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Tracking the Rise of Comedy as Something Worth Following with 'The Lowbrow Reader Reader'
In the hierarchy of artistic endeavors comedy occupies a hazy, confused space. The enthusiasm comedians are capable of generating among the general public is considerable but often fleeting; they seem unjustly deficient at inspiring the kind of long term devotion more commonly reserved for their peers in music and film. It was precisely this frustrating divide that drove Patton Oswalt to launch his Comedians of Comedy tour in 2004, a string of stand-up dates that circumvented the two-drink minimum drudgery of conventional comedy clubs in favor of smaller, hipper venues. “These are the kind of people that will support indie rock bands — for twenty years they’ll follow a band,” said Oswalt of the largely untapped fan base of younger, more enthusiastic audiences he was seeking out. “Very few people follow comedians and how they develop. It can be just as enriching and infuriating and fun.” Put simply, when it came to comedy, most people just weren’t all that invested.
Things have changed considerably in the time since The Comedians of Comedy helped forge the market for comedy nerds, but years before that demographic began edging toward the mainstream Jay Ruttenberg was already the kind of devotee that Patton Oswalt was hoping to create. By day the 25 year-old Ruttenberg worked as a New York City music critic, but by night he skulked along the streets of Manhattan dreaming up an outlet for his less exercised passion for comedy. Observing there was “a general dearth of writing about comedy, especially when compared with the fawning reporting on other corners of entertainment — most egregiously mainstream indie-rock,” Ruttenberg set about cobbling together a zine for likeminded enthusiasts. Not only would the publication attempt to improve upon the sorry state of comedy journalism, but it would also seek to hit back at a certain type of uptight, curmudgeonly newspaper reviewer — those crusty old men who exited Chris Farley movies shaking their heads in disgust and muttering about the decline of civilization. Launched in 2001, The Lowbrow Reader was both a labor of love and an act of protest. READ MORE
Gods of Rock (In Their Own Minds): The Early Days of Tenacious D
One night in 1996, Jack Black and Kyle Gass — the rambunctious, rotund frontmen for the mock rock outfit Tenacious D — stood on stage in a small cafe making demands. They were performing a bit in which they mapped out to a couple of Hollywood agents, played by Mr. Show’s David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, the route that would take them to stardom. “Number one we want a fucking record deal,” began Black, before ticking off further requests for a TV show and a movie. “That would be the pinnacle — if we had a movie.” At this point in their career Tenacious D were little known outside of certain small comedy circles in Los Angeles, so as he began to speak Black was unable to suppress an amused grin at the outrageous nature of their requests.
Yet within a decade Tenacious D would achieve, in bombastic fashion, all that they envisioned that night on stage. In short order they had under their loosely strapped belts a television show, a critically acclaimed record, and a feature film with the band’s name blazed prominently into the title. Although the rock opera Tenacious D In The Pick of Destiny turned out to be a surprise box-office bomb, earning a paltry eight million dollars, the duo’s prominence was still incontestable. On the journey upwards their 2001 album Tenacious D went platinum, they played Madison Square Garden as part of a world tour, and Jack Black emerged as a mega-star actor in his own right.
But it was that first jewel in Tenacious D’s crown that best captured the rowdy, freewheeling spirit of their act. Co-created along with Cross and Odenkirk — two of the band’s earliest champions — the television series followed the absurd exploits of a fictionalized version of The D as they quested after rock supremacy while only managing to reach, at best, low-end mediocrity. Consisting of six shorts packaged into three episodes, Tenacious D aired on HBO sporadically between 1997 and 2000. Despite the long gaps between episodes and the short-lived nature of the series, the duo’s exuberant presence on screen was uniquely compelling enough to attract a cult following that would later serve as the foundation for their world wide fan base. READ MORE
Kingpin: The Farrelly Brothers' Biggest Flop and Greatest Triumph
There are few locations in the landscape of American sports that evoke as distinct a sense of mediocrity as bowling alleys. As arenas of athletic contest they seem forever doomed to conjure up images of beer-bellied men competing in obscurity inside dingy, decrepit rooms. Bowling alleys have long been the natural environment of lowlifes, misfits, and losers. As such they serve as a perfect setting for the Farrelly brothers — who are always at their best when championing the crude underdogs of life — and in Kingpin the underlying joke running throughout is that anybody with some sense and a few prospects should in no way be investing a significant amount of themselves in bowling. But the directors aren’t simply lampooning this strange world; they’re also paying tribute to its unapologetic griminess. When Roy Munson, one time bowling wunderkind turned destitute conman, discovers that Lancaster Bowl no longer has a men’s room novelty machine for him to supply with florescent condoms, he’s shocked and offended. “And you call this a bowling alley,” he scolds the manager.
