost entirely on the performer’s ability to distill in a momentary rendition these key elements—a nearly perfect reproduction of voice quality combined with a pinpoint utterance that captures (as an interpretation) the apparent essence of a public persona.

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Although, of the three—impersonation, caricature, impression—the impression seems closest to Aristotle’s notion of imitation as well as to Freud’s ideas of the uncanny, its apparent economy is already the result of careful seriality and framing. An uncanny repetition, the impression requires that the audience already be familiar with the referent. Thus, the public persona and the performance event (the stand-up, the comic bit) already frame impressions as such, doubling them. And these performances double themselves by always announcing the object of the impression before the impression. In Christina Bianco’s performance on Ellen, Bianco’s impressions of contemporary female pop singers change instantly at each of Ellen’s suggestions (Britney Spears, Shakira, Cher, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Julie Andrews, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera) as Bianco sings “Total Eclipse of the Heart” without missing a beat. The condensed but persistent doublings of impressions as a comic event are the subject of Tig Notaro’s anatomizing self-reflective impression of impressionists on her September 19, 2011 appearance on Conan:23 Notaro: Do you guys like impressions? (Applause) Oh, good. I love when people do impressions—they tell you the name of the impression, then one second later they tell you the name of the impression again. Like you’re going to forget. So this is my impression of a person doing impressions . . . my impression of a person doing impressions. (She turns her back to the audience) Do you guys like impressions? (laughter) Yeah? You do? Okay, good. This is my impression of a person doing impressions. My impression of a person doing impressions. (She turns her back to the audience.) Do you guys like impressions? (More applause) Oh good! You’re gonna like this. This is my impression of a person doing impressions. Now actually I have three impressions aside from that one that I just nailed. The first one is a spring (She situates herself in front of the mike) The spring. Please be quiet. The spring. (Performs the sound of a cartoonic spring). And that’s my worst one. They are even better. It goes up from here. Second impression is curtains opening. Curtains opening. (She again arranges herself in front of the microphone). Curtains opening (her hand miming a hand on a curtain pull. makes a sound like that of curtains opening). (applause) That one’s really pretty good. My third and final impression is a clown horn. (Again adjusts her posture in front of the mike) A clown horn. (Clears throat) Clown horn. (Does uncannily mimetic sound of a clown horn. Much applause.) If you don’t like that then you just don’t want joy in your heart.

Notaro’s performance lays out the event subtending the impression as defined by repetition—as an arrangement of doubled doublings (or tripled triplings): the

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impressionist announces an impression, twice, does the impression of someone with whom the audience is familiar—another doubling—and then refers back to the impression she just performed. This suggests that impressions are more than simple uncanny doubles or mere imitations. They are nested and ambivalent likenesses that operate both because of their ability to distill the signified and because of the way the performance itself points to that distillation as an imitation. An impression is not an impression without an overt comparison; the act of setting up the comparison enables the payoff insight. Impressions are the uncanny already made safe, constantly oscillating between likeness and consciousness of the likeness as such. Not only is the event conscious of itself as an event, announcing itself and using that self-consciousness to point to itself as a set-up, it also requires that the event, even a performance as apparently simple as an impression, double itself. As Notaro amply illustrates in her doubled impression of impressions, the impression needs a doubled lead in, over and over, to introduce the double. The frame is all.

Bit VI

Breaking Stacks and Cutting Layers: The Self-Conscious Comedy of Comedy

President Treadway: No, I mean how do you spell Kadiddlehopper? Clem: Wrong, every time. . . . (laughs) ha, ha, ha, ha, I just got that myself. (pointing to President Treadway) Ask him fast. He didn’t even get it. (looking at the Dean) You didn’t care much for it either, did ya? The Red Skelton Show Blabby (Johnny Carson in his cantankerous elderly woman caricature): Well, when he told me to lie down on the couch, I figured, you know, it was my lucky day. Well, that’s what I do when somebody says that. (Pause. Gestures toward band leader stage left). I like him. McMahon: I didn’t know that you’d been seeing a . . . Blabby: (interrupting) I just . . . McMahon: an analyst. Blabby: I just told you I was seeing . . . Why don’t you listen to me? Bert Parks is available 364 days a year, you know that? One day, he works. He can be here every night. (pause) You know I’ve been depressed lately. McMahon: Depressed? (pause) Blabby: YES!!! Depressed. Why do you repeat everything? I can go to Taco Bell for that. The Tonight Show, June 17, 1977 . . . no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. Aristotle, Poetics, Part IV The comic event is always aware of itself. Even if it seems as if a comic event has arrived by accident, the moment of the cut retroactively resignifies the entire event as always already both comic and aware of itself as comic. In retrospect,

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that which the cut produces already knew itself to be the product of the cut. There is never a time before. Of course, comic performances are deliberately comic. Comedians intend comedy. As they perform, the many hints to this consciousness accrue along with hints of intention and performance that point toward a comedy to come (which is already there, but which won’t be there until the cut that retrospectively resignifies all of the prefatory gathering as a part of the comedy that finally has arrived). These hints include signifiers of trying not to signal comic intentions (body language that deliberately ignores the audience, hyper-seriousness of manner, indications that caricatures are aware they are funny, signs of efforts to maintain a straight face, mugging to the audience while pretending not to). These hints are visible as hints and they are as intrinsic to the comic event as the gathering of other elements, registers, orders, systems that explode into some condensation, insight, revelation at the event’s cut. In addition, comic bits such as caricature may work as a part of larger comic events so that even if the bits seem not to be self-aware, their context loads them with awareness even before they commence. Comic events require the duplicity associated with selfconsciousness—the sets of ironic knowledge and disavowals by which audiences know that comic performers know that they are being comic even as these performers pretend not to know while the audience always knows they know. This question of consciousness circulates as a part of comic set-ups, producing expectations while pretending not to do so. Both performers and audiences participate in that specifically fetishistic form of disavowal—“I know, but all the same” by which both performance and audience engagement can be in two places at once. If comedy is the flip side of the uncanny, it is also the “other” of the fetish, its “cut” as much a stand-in for the absent member as any glint, shoe, or other fetishistic object.1 The “cut,” which is a sudden explosion of unseen connections is, like the phallus, the something “seen” that appears to make a lie out of the fact that generally we don’t see these connections. The cut affords a sudden plenitude that seems to counteract the sense of lack that comes with castration in its metaphorical sense. Part of comedy’s pleasure exists in comedy’s capacity to produce a scene of apparent presence in absence, a sudden excess of knowledge in the context of disorder, denial in the face of an overwhelming lack of insight. The “cut” is the perverse fetish that organizes comedy. This fetishistic duplicity, which is not the same as, but which again doubles the doubleness of caricatures, enlists a consciousness of comic consciousness as a necessary element of comedy. This layer augments the other layers or scenes that already operate in a chain of comments upon comments. There is no

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“willing suspension of disbelief,” no real naiveté, no unwitting dupes, but instead willing participants whose wink of participation is a necessary part of the event. On both sides. Stand-up comedians always play this duplicity, simultaneously and most obviously providing set-ups and pretending they are simply talking while all the time everyone knows they are not simply talking. Caricaturists may perform as if they are what they caricature—this is particularly the case with Matt Lucas’s caricatures—but the interpretive quality of the caricature itself announces the caricature as a caricature. That such caricatures are repeated also supplies a self-conscious history or the history of the consciousness supplied by series. The deliberateness of the caricature is itself a signifier of a caricature’s self-consciousness. Even when caricatures forming a large part of a comic event’s set-up seem not to signal duplicity, they do so all the more. Dave Chappelle’s “Chuck Taylor” and Catherine Tate’s various neurotics display such a seriousness of manner that seriousness becomes a caricature of itself, its self-doubling making seriousness qua seriousness visible. This redoubling of affect and manner of performance also signals an awareness of the caricature as caricature even if the caricature seems not to be self-aware. Chappelle’s and Tate’s caricatures in general never break character, nor do Lucas’s and Walliams’s; however, all of these operate within contexts that already signal the caricatured quality of the caricatures. And the caricature breaking character (or perversely continuing it despite circumstances indicating that a shift would be necessary) constitutes the cut by which the caricatureness (and comedy) of the event plays out. Caricatures also signal self-consciousness through overt signifiers of selfconscious performance. These include the repetition of catch-phrases and gestures that have become intrinsic to the caricature: Dana Carvey’s Church Lady’s “Isn’t that special!” and the occult smiles of Kristen Wiig’s Dooneese and Gilly. Carvey’s Church Lady caricature also deploys orthopedic shoes, exaggeratedly disapproving facial expressions aimed at the audience (and audience that is itself already doubled by acting as both the Church Lady’s audience in a show called “Church Chat,” and the audience of Carvey’s performance as the Church Lady talking to an audience in “Church Chat”) as well as capabilities completely incommensurate with expectations about the church lady type. Carvey’s “Church Lady” investigates celebrity scandals (Jim and Tammy Bakker, Sean Penn, Jessica Hahn) with the avidity of a more secular individual, performs the “Superior Dance,” and expertly plays the trap drums. The caricature also has a way of looking directly at the audience over the rims of her horn-rimmed spectacles, which simultaneously seems to elicit the audience

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as agreeing with her various judgments about her guests with their “naughty parts,” and their questionable motivations—“Could it be SATAN?” and “How convenient!” This side glance to the audience, like all asides, breaks down the layers of performance while simultaneously adding one, flickering among the crowd of references a glimpse of the performing Carvey as a performing Carvey. Two of Kristen Wiig’s perverse caricatures, Dooneese and Gilley, also openly perform a multiplied self-consciousness. Both offer repeated grins at the audience that signal the caricatures’ awareness both of their mischievous pranks and of the performance of these pranks as a performance. These glances at the audience, like Carvey’s, produce a kind of conspiracy with the audience to which they then appeal. Like all asides, these glances simultaneously reveal the caricature’s performance as self-conscious performance, its appeal to the audience as a performance, and the performer’s persona as a part of the caricature. In these multilayered manifestations, Carvey and Wiig signal both their own and their caricatures’ awareness that they are funny. This awareness then becomes a large part of what is comic about the caricatures: the circulation of a self-consciousness of comedy as comedy.

Cracking Open and Cracking Up Mid-twentieth-century comedians often openly break the personae of their caricatures to make comments on both the caricature and their performances of caricature. Red Skelton, for example, mingles self-referential lines about the bits as bits offered in the persona of a caricatured character with lines about the bits and the caricature itself made by the persona of Skelton, breaking caricature. All of this he addresses to the audience, which, in the case of Skelton’s show, was live.2 This multilayered caricature enacts a complex web of comic events, all enwrapped, peeling, then recovering, but never in the same way. The effect is to accrue “other” scenes as each break refers to previous breaks, which themselves accrue as referential layers of the performance. It is as if there are several caricatures operating at once, each commenting on the other. In a performance of his caricature bumpkin, “Clem Kadiddlehopper,” Skelton deploys these caricature breaks and meta-commentary to increase the comic stakes of the bit by revealing an increasing evental complexity: Arriving as a prospective student at fly-by-night “Treadway University,” a diploma mill that offers instant degrees in “Medicine, Law, Dentistry, Architecture,

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Engineering, Arts, etc.,” the rube Clem Kadiddlehopper enters just after the President (Reed Hadley from Racket Squad, a police drama about con games that ran from 1950-1953) and the Dean of Treadway (comedian Benny Baker) have awarded a degree in civil engineering to a guy who is unable to find the doorknob as he tries to leave the room. (Clem enters, singing nonsense syllables.) President Treadway: That’s a very nice tune. Clem: Isn’t it nice? I wrote the words myself. I don’t know who did the lyrics. Dean (to the President): I don’t know if this guy wants to be a brain surgeon, but he needs one. President Treadway: Did you wish to enroll in for one of our courses, Mr. . . . uh? Clem: Kadiddlehopper. Clem Kadiddlehopper. President Treadway: How do you spell that name? Clem: C-L-E-M. Clem (looks toward the audience). President Treadway: No, I mean how do you spell Kadiddlehopper? Clem: Wrong, every time . . . (laughs) ha, ha, ha, ha, I just got that myself. (pointing to President Treadway) Ask him fast. He didn’t even get it. (looking at the Dean) You didn’t care much for it either, did ya? President Treadway: All right, let’s get on with your application, Mr. Kadiddlehopper. We have to ascertain your scholastic requisites. Clem: (taken aback) You wouldn’t dare! Dean: Now, take it easy, Clem. Professor Treadway merely wants to know if you have proof that you’ve been to school. Clem: Oh, yes. I have proof (spitting the “f ” towards the Dean) . . . (lisping) I studied in Pittsburgh! (spitting on the sibylants more) . . . Good thing I didn’t say “Mississippi, wasn’t it? Yes, I had a teacher, boy, who really swung a wicked hickory stick. Of course, I can’t tell you where she swung it. President Treadway: What kinds of marks did you get? Clem: Huh? President Treadway: What kind of marks did you get? Clem: Black and blue. She said she was going to knock my brains out but I think she had a bad sense of direction. (President Treadway gets up. Clem backs away, puts his arms out) Clem: Don’t you hit me!

Clem’s multiple address—to the president, to the dean, to himself, and by implication, to the audience—shifts rapidly through this bit. He openly refers to the bit’s comic lines, then in character asks the other characters if they got the humor. As Clem spits his responses to the dean, he opens up another point of multilayered self-conscious performance of the caricature as caricature.

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Skelton’s constant shifting works the same way as Carvey’s and Wiig’s moments of audience aside, breaking open and revealing all of the layers of the comic event as event, drawing attention to the comedy itself as comedy, which is, in the end, a significant component of the performance. This breaking open of the enwrapped layers of caricature in the comic event not only constitutes a species of cut (where all, made visible, simultaneously links the layers together), it also makes evident the degree to which a selfconsciousness of comedy as such is an integral part of the event. Midtwentieth-century performers such as Skelton, Jack Benny (whose signature sigh to the audience is the most basic version of this breaking open tactic), Johnny Carson, and Carol Burnett all deployed a consciousness of comic consciousness as an integral part of their stand-up routines, caricatures, and comic bits and sketches. Master of the straight-faced, slightly resigned, slightly disgusted “Can you imagine that” look to the audience, Jack Benny always layered this low-key persona atop his role as comic performer. The contrast between Benny’s persistent commentary on events, other characters, and situations, accomplished via his “aside” look to the audience, and the overt comic shtick in which he was engaged always made his comedy openly self-conscious of itself not only as comedy, but also as slightly ridiculous. Benny’s comedy was comedy about the slight failure of comedy, the reconsideration of the failing comedy constituting the comedy. In the first episode of 1953–54 season (aired September 13, 1953) of The Jack Benny Program, Benny’s guest was Marilyn Monroe.3 The show’s central sketch commenced immediately after Benny’s short comic monologue—well, not immediately because there is a hilarious (from a contemporary perspective) and robustly extenuated Lucky Strike cigarette commercial (the show’s sponsor) featuring an older male announcer reading the results of surveys of college students about which cigarette is their favorite. And TWO YEARS IN A ROW!!! this “favorite” is none other than Lucky Strike. The central sketch begins as an apparently serious travelogue about the virtues of sailing to Hawaii for a vacation with what appears to be a straightforward voiceover narrator. From filmed scenes of the “real” Waikiki and Honolulu, the sketch narrows to a staged scene beside a ship’s gang plank as passengers board for the return trip to the mainland. Hawaiian friends are gracing the departing passengers with leis as parting gifts, the significance of which the narrator adumbrates. Of course, no one gives Benny, sitting center stage with his luggage, a lei. Finally getting a chicken liver lei from the owner of the delicatessen he frequented, Benny and his

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faithful sidekick, Rochester, board the ship. The sketch then features an elaborate hula song that turns out to be another Lucky Strike commercial, complete with hula dancer wearing a lei made of, well, cigarettes. I mention these commercials because today they are strikingly elaborate, lengthy, and shameless. And comic— parodies of themselves. Aboard ship, Benny is at loose ends, trying to start conversations with passengers, envious of a pair he sees in the middle of an apparent media interview. A hefty woman sits in the deck chair next to him, and Benny tries to ignore her advances, finally striding over to the interviewing couple to inform them that he, too, is a celebrity worth talking to. Introducing himself, he ascertains that the interviewer is Alfred Kinsey. He scurries back to his deck chair and falls asleep dreaming that instead of his rotund neighbor, Marilyn Monroe is sitting next to him, and that she has gotten up to leave. He pursues his softig neighbor around some ship structures where they both disappear. Then, as if continuing the pursuit, the woman who reenters actually is Marilyn Monroe. The ocean liner setting of this 1953 television cruise ship encounter is partly a promotion for Monroe’s recently released film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which also takes place on an ocean liner. Benny catches up to Monroe and they talk: Benny: (holding Monroe’s arms gently from behind) Marilyn, why did you walk away from me? Why . . . why did you want to leave me? Monroe: (pulling away) Because I can’t trust myself with you. Benny: (offering one of his “You see” side glances at the audience) What? Monroe: You’re so strong and I’m so weak and when you look at me with those big, blue eyes (she turns toward Benny and falls into his arms) I just . . . I just . . . Benny: (again offering his aside glance) I understand. Monroe: In the picture, all I wanted was money and diamonds, but now, for the first time, I realize it’s all I really want [sic] (pulling Benny toward her) is you! (she tries to kiss him). Benny: (escaping to offer another sideways glance) Marilyn. Narrator: (breaking in) Dream on, Mr. Benny, dream on. Benny: Marilyn, Marilyn, Marilyn, I’m mad about you. Monroe: (holding Benny by the coat collar): I’m mad about you, Jack. (stepping away) Jack . . . Benny: Yes. Monroe: Jack . . . (sitting in a deck chair) Will you do something wonderful for me? It would make me very happy. Benny: (sitting in the next deck chair) Well, of course, Marilyn. I’d do anything . . . Anything for you . . . What is it?

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Monroe: In my next picture, there’s going to be so many love scenes, I want you for my leading man. Benny: Oh, Marilyn, (his hands clasped together) I’d love to be your leading man. Marilyn: Good. Now if we can only get permission from Daryl Zanuck. Benny: Why? Who did Mr. Zanuck have in mind? Monroe: Himself. (Benny looks aside at the audience again).

This self-conscious exaggerated doubling of a dramatic shipboard love scene, repeatedly broken with Benny’s self-conscious side glances, exemplifies the ways that comic events become comic as they cut at the points where the layers are revealed as such. In themselves, Benny’s side glances convey multiple layers of comment—“Gee, look, Marilyn Monroe is kissing me,” “Gee, how ridiculous is this?” “Gee, wow, Marilyn Monroe is kissing me,” “Okay, this is a sketch,” etc.,— not only indicate his consciousness of the unlikelihood of the scene, they also make visible the scene’s many accruing layers that comment upon other scenes, the glance itself commenting on them all. The complexity of the glance thus both opens out the sketch’s layers of comment upon comment from Benny’s dream of Monroe in place of the matronly woman (to whom he returns at the end of his dream) to the absurdity of Monroe making love to Jack Benny, to the doubling of the context of Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, Benny’s self-conscious asides offering cuts when the links among the layers become too absurd. Monroe’s comment about Darryl Zanuck is an inside joke about Zanuck as the head of Twentieth Century Fox studios, which produced Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Finally, Benny’s self-conscious looks, accompanied as they are by moments of silence, play with timing, exploiting the conversation, especially Monroe’s lines, doubling their value as Benny’s look comments upon them in multiple ways. Benny’s signature look, which itself enacts a cut by signaling a sudden selfconscious appeal to the audience in relation to the scene taking place, is the equivalent of Clem Kadiddlehopper’s meta-comic comments. Kadiddlehopper’s running meta-commentary and Benny’s audience glances offer gestures akin to asides that enact cuts that in breaking the comic material open—shifting the field of reference, forcing a retroactive reconsideration, inviting a consciousness of the bit as comic bit—contribute to and often produce the comic event upon which they comment. This meta-comic consciousness is, as always, a paradox in so far as this consciousness of comedy produces the comedy upon which it comments. This suggests that what passes for the comic performance—the ersatz Treadway University or Benny’s shipboard dream—are less the set-ups for jokes premised upon the material of the set-up than occasions for another kind

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of gathering: the accumulation of a running commentary upon the gatherings’ failure as set-up, which becomes the set-up upon which the bits’ self-conscious interventions play. One heir to these mid-century ploys is Johnny Carson, whose Tonight Show bits combine both Skelton’s brand of meta-commentary and Benny’s mastery of the “look.” For example, in a bit featuring “Aunt Blabby”:4 (Carson enters as Aunt Blabby, dressed in a floor-length black dress and grey wig with a shawl, cane, and sequined purse. McMahon tries to help her and she brushes him away. McMahon fusses with the shawl. After some exchange of quips:) McMahon: You’re certainly testy tonight. Blabby: Well, I’m sorry . . . but I . . . well, I don’t know what you mean. I think it’s maybe due to the fact that I’ve . . . I’ve gone into psychoanalysis. McMahon: Gone into psychoanalysis? Blabby: (again pausing, delaying, looking at McMahon.) Well, you could put it that way. Isn’t that what I said? McMahon: You’re seeing . . . Blabby: (interrupting) gone into psychoanalysis? McMahon: You’re seeing a psychiatrist. Blabby: I just told . . . yes, that’s true! He comes around to the home once a week. Weird doctor. McMahon: Weird? Blabby: Has a rubber nurse. I go to see him every so often so he can tell me if I’m playing with a full deck or the pilot light is on low or you know. When you get elderly, it goes (makes a popping sound) quick. McMahon: Alright, what’s the first thing that happens after you lie down on the couch? Blabby: Well, first thing he said was, “Put on your clothes.” McMahon: Wait a minute—why did you take your clothes off ? Blabby: Well, when he told me to lie down on the couch, I figured, you know, it was my lucky day. Well, that’s what I do when somebody says that. (Pause. Gestures toward band leader stage left). I like him. McMahon: I didn’t know that you’d been seeing a . . . Blabby: (interrupting) I just . . . McMahon: An analyst. Blabby: I just told you I was seeing . . . Why don’t you listen to me? Bert Parks is available 364 days a year, you know that? One day, he works. He can be here every night. (pause) You know I’ve been depressed lately. McMahon: Depressed? (pause)

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Blabby: YES!!! Depressed. Why do you repeat everything? I can go to Taco Bell for that. The Tonight Show, June 17, 1977.5

The sketch continues its shifting fields of operation from the Aunt Blabby caricature to jokes about other television hosts (Bert Parks) and self-conscious comments about repeated elements in Carson’s and McMahon’s stage relationship—McMahon’s tendency to repeat what Carson says and sometimes say too much. Aunt Blabby, like Clem Kadiddlehopper, shifts from layer to layer, drawing attention to the performance of the bit itself (McMahon’s pronunciation, his apparent lack of attention) to the established comic relationship between the two. This shifting meta-commentary is as much if not more of the sketch than the actual sketch, which seems to depend upon a series of quasi-salacious jokes about Aunt Blabby and the analyst’s couch. And all of this is subject to Carson’s timing—his practice of pausing, looking vaguely disgusted, and delaying a beat or two before making a comment on the bit or on McMahon or on culture in general (Taco Bell). Carson’s comments on the bit constantly shift registers, ranging agilely across a broad field. This enlists what might be surprise, but which operates more as a constant augmentation of the layers of the bit itself. The moments when Carson shifts layers draw attention to the comic event as such, but they also break it open, referring to a much longer event, which is the comic banter between Carson and McMahon generally. The sketch’s selfconsciousness of itself as sketch, of the show’s pretexts wrapped into the sketch, and finally to comic performance as performance (some of Carson’s comments to McMahon earlier in the sketch are about the performance of the bit) suggest that the comedy of comedy is as much, if not more, due to the sketch’s selfreferential qualities—to its own recognition of its own comedy. Why does such self-consciousness either contribute largely to a comic event and/or provide multiple cuts that make the event visible as such? And are these cuts comic simply because they make the event visible or does comedy itself have an element of contagion, of spectatorial mimesis that links, ultimately, to intention?6

Breaking Apart = Cracking Up = Comic Events Squared The scripted self-consciousness of Benny and Carson leads finally to the unscripted collapse of the comic gathering as performers’ own consciousness of the sketch as sketch provokes self-conscious laughter which cuts across the entire

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event, enacting a cut on the scripted cut and doubling the sketch’s gathering frames. The Carol Burnett Show (CBS 1967–78) became known for its players’ inability to keep a straight face during sketches, particularly after Tim Conway joined the ensemble in the 1975–76 season. In the “Hollow Hero” sketch from Season 3, Episode 18 (January 17, 1975), Burnett caricatures Queen Elizabeth II, Harvey Korman provides a Prince Philip type, Vicki Lawrence plays someone like Princess Anne, and Tim Conway plays Princess Anne’s suitor, a soldier who is hollow because he swallowed a live hand grenade and who occasions an echo if someone speaks into his mouth. Throughout the 8 1/2 minute bit, the queen, her consort, and the princess mildly send up the royal family, while the Hollow Man dodders and modifies suggested wedding plans, finally settling on a wedding at sea. Without a boat. When the princess asks him what they would be doing in the middle of the sea without a boat, the Hollow Man responds, “The back stroke.” He begins to laugh a halting, yukking laugh, walks over to the queen and consort, retells the joke, asks if they “get it,” and standing between them, continues his laugh, challenging Korman and Burnett to stay in character. At this point the camera focuses on Korman’s and Burnett’s faces, watching as they twitch and try to contain the laughter apparently about to erupt. The princess chews the Hollow Man out for his bad joke, the Royal family huddles, and the queen approaches him: Queen (in a feigned British accent): Young man. We like a good joke as much as anyone else. Consort: Yes, indeed, we like an occasional corker. (imitating the Hollow Man’s laugh) Queen: (taking the Hollow Man’s arm) Now, let me tell you one. (Gesturing with her hand) Suppose you are out to sea and you’re doing the backstroke, you see . . . Consort: (chiming in) At night . . . Queen: At night? (turning to the Consort) Who’s telling this? (she turns, takes the Consort’s nose and slaps her hand, an action she has taken several times earlier in the bit. She turns back to the Hollow Man and begins to laugh, breaking character. Both she and Conway try to keep straight faces, but it is increasingly apparent that they cannot.) I laugh just thinking of the punchline! (pause, while they both try to control their faces). Now, it’s a night and you are doing the backstroke and you are out at sea and you look up into the sky. What do you see? Hollow Man: Well, prolly see stars. Queen: You’ve got it. (The Princess breaks a vase over his head and he falls down).7

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This sketch, already a self-conscious layering of caricatures, arrives at a cut, not at the punch line, but before, as Conway’s insistent low-key laugh pushes the performers out of their caricatures, exposing the layers of the sketch itself, bending the sketch from a caricature of the British Royal family facing their daughter’s unfortunate marriage with a stiff upper lip to a bit about the difficulty of maintaining that stiff upper lip. The audience laughs uproariously, not at the Hollow Man’s joke which falls completely flat, but at the way Conway forces his fellow performers to break caricatured character to produce another layer about the unfortunate character of the caricatures themselves. All of this is self-conscious, comedy about comedy, an open secret that in breaking, admits the audience to the sketch as knowing participants, while shifting the bit to a commentary on the original bit which has now become another scene—the scene of T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow man” as literally a hollow man.8

Bit VII

Doubling Down on the Mise en Abyme: The Comic Contexts of Comedy

During the thirty years of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (1962–92), when Carson asked a guest stand-up comic to come over and sit down in the conversation area, such an invitation was a sign of having made it as a stand-up comic.1 The variety talk show was the frame that sponsored, contextualized, and encompassed the stand-up comic performance or “set” beyond the night club or comedy club venues of stand-up performance. Just being invited to appear on The Tonight Show was already a sign that a comic was an up-andcomer, especially during an era (1960s and 1970s) when stand-up comedy was becoming more of a mainstream preoccupation. Although The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–71) and other variety shows that hosted performers with guest slots also featured stand-up comedians, Carson’s Tonight Show became the comic arbiter. Like Jerry Seinfeld, who wrote and starred in his own sitcom (Seinfeld, 1989–98), the relation between stand-up and sitcom sometimes reversed, with stand-up performances enframing the narrative drama of the sitcoms.2 The first televised sitcom with a stand-up frame was The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–58).3 Televised live on a stage with a curtain and a two-room set, the show begins with George Burns delivering a stand-up set that leads vaguely to the show’s (usually equally vague) theme. Stage action interrupts Burns’s patter, and in the ensuing conversation between Burns’s wife, Gracie Allen, and her next door neighbor, Blanche Morton (Bea Benaderet), itself unwinds like the stand-up of a vaudeville comedy duo. Burns’s framing comic commentary punctuates each conversational beat, until the final staged segment (as well as during other points in the show). Burns and Allen’s domestic conversation is a stand-up routine, accomplished while sitting down: (George and Gracie sit down in their living room in the penultimate scene of the episode. Gracie’s niece Emily is visiting and is getting ready for a date. Gracie is darning socks and George sits beside her toying with a sock.)

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Gracie: I like Emily. George: You do, huh. Gracie: Uh-huh. We have so much in common. George: You have? Gracie: Yes. When I was her age, I was 17 too. George: Well, that’s uh . . . that’s quite a coincidence. Gracie: Yes. Oh, you should have known me then. You know, I didn’t know whether to be a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist or a great musician. Imagine having all of that undeveloped talent. George: (pause) And you’ve still got it. Gracie: Oh, thanks. Before I could make up my mind, you came along and we got married. George: I really stopped a great career there. Gracie: Oh, and I’d do it again. I’d much rather be your wife than amount to anything. (Long pause. George sticks his fingers through a large hole in a sock.) George: Look Gracie. You’d better sew this. My fingers are sticking out. Gracie: Well, they won’t if you wear it on your foot. Season 1, Episode 16 (April 26, 1951)

Throughout the show, which is unmistakably sponsored by Carnation Condensed Milk, commercial plugs weave into the conversation as they did in The Jack Benny Program and other live broadcast entertainment fare. At one point in The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show Carnation’s front man, Bill Goodwin, enters the show as a family friend to plug the virtues of Carnation Condensed Milk in the fabrication of a strawberry shortcake (and it makes a keen whipped topping!). During the 1950s and 1960s variety shows wove stand-up comedy into their programs’ menu of offerings. Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Red Skelton, Dinah Shore, Judy Garland, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Liberace, Jackie Gleason, Flip Wilson, Dean Martin, and Carol Burnett all hosted variety shows from the late 1940s through the 1970s that mingled stand-up comedy and short comic bits with musical and dance performances, circus acts, ventriloquism, and magic acts.4 All of these shows deployed comic bits and stand-up patter as introductory and transitional frames, which had the effect of de-emphasizing the comic event itself in favor of a commingling of genres generally with little to no relation to one another. Variety meant variety. In the 1960s, the British comedy series That Was the Week That Was (1962– 63) modeled a quick-mix mode of integrating comic bits that was soon taken up

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by Britain’s Beyond the Fringe (1964), Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (1967-1973), The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–70), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74), and Saturday Night Live (1975–). Jack Paar hosted The Jack Paar Tonight Show (1957–62), followed by Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. These two programs were structured as stand-up-enframed, talk-show-host variety guest shows that themselves spun off any number of competitors, including Late Night With David Letterman (1982–93), Late Show With David Letterman (1993–2015), The Arsenio Hall Show (1989–94), Late Night With Conan O’Brien (1993–2009), Conan (2010–), and Jimmy Kimmel Live! (2003–), among others.5 In 1989, the stand-up-framed sitcom reappeared with Seinfeld, featuring Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up routines at the beginning, the end, and at intervals during the show. Unlike George Burns’s combined stand-up/narrator functions, Seinfeld’s stand-up bore little immediate relationship to the sitcom’s plots or themes. Although concentrated analysis might discern some thematic links between Seinfeld’s standup’s adumbration of the absurdity of the quotidian and the absurdly quotidian plots of the rest of the show, any connection between the show’s frame and the sitcom narrative is not obvious. Instead, the relationship between them is more one of scale and specificity. The framing stand-up offers a broad, enveloping aura to the absurdity of the everyday. In Seinfeld, only this sense of the absurd permeates both frame and the sitcom’s performances of its absurd situations.6 More recently, stand-up performances frame the bits in sketch comedy shows featuring such stand-up comedians as Louis C.K. and Amy Schumer as well as comic writer, Nick Kroll.7 This arrangement is one of several organizations of the last decade’s new comic entries on expanded cable. Other arrangements include Dave Chappelle’s emcee hosting of his various comic bits; Nick Kroll’s nesting of thematically linked material; and hybrid sitcoms, such as Arrested Development’s deployment of a narrator/commentator (reminiscent of the narrator in Little Britain). All of these contextualizations and framings enact the comic event’s structure as always layered, self-conscious, and serial.

Framing the Frame; Or the Vertiginousness of the Stand-Up Playing the Stand-Up Doing Stand-Up. Like their predecessor and model, Jerry Seinfeld, stand-up comics Louis C.K. and Amy Schumer each frame their medley of comic bit shows with their own

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stand-up routines, returning to stand-up between each sketch. Like Seinfeld’s stand-up enframement, their stand-up also has little direct relationship to the bits, although there is a broader, auratic, and occasionally thematic harmony among them. Louie (2010–15), written by and featuring Louis C.K. and Inside Amy Schumer (2013–), both Comedy Central offerings, present their stand-up lead personae as both stand-up comics and as characters playing themselves (or their personae) in bits featuring them as themselves being stand-up comics. Although the Seinfeld of Seinfeld was both Jerry Seinfeld, the stand-up comedian, and Jerry Seinfeld, a character among other fictional characters in a sitcom, both Louis C.K. and Amy Schumer play themselves or the personae that front their performing selves in bits that also include other public figures—mostly other comics.8 What appears to be the shows’ concentration on a single figure—shows about a comic framed by the comic performing as a comic—is really both a complex layering and an extended seriality in which Louis, the stand-up comedian, plays Louis, the stand-up comedian, who relates to the Louis character (who is a stand-up comedian) as himself in supposed “real-life” situations with other comics. The same set-up occurs on Inside Amy Schumer, where the stand-up comedian Amy Schumer plays stand-up comedian Amy Schumer, whose supposed “real life” foibles with other real life comics and staff are also framed by stand-up Amy’s stand-up. Wrapping all figurations into a series of versions that refer to one another, both shows’ initial cut is not an immediate self-conscious revelation of this layering, but instead yet another fiction: the craven, déclassé character hidden beneath the public figure of the comic. In appearing to layer outwardly, it simultaneously appears to dig inwardly. Layering is revelation. The shows’ layerings and mise en abymes around the comic persona end up at the revelation that the comic persona will shamelessly do and say almost anything. For Louis C.K. this means a series of self-deprecating statements in his stand-up routines that do function as a kind of meta-commentary on the show’s themes—divorce, for example, or a discussion about gay male sexuality that takes place around a poker table peopled by other stand-up comics. After his divorce, he might, for example, have visited the home of a former female classmate who had attracted him and who had once asked him “to whip it out,” only to find her chubby, middle-aged and married. That, of course, we might expect. But he goes further and the two have voracious, desperate sex on her kitchen floor. Amy Schumer’s bits are similar in their consistent self-degradation: she agrees to star in a viral scat porn video, refuses to help friend Tig Notaro by running in

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a breast cancer marathon, or finds herself in a threesome with her boyfriend and his male friend having witnessed the men’s true love. Both Louis C.K. and Amy Schumer seem to spiral to a craven core. However, in relation to the stand-up frame, the fictional personas’ less-than-admirable behaviors complete the circle by presenting an irony that finally exposes the fact that the stacked personae— comic upon stand-up upon stand-up as character—are in fact all personae. The further from the stand-up the shows get, the more fictional the personae become, revealing not some authentic core essence of the performer (we are not getting to the heart of things or any “reality” in shows that are already parodies of “reality” shows), but instead a commentary on fantasy or fiction or both of the character that embodies a persona that has become increasingly removed from the persona performed in the stand-up. This seems distinctly ironic in the case of Inside Amy Schumer whose title seems to promise some probing, but instead leads us on a trail to “inside” behaviors (what the fictional Amy character does) that comment on the stand-up, producing finally an ouroboros, where the apparently “revealed” character undermines the stand-up and the stand-up comments generally on the events and contexts of the fictional Amy character, which are no longer strictly fictional but generalized comments on the somewhat degraded character of modern mating habits.

“Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories” “I’m Rick James, bitch.” Dave Chappelle, The Dave Chappelle Show, Season 2, Episode 204 (February 11, 2004) “Cocaine is a helluva drug.” Rick James, The Dave Chappelle Show, Season 2, Episode 204 (February 11, 2004)9 Just as Fry and Laurie’s various caricatures operate within self-conscious serial contexts, including framing meta-commentary on the bits as bits, so other comic events ensconce within multiple framings that themselves add to the layers already operating in the events via gatherings and cuts, caricatures, and a sense of narrative itself as potentially nodal and multi-directional. In their pilot episode in the bit, supra, in which Fry and Laurie as television critics comment

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on the comments of previous television critics, the bits’ literal framings make starkly evident the ways bits depend upon contexts which may or may not be evident, but which always operate. Just as the frame of a comedy show defined as such provides a context within which viewers both choose comedy and assume the material offered is meant to be comedy, so bits enframe smaller bits, ending up, as we have just seen with meta-comedy—as jokes about jokes.10 Chappelle Show’s long Rick James saga, “Charlie Murphy’s Hollywood Stories,” is a multiply and complexly enframed set of comic caricatures. As host of his own show, Chappelle introduces Charlie Murphy, Eddie Murphy's brother, who narrates events he experienced as a bystander on the Hollywood scene. Murphy recounts his encounters with Rick James; and as he does so, the scene shifts from Charlie narrating to the scenes he is narrating, with Charlie playing himself and Chappelle caricaturing James, complete with elevator shoes, gold tooth, and beaded braids. Charlie describes a run-in he has with James at Studio 54 where James slapped him in the face. The bit cuts to an enactment of the Studio 54 scene. Charlie comments on the scene, then the bit cuts to the real Rick James, who, as an interviewee, also comments on the events. There are, thus, four layers of contribution simultaneously framing one another in this extended bit: Chappelle as emcee, Charlie Murphy as interviewee, reconstructions of what Charlie narrates with Chappelle caricaturing Rick James, and Rick James as interviewee. Chappelle’s caricature layers some of James’s exaggerated attributes over his own persona, and sets James’s catch-phrase “I’m Rick James, bitch” that caught on from the sketch. In the context of the bit, James appears as a caricature of himself not only in contrast with Chappelle’s rendition of him, but also because in the cannily edited interview James contradicts himself and sometimes makes little sense. “Cocaine’s a helluva a drug.” The layers of the bit shift back and forth in no hierarchical order, but as commentary on and enactment of one another. Charlie might describe a scene, which is then dramatized, upon which Charlie then makes a comment, then upon which James makes a comment or James' interview is cut into the enacted scene, or Charlie comments on James' comments. Shifting from live interview to caricature, re-enacted scenes, and back, the interrelation of the layered scenes plays out—even anatomizes—the dynamic of layering typical to the comic. Layering is not simply the superimposition or comparison of several associated registers of tonality and knowledge around a single figure; it is also a more extended, narratively organized process of gathering and juxtaposing cultural knowledge, rumor, and fantasy, the accumulation of multiple contributing

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viewpoints, associations, histories, systems (i.e., show biz, rock culture, sexism, racism, wealth, fame, etc.) and even of unearthing sedimented belief systems (patriarchy). Each formal performed “layer” of Chappelle’s sketch provides context and contrast to the other layers, producing a sum whose parts all gain complexity and then cut in relation to one another. The first part of the extended bit ends with Charlie describing the time Rick James came to his brother’s house and ground his filthy boots into Eddie Murphy’s new white suede couch. Chappelle enacts the bit, exaggerating the boots, the dirt, and ultimately the effects of Charlie beating up James’s legs, as Chappelle’s James drags his useless legs off screen. The final “cut” of the bit is a “replay” of the “real” James, commenting on the event: James: See, I never did things just to do them. Come on, what am I gonna do, just all the sudden just jump up and grind my feet on somebody’s couch, like it’s, like it’s, you know, something to do? Come on, I have a little more sense than that. (slight pause) Yeah, I remember grinding my feet on Eddie’s couch.

The bit rewinds and replays James’s statement as the summary of the entire piece, the doubling of James’s own nonsensical reversal providing yet another glossing layer to its complexity as well as yet again doubling James himself. Chappelle interrupts the bit with a “to be continued” commercial moment then returns with the conclusion of Charlie Murphy’s saga of his interactions with Rick James. The final part of the sketch again occurs in an upscale bar, with James behind the bar serving drinks, high as a, well, kite. When he sees Charlie, he calls him over, and asks, “What do five fingers say to the face?” Charlie, taken by surprise, says he didn’t understand what James said, at which point James slaps him in the face. “That’s what!” Charlie slaps him back (which is replayed in slow motion), to which the interviewed James responds, “That’s absurd!” Charlie Murphy sums up the three encounters and the bit ends on the interviewed James, “Cocaine is a helluva drug.” This protracted sketch is slightly unusual for The Chapelle Show, although occasionally an extended sketch will occupy the entire program as it does in his parody sketch of Big Brother, “The Real World” (Season 1, Episode 6), hypothesizing an all-black cast with one hapless white dude. Even “Charlie Murphy’s Hollywood Stories” are framed with a short bit called “The Love Contract” in which a black Lothario, played by Chappelle, has his night’s companion sign a contract specifying her consent to specific activities, and then sign a “Confidentiality Agreement” when the night’s activities end all too

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quickly. Even this frame is framed by a warning at the beginning of the show that the following is “more offensive than usual.” The warning of offensiveness may set expectations that are easily fulfilled by “The Love Contract.” The relation between that first small, legalistic bit that gathers up the associations of playboy romance and overreaching, female complaint, fantasy, pure salaciousness, and singles’ sex in general seems to payoff with an appeal to legal formality. But even the contract, which gathers toward a bout of furious lovemaking, is quite literally cut by another commentary on the ultimate insufficiency of male performance, which abruptly cuts the romantic tryst short. The relation between this frame and “Charlie Murphy’s Hollywood Stories” has to do with the question of male prowess, although that is never superficially apparent. What the frame might accomplish, like the warning at the beginning, is a mild expectation of the salacious which turns into an examination of the pathetic nature of male oneupmanship. “Cocaine is a helluva drug.”

Chikk Klub Nick Kroll’s Kroll Show (2013–15) is a Comedy Central sketch comedy show that combines comic bits with popular cultural parody. Formerly a writer for The Chappelle Show, Kroll specializes in characters who are caricatures— Dr.  Armond, the pet plastic surgeon; Bobby Bottleservice; the “Rich Dicks”; Liz and Liz, the PR specialists; Fabrice; C-Zar; Ref Jef; and the elderly Jewish pranksters, Gil and George.11 The Kroll Show mingles bits with parodies, often drawing an extended parody through apparently unrelated bits. For example, in the second episode of the first season, the show begins with an extended parody “Chikk Klub” commercial, which deploys various young males extolling the “hot” virtues of the Chikk Klub sandwich even as they rue the chain’s anti-gay politics, ending on the catch-phrase “marriage between a man and a chicken sandwich.” This parody precedes The Kroll Show intro, which itself consists of a rapidly flashing series of print titles presented in a myriad of parodic fonts and contexts from the words stomping on LA to street signs, computer fonts, gaming fonts, cartoon fonts, etc.12 Mingling its material much as did such early comedy shows as The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and The Jack Benny Program, The Kroll Show always commences (after the pre-title bit and the titles) with Nick Kroll (like both Burns

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and Benny) talking to the camera presumably as Nick Kroll in an interview that is delivered as an interview with the real Nick Kroll outside of his comic persona. This performance of a non-persona persona seems to provide a grounding layer for the rest of the layering caricatures, even though it eventually becomes simply one among many caricatures—but only in retrospect. The show then mingles various extended bits, intercutting them. So a “Rich Dick’s” sketch about the two arrogant rich kids going to Mexico to acquire oxycontin, being kidnapped and threatened only to be saved by their rich dick connection to the drug lord is cut into segments interspersed with bits from “Dr. Armond, the pet plastic surgeon” parody reality show in which Dr. Armond has to bribe his wife to have sex with him by buying her jewelry and contend with his completely obnoxious distasteful son, Roman, who is simultaneously being forced to play basketball with a private “coach.” A third bit is Bobby Bottleservice’s online video chat with a prospective performer he wants to manage, interrupted by his mother. These are intercut and interspersed with a repeated bit, “Soaked in Success” which is a promotion for Chikk Klub, consisting of dousing “winners” with vats of Gatorade. Even the bits mention Chikk Klub at least once. The Kroll Show’s intercutting of bits structures all of the sketches as framing one another, all themselves doubly framed by the framing “Chikk Klub” parody/ satire. The rapid cutting makes the thematic similarities among the bits more apparent, but it simultaneously produces delays in timing so that each separate sketch gathers, accrues, delays, delays, and actually accrues parts of the other bits, while growing toward its payoff. And in each case the payoff is the ultimate revelation of male insecurity and incompetence. The Rich Dick’s fortuitous connection with the drug lord occasions a drug-filled party, but also the execution of their kidnapper. Dr. Armond’s uxorious sex consists of a protracted attempt to French kiss his wife who is feigning sleep as he comes in pathetic grunts while his son is smoking pot with his basketball tutor. Bobby Bottleservice’s attempt to lure his prospective client by reassuring her that he is for real and is considerate and will help further her career grinds to an instant halt when his mother appears. A short “Chikk Klub” commercial about a young man who has been rejected by every college to which he has applied being comforted by his father, who keeps calling him a winner, results in a series of Gatorade dumpings on the boy at each mention of the word “winner.” These sketch shows are not to the point of being narrative in the sense that a narrative structure—a single narrative comprising an interwoven set of plots—becomes an overarching organization. They seem, in fact, to have left

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overarching narrative (such as deployed by Seinfeld and sitcoms in general) behind for some other concept of organization that is less comprehensive, less restrictive, less tied to narrative logic, and more cooperative with the needs of performance itself as an intrinsic part of a comic event—especially the needs of timing and repetition. But before the combination of comic qua comic and sketch shows (or during, as such sketch shows began in the late 1960s), scripted sitcoms were a regular part of television comic offerings and, in the 1970s and 1980s a spate of film parodies appeared, sparked by Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein [1974]), Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker (Airplane! [1980] and The Naked Gun [1988], and The Naked Gun sequels), and Mike Myers’s Austin Powers series.13

Bit VIII

Ouroboros

Clov: Do you believe in the life to come? Hamm: Mine always was that. (Exit Clov.) Got him that time! Samuel Beckett, Endgame 49

The Second Coming This book will always have been too late, too after the fact. Addubitatio. Things are falling apart; it appears there has been no center. The thing has already spread its waves. The jostling and gathering and exploding are already past. Mere anarchy has been loosed upon the world. Retelling, it seems, was the only option, retelling and retelling and every time those waves spread away, hit one another, make more waves until they are only a faint echo, coming back a fizzle of damp fireworks. The next fifty or so pages continues the first one hundred and fifty or so. The comic has been incidental; the foregoing has certainly iterated events and routines, analyzed them as far as possible in summary text, but as for their dynamics, who knows? And the comic? There have been “pert challenges,” strumpets, fountainheads, big bangs, catch-phrases, and condensations and soon, very soon, there will be tree branches and roots and proto-rhizomatic organicism. Nature will not have forgotten us. The quaking Venn quivers and dissolves. There is no longer a distinction between one comic event and another, between a referent and its make-over. Parody jiggles foundational unity, showing that there was never such a thing. Only retrospection makes it so.

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Revealing Layers, Branches, Roots, and All; or Unmasking Parody’s Unmasking We have now reached a point very far from the original cause of laughter. Many a comic form, that cannot be explained by itself, can indeed only be understood from its resemblance to another, which only makes us laugh by reason of its relationship with a third, and so on indefinitely, so that psychological analysis, however luminous and searching, will go astray unless it holds the thread along which the comic impression has travelled from one end of the series to another . . . But what is that force which divides and subdivides the branches of a tree into smaller boughs and its roots into radicles? An inexorable law dooms every living energy, during the brief interval allotted to it in time, to cover the widest possible extent in space. Now comic fancy is indeed a living energy, a strange plant that has flourished on the stony portions of the social soil, until such time as culture should allow it to vie with the most refined products of art. Henri Bergson, Laughter, 102–103 (my emphasis) “parody (and travesty) achieve the degradation of something exalted in another way: by destroying the unity that exists between people’s characters as we know them and their speeches and actions, by replacing either the exalted figures or their utterances by inferior ones.” Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 249 Succored in the stony portions of the social soil, gliding from branch to branch, radicle to radicle, spreading through atmosphere and ground, this “force,” this “strange impulse” comes to vie with (“rivaliser”) refined artistic products. Freud thinks such rivalry can only mean a “degradation” of such refined products.1 Bergson, on the other hand, thinks this rivalry is more a match of competitors, natural phenomena that “vie,” the comic having survived its rough and stony upbringing to spread inevitably and rhizomatically through its various and picturesque media. These side appeals to organic figurations rival Freud’s assumption that somehow art and character are dignified unities that might be degraded by their “unmasking,” by the revelation that they are not what they seem to be, but something less “exalted” (as is evident in Freud’s evocation of the example of the society lady whose labor pains go unheeded until she cries out in evident and totally déclassé pain).2 Bergson’s organicism relies on a concept of the comic as “natural,” as akin to nature in its behaviors, thriving even in inhospitable media, forking and subdividing like tree branches or tree roots,

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redounding in spreading oceanic repetitions until comic events become twiggy and worn and peter out. Bergson’s “social” is already organic, albeit a “stony soil” that hosts and nurtures comic proliferations. In contrast to Bergson, Freud understands caricature and parody as similar attacks on the integrity of unified constructions. For Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, parody’s unmaskings appear as diminutions in class or status, as a kind of reduction of art into something else. The low phallic? But what if even Freud’s concept of degradation is more organic—more an integral part of an order of things that cannot comprehend exaltation without everything else, not that one is higher or better than the other, but that all are a part, all necessary?3 If this is the case, then parody is a performance that unmasks and delineates the elements both of other texts and performances as well as itself by making visible the layers that simultaneously striate and connect all of these. Like caricature, parody is an interpretation, selecting traits to emphasize, and perhaps selecting precisely those mechanisms by which the referent performance came into being in a kind of textual organicism. Instead of caricature’s selective exaggerations, however, parodies are performances that anatomize the elements and materials that undergird other texts and performances as well as itself, gathering these unmasked elements, methods, and the materials and the associations evoked by referent texts into a cut that exposes all of the myriad operations and in so doing, demystifies one “art” by recourse to another and then demystifies itself by revealing its own processes of demystification.4

“You going to try this accent, by the way, or what?” “Gone with the Wind” (Scene opens on the image of a large southern mansion, shifts to images of AfricanAmericans laboring in a field, back to the house. Interior. Scarlett’s bedroom.) Scarlett (Jennifer Saunders): (Feigning a southern accent fairly badly) Whatever shall I wear to Ashley’s party? (She throws down a gown.) None of my dresses seem right. (She clears her throat twice, cuing the entrance of someone off stage. Mammy [Dawn French] enters carrying a large flounced dress. Scarlett is donning a very large petticoat.) Ah, fiddle-dee-dee, Mummy. I don’t like any of the dresses that Daddy wants me to wear and I must impress Ashley.

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Mammy: (In a slightly lower class British accent) I thought you were going to wear this one (Holding out the gown she is carrying). Scarlett: Fiddle-dee-dee, Mummy (Snatching the gown away from her. She starts to throw the gown on the bed, but then throws it back at Mammy.) Mammy: That’s the one you asked for. Scarlett: Put it on the bed. Mammy: All right. (She puts the gown on the bed). Scarlett: (In British accent): Do me up. (Sighs). You going to try this accent, by the way, or what? Mammy: Oh, I was going to speak to you about that. Do you think I should? Scarlett: Well, try something, you know. (Gesturing to Mammy to imitate. Vaguely southern accent. Very vaguely southern.) “How are you today?” Mammy: (In British accent) Not very well, thank you. How are you? Scarlett: (interrupting, in British accent): Say it southern—(Feigns southern accent badly) How are you today? Mammy: (in a very unsuccessful attempt at a southern accent) Oh! Hoow Arrrre Yuuuu tuday? Hooow RRRR you. How RRRRRRRRRR yew today? Scarlett: (gestures to quit). French & Saunders, Series 3, Episode 5 (April 12, 1990).5

In their long-running sketch comedy series (1987–2007), French and Saunders, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders focus on the fine art of parodying other performance texts, particularly those of mainstream cinema. Their parodies, however, like the portion from “Gone with the Wind,” supra, as well as ambitious take-offs on The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Silence of the Lambs, Titanic, The Exorcist, The Piano, Braveheart, Aliens, and Whatever Happened to Baby Dawn, focus as much on unmasking modes of film production and performance as they do on imitating narratives, caricaturing characters, or producing stylistic pastiche. French and Saunders’s film parodies engage every comic trope that has appeared in this book so far. Using the organizing referent of a preexistent text, French and Saunders gather and cut, layer, caricature, break their layers with self-conscious references, all in the serial repetition (both within and among parodies) of comic events founded on recognizable characters and catch-phrases. Their most oft-repeated catch-phrase is not from any specific text, but from their own self-conscious cutting of parody performance as performance: “You gonna do the accent, or what?”6 French and Saunder’s parodies are “unmaskings,” not of any exalted unity, but of modes of production themselves as never having effected unities of any

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kind. Their parody is not so much a comment or interpretation garnered from torquing a referent text, but instead points to the nature of parody itself as that which endlessly unmasks its own unmaskings. In revealing the elements of other performances through very self-conscious means—means that must point simultaneously to another recognizable text or texts and to the parody as parody—parody deploys the comic events’ exposure of layerings (one text upon another, one event upon another, caricature and character, etc.) as self-conscious, self-referential mechanisms very self-consciously and self-referentially to the point where the nature of parody is parody parodying itself. In The Phantom Millennium (December 28, 1999), for example, a parody of Star Wars, Episode One, The Phantom Menace (1999), French and Saunders unmask the very literal special effects’ mechanisms of light sabers (they extend when one makes a “whooshing” sound), defeat an array of motley kitchen appliances (twice), unveil the means of production of a CGI character (a tall man appearing in a blue suit that will disappear in film processing) with a dog on his head—“Speak to the dog, look at the dog,” and over-play the accents— Jennifer Saunders exaggerating Ewan MacGregor and Dawn French grimacing through Natalie Portman’s Queen Amidala’s laborious British accent.7 As Queen Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi talk in a shot/reverse shot sequence, every shot of Queen Amidala changes her facial paint (which already looks like geisha make-up) to express precisely the emotions the reference performance of Queen Amidala had not managed to express. R2-D2 appears as “Dusty Bin” from the British game show 3-2-1. Out-of-place characters (a man on an 1890s bicycle, a TeleTubby) appear, à la Monty Python in the desert planetary scene. The young Anakin Skywalker pokes Saunders in the chest and asks why, if she is a Jedi, she has “such big tits?” French and Saunders’s parody focuses on the ways the Star Wars series itself deploys the magic of special effects instead of grounding itself, perhaps, in the quality of dialogue or acting. But in drawing attention to and providing alternate mechanisms for the effects, which far outstrip any other element of the parody, and in breaking character to comment on how the effects are produced, the parody ends up not only unmasking The Phantom Menace, but also itself as parody with the equivalent of a pointing finger that doubles the look—“see, we are making fun of ourselves making fun of ” Given that French & Saunders is a parody sketch show, neither parody nor self-consciousness of such is a surprise. But what the show’s parodies enact is the ways parody continually undoes itself, one cut producing a series of others.

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French and Saunders’s “Gone With the Wind” parody unravels all of the pretense of the referent film’s scenarios: the master/slave relationship, racial differences, national differences. Instead of simply citing the film’s performance of a settled Southern social order, French and Saunders’s parody anatomizes both order and the performances of that order, pointing to the performance (or total misperformance or total omission) of accents, Scarlett’s impoverished dialogue, and Dawn French’s refusal to appear in blackface. The self-consciousness of these omissions does not constitute irony, but offers a meta-commentary on the artificial and performed character of the referent text (i.e., Vivian Leigh was a British actor who also tried to perform an American Southern accent.). The effect of making the apparatus of both productions visible parses the text’s melodrama into the put-ons of performance, its cuts revealing the layers and operations of its parody and via this parody showing up the intrinsic artifice, investments, production gimmicks, and personal tricks of the referent text as well as revealing the layers that had contributed to the production of both texts’ romantic hyperbole and their reliance on stereotypes—on the performance of type itself. French and Saunders’s work demonstrates that parody is less a comment on the unity of a preexisting text than it is a second text that simultaneously reveals the apparatus of both texts. And this apparatus, arcane as it may be, comes down to the mechanisms of the comic event itself. Gathering—characters, caricatures, scenarios, referent texts, the apparatus of production—and cutting—revealing the layers the gathering has accrued by breaking them apart and making them visible as the modes of production they are as well as making visible the stereotypes, short cuts, and assumptions upon which we premise characters and narratives. Unmasking unity makes evident that such unity was always and ever only the illusion of such. The comic event’s task is not to degrade but to reveal not only that it, but other texts as well, comprise similar elements similarly (and equally precariously) arranged. And the nature of parody is such that it cannot stop until it unmasks itself unmasking.

Parody’s Paradox Parody unmasks itself as it makes itself. Or to make itself. Or both. It is an ouroboros. Or it should be. Some parodies avoid this inevitable mise en abyme by organizing themselves in discrete bits tied loosely together by the pretext of a

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referent performance, text, or even genre. Others frame serially into themselves. Such is Mel Brooks’s 1974 Blazing Saddles, a genre parody that enacts the character of parody as parody as it parodies racism and renditions of race relations, the stylistic practices of the Western, and, well, Marlene Dietrich.8 Like French and Saunders (or they like Brooks), Blazing Saddles often cuts across layers, revealing not only the practices of film production, but also parodying its own parody. Set during the construction of a rail line across a stereotypically bleak western United States landscape, Blazing Saddles pits the machinations of evil greedy politician Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) against the upstanding heroics of railroad worker, Bart (Cleavon Little). As the railroad runs into a patch of quicksand and must be rerouted, Hedley decides to use this delay as an opportunity to buy up all of the land in the relocation site, Rock Creek, a small, typically frontier western town where everyone’s surname is “Johnson.” To do this cheaply, Hedley decides to scare the denizens of Rock Creek out of their own town by sending in marauding groups of outlaws. After these outlaws have killed the sheriff and Rock Creek has asked the governor for a replacement, Hedley has the inspired notion that he should promote Bart, who has just stepped up for his turn at the scaffold (after he hit the railroad foreman with a shovel), as the new sheriff. Bart (dressed in a Gucci Sheriff ’s outfit) rides his palomino to Rock Creek to the entrancing strains of a Count Basie song, which seems to be extra-diegetic music until the film revises it into diegetic music when the Count Basie orchestra comes into full view in the middle of western scrubland as Bart rides past. This is in itself the anatomy of a parody in so far as it produces a too-like context which turns out retrospectively to have been constructed, the elements of this construction coming into full view. Bart arrives in Rock Creek only to face the racist hostility of the townsfolk, whose guns he escapes only by pretending he has been taken hostage and will be shot (which he does by aiming his own gun at himself). The townspeople decide that Bart is all right, thwarting Hedley’s attempt to undermine them. After a fairly protracted interlude during which Dietrich parody Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn) performs for the workers, Hedley conjures one more attempt to dispossess Rock Creek by enlisting every bad crook in the area to ride into the town and rape, kill, destroy, etc., so the citizens will abandon their homes. Sneaking into the criminal enlistment scene dressed as Klansmen, Bart and his new sidekick, Jim (Gene Wilder), learn of the plan; and calling on all of the railroad workers and townsfolk, erect a fake town set and even cardboard

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people to fool the marauders. The trick works, fooling the evil band whom the townspeople beat back. As they do so, the camera pulls back to reveal that the town set is and has been always a town “set,” as the larger Warner Brothers movie lot comes into view. The denizens chase the bad guys out of the studio gates onto the streets of Hollywood, while Hedley breaks off and heads to a movie theater playing, well, Blazing Saddles. Bart follows him on horseback. Hedley, having seated himself in the theater, settles to watch the movie, which shows Bart heading toward the movie theater on horseback. Hedley leaves the theater and encounters Bart outside where Bart shoots him in the crotch (this after Hedley had lied, claiming he had no gun, then producing one). Bart and Jim then decide to enter the movie theater and “check out the end of the flick.” Hoping for a happy ending, Bart and Jim settle down with popcorn to a scene in which Bart is deciding to leave Rock Creek to go where he is needed—to wherever the bad guys are. Asking Jim to go with him, the two ride off into what is apparently the sunset, until they encounter a parked limousine, dismount their steeds, get in the car, and ride off. Blazing Saddles enacts the quintessence of parody as an ouroboros—the text self-conscious of the text self-conscious of the text that unmasks both modes of production and parody’s essential paradox: a contradiction about representation itself that inclines toward the comic. In so far as representations can only represent themselves representing, the only thing that can be represented is representation itself. Some genres take the representation of representation as diegetic, “exalted,” serious. The comic pushes the other direction; like Bergson’s ever-dividing branches and roots, the comic persistently pierces diegesis to reveal the performance itself as performance. As representation. As one mode feigning another. If the serious is a bait-and-switch that situates a representation in the place of and standing for its referent, then the comic unmasks the whole affair as a shell game, cutting through layers again and again.

Bit IX

Ouroboroboroboros; Or, When Parody Takes Itself On

Now the story of elaborate parodies unfettered and those who had no choice but to keep them together . . .

Stuffed and Shagged (Jane Spencer [Priscilla Presley] climbs a ladder to fetch records for Lieutenant Frank Drebin [Leslie Nielsen], who is standing below) Drebin: (Looking up) Nice beaver. Jane: Thank you. I just had it stuffed.

(She hands a large stuffed beaver to Drebin.) Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, 1988

Caricaturing Cause/Effect An industrialist plots to assassinate Queen Elizabeth who is visiting Los Angeles. Who else to enlist for her protection but Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad? Drebin is a perennial mishap who inadvertently produces havoc as he unknowingly links his car to a chain of baggage carts at the airport; forgets to put his car in park so that it rolls down the street, hitting fireplugs, other cars, and sprouting a series of airbags; wears a transmitting microphone into the bathroom for a long and leisurely pee; destroys the evil industrialist’s prize possessions while examining a fountain pen. Although Drebin stops the assassination at the last minute, his interventions produce a constant chaotic barrage of misadventure that turns the “tragic” tone of potential disaster into the occasion for the unmasking propensities of a series of comic bits that unmask the propensities of another series of comic bits.

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Airplane! (1980), Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988) and its sequels, and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) and its two sequels are meta-parodies, parodies of parodies whose absurdity not only comments on the “other” genre “scene,” but also on other genre parodies as parodies of genre. They are rhizomatic in extremis. As parodies of parodies, these films unmask both genre and the tropes by which genre and its conventions are parodied, no longer in what becomes in retrospect a sophisticated restaging, but as an effect of gross hyperbole and a series of egregious mechanical mishaps, mistimings, and mistaken references. Meta-parodies are painful. Airplane!’s plot of a plane in distress that forces a PTSD war pilot to get back in the cockpit is premised on a case of rampant food poisoning that disables the entire crew except for the stewardesses. The film’s hyperbolized parodies of convention include a pattern of increasing drug abuse and misadventure by an airport flight manager (Lloyd Bridges), the perpetual inadvertent battering of a child en route for a heart transplant (Jill Whelan), a host of nauseated passengers, copilot Kareem Abdul-Jabar who denies he is Kareem Abdul-Jabar, a pedophilic pilot (Peter Graves), and an inflatable automatic pilot who saves the day as the plane is about to crash.1 Naked Gun also layers serial bits of escalating absurd pain, embarrassment, and incompetence, including continued injury to the character Nordberg (O. J. Simpson), who, at the beginning of the film, is shot multiple times, burns his hand, gets his foot caught in a bear trap, and falls off a boat, only to be injured repeatedly while in his hospital bed. When Nordberg is finally released from the hospital and meets Drebin at the baseball stadium at the end of the film, Drebin inadvertently pushes Nordberg’s wheelchair down the stadium steps, launching Nordberg, cast, bandages, and all, onto the baseball diamond. The character of Frank Drebin is, in fact, a walking disaster who wreaks inadvertent havoc everywhere he goes. Drebin’s havocs comprise the dynamics of the film itself as a collection of clumsy disasters loosely arranged in a plot about saving the queen that enact a commentary on parodic commentaries about serious character types.2 Naked Gun organizes its painful chaos roughly into a larger narrative of heroic intervention, but the film is less structured by any narrative arc (typical of detective drama) or sense of impending tragedy (typical of disaster films) than its trite and sketchy episodic plot offers a baggy pretext for chaining together a series of absurd bits that caricature cause/effect itself as the organizing impetus of any genre film. In so far as parody is an unmasking, genre parodies anatomize

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the logical illogic of narrative cause and effect as itself a set of strategies that produce a specific genre—the Western, for example in Blazing Saddles, disaster films in Airplane!, the police/crime film in Naked Gun, spy films in the Austin Powers series, and horror films in the Scary Movie series. Meta-parodies parody the genre parodies of narrative by revealing the skimpy veneer of narrative that sustains parody in the first place. In so far as genre parody narrative is a meager line hosting a series of caricature bits, meta-parodies caricature narrative itself as a mere pretext hosting a series of caricature bits. Genre parodies’ unmasking of film genres generally focuses on exposing the ways genres already reveal their own ploys and patterns both through the repetition of certain tropes (e.g., bad timing, misinformation, mistaken identity) and through the use of easily caricatured overblown generic character types—hero, villain, love interest, and creepy or comic secondary characters. Hyperbole becomes a means of unmasking, of making tropes visible as tropes. Meta-parodies hyperbolize genre parodies’ hyperbole, making both genre conventions and the conventions of their parody visible. Naked Gun, for example, simultaneously wraps and unwraps the generic construction of the character of a heroic police protagonist, revealing the unidirectional logic undergirding crime narratives. The genre of detection (or suspense) narratives pushes from mystery to revelation. Parodies of the genre, such as Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety, deploy the revelation plot to host a series of bits that caricature Hitchcock’s mystery/ terror genre (e.g., the bellboy stabbing protagonist Thorndyke [Mel Brooks] with a newspaper with the urgency of the shower scene in Psycho). The parody caricatures signature scenes from other Hitchcock films in bits loosely strung together in a narrative vaguely reminiscent of conventional suspense.

Playing Together But to repeat: no comic event is complete in itself; comic events require repetition, layering, seriality (which would make them appear to be more like soap operas), self-referentiality, self-consciousness, and even a self-consciousness of selfconsciousness. As only a part of the comic’s more complex scenario, narrative (as a recognizable dynamic organizing cause/effect relations) serves as one among several cooperating configurations or elements, providing part of the alibi for a comic set-up and payoff as well as a fairly indeterminate occasion for a collection of comic events. It is tempting to think of narrative structure as the comic event’s

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host—as the modest logic that hosts and alibis a motley collection of events. Certainly, most situation comedies weave multiple, sometimes interdependent plots that accrue to an often ironic payoff dénouement of sorts (where the comic payoffs and the narrative denouement tend to coincide, even as, as is usual in comedy, there will be yet another epilogical commentary). Sitcom episodes also function as parts of an even more encompassing grand narrative that links multiple episodes. And within this larger, primarily structuralist narrative dynamic, some of the comic event’s layerings operate as delays—as part of what Peter Brooks calls the narrative “middle,” the locus of dalliance, perversity, and misdirection (i.e., foreplay) on the way to (and as an intrinsic part of) narrative’s orgasmic pattern. The middle, in a narrative perspective, is the site of comic timing.3 In this version of narrative as a dynamic structure, comedy and tragedy would seem to share the same pattern, both rising to some sort of climax or cut that pays off. Tragedy’s payoff is revelation and insight, a catharsis that inspires pity and fear. Sort of. Comedy’s payoff, in this grand generic scheme of things, seems less insightful than fecund and perpetuating, its revelations more a glimpse at the odd perpetually fecund connections among things than any notion of profound truth (unless, of course, the odd connections among things is itself a profound truth). Ascribing to Bergson’s wave analogy instead of narrative’s typical dynamic structure with a single point of discovery/dissolution equalizes the broad categories of comedy and tragedy, saying little about either one as a specific tone, mood, practice, or even as differentiated entities. The wave analogy may also suggest that the generic categories of tragedy and comedy are more matters of perspective than dynamic—and perhaps ultimately a question of a combination of complexity and scale, especially if we envision narrative as dynamic instead of merely structural, as the complex mustering of systems, structures, and inclinations instead of the play off of binary forces.4 The comic event could easily be read in traditional narrative terms, but only if comedy’s complexity of detail, association, misrecognitions, and misdirections give way to structural notions of narrative’s necessary binary oppositions: “high” and “low,” exalted and degraded, male and female, them and us, evil and good. In the comic event, such distinctions are impossible; it is difficult to know in the set-up even what elements will become central or operational, especially since the comic event itself often takes a non-obvious tack. The scale of the comic event is much smaller than the scale of the broad categories of tragedy and comedy, but its gatherings, associations, intricacies, and accruals are far more widely flung. Or perhaps more evidently in play. The comic event’s operational

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intricacy does not lend itself easily to the restrictive binaries of structuralism, but instead requires (and generates) a more nuanced, broader, more complex and less oppositional approach. The one I have been trying to take. At the same time, what if the comic event does enact the basic dynamics of narrative as a dynamics? Instead of trying to cram (knowingly or not) the comic event into a capacious binary narrative structure (which can host almost anything, but in its analysis reduces everything to the same set of oppositions), what if we take the comic event as a model for ways to think about narrative itself as a complex, accruing, associational dynamic? One conceptual difference would be a much more complex account of narrative in general as the dynamic (as opposed to binary or the endless elaboration of binaries) gathering and clashing of systems, structures, knowledges, tropes, etc.—as something like a wave. Another difference would be that the comic event might itself offer one model for such a dynamic, so that instead of being a “lower,” flawed, and dependent genre, the comic actually undergirds the tragic. Of course, switching the relative valuation of binaries does not do much work (and in fact buys right back into the binaries), but thinking of the comic as foundational does shift entire conceptions of “art” from a fixation on the “exalted” as both goal and model to a much more attentive take on the myriad operations and contributions that have been going on all along. We have generally ignored this chaotic complexity in favor of a kind of Manichean clarity, assuming that somehow tragedy is a higher, and hence, more worthily imitable art, and everything else is merely a lesser imitation. Now that the story of elaborate parodies is unmasked and unfettered and there is no choice but to keep them together . . .

