The Comedy of Scott Adams: Comic strip
Scott Adams, the successful author of the Dilbert comic strip and several comic compilation books (and he also owns a food company), actually was Dilbert at one time. In working with telecommunications engineers as a software developer in the eighties and nineties, he had plenty of inspiration for his hapless character, who is at the mercy of corporate American policies and politics as well as management dunderheads.
Adams was interested in cartooning as a child, entering several contests – which he didn’t win. He kept his day job at Pacific Bell for eight years even after he started the strip in 1989 to continue to get good material – and for income security. White-collared workers embraced Dilbert, the sarcastic software engineer dealing with evil consultants (Catbert), annoying co-workers and incredibly stupid managers from his office cubicle.
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Now, his strip is syndicated in more than 2,000 newspapers worldwide in 65 countries and 25 languages; has Dilbert immortalized on t-shirts, calendars, office supplies, dolls and more; and has a string of Dilbert books, in which his satiric attitude toward business is obvious in titles such as: When Did Ignorance Become a Point of View?, Random Acts of Management, Fugitive from the Cubicle Police and Seven Years of Highly Defective People and Clues for the Clueless.
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In an interview with The Celebrity Café.com, Adams said he gets asked for his opinion on serious subjects such as the economy and technology. “It’s funny that anybody would listen to anything I have to say,” he commented. “Afterwards I often laugh and say, ‘Why the hell am I answering that question?’” His theory is it’s because he wears glasses, but we know the guy behind Dilbert must know something!
Of course, Adams isn’t afraid of getting something wrong. “Creativity,” he says, “is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” He uses his razor-sharp observations to ensure we all see the inanities in corporate-speak and management bullshit. Some examples:
Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.
Dance like it hurts, Love like you need money, Work when people are watching.
No matter how smart you are, you spend most of your day being an idiot.
Normal people ... believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.
I get mail; therefore I am.
Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart.
We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.
Thank goodness Bill Cosby “started out as a child.” We’ve been belly laughing about his inner-city Philadelphia childhood days since he began comedy routines in 1961 as a bartender-cum-comic at the Cellar, where he worked while attending Temple University in Philadelphia on a track and field scholarship. As with many comedians, Cosby was considered a class clown and always had an ability to make those around him laugh. He left Temple and started the club circuit in the early sixties, cutting his first album in 1963: Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow … Right! (1963). He won a Best Comedy Album Grammy Award for that and his 1964 record, I Started Out As a Child, and then just kept getting that award for new albums until 1969.
Some people wondered why, during a restive time like the sixties, Cosby didn’t get into any racial humor like his black colleagues, Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor. He found himself defending his choice of material often with black activists who wanted him to use his celebrity for racial activism. He said, “A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, 'Yeah, that's the way I see it too.' Okay. He's white. I'm Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike. Right? So I figure this way I'm doing as much for good race relations as the next guy.”
Indeed, anyone who didn’t come away from a Cosby routine about Fat Albert (Hey, hey, hey!) and Ol’ Weird Harold with fond reminisces of their childhood, probably never participated in a good snowball fight or scared themselves to death at a horror movie. Activist or not, Cosby was an important figure in black history: first black male star on television with I Spy, then an animated cartoon called Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and an unequivocal influence with his top-rated sitcom, The Cosby Show, in the eighties. Cosby was also a spokesperson for children with shows like Fat Albert and The Electric Company.
Cosby was considered a master of the anecdote, from his childhood and his own marriage, which became extremely popular as material for stand-up comics. His stories weren’t complete without using a variety of voices and facial expressions. Here are some examples:
It was because of my father that from the ages of seven to fifteen, I thought that my name was Jesus Christ and my brother, Russell, thought that his name was Dammit. "Dammit, will you stop all that noise?" And, "Jesus Christ, sit down!" One day, I'm out playing in the rain, and my father yelled, "Dammit will you get back in here!" I said, "Dad, I'm Jesus Christ!"
I love it when mothers get so mad they can't remember your name. "Come here, Roy, er, Rupert, er, Rutabaga... what is your name, boy? And don't lie to me, because you live here, and I'll find out who you are.”
My father established our relationship when I was seven years old. He looked at me and said, "You know, I brought you in this world, and I can take you out. And it don't make no difference to me; I'll make another one look just like you."
My mother comes in my room and says, "Just look at this mess! This is a pig sty!" Now, I've already been in the room five hours, and she wants me to LOOK at it.
