when it's at its best, nothing in the world can top Regular Show for absolute, ecstatic hilarity. its casually surreal tone and outsize beats (and every single moment with Eileen, who may very well be one of the Top 10 Supporting Characters In Any TV Show From The Last Decade) and handful of simple, addictive motifs (ohhhhhhhhhh!!!) just add up to something that makes me so implacably happy. bob's burgers can also provide this feeling a large percent of the time (primarily with tina), and adventure time is a more pathos-driven yang to this mf'ers yin, but right now regular show is on such a hot streak that i'm getting jitters just reading recaps.
so yeah, just had to put that out to the very small universe.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Swamplandia!, or How I Learned To Start Worrying And Fear Unreliable Narrators
so it's time for the next entry in an erratic series of reactions that I have to compelling media, and the troubling questions that they compel outta me when I am done consuming them. This past week, I marathonned through the last third of Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, a book as creepy as it is beautiful as it is funny as it is traumatic. A lot could be said about its sense of spirituality, and how its main character is actually the lady who dies within the first ten pages and almost literally haunts the rest of the proceedings, but the little bit that has got me troubled so much is a little issue that lies tangential to Hilola Bigtree's ghost, albeit one entombed within the actual literature of the novel: the incredibly realistic magical realism of Ava Bigtree's narration.
(hey yo so watch out for spoilers, and also a trigger warning about rape, in case anyone ever decides to hit the "random" button on google and finds themselves reading this while also simultaneously being in the middle of Swamplandia!, oh boy what are the odds of that, anyway just sayin')
to start off, I gotta say that Karen Russell is a genius of plot structure, narration, and tone. she uses those three elements in perfect tandem like a milky way bar uses caramel, nougat, and milk chocolate. for the better part of the first half of the novel, we are only experiencing the world of Swamplandia! through Ava's eyes, rich and mystical, exotic and strewn with peculiar metaphors. we are shown a swamp that is fertile with beauty and imagination, somehow so intensely swamplike in its description that it could not be less of a swamp at all. dismalness and dampness, in the eyes of Ava, is its own kind of fantastic beauty. naturally, what follows in these eyes, is a similar perspective shift on the plot and character work that goes around within this setting. when the park bankrupts, it comes across less pathetic than ominous; if we are not convinced that osceola is dating ghosts, we are at least amused and compelled by the elaborate fantasies and pantomimes. By the time Kiwi branches off into his own story on the mainland (and begins the third-person narration grounded much more deeply in barebones reality - the Noahs' Ark style artifice of the World of Darkness is universes away from Swamplandia!'s surreal digs), Russell sets us up to believe that, to some extent, the Ten Thousand Islands are a place possessed by a magicality somewhere to the left of typical offbeatness. the tale of Louis Thanksgiving convinces Osceola, it informs Ava's narration, and it convinces us of otherworldly endeavors.
which leaves us hapless fools when Ava, with her magic eyes, is left alone with this narrative heft. when the Bird Man shows up.
i haven't been crushed by any book I've read in the same way that I was by Swamplandia!'s final act. when everything comes crashing down. when I realized that the magical realism I thought about the world was, in fact, only the most realistic portrayal of a young outsider's perspective ever put to paper. and god fucking DAMN it for being that good.
nobody can write the mind of a smart child like Karen Russell. Ava's narrative gymnastics (and they are always vivid and impressive) avoid the pitfalls of typical "smart kid" precociousness by adhering strictly to the character's nature at all times. she is vulnerable and headstrong, observant and never precious. she absorbs the magicalness of her world through a lens that always seems somewhat skeptical. she is someone who WANTS to believe in the fantastic changes to reality, whose expectations fall far short, whose vision is cursed by reality, return-to-sender letters addressed to gator wrestling competitions, and ragged jackets covered with buzzard feathers. carrying the Red Seth around with her (a wonderful symbol for menstruation and innocence), interpreting the swamp as her own surreal heaven of sorts, she is the perfect voice of a curious preteen on the cusp on adolescence.
which, going back to the main point, just makes everything hurt so, so, so much more when we realize how so, so, SO wrong she had been about everything. how the only true magic and ghosts in the novel are those that can be cured with pills, or felt as shots of adrenaline and muscle memory in the gator pits. she slogs through the swamp and survives, but her magical hope throughout the novel keeps us from even seeing the swamp for what it really is.
when the Bird Man first shows up, we have no Chief or Kiwi to serve as a voice of reason. OF COURSE don't trust this drifting man who shows up out of nowhere with paper-thin stories and correct, mystical answers to every question Ava asks. OF COURSE don't go with him, alone, onto a boat in the middle of nowhere. OF COURSE he is just covering his own predatory ass when he insists that you don't involve the police, how he is a supernatural man who is solving a supernatural problem, how the authorities are not in his jurisdiction. OF COURSE the Bird Man is fucking bad news. But Karen Russell cannot let us know this until it is too late. She isolates the narrative within Ava's lens and, in doing so, strands us within the magical realm that we ought to know is false. By the time The Bird Man arrives, the Dredgeman's Revelation taught us practically to expect him. This is a magical book, of course.
Except it isn't.