Tanking; or, Absolutely Ouroboric (Scene opens in darkness. The sound of breathing. The light of a cell phone illuminates its key pad in close up as someone dials. The scene cuts to a kitchen with four young people at a table working. A phone rings. Saffy answers it. The scene cuts back to darkness with only a faint grey texture apparent.) Voice: (muffled) Saffy. It’s me. Listen. Darling, I’m in the isolation tank in my bathroom. Don’t leave the house without telling me, all right? I want to see if I can last another 15 minutes. Saffy: (scene cuts to kitchen) Okay. Uh, a call came through for Patsy, but I couldn’t find her.

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Voice: (scene cuts back to darkness) Oh, all right, okay . . . (sound of breathing) . . . there’s a call come through for you, Pats. (The camera pans right, revealing a lit cigarette and Patsy illuminated by the reflection of the cell phone light on small waves). Absolutely Fabulous, Season 1, Episode 4

As parody is a stripping back revelation of the mechanisms of another text or performance as well as its own, sitcom self-parody anatomizes both the sitcom genre and the ways sitcom’s evental structure redefines narrative’s dynamic oscillations precisely as dynamic oscillations instead of as the structural placidity of binary, oppositional distributions. Beginning with the ironic ouroboros of the anything-but-isolated iso tank (an irony we discern as the dialogue strips away the situation to reveal its opposite), the opening of the “Iso Tank” episode of the BBC sitcom series, Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2007) appears to set merely a perverse frame to yet another episode of the sitcom’s rendition of self-indulgent 90s faddist entrepreneurs, Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) and Patsy (Joanna Lumley).5 The episode continues with Patsy climbing from the tank, and Edina begging her not to shut the lid. We hear the sound of the lid shutting and a muffled groan from Edina, but the scene dissolves (in what we might assume is the temporal ellipse often signaled by such fades) to a new later scene in which Edina and Patsy are drying off apparently after their immersion. The episode parallel cuts back and forth between Patsy and Edina’s day and Saffy’s school meeting in the kitchen where the students are preparing a presentation on DNA. Unlike the über-stylish Edina and Patsy, Saffy (Julia Sawalha) and her cohort are what might be defined as “nerds.” A new student, Danny, who is anything but nerdy, joins the group, and finally Edina and Patsy come into the kitchen. Both are immediately entranced by and begin to flirt with Danny, interfering with Saffy’s project. Saffy asks why Edina and Patsy are not at the office, and Edina replies that she has very little to do now that her secretary Bubbles is doing everything. This represents a change in the status quo as from previous episodes we know that the mumbling north county Bubbles is completely confused and incompetent. Edina and Patsy continue to disrupt the students’ work as they imbibe champagne and eat caviar while talking loudly at the other side of the room. The scene cuts to Edina and Patsy entering Edina’s PR office to find a completely efficient Bubbles busy at work, taking over all of Edina’s habitual tasks. An occasion for a series of small jokes at the expense of celebrities, this scene terminates as a busy Bubbles leaves Edina and Patsy with nothing to do. Bored, they return to Edina’s kitchen as the students are leaving. The attractive Danny

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is the last to leave and a lascivious Patsy follows him out. Meanwhile Edina sits down to talk with Saffy, looking for something to do or a place to be now that Bubbles has become hyper-efficient. With the usual contrast of values between the serious, studious Saffy and the superficial Edina, Edina ends up mounting a protracted put down of her daughter, her friends, and her educational choices. Saffy fights back with apt commentary of her own. Edina’s boredom incites her to want to become suddenly and belatedly an involved parent, although she doesn’t even know what school Saffy is attending. Finding out that Saffy will be giving her DNA presentation at a school “open day event,” Edina begs to be permitted to attend. Saffy makes it clear that she does not want Edina there, which incites Edina to all of the hyperbole of parody as she starts an energetic guilt-trip, begging, trying to bribe, throwing a temper tantrum, threatening suicide, and then telling Saffy that if she does not let Edina attend, Edina will adopt a Rumanian baby. Saffy doesn’t believe her and calls her bluff. Edina then goes through a few preliminary steps, including calling Patsy (Danny answers) to find out how Rumanians look (“Like Ivan Lendl”), and trying to find out how to go about adopting, as if Rumanian babies are like fashion accessories (“I always regretted not getting a Vietnamese one when that was the thing” and “I could have one in every color, one in every room”). When Saffy suggests that Edina would have to go to Rumania, Edina counters with “Oh, that’s stupid, darling. I’m sure they could send over a selection and I could pick one.” Edina then puts the ultra-efficient Bubbles on the task. Saffy dares her to go on and Edina asks Bubbles to “send over a selection. I’ll pick one.” Edina exits, taunting Saffy, then rushes to call Bubbles and cancel the order. It turns out that Bubbles is unavailable and not taking calls, even from Edina. Edina and Patsy rush over to Edina’s office where the secretary treats her as if she were an interloper, threatening to call security. Ascertaining that Bubbles has gone to New York, Edina begs the secretary for the Rumanian number. The secretary announces, however, that the Rumanian deal “went through” and “the merchandise is on its way.” Incredulous, Edina complains that she didn’t even want her own babies and determines to send them back. Patsy suggests that instead she “mark ‘em up. Sell ‘em on.” Edina and Patsy return to Edina’s house and again encounter Saffy, who, saying she doesn’t believe that Edina would go through the adoption just to get at her, permits Edina to attend the presentation. In the next scene, Edina and Patsy arrive at Saffy’s school in their hired car. Puffing on cigarettes, they enter the school with Edina’s mother. Shepherded by a functionary to the headmaster’s office, Edina and Patsy stand outside the office,

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Patsy still smoking. The scene flashes back to their own school days waiting outside the headmaster’s office. In the flashback the two wait, and Patsy warns Edina not to say anything about her “and Tony.” The headmistress calls them in to her office and they encounter Tony as the headmistress excoriates them all. A buzzer interrupts their flashback and they enter the headmaster’s office only to find out that the headmaster is none other than this same Tony. The scene cuts to the presentation room, as all are waiting for Headmaster Tony. Edina enters belatedly, followed by the headmaster and Patsy who are in the middle of drinking and making out. The headmaster introduces the group and goes back to making out with Patsy. The group begins its presentation, but before it gets very far, they are interrupted by the arrival of squalling Rumanian babies, five in all. Edina leaves the room with the babies and the scene fades to black in a blur while the sound track continues. Edina’s voice calls in the dark, “Oh, God,” as Edina awakens in the iso tank and Patsy opens the door. Edina emerges from the tank garbed in a head-to-toe wetsuit. Edina asks Patsy how long she had been in the tank and Patsy answers, “About 30 seconds.” Edina then realizes she needs to check something and calls Bubble, who is her reassuringly clueless old self. Edina then praises her iso tank, saying that no one in the UK has one. Patsy tells her, “I heard Fergie has one.” Edina then sadly realizes she has to get rid of the tank. The two enter the kitchen where the students are working and ask after Danny, only to find out that he, too, doesn’t exist. Saffy then asks if Edina is coming to the program. Edina indicates that she isn’t. The entwined plots of Bubbles' transformation, Saffy’s presentation, and the Rumanian baby adoption intersect as a series of cause/effect events that produce three separate endings—one, the advent of the babies, the second, the revelation that the babies and Bubble’s efficiency were an iso tank dream, and the third with Edina choosing not to attend Saffy's presentation. Multiple plots and diegesis are enfolded within and around one another, the analepsis of the trip to the headmaster’s office signaling the flashback character of the entire concatenation, and the end unmasking the plot/comic event’s arrangements as simultaneously intricated and layered, cause/effect and coincidental. As both a sitcom and a comic event comprising a series of self-conscious self-revelations— ironic bit commentary on personalities (including Saffy’s) that redound back to the commentators, the subtle sub-plot of the caricatured cougar Patsy and the handsome young (retrospectively fantasmatic) Danny, the coincidence of Tony’s appearance in past and present—the episode unveils its own structure as it goes along. We only realize this layering and unveiling retrospectively as the accrued

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bits’ payoffs fall in place one by one. So the set-up of the iso tank itself produces a payoff in the form of a comment on Fergie. Patsy’s iso tank bathing suit sets up the later appearance of Edina’s iso tank wetsuit. The analeptic dream of the two teens who encounter Tony as they are chewed out by the headmistress pays off with the appearance of Tony as headmaster. The episode’s set-up rendition of a highly efficient Bubble pays off with the ending image of a befuddled Bubble who doesn’t even know what her job is. This intertwined, layered set of set-ups and payoffs affords the occasion for the sitcom’s typical barrage of caricatures and smaller comic bits, usually a running commentary on the superficial—fashion, celebrity, style, wealth, fame, and general issues of the “posh”—which are themselves parodies of a certain species of 90s self-indulgence. Edina is a caricature of the selfish, self-involved 90s faddist. Patsy is a stylish, alcoholic cougar. Saffy is a plain, pragmatic dork. Bubbles is a comically inefficient secretary with a mumbling north country accent. Combined, the caricatures offer the fertile terrain for set-ups and cuts that radiate commentary about everything from PR to motherhood, wealth, waste, indulgence, the imbecilities of fashion, self-help fads, and aging—and the sitcom as sitcom with its absurdly tidy plot lines intersecting in an always timely finish. The episode umasks its ploys by stripping back the pretense of pretense in calling Edina’s bluff, then showing that the bluff was a dream, then showing that Edina is unlikely ever to become an involved parent. In this stripping back, the episode’s plot itself unmasks the often elaborate concatenations of sitcom plots as always a matter of unnecessary pretense: of superfluous conditions, unreasonable predilections, and unanticipated complications. Absolutely Fabulous’s iso tank dream is the unmasking of sitcoms themselves as iso visions, produced through over-elaborate coincidences that provide the occasion for comic bits. Absolutely Fabulous’s complexly layered plot is both a plot and a layered set of comic set-ups and payoffs doing double duty. But more important, the episode always signals self-reflexively the strategies it employs. For fans of the series, the suddenly efficient Bubble would be a hint that the world is not quite right. A more subtle cue would be the scene dissolve instead of the series’ typical cuts. The set-up that relates present to past to present, as in the visit to the headmaster’s office, echoes the episode’s situation as dream, which subtle clues have already suggested, but which only affords the payoff ’s pleasure when the iso tank scene returns after “30 seconds.” The complexity of the episode’s interweavings layer and unlayer simultaneously, comment via meta-commentary and vice versa, interchange present and past, “reality” and fantasy, and arrive at the omphalos

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of five Rumanian infants. All of this produces a comic event comprising sets of comic bits whose interrelation as nested and intertwined produces the retrospective insight of seriality, repetition, and perverse interconnection. In other words, Absolutely Fabulous is a highly sophisticated parody of a sitcom as a sitcom made in the form of an elaborate sitcom. “Now the story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the one son who had no choice but to keep them together”

A Moment of Arrested Development: The Meta- Meta- Meta-Sitcom While Absolutely Fabulous strips its layers in a final dénouement to parody the serial inter-involvement of sitcom plots, the overtly episodic Season 1 of Arrested Development (2003–04) self-consciously parses its players, caricatures, and elaborate plottings from episode to episode.6 Like Absolutely Fabulous, Arrested Development’s comic event of intricated plots enact cause/effect incidents, coincidences, and cuts as a series of layered and interlinked gatherings and cuts. And like Ab Fab, it builds its layered situations on characters who are caricatures whose foibles account for actions whose effects, though they seem to be in proportion to the caricatures themselves, also augment the characters’ absurdity, usually based upon some sort of misrecognition—the literalization of the metaphorical, the figuration of the literal. Not only are the characters always in the wrong register, some of them (Michael) and the audience know from the start that these caricature characters are already caricatures of themselves, a fact which the sitcom caricatures by playing on and exponentializing the caricatured characters’ already-exaggerated characteristics. Gathering this material (and material on material) produces an accruing series of bits that pile into a cascade of set-ups. Even the show’s payoffs are set-ups. If comedy is a wave, Arrested Development is a tsunami.7 The show’s narrator (Ron Howard) marshals and augments this accruing series of set-ups. Deadpan but vaguely ironic, the narrator frames and narrates each episode, explaining each characterological and situational deviation as it happens. This layer of self-conscious narrative front-loads both the bits’ ironies and makes instantly visible the event’s gathering self-conscious self-reflection. Commencing both plot and set-up with self-consciousness simultaneously layers everything doubly and always already enacts the whole as a parody of itself— the narrator makes self-consciously evident the implicit idiocy of the family

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members as he narrates their implicitly idiotic actions, their character flaws, and the accruing sets of misrecognitions, missteps, and the always-ironic collisions that ensue, while at the same time unmasking the very qualities he reveals. That this narrator functions as the show’s threshold already sets everything up in an overt relation to tellingness. This is a narrative self-conscious of itself not only as a narrative, but also as a narrative in the process of being self-consciously narrated. This doubled and tripled self-consciousness of narrated narrative produces a sense of perpetuated stuttering removal that functions both like parody and like a hoax. In appearing to remove us from the show’s odd logics and make them visible repeatedly, one building upon another, the narrating also immerses the show in a set of incredibly complex logics that otherwise make little sense. This immersion both promotes expectations by signaling sets of possible payoffs and enables those payoffs through its self-conscious expansion of possibilities. The self-consciousness of the whole process also and at the same time means that ironically, of course, we knew—whatever—all along. Arrested Development’s focus is a wealthy land development and frozen banana stand family, the “Bluths,” whose scion, George Bluth, Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) is suddenly arrested for questionable bookkeeping. The eldest son, Michael (Jason Bateman), the only apparently non-quirky member of the family, expected his father to pass the reins of the business to him, but instead, George puts his inexperienced spendthrift wife, Lucille (Jessica Walter), in charge. Lucille exists in a constant war with her maid and gets off on pitting her children against one another. Her children include, in addition to Michael, Michael’s twin sister Lindsey (Portia de Rossi), an idle spendthrift like her mother, eldest son “G. O. B.,” (pronounced like “Job” the name) (Will Arnett), a completely incompetent magician unable to focus or take on any responsibility whatsoever, and Buster (Tony Hale), another completely incompetent, unfocused individual who has spent the past ten years as a perpetual student. Michael has a son, George-Michael (Michael Cera), who is, like Michael, a serious, competent, but somewhat naive individual. Lindsey is married to Tobias Fünke (David Cross), an awkward, self-conscious psychiatrist, who lost his medical license and has now decided to become an actor. The Fünkes have a mischievous, precocious daughter, Maeby (Alia Shawkat) to whom George-Michael is, despite his best efforts, attracted. After Season 1’s initial episode setting up the characters and situation, the show’s second episode begins, as all episodes do, with the phrase: “And now the story of a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together.” The episode begins with a narration, a newscast reporting that the Bluth family frozen banana stand, “a Newport beach

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landmark,” has burned to the ground. The program cuts to the Orange County Prison a week before the fire, where Michael is visiting his incarcerated father to try to find the flight records to enable him to run the business. His father, who is much more interested in the ice cream sandwich he is eating, merely comments repeatedly, “There is always money in the banana stand.” Declaring, too, that prison is his vacation, George, Sr. extols his prison gig as doing time as “the time of my life.” He introduces Michael to his roommate, T-Bone, “a flamer” in prison for arson, with the surprising familiarity of someone accepted by the prison’s tougher denizens. George, Sr. wants Michael to hire T-Bone as a salesman in the business. The conversation ends as George, Sr., unable to drag his attention away from his ice cream sandwich, gives Michael a “taste” by tossing a piece in his face. Meanwhile, George-Michael, who has been forced to share a bedroom with cousin Maeby when they all moved together into the Bluth development’s demo house, is having a difficult time not being aroused by the constant intimacy. Maeby jumps up and down on her cousin’s bed while he is in it; her father suggests she sit on George-Michael’s lap in the car as they go to school, and the tortured teenager has to share a bathroom with her. George-Michael tries to solve the problem by working more hours at the banana stand, and Michael, happy at his son’s initiative, reminisces about his own “enjoyable hours in the same job (accompanied by a scene from 1980 with a harried, chocolate-covered Michael serving a long line of customers.) Michael is so happy he makes George-Michael a manager. At the end of the conversation, Michael opens the refrigerator to find a paper bag marked “Dead Dove.” Opening the bag and looking in, a disgusted Michael says to himself, “I don’t know what I expected.” In the next scene Michael walks into the living room to find Lindsey and Tobias lounging on the couches. Chiding them for prolonged laziness and asking if they are even going to “try and find a job,” Lindsey responds that she “has a job. It’s called supporting my husband.” When Michael observes that she hasn’t even been shopping because the only thing he found in the freezer was a dead dove, big brother G.O.B. emerges from another couch, saying, “You didn’t eat that did you? Cause I only have a couple days left to return it. Died right in the middle of a show.” The scene shifts to the security camera in the pet store as G.O.B. is buying the dove, showing him accidentally crushing it in the door, and asking what their return policy is. Lindsey tells him she has gone shopping and Michael notices that she has purchased $68 hair gel. Lindsey suggests his outrage is because he lost out in the “best hair contest” in high school. The scene cuts to

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photographs of Lindsey and another guy in their high school yearbook. Tobias then begins talking about how he is an actor and how much rejection an actor must face, requiring, as Tobias suggests, “the heart of an angel and the hide of an elephant.” Lindsey points out that he has never actually had an audition, causing Tobias to leave the room in tears to cry in the shower with his cut-offs on (Tobias is pathologically afraid of being totally naked). As Michael tells Lindsey that she might want to set a better model for her daughter, suddenly Maeby appears laying on the floor behind the couch, asking that they shoot her if she turns out like her mother. This exhaustive description is, alas, necessary because the set-ups of the show occur through the fine interweaving of details, flashbacks, the adjustment of expectations (as new characters appear, having somehow always been present), and the small, seemingly meaningless detours of conversations. Ordering George-Michael to take Maeby to work with him in the banana stand, poor George-Michael’s desire to get away from her is thwarted. Lindsey, who resents Michael telling Maeby what to do, warns Michael, “If I know my daughter, that stand won’t be there in a week.” Michael tells George-Michael, “You stay on top o’ her, buddy. Do not be afraid to ride her . . . hard.” The next scene opens with George-Michael and Maeby standing together in the banana stand with no customers. Bored, Maeby keeps sticking her bare hand into the chocolate coating used on the bananas, suggests they go play skee-ball, and opens the cash register for some cash. As George-Michael responsibly explains that they need to account for every dollar in relation to the number of bananas, Maeby tries to play the accounting system by simply throwing a banana out for every dollar she takes. In the meantime, in a split screen presentation, Michael (who economizes by riding a bicycle), is going to try and get the flight records from his mother. The scene opens with Mrs. Bluth asking someone on the phone “Then why don’t you go marry an ice cream sandwich.” When Michael asks if it was his father, his mother, lying, tells him it was G.O.B. Before Michael can even ask her where the flight records are, she tells him she doesn’t know. Confronting his mother, Michael tells her he thinks she does know where the records are and she tells him that they are “all probably in a storage unit somewhere.” When Michael tries to find out where the storage unit is, his mother tells him she doesn’t remember. When he pushes, she gives him vague answers, finally telling him to “get a warrant.” Mrs. Bluth then tells Michael she is worried about G.O.B., saying she was on the phone with him (and Michael pushes her by insisting, “Just now, right?”) and he’s upset because Michael hasn’t included G.O.B. in the

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business. Urging Michael to make “him feel special,” (Michael tells her G.O.B. “isn’t special”), she offers as her final argument the assurance that “he loves you. We all love you.” As Michael tries once more to find out where the storage unit is located, his mother tells him, “It’s with your warrant,” as she chides her maid about dragging one of her coats on the floor—“It’s worth more than your house.” When Michael gives her a look, she says, “Oh, she doesn’t even have a house.” The next scene opens with Tobias at a news stand, buying a magazine called Actor Pull, and retiring to a couch on the boardwalk, opening it and turning to a section titled, “Parts.” Michael happens upon him and comments, “Tobias! Nice to see you off of the couch.” Tobias realizes the magazine he has purchased is actually titled Tractor Pull, as Michael points to an ad for auditions on a bulletin board next to the couch. Also seeing a sign for a “Fur Sale,” the narrator announces that Michael has figured out how to trick his mother into leading him to the storage unit. He calls her and tells her that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) wants to come by and see if she has charged any big ticket items to the business account, mentioning specifically, “furs.” The next scene opens with the maid wheeling a rack of fur coats out of the mother’s apartment building as Michael watches. The maid loads the rack onto a city bus and Michael follows on his bicycle. Scenes of Michael and the housekeeper on the bus intercut with scenes of Tobias auditioning for a part in a “fire sale” commercial, accompanied by Lindsey, whom the narrator describes as having come along “to appear supportive.” Tobias auditions in front of a man with over-coiffed hair who watches as Tobias, who thinks that he is announcing a fire instead of a fire sale, over-acts. As the auditioner and Tobias emerge, the auditioner to see if there is anyone else, the auditioner sees Lindsey, whom he recognizes as the other person with “Best Hair” in high school and also realizes would be his perfect spokesperson. The scene cuts back to Michael who is still following the housekeeper as she boards another bus with the rack of furs. She finally arrives at the storage unit, which the narrator announces is unfortunately “on fire.” As Michael picks up a picture of his father among the detritus, a fireman tells him, “somebody wanted this place to go,” telling him it was arson, “definitely the work of a flamer.” Behind Michael we see the housekeeper finally dismount the bus with the rack of furs. The next segment opens with Lindsey announcing that her commercial will be shooting the next day and that she will be paid $1000. As Tobias runs off to cry in the shower again, Michael tells Lindsey that he thinks his father is behind the arson of the flight records. After Lindsey points out that it is “ironic” that she has a job and he doesn’t even have the job he thought he had, Michael

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announces that he is about to go see his father because he has a business to run. As in the previous scene, G.O.B. suddenly appears, this time behind an open refrigerator door where he is removing the dead dove. Remembering his mother’s admonition, Michael tells G.O.B. he needs his help, but G.O.B. objects that he was going to return the dead dove. Asking G.O.B. to mail a letter with which he cannot trust the mailman, G.O.B., who, as the narrator tells us, suspects that he probably cannot return a frozen dove, takes the letter. Michael goes to the prison to confront his father, telling him that he is “not going to continue to run the company from in here,” and specifically bringing up George, Sr.’s attempt to get Michael to hire the “flamer” T-Bone. George, Sr. repeats his statement that “there’s always money in the banana stand.” Michael tells him that he has just put George-Michael in charge of the banana stand, and George, Sr. puts T-Bone to work in the banana stand with George-Michael and Maeby. Seeing another employee, Maeby taps into the cash register for money so she and George-Michael can go have dinner, explaining her trade-off of bucks for tossed bananas to T-Bone. T-Bone tries to tell George-Michael that the logic does not make accounting sense, but Maeby dismisses him, telling George-Michael that T-Bone is an arsonist, not an embezzler. Remember, this is a half-hour sitcom. Meanwhile, Michael gets a call from his mother who tells him that G.O.B. isn’t happy. When Michael tells her that he gave G.O.B. a letter to mail and the mother assures him G.O.B. mailed it, the scene cuts to the beach, where the narrator tells us that G.O.B. had indeed not mailed the letter, but instead, “had in an act of defiance dramatically hurled the letter into the sea.” The sea and sea breeze do not, however, cooperate, making the whole thing, as the narrator suggests, “a more difficult dramatic gesture” than G.O.B. anticipated. G.O.B. hurls the letter, which keeps flying back until G.O.B. ends up completely immersed into the ocean. The scene cuts back to Michael’s conversation with his mother, where Michael asks her what she wants him to do with G.O.B. The mother indicates her real purpose: “He’s my son. I want you to make him stop calling me.” Lindsey suddenly appears, asking, “Am I the only one who works in this family?” Tobias, whose feelings are again hurt by Lindsey’s getting the job for which he had auditioned, goes off to weep in the shower, while Lindsey and her mother go out to lunch on the funds Lindsey has not yet earned or been paid, dining at the same restaurant as Maeby and George-Michael who, as the narrator points out, are also dining on funds that they have not earned. As Lindsey and her mother quibble, the scene cuts to a shot of Tobias in his cut-

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offs sobbing in the shower and then to George-Michael and Maeby as GeorgeMichael finally realizes that in stealing the cash and throwing out the bananas they are doubling their losses. When George-Michael gets up to leave, he spots Lindsey and his grandmother. George-Michael gets increasingly upset as he realizes he has screwed up his management and that his female relatives will tell his father that they were out eating instead of working. Maeby tries to calm him down by asking what his grandfather would do, at which point a server brings Lindsey and Mrs. Bluth, Sr. a dessert of flaming bananas Foster. A cut to a scene of Michael approaching the banana stand, manned only by T-Bone. The narrator inserts that Michael has now realized that his father is even running the banana stand, and decides to “do a little detective work,” asking T-Bone if he burned down the storage unit. T-Bone answers, “Most definitely.” Michael leaves to ponder the situation alone on the beach when G.O.B. approaches, chiding, “Michael, having a nice day at the beach while the rest of us are busting our asses trying to deliver your mail?” As the two discuss how they both have been cut off from any control, and G.O.B. sees himself as “the joker, the magician,” extending his hands in a fire-ball trick that doesn’t work, Michael answers the phone. It is Maeby, who tells Michael she thinks George-Michael is about to “do something irresponsible.” The scene cuts to George-Michael wadding newspaper around the banana stand next to a gas can with T-Bone watching. As Michael arrives George-Michael confesses that he “screwed it up.” The narrator explains that Michael now realizes that he had done to his son “what his father had done to him so he came up with a solution,” telling GeorgeMichael to “burn it down.” So they “burn this son-of-a-bitch.” G.O.B. approaches on a Segway and they all enjoy what the narrator calls, “the cathartic burning of the banana stand.” Then Michael asks G.O.B. if he mailed “that insurance check” and G.O.B. quietly steals away on the Segway. The final scene opens with Lindsey, as the narrator tells us, hungover, awakening after her day of celebrating her job, realizing she had slept through the filming. The narrator continues to narrate that as the ad man called Tobias to report, Tobias missed the call because he was in the shower crying, though he used the expensive conditioner, which indeed helps his self-esteem and Lindsey actually said he looked good. Continuing, the narrator describes Michael going to the prison to show his father that he had taken the reins. Michael, eating an ice cream sandwich, tells his father that he burned the banana stand “right to the ground,” as George, Sr. exclaims, “Are you crazy? There was money in that banana stand.” As Michael warns him that the next time he wants to “have a little

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power struggle, just remember that you are playing with fire,” George, Sr. tells him that there was $250,000 cash hidden in the walls of the banana stand. Each of the gathered elements from the expensive conditioner to G.O.B.’s failing to mail the insurance check to George, Sr.’s repeated phrase to T-Bone’s employment gets its payoff. Many of the set-ups have to do with mistaken referents—“There’s money in the banana stand,” “flamer,” but almost all of them are linked to various meanings of the show’s allusions to fire. The narrator’s intercessions, mainly to account for characters’ motivations, tend to weave the multiple plots together on a conscious level, gathering all of the sub-plots to a large, flaming payoff. The interweaving of multiple, parallel plots and the inevitable collision is, via the mechanism of the narrator, both completely conscious and cleverly disavowed throughout the show’s gatherings. The central  statement “There’s money in the banana stand,” frames and hosts the other set-ups about money, control, and achievement. And the payoff sparks not from T-Bone, whom we might expect, but from the collision of issues of control with the problem of bad accounting as George-Michael himself tries to set the banana stand on fire. It’s a flamer all right. All the time, of course, we know what the phrase, “there’s money in the banana stand” probably means. Thus the show already works on the level of self-conscious irony in which the narrator, as an apparent straight man (whom we already know to be ironic), appears to take the entire pun-motivated plot seriously while we also know that the narrator already knows what he isn’t telling us when he is actually telling us—just as George, Sr. is being entirely straightforward about the money in the banana stand. These layers of knowing unknowing and unknowingly knowing enact a reverberating self-consciousness of parodical self-consciousness while wrapping audience consciousness of its self-consciousness into the gathered set-ups’ (and plots’) mix. It is as if the layers of caricature and parody have already extended into and beyond the relationship between parody and audience, so that we get the parody of the parody as if it is already coming back from itself as parody. The show parodies the parody of the show’s various layers of credulous audience (those who take the literal metaphorically)—Michael and George-Michael—while establishing those (useless, greedy, lazy, self-centered family members) who take the metaphorical literally as the ones who ultimately profit. Even if we might interpret this as a sophisticated commentary either on how to watch the show itself or on current corporatism’s perversions of the law, the joke—and the joke of the joke of the joke—is on us.

Bit X

The Long and Winding Road

“We have followed the comic along many of its winding channels in an endeavor to discover how it percolates into a form, an attitude, or a gesture; a situation, an action, or an expression.” Henri Bergson, Laughter, 146 Hamm: Absent always. It all happened without me. I don’t know what’s happened. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 74 We are taken unawares. Something “percolates” into something. Even if we think we have “followed” it, we can never grasp it in its fullness, in its wavelike gatherings. The comic feigns, performs a sincerity, pretends an improvisation. The comic event layers its “winding channels” in an epic demonstration of simultaneity through to complex modulations of performance: the quality, practice, mode of being that cannot be followed, that only appears to “percolate,” and percolates in events prefaced and consumed by expectations, accompanied by persistent disavowal, pushing toward anticipated payoffs, riven by seriality and repetition, and tied by the foaming ecstasy of a final return. It all happens without us, for us. And we don’t know what has happened even if we know what has happened. We are left to parse, mechanize, and build defenses, like Bergson’s, against that which ultimately controls and sways us, but with which we cooperate every step of the way. Bits, layerings, repetition, seriality, gatherings, self-consciousness of it all pays off. Foreplay. Sex. Not so much Bergson’s “strumpet,” but our own desire to be fiddled with. In the comic the audience is the strumpet, the comic event a joint affair, playing on both expectations and performances, convention and innovation, reaffirmations and surprise, buildings up and strippings away. But “how do you catch a wave and pin it down?” Nothing better than a series of waves, gathering, layering, but admittedly without the charm of physical performance. I could tell you “to wait for it,” but reading comedy is never the

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same as witnessing it. At the same time, textual comedy, such as that offered by, say, Catch-22 or an essay by David Sedaris, does this all differently. So all that follows is marred by the need for a wearisome listing description without the elements—gesture, tone of voice, presence, timing, eye movements, the rest of an audience—that make stand-up comedy what it is.1

How to be a Stand-up Guy “Uh . . . uh . . . I really believe . . . that it would be in the best interest of everyone . . . um . . . if, um, . . . if you could lower your expectations . . . yeah . . . yeah . . . yes. About 20%. Lewis Black, Stark Raving Black “We are gathered here today . . . to make sure . . . everyone eats. If not each other . . . fooood. Richard Pryor, Live on the Sunset Strip “Tonight, I’m gonna say some shit.” Wanda Sykes, I’ma Be Me “Quit being a faggot and suck that dick.” Louis C. K., Chewed Up “The point is you’re in a bad mood and now I’m gonna have to work even harder to make you laugh because you had to have things your way and you won’t back down. But that’s all right, because we’re all here and with all of our differences, we all have one thing in common. We’re all gay.” Ellen DeGeneres, Here And Now “This is such a big night for you!” Amy Schumer, Mostly Sex Stuff “You can’t fix stupid.” Ron White, You Can’t Fix Stupid Stand-up comedy is often the put-on impression of improvisation. Crafted and cleverly constructed, stand-up routines offer the impression of improvisation while providing the benefits of attentively arranged layers of gathering set-ups and serial cuts whose payoffs launch new gatherings that structure routines both

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in small and in large. There is nothing unself-conscious about stand-up and very little that is truly improvisational, though it also and at the same time sets up the possibility of improvisation as live performers interact with audiences. But even the improvs occur in the guise of the comic’s persona and most often feed into the bits that have been gathering. Stand-up is so self-referential that it appears to avoid self-referentiality by displacing such referentiality into the performed persona of the performer as if the performer is always referring to him- or herself. Of course, on the surface performers usually are referring to themselves as both the source and the butts of their own comedy. Talk about an ouroboros. Stand-up’s prime symptom of this coiled self-reference is performers’ opening lines. Appearing very much as improvisational spur-of-the-moment rejoinders responsive to the audience’s welcoming applause, these beginnings often turn out to have already been incipient layering, establishing the turns of the serial bits that follow, offering in many cases, the “end in the beginning,” circumscribing a multilayered ouroboros as the self-conscious, self-reflective performer comes back to where he or she began. The payoff was always already there. And we know but we don’t know and all the same . . .

Black and White There is nothing autobiographical about stand-up comedy, even though stand-up comedy would seem to be autobiography par excellence. Lewis Black begins his stand-up performance Old Yeller (2013) by introducing his nonagenarian parents in the audience.2 In A Little Unprofessional (2012), Ron White begins with a “personal anecdote”: “I was in Bakersfield, California Wednesday night and boy, you people think you’re stupid. Uh . . . last time I was in Austin was the first time I’ve ever blatantly been offered a three-way . . . And . . . and I turned it down ‘cause it was one of those deals where it was two dudes and me. I don’t even watch Two and a Half Men.”3 Richard Pryor begins his Here and Now (1983) performance describing and enacting his former modes of “fucking”: “I remember when I was twenty, man, I used ta fuck all day . . . quick . . . all day, right, . . . ‘Scuse me, bop (he makes a bodily gesture with his pelvis as if toward a woman). Thank you . . . Excuse me, pardon me, Miss, brrrrrrrrrrrrr.”4 Amy Schumer begins Mostly Sex Stuff with a narrative about sleeping with her “high school crush.”5 Wanda Sykes opens I’ma Be Me with an extended reference to events that occurred during her hosting of the White House Correspondents Dinner when President Obama

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laughed at jokes she made about Rush Limbaugh. Although both Obama and Sykes were criticized for laughing at another person’s misfortune, Sykes begins her 2009 stand-up commenting on the event: “You know, the last time I was here, I caused a little trouble. President laughed and he got in trouble. But the problem is he don’t know that I was holdin’ back. Not tonight, baby. Not tonight. Uh-uh. Tonight I’m gonna say some shit.”6 As what appears to be the platform for most stand-up comedy, the comic’s offer of the autobiographical is also a way to construct the persona the comic performs as a part of his or her act. And vice versa: the constructed persona offers the ersatz autobiography as guarantee of the persona’s performance even though we all already know that the persona is a performance. At the same time, we also hope that it is not—that it is the actual real-life comic who can be livid, salacious, or politically incorrect. But comic personas are always characters who function as first-person narrators rather than confessing citizens. Even when Wanda Sykes points to a “historical” event, what she is referring to is another incident involving her comic persona. The openings of stand-up routines not only establish the comic’s comic persona(e), they also set the routine’s method of layering, seriality, self-referentiality, and the cut that returns, perhaps uncannily, to the routine’s beginning. For example, Lewis Black’s and Ron White’s stand-up performances accrue layers that self-consciously refer back to previous observations, topics, or payoffs, themselves often signaled by the shows’ titles. Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Wanda Sykes, and Louis C.K. offer an episodic series of observations that begin gradually to reveal their commonality, and retrospectively, their layerings. Ellen DeGeneres and Amy Schumer strip away assumptions, baring the layers with which they began. Accruing, episodic repetition, stripping: all of these tactics are ways of enacting the comic event’s wave dynamic of gathering, the cut, then paying off, mounting and breaking, layering and repeating serially, and always, always self-referentially signaling the event’s self-consciousness of itself as a comic event. This last quality is the hallmark of stand-up comedy: the comic’s status as both disavowed and acknowledged, his or her commentary offered as simultaneously earnest and funny, the status of the bit, the joke, the anecdote as that which we already know must be delivered as if no one knows it is a bit, a joke, or an anecdote even though everyone already knows and expects it to be a bit, a joke, or an anecdote. “I would like to see the show you fuckers thought you were gonna see.” Lewis Black begins his 2013 stand-up routine, Old Yeller, with this line, typical of his practice of opening with lines that suggest that the audience is

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about to be offered less than they might expect. This reductive beginning offers a complex performance of ambivalence: the audience should expect less because it might have expected more? If it expected more, then is Black suggesting that he might also expect more? But if one expects less and gets more, then won’t the performance exceed audience expectations? And why begin by suggesting that the audience already may want too much? Black’s opening line sets the method of the routine to follow: the disappointing comparison between then and now, hopes and results—between what we might have expected and what we got in the end.7 After introducing his parents in the audience, Black begins a bit on the differences in expectations between single people and married people who criticize single people for being single. Black then sets the second of the routine’s dynamics: the perverse opposition to expectation. He is not unhappy being single at all. “Reality” undercuts expectations. Black’s comic cuts (comparisons of dreams and results) enact literal cuts—reductions, disappointments, and/or maybe not—and maybe a surprising obtuse contentment. Noting that the future he had looked forward to as a youth is the present, Black begins to layer the problems of the present as problems caused by a generation (“my generation”) that perfected the art of hanging out: “No generation hangs out better than we do.” His generation also, Black claims, was know-nothing “bullshitters” who had “no interest in facts.” Although they might have had great expectations—social security, health care, safe energy—what do they get? Unsolved funding problems and digital junk. At this point the routine has set out a mode of comparison, disappointed expectations, and governmental dysfunction based on the incapacities of a generation of people who hang out and can’t do math. No one could solve the problem of funding social security because in the end solving the problem involved doing “math”: “That’s where things went wrong.” No one carried the 2. And the idea that perhaps social security payments should follow the Consumer Price Index is a problem because “no one knows” what the Consumer Price Index is. Black’s comic cut is not only that nothing turned out as expected, but also that the no one knows anything at all anymore. Black returns to his earlier comparison of those married with children to the singles without, opining that perhaps they should raise the retirement age to 67. Characterizing the lives of contemporary soccer parents as impossibly horrible, Black asserts that parenting is not a job. “But,” he continues, “if you want to do it, be my guest, because you’ll be dead by 65 and social security will work.”