[referring to mothers] When they ask you a question, you try and answer, they tell you to shut up! "Day and night, night and day, work my fingers to the bone, for what?" "I don't..." "SHUT UP! And when I ask you a question, you keep your trap shut! Think I'm talking to hear myself talk? ANSWER ME!"
I asked my father for a dollar for the school picnic; he told me how he killed a grizzly bear with his loose-leaf notebook.
Whenhis wife sees that he has given the kids cake for breakfast] I've always heard about people having a conniption but I've never seen one. You don't want to see 'em. My wife's face split. My wife's face split and the skin and hair split and came off of her face so that there was nothing except a skull. And orange lights came out of her hair and there was glitter all around. And fire shot from her eye sockets and began to burn my stomach and she said, "WHERE DID THEY GET CHOCOLATE CAKE FROM?" And I said, "They asked for it!" And the children who had been singing praises to me... LIED on me and said, "Uh-uh! We asked for eggs and milk... AND DAD MADE US EAT THIS!" And my wife sent me to my room... which is where I wanted to go in the first place.
My wife and I were intellectuals before we had children. We were very, very bright people. My wife graduated from the University of Maryland, child psychology major with a B-plus average, which means that if you ask her a question about a child's behavior, she will give you at least an 85 answer. I, from Temple University, physical education major with a child psychology minor, which means that if you ask me a question about a child's behavior, I will tell you to tell the child to take a lap.
[After a birth contraction] Then my wife stood up... in the stirrups, grabbed my bottom lip... and said, "I WANT MORPHINE!" I said, "But dear... ”
[He imitates Lamaze breathing]
She said, "YOU SHUT UP! *YOU* DID THIS TO ME!" And on the next contraction, she told everybody in the delivery room that my parents were never married.
In the hospital room after the birth of their first baby] ... and I looked at it... and it wasn't getting any better. So I went over to my wife, and kissed her ever so gently on the lips, and I said "I love you, very very much dear. You just... had... a lizard." I mean, because the thing changed colors like, five times! And I said to the doctor, "Can you put this back? Cause it isn't finished cooking! It needs to cook two, three months!" But the hospital made us take it home.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
The Comedy of Jim Carrey: Physical Improvisation
We could say Jim Carrey is the poster child of the American Dream. Except he’s Canadian. But, his story of living in a van with his family when the factory in town sold out really shows how far a person can come if he’s extraordinarily talented and ambitious.
Carrey was always trying for a laugh, and even sent his resume in the Carol Burnett Show when he was 10. He became so disruptive with his humor in junior high, that the school administrators finally gave him special time at the end of the day to tell jokes to the other kids so he wouldn’t do it in class. “If there'd been Ritalin when I was a kid, I wouldn't be here now,” he noted.
Carrey was a straight-A student in high school until he decided to drop out to pursue a comedy career. He did his first performance at Yuk Yuk’s, a Toronto comedy club, at which he began to hone his comedy talent before making the big step of moving to Los Angeles in 1979 at the tender age of 19. There, he became a regular opening act at The Comedy Store after impressing club owner Rodney Dangerfield. He soon became known as an “anything for a laugh” comic who would use wild facial contortions and movements when the verbal jokes weren’t working.
Carrey didn’t want to top his career by doing lounge acts, so he started looking for other opportunities and landed a few bit movie parts, including one in Once Bitten and Peggy Sue Got Married. He nabbed a larger part as an alien in Earth Girls Are Easy, and his alien co-star Damon Wayans got him in on the ground floor of the television sketch comedy show In Living Color in 1990. Carrey's success in this genre brought him the lead role in the loony Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1994, the role that made him a full-fledged movie star. Later films included Dumb and Dumber, The Truman Show, The Mask, The Cable Guy and Bruce Almighty (for which he was paid $25 million).
Carrey is probably best known for his quick improvisational quirkiness, seen in his In Living Color performances and his physical humor, which includes rubber-faced impressions, clumsy trips and his own unique way of (as he puts it) “talking out of his ass,” which he demonstrated in Ace Ventura. His unique talents were highlighted in The Mask, which included a double part for Carrey as meek bank employee, Stanley Ipkiss, and the dashing debonair yellow personification of the title role. The film’s special effects complemented animated exaggerations of Carrey’s facial expressions to create the perfect venue for him.
Now at the top of his game, Carrey tries to stay true to his humor and not become overwhelmed with his fame. “I've been dubbed the man most responsible for the dumbing of America, so obviously I don't put much stock into thoughts like (the theme of the 'dumbing down' of contemporary comedy),” he said. “People love to laugh, and most people can find humor in just about anything, which is great. Trying to label or categorize comedy is ridiculous. I mean, if you laugh at a fart joke, does that make you a moron? I don't think so!”
