Tomorrow I have to go into New York for two days; it will be my mission there to go see this Sarah Silverman concert film. partly for an ulterior motive–I am a sucker for sexy semites with a slight overbite. but also because of all the raves I’ve heard from all of you concerning her part in The Aristocrats, and because I just heard a good interview with her on NPR. of course I will also feel like a fool paying $10.50 for a 75 minutes film of a stage show. but the chances of ever having an opportunity to see it here in the lehigh valley are about as good as pennsylvanians giving up scrapple and deep fried pork bits. i’m not saying pennsylvanians are fat….but when they sit around the movie house…
by the way, i believe john and mike might have been in the car with me and Pete (in Pete’s old volvo), on our way to the “good luck” bar, when a woman who I believe was Sarah Silverman pulled up beside us to tell us that she too was from Nashua NH (she saw it on the license plate)…even though I recognized her, I stared blankly and missed my opportunity to invite her along, knowing that probably in her secret heart she wished to spend the night with a bunch of English graduate students from USC. instead, i believe the evening ended with the “little New Yorker” at Cantor’s , served by a matronly Helga in white shoes, and then a morning of nightmare-ravaged sleep. ah, the days when we towered over the LA entertainment scene and made or broke careers with a mere glance….or at least the days when we had a regular table at Musso and Frank’s and every agent in town solicited our opinions…or at least when we dominated the Taco Bell on Figueroa and the homeless begged us for nickels and dimes….or maybe it was Norm’s and just that one guy who smelled….
Damn, I don’t recall this encounter. Ships passing in the night? Or passed out in Ships?
It’ll be interesting to hear your take on JESUS IS MAGIC, Michael, especially in light of A.O. Scott’s (negative but not mean-spritied) review in the NY Times. I wonder who’s more predicatble, Sarah Silverman or her critics. Take this line from Scott:
“What Bruce did with obscenity and Mr. Pryor – especially in his first concert film – did with race was to find the outer boundary of the audience’s tolerance and push beyond it, confronting and confusing the satisfied self-image of the liberal, sophisticated public. This kind of transgression has long since become ritualized and normalized, and Ms. Silverman’s act is the latest evidence that mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right.”
Ho-hum.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/movies/11magi.html
oops. scott’s objections sound very much like the ones i voiced in that other discussion.
for some reason the search function doesn’t seem to work for comments. i am referring to the discussion down at the bottom here.
What I most disliked about Scott’s review was how he ignored the central revelation: Jesus IS magic.
I see Scott’s point, but preferred Arnab’s version of it, which sounded less dismissive. But I’m kind of in the ho-hum camp, too. I gave a paper on political comedy this last weekend. Went fourth on the panel–which was reasonably good–after three papers more seriously describing ways that various American fictions tied into and helped shape various significant, power-laden, restrictive ideologies. My own claim was that certain comic approaches to politics ‘free up’ readerly attention in some interesting ways–no grandiose optimism, but not gloomy “spot the hegemony” shit, either. I got asked–and then repeatedly pushed by the audience–to defend the pragmatic effects of comedy. Comedy–and I know none of you, except the humorless Mauer, need reminding–is easily and often dismissed.
okay, i read scott’s review. i can’t say if it applies to silverman’s movie since i have not seen it but it describes far more articulately than i could the sense of ho-hum many such comics make me feel…well, basically what i said earlier:
mike, your points about not just the subversive potential of comedy but the different ways in which comedy subverts, as opposed to more worthy political action, are good ones, and you know i’d largely agree. but i think what needs to be factored in is the question of audience. scott may be a killjoy but i think he is conscious of the fact that you can’t talk about these things without noting the place of its address. this is beginning to sound like the discussion of crash.
from the review:
The tradition she wants to join is that of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, and in some ways she faces greater challenges than they did. Not just because she is a woman in a profession defined and dominated by men, but also because it is not as easy as it used to be to separate the hip from the square. What Bruce did with obscenity and Mr. Pryor – especially in his first concert film – did with race was to find the outer boundary of the audience’s tolerance and push beyond it, confronting and confusing the satisfied self-image of the liberal, sophisticated public.
