The Decline and Fall of the Gag Comedy Film

What ever happened to the gag comedy? It seems to me that the genre had a golden age in the '70s, evident in such hits as the Mel Brooks and ZAZ (Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker) had in that period (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Airplane!). Both remained productive even after, of course (Brooks at least having cult hits with History of the World, Part I (1981) and Spaceballs (1987), ZAZ bigger films like The Naked Gun), while others got in on the action, like Carl Reiner with The Man With Two Brains (1983), and Keenan Ivory Wayans in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988).

Still, by the '90s the genre was looking tired--in part, one supposes, of the approach having been exploited for so long, in the main by the same filmmakers (even if here and there you saw someone have some success, as Mike Myers did with Wayne's World (1992) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)). The genre had a bit of a revival with Wayans' Scary Movie (1999) by the end of the decade, but so far as I know no one seems to think the next wave of movies could really be compared with the first, with, quite the contrary, the most conspicuous producers of such film, the Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer team, not getting a particularly favorable treatment by the entertainment press. (Indeed, at the time of this writing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article regarding their critical reception reads: "The critical reception of Friedberg and Seltzer's films has been overwhelmingly negative.") The movies still get made, of course--but you are far more likely to find them on streaming than at "a theater near you."

What happened? Apart from the way the genre ran down, or particular "bad movies" turning the public off of the form, I think the culture changed. Gag comedies tended to be structured around a parodic narrative spoofing some well-known cinematic genre. In doing so Brooks and ZAZ had the benefit of an audience they could assume to share a longer pop cultural memory, all as pop culture continued to churn out material that, on some level, at least had some claim to novelty, enough of it to launch if not a new genre then a new wave of films that would make its own clichés off of which to play rather than reusing those of another era. Thus Brooks and ZAZ offered parodies of the Western, Universal Studios-style horror, the old-time historical epic, the post-Star Wars space movie boom, exploitation films, the Airport-style disaster movie, and so on (while in 1980 ZAZ could expect an appreciable number of their viewers to remember who Ethel Merman was). By contrast Friedberg and Seltzer, limiting themselves to what they could expect a relatively young audience to personally recall, in a time in which pop culture has become more fragmentary, and more ephemeral, and tended to rework the old rather than coming up with the new (arguably to diminishing returns), leaving them that much less to work with--just grab-bags of recent pop cultural material they often ended up merely referencing rather than mining for comedy, probably because no more could be done with it.

As that pop culture changed it may have not only deprived gag comedy-makers of material, but also obviated their approach, because now, in at least some degree, everything was a parody, everything was a gag comedy--to the point that the deadly serious Daniel Craig Bond films brought in a new Q who quipped that they don't make the old-style gadgets anymore, while Star Wars: Episode VIII was a long exercise in flippancy toward the saga. Listening to the throne-room dialogue I imagine a good many people must have thought: "This isn't Star Wars. This is Spaceballs!" And how do you make a Spaceballs out of a movie that is already Spaceballs? Would it be worth bothering to do so even if you could?

One may say that not just the niche that gag comedies had occupied disappeared, but so had the whole pop cultural ecosystem of which they were a part.

NOTE: This item is a follow-up to my earlier post about "The Rise of the Gag Comedy."

The Rise of the Gag Comedy Film

It seems to me that the gag-based comedy film (the comedy that rather than using gags was a showcase for gags), like the action film (the film that rather than including action is, likewise, a showcase for action), emerged in the '60s, and began to become a Hollywood staple in the '70s, with a similar logic at work in both--a post-television elevation of image over conventional narrative in more fragmentary work, with an onslaught of momentary shocks prevailing over the traditional pleasures of storytelling, to the point of such storytelling being merely a connecting thread between one shock and the next. In the action movie those shocks were intended to thrill, in the gag-based comedy to keep the audience in stitches. Still, the similarity was such that, reading the remarks of reviewers of the old Bond movies so critical to the emergence of both genres, critics just encountering the action movie thought they were looking at some sort of gag comedy (with the view of From Russia, With Love, a relatively serious Bond film, taken at the time for some kind of parody of Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, in spite of the Bond novel having come first).

