The Death of Tommy Cooper

Yesterday, I came across a video on YouTube of the death of the British magician and comedian Tommy Cooper.  (I’m neither going to link directly to the video or embed it due to the subject matter.  If anyone wants to view it, it is easy enough to find.  There are several versions of it, all essentially the same, it appears, on YouTube. )  Cooper died while performing on a live TV show called “Live from Her Majesty’s,” and perhaps it was a fitting end and perhaps not.  Morbid curiosity was only a small part of why I watched it.  The more compelling reason is that I am 50 now, and he died at 63, a point that is not that far away for me in time.

The odd thing about Tommy Cooper’s death was that people kept laughing at him while he was dying.  Cooper’s act was to effect being an incompetent magician (which he wasn’t).  He would tell jokes while putting off the inevitable failure of the trick he was performing and there would be mistakes and interruptions.  So, when he faltered a bit and fell to a sitting position on the floor, the members of the audience thought it was just part of the act.  And they laughed.  And as he sat slumped and breathing laboriously, they laughed.  And when he fell back dead on the floor, they laughed again.  Because each discreet action was believable as part of his act and each happened, quite amazingly, with the same timing that he used in pacing his gags.

I wonder how it felt for him to die with laughter in his ears.  I would like to think that it was pleasant.  He had spent his career making people laugh, and what more fitting way to go?  But as he sat slumped dying, did he not most likely think, “I’m dying, you bastards!  Don’t fucking laugh!  Call me a doctor.  Help me!”?

It is a mysterious thing, this passage from life that we call death.  I think that what is compelling about that video is that while most of us are familiar with the before and the after, it is rare for us to see the transition.

Still the important thing about Tommy Cooper, from our perspective, is not that he died, but that he lived.  He was, I think, a wonderful comedian who makes me laugh quite a bit.  So that’s why I decided to embed a clip of him quite alive and quite funny.  Enjoy.

The Departed

Famous people keep dropping like flies.  This seems to be the worst year for celebrity death in quite some time, perhaps since the year that John Denver and Sonny Bono died young and needlessly.  Of course, not all of the celebs who shuffle off this mortal coil are on the level of a Michael Jackson or a Patrick Swayze.  Some are known for other things than performing and are really only celebrities in the loosest definition of the word.  Two of those who have recently died are Larry Gelbart and Jody Powell.

Gelbart was a writer and more specifically a comedy writer and more specifically than that an immensely skilled comedy writer.  In death as in life, he is best remembered for creating, or, rather, adapting from the movie of the same name, the sitcom M*A*S*H.  there was more to him than that, though, and he wrote movies and plays and other TV shows.  Some of those are pretty damn good, too, such as the play Sly Fox and the TV movie Barbarians at the Gate.  He started out in radio at the age of 16 when his father, who was a Hollywood barber,  got him a job writing for Danny Thomas.  that led to a stint working on Duffy’s Tavern which led to writing for Bob Hope for a while.

In the ’50s, he worked for Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour and some specials.  He is represented by the character called Kenny in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, and I want to go further off to the side on that and say that the character of Lucas is not Neil Simon’s presentation of himself, but is, in fact, his take on the young Woody Allen.  It’s not about Your Show of Shows, which is what Neil worked on.  It is about Caesar’s Hour, which was where Woody came on board.  In fact, there is a legendary story about Woody being brought to the writer’s room by Milt Kamen, who you probably don’t remember, but should.  Kamen had found Allen when Woody was writing sketches at a resort in the Catskills and convinced Caesar to hire him.  On the appointed day, Kamen collected Allen and ushered him into the writer’s room with the introduction, “I have with me the young Larry Gelbart.”  To which Gelbart, who had been a top comedy writer for about ten years, responded, “The young Larry Gelbart is sitting right here.”

But that’s how young he was when he started.  He was maybe 26 or 27 at the time and seemed like an old pro.