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A cut and payoff that combines both threads. Layers gathered: expectations, comparison of parents versus singles, social security dilemma, bang. Black continues with the issue of a national health plan, adding to this a comparison between the Democrats (“dumb”) versus the Republicans (“stupid”). Asserting that calling the health plan Obamacare is stupid because the whole idea was Nixon’s, Black continues by comparing a “Christian ethic” (which he notes seems to be at odds with public behavior) with his own stance as a Jew, and observes that many politicians think that health care should be a matter for the states. He concludes by observing that “Many states shouldn’t be states.” Black next adds the topic of alternative energy onto health care policy and social security. And piled atop the topic of alternative energy, which Black exhorts is “not going to happen,” is, well, the ultimate cut, reduction, disappointed expectation, perverse torque in the way of things: the cell phone. Instead of alternative energy, Black comments, his generation produced the cell phone so that everyone could be in touch all of the time. Hang out. The phone both signals and produces everyone as ADD, unable to focus. This inability to focus is characterized, Black notes, by the fact that we give children speed and adults statin which makes adults lose their memories. Black continues to compare his generation’s potential and the disappointments of the present, offering a brief history of “improvements” in television: the shift from three television stations to cable (“and nothing to watch”), the invention of the television remote, our willingness to pay for television yet not pay taxes. The gathering continues with the computer and its “18 million websites,” email which permits people to work at home (and “you know what that means”), his friends urging him to have a Facebook page (which Black characterizes as a “predator” page), Spotify which will allow people to find his Facebook page, but which makes public what he is listening to so that “Now everybody knows I work at home,” continues with Zinga (“I don’t know what that means, but I know it has to do with the Consumer Price Index.”), and Zinga’s Farmville. Farmville, he exhorts, whether one is a Democrat, a Republican, business or the government, is the reason nothing happens. The person in charge is playing Farmville. He “forgot to carry the 2.” Returning to the idea of Facebook stock, Black notes that Zuckerberg paid one billion dollars for Instagram that had thirteen employees and no income. Looking for an explanation for this, Black admits it might be good for military personnel stationed overseas and for those with a love of calico cats. The calico cat theme organizes the next three bits which include commentaries on

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Facebook, cell phones, and the US Congress. Facebook, according to Black, is a misleading dating site (those with a love of calico cats) that a “delusional” Zuckerberg compared to the invention of the printing press. The cell phone is a prime symptom of ADD, hosting the impossibilities of multitasking, which, as Black points out, is a myth: no one can be in two places at once. He continues gathering proof of both ADD and that nothing is ever done by evoking Twitter (that he needs so people can find his Facebook page). The three bits come to rest with the idea that with the cell phone no one even needs to live at home any more, and the bits cut yet again on the difference between expectation and reality. Returning to the critique of Facebook he made twenty minutes earlier, Black observes that like most other modern inventions, it does nothing. The final gathering of Black’s layering comparisons between past and present returns to his earlier statement that the government is not doing anything. Noting that no one likes congress, Black observes that congress used to do things when it was “governed by drunks,” and now that it is governed by people who work out in gyms, it gets nothing done at all. After assuring gun owners that the government won’t take their guns (as it does nothing anyway), he returns to his characterizations of Democrats as “dumb” and Republicans as “stupid.” “Dumb,” he suggests, means that they are not funny. His example: that Nancy Pelosi refused to lower congressional pay during economic crisis because she said it “would demean the office.” “Stupid,” on the other hand, is funny. Example: the congressman who suggested that women should not have abortions after fifteen weeks because “the fetus can masturbate,” resonating with earlier comments about the real meaning of working at home. To end, Black reads from the website of a Ft. Wayne, Indiana legislator who is refusing to sign a non-binding resolution celebrating the anniversary of the Girl Scouts because they are “a radicalized organization that supports abortion and promotes the homosexual lifestyle.” Acting out a scenario in which a scout leader forces girl scouts to French kiss, Black completes the payoff to the gathered concatenation of comparisons between past and present—his critique of governmental inaction (both by showing inaction and commenting on the quality of the “actions” they do take) and the ADD features of a bunch of digital applications, which in themselves mean and do nothing—with the observation that Indiana is one of those states that shouldn’t be a state, returning thus to his discussion of health care and pulling the gathered observations together by appealing to a concept that has accompanied the routine, but which, apart

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from the earlier moment when he stated it, has not functioned as an organizing principle—except in large. The state is not functioning as a state; it does nothing while it fosters the growth of toys and media that do nothing and that make sure no one will ever do anything again. How comic is this? Or, perhaps, how is this a comic event? While what Black offers as commentary is a serious critique of contemporary American culture, it is a comic event both in its elegant layered structure and because of Black’s performance and timing. Black’s stand-up routines illustrate clearly the ways the comic event is the effect both of a layered serial structure in which returns to previous material produce cuts (connections, reductions, foci) and payoffs—the link between his opening line about expectations and the entire routine’s exploration of unmet expectations, gathered examples of how nothing is done (linked to the generation that does nothing), punctuating evocations of the theme of Democrat = Dumb, Republican = Stupid, periodic payoffs about the real meaning of “working at home,” the meaninglessness of the Consumer Price Index, and finally the observation that “many states shouldn’t be states.” Accruing, layering, returning, exemplifying, folding back, Black’s routine is both self-referential and self-conscious. Its hallmark, however, is Black’s delivery—hyperbolic outrage aimed at the ludicrousness of the phenomena he points out. The stand-up routine is less a diatribe about the uselessness of government and cyber toys than it is the performance of a cathartic disbelief about the ridiculousness of contemporary affairs. Almost foaming at the mouth, Black’s stand-up delivers not simply commentary about the absurdity of modern life, but performs this commentary as someone who is naively beginning to see the enormity of contemporary malfeasance and is shocked at culture’s complacency. The performance of shock and anger angles the commentary into a slightly unfamiliar perspective through which we can perceive contemporary phenomena, which we have begun to take for granted, as preposterous matter for comic consideration. If all of this weren’t so true, it would be hilarious. As Black’s routine performs it, it is hilarious because it is so true. How to make political commentary without appearing to do so while appearing to do so. And these days, perhaps comedy is the only real vector for political critique. Maybe in the end, Black’s comedy does something, even if pointing out the nothing of contemporary life. Black’s entire routine rests upon his performance of an outraged persona, a persona that is itself produced out of the collation of what appear to be the autobiographical details of Black’s personal life. One senses—and the performance

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itself signals (and these are two different processes)—that Black’s examples are less actual autobiographical facts than they are illustrative exaggerations. This, however, makes no difference in so far as Black’s evocation of the autobiographical enacts an imaginary persona via the delivery of bits. This persona then grounds the commentary that produces the persona, ouribourically authorizing both persona and commentary not as truth per se, but as a species of grounding verisimilitude upon which comic bits build upon one another in stand-up. The routine’s implicit narrative is the comic persona’s life experience. The performer can speak of the issues he or she raises because the persona has experienced and observed them and we believe the persona has experienced them because the performer introduces them as experience. But these are not merely the bland recountings of a typical individual. Black’s performance persona is hyperbolic; its signature gestures are a shaking of his mouth in an inability to find terms that can describe the absurdity of phenomena (bbbbbbbbbb), raising his voice in volume and register, and imitating total rage. He drinks water from bottles throughout the performance which may of course be necessary, but which also offers reasons to delay and control the timing of lines as well as signal the energy of the performance of seething outrage.

“You Can’t Fix Stupid” Ron White, who was long associated with Jeff Foxworthy’s “Blue Collar Comedy Tour,” also enacts a persona through the performance of personal anecdotes. White’s persona is as idiosyncratic as Black’s, combining the accent and body language of an East Texas native with the clothes and scotch-drinking habit of someone more like Dean Martin. As White himself comments, looking at his clothes, “I can’t believe I’m not gay.” These comic personae are neither mere platforms nor authorizers: both personae present precisely the ambivalence and unlikely combinations of traits that in themselves gather and layer perspectives and material. While Black is a grumpy East Coast bachelor whose baseline hyperbolic vexation enables and produces the appearance of a distanced perspective on sociopolitical events, White’s mixture of country boy with a patina of sophistication licenses commentary both from within and beyond a “down home” perspective. Black addresses politics and cultural absurdities directly and almost abstractly. White comes at social and sexual issues from the self-referential point of view of his persona’s “experience.”8

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Like Black, White’s carefully structured 2006 Comedy Central routine You Can’t Fix Stupid operates around a set of themes, linking gathering, layering, seriality, and cutting returns that pay off.9 Like all of White’s stand-up, this performance comprises anecdotes and events from White’s life—in this show from what seems to be the previous year: his summer settling into a new house, his performances, his honeymoon on a cruise ship, and his Texas background. White’s routine gathers around issues of penis size, relations between the sexes, semen tasting like chocolate, and the title punch line, “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” which appears both in the middle of the routine and at the end. Weaving these elements together in a series of experiential observations on everything from his landscaper and Michael Jackson to bachelorette parties and his cousin, White’s routine builds and layers in shorter bits than Black’s. Establishing early in the routine that his dick is short, but fat—a “cheese wheel,” (more low phallic comedy) White returns to this image throughout. The cheese wheel image itself enacts the same ambivalence as White’s appearance: it is self-deprecating but extraordinary. This self-deprecation provides a base from which White can comment freely on sex, his own (or his performance persona’s) desire, and sexual relations throughout the routine. One elaborately constructed bit begins with White relating his experience performing in a comedy club with a bachelorette party in progress. Describing the bachelorettes’ novelty items—little penis suckers, penis pacifiers, and finally an 8” chocolate penis on a stick—White complains that his comedy set pretty much lost out to the spectacle of the bachelorettes licking the chocolate penis as the men in the audience watched them, asking, “Is this free?” The link between the penis and chocolate comes back as White interweaves two additional penis tales: his honeymoon experience on a cruise ship where an extremely well-endowed fan (“It looked like he had a squirrel in his bathing suit”) who talked to him all day and the time his wife, whom he declares is “brilliant,” came up with a solution “for overpopulation.” Instead of Viagra, she suggested that drug companies design something that will make semen taste like chocolate, harking back to the bachelorette party. White returns to descriptions of his shipboard buddy, their arrival on a Greek nude beach, and the “anaconda” in the fan’s lap. The routine’s punch line—“you can’t fix stupid”—begins as a warning about falling in love with a person’s appearance instead of her substance, because there is always plastic surgery, but you can’t fix stupid. At the end of the routine, White

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talks about his upbringing in a small Texas town and his sexual awakenings, but finishes with a story about his cousin: I was talking to my cousin Ray the other day and he, uh, he said, “This world would be a better place if there wasn’t so many queers.” I said, “You know what? Next time you have a thought . . . (pause) Let it go.” I told him, “we’re all gay, buddy . . . it’s just to what extent are you gay.” He goes, “That’s bullshit, man. I ain’t gay at all.” I’m like, “yeah, you are, and I can prove it.” He goes, “Fine. Prove it.” I’m like, “All right. Do you like porn?” He goes, “Yeah, I love porn. You know that.” I’m like, “Do you only watch scenes with two women together?” He goes, “No, I watch a man and a woman making love.” I’m like, “Oh, do you like the guy to have a small, half-flaccid penis?” He goes, “No, I like big, hard, throbbing co— . . . (White pauses, imitates cousin’s moment of self-realization) . . . You like chocolate?”

The rhythm of White’s routine works through more cuts back to previous catch-phrases and hence, payoffs than Black’s, but White, too, deploys on-stage mannerisms—drinking scotch, smoking a big cigar—as ways to take time out and produce pauses in his telling. His routine layers payoffs instead of gatherings, offering more pauses as the audience laughs. At the same time, in its accruing of payoffs, there begins to be a sense that no payoff is really a payoff at all, but the gathering of a bigger payoff to come. This places the payoffs themselves in an ambivalent position much like White’s self-presentation. So as White goes from the “cheese wheel” to the “anaconda,” from coitus to cunnilingus, from success to working class (he notes that he is not a member of the “mile high club.” Instead he is a member of the “mile ahead club,” where you fuck behind a “Cracker Barrel billboard”), the ambivalence that characterizes his routine becomes more obviously (but still subtly) its organizing principle, reflected in everything from his self-presentation to his bits. One of the earlier bits in the routine is about a landscaper, who, when White asks him about trees he had planted that looked dead, scratched the trunks and told White that “the core is still alive.” Alive/ dead, Viagra/chocolate semen, gay/straight, male/female, penis pacifiers/“big, hard, throbbing co.” Low phallic humor.

Pryorities Richard Pryor lights a match. “What’s that?” he asks. Answer: Richard Pryor running down the street. Richard Pryor, Live on the Sunset Strip, 198310

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Like Black and White, (or they like him) Richard Pryor bases his stand-up routine on an enacted persona. Cool, common sense Richard relates the extremes of his past behavior. Not “angry enough” any more to be really funny, Pryor tells his audience “I feel the tension from you all. You want me to do well.” Returning to the stage after his free-basing self-conflagration, Pryor performs a stand-up routine that depends upon comparisons of groups: men and women, blacks and whites, and Africans and Americans. Pryor layers his commentary with caricature and impersonation, switching quickly from one dialect and mode of speaking to another, describing, then enacting scenarios, conversations, even conversations with himself, impersonating the incarcerated, mobsters, a rural white man, the down-home Tupelo philosopher “Mudbone,” and finally, his crack pipe.11 Pryor’s routine has a redemptive cast to it; organized around the lessons he has learned, the routine enacts a persona with a certain hard-won humility. The bits move less quickly from topic to topic than those of the later Black and White. Pryor’s routine circles slowly around such maxims as his wife’s insistence that he “express himself,” or that feelings are hard to deal with, or that women are much cooler about their feelings than men, that racism is ugly, that bravery is difficult, and that he has changed. Although these maxims link segments of the routine together, the gatherings of the routine exist more in the layerings of comment and caricature than in techniques of accruing material or building to periodic cuts and payoffs. The payoffs themselves occur not as the culmination of gathered material, but as a distributed part of the routine’s circlings in the layered impersonations and caricatures Pryor performs. The intimate quality of Pryor’s renditions of a performed inner voice combined with uncanniness of Pryor’s caricatured impersonations of types—prisoners, mobsters, white people, animals on the savannah, drug dealers, and drug paraphernalia—distribute payoffs throughout as a kind of persistent glow of recognition. The larger structure of the routine moves from a reduction in the amount of national “fucking” now that Ronald Reagan is president to Pryor’s experience as a married man, the question of expressing feelings, his experiences visiting the Arizona State Penitentiary while filming a movie (the pen is 80% black, but there are no blacks in Arizona, so they have to bus them in), his trip to Africa, his experiences as an emcee at a mobster-owned night club in Youngstown, Ohio, the monologue from “Mudbone,” (at the request of an audience member), and finally an account of his addiction to drugs complete with impersonations of Jim Brown and a talking crack pipe. Pryor’s routine, however, depends much more

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on his manner of recounting—the constant shift among the comic performer persona, another self, impersonations of characters, animals, and inanimate objects, and very very few punch lines. Pryor is a storyteller, par excellence, or more accurately, story performer. The middle of Pryor’s routine contrasts two different kinds of experiences: Pryor’s trip to Africa and his time as a night club emcee. Immediately following Pryor’s impression of a rural white’s invitation to Pryor to “kiss his girlfriend,” Pryor’s recounts his trip to Africa, picking up the theme of racism, but also reprising the earlier motif of incarceration, this time in relation to animals. Starting the section with the maxim that everyone should have “pride,” Pryor enacts a certain ambivalence about Africa as his “Motherland,” noting that of 700 million people, no one knew him. Excited, however, about being among black people in an original black country, Pryor comments that he realizes that somebody in his family “been lyin’ to me.” But landing in Africa and seeing all black people, Pryor enacts his excited realization that “People are the same! The people in Africa fuck over your luggage just like the people in New York!” He continues with a description of a trip to the bush during which he impersonates the differences between zoo animals and their wild counterparts. He comes back to an experience picking up an African hitchhiker, enacting the paradox of traded body odors where neither could stand the smells of the other. Finally, he arrives at the conclusion that what impressed him about Africa was that there were no “niggers”—that “all colors doing everything” means that no one is devalued. The Africa trip ends at the halfway point in Pryor’s routine. The second half of the routine begins with the topic of bravery as Pryor recounts how, as an emcee at a mob-owned nightclub, he went to the bosses with a cap pistol to demand higher pay for the performers. Enacting a perfect imitation of a movie mobster, Pryor relates how the mobsters laughed, spoke a nonsensical language about food, hugged him to them, and refused to let him pay for dinner. After an audience member’s request that he perform “Mudbone,” who offers advice about how to woo women, Pryor ends with a lengthy account of his experience with drugs. Performing his relation with drugs as the persistent call of his crack pipe, Pryor recalls his refusals to believe he was a junky. Even when friend, Jim Brown, asked him “What you gonna do,” Pryor stuck to the pipe, until one day walking down the street he set himself on fire and burned himself badly. Noting that “pain stops racism” and incites people to become religious, Pryor thanks God for “not burning my dick.”

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Finely woven and textured, Pryor’s routine emerges less as a series of distinct bits than as thoughtful commentary, subtly layered with continuous gatherings of caricature, impersonation, observation, and recognition that distribute payoffs throughout the gatherings as they all come together.

“White People Are Lookin’ at You” Signaled by an opening reference to her previous critique of Rush Limbaugh (to which I will return yet again later), Wanda Sykes’s performance persona in the 2009 HBO comedy special “I’ma Be Me,” is edgy (a more sexist and racist vocabulary would call her “sassy”) as she imitates what Michelle Obama might act like if she were not constrained by the public eye. Hypothesizing that Michelle had “rods implanted in her neck” so she couldn’t make the dissing neck movement typical of an angry black woman, Sykes enacts a caricature of a black woman trying to chew out her husband while so restrained. Posing the possibility that the White House might have hosted a domestic quarrel featuring clothes tossed out the window, Sykes imagines Michelle’s mother standing at the door, waving a finger: “White people are looking at you.” Merging Pryor’s tactic of layering impersonations and physical caricatures on recountings with more recent comics’ style of building shorter bits, Wanda Sykes gathers it all. Linking her bits with repeated catch-phrases and punch lines, Sykes’s routine, like Black’s, combines the personal with the political. But Sykes adds dimensions of racism and sexism to the mix, layering implicit comparisons between different kinds of intolerance and oppression. Beginning with an extended commentary on the “First Black President,” (following her reference to her outré comments from the White House correspondents’ dinner), Sykes does an impression of Obama’s manner of walking and notes how “cool” he is and how wonderful it is to “be happy and relax.” She compares this new post-racist possibility to her previous existence in which she had to be “dignified,” and not dance in public, for as her mother would warn, “White people are lookin’ at you.” She can buy whole watermelons instead of sneaking to the salad bar for melon slices. Maybe she can even go to Popeye’s. Through this entire commentary, Sykes enacts what she narrates, capturing contrasting attitudes of humility and pride in her body language, styles of walking, and the subtle deployment of her shoulders and face. Already a complex layering, Sykes’ routine’s physical caricatures and impersonations redound as well to the audience; the movements’

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subtle but uncanny comparisons remind everyone of the cultural effects of racist attitudes, not because Sykes told them, but because she embodies them from the point of view of someone who has enjoyed both positions.12 Sykes weaves physical caricature with a series of observations about change in the contemporary political scene: pirates, health care, a failing education system, immigration, the first Latina Supreme Court justice. She notes, for example, that the one group that can move freely in America is a “Mexican with a leaf blower,” enacting a scenario where such an individual is able to get into the White House and kidnap the president. This comprises a “public” first half of the routine, while the second half shifts to changes in her personal life. This includes her coming out in a bit in which she posits a “coming out” as black to her parents. Enacting the conversation (and taking all of the parts) with her parents, Sykes plays out her parents’ objections— Sykes (as mother): “You’ve been hanging around black people.” Sykes (as herself): “I was born black.” The implicit comparison between being black and being gay makes the differences attached to each prejudice starkly evident. Throughout the routine’s second half, Sykes shifts quickly from comment to caricature to enactment, playing out, for example, her experiences being on a gay male cruise. Swinging her mic between her legs from her waist, Sykes imitates the pleasures of a breakfast buffet with a gay man. She enacts another comparison, this time between gay and straight, when she tells the audience that her wife is “French,” instead of “white,” imagining black women saying, “Look at them white girls, just taking all of our good black dykes.” Again, transferring terms from one context to another makes a stark comparison. Sykes embarks on an extended commentary about the physical changes of aging. Performing a physical version of what happened when she got a charley horse doing Kegel exercises, she comments that “You can’t put Icy Hot on that.” She then begins an extended routine about an abdominal fat roll she carries around named “Esther—Esther Rolle.” Giving Esther a voice, Sykes enacts Esther’s dietary choices. “Esther loves bread and alcohol.” Esther loves cheesecake even though Sykes is lactose intolerant. Esther makes it so that Sykes has to wear Spanks. Sykes recounts the time she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Esther started climbing out of the Spanks and talking to Jay Leno. Sykes ends the bit by telling Esther, “White people are looking at you!” She continues the routine with an extended commentary on male impotence drugs. “Maybe your dick has run its course,” she suggests to the impotent. “Maybe that’s God’s way of saying you are all fucked out.” Dramatizing the

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plight of the little old lady who is “just waiting for the dick to die,” Sykes enacts a caricature of the woman whose husband’s dick has finally given out, performing “the dick don’t work no more” dance, “Ding, dong the dick is dead,” and “Hi ho, hi ho, the dick don’t work no mo.” But then, the little blue pill comes along, and she enacts the image of little old ladies walking around bent in old housecoats, commenting, “That’s a lady been tricked by science.” Low phallic humor. The final bit of the routine is an ouroboric joke about the effects of aging. Calling it a “true story,” Sykes recounts the time she left a shopping mall while talking to a friend on her cell phone. She tells the friend she cannot find her cell phone and begins to check all of her pockets. Telling her friend she thinks she left it in the store, the friend says, “Call me back when you find it.” Sykes goes around and through the issues about which she conducts a running comic commentary. These issues accrue; she returns with the linking payoff of “white people are looking at you,” and she layers her persona and its commentary with a series of caricatured performances which render in hyperbolic terms the dilemmas and insights produced by the implicit comparison of incommensurate systems—race/sexuality, male penile desire/female desire for a break, youth/ aging, and overall a sense that these incommensurabilities are always played out in the public eye. By making them public again in a series of repetitions, Sykes makes evident the public eye’s—“white peoples”—stake in a certain status quo as well as the doubled sensibility of those whose behaviors are always under scrutiny.

“Faggot, Cunt, N—, Deer” In his 2008 stand-up routine, Chewed Up, Louis C. K. makes Wanda Sykes’s performance look tame by comparison.13 Similarly combining personal stories and enacting caricatures of himself and others, Louis C.K. simultaneously performs a commentary on cultural norms and a critique of generally held attitudes often glossed by euphemism. Persistently exceeding (and thus revealing) cultural norms in his deployment of hyperbolically abusive language, Louis C.K. enacts caricatures of himself using the excessively offensive terminology he tells us he is using. The effect of this combination of Louis C.K.’s more or less normal—even mundane—guy persona with the antics of a much more unfiltered individual is to comment repeatedly on the anger that exists within “normal” behaviors and the contrary attitudes that hover behind more socially acceptable behavior.

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His opening bit provides the dynamic for the entire routine. Commencing with “Faggot, how are you doing?” Louis C.K. takes apart the meaning of the term “faggot.” Claiming that “faggot” doesn’t refer to gay men, but to a category he calls “faggot,” (“Quit being a faggot and suck that dick”), Louis C.K. disintricates the derogatory implications of the term “faggot” as someone who exhibits wussy traits from someone who has sex with other men. His connotative labors, especially in their necessary, energetic repetition of the term, not only estrange the word “faggot” from any sort of derogatory discourse, but also enact the ways the term refers derogatorily to persons whose behavior is essentially unmasculine. At the same time, the energy and repetition involved in this distinction between gay men and unmasculine men makes evident the kinds of stupidity involved in over-valuing the masculine itself. He continues this language lesson with the word “cunt”—a term he finds “aesthetically pleasing. I would never call a woman a cunt except my mother because she likes it for some reason.” Comparing the connotations of “cunt” to those of “vagina,” Louis suggests that while actual vaginas (a misnomer in his case for labia) are delicate and pretty and require butterflies, while a “vagina” suggests a large monster about to attack a town. Vagina dentata anyone? The language lesson continues with what would seem to be an opposing observation—that he finds the word “the N-word” offensive, because the “N-word” puts the word beginning with “N” in the listener’s head. As he suggests, “Don’t hide behind the first letter like a faggot, Say nigger, you cunt.” These derogatory terms, he suggests, exist in one’s head. Louis C. K.’s extended discussion of the differences between the words’ denotations and connotations sets up a dynamic in which what one says is not what one means and where what one does not say is what one means. This reversal becomes the method of the rest of the routine in which Louis actually says and caricatures himself saying what is in his head—that is, what he means instead of what he says. This sets up a continual paradox in so far as he is saying what he means but doesn’t say. But somehow as he says it, it becomes what he doesn’t mean. This produces a species of inside-out or möbius performance in which what he says and enacts and the more polite ways he isn’t saying what he is saying refer to one another, and are somehow both being said and not said simultaneously. Making a transition from vocabulary to his own physicality, he begins the next section with an anecdote about how he “thought” the word “nigger” in his head as applying to a particularly careful barista (“That nigger made the shit out of

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my coffee”). He continues with a bit about his weight—“Meals are not over when I’m full, meals are over when I hate myself.” Saying he is always uncomfortable, he points to his crotch and comments, “This is a bummer.” Weighing next the relative merits of briefs, boxers, and boxer briefs, he enacts a detailed, intimate portrait of the experiences of his genitals in clothing, including live-action imitations. And this all comes together as he describes his bunched genitals as the “Cinnabons” which he describes as one of his dietary compulsions—“A sticky hot bun with gizzy hot syrup—Hot cum. Fat Faggot treat”—and caricatures himself demanding a Cinnabon as he arrives at the airport, “Big fat faggot that I am.” His enactment of what no one says physically continues in his discussion of what it is like to be forty, when the medical profession no longer thinks it is worthwhile to fix you. Being forty is being in between meaning and meaninglessness, though he comments on the value of being a “white man,” especially in the present. Or around a time machine. But, as he comments, “I don’t want to go into the future,” where everyone else will be getting back at me. He continues with his status as a married white man who has to go to Walgreen’s to get toilet paper because he threw all of the toilet paper out so he could get out of the house to go to Walgreen’s. On the road, he encounters a deer. “I hate deer,” he exclaims, “Rats with hooves. Tics. Shit. Assholes.” Comparing his hatred with the normative love of vulnerable animals, Louis claims that he throws rocks at them and wishes they would die of AIDS. He describes this deer as actually running at his car, smashing into his mirror, breaking his neck and limping off into the woods to die. “Faggot cunt nigger deer!” His iconoclastic enactments continue as he describes his children (his twoyear-old daughter has “the density of a dying sun. A fat raccoon holding a bowling ball,”) and he comments extensively on the chaotic character of the shit in her diapers. Comparing next the characters of little boys and little girls, he comments, “Boys fuck things up; girls are fucked up.” More observations no one will voice. Suggesting next that he has been married nine years and so is “almost done,” he recalls a time in his life when he used to get angry that his wife “hasn’t fucked me in months.” Now he asks, looking at himself, “How did she fuck me for years?” This leads to his extended description of being a nine-year-old boy with a hard on, rubbing his dick everywhere—cars, refrigerators—and finally ends with a comparison between girls (they have “titties with the little perky nipples”) and women. Women have “breasts.” “With long chewed up nipples. And you’re not a man until you suck one of those fucking things, by the way.”

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Louis C.K.’s running commentary, his layering of narrative and enactment, the paradoxical structure that plays through the said and the unsayable by saying the unsayable and by only implying the said is both microscopically confessional— or at least the performance of such a confession—and cleverly möbius in its constant turning of the turnings of language, cultural attitudes and the reversals produced by comparisons. Debasing, chewing up, apparently, himself (or his persona), Louis C.K. appears to engage in a brutally honest commentary that exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of, well, everything.

“Procrastination” in the Here and Now Ellen DeGeneres frames her 2003 hour-long stand-up routine, Here and Now, with an observation about procrastination: “I have a problem with procrastination.” The routine itself continues with a self-conscious series of procrastinations, which involve observations of cultural paradoxes and inapt references linked metonymically as simultaneously performing procrastination and constituting the routine about which DeGeneres says she is procrastinating.14 Another ouroboros, DeGeneres’s routine shifts through series’ of associations—from organizing her CDs according to the categories of the groups’ names (e.g., Bread, Cranberries, Meatloaf) to the haunting character of commercial catch-phrases and jingles to the ADD of contemporary culture (cf. Black) to the paradoxical character of television news (“A disturbing new study finds that studies are disturbing”) to the ways the Clorox jingle emerges when she has emptied her mind through Yoga to problems with wireless technology, buttons that perform most tasks, laziness, rude people in movies, moving sidewalks in airports, elevators, pickle jars, toilet paper, CD packaging, and automatic flush toilets. She begins the conclusion of her routine with the observation, “We put thought into what other people are thinking about us when everyone else is just thinking about what we’re thinking about them,” a statement that enacts DeGeneres’s selfconscious ouroboric logic that folds and unfolds paradoxes. DeGeneres’s routine, like Black’s, compares past and present, like Louis C.K.’s exposes how what we say is generally not what we mean; and like Richard Pryor’s, Wanda Sykes’s, and Louis C.K.’s, DeGeneres’s act caricatures her internal monologues and hypothetical situations in which people say what they are really thinking. But instead of building a routine by layering and linking, DeGeneres begins with a doubled frame—the frame cited above about the “gay” character

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of the audience (and what that might mean to those who are there) and her selfreflective framing bit about the paradoxical dynamics of putting things off—“I’ll never get around to writing about procrastination.” These framing bits introduce and enclose a series of reflective unwindings, stripping back and moving via association among what people say in everyday mundanities—the social awkwardness of two strangers on an elevator, for example, who do not know what to say. DeGeneres claims that she likes to say something—“First day of parole,” perhaps, or “Wanna smell something weird?” Or the move from breath mints to breath strips which simply melt on the tongue: “Can we not suck any more?” She ends the enframed material by returning to the topic of music (after several impressions of what someone does to cover when she has just walked into a plate glass window). Music transports, she says as she proceeds to declaim all of the lyrics from Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shoop,” while confessing that the lyrics tell “her story.” Critiquing finally the multitasking she has been anatomizing throughout her shifting meditations, she suggests that we squeeze everything together so that we can “save time.” But pointing out that even if we could save up a whole chunk of time, she notes, “you know what we’d do with it? Nothing. Nothing at all. Isn’t that the point—to do nothing at all?” But she warns, “All we have is here and now and that’s why procrastination feels so right.” The return to the frame, the frame as the payoff that was already there as the pretext for the routine that led to the payoff. And so on. DeGeneres’s declamation of a series of metonymically shifting song lyrics retrospectively suggests another tactic to her entire routine: that of finding the otherness in behaviors, jingles, trite phrases, and even machines. DeGeneres repolarizes, illuminates words and gestures from a completely different, wholly inapposite angle, while, well, putting the whole thing off.

A Pert Frothy Challenge Flung at Philosophical Speculation: Mostly Sex Stuff “This is such a big night for you!! Um . . . But I’m celebrating. I finally just slept with my high school crush . . . Right? . . . Thank you!!!! . . . Thank you!!! But I swear now he, like, expects me to go to his high school graduation? . . . Like, I know where I am going to be in three years, right? I’m, like, whoa!!! So I’m fucking kids, right? Fucking small kids . . . Like, I don’t fuck kids. That’s a joke . . . Like, I would never . . . I shouldn’t say never”

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So Amy Schumer begins her 2013 Comedy Central stand-up routine, Mostly Sex Stuff. As in the opening, above, Schumer’s dynamic, like that of DeGeneres, is a stripping back by adding additional details that reveal assumptions and expectations. Like Louis C.K. and DeGeneres, Schumer’s delivery is confessional, observational, and conversational, moving along via association. But Schumer’s performance is much more aimed toward the audience, acknowledging audience comments, looking to them for affirmation, reading responses, and thanking them nearly parodically when they agree with her, applaud, and laugh.15 The routine is mostly sex stuff, not the typical Sex in the City sex stuff, but the gritty underside of young adult female sexual dilemmas. Break ups, for example: I went through a break up this year. I walked in on him masturbating . . . yeah, he’s like, “Are you mad?” I’m like, “Uh, no, but you seem to be. Holy shit!” . . . I’m like, “Does it owe you money?”