Such thinking, one might imagine, may have also made it seem the more natural for Hollywood to emphasize spoofing of the Bond series so much in trying to capitalize on its popularity--with the ultimate expression of that how Charles K. Feldman's Casino Royale, at one point conceived as a tough noir helmed by The Big Sleep director Howard Hawks, ended up the biggest and silliest of such comedies, and itself a key moment (though none but myself and Robert von Dassanowsky seem to think so) in the development of the gag comedy form.

It seems notable that, just as the befuddlement of those critics looking at the first Bond films, and the slowness of Hollywood to assimilate Bondian filmmaking (Star Wars was the breakthrough here, fifteen years after Dr. No, and just as the Suits failed to understand Bond they failed to understand Star Wars initially--simply thinking SPACE! where in the '60s they had thought SPIES!), it took onlookers some time to get used to gag comedy, if perhaps less. The pre-middlebrow Woody Allen was important here (scripting Feldman's earlier What's New, Pussycat? and making films like What's Up, Tiger Lily?), and Mel Brooks and ZAZ (the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team) more deeply and enduringly associated with it--the former hitting an early career peak with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, the latter with Airplane! (while the spirit of such comedy was so pervasive that the Salkinds' Superman, to go by the legends surrounding the script, would seem to have nearly gone in this direction).*

Just as with the innovators who made the action movie what it is today it is not the kind of place in film history in which the middlebrow are apt to take an interest, but it is a place nonetheless meriting some attention.

* Of course, others were involved--like Richard Lester in his films with the Beatles, and Monty Python, especially as they moved their work from the small screen to the large, but the focus here is on Hollywood's own offerings.

The Scientist in Balzac's Human Comedy: David Sechard in Lost Illusions

As I remarked not too long ago Balzac was an admirer of scientists and inventors, and a supporter of technological progress--with this, in fact, making him more critical rather than less of a money-dominated society, as we see in Lost Illusions. In Part III, "The Sufferings of Inventors," printer David Sechard, in an era where the demand for printed matter, and the material on which it is to be printed, are exploding, pursues the development of a new technique of paper-making.

Sechard's efforts are ultimately successful, but circumstances compel him to sell his innovation to richer businessmen prepared to destroy him to have control of the technology, such that they have the principal benefit of the development--all as Sechard's "discovery . . . [is] assimilated by the French manufacturing world, as food is assimilated by a living body," his development a tributary stream into a broad Mississippi of technological progress rather than a singlehandedly epoch-making occurrence. And after the hardships he had put himself and his wife through he gives up invention, "bidd[ing] farewell for ever to glory," and occupying himself with other pursuits.

In all that, as in so much else, Balzac's thinking is far, far truer to the history, and sociology, of science and technology than the conventional view prevailing at present, which desires to reduce that whole history to nothing but a series of Edisonades where inventors are invariably rewarded with demi-god-like glory and riches in this life, and eternal remembrance in a Pantheon of All-Time Greats after.

The "Cynical" Balzac

Balzac is, like pretty much every author who has dared to say a critical word about the social order, routinely charged with the crime of "cynicism"; while like pretty much every author against whom the charge is made undeserving of the charge.

Balzac was absolutely scathing in his criticism of a world where there was "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.'" But it was the cynicism of that world that he condemned, in part because of all those things that he happened to value--not least, human connections and human virtues. The way modern society corrupted and destroyed all that--cynically--was what he exposed and attacked, with the result that if the genteel folk of the salons regarded him as a monster, those fed up with the official lies and the hypocrisy have ever since found in his honesty, and his feeling, a breath of fresh air.

And that— was what seemed "cynical" to "respectable" opinion that did not like attention being called to such realities, of which it was defensive then and remains defensive now, such that he is less read today than he might be if he had their approval.

Indeed, it says everything that Henry James, at best an epigone of French realists like Balzac who willfully abandoned all that was best in them--indeed, while personally laying against Balzac the charge that he lacked a moral sense--became the god of Anglo-American letters.