Karen Russell executed the world's greatest rug-pulling, get us to believe the Devil doesn't exist while he breathes down our neck the entire time. I had in my mind the inkling that the Bird Man was a Bad Dude, but she keeps us from reaching that conclusion for sure until it is already too late. Ava sees in him a fatherly attachment that she needed in those lonely times, a face to relate to in trauma. When events happen that cause double-takes, like him staring at her while she sleeps in Stiltsville, she even manages to somehow disarm us by returning to vulnerable character beats and the two's increasingly unsteady rapport. Hell, she even manages to fucking squeeze a tremendously misguided, oh so tragically believable "I love you" out of Ava. By that point there's enough menace laid on for us to scream at Ava "NO STOP IT NO NO NO SCREAM AND GET OUT OF THERE," but we just can't. like ava, we've become trapped. emotionally and physically trapped. not by the Bird Man, but by Karen Russell. the swamp of exaggerated theatrics and otherworldly fancy is the grim hood of horror stories, a bloody bayou.
and, stuck behind Ava's too-hopeful-for-hope eyes, we can't escape.
Russell ends the novel on as happy a note as can be. but, she reminds us, the Bird Man is still out there, and though Ava is safe now, she is still a survivor of a great tragedy, and there are no easy answers or happy endings to that. Ossie gets her happy-ish ending on the same scale, too. but, as the ever-vivid narration reminds us, the ambivalent endgame ultimately points towards hope. the mainland can be just as magical a place as the Islands if you carry that magic with you, and there's always hope that the Red Seth survived as well.
now I've gone to just disjointed rambles (about three paragraphs ago, maybe) but those last 100 pages are still lurking in the back of my head. Russell proves horror and beauty as two sides of the same coin via the expert way she imperceptibly shifts the tone between the two at the end. I did not expect Swamplandia! to become so harrowing because it had already tricked me into its surreal security one hundred pages prior. the danger always exists, and we need friends and family to help us recognize and confront it before it can swallow us whole. even if Ava's only family at the time is the ghost of her dead mother.
(hey yo so watch out for spoilers, and also a trigger warning about rape, in case anyone ever decides to hit the "random" button on google and finds themselves reading this while also simultaneously being in the middle of Swamplandia!, oh boy what are the odds of that, anyway just sayin')
to start off, I gotta say that Karen Russell is a genius of plot structure, narration, and tone. she uses those three elements in perfect tandem like a milky way bar uses caramel, nougat, and milk chocolate. for the better part of the first half of the novel, we are only experiencing the world of Swamplandia! through Ava's eyes, rich and mystical, exotic and strewn with peculiar metaphors. we are shown a swamp that is fertile with beauty and imagination, somehow so intensely swamplike in its description that it could not be less of a swamp at all. dismalness and dampness, in the eyes of Ava, is its own kind of fantastic beauty. naturally, what follows in these eyes, is a similar perspective shift on the plot and character work that goes around within this setting. when the park bankrupts, it comes across less pathetic than ominous; if we are not convinced that osceola is dating ghosts, we are at least amused and compelled by the elaborate fantasies and pantomimes. By the time Kiwi branches off into his own story on the mainland (and begins the third-person narration grounded much more deeply in barebones reality - the Noahs' Ark style artifice of the World of Darkness is universes away from Swamplandia!'s surreal digs), Russell sets us up to believe that, to some extent, the Ten Thousand Islands are a place possessed by a magicality somewhere to the left of typical offbeatness. the tale of Louis Thanksgiving convinces Osceola, it informs Ava's narration, and it convinces us of otherworldly endeavors.
which leaves us hapless fools when Ava, with her magic eyes, is left alone with this narrative heft. when the Bird Man shows up.
i haven't been crushed by any book I've read in the same way that I was by Swamplandia!'s final act. when everything comes crashing down. when I realized that the magical realism I thought about the world was, in fact, only the most realistic portrayal of a young outsider's perspective ever put to paper. and god fucking DAMN it for being that good.
nobody can write the mind of a smart child like Karen Russell. Ava's narrative gymnastics (and they are always vivid and impressive) avoid the pitfalls of typical "smart kid" precociousness by adhering strictly to the character's nature at all times. she is vulnerable and headstrong, observant and never precious. she absorbs the magicalness of her world through a lens that always seems somewhat skeptical. she is someone who WANTS to believe in the fantastic changes to reality, whose expectations fall far short, whose vision is cursed by reality, return-to-sender letters addressed to gator wrestling competitions, and ragged jackets covered with buzzard feathers. carrying the Red Seth around with her (a wonderful symbol for menstruation and innocence), interpreting the swamp as her own surreal heaven of sorts, she is the perfect voice of a curious preteen on the cusp on adolescence.
which, going back to the main point, just makes everything hurt so, so, so much more when we realize how so, so, SO wrong she had been about everything. how the only true magic and ghosts in the novel are those that can be cured with pills, or felt as shots of adrenaline and muscle memory in the gator pits. she slogs through the swamp and survives, but her magical hope throughout the novel keeps us from even seeing the swamp for what it really is.
when the Bird Man first shows up, we have no Chief or Kiwi to serve as a voice of reason. OF COURSE don't trust this drifting man who shows up out of nowhere with paper-thin stories and correct, mystical answers to every question Ava asks. OF COURSE don't go with him, alone, onto a boat in the middle of nowhere. OF COURSE he is just covering his own predatory ass when he insists that you don't involve the police, how he is a supernatural man who is solving a supernatural problem, how the authorities are not in his jurisdiction. OF COURSE the Bird Man is fucking bad news. But Karen Russell cannot let us know this until it is too late. She isolates the narrative within Ava's lens and, in doing so, strands us within the magical realm that we ought to know is false. By the time The Bird Man arrives, the Dredgeman's Revelation taught us practically to expect him. This is a magical book, of course.