Or swallowing cum, dating, primping, the work it is to have a vagina, her mother’s ample pubic hair, uncircumcised penises, ass play, bathroom attendants, snobbish East Coast women, and finally anal bleaching. Most of these topical bits play out like the ones above: a proposition, a series of qualifications, a complete shift of perspective. Schumer subtracts as she adds, layers as she takes away. Her persona offers the perspective and mode of speaking of a young 30-yearold single woman, slightly slutty-but-not-really perverse. Like Louis C.K., she ventures into areas few people speak about publicly, a practice she makes even more evident in her bit on rich Connecticut women: In every group of girlfriends, there’s always one that’s the sluttiest . . . you now . . . if you don’t have that friend, you’re that friend, let’s be real. . . . And it wasn’t me in my group of friends. Shocker . . . was my nickname . . . um . . . But no. In my group of friends, the sluttiest of us was this girl, Katie. . . And, uh, we didn’t judge her for that, but she was, she wouldn’t own it. Like, as soon as she would have a boyfriend, she’d start acting like Mother Teresa. You know, she’d like walk different . . . she’d talk differently . . . like I remember one time she walked over with her new boyfriend . . . she was like, “Adam and I are thrilled you could join us for brunch.” (pause) I was like, “I’ve helped you get cum out of your hair.” . . . remember . . . we tried using peanut butter cause we’re stupid? You guys, you were an amazing crowd. Thank you so much!!

Bit XI

One More Time: The Aristocratic Apparatus

Far more artificial, but also far more refined, is the transposition upwards from below when applied to the moral value of things, not to their physical dimensions. To express in reputable language some disreputable idea, to take some scandalous situation, some low-class calling or disgraceful behaviour, and describe them in terms of the utmost “respectability,” is generally comic. Henri Bergson, Laughter 142 A man walks into a talent agency, his entire family—wife, two children, aging mother, and dog—trailing behind. He tells the agent: “Boy, have I got the act for you!” The agent eyes the group warily, but says, “Okay, what do you got?” The man pops out a top hat, opens his coat revealing a striped patriotic vest. He says: “Well, first I fuck my wife from behind, then she sucks me off. Then I finger my daughter, while my son licks my wife. Then my mother sucks off the dog. And then we all shit on the floor and the dog eats it. Then the dog pees on my leg and my wife licks it up while my children hump each other and my mother watches, fingering herself.” “Gee,” the Talent Agent says, “What do you call this act?” “The Aristocrats.”

What’s comic about this? The point is not, as Bergson suggests, a comic “transposition upwards,” but instead that the bit, already transposed, is not a joke at all, but the performance of a joke that isn’t there. It is the epitome of a comic apparatus as performance—and as the performance of another scene, which refers in its performance to another scene, ad mise en abymic infinitum. . . . As the performance of a performance of a joke manqué, “The Aristocrats” is comedy par excellence in so far as it draws attention to and plays with the elements of performance that make comedy comedy. The Aristocrats (2005), directed by Paul Provenza, is a cagily edited film collection of performances and interview/analyses of the joke, “The Aristocrats.”

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Collected as a set of versions and comments from “100 comedians” about “one very dirty joke,” the film’s organization and editing repeats tactics typical of the performance of all jokes: gathering, timing, caricature, interruptions, and distractions—all building to what we expect will be the cut that ultimately and retrospectively produces what we have already anticipated will be the comic event. As Paul Reiser comments in the film, “So absurdly front-loaded, it’s almost momentum, momentum, momentum, momentum and the punch line by the way . . . it’s nothing.” Delivery, too, is a crucial element of the event. George Carlin matter-of-factly describes the method: “I love the idea of floating right past that as if this is the most normal and the thing you are most used to doing.” The joke is all in the telling. Although the film’s comics seem to agree that Gilbert Gottfried tells the joke best, the film’s ample examples provide the opportunity to shop around. The variety of versions also offers the context for one of the favorite activities of comic fans—deciding whom they like best. People are passionate about their comic tastes and will argue vehemently about which comic is better. There is no way, hence, that a critic can do more than enter this fray simply by making the choice to include one comic’s version and not another’s. Watch the DVD if you would like to make your own choice. Two versions in the film offer instructive examples, however, of how the joke typifies the joke and comedy in general in so far as it is a selfconsciousness of the joke as a joke in the context of telling jokes. The joke gathers increasingly absurd elements and recounts them in a mode incommensurate with the content. The performance of the joke is everything and includes caricature, tone of voice, gestures, timing, and interruptions. It enacts the serial mise en abyme effect of the elaborate description of another scene which is itself a scene about describing yet another performance scene of performance. Its eventual cut produces the event as comic by revealing that there is no event other than the gathering. “The Aristocrats” is the reverse ouroboros of a joke which is a joke about a joke not really working as a joke as the joke of the joke. Sarah Silverman performs what is perhaps the most sophisticated version of “The Aristocrats”: (Silverman is seated on a couch. Throughout the telling she sometimes lounges a bit, laying back and fondling a small stuffed dog. The performance is also punctuated by editing cuts that shift camera distance and angle)

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Silverman: I don’t put the Aristocrats on my resumé anymore, you know. It doesn’t take away from my, like, my pride. I actually was (emphatic gesture) an aristocrat. It’s kind of weird to be part of that . . . legend. It was my Mom, Dad, me, my brother, and my Nana. My father would come out on stage, the music would play, and he would start masturbating. My brother comes out. They do a—like a mutual masturbation, like a dueling banjo. They are holding hands and spin (she gestures and enacts the spinning). I stay in a stationary position, the assholes come by and I lick the assholes and in one motion my mother puts both pinkies up their assholes as they come. It’s pretty . . . it’s pretty spectacular. It’s all about timing. (Pause. Interruptive commentary from another comic cut into the scene.) My brother has Down Syndrome, did I say that? People might think that’s a set back, but really it’s a selling point. It’s not a handicap. I don’t want to say it’s a gift. We think of it as a gift just in terms of ticket sales, but I mean we think of it as showing the other beauties that God creates, like ones with the bigger foreheads and the lower eyelids. Someone off-camera interrupts to ask: “Did they ever ask you to be on The Tonight Show?” Silverman: Not The Tonight Show but Joe Franklin loved The Aristocrats. He was like our rehearsal director when Dad and my brother weren’t there . . . and my mother . . . (Pause) . . . and my Nana, weren’t there. I was on his show. But it wasn’t a taped show . . . Um . . . but . . . we, like, did a show. Off-camera question again: “Like as a partner?” Silverman: Yeah. It was in his office. But he had a, uh (quizzically) bed in it . . . a, like a couch that he called “Uncle Joe’s Bed for Little People.” The couch was like a bed for little people. You know . . . (pause) (looks off) Joe Franklin raped me.

The cut in this bit works as a cut in comparison with both all of the previous performances of the bit and with the history of the bit itself. Not only is Silverman’s version the only one told as a first-person scenario, it is the only one that veers so far away from the titling and inadequate punch line. We all wait for this underwhelming punch line, which draws attention to the event’s cut by forcing a retroactive resignification of all of the preceding momentum as “high” instead of low or as a joke on the high as always already “low,” but mostly as a joke on the joke—on the expectations of an audience (who presumably has not heard the joke even though everyone has heard the joke) who are expecting some unlooked-for connection, some revisioning of every element in an unexpected place. Silverman’s version ends up in an unexpected place, all right, but her punch line is yet another joke on the joke—or perhaps more

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accurately, commentary on a joke such as this which is in the end probably not a joke at all.1 But lest we get too serious, or multilayered, or self-conscious, here is Bob Saget’s utterly depraved version of “The Aristocrats,” which is multilayered and self-conscious—a joke about a joke about a joke: Saget (Sitting at a table backstage before a set): This family—mother, father and four kids—doesn’t matter if they’re boys or girls, they’re gonna be used anyway as just nothing more than a hole—that’s what this joke’s about anyway—it’s about the way your kid—you know, if they have a paper route, if they go to school—and then you fuck ‘em,—No—[the film interrupts Saget with another comic’s commentary on Saget’s telling of the joke (his aim is to get as many disgusting thoughts into sentences as possible)] and the agent goes, “well, what do you people do?” The father’s like, “Watch us,” and he takes his wife’s bra and he rips off her underwear and some of her pubes with it, and it’s horrible and there’s a little bit of blood starts dripping down her leg and he just pulls out the tampon and throws it at the window and it sticks. They go down on each other in all different configurations, there’s a 69, there’s a 29, there’s a kid, the youngest 9, the father bends the kid over the guy’s desk and he’s like taking him from behind, which isn’t right—I just want to say right now, any of you people who are doing this, that are watching this, if you are having sex with your family, I don’t condone it, I think it’s wrong, I’d have to do a lot of PSA’s to support DO NOT FUCK YOUR FAMILY!!2

Bit XII

And . . . The Time——ing Is Right: The Politics of Delay

“Using comedy as a mechanism for political commentary is not a new concept by any means. In fact, its history can be traced back to 427 BCE, when an Athenian playwright and comedian named Aristophanes planted the first, fledgling seeds of political satire.” Nina Wilder, “Why the Intersection of Comedy and Politics Matters.” 1 When two hundred people walked out of Amy Schumer’s stand-up comedy show in Tampa, Florida, one departing audience member explained, “The show became political.”2 But what happens when politics and politicians themselves become comic? They may not mean to. They may not intend the self-satirical gestures that make all jokes about them already redundant. They may never have thought that perhaps if they offer self-parody or self-satire or both, such a gesture will make additional parody and satire difficult. By getting there first, they may inadvertently inoculate themselves against comic modes of critique, which have always been both pointed and indirect, posing the target of jokes as an easily recognizable entity (hence parody, caricature) and deploying the apparatus of the comic event to (1) make any critique “indirect” in repressive circumstances (which didn’t work for Amy Schumer); and/or (2) hyperbolize obvious inanities to make them visible as such. In fact, it may be a sign of these times that the many digitally enabled phenomena that offer self-enwrapped and instantaneous modes of pronouncement (selfies, Tweets) offer every public figure the means to contain and control the entire swirl of content, comment, and controversy produced by the declarations themselves. Critiquing such self-contained gestures becomes a matter either of making fun of the mode of delivery, or breaking down its appearance of unassailable immediacy via repetitions that lace the instantaneous event with comic delays and timings. Timing is all—a timing the comic event can arrange as an intrinsic part of its gatherings and the strategic

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control of the moment of the cut. If the “serious” events of culture have taken on the insular performativity of instantaneity, comedy’s deployment of strategic repetition and delay unpacks and anatomizes these enwrapped vectors of selfsame. The only way to prick apart the self-engorged layers of instantaneity is to slow them down, make them visible, then repeat them via caricature, parody, impersonation: transform them by framing them, by repeating them back to themselves as already a comic event.

Premature Ejaculations; or What’s the Point of Foreplay? The connection between comic performance and politics is a very old one. Even rehearsing the wealth of commentary on satire from the Greeks to the present would take more than an ample tome.3 What is new and different about contemporary comedy’s pokes at politics is timing: the way comic events can slow down, pick apart, and anatomize a politics that has become self-same— where political figures and statements wrap around themselves in instantaneous performative clots. This immediacy phenomenon is afforded by the internet and its various gimmicky appurtenances such as Tweets. Because of the delusive immediacy of internet messaging, any trajectory of thought, consideration, and reconsideration that may contribute to the measured character of political speech has disappeared in favor of the appearance of sincere knee-jerkitude, especially when the apparently careless style and discourse of the message itself signals what appears to be a lack of delay between thought and published message. Not to belabor the issue, but this would be the delay during which one thinks better of one’s first impulse, the time to reflect that anticipates ensuing causes and effects, the pause that transforms ego and self-serving monstrosity into civilized leadership—that moment when one discerns whether one has the proper addressee and is not, for example, sending an insulting comment to a world leader. The Tweet’s melding of signifier and signified into the now—the NOW—as one and the same undergirds contemporary notions of seriousness as comprised of authentic reaction untrammeled by reflection and barely inflected by language’s annoying tendency never to say what we mean. Adulation of this instantaneity suggests that in contemporary America, real men don’t think and this real masculinity is the guarantor of a wagging, indiscriminate potency. One rarely witnesses this species of overly efficacious Tweet from girls. They just don’t have the hydraulics.

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Evidence of spontaneous gutsy uncensored sincerity, the Tweet’s delusion of instantaneity makes visible cultural impressions of the relations between delay and deed—that is the amount of time that lapses between thought and statement, statement and statement, one part of a series and another—the amount of time that permits other people to think, consider, reflect. Foreplay. Internet applications themselves collude in producing this illusion of masterful immediacy. Spraying mental graffiti on millions of walls simultaneously, the internet’s apparent conglutination of thought, statement, and deed occults even the imaginary of any compositional process, making all of its effluvia performative and unquestioningly authentic. Immediacy’s illusion of efficacy then rebounds to the sender as unhesitating, potent, and authoritative—as he who waits no longer—enacting what appears to be action as opposed to thought in a culture where “action” becomes the compensatory guarantee of potent masculinity (you know the one that talks loudly, grabs pussy, carries a big gun, and drives a double-wheeled pickup truck), as the necessary condition for leadership—as in fact, already comprising leadership as such. At the same time, this impulsion’s shadowing twin—what we might call “premature ejaculation”—cancels out the aura of spontaneous manly action as exactly what it is: compensatory and inadequate, impulse without control, generated by narcissistic individuals who have deluded themselves into thinking that whatever occurs to them in the moment is right for history, since, well, they are history. Without foreplay, all this excitement is simply responding to itself, circling back to the sender as proof of its own emission. Narcissism loves its own company. The apparently potent immediacy of tweeting contrasts, however, with the exponentially powerful effects of—delay. If immediacy affords no pensive foreplay at all, any reaction to these bursts is always too little too late. Note the impression of the contemporary press running to catch the bus, complaining, hold on! Comedy’s measured delivery—wait for it—shows what we might think, as we think during this lull, of the Tweets’ immature failure of control, their emergence like a teenaged boy’s spastic frissons. Such excrescences generally signal what we call “a loose cannon,” a pustulating pinhead, or perhaps merely a dribbling head that long ago lost whatever control it might have had. While a real man of action today spews before he thinks and spewing itself has become the equivalent of omnipotent thought, this new deal also represents a serious shift from the old days (like last year) when the truly wise being thought before he spewed and delivered his measured thoughtfulness via delays that permitted others to consider. What after all is a rapid delivery other than an attempt to fend

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off criticism, to substitute a fait accompli for judicious consideration, or some flabby conclusion for the perquisites of carefully gathered rationality? Where are the foreplays of yesteryear that enacted the delays that turned blustering spontaneity into comedy (even though from a certain perspective the character who spews is already a comic bobo precisely because he cannot control his timing). And why might comedy be preferable to spewing these days? Because these days, comedy is the only antidote to spates of fashionable unreason against which no one—no one at all—has an effective rejoinder, because to rejoin unreason is to be frustratingly, but equally, unreasonable. And you are always too late anyway. Comedy, which is by definition unreasonable reason, offers a respite in these hosings, collecting, playing, distancing, exposing the tropes and traits of a failing patriarchy the wreck of instantaneity endeavors to disguise. If all are left gasping in the wake of presidential spume, politicians are left blinking in the middle of comedy’s busy intersections—intersections that enact the rhetorical value of timing as it both constitutes comedy and pushes back against the entire self-serving, cultural entrapping apparatus of delusive immediacy.

Real Men or Pause? Let’s stop and consider for a moment how timing and especially strategic delay—foreplay—might be the opposite of the spewage of propinquity and how the comic event’s gatherings and timed cuts have the effect of exploding and opening out the enfolded illogics of contemporary political speech. If the effect of internet immediacy is to collapse thought into action into persona, timing—delay—enacted by other modes of distribution produces both a lull and a metaphorical space of play for unravelling this overtyped conjunction. In contrast to vain interjaculations of instant tweetmission, the comic event offers an occasion to dally and review the arrangements by which delusions of power arise and are sustained in the first place. Because the comic event depends upon timing and because timing depends upon strategic delay, the comic event is one of the only modes of political critique that remains in this environment in which impulsive comments thumbed on a toy become edicts. But there is a history to this, which is itself dependent upon the ways digital media has developed means to record, distribute, and archive material that would not have been available for review or even view fifteen years ago. In

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fact, this entire study has taken advantage of digital preservations—has, in a way, itself plumbed the gap between events and their perpetual reproduction in the present. Digital media enable access to disparate recorded events that may have occurred in series containing temporal gaps that made the ironies and absurdities of their concatenations difficult to discern. Now that many of these linked events are gathered together on the internet, their accordioned immediacy produces a comic event where there may not have seemed to have been one before. Even the process of gathering this new comic event is all in the timing. Contemporary comedy can gather events via search engine and event self-reference on the internet’s archived collation. Occasions, such as, for example, the May 9, 2009 White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner, where comedian Wanda Sykes insulted Rush Limbaugh, might have faded into a past unseen by most, now live on, replayed—and in fact, evoked by the performer herself in a second comedy appearance in Washington, DC in October of the same year to which we also still also have access. In terms of “real time,” the sixmonth difference between May and October provides a lengthy delay between the first and second events, the insult and its re-evocation. But no one watches these digitally available events with a six-month delay. Instead, let’s reproduce the gathering that is possible now. First, Sykes’s insult at the White House Press Dinner: Rush Limbaugh, one of your big critics, uh, boy, Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails . . . so you’re saying I hope America fails . . . I don’t care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq, he just wants the country to fail. To me, that’s treason. He’s not saying anything different than Osama bin Laden has been saying. You know, you should look into this, sir, because I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the twentieth hijacker, but he was just strung out on oxycontin and he missed his flight. (laughter and boos). Too much?4

Six months later, in her Comedy Central performance, I’ma Be Me, Sykes refers to this moment at the Press Correspondents’ Dinner: Be back in DC . . . You know the last time I was here . . . (laughter) . . . I caused a little trouble . . . The President laughed and he got in trouble. But the problem is they don’t know I was holding back . . . (laughter) . . . Not tonight, baby. Not tonight! . . . Uh-uh. Tonight . . . tonight I’m gonna say some shit . . . I’m going for one of those beer summits, that’s what I’m doing . . . [audience interruption] . . . I’ll tell you it’s so good, just to be in DC and the first black president! Come on . . . (applause) what? (applause) First black president . . . but I got to tell you, it’s

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a little bittersweet. It is. First black president and the country is broke. What the fuck! . . . (laughter) . . . That’s fucked up . . . (laughter) . . . It’s like everybody went, Humph, we broke . . . let’s give that black guy a shot.

As always, the comic event runs both forward and backward. It is both foreplay and playback at the same time. This retrospection already enables some kind of reflection not only on itself, but also on its various referents: other jokes, social events, circumstances, politics, whatever. The circumstantial delay in this example—the time for thinking better of the first gesture six months’ earlier— does not result in an apology, but in fact, in the first event’s amplification, as it becomes the unspoken basis, not for a repetition, but for a discussion of the value of reconsideration itself. And the discussion of the past event involves a number of pauses, glances, and delays. It circles around as Sykes strides back and forth on the stage. Time for the import of past acts to sink in. Time for all to reconsider whether the original and unrepeated insult was justified. Time for some in the audience to be mystified. Time even during the second routine for the comic to bring her own actions into question as actions, as excesses perhaps, that may or may not need to be reined in, and finally as excesses enjoyed by the president, whose historic import the second comic routine is considering. And this second routine is indeed a consideration, an accruing and judging of multiple takes, not a conclusion nor the tweet’s instantaneous disposition. The distance between a political statement—even one such as that Sykes made at the press dinner—and its reconsideration as a part of a comic event renders the overtly political comic by taking it out of its original context, gathering it with different circumstances, frames, and timings, and then representing it as itself in all of its rebundled absurdity—and not simply the absurdity of Sykes’s comments, but that of Limbaugh’s statements as well. The ridiculous character of the “political” becomes the “cut” of the event as its intrinsic illogic becomes visible as such. When political discourse becomes concentrated in singular nondialogic commands such as Tweets, only comedy can unfurl and reposition these bursts from their existence as self-contained declarations to a mode of discourse that permits discussion and exchange. One might argue that distinctions in genre and media account for this difference, that a Tweet is different than a comedy routine. But that is exactly my point: the choice of mode already says something about intention. Not that any president should necessarily engage in stand-up (though that might happen inadvertently), but that in choosing a mode that performs the way a

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Tweet does, the user has already determined to be dispositive. How, in this age of enslaving digitography (a medium whose illusions of control and distribution bely precisely the lack of both), can any public figure avoid the appearance of, well, shooting off at the . . .? Simple. Don’t tweet. There are other means available for distributing opinion. But there is also another side to this: the digital capability of infinite repetition, not of an event in context, but of an event ripped from context as already significantly self-same. Comedy routines, by definition, require pauses, both because they are engaged in a cybernetic relation with live audiences and because comedy itself requires . . . wait for it . . . time for it to sink in . . . foreplay . . . delay. In internet iterations of comic performances, the pauses of comic timing become one of the only means of deliberate delay—or delays for deliberation— available in media. Because these delays afford time for reflection, they perhaps also double as considerations of politicians’ acts and manners themselves—in fact, one of the only public sites where that is still possible, given the fact that simply declaring misinformation makes that misinformation fact even—and especially—because it isn’t, which gets us into the internet’s subtending dynamic of perpetual paranoia. Any plaintive challenges to misinformation come up in the rear, always breathlessly shouting, “Wait a minute . . .?” with one cartoonic finger raised. This produces the illusion of protesting too much which in turn suggests that those trying to hold the expostulating tweeter accountable are the ones who are finicky, incorrect, not real men, etc. Internet availability of multiple meditations on something like a Tweet declaration enables this comic gathering in a way not possible before the internet easily afforded access to archived material. Even if the internet often spreads misinformation, user ability to cull selective events to enjoy in a viewercontrived sequence produces comic events that gather, time, and cut series of actions into a retrospective comic commentary on political declarations. For example, Donald Trump, in his capacity as president of the United States, tends to tweet unilateral policy decisions, a practice that makes such declarations seem like dictates. Various comic television shows turn this tweeting into fodder for parodic performance. If, as has been the case throughout the candidacy and election of Trump, such comedy shows have parodied the electee, viewers can collect those performances archived on the internet, combining them perhaps with their real-life referents, and producing thereby an extended gathering and cut that continually produces an extended—and extending—comic event through time and with the kinds of delays that enable consideration. Even if

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we think that comedy is a way finally of dispensing and evaporating any real critique, the possibility of second thoughts and the potential consequences of rethinking actions is enabled by the delays event availability offers. (Of course, at the same time, one could just as easily collect material that supports the Tweets. This, too, would involve delays and time for reconsideration. But this collation would not occur in a comic form. Instead, it provides more fodder for the comic engine, whose gatherings may someday hit home in an epic cut.) Saturday Night Live has taken on the role of political parodist throughout the 2016 presidential election and after. In the form of parodic caricatures, SNL’s skits zero in on the mannerisms and infelicities of Donald Trump’s behaviors, among these, his tweeting. In a routine from December 2016, “Classroom Cold Open,” SNL caricatured Trump and Kellyanne Conway discussing Trump’s tweeting: Trump (Alec Baldwin): Kellyanne, I just retweeted the best Tweet. I mean, wow, what a great, smart Tweet. Aid 1: Mr. Trump, we’re in a security briefing. Trump: I know, but this could not wait. It was from a young man named Seth. He’s sixteen. He’s in high school and I really did retweet him. Seriously. This is real. Kellyanne (Kate McKinnon): He really did do this. Aid 1 (Kenan Thompson): Well, sir, you are the President-elect, so I guess you can do whatever you want, but we’d really like to fill you in on Syria. Trump: God, Seth seems so cool. (laughter) His Twitter bio says he wants to make America great again. Aid 2 (Alex Moffat): That is cool, sir. Trump: It also says he loves the Anaheim Ducks. Kellyanne: Okay, see, there is the reason, actually, that Donald tweets so much . . . he does it to distract the media from his business conflicts and all the very scary people in his cabinet.5

We know here that Alec Baldwin is not Donald Trump and that is the point: in comedy and caricature, one can perform an interpretation of someone else without ever being mistaken for that someone else. There are temporal, spatial, and agential differences that provide the gaps enabling thought and analysis. These comic routines are also the effects of interpretation, thought, and analysis, so they continue a process that performs a retrospective interpretation of current events. As in all comic events, this parody is not self-contained, but refers perpetually to other scenes—unlike the internet, which provides the possibility for gathering

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events, but which also which strives to produce a self-contained universe supplanting the actual universe. Recall that the internet is a set of machines running algorithms which are never “objective” but already calculated to produce certain kinds of results and not others, including the sense of a timeless, contextless immediacy in the ramshackle delusion of a world that perpetually remakes its own contextless context. The repeatability of Tweets requires no temporality nor sense of delay, pause, or foreplay; each Tweet, even if it is a retweet, Tweets as if anew. There is no context because Tweets themselves are self-contained, contextless, and actually timeless, even if they appear to respond to or comment on some other event. Tweets don’t actually need the event to which they seem to refer; they are pure display. They are performances of performance. Hence, one can retweet infinitely. It is like jacking off. The difference between retweeting and a comedy bit about retweeting is that the comedy bit—an event that always evokes context—is both unrepeatable and, given the capacities of the internet, perpetually repeatable, but each time as a different phenomenon. In framing and distancing the tweet—in its delaying delay—the comic event makes you think.

Spiceying Things Up Melissa McCarthy’s elaborate SNL caricature bit on Press Secretary Sean Spicer anatomizes the redundant self-sameness of the Tweet one step further, enacting the difference between immediacy and delay as, well, a matter of, well, words. A parody of a press conference led by White House press secretary Sean “Spicey” (played by Melissa McCarthy) enacts the bizarre logic of Tweetly repetitions: Spicey: Glen Thrush, New York Times (covers mouth) Booo . . . Go ahead . . . Glen (Bobby Moynihan) Yeah, I wanted to ask about the travel ban on Muslims. Spicey: Yea, it’s not a ban. Glen: I’m sorry? Spicey: It’s not a ban. The travel ban is not a ban which makes it not a ban. Glen: But, you just called it a ban. Spicey: Because I’m using your words. You said “ban.” You said “ban,” now I’m saying it back to you. Glen: The President tweeted and I quote: “If the ban were announced with a oneweek notice . . .

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Spicey: (interrupting): Yeah, exactly. You just said that. He’s quoting you. It’s your words. He’s using your words, when you use the words and he uses them back, it’s circular using of the word and that’s from you. Glen: (staring at Spicer incredulously): What? Spicer: Seriously, Glen. Are you going to start with this right out of the gate, Glen? I mean what do you want me take my nuts out so you can get a better kick at ‘em? Glen: You have to have known that I would ask that question. Spicey: Okay, uh, sit down, Glen. Who here—just by show of hands (Spicey raises hand)—who here hates Glen? Right? Everybody. One, two, three, infinity (No one raises a hand). Now, okay, let the record show that everyone raised their hands because everybody hates Glen. So print that—that’s your story.6

Avoiding the question by shifting the issue to one of whose words are whose in an ouroboric reversal (if such a thing is possible)—or maybe even a turning inside-out—McCarthy’s bit enacts the logic of a presidential executive order as a self-contained circle. Like a Tweet, Trump’s version of the Executive Order simply commands as Executive Orders do, requiring no participation by elected governing bodies. The order is presumptively performative in the old Austinian sense of the word. The language of the Order, like the language of a Tweet, says what it says and in so saying accomplishes what it says, the Tweet enacting itself instantaneously and the Order enacting a change in policy. Spicey’s exchange with the New York Times reporter—Spicey’s rebounding of the ban’s banning language to the journalist—anatomizes the immediacy of the Tweet by undoing the collapse of message and messenger, producing a temporal delay between question and response, and displacing one source to another. The word “ban” is still moored to the performance of enunciation in a neat shift of responsibility, once the word itself became—after a delay for judicial retrospection—a liability. What Spicey enacts via the scattering performance, sleight-of-mouth confusions of repetition (kind of like a retweet), is the overt and clever shift of discourse from one mode—the executive order—to another equally performative moment, when not only can spin doctor Sean spin the spun (since the frame is already infinitely itself), but in the process unload the performance of spun banning onto the enemy news media who then witness (and we with them) both the shifting of blame and the production of false news. So where is the payoff in the persistent concatenation of gatherings? No matter how anyone gathers and arranges these bits, no matter how the events refer to and string one another along, the cut will always come as an expected surprise.

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So . . . A guy walks into a bar (maybe in the same small town as the “meanest man”). He notices customers standing in lines that belly up to the bar in various places. The bar kind of looks like a bus station. The newcomer sits on a bar stool and asks the bartender what the lines are for. The barkeep tells him the lines are for various groups and specialty drinks. The new customer asks which lines are for which. The barkeep points to one line and says, “That one’s for bizarre threesomes.” And indeed there are priests, rabbis, ministers, sailors, giraffes, skunks, and yo’ Mama all lined up. Pointing to another line, the barkeep nods, “That one’s for lawyers,” and the newcomer could see three-piece suits, briefcases, and a few of the customers cross-examining one another. A third line is indeed for people waiting to catch the bus. The newcomer asks what a fourth line is for. The barkeep says it is for people who want the bar’s special cocktail. “What’s that?” the newcomer asks. “A Drunken Mary.” “What makes her ‘drunken’, the newcomer asks. “The glasses are almost empty,” the barkeep replies. “So where do I go if I want a Planter’s Punch?” The barkeep tells him that if he wants a punch, he’ll have to stand in line. The newcomer looks around, but there is no punch line.

Notes Prolegomenon 1 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2008). Auslander thoroughly explores the perquisites of “liveness” and works through many of the issues of filming, recording, and otherwise preserving and replaying live events. 2 For work on comedy in prose fiction, see Lisa Colletta, Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel (New York: Palgrave, 2003); James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Regina Barreca, Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994); and Richard Simon, The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud (Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1985). 3 One might expect that “comedy” would be a more thoroughly explored critical category, but critics often seem daunted by comedy. Philosophers in general try to determine a single common denominator that might describe, characterize, and account for comic phenomena, while literary critics tend to try to produce and populate classifications and categories. Recent criticism has taken a more judgmental approach, criticizing some comedies for insulting various groups, while more linguistic and sociological critics have adopted a more “micro-” approach in seeing comedy as an effect of linguistic misapprehension or misuse, social miscontextualizations, or other structurally identifiable phenomena. 4 Another more contemporary critical tendency that attempts to pin the comic down is a focus on comic method—on the specific methods of contemporary stand-up comedians. Books of interviews with contemporary comedians focus on the nuts and bolts of comic preparation and performance. See Larry Wilde, Great Comedians Talk About Comedy (Mechanicsburg, PA: Executive Books, 2000); Franklin Ajaye, Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy (Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press, 2002); Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). This last study also participates in another critical tendency: producing histories of comedy. Both Zoglin and William Knoedelseder, I'm Dying up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy's Golden Era (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), focus on comedians and their lives and practices in the 1970s. Some critics narrow the

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range of their examinations to a genre such as film comedies. See for example, Andrew Horton's Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), which, like Andrew Stott's more universal examination, Comedy: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2005), begins by noting the ways criticism has defined, restricted, and delimited comedy to formulas. Geoff King’s Film Comedy (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), shares the more broadly thematic conception of Stott’s study, organizing itself around broad practices and categories such as “transgressions and regressions,” and “satire and parody,” Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins coedited a collection of essays, Classical Hollywood Comedy (New York: Routledge, 1995), which focuses more on the history and range of comedy films. Rick DesRochers’s The Comic Offense: From Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) looks at four exemplary comedians and contemporary comedy’s links to vaudeville. Along more theoretical lines, John Limon’s phenomenological study Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), along with other estimable explorations of laughter, such as James R. Kincaid’s Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), join Henri Bergson in focusing on one response to comedy (or the comic). As Beckett’s Nell clearly knows, laughter and comedy, like comedy and the comic, are distinct phenomena that sometimes overlap. In some ways, laughter provokes theory in the same way the broad notion of “comedy” attracts philosophers and critics. Limon’s book mingles personal anecdotes with more theoretical excursions, working always around two poles: the purposes and sources of comedy as laughter and abjection, respectively. Limon pays astute attention to the circumstances of specific historical performances, and links performance to issues of reception, social context, and his own experience. It is a sort of autobiographical excursus on comedy. Kincaid is the coauthor of one of the funniest books I have ever read, Percival Everett and James Kincaid’s A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (New York: Akashic Books, 2004). This is exactly the kind of book that might excite the disdain of those who take comedy quite literally as the occasion for excoriating bouts of finger-wagging. 5 Stott wisely avoids trying to pin comedy (or humor or the comic or laughter or whatever) down, trying instead to maintain a field of multiple phenomena, themes, and practices as his subject. The one formulation to which Stott is willing to ascribe fully is Henri Bergson’s notion that whatever is taken for comedy must “intersect with human consciousness” (8). Thus, comedy cannot be, perhaps, posthuman. Noting comedy’s various “themes”—inversion, the ridicule of inflexibility, “alternative identities, or a relaxation of social codes and a suspension of laws governing the body,” and linguistic nonsense—Stott positions his study among

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these possibilities: “That our understanding of it is not contained by one definition or narrative arc is one of the principles of this book” (2–3). In his introductory overview, Stott also points to the critical tendency to want to categorize comic phenomena. In his first chapter on “Comedy in the Academy,” Stott demonstrates the general critical confusion that attends attempts to treat comic phenomena. Briefly tracing the history of comic criticism and more current approaches (carnival, postmodern considerations of comedy's possible political effects), Stott’s first chapter effectively illustrates many of the problems of comedy's multiplicity, especially in the broad swath the generic category cuts. One tendency among critics Stott identifies is the continued impulse to categorize the broadly comic into what might appear to be more manageable phenomena. Premising these categorizations on everything from tone to purpose, context, political effect, and structure, such categories as “parody,” “satire,” “humor,” “satirical parody,” “travesty,” “burlesque,” “irony,” “the joke,” “the Pun,” etc., seem to manage comedy’s apparent mess simply by dividing it up. 6 In keeping with the scholarly gloss of this work, I am offering a footnote to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), which addresses the genre of comedy as one of four “mythoi” associated with seasons. As a genre, comedy is a broad mood, associated in one parameter with the narrative disposition of events (i.e., marriage) and in another, with the ethos consonant with ritual renewal. I could go so far as to say that in comedy tone and mood link to narrative, exposing narrative’s dynamic (as opposed to strictly structural qualities), and demonstrating how no matter how hard we try, parsing elements—even defining something as an element—always fails to capture whatever we are trying to analyze. Unless maybe that analysis is an analysis of analysis. 7 The two primary “philosophers” work to which I refer in this book are Aristotle’s fairly brief comments about comedy in the Poetics, translated by Ingram Bywater. (New York: Modern Library, 1954), and Henri Bergson’s essay, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956): 59–190. Despite the fact that he commences by evoking Rabelais (always a good sign), critic George Meredith’s “An Essay on Comedy,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956): 1–57, focuses specifically on stage comedy and thus offers little beyond a study of generic tropes. In addition to Aristotle’s and Bergson’s work, I engage Sigmund Freud’s tome, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960), which is as much (if not more) philosophy as psychology. This scholarly “other scene” (i.e., footnotes and constant references to outside sources) occupies this space as the comforting non-distraction of authority so that the work of the text can continue as if always grounded just as the main body grounds these notes—and just as some “other” scene is always the pretext for a comic