Of Money and Obsession: Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans

Emile Zola, in explaining his conception of the "experimental novel" (he meant "experimental" not in the sense of unreadable avant garde prose, but the novel as quasi-scientific thought-experiment based on scientific knowledge of objective reality), referred to Balzac as the "father" of the form, specifically citing his book Cousin Bette as a model of such experimental rigor in its treatment of the theme of adultery.

Striking a work as Cousin Bette is in that regard, I found Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, if perhaps a less satisfying work when taken as a whole, the book's first two parts are in their way a more forceful treatment of the interaction between money and "passion" of that kind as the Baron de Nucingen burns through francs by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of a woman he scarcely glimpsed one night in the woods.

"The Rectification of Names" and George Carlin

The Analects of Confucius contain an interesting dialogue on the "rectification of names" as a priority in administration, on the grounds that language must be "in accordance with the truth of things" for the sake of carrying on "affairs . . . to success"--so much so that "the superior man requires . . . that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."

Alas, in this day and age it can seem as if, in this culture as in probably every other, language is nothing but a collection of evasions and obfuscations, by and large for the most unvirtuous purposes--a refusal to acquiesce in which makes one an incomprehensible eccentric at best to most of the others they will meet.

George Carlin refused to acquiesce in that manner. And in that, I think, one could regard him as a "superior man" who did far more the sake of contemporary culture than just about all the literati of the mainstream today put together.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the State of the World Today

I came relatively late to the minor pop cultural phenomenon that was Mystery Science Theater 3000 (henceforth, just MST3K for brevity's sake), catching its last three seasons on what was then still the Sci-Fi Channel.

It is not the sort of thing that would appeal to me as much today--it fundamentally comes down to three actors (two of them playing robots) mocking a bad movie as they sit through it. And even back when it had appealed to me not everything worked--especially when the film did not seem to merit the mockery the jokes tended to fall flat. Still, at its best it was hilarious--to the point that some of their quips seem to have stuck in my memory years and decades later.

At the end of the little group's viewing The Deadly Bees, when the house that was the principal setting of the film goes up in flames, Crow T. Robot quips that the house "was made of typing paper and oily rags."

I think of that line a lot.

Like after hearing each and every report about the world--about the climate and the environment generally, about the state of the economy, about the international order.

We are reminded with truly distressing frequency that the "house" we live in is likewise made of typing paper and oily rags.

What is All the "Cringe" Comedy Really About?

One of the more oft-used words to describe the kind of comedy we have tended to see on twenty-first century TV has been "cringe." Associated with shows like The Office, watching it we will see Michael Scott say something terribly offensive, and appall everyone around them, while being completely oblivious to what he did--with a good time had by, if not all, at least those who like this kind of comedy.

Why has this kind of comedy become so popular in this period?

One possibility that occurs to me is that this is a matter of twenty-first century class politics. These days it seems that "punching down" in comedy is treated as daring, even heroic. ("Look how edgy I'm being!" they say as they beat up on an oppressed group. "I'm a free speech hero!")

Especially given the prevailing attitude toward class, punching down at people who seem awkward by the "upper middle class" (to use Michael Lind's term, "overclass") standards that are thought of as society's standards--who are so much more likely to be from lower class backgrounds as to make this a form of mockery of the less affluent--is fair game.

And we see it the more insofar as comedy these days so rarely punches up.

Are People Really Self-Publishing Millions of Books Each Year?

Recently I was surprised to read that the number of "new" books self-published annually was in the millions.

Why?

My conjecture (it is hard to get beyond that given the paucity of data and analysis out there) the self-publishing boom we saw circa 2010 (when e-book readers arrived on the market, when publishing services like Amazon's came into the business) prompted a Great Drawer Clearing. Meanwhile, deceived by our "success story"-addicted media, a great many people who never had a chance of becoming authors the traditional way fancied that maybe they could make a career this way.

