Funny Ha Ha

A man, "Swanson," reclines in a chair eating cookies and drinking whiskey. A male nurse attends to his unconscious father. "You ever have to reset a prolapsed anus?" Swanson says calmly. No response. "Do you even know what that is? You ever have to deal with that? A prolapsed anus? They teach you that in nurse school? You and the ladies get that lesson?" Swanson continues to probe. The nurse remains silent. "Anus and Andy? Nothing? Famous anus cookies? Nothing?" The nurse walks out of the room. 

This is Rick Alverson's 2012 film, The Comedy. Interminable filthy jokes, slabs of racist/fascist provocation, much golden-hued slo-mo footage of beery, jiggling male bodies.  Swanson,  played with terrifying deadpan venom by Tim Heidecker, insults his friends and family; he humiliates cab drivers, landscapers and other working class folks. It's really horrible.

You may decide that in the past decade you've gotten your fill of poisonous behavior from affluent white men. You may feel that even depicting such behavior is redundant or that it takes part in the same impunity that continues to enable such men. 90 minutes of acute discomfort might not be for you. I get it. 

But for me, The Comedy  has come to feel prescient. It anticipates both the moral decadence and, possibly more insightfully, the deep sadness of our current moment. At the time of its release, many--those who didn't walk out of the theater, anyway--took The Comedy as a critique of Williamsburg hipsterdom. Others understood it as a feature-length version of of the cringe-comedy genre as purveyed by folks like Neil Hamburger and Heidecker himself in The Tim and Eric Awesome Show, the Adult Swim series that made him famous. The Comedy does these things. But it also identifies and predicts a mode of language with which we have become painfully familiar. The discursive world it depicts has come to seem like an elaboration of the one that we have all, mostly against our will, come to inhabit. 

All of this resonated with me on first viewing, even if I struggled to articulate just what was happening. What was readily apparent is that there is a wound at the film's heart, a wound that, to his credit, Alverson refers to only obliquely. Swanson's wealthy father is dying; his mother is absent. Swanson's brother lives in a mental hospital. We sense something badly broken with this family; bitterness and estrangement seem to be the rule. Swanson has exiled himself to a small sailboat in the East River and has dedicated his life to numb, idle hedonism. It seems clear that Swanson's wasted life (wasted in both senses of the term) is the product of some deep grief, a grief that the film's visual style--the long, silent takes, the scenes' slow unfolding, the waning evening light--evokes beautifully. Alverson puts this sense of grief  into tension with the awful things we see Swanson do, which produces a feeling of gradually unfolding catastrophe, a slow, terrible revelation. 

Let's talk first about what exactly makes watching this film so uncomfortable. Here's Merve Emre in The Los Angeles Review of Books on The Comedy's "queasy" anti-comedic sensibility:

Formally speaking, the humor on display in The Comedy is classic travesty: humor that operates by constructing a debased or grotesque likeness of the subject at hand. But as the prolapsed anus monologue makes clear, it’s travesty that wears out its welcome. A joke is offered and laughter elicited, but instead of moving on to the next joke like a good stand-up comedian would, Alverson’s characters beat their material into the ground. They stutter, halt, and repeat the same scatological or sexual premise with such one-sided determination that the metaphysical fabric of the joke begins to unravel into a series of critical questions. Why does this count as a joke? Why is it funny? Why was it ever funny? 

What makes the film even more painful is that the "jokes"--they are barely jokes--take place not within the winking, pastiched context of The Tim and Eric Awesome Show nor the explicitly performative setting of a comedy club, but within the conventions of cinematic realism and cinema-verite. The audience for these jokes is the other characters in the film: the weary nurse caring for Swanson's  dad, Swanson's sad sister-in-law, dudes in a Bed-Stuy bar, some unfortunate cab drivers and everybody else on whom Swanson sets his sights. They are not sequestered behind the fourth wall and they are not in on the joke. Imagine The Tim and Eric Awesome Show's parodic venom and disgust extended into real time and placed within what scans to the viewer as reality. Queasy is definitely the word.

The typical contemporary reading of  The Comedy--as a roasting of early aughts hipsterdom and the associated ironic attitude--is made easy by the fact that Swanson and his pals are indeed aging, bored Williamsburg hipsters, grown alcoholic and fat by at least a decade of drugs and Pabst and artful shiftlessness. But, especially in retrospect, it feels like their hipsterhood is a smokescreen and that the mode of discourse in question here is something more (or, as it happens, less) than irony. 