This kind of transgression has long since become ritualized and normalized, and Ms. Silverman’s act is the latest evidence that mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right. Her version of insult humor is actually flattering, both to herself and to those who find it funny. She depends on the assumption that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist joke, the telling of which thus becomes a way of making fun simultaneously of racism and of racial hyper-sensitivity. (Like many young, otherwise deracinated Jewish comedians, Ms. Silverman falls back on her ethnic identity as a way of claiming ready-made outsider status.)
well, I’ll let you know what I think after I see the movie this afternoon. but I do find things in this review puzzling–most notably the idea that comedy somehow must be “edgy” at all times and must always pay homage to the gods of richard pryor and lenny bruce. as i mentioned in another post, i am interested in the idea of “shtick” and it seems to me that lenny bruce and pryor in his own way never entirely left the “traditions” of comedy. instead of evaluating silverman in terms of her inability to live up to this now sanctified and mystified tradition of “edgy” comedy, why not actually evaluate the comedy—say, in terms of “did it make you laugh?” I also wonder a bit about the dismissiveness of so much “aggressive” or “offensive” comedy—another reason for its prevalence might be the actual fact that people under the current circumstances of society are actually really traumatized and make jokes aboutit for the classic reason of releasing and managing their anger–maybe for all I know silverman was raped, and by making the experience into a new kind of “shtick” actually taps into the genuine tradition of outsider-comedy developed most notably by jews–rather than cynically buying a “ready made” outsider stance. does scott recognize the irony and contradiction of evaluating a comedian by her allegiance to “the tradition” of pryor and bruce, while then condemning her for not really being an edgy outsider?
I wonder if it’s worth pointing out that Lenny Bruce wanted very much for people to be hip. That is, hip to language, to race, to politics and religion, etc. If his audiences were (at least initially) uncomfortable when he did his “How to Relax Colored People at Parties” or “Thank You Masked Man” routines, then that makes him a pioneer. But I don’t think Bruce thought that once his audience got hip, he’d no longer be “edgy.” His aim was to make audiences hip–and, for the most part, they are (a little bit). Audiences in comedy clubs no longer expect wife jokes (well, some do). They want the stuff Silverman does. What Lenny Bruce did was change the culture. And now we’re bashing Sarah Silverman because she’s reaping the rewards of Bruce, Pryor, Gregory, and Carlin?
I suppose one might argue that Silverman and others should continue to “push the envelope,” and I think Lenny would have wanted that. But I’m not sure Silverman doesn’t push. Even the hippest of audiences will not survive a Silverman show without at least one moment of mild discomfort (she’s aware of her audiences’ pretense to hipness, and exploits that. Her narratives often take wild, unexpected turns). And that’s tough to pull off, isn’t it? What Bruce and others did was make it hard, very hard, for contemporary comics to “unsettle.” And those who try are held to a higher standard than those who don’t, which I think is fair. What’s not fair are the criticisms of Scott and the like.
Silverman can get a laugh when she says “Jew” and “I was raped” because audiences can handle these concepts; they’re hip now. So she’s not edgy, she’s the new political correctness. Really? Isn’t that as dangerous as saying that we’re beyond racism (and therefore we don’t need affirmative action anymore)?
In fact, at one point, in the film does something like the following: “You know who has a small vagina?…Barbie. Not Klaus Barbie, the infamous Nazi…you know, Nazi’s are assholes. Yeah I can say it–I’m edgy!…But they’re so cute when they’re small…” Silverman pokes fun continually at the idea of the necessity of a comedian’s being “edgy.”