Still, much as agents and editors and anti-populist critical snobs snivel about "everyone" thinking they are a writer, there was only so much stuff in those drawers, with the most likely candidates probably putting out the most likely stuff first. At the same time those who had been gulled into believing that some revolution was here, the power in the hands of the authors, quickly learned otherwise. It was not a case of "Publish it, and they will come." Rather you published it and it just sat there, very few self-published writers selling anything to people who were not friends and family (I dare say, more than usually supportive friends and family). There was thus less apparent incentive to bring out old stuff, let alone write new stuff--less and less all the time as the market grew ever more cluttered while people read and read less, supply and demand moving in opposite directions, with the limitation of the e-books so critical for the self-published to a relatively small part of the market, and the unrelenting hostility of the gatekeepers toward the self-published not helping in the least, among much, much else that made the road steeper rather than easier.

It seemed to me the case, too, that young people have been less inclined to dabble in long-form writing than their forebears (with, indeed, the "decline" of the English major seeming to me to reflect decreasing interest), while people of all ages seem to have been devoting time and energy to activities very different from writing books or anything at all, to a much greater degree than even a few years ago. (Wanting to express themselves they "micro-blog" on Twitter, or vlog on YouTube, rather than "blog" in the old way.)

Nothing I have yet seen has convinced me that this picture of the situation is inaccurate--while the aforementioned figure can conceal a lot of ambiguity, given that it is less than clear just what counts as a "book" (a lot of self-published work not even purporting to be that--short stories sold individually probably lumped into the figure), let alone a new one (given the ambiguities of reissue with self-published work the author can edit any time). The result is that I can easily picture, for example, the number of items that resemble what most think of as books hitting the market for the first time in this way in any given year as rather smaller--with the kind of decline I have talked about not ruled out.

Do They Really Publish a Million Books a Year?

Recently I have seen it estimated that, excluding self-published titles, between 500,000 and 1 million new titles are published in the U.S. each and every year.

I have tried digging into the figure but do not know how it was arrived at--and strongly suspect that it is misleading.

After all, when you collect statistics you have to define your terms clearly, and I have seen no such definition in connection with these figures. My guess is that they refer to any published item distributed in a discrete unit, excluding periodicals--which could easily include many things we do not think of as books, especially if commercial distribution is not required for inclusion in the category, such as pamphlets handed out by political or religious organizations. Even when we define the term "book" more exclusively there is the question of how we define "new." Does a barely touched "new" edition of an older book count--like a reissue of a classic with a couple of pages of "foreword?"

One can go on and on like this, but I think this makes the point--those things most of us think of when we hear the word "book," in length and formatting and manner of presentation to the public (and certainly expectation that they will find a new audience), and certainly "new book," actually hitting the market in any given year, probably number a good deal less than that. Certainly the number of, for example, new, first-edition novels published annually through the traditional channels would seem far fewer--and we do well to remember that when attempting to consider the shape of the market.

Remembering The Last Action Hero

Arnold Schwarzenegger's career as an action hero is probably most associated with the '80s and the films he made in it--The Terminator (1984), Commando (1985), Predator (1987) and others. But, unlike the career of his contemporary Sylvester Stallone, whose career really did peak then (arguably in 1985, when Rambo: First Blood, Part II and Rocky IV were the second and third-biggest hits of the year), his biggest success came in the early '90s--the years of Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and True Lies (1994), as well as the comedy Kindergarten Cop (1990). Still, if this patch gave him his biggest films (big enough that the remakes, sequels, spin-offs continue to this day, with a show based on True Lies on CBS), it was not unmarred by disappointments--like the comedy Junior (1994), and of course, The Last Action Hero (1993).

Made on a then-massive budget of $85 million (how times have changed!) it was one of the biggest disappointments of the year, pleasing few as action movie, or as comedic "meta" take on the genre. Still, it seems to have endured in the popular memory rather more successfully than that same summer's flop Super Mario Bros. (again, how times have changed!), and even if time does not seem to have improved its reputation it still had its moments, like Charles Dance trying to explain to Anthony Quinn the difference between a turn of one-eighty and one of three-sixty, and of course, the reason why Schwarzenegger's going after the bad guys this time was "personal."

Quentin Tarantino's Recent Thoughts on the Bond Series

Quentin Tarantino name has come up before in relation to the Bond films.

Back in the '90s he actually aspired to make a film adaptation of Casino Royale.