Gelbart was best known as a writer of clever dialogue in the spare, unsentimental tradition of George S. Kaufman.  As the guy who wrote most of the best episodes of the first four seasons of M*A*S*H and who also had a hand in all the others from that period, his influence on me was enormous.  His characterization of Hawkeye showed that he could have been a good writer for Groucho, had Groucho still needed top-notch film writers in the later decades of his career.  for many years, my true ambition was to be the young Larry Gelbart.  For a while, it was to be the middle-aged Larry Gelbart.  A person could do worse.

The second person I wanted to bring up was Jody Powell.

Now, I can’t say that he was any particular influence on me, although I’m sure he would have been had I actually known him. ( At least that’s what I got from the tribute that Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about him on The New Yorker website.)  I just wanted to note that I saw him once when I lived in Washington.  He crossed K Street in the opposite direction that I was, and I recognized him.  He gave no indication of knowing me, as shocking as that might seem.  I didn’t stop him, didn’t follow him, didn’t pester him, just took note of him.  “That’s Jody Powell,” I thought.  “Cool.”  He certainly didn’t look like a guy who would die, unexpectedly, of a heart attack at age 65.

You just never know.

What Closes on Saturday Night

People like to throw the word “satire” around a lot these days, but the term is rarely understood or applied properly.  I say this after reading a review of what sounds like a dog of a movie, Hamlet 2, in The New York Times.  At several points, the reviewer, Stephen Holden, refers to the satire in this film, only I don’t see anything satiric about it.  It’s merely a spoof, and Mr. Holden seems to think that sending up Dead Poets Society–however abysmal and worthy of derision that film may be–qualifies as satire.  However, it doesn’t, at least not to my mind.

Satire is a political and social weapon, and it has one target:  Those who have too much, control too much, and think that they have a right to dictate what sort of lives the great mass of humans get to live.  It is a cudgel that should be used in defense of the defenseless and against those in power.  You can make fun of a cripple, but a cripple can’t be satirized.  Neither can someone who is poor.

However, it seems to me to have been a trend in this country over recent years to attack those without power while giving those with power a relatively free ride, the main exception being partisan caricatures.  The Daily Show is capable of rising to the level of satire, but not much else that I see.  In the main, we spoof the rich and powerful–the “how stupid is Bush” trope is more spoof than anything else– while attacking the poor and downtrodden.

Let me use a couple of examples to show what I mean.

The first is an example of how popular it is these days to kick the poor. It’s a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look concerning two homeless men, Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and his cohort, Ginger.  Now, I like Mitchell and Webb.  I’m not here to run them down.  I just found this sketch disappointing because it does nothing except reinforce stereotypes and take potshots at people who are already down.  This takes no courage, no wit, no incisiveness, nothing.  At best, it takes a bit of a mean streak.

Contrast this with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer as Tom fun and Derek:

There is an element of understanding and sympathy here that makes it poignant in a completely unsentimental way.  The small stain of satire in the piece is inherent in its sympathy with the characters and addresses the narrowness of a society  that pushes some of its weakest members to homelessness for their eccentricity (in losing their lodgings for Derek’s “unconventional way of eating an arctic roll“–a kind of dessert) and to theft in search of a bit of fun.

Satire denies the supremacy of the powerful by invoking laughter, but it is a laughter tinged with outrage.  Satirists are injured idealists, disappointed lovers.  They are people who use wit in order to defend those who cannot defend themselves and to deflate pretension.  And of all the things that one might claim about the homeless, calling them pretentious isn’t one of them.

Hands Across the Water with Horse Butter and Hat Cream

I was going to explain the relationship between the following two videos, but have decided that they don’t need it.  I guess I will point out that the first is American and from the ’50s and that the second is British and from the ’90s.  The first, of course, is Ernie Kovacs.  The second is Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.

At Last!

Well, it seems that the dunderheads who run the BBC are finally starting to catch on.  I just, completely by accident, found out that they are allowing plain, ordinary people, just like you and me, to embed videos they have up on YouTube on our blogs and websites.  Good for them.  They have finally realized that there is this thing called “viral marketing” that they might be able to take advantage of.  Maybe some day they will come to understand that putting entire episodes and seasons of shows on the web actually protects their copyright rather than infringes on it and gives them a new medium in which to generate income.