When I read most critics I can’t help wondering why each and every one of us here doesn’t have a high paying job as a movie critic–since what is said here is generally far better than what I read in the press. For instance, check out (on rottentomatoes.com)the lazy and dumb review by Roger Ebert (though I must agree with him that the film is badly edited and amatuerishly directed). The critics of Silverman’s film seem to fall into two rather obtuse camps: the first believes she is the second coming of Lenny Bruce and fall all over themselves, with a desperate desire to be in the “hip” crowd, to praise her act as transgressive, edgy, profane and “taboo-shattering.” The second groups condemns her for the same reasons. Perhaps a third camp should be added–someone like Scott who believes she is attempting to be edgy but fails to match the Great Tradition of confrontational comedy.
Well, all three of these positions seems to miss the point–that Silverman is playing a character, putting on a persona who combines, as she says in an interview, “arrogance” with “ignorance.” Her character achieves two contradictory goals–demonstrating that those who are self-aware enough to attempt, however awkwardly, their racist inclinations nevertheless fall into a more insidious racism AND that the topic of racism permits many people a self-importance/righteousness that is less about racism and more about ego. Silverman’s character indulges in both. What’s impressive about her comedy (as well as funny!) is that she reveals the current dilemma of so-called transgressive comedy—that you can’t achieve it easily (as John insightfully notes) in a society that has been considerably “wised up” and that, when using its language and invoking its “tradition,” you can’t help but run up against its counterpart (the smug anti-racism which conceals a deeper new form of racism—the fact that the continual deployment of the category of “race” itself maintains the fiction of biological differences at the expense of historical/social differences).
A similar thing happens with the joke about 911—Silverman says that American Airlines should look on the bright side, and start saying of themselves “First through the towers,” in order to emphasize that something good came out of the tragedy. further, she finds 911 devastating because it happened on the same day that she discovered her soy latte’s had 900 calories.”And I had been drinking them EVERY DAY!” what strikes me as interesting about these jokes is the implicit criticism of the piety that surrounds an event like 911–everyone wrings their hands, no matter how distant from the actual tragedy they are–in short, they use the event (just like their vigorous anti-racism) as self–aggrandizement.
unfortunately it is a fact of life that one is unable to grieve for every tragedy. if one did, there would be no end to it. hence, we are selfish and egocentric and use our condemnations of racism and weeping at 911 to make us feel less the heartlessness that to some extent is necessary in maintaining any kind of sanity. And for those who do feel the tragedy–and I’m not in any way saying that people do not feel compassion for victims or become upset by such events–they more often do so by silent grief rather than public performance. The remarkable public performance of outraged piety that surrounds 911 conceals two things: that we have a long history of violence and to pretend that an attack is such an unprecedented event is disingenuous at best; and second the more the event is used ‘symbolically’ the less its reality is perceived. Hence, the ‘war on terror’ becomes an all-encompassing phrase, never precise and never clear about its aims.
I think Silverman is trying to do a new kind of “shtick”–with the implications of using a formula and meeting expectations that this word brings with it. The new shtick of comedy must necessarily make use of the “transgressive” tradition since it has been enshrined as the measure of good comedy. But her shtick has a double edge: by returning to some degree to the kind of insult/ethnic comedy performed by people like Don Rickles (whom nobody identifies with the “hip” tradition of Bruce et al.–though we could say that he, too, holds stereotypes up to examination by continually performing them)she pays homage to a tradition too easily labelled reactionary, and by also simultaneously invoking and denying the current importance of ‘edgy’ comedy she demonstrates that the current tradition shouldn’t be so self-congratulatory about its tansgressiveness because contemporary comics can’t escape the current condition that they must PERFORM transgression rather than achieve it.