The Farrellys gave birth to Kingpin — the most peculiar member of their brood — in 1996, between their breakout hit Dumb and Dumber and their crowning achievement There’s Something About Mary. Fittingly, the movie is like a strong-headed, wayward middle child vying for a share of the attention heaped on its more celebrated siblings. Upon release it flopped at the box-office (Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary combined made over 300 million dollars; Kingpin made just 25 millions dollars) and baffled even critics who had taken a shine to the directors’ previous effort. In fact the movie was such a commercial failure that it prompted the brothers to get as outrageous as they possible could with There’s Something About Mary in the belief that their careers in movies might soon expire. But over the years Kingpin's reputation has flourished, and though it has emerged as a cult favorite it merits recognition as on par with the Farrellys’ best. READ MORE
The Perfect Misanthropy of The Foot Fist Way
It’s a rare phenomenon that a film so completely decimates an audience’s understanding of civility that it forces them to recalibrate their entire moral compass. Before Danny McBride swindled us into liking Kenny Powers, the bullying, ultra-arrogant former major league pitcher in Eastbound & Down, he forced on us a protagonist far more brutal and amoral. Fred Simmons, strip mall Taekwondo instructor and small town psychopath, intruded upon the public consciousness in 2006 with Jody Hill’s The Foot Fist Way, leaving audiences stunned and struggling to regain their internal equilibrium, as if they had been suddenly dropped into higher altitudes.
Fred Simmons’s savage presence loomed so large over the movie that some critics, despite their admiration for the film itself, couldn’t overcome their distaste for its protagonist. “The hero of The Foot Fist Way is loathsome and reprehensible and isn’t a villain in any traditional sense. Five minutes spent in his company and my jaw was dropping,” wrote a horrified Robert Ebert. “I cannot recommend this movie,” he concluded, “but I can describe it, and then it’s up to you. If it sounds like a movie you would loathe, you are correct.” It’s worth noting that Ebert still gave the film a 2-star review, presumably out of deference to the filmmakers’ effectiveness at bringing their unsettling vision to life. READ MORE
Zach Galifianakis Shows the Rawness of Standup at the Purple Onion
About a third of the way through The Comedians of Comedy, the 2005 documentary chronicling the indie band-style stand-up tour Patton Oswalt threw together to bring alternative comedy to the masses, Zach Galifianakis makes a peculiar, unexpected entrance. The other three comics on the tour — Oswalt, Maria Bamford, and Brian Posehn — have arrived in Portland in advance of Galifianakis and are planning to connect with him later on that night. In the interim, the filmmakers accompany Oswalt and Posehn to a comic book shop and, after being informed that their camera isn’t allowed inside, go wait in an alley around the corner. With the camera still recording, they set it on the ground…and suddenly into the frame glides Galifianakis, as if he had just materialized out of the thin, Pacific Northwest air. “How’d you just appear there?” the filmmakers ask him. Galifianakis hesitates for a moment, seeming to calculate the exact degree of sincerity with which he should respond, then grins cryptically. “I read it on Patton’s blog,” he replies, before disappearing off down the street, prancing at full speed like some sort of deranged short-distance runner.
In retrospect this entrance is perfectly fitting for the comedian who was flitting in and out of the public consciousness for a decade before breaking it huge in 2009 with The Hangover, and who now manages to so bombastically capture the spotlight while remaining in many ways inscrutable behind a full, scruffy beard and enigmatic smile. Prior to The Comedians of Comedy, Galifianakis had been cultivating a cult following in New York and Los Angeles with his live performances while also participating in a slew of short-lived projects that either failed to nourish his weird brilliance or were too frail to effectively contain it. Most notable of these was his own VH1 chat show, Late World with Zach, in which Galifianakis made a consistent point to focus on the program’s poor ratings and the fact that nobody watching it seemed to know who he was. The show ran for nine episodes in 2002 before its cancelation. “I just had that feeling, like I was a wash-up pretty early,” Galifianakis confided in a 2009 interview with the New York Times. Banished from VH1 and with no clear path forward, he returned to his roots.