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Notes performance. Scholarly notes are a version of the appurtenances Michel Serres suggests are required for territory marking activities (e.g., urinating on boundaries) and although they (both notes and territory marking) are “low,” phallic, and authoritarian, they little resemble the low phallic character of comic subject matter, especially in so far as they seem to offer a wall or stop to comedy’s tendency to selfproliferate. On the other hand, some comic events are appropriations of property that has already been marked, satire especially. Like comedy, notes self-proliferate as well. I now need to offer a note to Serres’s Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution, trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Philip Auslander, for example, points to the conceptual and critical approaches of Andy Kaufman and Sandra Bernhard as both of these emerge within and deploy mass media itself as a comic vector. See Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). From the Symposium. In The Collected Works of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 520–25. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud comments that although he thinks a third party is unnecessary, “the third person, to whom the comic thing is told, intensifies the comic process but adds nothing to it. In a joke this third person is indispensable for completion of the pleasure-producing process; but on the other hand the second person may be absent, except where a tendentious, aggressive joke is concerned” (224). Most theories of comedy are commingled with theories of laughter in the assumption that the latter is an effect of the former. But almost all are structural in some way; that is, they isolate an element, an inequality, or an incongruity and see that as the core, spark, or motivation for comedy (or laughter or humor). Most summarizers of philosophy’s attempts to unravel comedy from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries—such as sociologist Peter Berger’s Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997), and Simon Critchley’s On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002)—organize their material according to a protocol of lowest common denominators. In “Sexual Outlaws: Queer in a Funny Way,” Women’s Studies 40, no. 6 (2011): 762–77, critic Jennifer Reed beautifully summarizes Critchley’s thesis about humor: His argument is that what we find deeply funny, what he calls “true humor,” are the social forms, structures, and categories which we are able to see as arbitrarily set—including those that are internal to our own subjectivities—and our understanding that we have a blind attachment to and investment in them. Critchley defines what he calls “true humor” in his book, On Humor: “Humor is precisely the exploration of the break between nature and culture, which reveals

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the human to be not so much a category itself as a negotiation between categories” (29). That is, we laugh at the recognition that our very state of being is unstable, and often lies in between the seemingly stable categories. We laugh when we see the seams exposed, and can identify it as a common human experience. (766) Critchley’s analysis, too, is a formulaic, structural reading that understands the comic (or “humour”) as an intellectual process, as the effect of recognition—here instability in conceptual realms. There is not much difference between Critchley’s analysis and Bergson’s, except that Critchley glosses Bergson’s human/machine “break” in terms of the “social.” A quick review of the history of philosophy (if there could ever be such a thing) reveals a similar pattern that comes not necessarily from the ways some philosophers analyze the comic (as this prolegomenon suggests, Bergson’s work contains comic enactments in its side comments), but from the ways they reduce comedy to some key attribute. So Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics, 1982), locate this key as psychological in individuals’ investments in superiority. Herbert Spencer’s “The Physiology of Laughter,” Macmillan's Magazine 1 (1860): 395–402, and Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious develop another psychological theory, the “Relief Theory,” in which laughter (not comedy) is a way to discharge tension. Francis Hutcheson in Reflections upon Laughter, and Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees (New York: Gale ECCO, 2010), Immanuel Kant in Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith, Revised ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 2009), Arthur Schopenhauer in The World As Will and Idea, trans. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 9th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), and Bergson see the gist of comedy as an effect of incongruity (variously defined as absurd, intellectual, sensual, and located in reason and/or physiology), while John Morreal in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), and Robert Latta in The Basic Humor Process: A Cognitive-Shift Theory and the Case Against Incongruity (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011) locate incongruity in simultaneous juxtapositions. In “Laughter and Literature: A Play Theory of Humor,” Philosophy and Literature 28, no. 1 (April 2004): 1–22, Brian Boyd envisions incongruity as resulting from a shift from seriousness to play. In “Semantic Mechanisms of Humor,” in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979): 325–35, Victor Raskin sees all of this as semantic incongruity and Peter Marteinson in The Origins of Laughter: A Philosophical Study of the Comic (Raleigh, NC: Lulu Press, 2005) hypothesizes that such incongruity is produced in a “cognitive impasse” linked to shifts in the perception of reality. The point is that all try to distill comedy into some common element or operation without much attention to performance, context, or

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Notes unpredictability. From Aristotle on, comedy must be reined in, reduced to a single operation (incongruity, relief, superiority) because it is the one phenomenon that can neither be anticipated nor controlled—it is the one phenomenon that cannot be reined in. If the nature of the comic is that it emerges from combinations that are both always there and as-if newly recognized (and often re-recognized because we can laugh more than once at the same joke), then how does one predict a “structure,” “principle,” or common denominator? America’s Funniest Home Videos, television series, hosted by Bob Saget and Tom Bergeron, (1989-present, ABC). Jackass, television series, starring Johnny Knoxville (2000-2007, MTV). Which would seem to ascribe to theories of humor as evoking feelings of superiority. But comedy is much more complex than that, involving both the shape of the gathering possibilities and the timing of the cut by which one (or a small list) of links emerge (and not always the same ones from the very same material). These shows elicit as much empathetic suffering as they do laughter, which suggests that superiority is not as much a comic motive as some might suggest, while John Limon’s argument about the role of abjection might be just as operative. Laughter in this context may indeed be a way of expelling a complex of incommensurate feelings. The point is that there is no single denominator to comedy, but a complex plethora that works in terms of timing and the variants of performance rather than any thematic consistency or “mood,” unawareness, or plain stupidity. And there are no formulas or rules for these aspects of performance, since they also depend on a huge number of factors—issues of audience, site, repetition, cultural knowledge, mood, etc. This notion of disavowal comes from Octave Mannoni’s Clefs pour l’imaginaire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985). His formulation of disavowal is, “I know, but all the same” Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958). All subsequent quotes are from this edition. Bergson, Henri. Le Rire, ed. Bertrand Gibier http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/ bergson_henri/le_rire/Bergson_le_rire.pdf Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. After offering a list of joke techniques, Freud comments that “this variety and number of techniques has a confusing effect. It might make us feel annoyed at having devoted ourselves to a consideration of the technical methods of jokes, and might make us suspect that after all we have exaggerated their importance as a means for discovering the essential nature of jokes. If only this convenient suspicion were not contradicted by the one incontestable fact that the joke invariably disappears as soon as we eliminate the operation of these techniques from its form of expression! So in spite of everything, we are led to look for the unity in this multiplicity” (46). Or the joke disappears the moment we even try to locate the techniques in the first place. In spite of everything, we look for the one instead of for the many. That itself may be the low phallic joke.

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18 Jerry Aline Flieger, The Purloined Punchline: Freud’s Comic Theory and the Postmodern Text (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 19 Franklin Ajaye, Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy. 20 Ibid. 21 Alain Badiou, “The Event as Trans-Being,” Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2004). 22 This is a rendition of Tom Byers’s original telling of the joke, though it is difficult to determine what exactly is original, since I have heard him tell that joke by request many times. 23 Samuel Beckett, Watt (New York: Grove Press, 1959). 24 James Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter. 25 The term “apparatus” has been deployed in many contexts from psychoanalysis to media and film studies. Christian Metz uses the term in his study of film, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), as does French dentist Jean-Louis Baudry in his two essays, “The Apparatus” and “The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” both in Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Teresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 41–6 and 25–37. Vilèm Flusser and Siegfried Zielinski employ the term to refer to the conglomerations that produce media phenomena. See, for example, Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006). 26 Jimmy Kimmel Live! television series, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. (2003-present, ABC). 27 Jimmy Kimmel Live! Sarah Silverman, “I’m F*@#ing Matt Damon,” YouTube video, January 31, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSfoF6MhgLA 28 Damon’s bad joke refers back to a line from the film Good Will Hunting, in which he and Ben Affleck starred. Good Will Hunting. Directed by Gus Van Sant (1998; USA: Miramax Productions, 1998). 29 In Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), Lacan describes the “cut” as that “Un” of the “Unbegriff ” (or non-concept, a pun linked to “Grundbegriff ” or foundational concept). Lacan says: “Last time I spoke to you about the concept of the unconscious, whose true function is precisely that of being in profound, initial, inaugural, relation with the function of the concept of the Unbegriff—or Begriff of the original Un, namely the cut. I saw a profound link between this cut and the function as such of the subject, of the subject in its constituent relation to the signifier itself ” (43). The “cut” is that moment in which

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Notes the subject comes into conscious being as separate. See Roberto Harari, Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2004), 72–73, and Ellie Ragland, Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure: Topology and Language in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2015), 167. Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “F*@#ing Ben Affleck,” YouTube video, 5:49, 2008, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwIyLHsk2h4. There are many additions to the Kimmel/Damon “feud,” but here are three: 1) Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “Matt Damon Takes Over Jimmy Kimmel Live,” YouTube video, 4:56, January 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOHeLc7g6iI; 2) Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “Jimmy Kimmel Auditions for Every Matt Damon Role,” YouTube video, 5:43, January 25, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8SH16TuCYyE; and 3) Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “Guillermo in the Bourne Ultimatum,” YouTube video, 3:48, January 8, 2013 http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=P9z89hwcAsY. The feud itself lasted for years. “Late Night Political Humor,” Political Irony, posted September 26, 2008, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.politicalirony.com/2008/09/26/late-night-politicalhumor-18/ “Jokes.” TeamCoco, posted November 16, 2010, accessed October 23, 2016, http://teamcoco.com/jokes/nov-16-2010-the-new-oxford-dictionary-hasdeclared-sarah-palins “The Best of Late Night Jokes,” Newsmax, posted April 08, 2010, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.newsmax.com/Jokes/215/. “Late Night Political Humor,” Political Irony, posted April 21, 2010, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.politicalirony.com/2010/04/21/late-night-politicalhumor-337/ “Late Night Political Humor,” Political Irony, posted March10, 2010, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.politicalirony.com/2010/03/10/late-night-politicalhumor-306/. Charles Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (New York: First Anchor Books, 2010). For a thorough account of the characteristics of “liveness,” see Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999). Edgar Allan Poe, “Murders on the Rue Morgue,” in Selected Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

Bit I 1 “Wave.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. September 11, 2016, accessed September 11, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave.

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2 Karl Kerényi describes Dionysian celebrations at length in Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 290–315. 3 The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Television show. Hosted by Johnny Carson. NBC. (Episode 4.83, April 27, 1965). At the time of the show, Ed Ames starred as the Native American character “Mingo” on the Daniel Boone Show. 4 As there is no actual record of longest live television laughter, online commentators, always a reliable source of information, claim this honor for this bit on The Tonight Show, for the “Egg” bit on I Love Lucy (Season 6, Episode 19, aired March 11, 1957), for the “Switched at Birth” bit on The Dick Van Dyke Show (“That’s My Boy,” Season 3, Episode 1, aired September 25, 1963), and for the curtain-dress joke during the “Went with the Wind” sketch on The Carol Burnett Show (Season 10, Episode 8, aired November 13, 1976). 5 As Rolling Stone contributors B. Zehme and D. Cowles commented in “A Sad Day for Comedy,” Rolling Stone, May 28, 1992, 63, a tribute penned just after Carson quit The Tonight Show in 1992: “Half-dressed, standing in mirror, here is Johnny, considering dentition and wattle; he closes the door to take his touch-up unscrutinized. He has a largeness for a man who is not large.” “A magnified leprechaun” is how Kenneth Tynan saw him in his famous New Yorker profile, “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1978, accessed October 3, 2016, http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/02/20/fifteen-years-salto-mortale. “Certainly, Carson’s eyes twinkle better than other eyes—and never more so than when watching a comic do stand-up fifteen feet in front of the desk. (Amazingly, his eyes have said everything he never could, always directly into the camera, his great silent partner.) Off camera, Carson watches comics with absolute glee, eyes wide, mouth agape, a luminous face posed to laugh. And no laugh will ever mean more than his.” Noel Murray comments in 2011 in “The Tonight Show, 3/6/69.” The A.V. Club: A Very Special Episode, January 6, 2011, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www. avclub.com/article/ithe-tonight-showi-3669-49675: “But for me, sitting through the same clips year after year—of Carson getting peed on by visiting zoo animals, or Ed Ames lodging a tomahawk in a dummy’s crotch, or Dean Martin flicking ashes into George Gobel’s cup—was a crash course in late-night history, and a small sample of what I imagined to be a loaded cache of broadcasting gold.” In his New Yorker essay, Kenneth Tynan reports that “Even his fellow comedians, a notoriously paranoid species, found that working with him was a stimulus rather than a threat. ‘He loves it when you score,’ Woody Allen said, ‘and he’s witty enough to score himself ’. Mel Brooks has explained to me, ‘From the word go, Carson could tell when you’d hit comic gold, and he’d help you to mine it. He always knew pay dirt when he saw it. The guys on other talk shows didn’t.’” And Tynan quotes Carson himself as saying, “But there’s an old vaudeville proverb—‘A comic is a man who says funny things,

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and a comedian is a man who says things funny.’ If that’s a valid distinction, then Fred was a comic, whereas Jonathan Winters and Mel Brooks are comedians. But they make me laugh just as much.” Carson also described his comic method as “I’m a reaction performer . . . I react off a situation” (quoted in John Miller, “From the Great Plains to L.A.: The Intersecting Paths of Lawrence Welk and Johnny Carson,” The Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) 79, no. 2 (2003), http://www.vqronline.org/ essay/great-plains-la-intersecting-paths-lawrence-welk-and-johnny-carson). The innumerable biographies and commentaries about Johnny Carson emphasize his two sides: a public persona—“the king of late night”—who believed in complete professionalism and the shy private man who hated to give interviews or discuss his personal life. The New York Times obituary noted that Mr. Carson impaled the foibles of seven presidents and their aides as well as the doings of assorted nabobs and stuffed shirts from the private sector: corporate footpads and secret polluters, tax evaders, preening lawyers, idiosyncratic doctors, oily accountants, defendants who got off too easily and celebrities who talked too much. All these oddments were sliced and diced so neatly, so politely, so unmaliciously, with so much alacrity, that even the stuffiest conservative Republicans found themselves almost smiling at Mr. Carson’s Nixon—Agnew jokes and uptight doctrinaire liberal Democrats savored his pokes at Lyndon B. Johnson and the Kennedys. Members of the public couldn’t say whether they were on Johnny Carson’s side or he was on theirs. All they knew was that they liked him and felt they knew him—a claim most of those who were close to him in his life, including his wives, family and “Tonight” staff members, would not make with much confidence. They knew Mr. Carson was intensely private, a self-described loner who shunned the spotlight when off camera. Richard Severo and Bill Carter, “Johnny Carson, Low-Key King of Late-Night TV, Dies at 79,” New York Times, January 24, 2005, accessed October 23, 2016, http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/arts/television/johnny-carson-lowkey-king-oflatenight-tv-dies-at-79.html?_r=0. In “Our Favorite Johnny Carson Moments,” TVGuide.com, October 23, 2010, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.tvguide. com/news/johnny-carson-moments-1024634/, critic Adam Bryant puts “The Tomahawk Toss” at the top of his list of “favorite Carson Moments” in his 2010 retrospective published on what would have been Carson’s 85th birthday. 6 Life of Brian, DVD, directed by Terry Jones (1979; London, UK: HandMade Films, 1979).

Bit II 1 With thanks to Tom Byers.

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2 Curiously, apart from Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, there is either way too much or hardly anything in the MLA Bibliography that analyzes the dynamic of jokes. If one looks up a “subject” such as “analysis of jokes,” one ends up with four or five essays on statistical analysis, an approach surely even less likely than philosophy to account for or understand humor. If one looks up the term “joke” there are almost two thousand entries. Folklorists are the best source, but their approach is descriptive. This either has to do with a failure of search protocols or the fact that jokes are evasive and difficult to define. 3 In his introduction to Jokes and the Unconscious Freud summarizes a tendency among the commentators he reviews: “A favourite definition of joking has long been the ability to find similarity between dissimilar things—that is, hidden similarities” (7). Although this seems akin to what I am proposing here, performance, timing, order, and context make a big difference to the comic event as event. The bar joke, supra, is not about dissimilarity, but about similarity and its redundant re-recognition, not of the actors, but of the dynamic itself. This joke is more the brief revelation of “sense in nonsense,” but on a self-reflexive plane. The context of contemporary joke culture, however, would mean that no one would ever take the set-up as an issue of dissimilarity in the first place. What Freud ultimately proposes is instead much more like the operations of metaphor. Freud’s study does focus from the start on jokes instead of on the broader categories of the comic or comedy. And then again, his “disjecta membra” has a curious resonance with Bergson’s “pert bobbings,” “frothings,” and other throw-away lines. The throw-away is the comic, enacted by philosophy as that which it rejects, but must nonetheless mention. After offering a list of joke techniques, Freud comments that “this variety and number of techniques has a confusing effect. It might make us feel annoyed at having devoted ourselves to a consideration of the technical methods of jokes, and might make us suspect that after all we have exaggerated their importance as a means for discovering the essential nature of jokes. If only this convenient suspicion were not contradicted by the one incontestable fact that the joke invariably disappears as soon as we eliminate the operation of these techniques from its form of expression! So in spite of everything, we are led to look for the unity in this multiplicity” (46). Or the joke disappears the moment we even try to locate the techniques in the first place. Again in spite of everything, we look for the one instead of for the many. That may be why accounts of comedy are always reductive. 4 Criticism and analysis of The Big Bang Theory has three strains: arguments about how the show represents “nerd” figures (whether its characterizations are accurate, insulting, or beneficial), about the show’s possible misogyny, or about disability studies approaches to the character of Sheldon. For the first and second, see Rob Sheffield, “The Super Nerd,” Rolling Stone 1113 (September 16, 2010): 56–57, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed September 11, 2016), 56; and

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Chris Baker, “No Self-Respecting Nerd Would Ever Watch Big Bang Theory,” Wired, January 23, 2014, accessed September 11, 2016, http://www.wired.com/2014/01/ bazinga-the-problem-with-big-bang-theory/; Jeremy Fogelman, “Why does The Big Bang Theory Hate Nerds?” CliqueClack.com, January 16, 2013, accessed September 11, 2016, http://cliqueclack.com/p/big-bang-theory-hates-nerds/; Arthur Chu, “Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds,” The Daily Beast, May 27, 2014, accessed September 11, 2016, http://www.thedailybeast.com/ articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-andnerds.html; India Ross, “The Big Bang Theory and the Rise of the Pathologically Nerdy in Sitcom TV,” PopMatters.com, August 20, 2013, accessed September 13, 2016, http://www.popmatters.com/column/174101-the-one-with-the-scientists/; Geektome. “The Big Bang Theory and the Nerd Myth,” Red Eye Chicago, December 29, 2013, accessed September 13, 2016, http://blogs.redeyechicago.com/geekto-me/2011/12/29/the-big-bang-theory-and-the-nerd-myth/. Nicki Gostin, “The Big Bang Theory Star Melissa Rauch on Nerds, New Jersey and Real Housewives,” The Huffington Post, October 11, 2011, accessed September 13, 2016, http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/11/big-bang-theory-melissa-rauch_n_1005581.html; Fred Topel, “Nerds Don’t Get the Girl! Or Do They?” Dishmag.com, n.d., accessed September 11, 2016, http://dishmag.com/issue74/celebrity/6850/nerds-don-t-getthe-girl-or-do-they-dish-talks-to-big-bang-theory-s-johnny-galeck-/. And for the third, see, for example, Shannon Walters, “Cool Aspie Humor: Cognitive Difference and Kenneth Burke’s Comic Corrective in The Big Bang Theory and Community,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 7, no. 3 (2013): 271–88. 5 A Bit of Fry and Laurie, television series, starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (1989–1995: BBC1 and BBC2). 6 Vincent Cosgrove, the New York Times DVD reviewer, characterizes the scene I am in the middle of analyzing: Mr. Fry and Mr. Laurie wield words—real or nonsensical—with a precision Henry Higgins would admire. Skewering language, they also conjure a Lewis Carroll-like world. While there are moments of physical comedy, the pratfalls that produce the most laughs are verbal. Sample this prime example of Fry-Laurie gibberish: “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.” Their adventures through the looking glass take them to strange places. After a fanciful skit about a privatized police force (a dig at Thatcher-era policies), Mr. Fry and Mr. Laurie play critics on a show called “Argue the Toss,” commenting on the police sketch (“Brilliant!”). Next comes “Up the Arts,” in which the two, playing another pair of critics, analyze the insights of the previous critics. (“So their futures as critics—bulbous, would you say?”) Two more critics riffing on the previous critics come next on “Oh No, Not Another One.” The Mad Hatter would grow delirious at this party.

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“Before He Got So Serious, Dr. House Was a Hoot,” New York Times, December 17, 2006, accessed October 22, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/arts/ television/17cosg.html. 7 Lewis Black, Stark Raving Black, October 8, 2009, (Detroit Michigan: Stark Raving Black Productions) iTunes video. The soundtrack of this routine also won the Grammy for the Best Comedy Album.

Bit III 1 Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, television series, starring Dan Rowan and Dick Martin (1968–73, NBC). 2 Saturday Night Live, television series, created by Lorne Michaels (1975–present: NBC). 3 Monty Python’s word play has engendered admiring study from discourse analysts who believe that the roots of comedy (or at least some of them) are primarily linguistic, a position that again dispenses with issues of performance and timing in favor of yet another, albeit perhaps more complex, structure. There is little in traditional theories of comedy that accounts for Monty Python’s method, except that its repetitions build series that function as set out above. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, television series, starring Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin with Carol Cleveland, Ian Davidson, and Connie Booth (1969–74: BBC). See also, my essay, “Sketchy Counterculture,” in Preserving the Sixties: Britain and the ‘Decade of Protest,’ eds. Trevor Harris and Molly O’Brien Castro (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 144–59. David Sterrit and Lucille Rhodes, “Monty Python: Lust for Glory,” Cineaste 26, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 18–23, describe this serial process as “juxtaposition” and “disjunction”: Another mark of the troupe’s inventiveness is its rejection of familiar TV formulas, from standup joke-telling to sitcom-style narrative. In place of standard formats the troupe cultivated a stream-of-consciousness sensibility calling for mercurial change from one moment to the next. Even when a loosely strung story does unify an installment of the show, as happens in some of the later programs—Palin as a muddled chap on a cycling tour, for instance—its verbal and visual action follows the same free-association (il)logic that characterizes the installments with multiple sketches.This emphasis on outlandish juxtaposition is encapsulated in Gilliam’s animations, which join the segments of a given show by contributing yet another level of disjunction. What might have served as a smokescreen for continuity gaps becomes the mightiest continuity gap of them all—and a hugely effective one, since, as Gilliam has acknowledged, the ability to insert an animation at any given moment allows the Pythons to end a routine as soon as it reaches its comic climax. This eliminates the need for follow-through

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Notes and denouement that they saw as built-in structural flaws of conventional TV-sketch humor. (18–19)

For other analyses of Monty Python’s methods and history, see Marcia Landy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2005), and Steve Neale’s “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” in The Television Genre Book, ed. Glen Creeber (London: British Film Institute (BFI) 2001), 76–78. 4 The “Listverse” staff notes that “Monty Python’s Flying Circus was cancelled after four episodes in Finnish TV in 1970s after this sketch appeared. This was done because it was said that the sketch was offending people who had cerebral palsy.” Listverse Staff. “Top 25 Monty Python Sketches.” LISTVERSE, November 3, 2007, accessed October 23, 2016, http://listverse.com/2007/11/03/top-25-monty-python-sketches/. 5 Little Britain, television show starring David Walliams and Matt Lucas, (2003–04: BBC Three; 2005–07: BBC One). The Catherine Tate Show, television series, starring Catherine Tate, (2004–06: BBC Two; 2007, 2009, 2014: BBC One). 6 For further analysis of the show’s deployment of repetition, see my “‘Aaa, Aaa, Aaa’ Repetition/Compulsion, and Queer Comedy in Little Britain,” in Frames 22, no. 2 (2009): 16–30. For commentary about Little Britain’s parody of sexuality and gender, see Ellie Kennedy’s “‘But I’m a Lady!’ Undoing Gender Bending in Contemporary British Radio Comedy,” in Gender and Laughter: Comic Affirmation and Subversion in Traditional and Modern Media, eds. Gaby Pailer, Andreas Böhn, Stefan Horlacher, and Ulrich Scheck (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2009), 251–67. Kennedy reprises Andreas Böhn’s argument about comedy and identity at some length: Andreas Böhn, in this volume, posits “the imperative of flexibility” as a new paradigm for subversive post-modern comedy. Böhn draws on Henri Bergson’s notion of laughter as a corrective to inflexibility (Bergson 21), but suggests that laughter in contemporary comedy has a more complex function than simply bringing non-adherents into line with dominant ideologies. He further argues that the binary paradigm of “laughing at” versus “laughing with” is insufficient for an understanding of laughter as subversive. If we laugh at those who do not conform to a particular norm, we merely reiterate that norm; however, if we laugh with a non-conformist at the norm, we acknowledge and thereby re-affirm the power of that norm. Thus, if both laughing at and laughing with the norm serve to uphold the norm, true subversion is barely possible. In search of a more enabling theory of the comic, Böhn posits flexibility as the new “super-norm.” (251–52) Although comedy and laughter are not the same thing, and the notion of a “norm” is itself a grand fiction against which Little Britain constantly pushes, an emphasis on “subversion” suggests a motivation for comedy that may be (and not always) only one effect of the cut. The underlying assumption of much criticism of Little Britain is the inevitable political nature of any comedy that uses caricatures of types who

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are perceived as somehow disadvantaged or oppressed. Little Britain’s repetition is a way to drive around binaries through persistent reframing. Little Britain’s repeated bits and deployment of caricatures of the variously disadvantaged engender much critique of the show’s renditions of such figures, often in terms of whether and how truly subversive Little Britain’s critique is as opposed to simply insulting. Issues of gender and sexuality top the list, as in Kennedy’s essay above, but also in Deborah Finding’s “‘I can’t believe you just said that’: Figuring Gender and Sexuality in Little Britain,” MEDIA@LSE Electronic Working Papers 13. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@ lse/research/mediaWorkingPapers/pdf/EWP13.pdf. Critics worry about class issues with Vicki Pollard, as in Imogen Tyler’s “Chav Mum Chav Scum,” Feminist Media Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 17–34. For more about the show’s representations of the disabled, see Margaret Anne Montgomerie, “Visibility, Empathy and Derision: Popular Television Representations of Disability,” ALTER, European Journal of Disability Research 4, no. 2 (2010): 94–102. And consider finally questions of whether and how offensive the show’s caricatures are (see Sharon Lockyer, “Dynamics of Social Class Contempt in Contemporary British Television Comedy,” Social Semiotics 20, no. 2 (2010): 121–38; her Reading Little Britain: Comedy Matters on Contemporary Television (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), and her volume, coedited with Michael Pickering, Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Much of the criticism of Little Britain comes from social scientists and media theorists who deploy cognitive science models for understanding humor (which, like Bergson and Freud before them) are looking for structural formulas as a way to explain highly variable and unpredictable performances which, even if filmed, are never the same twice. Like philosophy, cognitive science reduces comic complexity, performance, and unpredictability to “models”—Julia Snell’s deployment of “Schema Theory” for example, in “Schema Theory and the Humour of Little Britain,” English Today 22, no. 1 (2006): 59–64. Such models, based as they are on a particular set of defined functions, lose all of the other complexities that attend the comic event as such, and hence, may not see the subtleties by which assertions reverse themselves or gather to an altogether different point. One effect of Little Britain’s deployment of caricatured types and catch-phrases is that so doing catalyzes identity politics’ total lack of senses of proportion and humor, rigid notions of oppression, and deployment of broad stereotyped categories. Little Britain is, in other words, critiquing identity politics itself. Ironically, if satire/comedy is one of the only ways to mount contemporary political critique and many people take satire at face value, the critique is lost on those who would wish it made. This seems to be a matter of identifying tone and adopting a more flexible and multireceptive attitude toward comedy itself. This attitude has increasingly disappeared with approaches that have trapped critique into the literal and censored many attempts to get around identity politics’ rigid oppositional binaries. In his review of

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Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering, eds., Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, and Sharon Lockyer’s Reading Little Britain: Comedy Matters on Contemporary Television, Critical Studies in Television 6.1 (March 2011), Phil Wickham notes the flatness of approaches to a show that “was a national phenomenon in the middle part of the last decade, and characters such as Lou and Andy, or Vicki Pollard, achieved the kind of recognition thought lost to the medium and the genre in the multichannel age. There is a lot to say about the show too; its sketches can be read in widely different ways and arguments have been had in popular discourse about what it said about contemporary Britain, a discussion it invited through its title and stateof-the-nation comic Tom Baker voice-over. There is plenty that can be exulted and plenty that can be decried in the show and the ambiguity of response is one reason why a critical volume is so welcome. And yet . . . ultimately Reading Little Britain also feels disappointing” (117). In “New Tricks and the Invisible Audience,” Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal in Television Studies 5, no. 1 (March 2010): 69–81.

Bit IV 1 The Carol Burnett Show, television series, starring Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Lyle Waggoner, and Dick Van Dyke (1967–78, 1991: CBS). The “Went with the Wind” sketch aired on Season 10, Episode 8 (November 13, 1976).

Bit V 1 Critics assign many motives to caricaturing and define it variously in different media, but most of this discussion is circumscribed by a notion that literary and graphic caricature belongs on the one side to the realm of the polemical, political, and ethical and on the other to the question of subjectivity itself. Is caricature “high” or “low” art? Or the site of a merger between them? Scholarly explorations of caricature, by and large, do not consider the ways caricature is an intrinsic part of comedy. Literary studies tend to focus on the function of caricature and authors’ motives for deploying it. Earle David’s essay, “Dickens and the Evolution of Caricature,” PMLA 55, no. 1 (1940): 231–40, explores how Dickens developed his use of caricatured characters. In “Dickens, Hablôt Browne, and the Tradition of English Caricature,” Criticism 11, no. 3 (Summer 1969): 219–33, Michael Steig links Dickens’s use of caricature to “graphic art” (220). In “‘An Art to be Cultivated’: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism,” American Literary Realism 32, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 185–221, Henry B. Wonham hypothesizes that Henry James’s deployment of ethnic

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caricatures was a defensive mode by which the insufficiently differentiated swarms of immigrants might become exaggerated and hence more alien, typologized, and controllable. In another essay, Wonham suggests that Mark Twain’s use of ethnic caricatures addresses the problem of the “substantiality or insubstantiality of the self ” about which Twain was “ambivalent.” In “‘I Want a Real Coon’: Mark Twain and Late-Nineteenth-Century Ethnic Caricature,” American Literature 72, no. 1 (March 2000): 118. In his essay on Bernard Malamud’s caricatures in comparison to those of Sholem Aleichem, “Bernard Malamud: The Scope of Caricature,” The English Journal 53, no. 5 (1964): 319–35, Sam Bluefarb sees Malamud’s caricatures of Jewish immigrants as primarily ironic and self-deprecating—as “not so much objects of their own laughter as of ours—and of our commiseration, too” (319). Bluefarb also suggests that the caricatures “raise from caricature to allegory,” situating the caricature as a significant element of the formation of group coherence (320). Much critical analysis of caricature also focuses on caricature drawings. Lotus Magazine’s analysis of drawn caricatures of Napoleon offers perhaps the broadest, most joyous, and most caricatured definition of the caricature: “Of all of the arts that of caricature has the most universal appeal. To be effective it must be broad and obvious, and must be capable of being readily understood at once by prince and peasant, by emperor and clown. It awakens an emotional response equally in the anemic gentleman wearing large round spectacles with a horn frame, and in the double-fisted laborer who carries his luncheon to work in an old tobacco tin” (314). See The Lotus Magazine 9, no. 6 (1918): 314–15, 317–18. In “Architectural Sketches and the Power of Caricature,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 1 (1990): 49–58, architect Kendra Smith suggests that caricature drawings employ “simplification, transformation, and swift thoughts” (49). These characteristics may also themselves be a caricature in so far as they neither delimit, nor actually describe the phenomenon other than suggest its mode of production (“swift thoughts”). Others employ Freud’s reading of jokes as a model—see, for example, Mark Hewitson’s analysis of German war cartoons via Freud’s notion of jokes as moments of unrepression (“Black Humour: Caricature in Wartime.” Oxford German Studies 41, no. 2 (2012): 213–35). Stage caricatures have often been read as political. In “Caricature, Cultural Politics, and the Stage: The Case of Pizarro,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2007): 607–31, Heather McPherson details the ways Sheridan’s Pizarro generated political caricatures and itself enacted contradictory political commentary—“As caricaturists and politically astute critics recognized, Pizarro was a multi-layered melodramatic spectacle that, despite its apparent loyalist rhetoric, actually celebrated the principles of the opposition” (613). 2 Jean Genet, The Balcony, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1958). 3 As noted in note one, supra, ethnic caricatures have served a number of ends, according to scholars who have written about nineteenth-century uses of literary

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caricature. Blackface is a much more complex phenomenon with a long history that may have less to do with comedy or comic caricature than with issues of cultural difference, assimilation, envy, appropriation, and tribute. In other words, depending on context, audience, and occasion, blackface is the enactment of various kinds of ambivalence. Eric Lott calls this “Love and Theft” in his study of blackface minstrelsy, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). In his study of Jewish immigrants’ deployment of blackface, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the American Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), Michael Rogin suggests that by adopting blackface in performance and thus identifying with what was seen as the most oppressed group, immigrants could then assimilate into mainstream culture as white. In her 1931 study, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), Constance Rourke suggests that “humor has been a fashioning instrument in America, creating fresh bonds, a new unity, the semblance of a society, and the rounded completion of an American type” (232). Jennifer Schlueter paraphrases Rourke’s claim by way of introduction to her analysis of contemporary blackface performer Shirley Q. Liquor in “‘How you durrin?’: Chuck Knipp, Shirley Q. Liquor, and Contemporary Blackface.” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (2013): 163–81. Schlueter suggests, “The rough comedy of popular stages, where caricature reigned, was, Rourke argued, the site where Americans jostled, joked, and jousted their way to an identity and a culture” (163). Schlueter’s study of Liquor focuses usefully on the problems of audience and context in the performance of caricature, providing a perceptive study of the way comedy—and caricature—play with, deploy, and depend up a wide range of circumstances that are neither rigid nor predictable. 4 See Shawn-Marie Garrett’s tracing of the shifting functions of blackface as deployed by both black and white performers in “Return of the Repressed,” Theater 32, no. 2 (2002): 27–43. 5 Richard Pryor, stand-up special, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1981–82. Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures). Many critics and reviewers rehearse Pryor’s troubled history with violence and drugs, but some also adulate his comic capabilities. As Leo Benedictus of The Guardian observes in a review of the DVD “Comedy Gold: Richard Pryor Live in Concert,” The Guardian, April 4, 2012, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/apr/04/richardpryor-live-concert-dvd, “Pryor’s reputation as one of the three or four people who could be called the greatest stand-up of all time is not based on anything approaching sympathy. Watch any of his remaining recordings, and there is just no arguing with his unteachable brilliance as a mimic of human voices, words and movement.” See also Eric Lott’s analysis of a 1974 bit “between a black wino and a black junkie,” in “The Aesthetic Ante: Pleasure, Pop Culture, and the Middle Passage,” Callaloo 17, no.