To celebrate this momentous decision, I am embedding this favorite clip from QI:

Notes, Comments, and Hatchets, Part 1A

There’s so much wrong with Malcolm Gladwell’s hatchet job on To Kill a Mockingbird that I’ve had to actually write a second blog post just to cover all the nonsense.  Here goes.

In yesterday’s post, I deconstructed the basic ideas that underpin Gladwell’s contentions concerning the book.  Today, I’m just going to quickly go over a couple of smaller points.

One of Gladwell’s later tactics is to draw a comparison between To Kill a Mockingbird and criticisms that George Orwell made of Charles Dickens.  First, he fails by assuming that simply because George Orwell said something that it is automatically true, that Orwell–who I think would have been disgusted by being used in this manner–was Christ returned.  The real problem that Gladwell encounters, though, is that when Orwell criticized Dickens for attacking “the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places” and for showing “no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown,” he is not attacking Dickens the novelist, he is attacking Dickens the social satirist.  Again, To Kill a Mockingbird was not, is not, and was never intended to be a satire, social or otherwise.  The comparison is not valid.  Orwell, had he lived may have loved, hated, or ignored To Kill a Mockingbird, but he certainly would never have confused it for satire.

Next, as raised in a comment in my previous post, Gladwell’s interpretation of the sequence at the end of the book concerning Boo Radley is just plain wrong.  To Kill a Mockingbird is, at its heart, a meditation on some basic teachings of Jesus, such as “do unto others” and “turn the other cheek.”  Boo Radley, who is not merely “shy,” as Malcolm Gladwell would have it, but is either mentally retarded or just plain crazy, defends Scout and Jem not as a matter of civic duty, but in response to a series of small kindnesses.  He would derive no benefit from notoriety–a concept which leaves the well-known Mr Gladwell aghast–and would only, in the long term, suffer harm from it, probably ending up being institutionalized.  Since Mr Gladwell appears to be incapable of absorbing anything other than the most surface elements from a story, he takes the Sheriff’s reference to “angel food cakes” quite literally, and does not interpret it as a metaphor for the invasion of Boo’s privacy and the harm that can be done by the well meaning.  It means that Boo Radley sought no glory and deserves the right to have no glory thrust upon him.  In other words, good works are their own reward.

Finally, Mr Gladwell excoriates the book for presenting what his own research shows was a fairly realistic depiction of conditions in the South in 1936.  Harper Lee’s mistake, in his view, is in telling us the truth simply because that truth is uncomfortable and ugly.  He wants Atticus Finch to be something he was unlikely to be, a person who stood outside the society he lived in, immune from the values he was raised with and surrounded by, some sort of Nietzschian Superman, who is exactly the sort of person I’ve never come across in real life.  Mr Gladwell’s problem is that he doesn’t want a novel, he wants a fable, a fairy tale, in which things work out the way we want them to rather than in the way they actually happen.

It is true that Atticus Finch tends to get placed on too high of a pedestal, however, that is the fault of neither Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird.  That is the fault of readers who tend to romanticize their heroes and wrongly so.  Atticus Finch was a good man, but not a great one, a person who sought justice where none was likely, but not a revolutionary.  And yet, when all is said and done, is there not something to be said for a book that preaches understanding and compassion as virtues?  Are these not, in fact, the same sort of virtues that Dr. King so often preached?  Why should Malcolm Gladwell and The New Yorker be so against compassion?  It’s because it is hard to find room for compassion when you are planning a hatchet job.

Notes, Comments, and Hatchets, Part One

This is the first in at least a two-part series concerning The New Yorker and the various hatchet jobs that it does on established literary figures and works.  For a place that’s continually published crappy fiction throughout my adult life, they like to get awfully uppity.