It was in the mid-90s that Galifianakis began his comedy career, haunting stand-up open mics in the backs of Times Square hamburger joints and sports bars where “you were literally yelling over the sound of the game, trying to get people’s attention.” The exposure from The Comedians of Comedy marked a revival of sorts for him, and the following year he re-teamed with its director, Michael Blieden (Super High Me, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon) to release his own stand-up special. Divided into three distinct, intertwined segments — performance, road documentary, and interview (with Zach playing the part here of his twin brother, Seth) — Zach Galifianakis: Live at the Purple Onion provides us with captivating access to the raucous, unpredictable atmosphere of stand-up that audiences at home rarely get a chance to see. READ MORE
Revisiting Funny People
“You cannot make friends with the rock stars.”
— Lester Bangs to William Miller, Almost Famous
It’s difficult for me to think about the career of Judd Apatow without being startled by its eerie similarity to Cameron Crowe’s. While they came of age in distinctly different cultural milieus — Crowe in the hard-rock haze of early ‘70s Southern California and Apatow in the boozy New York comedy clubs of the ‘80s stand-up boom — they both transformed their earnest, ambitious fandom into established Hollywood brands. As teens they took it upon themselves to document the worlds that held their fascination: Crowe went on the road with Led Zeppelin to cover them for Rolling Stone; Apatow recorded interviews with Jerry Seinfeld and Gary Shandling which he broadcasted over his high school’s 10-watt radio station. By their early twenties both were full-fledged professional wunderkinds, with Crowe penning the screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Apatow becoming co-creator of the celebrated The Ben Stiller Show. And then, finally, with their careers in the ascendant, both men made great films that looked back upon their improbable journey.
Here the trajectories diverge. Almost Famous was universally embraced and won Crowe an Oscar for his screenplay. Funny People performed middling at the box office and, though it snared its fair share of admirers, critical reception was mixed. That some audiences seemed not quite sure what to make of Apatow’s third and most ambitious film is understandable; it’s a tough, sometimes dark move that requires a measure of commitment from the viewer. But the fact that some reviews were so violently dismissive of such a complex and honest work reveals a near total misunderstanding by many critics of not just the movie itself, but also Apatow’s entire career. READ MORE
Revisiting Marc Maron's Darkest Days on Final Engagement
“Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.”
—Rainier Maria Rilke
Of all the titles and descriptors Marc Maron has acquired through the perilous swings of his long career, “Feral Cat Wrangler” might be, curiously enough, the most appropriate. It’s one he gave to himself, an acknowledgment of his inclination for taking in wild strays. But it also serves as a profound metaphor for his duties as host of the enormously popular WTF podcast, on which he welcomes in from the trenches of entertainment a long parade of misfits, outcasts, and loners — known professionally as comics — to talk intimately and at length about their careers, relationships, and existential musings. The correlation isn’t lost on Maron. “We’re just a bunch of fucking stray cats sometimes,” he once observed after recording an interview with an old friend and peer with whom he’d fallen out of touch. “You’re out of the limelight and you’re not on television, and you all sort of started together gunning for the same prize. And then you just don’t see people.” When he does in fact cross paths with a stray comic who’s fallen off the grid, he can’t help but wonder in amazement, “Where the fuck have you been? What have you been doing? How are you okay?”
Not so long ago had someone asked those questions of Maron, the answers would have been bleak. READ MORE
Inside Darrell Hammond's Dark Days at SNL
Look for Darrell Hammond at the curtain call of a Saturday Night Live show, when the cast gathers on stage to say goodbye while the band roars and the credits scrawl. Chances are you won’t find him. Often times — even for years at a stretch — he had already left the studio, departing as soon as his final sketch was over. Backstage animosity at SNL is well chronicled, but it wasn’t bitterness or spite that kept him from taking that final bow with his peers. It was that, once out of character, he felt he simply didn’t belong up there with them.