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2 (Spring 1994): 545–55. Here Lott points to the Pryor’s complex and sophisticated address, commentary, and irony, especially to black audiences (549). Albert Johnson provides an impressionistic analysis of Pryor’s complex multiple significations in “Moods Indigo: A Long View,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1990–91): 13–27. The Flip Wilson Show, television series, starring Flip Wilson (1970–74: NBC). Wilson’s Geraldine did, of course, produce the surprising critique that Wilson’s caricature might “encourage effeminacy in young black males, who, some believed, would use him as a role model” (Jannette Dates), qtd. in Beretta E. SmithShomade’s Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 65. In the 1970s “role model” strain of criticism in “The New Stereotypes Are No Better Than the Old,” The Urban Review 6, no. 2 (1972): 14–18, Roger Wareham and Peter Bynoe comment that “Flip Wilson neatly ducks the black male sexuality taboo by being neither entirely male nor female, but both. Most people when thinking of Flip think of Geraldine, hence the character represents little threat to even the least secure white heterosexual male consciousness. Unfortunately, Flip’s sexual ambivalence is probably wreaking havoc on the minds of impressionable black children who identify with him” (15). Wilson’s show was successful for a time, occupying the #2 spot for its first two years, winning two Emmy Awards and nominated for eleven others. Its popularity enabled him to feature a bevy of established Hollywood stars (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra) as well as such contemporaneous performers as Roberta Flack and Redd Foxx. According to the website IMDB, The Flip Wilson Show garnered seventeen total Emmy nominations with two wins. IMDB omits the Emmy nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Lighting Directions (1972). http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0065294/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1, accessed October 23, 2016. Jill Dolan characterizes Tomlin’s performances as accomplished via “gestes,” “marking each character with a gesture that defines her, while her words and her relations to the carefully self-contained social world Tomlin and Wagner create unsettle bourgeois presumptions. Transformations between and among these social spheres happen in split-second adjustments of posture, gesture, and voice, which materialize on Tomlin’s face and body through her hard performative (and performed) labor . . . Tomlin models ways to practice identity through simple social gestes made both familiar and strange by how she twists them” (500–01). See “‘Finding Our Feet in the Shoes of (One An) Other’: Multiple Character Solo Performers and Utopian Performatives,” Modern Drama 45, no. 4 (2002): 495–518. For another through analysis of Tomlin’s characters, see Suzanne Lavin’s Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin and Roseanne (New York: Routledge, 2014). Madea’s Class Reunion, directed by Tyler Perry, starring Tyler Perry, Chandra Currelley, Cheryl Pepsil Riley (Atlanta, GA: Tyler Perry Studios, 2008); Madea’s Family Reunion, directed by Tyler Perry, starring Blair Underwood, Keke Palmer,

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Lynn Whitfield, Lisa Arrindell Anderson, Jenifer Lewis, Rochelle Aytes, Boris Kodjoe, and Tyler Perry (Atlanta, GA: Tyler Perry Studios, 2006); Madea Goes to Jail, directed by Tyler Perry, starring Tyler Perry, Keshia Knight Pulliam, Derek Luke, and Robin Coleman (Atlanta, GA: Tyler Perry Studios, 2009). Madea’s Big Happy Family, directed by Tyler Perry, starring Tyler Perry, Loretta Devine, and Shad “Bow Wow” Moss (Atlanta, GA: Tyler Perry Studios, 2011); Madea’s Witness Protection, directed by Tyler Perry, starring Tyler Perry, Eugene Levy, Denis Richards, and Doris Roberts (Atlanta, GA: Tyler Perry Studios, 2012); A Madea Christmas, directed by Tyler Perry, starring Tyler Perry, Anna Maria Horsford, Larry the Cable Guy, Chad Michael Murray, and Eric Lively (Atlanta, GA: Tyler Perry Studios, 2013); Madea Gets a Job, directed by Tyler Perry, starring Chandra Currelley-Young, Melonie Daniels, Tamar Davis (Atlanta, GA: Tyler Perry Studios, 2013). Madea’s Neighbors From Hell, directed by Tyler Perry, starring Jayna Brown, Cassi Davis, and Rhonda Davis (Atlanta, GA: Tyler Perry Studios, 2014). 11 The Nutty Professor, directed by Tom Shadyac, starring Eddie Murphy and Jada Pinkett Smith (Beverly Hills, CA: Imagine Entertainment, 1996). 12 Perry’s performed caricatures, of course, received the critique caricatures often receive: on the edge of familiar, caricatures can (and often are) taken literally and thus become insulting. Or they are seen as poking fun at a stereotype, in which case they become insulting. In “‘Check With Yo’ Man First; Check With Yo’ Man’: Tyler Perry Appropriates Drag as a Tool to Re-Circulate Patriarchal Ideology,” (a title which pretty much says it all), Timothy Lyle comments: “Perry seems to promote a radical feminist agenda in which he presents typical controlling image stereotypes that plague African American women, and he deconstructs, reclaims, and reconstructs the images to offer a different vision. He shifts the relations of power from a male-centered negotiation of power to a female-centered renegotiation of power. Or does he?” (944). In Callaloo 34, no. 3 (2011): 943–58. Robert Patterson also argues perhaps more vehemently in “‘Woman Thou Art Bound’: Critical Spectatorship, Black Masculine Gazes, and Gender Problems in Tyler Perry’s Movies,” Black Camera 3, no. 1 (2011): 9–30: Perry’s films interpellate black women into submissive gender roles vis-à-vis the nuclear family, while simultaneously grappling with feminist political and theoretical issues such as sexual abuse and domestic violence that may structure (black) women’s oppression. Perry’s works operate within a patriarchy affirmation–critique dyad: struggling to critique patriarchy as a system, they instead identify only its most blatant and egregious manifestations as problematic. Furthermore, Perry’s success hinges on his and the audience’s inability or unwillingness to connect the particularly egregious manifestations of black patriarchy, specifically physical abuse and sexual molestation, with a more ubiquitous system, namely, submissive gender roles and expectations. (9)

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In her review of Madea’s Family Reunion, “Off the Chitlin Circuit: Madea’s Family Reunion (Lionsgate, 2006), Directed by Tyler Perry,” Contexts 5, no. 4 (2006): 71–3, critic Kimberly McClain Dacosta expresses the “hope” that ensuing Madea features will be “far, far behind,” mostly on the basis of what she details as the film’s sloppy “melodrama” (71). She comments, “The combination of slapstick, melodrama, and attempts at serious social commentary makes for a confusing, disjointed movie. Still, it feels somehow familiar, as though we have seen all this before” (72). Tamika L. Carey lays out the critical disputes surrounding the reception of Perry’s films and especially his representations of strong black female characters in “Take Your Place: Rhetorical Healing and Black Womanhood in Tyler Perry’s Films.” Signs 39, no. 4 (2014): 999–1021. Nicole Hodges Persley thoughtfully intervenes in the critical castigations of Perry in her essay, “Bruised and Misunderstood: Translating Black Feminist Acts in the Work of Tyler Perry.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 1, no. 2 (2012): 217–36. And in the midst of all of this, filmmaker Spike Lee also compares Perry’s work to a species of retrograde representation: “I think there’s a lot of stuff out today that is coonery and buffoonery. I see ads for ‘Meet the Browns’ and ‘House of Payne’ and I’m scratching my head. We’ve got a black president and we’re going back. The image is troubling and it harkens back to Amos ‘n’ Andy, (elicited by Byron Pitts in a television interview with Perry, then quoted in Issie Lapowsky, “Tyler Perry Responds to Spike Lee’s Claim That His Work is Comparable to ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’. ” Daily News, October 26, 2009, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.nydailynews. com/entertainment/tv-movies/tyler-perry-responds-spike-lee-claim-workcomparable-amos-n-andy-article-1.380544). In the same Daily News article, Oprah Winfrey came to Perry’s defense, commenting, “I think [Perry] grew up being raised by strong, black women. And so much of what he does is really in celebration of that. I think that’s what Madea really is a compilation of all those strong black women that I know and maybe you do to? And so the reason it works is because people see themselves.” While the notion that the caricatures work as comedy because they cut to some familiar, recognizable feature emerges among several of these critics (including Oprah), critical insistence on a political interpretation of Perry’s caricatures is linked to the wide popularity of his films—basically, to the very comic success familiarity might enable. If we regard the caricature as an interpretation that is part of a comic set-up, then it operates on familiarity as something akin to Lott’s version of “love” or Oprah’s “celebration”—a fondness for the type itself as well as its predictability. But if critics read the caricatures only as stereotypes, comedy becomes retro political commentary. The same thing happens if Perry’s caricatures are perceived as role models. The challenge of the caricature is that it is ambivalent in the sense that it is both an exaggeration and it rings true. If taken out of

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Notes context—out of its complex set-up—then it becomes mere commentary, which elicits a critical political response. The question then is what difference, if any, does comedy make? Does it license insult or does it produce complex interrogations of assumptions, types, cultures? Or both? During and after the 2016 presidential election, Baldwin performed a caricature of Donald Trump that exaggerated Trump’s speech patterns and physical mannerisms. See SNL, “Alec Baldwin: Donald Trump Sketches,” accessed April 8, 2017, https:// www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/cast/alec-baldwin-57921/impersonation/donaldtrump-285097. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David Mclintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Various performances of Carvey’s “the Church Lady” on Saturday Night Live are fleetingly available online only to be quickly blocked by Sony in its policing of its property rights. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, television series, hosted by Johnny Carson (1962–92: NBC). Carson’s Aunt Blabby itself referred to another such figure: Jonathan Winters’ AMaude Frickert.” See “Jonathan Winters rated X-Maude Frickert,” YouTube video, 2:56, April 13, 2013, accessed October 3, 2016, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5zlnqv-ka4. See SNL, “Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin Address the Nation.” video, 3:53, aired September 13, 2008, Posted 2008, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.nbc.com/ saturday-night-live/video/sarah-palin-and-hillary-clinton-address-the-nation/n12287. In contradistinction to the critiques levied at Lucas and Walliams as unfunny bullies, Little Britain’s payoffs make sharply evident the follies of categorical modes of thought including identity politics itself instead of simply making fun of the types they caricature. Focusing on the caricature of types is comic interruptus, with premature ejaculations of complaint. In his interview with Tate, “Catherine Tate: Multiple Personality.” The Independent, March 22, 2004, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ people/profiles/catherine-tate-multiple-personality-65541.html, Gerard Gilbert quotes Dawn French’s comment about Tate’s talent: “In fact, it was French who paid the compliment that is quoted in every article about this new face: ‘Catherine Tate is far too talented and she must be destroyed.’” Paul Julian Smith calls Wiig “a showy mimic” (8) in “Beneath the Glamour,” Film Quarterly 65, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 8–9. Chappelle’s Show, television series, performed by David Chappelle, (2003–06: Comedy Central). In “‘Black’ Comedy: The Serious Business of Humor in In Living Color, Chappelle’s Show, and The Boondocks,” in African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings, eds. David J. Leonard and Lisa A. Guerrero (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013): 177–90, Lisa Guerrero astutely characterizes Chappelle’s method as a “tactic

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of doubling (using an idea/characteristic/stereotype in service of dismantling the effectiveness and legitimacy of the very same idea/characteristic/stereotype)” a which “allowed him to confront serious racial issues while becoming one, if not the most wildly popular black comedian the television industry had ever seen” (238). Guerrero also categorizes Chappelle’s comedy as “satire.” In “Polysemic Scaffolding: Explicating Discursive Clashes in Chappelle’s Show,” Communication, Culture & Critique 3 (2010): 270–89, Lisa Glebatis Perks calls Chappelle’s practice an “activation of polysemic potential” in an essay that analyzes Chappelle’s comedy as founded on polysemous discourse (270). She sees three instances of this “polysemic comedy: Egregious stereotyping versus subtler mediated racism, inverted racial stereotypes versus traditional stereotypes, and serious versus nonserious discourse” (270). Appended only to discourse instead of to the larger field of performance, Perks’ analysis offers a partial account of how Chappelle’s comic performance manages to accomplish what Guerrero suggests. It also offers a discourse-based account. 22 For Rich Little, see “Rich Little, Comedian Impressionist,” YouTube video, 5:46, December 2, 2006, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=78sSn3E_Vvc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNT8UGydiCQ; for Frank Calienda, see “Frank Caliendo on Letterman Show during Impressionist Week,” YouTube video, 6:50, November 29, 2006, accessed October 23, 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P52bmJXYQPQ&index=3&list=RD78sSn3E_ Vvc); and for Christina Bianco, “Christina Bianco Diva Impressions ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ (as Adele & more!),” YouTube video, 6:35, August 11, 2013, accessed October 23, 2106, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3DlDPeurRw. 23 Tig Notaro Stand-Up 09/19/11 CONAN on TBS,” YouTube video. 5:44, June 2, 2016, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kxO2Xes31A.

Bit VI 1 This reading is based on Sigmund Freud’s account of the fetish as an image or object that substitutes for what the infant male perceives as “missing” on the mother—the penis. See Freud’s “Fetishism” (1927) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press). The formula for disavowal comes from Octave Mannoni’s Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène. 2 The Red Skelton Hour (The Red Skelton Show), television series, hosted by Red Skelton, (1951–53; 1970–71: NBC and 1953–70: CBS). The sketch cited here “Red Skelton as Clem Kadiddlehopper 1 2,” YouTube video, 8:46, November 16, 2012, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3Jlxm9aX3A. Accessed October 23, 2016 is from The Red Skelton Show, Season 4, Episode 8 (November 9, 1954).

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3 The Jack Benny Show, Volumes 1–5. DVD. Alpha Home Entertainment, 2008. 4 For Jonathan Winters’s Maude, see, for example, “Dean and Maude,” YouTube video, 1:57. December 8, 2006, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=q08L6POKJsE This is from The Dean Martin Show, aired June 17, 1977. 5 Tonight: Four Decades of the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Carson Entertainment group, April 4, 2014. 6 Adding self-consciousness of comedy and of comic performance to the caricature that contributes to the sketch may itself be the cut, especially if it is especially uncanny, especially biting. In 1991, Dana Carvey performed a sketch titled “Carsenio” on Saturday Night Live, in which he combined the stylings of Arsenio Hall (hair, suit, music, fist rolling from the audience) with a dead-on imitation of Carson’s voice, speech, and manner. Owing Carson for “Church Lady” which he combines with the hamstrung carriage of the 1990s faithful, Carvey’s caricature is so close to Carson that its doubling causes a double take. This is an example of how caricature can teeter on the edge of uncanny impersonation, producing an oscillation between the insights of the cut and the vaguely uncomfortable feeling that we have been here before. See Saturday Night Live, television series, (1975– present.: NBC). The “Carsenio Show,” sketch aired Season 16, Episode 20 (May 18, 1991). See “The Carsenio Show” at NBC’s SNL website, video, 7:35, May 18, 1991, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/thecarsenio-hall-show/n10088. 7 Season 9, episode 16, aired January 3, 1976. Available on The Carol Burnett Show: Ultimate Collection. DVD. Time/Life Star Vista, September 16, 2014. 8 T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in Poems: 1909-1925 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932).

Bit VII 1 Carl Reiner said it “was like the Pope blessing you.” Quoted in Jesse David Fox. “Can You Guess Whom Johnny Carson Asked to “the Couch”? May 15, 2012, accessed October 23, 2016 Splitsider. http://splitsider.com/2012/05/can-you-guesswhom-johnny-carson-asked-to-the-couch/. 2 Seinfeld, television series, starring Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander (1989–98: NBC). Other comedian characters’ sitcoms followed Seinfeld’s suit (who himself had already followed George Burns and Jack Benny)—Inside Amy Schumer, television series, starry Amy Schumer, Kevin Kane, and Kyle Dunnigan (2013–present: Comedy Central); Chappelle’s Show, television series, starring Dave Chappelle, Donnell Rawlings (2003–06): Comedy Central.

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3 The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, television series, hosted by George Burns and Gracie Allen (1950–58: CBS). 4 The Ed Sullivan Show, television series, hosted by Ed Sullivan (1948–71: CBS); The Steve Allen Show, television series, hosted by Steve Allen, (1956–60: NBC; 1961: ABC); The Dinah Shore Show, television series, hosted by Dinah Shore (1951–60: NBC); The Judy Garland Show, television series, hosted by Judy Garland and Jerry Van Dyke (1963–4: CBS); Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall (The Perry Como Show), television series, hosted by Perry Como (1948–67: NBC); The Rosemary Clooney Show (The Lux Show), television series, hosted by Rosemary Clooney (1956–8: NBC); The Liberace Show, television series, hosted by Liberace (1952: NBC NBC; 1958–59: ABC; 1969: CBS); The Jackie Gleason Show, television series, hosted by Jackie Gleason, (1949–52: DuMont); (1952–57; 1961; 1962–66: CBS); The Dean Martin Show, television series, hosted by Dean Martin, (965–74: NBC); The Carol Burnett Show, television series, starring Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Lyle Waggoner, and Tim Conway (1967–78, 1991: CBS). 5 That Was the Week That Was, television series, presented by David Frost, (1962–63: BBC TV); Beyond the Fringe, comedy stage revue, written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore, premiered 1964, Royal Lyceum Theater, Edinburgh, Scotland. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, television series, starring Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, (1968–73: NBC); The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, television series, hosted by Dick and Tom Smothers, (1967–69, 1988–89: CBS); Tonight Starring Jack Paar (The Jack Paar and The Tonight Show), television series, hosted by Jack Paar, (1957–62: NBC); Late Night with David Letterman, television series, hosted by David Letterman, (1982–93: NBC); Late Show with David Letterman, television series, hosted by David Letterman, (1993–2015: CBS); The Arsenio Hall Show, television series, hosted by Arsenio Hall, syndication: 2013–14. Late Night with Conan O’Brien, television series, hosted by Conan O’Brien, (1993–2009: NBC); Conan, television series, hosted by Conan O’Brien, (2010–present: TBS). 6 Many critical essays have been offered analyzing various aspects of Seinfeld, including Vlad Dima’s “‘Hellooo’: Voices, Reversals, and Subjectivities in Seinfeld,” Journal of Popular Television 1, no. 2 (2013): 191–205, which examines the gender politics of the voice as one episode deploys it as both a comic and uncanny device; studies of the way the sitcom evokes Jewishness, as in Rosalin Krieger’s “‘Does He Actually Say the Word Jewish?’—Jewish representations in Seinfeld,” Journal for Cultural Research 7, no. 4 (2003): 387–404; Robert Storey deploys Seinfeld as the laboratory example to illustrate his own theory of comedy based on comic types’ “blunders of mastery” (85), as he both critiques and tries to arbitrate the lack of connections among sociological, neuropsychological, and psychological accounts of the functions of laughter and humor in “A Critique of Recent Theories of Laughter

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and Humor, with Special Reference to the Comedy of Seinfeld,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2 (Spring 2001): 75–92. Storey’s analysis of types is taken up by Barbra S. Morris in “Why Is George So Funny? Television Comedy, Trickster Heroism, and Cultural Studies,” in The English Journal 88, no. 4 (March 1999): 47-52, which focuses on George as a comic hero. David Pierson considers the way Seinfeld represents a “comedy of manners,” involving a level of self-consciousness on the part of the characters that they are engaged in meaningless conventional discourse. In “A Show About Nothing: Seinfeld and the Modern Comedy of Manners,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no. 1 (2001): 49–64. The question of the relations between comedy and political/cultural critique arise in Paul Paolucci and Margaret Richardson’s “Dramaturgy, Humor, and Criticism: How Goffman Reveals Seinfeld’s Critique of American Culture,” in Humor 19, no. 1 (2006): 27–52. Of course, deploying the term “absurd” says very little other than to note the seeming lack of coherence among the show’s chance encounters and paradoxical analyses as they produce or result from a “narrative turn,” as James Phelan demonstrates in “Narratives in Contest: Or, Another Twist in the Narrative Turn,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (January 2008): 166–75). For the question of the “absurd,” see also Nesrin Yavas’s “Is Seinfeld Any Less Absurd Than Godot?” Ege Ingiliz ve Amerikan incelemeleri dergisi 13 (2003): 117–24, even if, as we might suspect, neither text is “absurd” at all, but makes its own kind of comic sense. 7 Louis C.K.’s television show, Louie, began airing in 2010 on FX—Louie, television series, starring Louis C.K. (2010–present: FX); Kroll Show, television series, starring Nick Kroll, (2013–15: Comedy Central). 8 Most published material on Louis C.K. considers his source material, selfdeprecation, and anger—and most, at this stage, are reviews—The New York Times has published at least two, as has The Guardian. As Leo Benedictus of The Guardian observes in “Comedy Gold: Louis CK’s [sic] Shameless,” The Guardian, September 19, 2012, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/ sep/19/louis-ck-shameless-comedy-gold: “C.K. is such an exceptionally fluent performer that even when he isn’t funny, which is almost never, he is a pleasure to watch. At times you can almost see how therapeutic it is for him, and for the audience, to have their shared unspoken rage released so expertly.” Like that of Louis C.K., criticism of Amy Schumer’s comedy is at this point primarily from reviews and interviews. In The Washington Post, Rachel Lubitz discusses the female orientation of Schumer’s comedy in “Amy Schumer Strives to do Comedic Justice to the Female Experience.” The Washington Post, March 6, 2004, accessed October 23, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/amy-schumer-strives-to-docomedic-justice-to-the-female-experience/2014/03/06/ba0026ee-a087-11e3-9ba6800d1192d08b_story.html, although a year later, The Washington Post criticized her for “racism” in jokes about Mexicans. (See Stacey Patten and David J. Leonard,

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“Don’t Believe Her Defenders. Amy Schumer’s Jokes Are Racist,” The Washington Post, July 6, 2015, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ posteverything/wp/2015/07/06/dont-believe-her-defenders-amy-schumers-jokesare-racist/.) This repeats yet again the problematic relationship between comedy and identity political critique (which verges easily into insult for some people) observed by critics in relation to Tyler Perry. Chappelle’s Show, television series, starring Dave Chappelle (2003–04: Comedy Central). Unlike Schumer’s critics, Dave Chappelle’s critics love his brand of cultural critique: “Consider this a warning: Dave Chappelle will probably offend you. But if you’ve got a thick skin and can take it, you just might find him funny— brilliantly funny.” So exclaims Rebecca Leung of 60 Minutes in “Chappelle: ‘An Act of Freedom,’” CBS News: 60 Minutes, December 21, 2004, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chappelle-an-act-of-freedom-21-12-2004/. But scholars have also analyzed Chappelle’s complexity. Lisa Glebatis Perks, for example, notes in her essay abstract that Chappelle’s Chappelle’s Show features “three prominent discursive clashes at the heart of Chappelle’s Show’s polysemic comedy: ‘Egregious stereotyping versus subtler mediated racism, inverted racial stereotypes versus traditional stereotypes, and serious versus nonserious discourse’” (270). In “Polysemic Scaffolding: Explicating Discursive Clashes in Chappelle’s Show,” Communication, Culture & Critique 3 (2010): 270–89. Lisa Guerrero calls Chappelle’s show “wholeheartedly black satire” that deploys a practice of “doubling” in which he “deliberately and expertly deconstructed the racial aspects of various social, political, and cultural issues and did so through the creative use of racial stereotypes, histories, and ideologies.” “‘Black’ Comedy: The Serious Business of Humor” in In Living Color, Chappelle’s Show, and The Boondocks. In African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings, 237. The Kroll Show, television series, starring Nick Kroll (2013–15: Comedy Central). In his review of The Kroll Show’s second season, Erik Voss notes that “Perhaps the most fun aspect of Kroll Show is the lengths Kroll goes to to weave his various ‘minishows’ into one, big universe of garbage television. CCzar and Liz B. having a baby. The PubLIZity girls being credited as creators of ‘Armond of the House’. Dr. Armond being one of the dads in ‘Dad Academy’. Even having CCzar shout ‘Let them eat cake!’ right after the Cake Train sketch. These subtle jokes indicate that Kroll Show is much more than a one dimensional character parade for Kroll; it’s a nuanced satire of one of the uglier trends in American culture. And Nick Kroll isn’t afraid to get ugly to call it out.” “‘Kroll Show’ Season 2: Good TV Making Fun of Bad TV.” Splitsider January 14, 2014, accessed October 23, 2016, http://splitsider. com/2014/01/kroll-show-season-2-good-tv-making-fun-of-bad-tv/. The extant reviews of the show unanimously see it as making fun of bad television as well

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as producing its own “universe” of reality burlesques. See, for example, Brandon Nowalk, “Kroll Show Skewers Reality TV, but in a Friendlier Fashion,” TV Review, The A.V. Club, January 14, 2014, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.avclub. com/review/kroll-show-skewers-reality-tv-but-in-a-friendlier--200820. 13 Blazing Saddles, directed by Mel Brooks, starring Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1974). Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks, starring Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman, and Cloris Leachman (Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1974). Airplane! Directed by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, and Leslie Nielsen (Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1980). The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad! Directed by David Zucker, starring Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, and O.J. Simpson (Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1988). The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, directed by David Zucker, starring Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, and George Kennedy (Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1991). Naked Gun 33½: The Final Insult, directed by Peter Segal, starring Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, and George Kennedy (Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1994). Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, directed by Jay Roach, starring Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael York, and Mimi Rogers (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 1997). Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, directed by Jay Roach, starring Mike Myers, Heather Graham, Michael York, and Robert Wagner (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 1999). Austin Powers in Goldmember, directed by Jay Roach, starring Mike Myers, Beyoncé Knowles, Seth Green, and Michael York (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2002).

Bit VIII 1 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 250. 2 Ibid. 3 In her extensive generic analysis of literary parody in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), Linda Hutcheon notes that parody need not be any form of degradation: “There is nothing in parodia that necessitates the inclusion of a concept of ridicule, as there is, for instance, in the joke or burla of burlesque. Parody, then, in its ironic ‘trans-contextualization’ and inversion, is repetition with a difference. A critical distance is implied between the background text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony. But this irony can be playful as well as belittling; it can be critically constructive as well as destructive. The pleasure of parody’s irony comes not from humor in particular but from the degree

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of engagement of the reader in the intertextual ‘bouncing’o(to use E.M. Forster’s famous term) between complicity and distance” (32). 4 See also G.D. Kiremidjian’s “The Aesthetics of Parody.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28, no. 2 (1969): 231–42. 5 French and Saunders, television series, starring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders (1987-2007: BBC Two). 6 Like all of the enframed and layered shows in the previous bit, French and Saunders follows what appears to be a formulaic pattern such as described below. However, this structure may itself be an intrinsic element of the set-up of parody and satire themselves, which require these multiple layers to function. If one does not apperceive the layers in a comic “cut,” then the parody/satire remains one dimensional and is thus open for critique as derogatory. Ziva Ben-Porat describes the structure of most comedy sketch shows in her essay “Method in Madness: Notes on The Structure of Parody, Based on MAD TV Satires,” Poetics Today 1, no. 1/2 (1979): 245–72: TV series are ideal objects for satire and for parody. One could even say, following Revzin (1971: 587), that they are parodic texts par excellence since they contain a text-generating mechanism. Each individual episode, in spite of obvious differences in its surface structure, is a true token of its series; and each series, regardless of the particular subgenre to which it belongs, is a true token of the genre. The biting satire, the mild situation comedy, the nostalgic realistic family (melo)drama, the private-eye or police-detective suspense story, the glorification of a professional (be it a lawyer, a physician, or a teacher) are all produced according to the same “grammatical” rules. There is a fixed set of characters (often “character-types” in the classical and neo-classical sense), played over and over again by the same actors, whose inter-relations, functions, and order of appearance are as fixed as their individual traits and mannerisms (or gimmicks). There is also an empty slot, occupying a fixed position in the system of characters, filled by a guest-star, whose age, sex, profession, or appearance varies according to the demands of the particular episode, but whose functions remain constant—to provide the permanent protagonists with the opportunity to reveal their skills and attributes. The structure of each plot—the distribution of exposition-material, the order of plot events, the exact location of the crisis—is also permanent, and each series has one basic structure, which reappears in each episode. (245–46) 7 Star Wars, Episode 1, The Phantom Menace, directed by George Lucas, starring Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman (Los Angeles: Lucasfilm, 1999). 8 In her essay “‘A Hell of a Place’: The Everyday as Revisionist Content in Contemporary Westerns,” Mediascape: UCLA’s Journal of Media and Cinema Studies (Fall 2009) http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Fall09_Western.html, Erica Stein

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calls the end of Blazing Saddles a “strategy of exposure,” which, she argues, enables the film to be “revisionist”: to show the “demands of a capitalist production system.” Not an analysis of comedy, but of comedy’s possible political commentary, Stein sees this practice as potentially “corrective.” This argument continues the oddly bifurcated take on any kind of satire offered by comedy as not funny but instead as either instructional or bigoted. Critics try to account for Blazing Saddle’s humor via Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, as in Bill Hug, “Blazing Saddles as Postmodern Ethnic Carnival” Studies in Popular Culture 36, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 63–81. This includes the recourse to Kenneth Burke’s categories of satirical discourse, as in Beth E. Bonnstetter, “Mel Brooks Meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin): Comedy and Burlesque in Satiric Film” Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 18–31. But reviewer Jason Guerrasio perhaps sums it up most usefully: “It’s been 40 years since Mel Brooks changed comedy movies with the success of his raunchy Blazing Saddles, and what’s incredible about watching it today—after the slew of R-rated comedies we currently digest—is that it still plays to gutbusting perfection. Cleavon Little as a black sheriff in the overwhelmingly racist Old West, every race and creed lampooned with razorsharp precision, and yes, the farting scene. It’s the movie that introduced an unapologetic crass comic style that would be elevated over the decades by the likes of the Farrelly brothers, Todd Phillips, and Sacha Baron Cohen. Brooks goes even a step further, calling it the funniest movie of all time (more on that later).” “Mel Brooks Remembers the Funniest Movie He Ever Made,” Esquire, May 21, 2014, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/ mel-brooks-remembers-blazing-saddles.

Bit IX 1 In “Airplane funniest film ever, research finds,” The Telegraph reported that Airplane is the “funniest film ever” according to the “movie subscription service Lovefilm,” September 6, 2002, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ film/9525372/Airplane-funniest-film-ever-research-finds.html. Coming in third was Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad. The New York Times critic Matt Zoller Seitz notes that it “became one of the highest-grossing comedies in box office history,” in “Surely It’s 30 (Don’t Call Me Shirley!),” New York Times, June 25, 2010, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/movies/27airplane.html? 2 In his essay “Humor Mechanisms in Film Comedy: Incongruity and Superiority,” Poetics Today 23. no. 2 (Summer 2002): 221–49, Jeroen Vandaele works through the categorical linguistic and structural concepts of “incongruity” and “superiority” as undergirding “humorous phenomena.” This kind of analysis, alas, ends up saying much more about the categories and intellectual tradition than about the exemplary

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texts whose humor evaporates in the face of philosophical rigidities. Daniel Harris chalks the spirit of Naked Gun and its ilk up to what he dubs “Zaniness”: “In a society intolerant of unconventional behavior, we have devised a symbolic method of achieving the illusion of rebelliousness by practicing what might be called controlled nonconformity. Zaniness allows us to misbehave and yet minimizes our risk of being ostracized as eccentric.” “Zaniness,” Salmagundi 104/105 (Fall 1994– Winter 1995): 207. Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot.” Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977): 280–300. See Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphoses: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham, 2008), and Judith Roof, “Out of the Bind,” in Narrative Theory Unbound, eds. Robyn Warhol and Susan Lanser (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015), 43–58. Michael T. Schuyler in “Camp for Camp’s Sake: Absolutely Fabulous, Selfconsciousness, and the Mae West Debate,” Journal of Film and Video 56, no. 4 (2004): 3–20, locates Ab Fab’s self-consciousness in what he sees as the show’s “camp” presentation, where the category “camp” itself is a mode of performance that implies issues of consciousness and audience. In “Feminine Desire in the Age of Satellite Television,” Journal of Communication 49, no. 2 (1999): 55–70, Michael Curtain sees Ab Fab as representing “feminine desire as so voracious and uncontrollable that it was unlike most anything that has ever graced the airwaves of popular television” (62). To locate the show’s comedy in the characters’ “desire” seems less apropos than to see its comedy as exceeding typical formulas through hyperbolic parody of types, cultural practices, the excesses of wealth, the hypocrisies of parenting, etc. But as Curtain continues, “Absolutely Fabulous not only resisted these conventions, it directly assaulted them, savaging the tidy little bows and wrappers of mass television on its way to ripping open a Pandora’s box of kinky feminine desire” (62). Curtain also notes how reluctant male BBC executives were to produce the show because it did not match executives’ conceptions of “feminine desire” (63). Arrested Development, television series, starring Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Alia Shawkat, Tony Hale, David Cross, Jeffrey Tambor, and Jessica Walter (2003–06: FOX; 2006–present: Netflix). Commenting on Season 4, New York Times critic Mike Hale judges: “the new Arrested Development . . . is a painstaking exercise in the art of withholding. It’s ‘Rashomon’ on steroids: As each episode tracks one member of the hyperdysfunctional Bluth family over roughly the same stretch of time, the story constantly circles back on itself, and information is rationed like methadone in the rehab center that first appears in Episode 3. Principal scenes play out over and over, becoming incrementally more clear.” Hale continues: “This is not how Arrested Development worked in its first three seasons (encompassing 53 episodes). There was narrative trickery, but the chronology was straightforward,

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and, more important, the storytelling and the humor were furiously paced. Jokes of every variety, bits of physical comedy, elaborate wordplay, innuendo and allusions tumbled out so quickly that you barely had time to register them. If one thing didn’t make you laugh, the next was there before you knew it.” In “A Family Streamed Back to Life,” New York Times, May 26, 2013, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/arts/television/arrested-developmenton-netflixcom.html?_r=0. NPR presented the “NPR’s Guide to the Running Gags from the Show,” in which Jeremy Bowers, Adam Cole, Danny DeBelius, Christopher Groskopf, and Alyson Hurt tracked Season 4’s gags that occur in the foreground, the background and those that are foreshadowed. This insight (and labor) lays out the complexity of Arrested Development’s set-up, payoff complexity, as it seems to occur in three layers simultaneously. “Previously, On Arrested Development: NPR’s Guide to the Running Gags from the Show,” National Public Radio (NPR), May 18, 2013, accessed October 23, 2016, https://apps.npr.org/ arrested-development/. Ruth McKay identifies the metafictional aspects of the show in “Reflexive Modes and Narrative Production: Metatextual Discourse in Contemporary American Narrative,” Canadian Review of American Studies 44, no. 1 (2014): 65–84.

Bit X 1 Many collections of interviews about stand-up comedy offer comics’ accounts of their methods, but perhaps the best analysis of the myriad tactics of stand-up is the documentary film, The Aristocrats, which presents the various modes of telling of a single joke. The Aristocrats, documentary film, directed by Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, (New York: THINKFilm, 2005). 2 Lewis Black, Lewis Black: Old Yeller-Live at the Borgata, stand-up comedy special (Image Entertainment, Stark Raving Black Productions. Borgata Hotel, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August, 2013). 3 Ron White, Ron White: A Little Unprofessional, stand-up comedy special (Electra Star Productions: Paramount Theater, Austin, Texas, September 2012). 4 Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor: Here and Now, stand-up comedy special, performed by Richard Pryor. Recorded at Saenger Theatre, New Orleans, LA (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1983). http://www.veoh.com/watch/v56295882EBPktEqr. 5 Amy Schumer, Amy Schumer: Mostly Sex Stuff, stand-up comedy special, directed by Ryan Polito, August 18, 2012, DVD. 6 Wanda Sykes, I’ma Be Me, stand-up comedy special, starring Wanda Sykes. Premiered October 10, 2009. Performed at the Warner Theatre, Washington, DC and New York: HBO. http://www.hbo.com/comedy/wanda-sykes-ima-be-me.