That ship sailed a very long time ago--as the Casino Royale that actually kicked off the reboot made clear. But he did recently discuss the Bond film series in the Deadline interview from a little while back, during which he suggested that EON go back to the books and actually adapt the books.

The idea has the virtue that, in contrast with most remakes, which bring nothing new to the table, those movies would be genuinely different from what was made before, and from anything out there today.

However, "different" does not mean an audience would necessarily exist for them.

Let us, for the moment, not belabor the well-known, much-chewed over matter of the social sentiments of the books. We all know how absolutely intolerable they would be to respectable opinion--and the fact that, while the more overt racism may be removable without damaging anything essential, the gender politics could not be altered without making a mockery of any pretense to faithfulness. The idea has at least three other strikes against it:

1. Filmed as they are the novels would be period pieces--a tough sell to American audiences these days. (Indeed, I recently remarked the anomalousness of Indiana Jones as a popular success given this trait of theirs--and counted it as one of the factors working against that film's box office success.)

2. The narrative structure of the books--which are less the stuff of action movies than "slow burn" thrillers unlikely to be very exciting to today's readers. (Indeed, as Raymond Benson's stuff makes clear even readers of Bond novels expect something different these days, never mind viewers of Bond films.)

3. Much of what made the books interesting to readers when they came out is simply not going to reach today's audience. What was glamorous by the standard of '50s Britain is less impressive today in an era in which working people may be struggling to keep themselves in modest shelter and adequate food, but the level of luxury presented by pop cultural fantasy has exploded right along with the fortunes of the richest. Meanwhile the agonies over the place of Britain and its elite in the world that seems to have been so bound up with the books' reception are also unlikely to resonate with a wide audience (and none at all outside Britain).

There therefore seems no question of any such thing being blockbuster material--while the kind of mid-range movie such productions could have been is simply not getting made anymore, certainly not for theatrical release, while streaming is becoming ever more penurious. One might imagine as an alternative the adventures of James Bond being adapted as a TV series--with, perhaps, a few novels squeezed into a particular season. (I could see, for instance, Casino Royale through From Russia with Love as a season, ending with the cliffhanger of Bond's poisoning; Dr. No and Goldfinger and the For Your Eyes Only short story sequence the basis of a season two; and the books between Thunderball and The Man with the Golden Gun as the basis for one long arc, maybe wrapping up the sequence with another two seasons.) Yet I am doubtful that very many would be persuaded to stick with Bond through it all (again, period pieces are tough sells, and even if I rejected belaboring them there are those politics), while I have seen little evidence of either Everything Or Nothing productions, or Amazon, being up for it, making it much more a provocative notion than a serious proposition.

Social Withdrawal, or Social Rejection?

When those who attend to the matter of those who have withdrawn from society write about them their tendency has been to emphasize the actions of those who have withdrawn, and identify these actions with choices they have made. They gave up on the job market. They dropped out of the "dating pool." They refused to come out of their bedroom, or their parent's basement.

I suppose this is intuitive for those who take the conventional view of things (individualistic, squeamish about the existence of society and its inequalities, not least in the area of power). But, here as in so many other areas of life, that view can be limiting and misleading--overlooking the extent to which those who act in such ways may be coping with choices others made, and in which they could not do much more than acquiesce, which may have them not so much withdrawing as accepting others' rejections. The rejection of potential employers. Rejection in "the dating market" and social life generally. Even rejection by their own families.

After all, it does not seem to be those positioned to "succeed" that take that course, but those who have the most frustration, to go by what the anecdotes and even the statistics tell us. Not the privileged kid with all the advantages who got all the breaks and is now on the "fast track to success" but the kid who never got a college degree is likely to end up playing games in their parents' basement. Not the "eligible bachelor" who walks away from dating, but those whose prospects were much less good. And not the popular kids but the victims of those vigilante enforcers of social life, bullies, who end up hikikomori.

Considering all this one can plausibly see all these persons as having been "shut out" before they became "shut-in." And that seems to me to confirm yet again the value of the sociological approach to the issue on the part of those who want to understand, and help, rather than wring hands and moralize in that way that the real-life Ron Burgundys of the mainstream media love so much.