Though peculiar, this disappearing act seems fitting for the cast member who was in a way the show’s least visible all-star. And Hammond is certainly an all-star. He’s something like SNL’s Iron Man, the Cal Ripken, Jr. of sketch comedy. As the show’s longest tenured player (1995-2009) he’s appeared in more episodes than any other cast member and portrayed several of its most iconic characters. And yet he’s always been obscured. We’ve seen him only beneath pounds of makeup, an assortment of wigs, and a prosthetic nose or two. We know him only through the filter of larger personalities like Bill Clinton, Sean Connery, or Dick Cheney. Paradoxically, SNL’s most ubiquitous member is also its most inscrutable and least understood.
Unfortunately, Hammond’s new memoir, God, If You’re Not Up there, I’m Fucked, doesn’t go far enough in bridging that divide. As the title suggests, it focuses mostly on the sordid despair that engulfed much of the comic’s life from childhood up until he left a rehab clinic in 2010 where he was residing under a false name. We’re taken through a series of wretched locales that range from Bahamian jail cells to Hell’s Kitchen mobster hangouts to Harlem crack houses. We’re given access to a lot of Hammond’s decidedly grim personal history. However, most of the information we receive is unaccompanied by much insight or depth, so that although we’re sympathetic toward the author’s struggle (and sufficiently shocked), we’re still left with only a somewhat superficial understanding of what he went through and how he persevered. READ MORE
Tina Fey's Bossypants: How To Succeed in Show Business By Really Trying
You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody at the moment as well positioned at the nexus of comedy, entertainment, and the cultural zeitgeist as Tina Fey. She cut her teeth at improv on the stages of the Second City Theater in Chicago, incubator of such geniuses as Belushi, Aykroyd, and Colbert. She rose through the ranks of Saturday Night Live to become head writer and the anchor for its Weekend Update. She’s the creator of NBC’s 30 Rock, which broke records for garnering the most Emmy nominations for comedy in a single year. Oh yeah — and she also delivered late night impressions of a certain former governor so dead-on that it made entire swaths of the country simultaneously laugh, shudder, fall in love, and fear for the Republic. Well, now this eclectic woman has a book, Bossypants, and you’d better read it. After all, given that people seriously believed she was single-handedly capable of tilting the 2008 presidential election, there stands a decent chance that in the future part of Tina Fey’s job description might include leading the free world.
In Bossypants, Fey packs a lot of history and information into less than three hundred pages of quick, clean prose scattered with a healthy amount of poop jokes. It’s got something for everyone. It’s an autobiography as well as a humor book. It’s an inside look at the cutthroat politics of television as well as an examination of the social politics of motherhood. It’s funny, insightful, and inspiring. But above all, it’s instructive. Aspiring comics would be well advised to whip out a pen and highlighter and take some notes. READ MORE
Anthony Jeselnik Is Not an Asshole
With 2010 over and done with, Anthony Jeselnik has a lot to be cocky about. He finished up a stint as a writer for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, returned to perform on the show as its very first stand-up, and then released his debut comedy album in September. On Shakespeare, which is as arrogantly absurd as its title suggests, Jeselnik relentlessly dishes out meticulously constructed one-liners so darkly intelligent and subversively funny that Punchline Magazine voted it the best comedy album of the year and most everyone else agreed. And yet all the recent success and accolades haven’t gone to the comedian’s head. Anyone that’s ever seen him on stage knows that he’s been about as brashly confident as humanly possible for a long, long time.
Upon seeing Jeselnik perform one quickly discovers a staggering synergy of content and attitude. That’s a polite way of saying that most of the jokes he utters edge toward the despicable and he’s just way too arrogant to give a damn. You can almost feel his audience cringe while it laughs, a little reluctant to give the guy any more encouragement but yet unable to help itself.
But Jeselnik’s swaggering bravado on stage is actually very far away from being just the marriage of an ego run amok and a stubborn lack of propriety. The truth behind his persona is much more interesting than that. It is, in fact, a deliberate creation that was designed both to reach audiences in unexpected ways as well as to give a young performer a jolt of personal momentum in a profession filled with failure and self-doubt. It’s also just a hell of a lot of fun, too.