Ironic speech or behavior gestures at its opposite--as in, to take an example from a previous decade, wearing a trucker hat or sporting a mullet to show that you are not, in fact, among the class of people who would authentically wear a trucker hat or sport a mullet. There are indeed moments in The Comedy in which the characters speak ironically, particularly when Swanson and his friends are drunkenly performing for one another. But more often, Swanson is up to something else. More often, Swanson uses speech not to indicate a particular meaning opposite his words' face-value content but simply to provoke. He adopts personae and indulges in riffs with the sole purpose of creating confrontation. Thus: the prolapsed anus discourse; a Hitler apologia with a credulous young woman at a party; racist patter with the Black guys at the bar; misogynistic insults lobbed at various women. Swanson pushes every interaction to the point of abrasion. When a conversation partner refuses to react, as when the nurse leaves the room, a wave of contempt passes over Swanson's face.

Without question, Swanson makes use of the tools of irony in order to create these performances. It is telling that he frequently either adopts the persona of a working person or singles out working people for his provocations.  Among the film's ugliest moments is when a drunk Swanson offers a cab driver, Raj, $400 to drive his a cab for 20 minutes. Swanson knows that Raj can't afford to refuse. He also knows that, by accepting, Raj is putting his livelihood in jeopardy. Swanson exploits this knowledge to it's fullest, terrifying Raj by brazenly careening through the city. It is here that the question of hipsterdom seems most germane. Swanson's economic privilege allows him a dilettante's distance on the world of work.  It frees him from the necessity of earnestly owning a particular working identity and allows him to adopt identities at his leisure.  Swanson's life is empty and meaningless and so he enjoys dabbling in the sense of purpose work bestows. He is free of (or alienated from) any particular identity and so he assumes identities at will. In addition to his cab-driving stunt, he poses as a landscaper, a store-owner and a dishwasher. But in positioning himself away from these many identities and beliefs, Swanson signals that he actually has no stable place to stand. With his endless negations, he finally negates the possibility of an identity of his own.  

Language functions for Swanson in the same way. What for others is a necessary tool for negotiating daily life and for creating and maintaining relationships, is for him a luxury good.  As with his dalliances with work, his speech is a symbol of his leisure, of the freedom from commitment granted him by his privilege. And he flaunts this freedom by engaging in speech that is so knowingly perverse, so evidently calculated and performed that we feel he cannot possibly mean what he says. As Emre observes, the humor in The Comedy constructs "debased or grotesque" likenesses of its subjects. When it comes to Swanson's  language, "debased" and "grotesque" are definitely the words. 

Now, all of our speech is an ad hoc construction, a mixture of performance, manipulation, aspiration and much more. But our social world depends on a level of trust that, in some authentic way, we "mean" what we say, or try our best to. With his almost total unwillingness to engage in sincere, conventional speech, Swanson breaks that trust. His speech is intended specifically to nullify language's relational capacity.  It is not that it has no content or is itself meaningless; his performances would have none of their astringent power if they were not deeply meaningful to us, if only in their repulsiveness. But this only signals that Swanson means to use language as a tool for severing the possibility of relationship.  His language unravels itself. This is more poisonous than gibberish, deeper and more radical than irony. This is a travesty of expressive language, much as the whiskey, beer and cookies he ingests (you never seem him eat or drink anything else) are a travesty of nourishing food.

As Emre indicates, these travesties unravel themselves through sheer, determined repetition. And when we take a look, these intertwined themes of travesty and unraveling, or decay, show up throughout the film. Toward the film's middle, Swanson's artfully shiftless crew gather in a park to play wiffle ball. But the game devolves into drunken nonsense. They hit each other with the bat; they chase each other on their bikes; they drink: it's a travesty. Accompanying this scene is William Basinski's "Disintegration Loop 1.1," an analog tape composition in which a short section of pastoral music is looped repeatedly over the course of an hour, the sound gradually decaying with every repetition until it falls into white noise. In its original form, the music is set to a video of the smoking lower Manhattan skyline, shot from Basinski's Brooklyn rooftop during the last hour of daylight on September 11th, 2001. The piece is incredibly beautiful, but the video never allows us to forget that "Disintegration Loop" bears witness to a catastrophe. That the softball game is backdropped by the Manhattan skyline refers both to Basinski's video and to the very catastrophe it represents.

More catastrophic decay: In his dying father's house, Swanson paces an empty swimming pool making wordless faux-operatic vocalizations which reverberate back toward him in a hollow echo. Here, Swanson achieves an intentional emptiness that he seems to have been striving for throughout the film. His voice's only content is its own sonic aura. Later, Swanson and his pals unleash a derisive chant of "We want some hip hip hop!" (and then, "You gonna get-ta no no tip!") on a taxi driver unlucky enough to have a broken radio. Their voices are forceful and rhythmic, more like music than speech. The words begin to distort and lose their shape, devolving toward pure, cruel sound.

