Just finished reading
Last Words, George Carlin's autobiography. It is supposedly unfinished (and will forever remain so), but it makes it into the 2000's and covers most of the "pivotal moments" in his creative life, so it doesn't feel short.
The booze and drug fueled years are laid out in detail - enough detail anyway - with the humor and candor you'd expect from Carlin. But what is most interesting, to me, are the sections where he discusses his doubts and misgivings about his act and the material he was doing. I did not know, and would never have guessed, that he was still sorting out what he wanted to do with his comedy well into the 1980's, when Carlin was in his 50's.
One of the more entertaining chunks is a recollection of being given an award at The Aspen Comedy Arts Festival in 1997, and being around Lorne Michaels, Chevy Chase, Laraine Newman, et al:
Now I see Lorne, for whom I have no respect, because he's a hands-and-knees cocksucker... Then it's just movie talk, yuppie talk...And I'm realizing that this group of people, who were once considered radical and revolutionary, has become just another Hollywood celebrity club. The Lorne Club. That their chitchat is a modern version of the fraudulent showbiz crap I was expected to do forty years ago in Mike Douglas' gazebo.
And that's why Carlin was the best - zero tolerance for bullshit.
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I'm not sure what to make of John Wenzel's
Mock Stars: Indie Comedy and the Dangerously Funny. First of all, the introduction is 28-pages long, and long intros make me suspicious, especially in books about comedy - too much set-up. In it, Wenzel stresses that the label "indie comedy" is troublesome, just as "alt-comedy" and other labels are. He also takes great pains to explain other things he's not trying to do - pigeon-hole certain comedians as cult figures or cultural firebrands in the manner of Lenny Bruce, or make the case that some underground comedy revolution has taken place. He proposes Mock Stars as a collection of profiles of comedians who embody a "DIY ethic."
The problem is that painting a picture of a handful of comedians - Patton Oswalt, David Cross, and others - as cult favorites is exactly what the book does, even if it does seem unintentional. By recounting the history of The
Comedians of Comedy and their foray out of traditional comedy clubs and into rock venues, sometimes performing on the same bill as bands, Wenzel seems unable to avoid the appearance that he is trying to establish their underground, hipster street cred. I'm big fans of many of the comedians in the book, and yes, they are original and not your typical comedy club fare. But the idea that these comedians succeeded solely on the "DIY ethic" is a little misleading. It's true that Oswalt and his hand-picked band of misfit comics went out and found their fan base outside of comedy clubs, but it's not as if they were working basement shows or getting barred from the clubs. They climbed the club ladder for years, just as any comedian does. And none of them have been arrested after shows or brought before a judge on obscenity charges, as Lenny Bruce and George Carlin had been. Maria Bamford is hilarious. So is Zach Galifianakis. But they're not the Beat writers of the fifties or the punk rockers of the seventies in the sense that they set out to overthrow some artistic model. What they did (brilliantly) was circumvent a business model. Because of this,
Mock Stars can't be a history of a cultural/artistic revolution so much as a history of a really smart marketing strategy.
If you're wondering why this post doesn't have a funnier title, it's because there isn't one. And no, I'm not making this up. I couldn't. If you asked me yesterday what kind of hell I would design for my most hated enemy, I doubt I would have conceived of anything as sadistic as ABBA World. That's a level of evil genius to which mere mortals can only aspire.