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7 As Charles Isherwood’s New York Times’ review of Black’s comedy, “His Knickers May Be in a Twist” Lewis Black: Running on Empty’ at Richard Rodgers Theater,” New York Times, October 10, 2012, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.nytimes. com/2012/10/11/theater/reviews/lewis-black-running-on-empty-at-richardrodgers-theater.html describes it: “Arriving onstage to a long burst of affectionate applause, Mr. Black instantly rains on the parade: ‘This is not going to be that entertaining,’ he says dolefully. Assessing his general feeling about the recent past and the predictable future, Mr. Black comes up with a bleak motto that he might just as easily have chosen for the show’s title: “Nothing is going to change.” Jeffrey Jenkins notes as well Black’s performance style as key to his stand-up: “As stand-up comedy goes, ‘Black Humor’ is some of the smartest writing around. But it’s Black’s performance style that elevates the work above the detached irony of the postSeinfeldian universe. Infusing his work with a mixture of fevered incredulity and sputtering exasperation, the actor-comedian pointedly demonstrates the foolishness of our so-called civil society.” Review of “Black Humor: The Comedy of Lewis Black,” Backstage, February 21, 2001, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www. backstage.com/review/reviews_29/. Michael Posner of the Toronto Globe & Mail traces Black’s performance to his years of training in the theater, but adds to critics’ appreciation of Black’s comedy as essentially an effect of performance: “Like all great comics, what makes Black’s material so effective, of course, is not just the cleverness of the individual lines (on Janet Jackson’s Captain of the Battleship Galactica Super Bowl costume: “She was essentially saying, ‘Look at me . . . I have no friends”; or, “Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California . . . And we are not on LSD. Why do people do drugs any more when reality becomes a hallucination?) It’s his impeccable timing and delivery.” Michael Posner, “Black humour at its brightest,” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada] 2 October 2004, accessed August 30, 2016, http:// www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/black-humour-at-its-brightest/article4091028/. 8 There is very little, if any, analysis of White’s mode of comedy other than to comment that he is not quite the same good ol’ boy as the rest of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour (Jeff Foxworthy, et al.) Often, White’s mode is transposed into an assessment of his audience. In an interview with Michael Senft of the Florida Sun-Sentinel, “Blue Collar Comic Ron White Breaks Out,” January 13, 2006, accessed October 23, 2016, http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2006-01-13/ entertainment/0601110635_1_comedy-blue-collar-tv-drink. White notes: “I definitely have a different set of fans. There’s some overlap but you can tell the difference between a Ron White crowd and a Larry the Cable Guy crowd. I’m pegged as a Southern comedian, partly because of the company I keep and partly because of my voice, but if you look at my material there’s very little reference to the South. It’s just stuff I wrote that I find funny. But either way I’m making a lot of money, so I don’t have to sell shrimp out of the van on the side.”

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9 Ron White, Ron White: You Can’t Fix Stupid (Parallel Entertainment. Majestic Theater, Dallas, Texas, March 25, 2006). 10 Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip. 11 Larry Coleman argues that Pryor’s storytelling style derives from an African influence, which deploys specific character types such as “the trickster,” “tonal semantics,” and “indirection and innuendo.” Although it would be fair to say that almost all stand-up comics use versions of these elements, Coleman’s argument is that Pryor deploys specifically African versions of these. See “Black Comic Performance in the African Diaspora: A Comparison of the Comedy of Richard Pryor and Paul Keens-Douglas.” Journal of Black Studies 15, no. 1 (September 1984): 67–78, 68. Reviewer Leo Benedictus points to Pryor’s “unteachable brilliance as a mimic of human voices, words and movement.” In “Comedy Gold: Richard Pryor Live in Concert,” The Guardian, April 4, 2012, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www. theguardian.com/stage/2012/apr/04/richard-pryor-live-concert-dvd. As William Cook points out in “The Time of His Life” in The Guardian, June 7, 2004, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/jun/07/comedy: “Like all the best stand-ups, Pryor is a brilliant actor, but his talents don’t stop at mimicry. With the face of a sad clown and the body of a ballerina, he’s also an accomplished mime. Not many comedians can impersonate animals, at least not in a way that’s both true and funny. Pryor plays three different breed of dog—Alsatian, Great Dane and Doberman—all instantly recognisable, and all hilarious.” In “The Aesthetic Ante: Pleasure, Pop Culture, and the Middle Passage,” Callaloo 17, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 545–55, Eric Lott analyzes one of Richard Pryor’s bits at length, showing the ways character types—junkie and wino—produce community self-recognition. 12 Leo Benedictus declares that “Sykes is at heart an actor,” in “Comedy Gold: Wanda Sykes—Sick and Tired,” The Guardian, January 10, 2013, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/jan/10/comedy-gold-wanda-sykes. The tendency to underappreciate the talents of female comedians does arise as somehow critics see a qualitative difference between what Sykes does and what male stand-up comedians do, even though there is really is only a difference in the delivering persona’s style, sex, sexual orientation. For example, in his review of “Wanda Sykes I’ma Be Me,” Aaron Cutler cautions: “There’s a very thin line between invoking a stereotype to critique it and doing so to exploit it, and I can’t help but feel that at times Sykes is employing black stereotypes under the cover of discussion (snapping her fingers and slapping her ass to show how people secretly expect Michelle Obama to behave) in order to get cheap laughs. A back and forth between simplification and provocation takes place throughout the evening, in fact, as tired jokes about farting and erectile dysfunction pad out more stimulating discussions.” He continues by noting how few “class” jokes there are as if somehow Sykes is responsible for equal representation of all identity

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categories. My point here is that what passes as genius for male comics becomes the subject for sanctimony when female comics are being reviewed. Where comedy is concerned there may still be just a bit of overt sexism on the part of reviewers. See “Wanda Sykes I’ma Be Me,” Slant, February 2, 2010, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/wanda-sykes-imabe-me. Nancy Franklin’s New Yorker review of black female comics notes about Sykes: “It’s hard to know how seriously to take Wanda, since Sykes delivers her zingers with a coy, winning smile, and though she has a mouth on her, she has a high-pitched voice, which makes her difficult to read—you’re not sure whether she’s angry or merely whiny.” In “Watching Wanda: A Big Personality Hits the Small Screen,” The New Yorker, May 5, 2003, accessed October 23, 2016, http:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/05/05/watching-wanda. In “Who’s Afraid of Wanda Sykes?” Salon, May 12, 2009, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www. salon.com/2009/05/13/wanda_sykes_2/, reviewer Joan Walsh openly wonders why Sykes’s jabs at politicians are viewed as extreme and those of other comedians are not. Discussing Sykes’s 2009 lambast of Rush Limbaugh. Walsh observes, “I’m late to the faux outrage about Sykes’s edgy hilarious routine, but let’s let Jon Stewart get the last word. Like many of us on Monday he wondered how Sykes could provoke outrage while torture revelations provoke yawns and/or lame rationalizations.” And Walsh continues with a postscript: “Plus: Is anyone more repellent than Christopher Hitchens? Well, Limbaugh is, but it’s getting close. Here’s what he’s quoted telling New York Magazine about Sykes’s performance: “The black dyke got it wrong. Nobody told her the rules,” he said. (Oh, did I forget to mention Sykes is a lesbian? Trust Hitchens to remember!) The rules, according to Hitchens? “The president should be squirming in his seat. Not smiling.” 13 Louis C.K. Louis C.K.: Chewed Up, stand-up comedy special, Image Entertainment: Berklee Performance Center, Boston, Massachusetts, October 2008). Critics view Louis C.K., like Louis Black, as an “angry” comic, but seem to focus on his comic motivations instead of his craft. A 2009 Guardian interview with the performer, “All the Rage,” tries to plumb Louis C.K.’s rage, but instead, of course, uses the topic to produce a written comedy monologue: “Why am I angry? I’m sitting here right now in my underwear and socks that don’t match trying to write this on the day it is due. I had two weeks, I did nothing. Every time I sit at my laptop to try and create something, I start to feel agitated. That’s normal. But instead of letting that agitation settle down, or letting it morph into inspiration so I can get some work done, I click over to the internet and masturbate to the first picture of a leg that I can find. I’ve done it three times since I started writing this just now.” (Louis C.K. “All the Rage,” The Guardian, July 25, 2008, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/jul/26/ comedy.) Leo Benedictus links Louis C.K.’s rage to his comedic method: “Funny

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how? CK is such an exceptionally fluent performer that even when he isn’t funny, which is almost never, he is a pleasure to watch. At times you can almost see how therapeutic it is for him, and for the audience, to have their shared unspoken rage released so expertly.” “Comedy Gold: Louis CK’s Shameless” September 19, 2012, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/ sep/19/louis-ck-shameless-comedy-gold. Andrew Marantz of The New Yorker, too, plumbs Louis CK’s psychical motivations in “Louie CK’s Motivating Anxiety,” February 7, 2014, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/ culture-desk/louis-c-k-s-motivating-anxiety, concluding that “And this is C.K.’s motivating anxiety—the most conventional of anxieties, but no less powerful for being a cliché: his desire to be recognized, despite a thin C.V., as an artist.” But unlike critiques of Wanda Sykes (who also has some justifiable anger) critics love Louis C.K. and, assuming from the start that he is funny, work to discern how that comedy is produced. For example, Brian Logan locates the Louis C.K.’s comedy in its combination of sadness, celebration, and its encounter with “real, unmediated life.” “The script wouldn’t read much like comedy. There are few jokes. It’s all about CK’s attitude. Look at his snort of amusement at the sensation of onrushing dread. ‘Oh no, here it comes’—laugh—‘I’m alone.’ It’s exciting enough to watch someone use a chat show to talk about the hollowness of existence—the very thing (you might say) that chat shows are poorly designed to obscure. See how uncomfortable O’Brien looks, and how relieved he is to return to his glib comfort zone in the Bruce Springsteen bit. It’s more exciting—provocative, odd, freeing—to see CK laugh at sadness, not in denial of how bad it feels, but in celebration of the fact that it’s part of real, unmediated life.” “Louis CK Exposes the Existential dread of Mobile Phones—Brilliantly,” The Guardian, April 4, 2014, accessed October 23, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/apr/04/louis-ck-existential-dreadmobile-phones-brian-logan-open-mic. 14 Ellen DeGeneres, Ellen DeGeneres: Here and Now, stand-up special, (HBO: Beacon Theater, New York, NY, June 25, 2003). Only John Limon really analyzes DeGeneres’s method, comparing her stand-up monologues to those of Lennie Bruce in “Spritzing, Skirting: Standup Talk Strategies,” in Talk, Talk, Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation, ed. S. I. Salamensky (New York: Routledge): 105–18. 15 Rachel Lubitz describes Schumer’s trajectory: “During her seemingly painless rise to fame, Schumer created her own brand of comedy that’s equal parts vulgar and cheery with a core audience in mind. Her stand-up often veers to the taboo—think jokes about circumcision and being blackout drunk—but everything is delivered with a touch of irony and aloofness from someone who has described herself as being sweet-looking and ‘a little Cabbage Patch-y up top’.” “Amy Schumer Strives to do Comedic Justice to the Female Experience.” The Washington Post, March 6,

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2004, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ amy-schumer-strives-to-do-comedic-justice-to-the-female-experience/2014/03/06/ ba0026ee-a087-11e3-9ba6-800d1192d08b_story.html. Oddly, most of the material published on Schumer is biographical, describing her success as a comic without saying much about her comedy except that it appeals to “girls.” Leo Benedictus does note her “double punchline” method or tendency to undermine one punch line by adding another one that shifts the meaning of the first. “Comedy Gold: Amy Schumer’s Mostly Sex Stuff,” The Guardian, September 20, 2013, accessed October 23, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/sep/20/comedy-gold-amy-schumermostly-sex-stuff.

Bit XI 1 Silverman’s comedy exceeds comedy, torquing it in a möbius way to reveal some of what undergirds it, which arguably renders her comedy more profoundly multidimensional, whatever that means—it exposes what hovers as comedy’s necessary appurtenance, not the tragic, but the unpleasant motives of petty humanity. As she said in an interview following her speech at the Democratic Convention on July 26, 2016, “When you’re a comic and you do material that you mean in one way and people take it in another—like years ago, I would do a lot of racial stuff, and I meant it in a very bleeding-heart liberal way, ultimately. By being the idiot. There were people who would take that literally, and we would call those mouth-full-of-blood laughs. They’re the laughs you don’t want. And those people cheering for Bernie when he came out—the whole place was so inspired, the whole room was amazing. But that little section of quote-unquote Bernie Bros or whatever, it’s the fans you don’t want. The fundamentalists of any group, including fans of Bernie or fans of Hillary or fans of anyone are a bummer. So that’s just a given. It’s not that big a deal.” In Dave Itzkoff, “Sarah Silverman on Bernie or Bust, and the Joke She Didn’t Tell,” New York Times, July 26, 2016, accessed September 13, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/ arts/television/sarah-silverman-bernie-or-bust-democratic-national-conventionhillary-clinton.html. 2 Like Silverman’s, Saget’s performance rests upon something inherent to, but often occluded by comedy. As he confesses in an interview about this routine, “‘My justification is that I find stuff that is horrific funny,’ he said. ‘I find things that are terrible - terrible, terrible, terrible - hilarious, because how could people be so horrible? It’s my defense. I could sit around crying all day. I’m a very sensitive person.’” George Gurley, “Bob Saget’s Full Mouth,” The Observer, May 9, 2005, accessed October 23, 2016, http://observer.com/2005/05/bob-sagets-full-mouth/.

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Bit XII 1 Nina Wilder, “Why the Intersection of Comedy and Politics Matters,” The Duke Chronicle, October 26, 2016, accessed March 6, 2017, http://www.dukechronicle. com/article/2016/10/comedy-and-politics. 2 Ibid. 3 For example, in Presence and Resistance: Postmodern and Cultural Politics in Contemporary Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), Philip Auslander surveys the relations between comic performance and politics in the 1980s and 1990s. For additional contemporary commentary, see Jonathan Gray and Jeffrey Jones, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (New York: NYU Press, 2009), S. Robert Lichter, Jody Baumgartner, and Jonathan S. Morris, Politics Is a Joke!: How TV Comedians Are Remaking Political Life (Westview Press, 2014); and S. McClennen and R. Maisel, Is Satire Saving Our Nation?: Mockery and American Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 4 “Wanda Sykes ‘Rush Limbaugh, 20th Highjacker (sic).’” YouTube video, May 9, 2009, accessed October 3, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RJLli-3Lzk 5 “Classroom Cold Open,” December 9, 2016 “Top 5 Donald Trump SNL Skits,” YouTube video, December 9, 2016, accessed March 26, 2017, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=nUxwknwK1bc 6 “Sean Spicer Press Conference (Melissa McCarthy)-SNL,” YouTube video, February 5, 2017, accessed March 23, 2017, youtube.com/watch?v=UWuc18xISwI.

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Index Abdul-Jabar, Kareem 126 A Bit of Fry and Laurie 52–4, 58, 63–7, 87–9, 111–12, 192 n.6 Abrahams, Jim 116 Absolutely Fabulous 129–34, 211 n.5 Ackroyd, Dan 57 Affleck, Ben 29–30 Airplane! 116, 126–7 Allen, Gracie 107–8 Allen, Steve 108 America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFV) 9–10 Ames, Ed 41–3 apparatus 3, 23–5, 92, 122, 165, 169, 172, 187 n.25; psychic apparatus 15, 31 Aristocrats, The 165–8 Aristophanes 5, 169 Aristotle 8, 13, 22, 34, 39–40, 48, 82, 89, 93; Poetics 7, 39, 75, 95, 183 n.7 Arnett, Will 135 Arrested Development 109, 134–41, 211 n.7 Arsenio Hall Show, The 109 aside 8, 11–14, 19–20, 25, 27, 29, 34, 41–2, 49–50, 98, 100–2 audience 2–3, 6, 9–12, 17, 24, 33, 41–3, 48–50, 78, 80, 83, 93–4, 96–102, 106, 134, 141, 143–7, 152–7, 162–3, 167, 169, 174–5, 186 n.13, 198 n.3, 199 n.5, 200 n.12, 206 n.8 211 n.5, 213 n.8, 216 n.13 Auslander, Philip 2, 7, 181 n.1, 184 n.8 Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery 116, 126–7 Badiou, Alain 17–18, 28 Baker, Benny 99 Baldwin, Alec 81, 176 Bateman, Jason 135 Baudry, Jean-Louis 23–4

Beckett, Samuel: Endgame 1, 12, 20–3, 117, 143, 182 n.4; Watt 21, 23 Belafonte, Harry 78 Benaderet, Bea 107 Benny, Jack 77, 100–4; 115; Jack Benny Program, The 100–2, 114 Ben-Porat, Ziva 209 n.6 Berger, Peter 8 Bergson, Henri 70, 124, 128, 182 n.4, 185 n.11; Laughter 8–15, 19–20, 22, 27, 32–4, 39, 49, 57, 75, 118, 143, 165, 183 n.7, 194 n.6 Beyond the Fringe 109 Bianco, Christine 92–3 Big Bang Theory, The 50–1, 53–4, 58, 69–70, 73–4, 191–2 n.4 Black, Lewis 54–5, 144–52, 154, 156, 213 n.7, 215 n.13; Old Yeller 145–52 161; Stark Raving Black 54–5, 144 blackface 77, 122, 198 n.3 Blazing Saddles 116, 123–4, 127, 210 n.8 Böhn, Andreas 194 n.6 Bridges, Lloyd 126 Brooks, Mel 116, 123, 127, 190 n.5, 210 n.8 Brooks, Peter 128 Burke, Kenneth 201 n.8 Burnett, Carol 70, 100, 105–6, 108; Carol Burnett Show, The 70–4, 105–6 Burns, George 107–9, 115; George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The 107–8, 114 Caliendo, Frank 92 camp 211 n.5 caricature 26–8, 36, 44–5, 47, 49, 52, 63, 66, 75–87, 89–93, 96–100, 104–6, 111–12, 115, 119–22, 125–7, 134, 141, 154, 156–61, 166, 169–70, 176, 194–5 n.6, 196–7 n.1, 197–8 n.3, 200–1 n.12, 202 n.18, 204 n.6

Index Carlin, George 16, 166 Carson, Johnny 41–3, 82, 95, 100, 103–4, 189–90 n.5, 204 n.6 Carvey, Dana 30, 75, 77, 82–4, 86, 97–8, 100, 204 n.6 catch-phrase 30, 57–8, 65–6, 68, 73, 75–6, 78, 84–5, 89–90, 92, 97, 112, 117, 120, 153, 156, 161, 195, n.6 Cera, Michael 135 Chaplin, Charlie 9 Chappelle, Dave 77, 90–2, 97, 109, 111–13, 146, 203 n.21, 207 n.10; Chappelle’s Show 91–2, 111–14, 207 n.10 class 20, 32, 61–2, 66–7, 79, 84, 90–1, 119–20, 153, 165, 195 n.6, 203 n.21, 214 n.12 Clinton, Hillary 83 Coleman, Larry 214 n.11 compulsion 67–8, 160 condensation 14–15, 48–9, 57, 74, 76–7, 83, 90, 96, 117 Conway, Kellyanne 176 Conway, Tim 70, 105–6 Cosby, Bill 16 Cosgrove, Vincent 192 n.6 Critchley, Simon 8, 16, 184–5 n.11 Cross, David 135 Curtain, Michael 211 n.5 cut 1, 18–20, 25, 27–8, 31–2, 43–5, 47, 51–5, 57–8, 63, 66–7, 70, 74–5, 76, 81–2, 87, 89–90, 92, 95–7, 100, 102, 104–6, 110–1, 113, 115, 119–20, 122, 128, 133, 144, 146–8, 150, 153–4, 166–7, 170, 172, 174–5, 186 n.13, 187 n.29, 194 n.6, 204 n.6, 209 n.6 Cutler, Aaron 214 n.12 Dacosta, Kimberly 201 n.12 Damon, Matt 25–31, 39–40, 43, 47, 51, 57–8 DeGeneres, Ellen 144, 146, 161–3; Here and Now 144, 161–2; Ellen 93 de Rossi, Portia 135 Desrochers, Rick 7 disability 195 n.6 disavowal 10–11, 13–14, 20, 96, 141, 143, 146

227

Dolan, Jill 199 n.9 double entendre 14–16, 27, 53, 64–5, 73 drag 79–81, 200 n.12 Ed Sullivan Show, The 107 Eliot, T.S. 106; Hollow Man, The 106 feedback 2, 6, 23, 36 fetish 14, 24, 96, 203 n.1; fetishism 24, 96 Fey, Tina 83–4 Flieger, Jerry Aline 15 Ford, Harrison 30 framing 10–11, 36, 44–5, 58, 64–5, 91, 94, 105–15, 123, 130, 134, 141, 161–2, 170, 174, 177–8, 195 n.6 French, Dawn 119–23, 202 n.19 French & Saunders 119–22, 209 n.6 Freud, Sigmund 7, 15, 20, 23, 48–9, 51–2, 76, 119, 183 n.7, 184 n.10, 186 n.17, 191 nn.2–3, 197 n.1, 203 n.1; Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious 6, 14, 48–9, 118–19, 183 n.7, 184 n.10, 186 n.17, 191 nn.2–3; Uncanny, The 75, 81 Fry, Stephen 52–4, 64–5, 85–8, 90, 111–12 Frye, Northrup 4 Galecki, Johnny 50 gender 5, 195 n.6, 205 n.6 genre 1, 3–4, 23, 36, 47, 51, 53, 63, 108, 123–4, 126–7, 130, 174, 182 n.4, 183 n.5, 196 n.6, 209 n.6 Gentlemen Prefer Blonds 101–2 Gilliam, Terry 59 Gone With the Wind 71–4, 119–20, 122 Gottfried, Gilbert 166 Graves, Peter 126 Guerrero, Lisa 202–3 n.21, 207 n.10 Hackett, Buddy 77 Hale, Tony 135 Helberg, Simon 50 High Anxiety 127 Hitchcock, Alfred 127 Hitchens, Christopher 215 n.12 homophobia 30, 66, 85, 153 homosexual 149, 157, 159, 161

228

Index

Howard, Ron 134 Hutcheon, Linda 208 n.3 hyperbole 75, 85, 89, 91, 126–7, 131, 150–1, 158 hypobole 91 identity politics 84, 195 n.6, 202 n.18, 207 n.8 imitation 75–6, 81–3, 89, 92–4, 129, 155, 160, 204 n.6 impersonation 32, 47, 76–8, 80–1, 84, 92–3, 154–6, 170, 204 n.6 impression 76, 92–4, 145 improvisation 25–9, 39–43, 47, 78, 143–5 interpretation 76, 81–2, 86, 89, 92–3, 119, 121, 176, 201 n.12 irony 19, 44, 63, 67–8, 82, 84–7, 89–92, 96, 111, 122, 128, 130, 132, 134–5, 141, 183 n.5, 199 n.5, 208 n.3, 216 n.15; dramatic irony 63 Jackass 9 Jackson, Michael 80, 152 James, Rick 111–4 Jenkins, Jeffrey 213 n.7 Johnson, Arte 57 Kahn, Madeline 123 Kant, Immanuel 7 Kierkegaard, Sören 7 Kimmel, Jimmy 25–9, 31, 35, 39, 43, 57–8; I’m F*cking Ben Affleck 29–30; Jimmy Kimmel Live! 25–6, 31, 109 Kincaid, James 22, 182 n.4 Korman, Harvey 70, 105–6, 123 Kroll, Nick 77, 109, 114–15, 207 n.12; Kroll Show 114–15, 207 n.12 Lacan, Jacques 23, 28, 31, 187 n.29 Late Night with Conan O’Brien 109 Late Night with David Letterman 109 Late Show with David Letterman 109 laughter 2, 3, 7–9, 11, 14, 21–3, 25–6, 33–5, 41–2, 48, 59, 69–70, 90, 104–6, 118, 146, 153, 163, 173, 182 n.4, 184–5 n.11, 186 n.13, 189 n.4, 190 n.5, 192 n.6, 194 n.6, 205 n.6, 212 n.7, 214 n.12, 216 n.13, 217 n.1

Laurie, Hugh 52–4, 64–5, 85–8, 90, 111–12 Lawrence, Vicki 70, 105 layering 10–11, 23–4, 31, 36, 40, 43, 45, 58–9, 61, 63–5, 69–70, 72–4, 76, 79–81, 83–90, 92, 95–106, 112, 115, 118–20, 122–4, 127–8, 132–4, 143, 145–52, 154, 163, 209 n.6 Lee, Spike 201 n.12 Leno, Jay 157; Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The 157 Liberace 108 Life of Brian 43–5 Limbaugh, Rush 146, 156, 173–4, 215 n.12 Limon, John 7, 182 n.4, 186 n.13 Little Britain 58, 63, 66–8, 84–5, 89–90, 109, 194–6 n.6, 202 n.18 Little, Cleavon 123, 210 n.8 Little, Rich 92 Lott, Eric 198 nn.3–5, 201 n.12, 214 n.11 Louie 110 Louis C.K. 109–11, 144, 146, 158–61, 163, 206 n.8, 215–6 n.13; Chewed Up, 145, 158–60; Lubitz, Rachel 216 n.15 Lucas, Matt 66, 84–5, 97 Lumley, Joanna 130–3 Lyle, Timothy 200 n.12 McCarthy, Melissa 176–8 McKinnon, Kate 176 McMahon, Ed 95, 103–4 Maher, Bill 35 Martin, Dean 108, 151 Metz, Christian 23–4 mise en abyme 2, 11, 24, 43, 52, 54, 58, 107, 110, 123, 165 misrecognition 128, 134–5 Moffat, Alex 176 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 13 Monroe, Marilyn 100–2 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 58–63, 109, 121, 193–4 n.3, 194 n.4 Moynihan, Bobby 177 Murphy, Charlie 111–14 Murphy, Eddie 81, 112–13 Myers, Mike 116

Index Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, The 116, 125–7, 211 n.2 narrative 36, 66–7, 69, 107, 109, 111, 115–16, 120, 122, 126–30, 134–5, 145, 151, 161, 183 nn.5–6, 193 n.3, 206 n.6 nationalism 61, 122 Nayyar, Kunal 50 Nielsen, Leslie 125 Notaro, Tig 93–4, 110 Obama, Barack 81, 146, 156 Obama, Michelle 156 O’Brien, Conan 34–5; Conan 93, 109 ‘other scene’ 11, 23–5, 27, 31, 40, 42, 44, 48–9, 51–2, 58, 64, 74, 76, 85, 88, 90, 92, 98, 102, 126, 165–6, 176, 183 n.7 ouroboros 66, 82, 111, 117, 122, 124–5, 129–30, 145, 151, 158, 161, 166, 178 Paar, Jack 109; Jack Paar Tonight Show, The 109 Palin, Sarah 34–5, 83–4 Parks, Bert 103–4 parody 26, 29, 47, 52, 60, 62–3, 65, 73–4, 77, 87, 101, 111, 113–15, 117, 120–7, 129–31, 133–5, 141, 169–70, 175, 182 n.4, 183 n.5, 194 n.6, 208 n.3, 209 n.6, 211 n.5 Parsons, Jim 50 pastiche 65, 120 patriarchy 172, 200 n.12 Patterson, Robert 200 n.12 payoff 47–8, 52, 59, 73, 94, 115, 127–8, 133–5, 141, 143–6, 149–50, 152–4, 156, 158, 162, 178 penis 151–3, 163, 203 n.1 performance 5, 6, 11, 16, 17, 23–5, 28, 32–3, 35–6, 40, 45, 48–9, 58, 65, 76–7, 79–82, 85–6, 88, 90, 93–4, 96–100, 102, 104, 107–9, 114–16, 119–24, 143, 146–7, 150–2, 158, 161, 163, 165–7, 170, 175, 177–8, 181–2 n.4, 184 n.7, 186 n.13, 191 n.3, 193 n.3, 195 n.6, 203 n. 21, 211 n.5, 213 n.7 Perks, Lisa Glebatis 203 n.21, 207 n.10

229

Perry, Tyler 77, 80–1, 200–1 n.12; Madea Gets a Job 80; Madea Goes to Jail 80; Madea’s Big Happy Family 80; Madea’s Class Reunion 80; Madea’s Family Reunion 80; Madea’s Witness Protection 80; Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas 80; Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Neighbors From Hell 80 phallus 14, 40, 96 philosophers 4, 7, 8, 13, 16, 20, 70, 181, n.3, 182 n.4, 183 n.7 philosophy 3, 9, 185 n.11, 191 n.3, 195 n.6 Pierce, Charles 35 Pitt, Brad 30 Plato 5 Poe, Edgar Allen 37; “The Murders on the Rue Morgue” 37 Poehler, Amy 83 politics 33–5, 41, 55, 59, 62, 83–4, 148, 150–1, 156–7, 169–78, 183 n.5, 194–5 n.6, 196 n.1, 197 n.1, 200–2 n.12, 206 n.6, 207 nn.8, 10, 210 n.8, 215 n.12 Posner, Michael 213 n.7 power 59–60, 68, 172 Presley, Priscilla 125 Provenza, Paul 165 Pryor, Richard 77–8, 92, 144–6, 153–6, 161; Live on the Sunset Strip 77–8, 144–5, 153–6, 198 n.5, 214 n.11; Richard Pryor . . . Here and Now 145 pun 34, 141, 183 n.5, 187 n.29 punch line 106, 156, 166–7, 179, 217 n.15 race 77–80, 122–3, 158–9, 203 n.21, 207 n.10, 217 n.1 racism 77, 85, 113, 123, 154–7, 203 n.21, 206 n.8, 210 n.8 Radner, Gilda 77 recognition 23, 31–2, 36, 89, 104, 154, 156, 185 n.11 Reiser, Paul 16, 166 religion 44–5, 79, 82–3, 155 repetition 2–3, 11, 20, 24, 31, 33–4, 36, 40, 43, 45, 48, 52–4, 57–9, 61, 63, 67–9, 74, 76, 81–2, 85, 89–91, 93, 97, 116, 120, 127, 134–5, 143, 146, 158–9, 169–70, 174–5, 178, 186 n.13, 193 n.3, 194–5 n.6

230

Index

repression 20, 49, 92 retroactive resignification 21, 32, 34, 43, 45, 48, 51, 95–6, 102, 167 retrospection 2–4, 16, 18, 23–4, 28, 31, 42–3, 45, 53–4, 115, 117, 123, 126, 132, 134, 146, 162, 166, 174–6, 178 Rickles, Don 77 risus purus 21, 23 Rock, Chris 16 Rogin, Michael 198 n.3 Rourke, Constance 198 n.3 Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In 57–8, 79, 109 Saget, Bob 168, 217 n.2 satire 30, 52, 60–2, 90, 115, 169, 182 n.4, 183 n.5, 184 n.7, 195 n.6, 207 n.10, 209 n.6, 210 n. 8 Saturday Night Live 57, 81–3, 91, 109, 176–8 Saunders, Jennifer 119–23, 130–3 Sawalha, Julia 130 Scary Movie 127 Schlueter, Jennifer 198 n.3 Schumer, Amy 109–11, 144–6, 162–3, 169, 216 n.15; Inside Amy Schumer 110; Mostly Sex Stuff 144–5, 162–3, 206 n.8 Schuyler, Michael T. 211 n.5 Sedaris, David 144 Seinfeld, Jerry 16, 107, 109–10; Seinfeld 107, 109–10, 116, 205–6 n.6 self-conscious 2–3, 11, 23, 36, 52, 58, 63, 65, 72–3, 79, 85–7, 92, 95–100, 102, 106, 109, 111, 120–1, 124, 127, 132, 134–5, 141, 143, 145–6, 150, 166, 168, 204 n.6, 206 n.6, 211 n.5 self-referential (self-reflexive) 52, 59, 62–3, 65, 73–4, 104, 121, 127, 133–4, 145–6, 150, 191 n.3 series 2–3, 10, 52–4, 57–9, 61–3, 65, 67–9, 74, 93, 109–11, 120, 125, 127, 143–6, 150, 173, 193 n.3, 209 n.6 Serres, Michel 184 n.7 set-up 14, 19, 29, 41–4, 47–8, 51–2, 54–5, 57–9, 61, 63, 66–8, 73–6, 84–90, 94, 96–7, 102–3, 110, 137–8, 133–4, 137, 141, 191 n.3, 201–2 n.12, 208 n.6

sex

13, 78, 84, 114, 143, 151–3, 159, 163; sexuality, 158, 194 n.6, 195 n.6; sexual difference 5; sexual innuendo, 79; sexual typology, 78 sexism 83–5, 113, 156, 215 n.12 Shakespeare, William 4, 11, Hamlet 11–12; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 78 Shawkat, Alia 135 Shore, Dinah 70, 108 Silverman, Sarah 26–30, 166–7, 217 nn.1–2; I’m F*cking Matt Damon 26–30 Simpson, O.J. 126 Sinbad 16 situation comedy 74, 107, 109–10, 116, 128, 120, 130, 132–4, 139, 193 n.3, 209 n.6 Skelton, Red 95, 98–100, 102–4 Smothers Brothers’ Comedy Hour, The 109 social commentary 35, 59, 67, 77, 85, 201 n.12 Spicer, Sean 177–8 stand-up 36, 70, 77–8, 81, 92–3, 97, 100, 107–11, 143–63, 165–9, 181 n.4, 189–90 n.5, 193 n.3, 214 n.11 Stein, Erica 209–10 n.8 stereotype 61, 68, 77, 80–1, 84–5, 89, 122, 195 n.6, 200–1 n.12, 203 n.21, 207 n.10, 214 n.12 Storey, Robert 205 n.6 Stott, Andrew 3, 7, 182–3 n.5 Sykes, Wanda 144–6, 156–8, 161, 173–4; I’ma Be Me 144–5, 156–8, 173–4, 214–15 n.12, 216 n. 13 Sypher, Wylie 22 Tambor, Jeffrey 135 Tate, Catherine 58, 77, 90–1, 97, 202 n.19; Catherine Tate Show, The 63, 90–1 That Was the Week That Was 108 Thompson, Kenan 176 timing 17, 19, 21, 26, 32–3, 36, 42–3, 48, 102, 104, 115–16, 127–8, 144, 150–1, 166, 169–70, 172–5, 186 n.13, 191 n.3 Tomlin, Lily 57, 79–80, 199 n.9; Happy Birthday Elizabeth: A Celebration 79–80

Index Tonight Show, The 167 Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The 41, 82, 95, 103–4, 107 Trump, Donald 81, 175–8 Tynan, Kenneth 189–90 n.5 uncanny 44, 64, 76–8, 80–4, 89–4, 96, 146, 154, 157, 204 n.6, 205 n.6 unconscious 1, 3, 13–15, 20, 25, 36, 49, 51, 82, 187 n.29 unrepression 15, 52 Voss, Erik 207 n.12 voyeurism 20, 24

West, Mae 77 Whelan, Jill 126 White, Ron 144–6, 151–3, 213 n.8; A Little Unprofessional 145; You Can’t Fix Stupid 144, 151–3 Wickham, Phil 196 n.6 Wiig, Kristen 91–2, 97–8 Wilder, Gene 123 Wilder, Nina 169 Wilson, Flip 78–80, 108, 199 nn.7–8; Flip Wilson Show, The 78–9 Winfrey, Oprah 201 n.12 Winters, Jonathan 190 n.5 Young Frankenstein 116

Walliams, David 66, 77, 84–5, 90, 97 Walsh, Joan 215 n.12 Walter, Jessica 135

231

Zucker, David 116 Zucker, Jerry 116