Finally: Swanson encounters a young waitress at his restaurant (we never learn her name), who agrees to play along with his provocations. He brings her back to his boat, where they share a kind of knowing meta-seduction. Suddenly, she falls into epileptic seizure.  Her body convulses; its gestural and emotional content violently sheer away; all that remains is mute visceral affect. Swanson looks on without expression. In this scene, and in the scenes above, we approach a kind of limit moment of perception and experience, in which the structures of communication vested in speech and physical gesture--the very things that make meaning possible--seem to have all but melted away. 

When I first saw this film, back in 2012, I struggled to come up with an analogy for Swanson's mode of being. The film is called The Comedy, and there is no question that the structure and ethics of comedic performance are among it's primary themes. But, I thought, the film's closest cousin is probably advertising, with its collage of free-floating referents and gestures, nuggets of sentiment loosed from their historicity and repurposed for the sake of emotional manipulation. It's worth remembering here that The Tim and Eric Awesome Show most often adopts the structures and aesthetics of advertising--along with cable access programming and other televisual filler--as the formal context for its scathing, hyperactive parodies. But even advertising urges us toward the common language of consumerism, exploitive and pernicious though it may be. Swanson's performances are even more desperate and grotesque than that. They willfully fray the social fabric. They point at alienation itself. 

While Swanson's language may reflect a freedom from historical and cultural commitment, the film--and, it seems, Swanson himself--understand the violence at the heart of that supposed luxury. Listen to the long speech he makes to his sister-in law, Liza, in an exaggerated southern gentleman's drawl. They are outside of his father's mansion waiting for the old man to die. Just to warn you, this is really terrible:

Oh Liza, Liza, them slaves be workin' hahd out heuh. Dyin' out there in the thousands. In the sun. Just keelin' over from the heat. From the heat-uh. C'mon nah. Ain't it good, ain't it raht to see them die? How hahd they wuhk fo' this famileh? Papa used them skin for makin' nice furnitchuh. He tans 'em out there, makes a nice...that couch you're on in there is all slave meat. Slave skin. As it should be, lawd bless 'em. Slave penis and vagina. C'mon that's funny. I know you think that's funny. You ain't--your sense o' humor ain't died. Its a good crop o' slaves we have this year id'nit? Real nice. A nice bunch. Ah got to know 'em personally. Some of 'em ah know all by their first name! 

He pauses for a second and then resumes, more haltingly.

Old man be dead by now, I 'spect. He ain't breathin' too good. I 'spect he won't...he won't shine too kindly on our famileh. He got one son out there on a boat. He got one up there in the loony bin, married to some whore...who, who rubs her...who rubs shit on her vagina. Some whore that...you the kinda whore that, you the kinda whore that swallows cum...you are my only cum swallowin' sistuh-in-law. I appreciate it. Cum swallowuh: That's a proud thing to be in this famileh. 

The first thing we understand about this is the obvious: the extreme violence, racism and ugliness, the will to alienate his listener as completely as possible. But there is also a shade of deep self-laceration. We do not know how the old man has acquired the wealth to pay for his son's shiftlessness, but Swanson makes us understand, quite graphically, the disgust that he attaches to it. His privilege is paid for in blood money. His perversity is an inheritance that he cannot escape. This speech suggests, I think, that the ultimate target of his nihilism is himself. Grief lurks around the edges of his speech; it seeps through the cracks when Swanson's words fail him. But it is a grief he cannot allow himself to experience.

He pauses again. In a soft, unaffected voice he asks, "So how long...how long do you think they're gonna keep him up in there? So are they weaning him off the stuff or how does that work? What's the process?" Liza has been pacing back and forth, wearily absorbing it all. She says: "Are you really asking that?" He replies by making a joke about conjugal visits.


*       *       *

Alverson takes pains to show us Swanson's sadness, his isolation and self-hatred. But the film never exonerates him. We sympathize with his suffering but we are never allowed to forget how nasty he really is. Think, here, of the waitress's physical anguish and the unmoved look on Swanson's face as he watches her seize. If he has a capacity for sympathy, he has effectively disguised it under a thick coating of boredom and caprice. His voice might echo beautifully in an empty swimming pool, but this decay is no ecstasy. 