Silverman says she wants to bring down Martin Luther King Jr.–be the first comedian to really rip into him–after all he wasn’t such a great guy, he “would fart in the car with the windows rolled up, and laugh.” does that seem like a comedian striving to be deemed “edgy” by A.O. Scott or rather like someone who revels in being puerile for the sake of bringing down humorless sacred cows. in the stifling air of piety that surrounds figures like MLK–and undercuts their power–it’s more refreshing to acknowledge that he, too, had an asshole like everyone else….the current fling with “diversity” seems to have a weird homogenizing effect and the paradox is part of silverman’s act.
and did I mention that she’s hot?
john, that’s a strange analogy. the point i think is not that we’re beyond racism but that racism is a lot harder to trouble now. scott is suggesting that when audiences laugh at jokes like this what they’re really laughing at is the idea that someone might actually mean it. sure, it isn’t silverman, or any other similar comic’s, fault that she operates in a time when transgression itself has become commodified, but i think this commodification nonetheless is a bigger problem for someone like her now than it was for pryor or bruce or whoever. from michael’s description it sounds like her comedy is aware of this and strains against it–trying to find a place where even her hip audience won’t follow her. the dilemma, of course, is that transgression itself can get stripped of content. john waters deals with this in cecil b. demented: how can you shock anyone anymore when the shocking has become normal? perhaps there’s no way out of it except to constantly demonstrate the contradiction. or maybe silverman needs her own tony clifton.
but michael’s critique of the film itself doesn’t seem that different from what scott says, other than the fact that michael dwells on the fact that she is funny, whereas scott is merely dismissive. (of course, michael’s stuff about comedy itself is better than anything in scott.) the comparisons to bruce/pryor are interesting upto a point but i agree that he gets too hung up on it–we might ask though if there is something to the fact that bruce and pryor were transgressive off the stage as well as on it. at the same time i don’t think scott’s critique should be so easily dismissed either.
i’m looking forward to seeing this for myself–though i don’t know if it will even come here.
I’m not sure Scott is saying that what audiences are “really laughing at is the idea that someone might actually mean it.” What Scott says is: “She depends on the assumption that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist joke” and “she’s playing it safe.”
well, that intentionalist stuff is what weakens scott’s argument, but i’m not sure it isn’t there in michael’s more sympathetic review as well.
>When I read most critics I can’t help wondering why each >and every one of us here doesn’t have a high paying job as >a movie critic–since what is said here is generally far >better than what I read in the press.
My line, perhaps not that original, of feeling like I was on the march with the penguins from August 11th, appeared in Philadelphia Weekly last week. Why don’t I have the lucrative PW contract?
If you guys had taken me in my car the night you saw Sarah Silverman, she and I could have had a long conversation about how we both had one degree of separation from Adam Sandler, and we’d have been best friends. She wouldn’t be dating that Jimmy Kimmel character. And yes, Michael, she’s hot.
Nikki–I feel that I missed a major moment there–I believe that the night we encountered Sarah Silverman was a “boy’s night out” from what little remains of my memory. I may have been the only one to recognize her, because at the time I watched little besides Comedy Central.
here’s a scenario: you’d be still dating that Mike O’Malley guy who has a popular sitcom (now in syndication) and I’d be hooked up with Sarah Silverman and we’d be mingling in the hot spots of LA,uncaringly dropping wads of cash at Hollywood Park and developing “pilots” that never get “picked up” but that nevertheless pay us huge amounts of cash. I’d hope we’d still encounter Pete–he could be part of the entourage, the group of witty English expatriates that would make us feel part of an Evelyn Waugh novel. I’d buy my own endowed chair at USC and have some of the assholes kicked out. Jimmy Kimmel would still be sweeping up spit at Hank’s, and I’d get my own talk show, revolutionizing TV in its glittering combination of Adorno-esque ideological critique, show business schmaltz a la Joe Franklin or Sammy Maudlin and hard-hitting Edward R. Murrow muckraking. I’d buy each of my friend’s a gold cadillac, as long as they laughed at my jokes and never told me that I was taking too much xanax. and i’d tell sarah not to worry so much about her semite hirsuteness, as I kinda like it….
That’s a great scenario, Michael, except I’d rather chew off my own left arm than still be dating Mike O’Malley. It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
One can never take too much Xanax.
Nikki, you dated Michael O’Malley??? Didn’t you, in the Writing Center lounge, call him an asshole to his face? (You became my hero then).