Recently I caught up with Anthony Jeselnik to talk about the perception of his persona, the way it came into being, and how he pulls it off. READ MORE
Mr. Funny Pants: Michael Showalter's Would-Be Magnum Opus
When Michael Showalter first sat down to write his debut book, he set out with the high-minded and sincere intention to write an “important memoir” that would change the lives of its readers in profound and significant ways. The modest benchmark he set for himself as a first-time author was to write something comparable to David Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Well…things did not pan out exactly as Showalter first intended, but that doesn’t mean that what he produced instead, the uniquely absurd Mr. Funny Pants, is worse off as a result. In fact, it is due in large part to its quirky navigation of that strange gulf between lofty aspiration and sobering reality that Showalter’s literary introduction is such a hilarious and improbably intimate read.
While Showalter will forever be defined in part by his membership in certain beloved comedic posses, whether it be the youthfully rambunctious The State or the adorably weird Stella, recently his own specific comedic sensibility has come more sharply into focus. In 2005 he ventured off on his own to write, direct, and star in The Baxter, a sweetly sad comedy that follows the life of the guy that the girl in the movies leaves behind for the triumphing hero. What The Baxter suggested and Mr. Funny Pants confirms is that Showalter possesses a very silly brand of humor that is highly attuned to those personality defects of panic, desperation, and insecurity that most of us share but do our best to hide.
After a few frenzied years spent striving toward literary greatness, what Showalter eventually produced was a "novel-length comedic essay on procrastination and insecurity." In less interesting or honest hands this sort of endeavor could have easily come off as merely charming at best or overbearingly pretentious at worst. But what makes it so funny and engaging is that readers truly get the sense that they are privy to the manifestation of Showalter’s authentic personality on paper. As we barrel through his frantic inner-monologue we are left with little doubt that his aspiration to write an earth-shattering memoir was genuine, and that the subsequent effort to explain, postpone, and lament what actually happened instead is hilariously real. READ MORE
Patton Oswalt's Surprisingly Haunting Memoir
Once you’ve made it, it’s hard to resist the urge to take a victory lap. For those who’ve succeeded in a big way on a large stage, the lap usually takes the form of a book, in which thinly disguised self-glorification attempts to pass for genuine reflection and introspection. And yet in his memoir Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Patton Oswalt, who has racked up impressive achievements in stand-up, movies, and television, not to mention his status as the standard-bearer for alternative comedy, abstains from even the mere hint of self-satisfaction. Rather than just dully chart the path that led him out of obscurity and into startling professional success, the comedian instead focuses the gaze of his memory on the days before stand-up was even a glimmer of a dream to examine exactly what it is that he left behind.
Although some have promoted the book as a collection of comedic essays, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is very much a memoir — and a subtly haunting one at that. Nestled amidst the fifteen chapters are a few pieces that are pure humor, such as the one in which the author lists some questionable wine descriptors (“The Unattainable Riesling: Angel sweat strained through diamond mesh into a platinum tureen hammered smooth by three former presidents and the current pope”). But the majority of pages — and by far the most compelling ones — are a recollection of a past that is, both for better and worse, gone and irrevocable. READ MORE
The Benson Interruption's Rough Transition From Stage to Screen
Comedians speak often about the inherent isolation of their profession: the loneliness of the road, the solitary process of joke writing, and the misery that follows a horrible show. But perhaps the most forlorn moments of a comic’s life come when he is actually out on stage, under the glare of hot lights, peering into an inky oblivion where audience members sit expectantly, all thinking in unison one single, exacting demand: Make me laugh.
Jerry Seinfeld once observed that within the animal kingdom of performers, stand-ups are a special sort of species. “Stand-up comedy doesn’t belong in the arts section; it belongs on the sports pages.” Scores are kept, wins and losses assessed. Unfortunately, more often than not, the comic comes in as the underdog and departs as the vanquished. If stand-up is indeed a sport, it’s never been a team one — until now, with the November debut of The Benson Interruption on Comedy Central. READ MORE
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