Except it isn't.
Karen Russell executed the world's greatest rug-pulling, get us to believe the Devil doesn't exist while he breathes down our neck the entire time. I had in my mind the inkling that the Bird Man was a Bad Dude, but she keeps us from reaching that conclusion for sure until it is already too late. Ava sees in him a fatherly attachment that she needed in those lonely times, a face to relate to in trauma. When events happen that cause double-takes, like him staring at her while she sleeps in Stiltsville, she even manages to somehow disarm us by returning to vulnerable character beats and the two's increasingly unsteady rapport. Hell, she even manages to fucking squeeze a tremendously misguided, oh so tragically believable "I love you" out of Ava. By that point there's enough menace laid on for us to scream at Ava "NO STOP IT NO NO NO SCREAM AND GET OUT OF THERE," but we just can't. like ava, we've become trapped. emotionally and physically trapped. not by the Bird Man, but by Karen Russell. the swamp of exaggerated theatrics and otherworldly fancy is the grim hood of horror stories, a bloody bayou.
and, stuck behind Ava's too-hopeful-for-hope eyes, we can't escape.
Russell ends the novel on as happy a note as can be. but, she reminds us, the Bird Man is still out there, and though Ava is safe now, she is still a survivor of a great tragedy, and there are no easy answers or happy endings to that. Ossie gets her happy-ish ending on the same scale, too. but, as the ever-vivid narration reminds us, the ambivalent endgame ultimately points towards hope. the mainland can be just as magical a place as the Islands if you carry that magic with you, and there's always hope that the Red Seth survived as well.
now I've gone to just disjointed rambles (about three paragraphs ago, maybe) but those last 100 pages are still lurking in the back of my head. Russell proves horror and beauty as two sides of the same coin via the expert way she imperceptibly shifts the tone between the two at the end. I did not expect Swamplandia! to become so harrowing because it had already tricked me into its surreal security one hundred pages prior. the danger always exists, and we need friends and family to help us recognize and confront it before it can swallow us whole. even if Ava's only family at the time is the ghost of her dead mother.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
some mangled still-kinda-catatonic-from-its-compellingness thoughts about The Act of Killing re:a conversation i overheard on the T by some jerk in a pink shirt with an incredibly wrong opinion
you decided to base your criticism entirely on "the film COULD have done this" and "if the josh oppenheimer did THIS instead then the film would be like THAT" instead of actually having an opinion on the movie that joshua oppenheimer did make! until you did come up with a sliver of that opinion, which was "i guess maybe what he was trying to do was explain why these guys are evil?" despite your equivocation, you are definitely on the right track, on one level. but you are missing the entire point otherwise.
one thing you said was that you "thought he was trying to do some Wong Kar-Wai shit with the waterfall." first of all: you are terrible. I could maybe give you a pass because it looked like you were on a date and you were trying to impress her by looking like a smart white boy who knows an asian director look how worldly you are. on the other hand, you just took someone on a date to see fucking THE ACT OF KILLING WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.
first of all, there was not even a single thing related to wong kar-wai at all in this, outside of the most general definitions of dreamlike directing. there aren't even fucking happy dreamy waterfalls in any wong kar wai movie i've seen. stop saying things that don't make sense to impress people who you assume don't know any better. more importantly, though, you seemed to miss the entire very-large-part-and-also-point of the movie where there is a film within the film that the murderers are effectively creating and directing. the murderers picked that waterfall. they picked those outfits, those colors. we are supposed to be amazed, appalled, and gaggingly amused by their atonal choices because, for christs fucking sake, it looks like they're trying to make one-part giallo acid thriller, one-part budget remake of miller's crossing in their buddy's closet, and one-part zyrtec commercial. congo talks about finding the symbolism of the waterfall beautiful. you talk about finding the waterfall to remind you of a completely unrelated Chinese director. you both miss the point entirely.
the film is about evil, but it's about understanding it from different angles. it's about a very specific, terrifying type of evil: sanctioned evil. it's about evil that wins, and attempting to subvert it with some quicksand of perspective. congo's endless retching during the last five minutes of the film is so affecting because it's a murderer seeing, for the very first time, what it's like to be a loser. and he can only understand it in a ridiculously complex multi-meta process. first, he sees how the recreations affect the extras negatively. but this isn't enough. then, he places himself in the victim seat and feels a certain exhaustion and fear, but this isn't enough. he still calls in his grandkids to watch the scene as if he won a hot dog eating contest and was appearing on the evening news. when he finally watches himself as the victim, he starts to crack. but it's joshua's words, on top of his own revelatory confession, that finally get him -- if not to empathize or fully understand the actions he committed -- realize the effects they had. he realizes his fucked up perspective on the act of killing, and finally questions himself. "have i sinned?" it's a question that the entire indonesian society failed to ask itself. he, alone, begins to break from the denial.