Thank you, Frisoli, for putting an eloquent voice to what I too love about Sarah Silverman.
Who is “Li’l Pony” and what happened to the t, the second t, and the e?
my pleasure “Li’l” and say hello to jonie v.
xanax is nice with a bourbon chaser. and you may have taken too much xanax if you wake up in tijuana without a kidney.
when I say “Michael O’Malley” I mean the guy who’s on the sitcom “Yes Dear” not the writing program jackass suck-up from USC–dear lord, give Nikki some credit!
Dear Jeff, Li’l Pony is a big fan of weliketowatch and I simply move too fast for the t, the t, and the e to keep up.
Why can’t Jonie V right on this blog, arnab?
whoever all these people are, they can all comment. only the chosen can make new posts. that reminds me, i need to set gio up–though perhaps we should make her prove herself through comments first? i mean, she did refuse to repudiate the italian national team’s style of play.
And we haven’t heard from her since–though I’m all for Gio.
kiss my ass arnab.
thanks john.
gio, how can you expect us to let you become a member of the blog when you comment so wastefully? you could have invited me to kiss your ass and thanked john in one comment–instead you made two. a dreadful use of server resources.
I
disagree.
silverman interviewed by the onion’s a.v club.
i think even frisoli will be given pause by her implied endorsement of colin quinn.
c’mon Arnab–she’s just protecting an old buddy, even if he’s a rather lame comedian…like when I told Jim that he should reconsider throwing you out of grad school, or when I told that store manager that John did NOT in fact have a live lobster down his trousers, merely that he had a grotesque swelling of the genitals. that’s what friends do.
yeah, yeah, but have you heard colin quinn on race? that show of his on comedy central used to send my blood pressure through the roof. maybe silverman herself doesn’t know where the line between people like andrew dice clay (and clay acolytes like quinn) and people like herself is.
Watched this last night, and while, in theory, I buy all of Frisoli’s comments; in reality, I thought the film was boring and facile (and it looked like a cheap HBO special). To echo Arnab from post #4 in this thread: ho hum. I guess I’m also in A. O. Scott’s camp on this one as well. I laughed (but not like I expected) but never really felt uncomfortable with the material. I did, however, feel superior to the material, because institutional racism is still endemic in this country. When one out of four black men will end up in jail, how far has this nation really traveled? What was most intriguing to me was the fact that Silverman unleashed her biggest jokes on black American identity. Sure there are the jew jokes and a few gay jokes and a couple of “chink” jokes, but mostly Silverman unloads on black America. Now Frisoli has argued:
I will argue that Frisoli is smarter than Silverman (and probably sexier but I’ve never dug J.A.P.s be they real or performative).
thank you Jeff.
first, my comments are 5 cents/word–paypal accepted.
second, remember, she’s doing a character…does this affect your reading at all?
third, yes, the film looks like crap. who “directed” and “edited” it?
fourth, I dig her.
fifth, yes, I am sexier than her.
I don’t understand by what standard Silverman is being judged. Some of her stuff is just very funny. Blaming her for the hipster crowd’s take on race is like blaming Tarantino for fanboys. As Frisoli says, she is playing a character, one who is bigoted but so in denial that she cannot recognize that bigotry. The humor is largely in the enormously convoluted explanations she comes up with to explain why she is, in fact, not bigoted. When a Mexican woman complains to her about her comment that Mexicans smell, her response is to feel sorry that this woman does not realize that you cannot smell yourself. Her “half-black” boyfriend breaks up with her because of his low self-esteem.
I must say that I don’t understand what the continued existence of institutional racism has to do with how one regards Silverman’s humor, unless one wants to argue that certain material should be off limits, nor Jeff’s bizarre implication that comics should avoid picking on one group and afford equal time to insulting each racial, ethnic, religious and sexual group. Racism towards African Americans is America’s original sin. Of course any treatment of bigotry, whether humorous or not, will focus its attention on race.
who “directed†and “edited†it?