Another Take on the Cult of Celebrity

My usual first thought regarding the cult of celebrity is its foolishness--and the second, its essential backwardness, reflecting as it does a hierarchical outlook more befitting barbarians than civilized people (the more in as it is so much taken for granted). However, one alternative treatment of the theme that impressed me was David Walsh's discussion of the issue way back when Michael Jordan retired. Certainly he remarks the essentially inegalitarian character of a society where celebrity exists in such a manner. ("Excessive celebrity must be . . . a rationale for inequality and reinforces it." After all, "[t]he heaping of fame and wealth upon a single individual . . . is only possible and meaningful if the vast majority have no access to those rewards.") He noted, too, that the status of celebrities from the world of entertainment was partly a matter of the repellent, toxic quality of the public figures seen to be elsewhere. ("It was impossible for a sports star to swell" to such a "monumental size in the American popular consciousness" as Jordan did "as long as there were figures . . . respected, rightly or wrongly, for their accomplishments on behalf of society as a whole." In the era of the Clinton impeachment that was ongoing as Walsh wrote those words, he asked, "Who deserves such admiration?")

However, he also argued for the fascination with celebrity being a function of what one might (to use a different writer's famous phrase to which Walsh alludes), so many people's "leading lives of quiet desperation." The "millions" doing so,

going about their daily lives without any sense of a greater purpose to their existence than the struggle to make ends meet . . . denied richness and pleasure and variety and meaning . . . turn hungrily to the media-chronicled lives of celebrities--who apparently have everything they don't . . . who are "real" while they are, to themselves, non-existent--in search of a life with content.

He adds that "[t]his vicarious existence stands in for real existence, except because it is not real or substantial . . . can never fill them up, and so they are always desperate for more, something, anything to fill up the gaping hole."

In short, the celebrities "live the fantasy," or at least seem to be doing so, and other people find vicarious satisfaction in it, however faint or limited or tenuous--the more in as they are incessantly told that they too could be doing this, may someday be doing this. ("The media . . . encourages many young people to believe that they can escape their difficult conditions of life by following the basketball star's path. For ninety-nine point nine percent of them this is an illusion, and a bitter one.")

They may as well be the people in Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where off-world drug-trippers rely on "virtual" experience of a cushier life; at playing at "being" Perky Pat (ominously, as the atmosphere warms, endangering the survival of life on Earth . . .).

All this, of course, is very sad--but sad as it is it still strikes me as staggering in its stupidity, with stupider still those who exalt people's following celebrity in this way as some sort of need, when really it is at best a way of avoiding looking at their real needs and trying to satisfy those. If we indeed live in a world where quiet desperation is the lot of the mass, after all, they ought to be looking for more than vicarious living through mediated images of people acting the part of those to whom life has given everything as they try to get on after life has given them nothing, or next to it.

Remembering Spin City

Recently considering the politically "safe" character of the '90s-era sitcom I found myself recalling the sitcom Spin City, precisely because it was so blatant an example. Here we have a sitcom with, for a protagonist, the Deputy Mayor of New York, and the Mayor and his staff for supporting characters--but, from what I saw of it (which I thought was a lot in reruns on FX), it was pretty much your standard workplace comedy, full of wacky characters who do not actually do anything but get on each others' nerves and have "Will they/Won't they" romantic tension under the nose of a silly, incompetent, oblivious boss.* A little "identity politics" apart, I have the impression that the "China" episode of the not wholly dissimilar The Office all by itself spent more time on a political issue than anything in Spin City's six seasons did--to say nothing of how it looks in comparison with Michael J. Fox's previous long-running sitcom, Family Ties (to which there is a tiny allusion at the end of Fox's character's departure, when he goes on to a job in Washington D.C. and mentions meeting a Senator Alex P. Keaton from Ohio, of whom his opinion is none too flattering).

In all that, as in a great deal else (yes, a good part of the humor would probably be off-limits today), it was quintessentially of its time.

* Indeed, his Mayor Randall Winston being the first impression Barry Bostwick made on me the thought that he was Thodin in Lexx was quite a shock.