it's a tremendously pitiable and affecting moment, made possible through layers of literal self-reflection, and it's a process that mirrors watching the act of killing itself. as the audience, we are the next layer on top of this perspective onion. and, watching it, we are constantly reminded of this institutional, unrelenting evil as it gets reinforced as reality one surreal juxtaposition after another. the point (at least, in my reading) of the movie isn't trying to qualify or understand how or why the indonesian paramilitary people are evil. it's about taking it one step further. the root of their evil lies in the overall denial that their actions were evil inandofthemselves, as evidenced most strongly in the minister's speech after the staged "KILL ALL COMMUNISTS!!!" shot. "We don't want to appear brutal, but we also must exterminate the communists." By presenting evil through seeming self-parody, we are forced to understand their delusions as reality. They boast in front of the camera. They are more honest with others, in their schlock and overacting and artifice, than they will ever be with themselves, their souls. And only by turning an eye on themselves, as we turn onto them, will they truly realize the breadth of the destruction they have caused.
one thing you said was that you "thought he was trying to do some Wong Kar-Wai shit with the waterfall." first of all: you are terrible. I could maybe give you a pass because it looked like you were on a date and you were trying to impress her by looking like a smart white boy who knows an asian director look how worldly you are. on the other hand, you just took someone on a date to see fucking THE ACT OF KILLING WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.
first of all, there was not even a single thing related to wong kar-wai at all in this, outside of the most general definitions of dreamlike directing. there aren't even fucking happy dreamy waterfalls in any wong kar wai movie i've seen. stop saying things that don't make sense to impress people who you assume don't know any better. more importantly, though, you seemed to miss the entire very-large-part-and-also-point of the movie where there is a film within the film that the murderers are effectively creating and directing. the murderers picked that waterfall. they picked those outfits, those colors. we are supposed to be amazed, appalled, and gaggingly amused by their atonal choices because, for christs fucking sake, it looks like they're trying to make one-part giallo acid thriller, one-part budget remake of miller's crossing in their buddy's closet, and one-part zyrtec commercial. congo talks about finding the symbolism of the waterfall beautiful. you talk about finding the waterfall to remind you of a completely unrelated Chinese director. you both miss the point entirely.
the film is about evil, but it's about understanding it from different angles. it's about a very specific, terrifying type of evil: sanctioned evil. it's about evil that wins, and attempting to subvert it with some quicksand of perspective. congo's endless retching during the last five minutes of the film is so affecting because it's a murderer seeing, for the very first time, what it's like to be a loser. and he can only understand it in a ridiculously complex multi-meta process. first, he sees how the recreations affect the extras negatively. but this isn't enough. then, he places himself in the victim seat and feels a certain exhaustion and fear, but this isn't enough. he still calls in his grandkids to watch the scene as if he won a hot dog eating contest and was appearing on the evening news. when he finally watches himself as the victim, he starts to crack. but it's joshua's words, on top of his own revelatory confession, that finally get him -- if not to empathize or fully understand the actions he committed -- realize the effects they had. he realizes his fucked up perspective on the act of killing, and finally questions himself. "have i sinned?" it's a question that the entire indonesian society failed to ask itself. he, alone, begins to break from the denial.
it's a tremendously pitiable and affecting moment, made possible through layers of literal self-reflection, and it's a process that mirrors watching the act of killing itself. as the audience, we are the next layer on top of this perspective onion. and, watching it, we are constantly reminded of this institutional, unrelenting evil as it gets reinforced as reality one surreal juxtaposition after another. the point (at least, in my reading) of the movie isn't trying to qualify or understand how or why the indonesian paramilitary people are evil. it's about taking it one step further. the root of their evil lies in the overall denial that their actions were evil inandofthemselves, as evidenced most strongly in the minister's speech after the staged "KILL ALL COMMUNISTS!!!" shot. "We don't want to appear brutal, but we also must exterminate the communists." By presenting evil through seeming self-parody, we are forced to understand their delusions as reality. They boast in front of the camera. They are more honest with others, in their schlock and overacting and artifice, than they will ever be with themselves, their souls. And only by turning an eye on themselves, as we turn onto them, will they truly realize the breadth of the destruction they have caused.
Monday, June 17, 2013
midway mark: some unofficial reflections
after reading a very thorough personal statement by Patton Oswalt and watching another interview with Norton, I've discovered my views on the latter straying a little back into "eh, not really getting it entirely" territory. still, the dude's set pretty much embodied (largely) Oswalt's ideal of "tackling a heavy subject in a safe way" about 80% of the time, and of that last 20%, only about 5% was straight-up objectionable. still, speaking as a white man, i've got less credence judging such things for what they're really worth. so meh i guess. I STILL REALLY REALLY LIKED THE ROUTINE ABOUT THE OLD DUDE IN THE LOCKER ROOM.
just discovered a wordpress blog that I had intended to revitalize my faith in creative writing from 2 years ago. needless to say, it failed at its job.
i also started a physical diary! so balls to this semi-public monstrosity from now on! except for the year-end things, those are kind of fun traditions i guess?