Sadly, it was directed by Liam Lynch who used to have a very funny puppet show on MTV called Sifl & Olly. You can still see clips of the Sifl & Olly show on youtube – It certainly wasn’t ground-breaking stuff technically; in fact it also looked terrible – like this film – but it was very funny. I wish Lynch would return to his puppets.
I’ve not posted about this film, though I saw it in a theater last year, and was disappointed in it. First, much of the material she did was old; if you’re a fan of her comedy, you’ve heard these bits. Second, the music interludes were boring and pointless. Third, her delivery of the jokes wasn’t as sharp as I’ve seen her perform them before. And most importantly for me, part of the fun of her schtick is the way she manipulates audiences. She’s at her best as a guest on Conan O’Brien’s show where she comes out all cute and naive, and immediately the crowd likes her. Over the next 7 minutes, she slowly, carefully unleashes her race jokes, anus-waxing bit, the chinese bit and so on, until the whole audience – mostly from the south and midwest visiting the big city – are stunned. As is even Conan. So much of what I loved about her was the uncomfortableness of those around her.
Watching her do the act in front of a big theater full of people who know exactly what she’s about, and have paid 50 clams to watch her do the bits, well, her kind of humor doesn’t hold up as well there.
chris and michael’s points are well-taken (i am yet to watch the film itself, of course). however, mark sums up my feelings about this sort of comedy:
I think it’s much more complicated than that, Arnab. Mark is pointing out that he enjoys Silverman best when she manipulates audiences, that she’s deadliest when audiences are caught unawares. But Mark is Sarah’s audience as well. When he watches her skewer audiences on Conan, he’s also an audience member, isn’t he? The problem I have with A.O. Scott’s argument is that his notion of “audience” is a bit too homogenous. For Scott, audience is a single-minded “it.”
again, my point is not directly about silverman herself (most of what i’ve seen of her i’ve liked) but about the whole genre of comedy which seems to be about people laughing at the idea that anyone could actually espouse the terrible things the person on stage is saying. there may be formal brilliance but there isn’t much of a social edge. of course, there’s no reason there should be–my annoyance is evoked by responses that suggest that there is.
and i’m not sure if the tarantino-fanboys analogy works. stand-up is far more about a direct connection in a room between the performer and the audience than film is.
but again, as John points out, there are multiple audiences. The vast majority of people who encounter Silverman do it through the medium of film, watching ‘Aristocrats’ and ‘Jesus is Magic.’
As I wrote my graf I was wondering then how she was so good in The Aristocrats, where we can’t see an audience either cringing, or nodding knowlingly.
The answer is that there WAS a second less aware audience that was caught off guard; Joe Franklin.
Joe of course said publicly he was considering bringing a lawsuit against her foor slander, and we kind of knew, watching her in Aristocrats, that someone like Franklin would be completely flabbergasted by her statements.
her bit in the aristocrats is great. but isn’t jesus is magic a concert film? there’s a difference to my mind between watching silverman perform a bit directly to a camera (as in the aristocrats) and watching her (or any other comic) live or on concert film. there’s a reason stand-up is always funnier or unfunnier live.
the silverman fans here seem to be pointing to some sort of transgressive element in her comedy. somehow that doesn’t work for me when it is greeted with thunderous applause rather than uncomfortable silences. at a formal level, sure, the clever ways in which she structures her jokes and punchlines are very pleasurable but if she’s really being transgressive, rather than merely outrageous, shouldn’t more people be uncomfortable? this is why i agree with mark that her comedy loses bite when it is placed in the context of adoring fans. (i’m referring to the stuff about race etc..) not because the jokes are different but because it comes across differently when everyone around you is laughing their heads off at everything as opposed to shuffling their feet and not knowing whether they should laugh at a particular bit or not.