In his classic 1973 book Groucho Harpo Chico & Sometimes Zeppo, Joe Adamson coined the phrase "The Age Of Heroic Comedy" to describe the era of great film comedians who followed Chaplin, comedians whose larger-than-life characters were bigger and more important than the stories in which they appeared. For Adamson this era lasted roughly from The Kid in 1920 to The Bank Dick in 1940 (intriguingly, it overlaps with the so-called "Golden Age of Sports", the 1920s, in which athletes like Babe Ruth, Red Grange, and Bill Tilden were "bigger than the games they played"). The AOHC ended due to a number of factors, among them the rise of screwball comedy (where attractive romantic leads took the roles previously played by comedians), but perhaps mostly because of the evolution toward screen naturalism (which the advent of sound quickened), in which story took precedence over all, resulting in characters being scaled down from the operatic levels of before.
Television comedy had its own sort of Heroic Age, in which star comedians were bigger than their sketches. Now-legendary figures like Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, and Sid Caesar had their own shows and dominated early television.
By the end of the decade, they were all off the air.
I recently unearthed a Life Magazine cover story on Ernie Kovacs from April 1957. The most interesting part is not specifically about Kovacs, but the epilogue, an overview of TV comedy at the time, which is considered to be in decline.
The tone is pessimistic. Gleason and Caesar were about to leave the air; Berle already had the year before. None of the comedians interviewed knows what the answer is, or even exactly what the question is.
A few months later Bob Hope was a guest on the Steve Allen show. Allen said something about a cowboy burying an Indian, and Hope replied "I didn't know cowboys buried Indians. I thought they just buried comedians".
True, westerns bore some responsibility for the comedy crisis. The "Adult Western" era had begun in 1955 with the premieres of Gunsmoke and Cheyenne, although oaters would not truly start to dominate prime time until that fall, when Wagon Train, Maverick, and Have Gun Will Travel would all make their debuts. I think there were other reasons for comedy's fall from grace. One was the rise of the sitcom. A format invented on radio, though even there it was dominated by star comedians like Jack Benny and Burns & Allen, all of whom showed they were bigger than the silly stories by frequently breaking the fourth wall or making jokes about their real-life personalities.
With the success of I Love Lucy in 1951 this format began to be modified. No matter how wacky the situation, it was always "Lucy Ricardo" being zany, never "Lucille Ball". There was no wall breaking, no winking at the audience, no smirking references to her home life with Desi Arnaz. The plot was all.
Even a comic as over the top as burlesque vet Phil Silvers respected the new dynamic, with his personality never allowed to trump the intricately-detailed farces of Sgt. Bilko.
You can watch every Honeymooners sketch/episode and never see Jackie Gleason break character. He very, very occasionally did with other characters, but never Ralph Kramden. It's very tempting to cite The Honeymooners going from a sketch on a live TV variety show to a filmed sitcom as a metaphor for the entire era.
It's sometimes claimed that what ended this golden age of TV comedy was the increased viewership outside the major cities, as television spread out into the unsophisticated hinterlands (Sid Caesar was driven off the air by Lawrence Welk!). Again, there is some truth in this. Early TV comedy was written and performed at the speeded-up tempo of city life, and as television made its way to where the pace of life was slower, its own pace slowed down.
But I think there was another reason. As more people moved from the bustling cities to whitebread suburbs, television itself became suburbanized. Family sitcoms Father Knows Best, Leave It To Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show increased in popularity as the decade progressed. You can actually see this process onscreen with Sid Caesar. A comparatively unremarkable sketch called The Commuters became an increasingly important part of the Caesar show, until eventually it was taking up a half hour or more per episode.
Fascinatingly enough, this also took place with TV comedy's rival, the western. The first "Adult Western" heroes were either outright drifters (Cheyenne) or gunslingers with a badge (Matt Dillon, Wyatt Earp). But 1957 brought Wagon Train, essentially a ranch on wheels, and then 1958 provided a key link in the Rifleman, a gunslinger tied down to his homestead. And 1959 sealed the deal with the ultimate ranch western, Bonanza.
With so much domesticity taking place on and off the range, how could "Heroic Comedy" survive? By the dawn of the '60s Caesar, Berle, Silvers, Gleason, and George Gobel were off the air, and Kovacs was reduced to monthly specials on little-watched ABC -- which only got on the air at all because they were subsidized by his sponsor, Dutch Masters cigars. Only the near-forgotten Red Skelton -- significantly, more popular in the sticks than the cities -- still had a weekly showcase.
