The sun: Here is a premise that 9 out of 10 people on the street would find funny. The target is enormous and easy to hit, so the execution doesn't have to be perfect. There will be an explosion. Boom: cheese, ham, fruit carts tipping over, one caveman hitting another caveman on the head with a club. Pandemonium. If this is executed beautifully, everyone can enjoy it. If it's executed without care, there will still be plenty of laughter in the auditorium, but a certain percentage of the audience will only have a sick, sad feeling. Beautiful execution of solar comedy is rare. When it happens, the work in question is clutched with extreme loyalty to humanity's bosom.
No, we're not going to make individual stops to all the other planets. We're going to leap to Pluto, sailing past "Men and women are different!" and "Office life is bizarre!" and "Behold the quirks of this famous person!" and then you can extrapolate.
Pluto: Here is a premise that 1 out of 10 people on the street would find funny, and that's only if you're on a street in a cosmopolitan city. Pluto's orbit is huge, your ship is tiny. Calculations must be incredibly precise, only once you're out as far as Pluto, you can't use your conscious mind to calculate. You have to get there the same way the swallows get to San Juan Capistrano. You have to feel it, make infinitesimal adjustments in the wind. Courage is required to venture to Pluto, and a willingness to fail. You may not make it. You can't care if you make it or not. Be prepared for a sea of blank stares, or worse. The audience might get angry. They think you're trying to do something untoward, and they're right. And even if you hit Pluto exactly, even if your landing is right on target, you're not guaranteed an explosion of laughter. But something fine will happen, something deep. A ripple in the cosmos, generating from this tiny Plutonian stage. An evolutionary quantum leap.
Please embroider, if you like, or erase and start again.
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Short shrift to the bulk of the solar system. Laziness, considering that the bulk of our comic experience takes place in the middle. The middle is harder to get at, and I didn't have anything for it yet.
ReplyDeleteOh, well, it's a start.
I was witness once, to an accident. A car, dirty white, launched from the otherwise reliable Eight Freeway West.
ReplyDeleteBy rights, it should not have been so weightless. But what my eye saw was two thousand pounds of steel, airborne, full of grace.
I watched a dirty-white car leave the ground, spin, describe an arc sufficient to clear a chain-link fence, and I thought:
what stops the Earth? What stops the Earth from shaking us off?
So I guess Louis C.K. is hovering somewhere around Uranus?
ReplyDeletedammit. that comment, livingstone, plus ready access to youtube, just cost me half an hour of billable time.
ReplyDeletePlanets in their courses. They don't seem real.
ReplyDeleteThe leap year is comforting--things aren't so precise--a little adjustment is necessary.
My question is What's really in the center of the Earth? Molten core? Please. We know as much about the center of the Earth as we did about the Moon in the fifties. We're all worried about what's in space, what's coming to get us...try worrying about what's under your feet. That's where They live.
As for slapstick sun vs. the subtle, obscure plutonian jokes, I pefer the latter. To a fault. Oft is the occasion when I say something frighteningly, subtly witty and no one hears it, nobody listens aggressively enough to capture its hilarious essence. So I repeat it, slightly exasperated. There are those who say, "If you have to explain it, it's not funny." Well guess what? Fuck you.
ReplyDeleteThe 3 Stooges elicits a wan smile and long, satisfying yawn, followed by a nap on the couch and the sense that I am ten again, visiting grandparents whose TV seemed only to play old cartoons. That's the sun.
In that vein, Pluto would be "Jim's Journal," comic strip that ran in my college newspaper. Stick figures, 4 panels, mundane plot...but oh. If you were willing to pay attention...Jim had a dog named Mr. Peterson, represented by a scribble near Jim's stick feet. Jim might go to the laundromat, or make dinner. And that was it. It was funny in that it didn't try to be funny. It depicted the dull moments of life. That in itself is funny, the same way existence is misspent, and we don't have the Big Answers, which is absurd, which is funny.
Yes, exactly.
ReplyDelete("If I have to explain it, you're not funny.")
I left my sketch comedy group after many happy years (that included a whole show devoted exclusively to Pluto) when the operation started to move more towards the middle/inner planets in the hopes of increased commercial success. Betrayal! And there they all were, big crowds, cocktails on Venus, maybe a little after-hours Martian action. And there I was, floating "hilariously" alone somewhere past Saturn.
Withnail and I --> it's not all the way to Pluto (like Andy Kaufman) (who never hit for me, so I am not as funny as Andy Kaufman) but it's nice and far, and has some of that essential loneliness in it.
Plutonian comedy always contains something like a koan.
Achewood makes me laugh. Jim's Journal was kinda ghaie*;0}
ReplyDeleteAchewood is just about perfect.
ReplyDeletedude, at 21 we didn't HAVE achewood.
ReplyDeletewhich is wonderful--loves it--but closer to Jupiter than jim's journal, which is clearly plutonian.
maybe you're more of a "4 in 10" kind of guy.
I'm new to it but Yes Achewood!
ReplyDeleteA few things from my favorite planet, which one it is I'm not sure:
single gestures that go on too long.
the figure that moves at a different pace as everything else.
the mundane expressed mundanely as entertainment.
faces that reveal nothing of the action they are engaging in.
anyone that can sustain something past everyone else having stopped.
the person that can hear the word or phase that is just slightly off but not so much so that more than 3 out 10 even notice.
and We Are the World 25. but support Haiti.