this is exactly why her bit in the aristocrats is so excellent. she takes the rationale of the film–a series of baroque performances of a joke–and turns it into awkward confessional, turns it inside out. a deviant like mark laughs mostly at the befuddled joe franklin, but everyone else, including people like me who had no idea who joe franklin is, suddenly gets moved into another realm–one where we remember that this joke is about (child) rape and violence. she messes with us not just because she messes with the form of the joke, but because she changes the frame. the audience is as much the punchline of that joke as joe franklin is.
i would assume that the edge of the bit about the woman who feels sorry for the mexican woman who cannot smell herself (for example) lies in the fact that the character she is performing is deviating from the accepted script of race-talk and in her “naivete” is exposing some truth that the pieties of race-talk hide. i think for a stand-up whether this is transgressive or just outrageous depends largely on the audience. (someone please make the connection for me between silverman and borat on the ali g show.)
again, like i keep saying, for all i know , silverman’s comedy may force audiences off-balance not just at a formal but at a content-level as well–i’m really taking out on her my years old annoyance at a bunch of smug comics i once watched perform in los feliz.
Depending on the audience to legitimate or to de-transgressivize (ahem) a comic and her bits (ahem) strikes me as terribly confusing and reductive, an attempt to nail a frame down rather than the ‘content’ inside the joke.
Ye olde criticisms of comedy would say: you can’t joke about X; X is always unfunny. Like the Holocaust, or me. But the new “edgy” criticism says–oh, hey, sure, we can joke about anything. But who’s we, white man? There’s a terrible anxiety about who’s telling, who’s listening, who’s not “in” or who’s too “in” or… and it all strikes me as the same old shtick attempting to read comedy from a pure evaluative stand-point (is good, is bad) rather than as a complex aesthetic and social performance. So… in other words, I’m calling out the urge to judge Silverman’s act via audience (or any other “bad” edgy comic) as not so distinct from the urge to judge Silverman’s act itself. Same logic, same displacement of comedy as complexity.
(As a thought experiment, imagine saying this about a nice hard serious film. Shoah only works when it has the right audience. Or, even more pertinent and less snide, think about how Schindler’s had that big press about the Oakland school kids who laughed during the film. There was a huge hue and cry from the mainstream press–because you don’t joke about the content. And I seem to recall we gave a huge hue and cry–how dare the audience be judged! Content/texts are open… and this shows the audience’s agency, their unwillingness to be slaves to social codes for reading…. With Silverman, ‘though, we find it easier to align our distrust of her subjects and of her audience.)
But I’m digressing–this is one of my reasonable-sized posts, so I’ll get to the point I’d originally wanted to make, which mainly repeats John’s point about us being in the audience, too. Maybe Silverman’s jokes transgress because they seem to be mocking the naive racist, but in fact, because the jokes reinscribe that hip detachment from racism, they also seem to show that her audience is racist. But, see, we–outside “her audience”–know better, and in fact we can see: Silverman is actually mocking those who mock the naive racist, as being actually themselves complex racists.
Or… wait…..
Borat is a helluva good example. Arnab is, I think, suggesting that Cohen’s interventions into audiences completely unaware of the joke might represent a more serious transgression. But then there’s the whole problem of who Borat/Ali G is marketed to, all of us actually watching (and not being there).
If Max wasn’t ready for his bath, I might stop and try to puzzle out how jokes are these ever-widening meta-framing devices, constantly unsettling our attempts to define the content “inside,” the actual (intended?) audience, and the explicit structures of interpretation… when our every attempt to pin such down get stymied.
(This is NOT to say that points by Jeff, Arnab, and others aren’t on target in some ways. But it is to say that points by J, A, et al. are off-target in some ways.)
mike, i wasn’t actually trying to argue that there is a “right” (or authentic audience) and a “wrong” one, or that some things shouldn’t/can’t be joked about. i’m arguing that by its very nature stand-up cannot be separated from audience. even live concert film of a great stand-up interacting with an audience is a very weak substitute for being in the audience. not simply because you laugh more when people around you are laughing but because the audience is part of the act, and how it works, in a way they are not in the more detached process of watching a film or a dvd– in the latter case they might interact with other people watching with them and influence their experience but what’s on screen won’t change. live, the same routine changes depending on what the audience is and how it is responding on any given night. now you’ll tell me that the meaning of a movie changes depending on who is watching but that’s not what i’m talking about.