about that, though, I can already feel a dearth of memory coming on about January through April. maybe i might start to put it all together better once i step away from the manic heydey of May 2013 (CAN I GET A "HOO HAH TWO TIMES TUESDAY???" and somewhere, in a dominoes across the nation, a packers fan with tight black curls mumbles "hoo-hah") but here's the I Can't Remember Shit Already reflection for the first few months of the year
January: What did I do where was I even
February: I guess I was back at school
March: did I write a paper? or something
April: showers bring may flowers
TO BE CONTINUED???
just discovered a wordpress blog that I had intended to revitalize my faith in creative writing from 2 years ago. needless to say, it failed at its job.
i also started a physical diary! so balls to this semi-public monstrosity from now on! except for the year-end things, those are kind of fun traditions i guess?
about that, though, I can already feel a dearth of memory coming on about January through April. maybe i might start to put it all together better once i step away from the manic heydey of May 2013 (CAN I GET A "HOO HAH TWO TIMES TUESDAY???" and somewhere, in a dominoes across the nation, a packers fan with tight black curls mumbles "hoo-hah") but here's the I Can't Remember Shit Already reflection for the first few months of the year
January: What did I do where was I even
February: I guess I was back at school
March: did I write a paper? or something
April: showers bring may flowers
TO BE CONTINUED???
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Some thoughts about other people who i don't know well enough to directly tell them these thoughts
"Remember when you used to always wear that one hat but now you wear a new hat? You've wore your new hat so much that I already forgot what your old hat looked like."
"You're a pretty terrible person but your hair looks really soft."
"You're a pretty terrible person but your hair looks really soft."
Saturday, March 30, 2013
a lot of words about being really pleasantly surprised by jim norton and why as a person who goes to college i now feel the need to explain it
on the first day of the greatest class that i ever took in college we read this short story by Grace Paley, a real short one only four pages, where the narrator mentions that a comment from her ex-husband made her feel like a set of pipes choking on a plumbing snake. it was a beautiful metaphor. it still is a beautiful metaphor. but my professor mentioned that its beauty was clever, that the abundance of poetics is purposefully used to distract from one emotion and center on another. play with the reader's sympathies, basically.
this is why jim norton may be one of the smartest comedians working today.
now, his set at the somerville theater that i decided to see on a literal coin flip whim had some material in his act that would make ann coulter on a pink triangle, but as he himself said in his act, but that isn't why i'm, as he would say, "BLOGBLOGLBOLGOBLOBLOG"ging right now. maybe i'm givin this a terrible english major overintellectualization treatment (and i already am i mean come on i'm comparing him to GRACE FUCKING PALEY) but 90% of that man's set wasn't just absolutely hilarious, it was so funny that I did not even notice the kind of jokes I was laughing at, and then after I did realize, I kept laughing because I realized how incredibly clever he constructed his set to basically nullify any bad faith that would come from them.
i am gonna spoil the act and its jokes a little bit for a mo' (this set will eventually become a TV special, I think) so if you're real sensitive about having jokes ruined for you then stop reading.
okay now i just did something that jim norton would never do. throughout the act, that man basically set no limits. he spoke everything and whatever he himself perceived within the world to be truth. a lot of this was political (about 5 minutes consisted of an almost jokeless rant against the mainstream media) and a lot was provocative (some needlessly, others... well this is what i'm writing about so bear with me) and if i were at home half-listening to similar routines on youtube then i as a person i-would-like-to-think-pretty-aware of the nuance of identity politics and trauma and shit would have been like “eh…. Not my cup of tea.”
And for the first few minutes i wasn’t really all too that entranced, also because the opener didn’t really do a good job and had me thinking about maria bamford’s “loud girl comic” routine the entire time. But after a little while some stuff began happening so subtly that i didn’t notice. Jim norton was weaving a web that trapped me in it. And that web was made of extremely elaborate, hilarious, beautiful language.
Norton is the absolute master image-heavy comedy, which coincidentally makes him the master of both the dick joke and self-deprecation. He would open with a more provocative statement to get the audience’s attention (“oh a drunk girl… BONER!!!” e.g.) before going into these extremely detailed pictures of some sort of sexual observance, fantasy, or gripe, usually self-deprecating (“but always with girls i turn into a creep…”) . And without fail he would ascribe unto these utterly crass topics jaw-droppingly good analogies (“…crouched in the corner, blinking like a fucking screensaver”). He would run with the image for maybe a solid minute, elaborating every nook and cranny, every possible outcome. He would milk the fucking joke for all the laughs it’s worth. Very ***asterixlyimportantly**** he would go as extreme as possible, not just with his subject matter and his provocation, but in the trope and the delivery as well. Like paley, his heightened language was used to alter the sympathies of the audience, though norton’s goal is singular in doing this: to scorch all the sympathies. Scorch them all. As a provocateur he wants to offend, and yes people would be offended, and most provocateurs (tosh, clay) don’t really get complex or clever enough like say louis ck to accept the joke despite its gross roots (and i am completely excepting people who truly don’t mind the offensiveness at all of which the base level of enjoyment for the show is already much higher and not something that sort of needs to be overcome). Well add norton to the list, then, of comics who get shit done comedically because, like paley, his stories and jokes are so well-phrased and constructed that, on a second level, it completely detaches from its provocative origins 99% of the time.