Today’s installment concerns Malcolm Gladwell’s knifing this week of the classic book To Kill a Mockingbird in honor of its 50th anniversary.  Gladwell’s approach to the novel is social rather than artistic.  In fact, even though it is a work of art and not a treatise on race relations, he makes no assessment of either the merits or demerits of the text.  His problem with it is that it does not make any attempt to overthrow Jim Crow and end racism as it was known in one fell swoop.  He attacks it for fostering what he calls “[o]ld style Southern liberalism,” an approach to Jim Crow and politics in the South that was destroyed in the battle between the Civil Rights movement and diehard segregationists in the late ’50s and early ’60s.  He calls old style Southern liberalism “gradual and paternalistic,” which seems accurate.  Further, he claims that Atticus Finch’s approach to race relations and dealing with justice in the South at the time of the novel was too namby-pamby, too paternalistic, too forgiving of people, and not committed enough to true equality between blacks and whites, and this is probably true too.

The problem is that the novel is not, in its essence, about race relations and was never meant to be a kind of manifesto.  Harper Lee set out to tell a story about certain people in a particular time-and-place.  She was trying not to change the world, but to describe it, as it was, as best she could.  Oh, she could have portrayed Atticus in the hero mode of the average boy’s adventure novel, righting wrongs and always following the true moral path.  Instead, though, she attempted to draw a portrait of a man. As someone who could have actually existed in space and time.

The primary mistake that Gladwell makes is a classic one.  He assumes that the point of art is to change the world, which it most assuredly is not.  In fact, he attacks both the novel and the character of Atticus for using the “hearts and minds” method, which is seen as being too slow, too incremental, too otherworldly.  The truth is that this is how all art works.  Art is about evolution rather than revolution, and anybody who thinks that the shackles of oppression will be broken and abandoned because of a book is out of his or her tree.  People have tried to do that and never has a one accomplished, at the end of the day, a damn thing.  In fact, most ended up being worth nothing more than recycling.  Pedantic and self-important books tend to end up in the dust bin, with the possible exception of Ayn Rand’s.  And, fortunately, most people, mainly boys, who grow enamored of Ms Rand eventually outgrow her.  Her work is juvenalia for juvenile minds.

No, the best that a novel can do is to get the reader to understand another person’s suffering and thereby increase the reach of that person’s compassion just a jot further.  And that is what To Kill a Mockingbird is on about:  compassion.

When Gladwell complains that Atticus is too forgiving of Walter Cunningham, the “poor, white farmer” who leads a mob in an attempted lynching, he misses (and so does the scholar he quotes) the entire point of the episode.  Here.  Let me let Malcolm explain his point of view for himself:

The mob eventually scatters, and the next morning Finch tries to explain the night’s events to Scout. Here again is a test for Finch’s high-minded equanimity. He likes Walter Cunningham. Cunningham is, to his mind, the right sort of poor white farmer: a man who refuses a W.P.A. handout and who scrupulously repays Finch for legal work with a load of stove wood, a sack of hickory nuts, and a crate of smilax and holly. Against this, Finch must weigh the fact that Cunningham also leads lynch mobs against black people. So what does he do? Once again, he puts personal ties first. Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is “basically a good man,” who “just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” Blind spots? As the legal scholar Monroe Freedman has written, “It just happens that Cunningham’s blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people.”

First, is it true that “Cunningham’s blind spot . . . is a homicidal hatred of black people”?  Is Walter Cunningham, in fact, going about killing blacks as he comes across them or is his leadership of this mob more specific than that?  Does he in fact lead “lynch mobs against black people” or lead one mob against one particular black person?  Are members of any mob a collection of psychopaths or are they groups of people who are under the sway of mass hysteria?  Do people quite often do things in groups that they wouldn’t dare do alone?  And shouldn’t the renowned writer on sociology be aware of that?

Cunningham’s blind spot is not “a homicidal hatred of black people,” but rather an unquestioned belief in an evil social system.  Again, Harper Lee could have painted him as merely a monster, a villain, but that would have taken her story in the fantasyland of melodrama.  In the real and complex world, good men can do evil things, quite often because they have invested their identities in a rotten system or because they get swept away in the hysterical moment.  Is it better to understand that person and their frailties or to condense them into a caricature of their real selves, all the better to hate them with?   For both Malcolm Gladwell and Professor Monroe Freedman are guilty of stereotyping.  They have to if they want to construct that straw man where the character of Walter Cunningham used to be.