Here in 2023, after Gamergate and Trump and the Alt Right and the capitol invasion we have a much more precise frame for Swanson's style of communication: Swanson was a troll before that term gained wide cultural currency. Many (but not all) comedians have long hid behind the argument that if a joke is funny, it must express some truth, even if that truth is dark or shameful. For this reason, the argument goes, all genuinely funny comedy serves the interest of truth-telling and is therefore socially necessary.  The internet has exploited to the fullest, most damaging extent possible, the ambiguity and license inherent in that point-of-view. These days, I think many of us know to ask the question: Funny to who? True to who? What ideology is this "truth" reinforcing? That disabled reporter over there sure is pathetic. That woman is a nasty slut. Black people are so stupid and they talk like this. I'm kidding but it's true. You can tell because people are laughing.  I said earlier that Swanson's leaves himself without a stable identity. But the film makes the terminal point of this unraveling quite clear. We understand better now, the way that the repeated travesty of language, the decay of its relational capacity, resolves in an ideology of cruelty. Swanson may not "mean" what he says but that distortion and inversion of meaning is itself definitive of fascist discourse. For a long time, maybe forever, we've been nurturing forms of sadism, allowing them to circulate throughout our culture. We laugh or we avert our eyes or we admire ourselves for our unabashed honesty.  

In the film's final scenes, Swanson walks the streets, rides the subway, bikes to the beach, alone. His friends are nowhere to be found. He looks brutally depressed. The film's final image, of Swanson playing in the surf with a nameless child, only underscores the loneliness of his life. We wonder: If this venom, this pain and anger, is the product of some soul-deep brokenness, what is our wound?   

All Shook Down

The hardest, most essential part of depicting Elvis on film is finding a living human being to play Elvis Presley. In Austin Butler, Baz Lurhman has his man, an actor who could credibly draw screams of wanton desire, not to mention bras and undies, from a throng of teenage girls, who could compel a segregationist moral panic simply with the movement of his hips. But who could also slay a Vegas crowd with plodding--though somehow still electrifying--kung-fu moves while wearing a massive, bedazzled jumpsuit, who could make you almost forget the chintzy venue, the pounds of bloat, the extremely gone look in the eye, who can usher you through kitsch to something closer to nirvana through the sheer force of his rock-and-roll kingliness.

Butler can do all these things and yet this movie is astonishingly bad and not just in the normal, just-so biopic-y ways. Want to tell the story of Elvis? Build the movie around Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's lecherous longtime manager. Cast Tom Hanks, put him in a fat suit and facial prosthetics, let him run the show in a Dutch-accented voiceover that is neither Dutch, nor how Colonel Tom actually spoke. In honor of the old sideshow huckster, give the film a portentous mescaline carney vibe. Give us, please, lots of shots of the aged Colonel (spoiler: he's not a real Colonel) wandering empty casino floors in a hospital gown, IV bag in tow. That's how you make a movie about Elvis. 

Luhrman has always been a cornball whose movies tend to date themselves almost instantly. But he also has a feel for intense, vivid romance. I challenge you to look at Leo and Claire making eyes at each other through the fish tank while that Des'ree song plays--two movingly beautiful people visibly stunned to be gazing on one another--and not get all the way up in your feelings. (For the full Baz experience, contrast any scene featuring R  + J with the rest of the movie: the MTV Beach House-style editing, the Benny Hill-style gags, the white dudes screaming Shakespeare in blaccent.) 

We get some of that ecstatic romance in this film whenever Elvis is on stage casting his spell with that. But almost everything else here--Col. Tom's voiceover, the tone-poetic montages, the scary-clown motif (for real)--steps on that magic. The worst part: I know Luhrman has always gone big with anachronistic music choices but how could it possibly be the right idea to bleed Elvis's songs into a hip-hop remix at almost every turn? I get that it might be time to reappraise Elvis's relationship to Black music. He was a truly great blues and gospel singer who came by his influences honestly and had lots of Black fans back in the day. Maybe he actually was tight with B.B. King and Little Richard as this film suggests, I don't know. But the theft racial capitalism pulled off with Elvis as its poster boy was real and no amount of Denzel Curry verses can change that. I mean, the closing credits feature Nardo Wick rapping over "In the Ghetto"--a ludicrously out-of-touch song, basically the Moynihan report in lounge boogie form. That's just the crassest revisionism. And if you want to push the point about the line that runs from big Mama Thornton to Doja Cat, make a movie about Big Mama Thornton, call it "Hound Dog." Black music doesn't need Elvis. Don't name check a blues legend in one scene to give street cred to the epochally famous white rock star. Don't pretend her brief appearance makes the theft any less criminal. 

The film closes with one of Elvis's final shows, just months before his death. The scene segues from Butler's performance into archival footage. Swollen and sweaty, all of 42 but looking prehistoric, Elvis mumbles and staggers to the piano; everyone shifts uncomfortably in their chair. Elvis sips from one of the many Coke cups scattered around and, with a roadie holding the mic in front of his mouth, unleashes an absolutely hair-raising version of "Unchained Melody." He is 'luded to the gills, dying before our eyes. But his voice is massive and gorgeous and his passion is real. That's Elvis for you, the fucking King. It's hard to understand why Luhrman felt the need for the grand guignol expressionism when all you really need is the man himself.