Suddenly, another layer of it all, on top of these plain, hilarious, beautiful joke constructions, becomes evident. It’s all a big exaggeration, an inescapable atmosphere of what’s basically anti-bragging, the extreme comedian’s holy grail. Dank, shitty observances snowball into a glorious dick-shaped monolith of cobwebs, like a canadian trailer park louis ck (oh shit is he the alice munro of comedians now too???), or a modern diogenes of sinope. This is a short, out of shape man saying terrible things not just to provoke you, but because at the same time we are constantly reminded that A) his subliminal is compensating and B) his liminal is telling the supertruth. He manages the incredibly difficult balance of crafting a stage persona equal parts ridiculous (that you can’t take him seriously) and earnest (that you sympathize with him).
He says both of these qualities about his character pretty explicitly in different routines, calling attention to the atmosphere he’s created without dispelling it for anyone in the audience. He provokes us into thinking about ourselves, the topic being joked about, and, most importantly, himself. Even when he sacrifices “politically correct” contexts for the sake of joke delivery, he recreates a whole new context wherein judgment has shifted from the joker to the jokee. He tells a routine about feeling gay because he loved the way the man next to him on a flight smelled, but he delivers it with incredible earnest, all disbelief and no vitriol. It calls attention to how he, already established to have no luck with women, not has bisexual shame under his belt, but it isn’t a panic. It’s basically a celebration. He gets so deep into describing how great this man smelled that i started to fall in love with that odor, tucked away in a cabin too impossible to reach. He finds himself unwittingly feeling homosexually towards another man, and we laugh because we know that his established perverted lust for women would never traditionally make room for men (the extremeness of the womanly lust retroactively casting the exaggeration tonality on it all), but we also laugh because he embraces it so sincerely, and is merely embarrassed because he broached the topic poorly with the man in question. In common parlance, he asked his crush out very awkwardly and was hilariously rejected. All throughout, the clever constructions of the joke and rapid-fire delivery keep the trance unbroken. We are distracted by his sewer snake joke into sympathizing with norton and decrying the homophobia (once the seed of the joke, now just an incidental) that quashed these two mens’s blooming, smelly friendship.
In that one routine, norton has me eating shit out of the palm of his hand. And it tastes absolutely delicious.
One more example, and maybe the most well-constructed routine of the set, was about subtly coercing a handjob from a masseuse. There, at the base, you’ve got sexual coercion, misogyny, and general perversion set up. And the the rug gets fuckin pulled. He details each step to his method of getting happy endings with scientific precision, filling the exaggeration quotient by acting as if he literally wrote the book on convincing people to give him handjobs. But the pulls out earnest consideration by taking a sudden fucking left turn into john travolta territory. In the greatest formalist move of the show, he casts a mirror on himself and the audience by revealing that every move he used to get a handjob was used by travolta when a bunch of male masseuses sued him too. The wrongness of the scenario, what was first gross exaggeration becomes gross realness, gets generalized, superevident, and the judgment is thrown back to us while the norton train keeps a-rollin with earnest exaggeration about all the gay things he would totally do to john travolta. we are free to enjoy the joke for its jokeyness, of which a lot of jokeyness there was indeed.
When the spell broke for a couple minutes, once for the aforementioned political speech (which also included a defense of daniel tosh point oh that was actually about as saliently made as you can get from the camp of tosh defenders) and again near the end when he briefly broke into doing opie and anthony characters, i was able to collect myself for a bit and realize how incredible the whole performance was. This dude sequenced a set like a fucking comedy titan and could make basically any joke land, no matter how outlandish or crude. I could have listened to him talk for hours about a 70 year old man futzing around a men’s locker room slapping powder on his balls. For HOURS. Even when he slags for a little bit every once in two whiles, he is able to dip back in with some of the most graceful and quickest-acting segues ever. A long-running take on the media’s handling of the aurora shooting started to lose steam and become too hokey when suddenly it became about how pornography is better than michael douglas. Like what how did he even? Not every transition was so smooth but it didn’t need to be when the storytelling was so great; when one quality started to falter, the other picked up lightning quick and the set was back on track for a great, hilarious ending that came out of nowhere. I left wanting more, and also his autograph (but all i had on me was a Toni Morrison novel so I went home THE END).
Norton brings highest-common-denominator nuance to lowest-common-denominator material like dicks and butts and vaginas and handicapped jokes and gay jokes and misogyny and basically anything is the seed for these routines, but norton grows a big dick shaped tree out of them, taking them to ridiculous heights all while degrading himself and maintaining that heightened gross-out atmosphere. He accomplishes “now trust me i have TONS of gay friends BUUUUUT” without the painfulness, and in reaction to that seed we hold the attitude in contempt without blaming him because, well, the dirtiness of homophobia and misogyny is still a truth in this world that norton’s exaggerated character reveals to us through his routines, leaving us to cast our own judgments if we feel the need to. I keep comparing him to some sort of plant but goddamn if he doesn’t plant the seeds for shitbushes and come up with goldandwatermelontrees every time.