As Jean Renoir said in The Rules of the Game, “The terrible thing about life is this:  Everyone has his reasons.”  This is not to imply a kind of leveling of reasons and actions, but to open the possibility in one’s mind that we are all human and fallible.  It is to imply that compassion is a virtue and that blind judgment is not.

As part of Gladwell’s attack, he says that To Kill a Mockingbird is “a novel set in mid-century Alabama,” and while I cannot carp about it being set in Alabama, I must complain about the “mid-century” part.  The purpose, of course, is to make sure that your straw man is set in the proper straw setting.  The meaning that Gladwell wants the reader to take away from “mid-century” is that the novel is set in the 1950s, the decade that saw the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, just so that he can show how out-of-step the book was with the times that it sought to portray.  Which is nonsense.  The novel is set in 1936, a very different time in Southern history.  This “mid-century” business is misleading, just the kind of trick used when the author has few legitimate arguments to make.  And so much for The New Yorker’s fabled fact-checking department.

Attack To Kill a Mockingbird if you must, but at least attack it for what it is, not what it isn’t.  To do so should be beneath a writer of Malcolm Gladwell’s stature, and to print it should beneath a publication such as The New Yorker.  Unfortunately, as further entries in this series will show, the hatchet job is an accepted part of The New Yorker’s ethic.

UPDATE:  I have added a part two to this argument.

What If?

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the arrest of Dr. Henry Louis Gates last week, I’m struck, yet again, by the pointlessness of our news coverage.  I’m not going to get into the particulars of the case.  That has already been done ad nauseum, and since I wasn’t a completely neutral party who was there, how can I say what went on?  I will say this:  Instead of drinking beers under a magnolia tree, it would have been better had the President joined them in the White House screening room for a viewing of Rashomon.

Last night, while I was skimming the umpteenth post on The Daily Dish about what’s being moronically called Gates Gate, I was struck by the thought of how ephemeral the whole thing is, how although it’s the big thing of the moment, in a few weeks it will be forgotten.  The news, as a concept, is a voracious consumer of outrage.  Based in melodrama, it searches endlessly for heroes and villains and works mostly by manipulating emotions by taking very real people and reducing their sufferings to a kind of marionette show.  You can’t sell papers, even digital ones, without stoking somebody’s discontent or their pity.

The news is grounded in sentimentality, which makes it harder to take any given story seriously for any particular length of time.  Since the story is sentimentalized, it is shallow.  Since it is shallow, it cannot be sustained.  To do otherwise would be like watching the same scene from a soap opera over-and-over again.  And it’s hard to imagine anything that could be duller than that.

Even longer-lasting stories, such as the War in Iraq, are presented in sentimental ways and are presented as a series of distinct sentimental stories rather than as one continuing narrative.  In the case of the Iraq War, it started out with a patriotic pageant called “Shock and Awe.”  This was followed by the desert melodrama “The Looting of Baghdad.”  “Abu Ghraib,” “al Qaeda in Iraq,” “Saddam Down the Spiderhole,” “Crisis in Fallujah,” “Improvised Explosive Device,” “The Hanging of Saddam Hussein,” and “The Surge,” among a plethora of titles, all had their moments in the sun.  And just to be clear, I am not trying to belittle the suffering incurred by the soldiers involved, their families, or the Iraqis themselves.  These are all people who experience these stories not as melodrama but as tragic farce.  Their suffering is real and should not, cannot, be diminished.

And that is part of the hell of it.  By sentimentalizing such a story, the news business does exactly that.  It diminishes the suffering of those directly involved.  It takes something profound and makes it passing fair just for the sake of making a few more dollars.