thus i’d argue that you cannot separate stand-up from audience–if you get a stand-up to take the same routines and record them into a camera with no audience present it will not work. this is why so many stand-ups are terrible in other mediums. or look at andy kaufman, for instance, and the difference between his stuff on stage and the more conceptual designed-to-be-recorded stuff. andy wrestled with people who really wanted to rip his head off, who rooted for jerry lawler to kill him.
again, this may not apply to silverman, who perhaps does push her hipster homebase to discomfort that is masked unconvincingly by post-ironic laughter.
as for the borat reference i didn’t mean to suggest that the ali g characters are more transgressive; i actually think that borat is the mirror image of the kind of hipster comic i am talking about here. i can’t see borat doing “throw the jew down the well” in a hip l.a club anymore than i can see silverman playing to the audience of the blue collar comedy tour. some of those people might take her act very literally and then would it still be funny? wait, that sounds familiar–this is why dave chappelle quit his show.
Ok–fair enough. The social contexts of stand-up, film, or Boratic performance are distinct. That said…. I’m not sure stand-up is weakened by filming necessarily–it’s just different, the same act differentiated by the distinction between kinds of audience context. It’s like filming a play; why bother filming the stage? That usually fails.
But I can imagine a play that works damn well filmed as theater (Luis Valdez’ Zoot Suit) and stand-up that still plays well on film, because it fits that performer-audience context as well (Kings of Comedy and much of Pryor strike me that way. Oh, and Gallagher.)
Another example: the frame shifts for Upright Citizens Brigade –they do filmed sketches, filmed pranks, and (on the dvds) filmed live performance of the same sketches (most of their material was developed live, then reimagined for the television filming). All work, for this viewer, although you are right: the kind of laughter provoked, the way I interpreted, shifted as the context of performance shifted. But they perhaps illustrate something I’m way too vaguely trying to get at: how traces of other performance contexts creep/seep into every performance. I.e., when UCB do the film, the performance–and my reception–is still tinged by other performance contexts. And other audiences.
okay, finally watched this a couple of nights ago. sunhee tired of it after about 45 minutes. i thought it was equal parts very funny and trying too hard; often at the same time. unlike most people here, i did enjoy the songs a lot, especially the three-part harmony on “amazing grace” at the end. but then singing assholes are always funny. all in all, not worth very much fuss of any kind.
as always, michael’s commments about silverman’s jokes are more interesting than silverman’s jokes.
awww, shucks! but I can’t make jokes with such an appealing overbite. and you’re right, arnab, the fuss is probably way out of proportion to the material. I mean nothing could be more controversial than, let’s say, Don Rickles Chinese impression which I saw him unveil for a horrified Conan O’Brien audience. Then he did the flapping dickey.
Has the party ended? Finally saw this. One joke in the concert–about Ron Jeremy–made me burst out laughing, a number made me smile, many were well-written but … when you’re admiring the technical apparatus of a joke, you’re not exactly an ideal audience member. One joke after, during the credits, seemed more interesting than everything that came before: as I recall, “When a bird eats scrambled eggs, do you think she ever stops and says, ‘Hey, this came out of my pussy?'” So I’ll return (briefly) to Michael’s reading and avoid the criticism of racism, hipster irony, blah blah — what she excels at is the absurd implosion of our assumptions about where a joke might be headed, what the speaker’s position is, and the use of the word “pussy.” That last element may be the crucial point about comedy.
I didn’t see any evidence of her singling out blacks, or really any group, although Jews got more mentions than any. I was keeping track on a small blackboard I keep near my television, but Max spilled his wine on it, ruining my careful tabulation of Silverman’s racism. Max’s favorite joke, by the way, was the singing asshole; he and Arnab seem to share a sense of humor.