Most of this don’t make a lick of goddamn sense probably, and that’s because A) describing why someone was funny is a pain in the dick to do in the first place and trying to decode a multilayered context that’s built upon something as unfunny as a rape or handicap joke is harder than an elephants tusk, and B) as i said, a lot of the sustainment of this effect was in momentum and atmosphere. If he were not masterful enough to maintain the layer of exaggerated self-aware self-deprecation, it would have been easier to find his offensive jokes offensive. If he did not betray an earnestness in the handling of his exceptionally provocative numbers, his jokes would have seemed mean-spirited and cruel. If his language did not juxtapose so brilliantly the rawness of his subject matter, then that would be the end of jim norton would have all fallen hard.
Well luckily his set at the somerville theater was the exact opposite of everything i just said. To paraphrase him, if every comedian was clean as a daisy shit would be boring as fuck. Being dirty and fucking around in the muck is hard to do without seeming like you’re hitting easy targets or provoking just for the sake of provoking. Norton, you are the 1% than knocks it out of the park. And aside from a couple lulls and not-far-enoughs that amounted to probably five minutes out of an hour-and-a-half set, i’d say you’re doing pretty good for yourself.
this is why jim norton may be one of the smartest comedians working today.
now, his set at the somerville theater that i decided to see on a literal coin flip whim had some material in his act that would make ann coulter on a pink triangle, but as he himself said in his act, but that isn't why i'm, as he would say, "BLOGBLOGLBOLGOBLOBLOG"ging right now. maybe i'm givin this a terrible english major overintellectualization treatment (and i already am i mean come on i'm comparing him to GRACE FUCKING PALEY) but 90% of that man's set wasn't just absolutely hilarious, it was so funny that I did not even notice the kind of jokes I was laughing at, and then after I did realize, I kept laughing because I realized how incredibly clever he constructed his set to basically nullify any bad faith that would come from them.
i am gonna spoil the act and its jokes a little bit for a mo' (this set will eventually become a TV special, I think) so if you're real sensitive about having jokes ruined for you then stop reading.
okay now i just did something that jim norton would never do. throughout the act, that man basically set no limits. he spoke everything and whatever he himself perceived within the world to be truth. a lot of this was political (about 5 minutes consisted of an almost jokeless rant against the mainstream media) and a lot was provocative (some needlessly, others... well this is what i'm writing about so bear with me) and if i were at home half-listening to similar routines on youtube then i as a person i-would-like-to-think-pretty-aware of the nuance of identity politics and trauma and shit would have been like “eh…. Not my cup of tea.”
And for the first few minutes i wasn’t really all too that entranced, also because the opener didn’t really do a good job and had me thinking about maria bamford’s “loud girl comic” routine the entire time. But after a little while some stuff began happening so subtly that i didn’t notice. Jim norton was weaving a web that trapped me in it. And that web was made of extremely elaborate, hilarious, beautiful language.
Norton is the absolute master image-heavy comedy, which coincidentally makes him the master of both the dick joke and self-deprecation. He would open with a more provocative statement to get the audience’s attention (“oh a drunk girl… BONER!!!” e.g.) before going into these extremely detailed pictures of some sort of sexual observance, fantasy, or gripe, usually self-deprecating (“but always with girls i turn into a creep…”) . And without fail he would ascribe unto these utterly crass topics jaw-droppingly good analogies (“…crouched in the corner, blinking like a fucking screensaver”). He would run with the image for maybe a solid minute, elaborating every nook and cranny, every possible outcome. He would milk the fucking joke for all the laughs it’s worth. Very ***asterixlyimportantly**** he would go as extreme as possible, not just with his subject matter and his provocation, but in the trope and the delivery as well. Like paley, his heightened language was used to alter the sympathies of the audience, though norton’s goal is singular in doing this: to scorch all the sympathies. Scorch them all. As a provocateur he wants to offend, and yes people would be offended, and most provocateurs (tosh, clay) don’t really get complex or clever enough like say louis ck to accept the joke despite its gross roots (and i am completely excepting people who truly don’t mind the offensiveness at all of which the base level of enjoyment for the show is already much higher and not something that sort of needs to be overcome). Well add norton to the list, then, of comics who get shit done comedically because, like paley, his stories and jokes are so well-phrased and constructed that, on a second level, it completely detaches from its provocative origins 99% of the time.
Suddenly, another layer of it all, on top of these plain, hilarious, beautiful joke constructions, becomes evident. It’s all a big exaggeration, an inescapable atmosphere of what’s basically anti-bragging, the extreme comedian’s holy grail. Dank, shitty observances snowball into a glorious dick-shaped monolith of cobwebs, like a canadian trailer park louis ck (oh shit is he the alice munro of comedians now too???), or a modern diogenes of sinope. This is a short, out of shape man saying terrible things not just to provoke you, but because at the same time we are constantly reminded that A) his subliminal is compensating and B) his liminal is telling the supertruth. He manages the incredibly difficult balance of crafting a stage persona equal parts ridiculous (that you can’t take him seriously) and earnest (that you sympathize with him).