The chaff of this approach to news is the kind of person we call a celebrity.  These are people of no discernible talent who attain a sort of notoriety, quite often from a scandal, and they work quite hard to remain in the public eye.  I just saw a headline concerning Kim Kardashian this morning that described her as a star, and I’m still not sure why I should know her name at all.  Except that she was involved in some scandal at one time, which made her part of the news cycle.  For the person who gets addicted to the notoriety, life becomes a melodramatic story of various romances and break-ups and career moves.  It’s a very sad thing, this addiction to fame, and I can’t imagine the bottomless, existential dread that must envelope Ms Kardashian every time she looks in a mirror and notices an imperfection.  Michael Jackson was killed by his fame and by the sentimentalized parody of a person he became in its service.

And so the omnivorous news cycle continues, chewing up people and stories and spitting them out as parody humans, no longer noble or tragic but merely pitiable.  And there’s nothing to be done about it because most people prefer melodrama to tragedy and sentimental comedy to farce.  They like everything tied up at the end with ribbons made of avuncular smiles and homebaked pies.  It’s a reality of a kind, a shabby, sentimental one, but that’s what folks like.  For the advantage to sentimentality is this:  When the emotions produced are fake and trite, you don’t have to risk the power of true pain and joy.

Newspaper Madness

One of the arguments that people–and by people I mean print journalists–make for the inability of newspapers to move online is the claim that the level of reporting would suffer because news outlets, due to the smaller levels of revenue available online, would have to close foreign bureaus and layoff staff and just generally not be able to do as much reporting as they have traditionally done.  Fair enough.  The loss of solid reporting would be a loss to society.  However, that argument can only hold water if the two basic assumptions underpinning it–that quality reporting can’t be accomplished without a wide network of standing bureaus and that online reporting is inherently inferior to its print cousin–are actually true.  I’ve encountered a couple of things in recent weeks that lead me to believe that neither is.

The first has been the coverage of the demonstrations in Iran.  While The New York Times has mostly reported on the press releases and statements of the most hardline Ayatollahs and the dismal to the point of being pathetic Ahmadinejad, Andrew Sullivan on his blog The Daily Dish has been doing actual reporting based on Twitter tweets and emails and on information gleaned from people who have connections with family and friends inside Iran.  This is reporting.  And this is why, when a very important and respected group of Ayatollahs came out against the recent election, all the big news outlets were slack-jawed in their disbelief while Andrew and his readers were not.

The second piece of reporting has had to do with the sudden resignation last week by Governor Sarah Palin.  (For the sake of the argument I am presenting, I offer no opinions for or against Gov. Palin.  This has to do with reporting facts, not opinions.)  While the MSM took the Governor’s statement at face value and, even in interviews, tossed her softball questions, online outlets were checking her statements to see what was factual and what wasn’t.  Again, the online outlets are reporting while the MSM is passing along press releases.

None of this is new.  The MSM let us down in considering the Iraq War.  They let us down on torture allegations.  They’ve let us down over-and-over again for the longest time.  It predates Mr. Bush’s presidency and it has outlived it.  The big newspapers and the networks and the other big news outlets have routinely relied on press conferences and government contacts instead of real reporting, which is simply awful and lazy journalism.  All the actual journalism that gets done gets shunted into a special category called “investigative journalism” and is done mostly by magazines rather than newspapers and news shows.  All the MSM really does is support the status quo, which is what state-supported media are supposed to do.  If they are not asking questions about everybody in power all the time (and this is where Fox News also misses the mark:  they coddle one side and attack the other) they are not doing their jobs.  They have stopped being reporters and started being merely typists and apologists.

I think that the MSM can either adapt or die.  I think that journalism suffers from being made into a profession instead of a calling.  I think reporters should dig and question and be cynical about politicians and aloof from them.  I think that finding ways of supporting them in their current condition is bad for democracy and bad for the Republic.

The Proof Is in the Posting

As the following shows, I submitted a comment to The Times at 2:25 PM on Tuesday, June 23rd.  I made this capture at 11:00 AM on Wednesday, June 24th.  Why other people’s comments get in but mine seem to routinely get lost or disposed of is anyone’s guess.  Purists may also now compare what is posted below to my previous post to see how the comment changed in the rewriting.

UPDATE: The above comment finally made it past the gatekeeper.  The first comment I submitted seems to have disappeared into the aether.