He says both of these qualities about his character pretty explicitly in different routines, calling attention to the atmosphere he’s created without dispelling it for anyone in the audience. He provokes us into thinking about ourselves, the topic being joked about, and, most importantly, himself. Even when he sacrifices “politically correct” contexts for the sake of joke delivery, he recreates a whole new context wherein judgment has shifted from the joker to the jokee. He tells a routine about feeling gay because he loved the way the man next to him on a flight smelled, but he delivers it with incredible earnest, all disbelief and no vitriol. It calls attention to how he, already established to have no luck with women, not has bisexual shame under his belt, but it isn’t a panic. It’s basically a celebration. He gets so deep into describing how great this man smelled that i started to fall in love with that odor, tucked away in a cabin too impossible to reach. He finds himself unwittingly feeling homosexually towards another man, and we laugh because we know that his established perverted lust for women would never traditionally make room for men (the extremeness of the womanly lust retroactively casting the exaggeration tonality on it all), but we also laugh because he embraces it so sincerely, and is merely embarrassed because he broached the topic poorly with the man in question. In common parlance, he asked his crush out very awkwardly and was hilariously rejected. All throughout, the clever constructions of the joke and rapid-fire delivery keep the trance unbroken. We are distracted by his sewer snake joke into sympathizing with norton and decrying the homophobia (once the seed of the joke, now just an incidental) that quashed these two mens’s blooming, smelly friendship.
In that one routine, norton has me eating shit out of the palm of his hand. And it tastes absolutely delicious.
One more example, and maybe the most well-constructed routine of the set, was about subtly coercing a handjob from a masseuse. There, at the base, you’ve got sexual coercion, misogyny, and general perversion set up. And the the rug gets fuckin pulled. He details each step to his method of getting happy endings with scientific precision, filling the exaggeration quotient by acting as if he literally wrote the book on convincing people to give him handjobs. But the pulls out earnest consideration by taking a sudden fucking left turn into john travolta territory. In the greatest formalist move of the show, he casts a mirror on himself and the audience by revealing that every move he used to get a handjob was used by travolta when a bunch of male masseuses sued him too. The wrongness of the scenario, what was first gross exaggeration becomes gross realness, gets generalized, superevident, and the judgment is thrown back to us while the norton train keeps a-rollin with earnest exaggeration about all the gay things he would totally do to john travolta. we are free to enjoy the joke for its jokeyness, of which a lot of jokeyness there was indeed.
When the spell broke for a couple minutes, once for the aforementioned political speech (which also included a defense of daniel tosh point oh that was actually about as saliently made as you can get from the camp of tosh defenders) and again near the end when he briefly broke into doing opie and anthony characters, i was able to collect myself for a bit and realize how incredible the whole performance was. This dude sequenced a set like a fucking comedy titan and could make basically any joke land, no matter how outlandish or crude. I could have listened to him talk for hours about a 70 year old man futzing around a men’s locker room slapping powder on his balls. For HOURS. Even when he slags for a little bit every once in two whiles, he is able to dip back in with some of the most graceful and quickest-acting segues ever. A long-running take on the media’s handling of the aurora shooting started to lose steam and become too hokey when suddenly it became about how pornography is better than michael douglas. Like what how did he even? Not every transition was so smooth but it didn’t need to be when the storytelling was so great; when one quality started to falter, the other picked up lightning quick and the set was back on track for a great, hilarious ending that came out of nowhere. I left wanting more, and also his autograph (but all i had on me was a Toni Morrison novel so I went home THE END).
Norton brings highest-common-denominator nuance to lowest-common-denominator material like dicks and butts and vaginas and handicapped jokes and gay jokes and misogyny and basically anything is the seed for these routines, but norton grows a big dick shaped tree out of them, taking them to ridiculous heights all while degrading himself and maintaining that heightened gross-out atmosphere. He accomplishes “now trust me i have TONS of gay friends BUUUUUT” without the painfulness, and in reaction to that seed we hold the attitude in contempt without blaming him because, well, the dirtiness of homophobia and misogyny is still a truth in this world that norton’s exaggerated character reveals to us through his routines, leaving us to cast our own judgments if we feel the need to. I keep comparing him to some sort of plant but goddamn if he doesn’t plant the seeds for shitbushes and come up with goldandwatermelontrees every time.
Most of this don’t make a lick of goddamn sense probably, and that’s because A) describing why someone was funny is a pain in the dick to do in the first place and trying to decode a multilayered context that’s built upon something as unfunny as a rape or handicap joke is harder than an elephants tusk, and B) as i said, a lot of the sustainment of this effect was in momentum and atmosphere. If he were not masterful enough to maintain the layer of exaggerated self-aware self-deprecation, it would have been easier to find his offensive jokes offensive. If he did not betray an earnestness in the handling of his exceptionally provocative numbers, his jokes would have seemed mean-spirited and cruel. If his language did not juxtapose so brilliantly the rawness of his subject matter, then that would be the end of jim norton would have all fallen hard.
Well luckily his set at the somerville theater was the exact opposite of everything i just said. To paraphrase him, if every comedian was clean as a daisy shit would be boring as fuck. Being dirty and fucking around in the muck is hard to do without seeming like you’re hitting easy targets or provoking just for the sake of provoking. Norton, you are the 1% than knocks it out of the park. And aside from a couple lulls and not-far-enoughs that amounted to probably five minutes out of an hour-and-a-half set, i’d say you’re doing pretty good for yourself.
hahaha
so recently i was like "am i making one continuuous mistake again" and well turns out i was so i was like "lol forget that shit" so i diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid *sunglasses fall on face*
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