Carlin at Carnegie

My father would have turned 69 on the 25th of May (which is when I started drafting this). But he died twelve years ago after a very rapid struggle with renal cancer that metastasised in his brain.  I've written about that time here, for those who care.

He was a career civil servant, which was and is a noble profession. But for about 15 months in the early 1980s, he had a kind of awesome job. He was responsible for home entertainment for foreign-posted employees of the Department of External Affairs. It was the dawn of home video, basically. He made the decision to use VHS as opposed to Betamax. He purchased a few dozen VCRs and sent them overseas. And he built a fairly large video library. Every six weeks a package of tapes would be sent out by diplomatic courier to a station; a few children's, a few family, and a few adult. At the station they would be borrowed and circulated among the staffers and then shipped back. (Places with easy access to English-language entertainments were typically exempted, of course.)

On weekends he would bring a VCR home, along with a few tapes, until it was more feasible to buy our own: a ridiculous thing to do in 1981.

It was the old Panasonic. This model had a digital clock: the year previous it still had an analogue. To set a recording you would adjust the little stick to the appropriate place on the hour dial (yes, just like a cheapo travel alarm clock), turn the dial to the desired channel, depress the record button, and voila.  Ours had the accuracy of a precise start time, but it would still only stop when the tape ran out. A wired remote control: an actual switch with pause and play/record. Pausing on play turned the screen a slate static. We had that until the late 1980s: until well after dad left. 

http://www.vhscollector.com/movie/carlin-carnegie

But I digress. One day he brought home Carlin at Carnegie (linked here to a wacky Japanese YouTube equivalent).

This was Carlin's first special since his heart attack, and his third overall. It was also related to his A Place for My Stuff album but recorded separately from it. This was the last time that the recording process didn't generate both a special and an album: so it is the last time the two were considered as separate avenues of performance. And it was more in keeping with a spot on tour, mixing new routines and older bits: there are routines taken from albums as far back as Toledo Window Box. And it was the first special that made it to home video. But the historical context is largely irrelevant save for how I reacted to it.

I would have been ten. I did not know what Carnegie Hall was. I think I knew what 'cunt' meant based on reading cadged copies of Penthouse and discovering the letters section. (I was a precocious, bookish pervert.) But I also knew about stand-up comedy. There was a curtain one walked through, and the camera stayed nice and still. It came in five-minute chunks and was repeatable at school. 

What the fuck was I looking at?

The stacks of chairs on the unadorned stage betrayed an intentional lack of artifice. Like the bare brick wall or the curtain, this showed that a raw performance, and not a capital P performance was taking place. And he just walked on, settled the crowd, and asked the inevitable question:

“Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?”

So yeah: it messed me up a little.

It isn't his best work: the 1980s are his post-heart attack, cute period, when he is oddly middle-aged and resting on laurels. His game-changing FM/AM - Class Clown - Occupation: Foole hat-trick from the early 70s fuelled his reputation, and the "goofy shit" drug albums that followed were in the past. It really isn't until 1988's What Am I Doing in New Jersey? that the "angry Carlin" for which he is now most remembered emerged.

But  as an introduction to Carlin, and more importantly as an introduction to what stand-up is, it could not have come at a more important time. Kevin Smith has also written about its influence on him (he had HBO and recorded it on his Betamax). The coincidence of the material and the medium of home video places it as a pivotal piece in the history of stand-up.

Carlin's last interview justifies me which is all you need to take from it

So in the past few days I've been shitting my pants. As I wrote last week, the book's title is based on a George Carlin quote, but when I checked the source, he doesn't use those words. He says "a vulgar act" and "the people's art." Did I misread "act" for "art"? And then title something for it?

The. Fucking. Title.

All that kept me in line was that (a) in this day of cutting and pasting when I found the quote I more than likely did that rather than retype it, and (b) the layout of the page is different now, which might have meant an intervening edit. But seriously: the title? The proofs are coming from the press very soon: was I going to have to cross out the "r" for the "c"? I'm not changing the title, but the hommage-ness of it just disappears.

Then I come across this interview in Psychology Today, and the following quote:

Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one’s chest, to sing one’s song. So that element is present in all art. And comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts—it’s a vulgar art, it’s one of the people’s arts, it’s the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form—it’s certainly artistry. So self-expression is the key to even standing up and saying, "Hey, listen to me."

So this is an idea that he was entertaining at the time as a new way of articulating the inevitable "what is stand-up comedy" question. Thus I googled the shit out of ["george carlin" "a vulgar art"] and he was saying it, or quoted as saying it with vague attribution, all the goddamn time his last year, like here and here and here and finally, in Last Words, his sort-of memoir compiled from interviews with Tony Hendra:

Long ago I described my job as being "a foole": that's still what I do. Once, this kind of comedy was called the people's art, a vulgar art. Maybe all comedy is.

BOOYAH! 

Watch (or download or read the transcript the New York Public Library's tribute to George Carlin timed for the launch of Last Words. Or this thing.

Explaining things

I got copies of the upcoming catalogue from University Press of Mississippi: it's real now. So yes, I've googled myself some more and I'm seeing it listed places. (Fuck you: I have so little else in my life apart from my hot wife, amazing son, well-paid career and respect of my peers.) But then I came upon this thing, 

“Society has its talkers, but how rare the instances of refined and elevated conversational power! Talking is indeed a vulgar art everywhere, but how few make it a fine art! The endless repetitions of the commonest platitudes; its gossip - if not mischievous or malicious, yet empty of good - discover often a talent and a tact of no ordinary grade; but how unworthily employed!”

— Mrs. Katie Clark Mulliken, "Conversation as a Fine Art." The Ladies' repository: a monthly periodical, devoted to literature, arts, and religion. Volume 1, Issue: 1, Jan 1868, pp. 10-13.

I liked it because, in full on nineteenth-century lady style, it keyed into one of the things I'm getting at with the name of this book (and blog). My title was inspired by an interview George Carlin did for the HBO website prior to what was to be his last special, It's Bad For Ya.

“I am a stand-up comedian, and I love that title. Stand-up comedy is a vulgar act. It can be vulgar the usual way we use that word. But vulgar really means “of the people.” It’s the people’s art. Just stand up and talk about the things that are on your mind. Whether it’s shopping or credit cards or your wife or your kids, or if it’s stuff about America, it’s all stand-up comedy.”

My contention has always been that stand-up comedy is a form of talk not substantially different from the talk we all engage in in small-context settings. It is playful, non-instrumental, ludic. It is conversation, but really that moment in a conversation where one person kind of takes over for a while. The other people are there and are necessary for this person's verbal display, and their reactions are not only the goal but part of the performance itself, but it is that moment in conversation when focus is on one talker. It is talk among a small group of intimates.

Stand-up comedy introduces the complexity of the larger group, the specialised space that forces attention on the performer (as opposed to it being temporarily granted), the increased expectations of competence on the professional, performing in front of strangers, the spatial distances of broadcasting and the spatio-temporal distances of recording, all of which interrupt that 'small group of intimates' vibe and yet is the style of talk being enacted on stage. 

We all know good talkers (and bad talkers), but the professionalisation of stand-up is more than simply talking well: it is learning and mastering the skill sets required to bridge those various distancing mechanisms and, in collaboration with the audience, create the pretense of intimacy.

If you want an amazing discussion of the kind of informal talk I'm referring to, read Michael J. Bell's The World From Brown's Lounge: An Ethnography of Black-Middle Class Play. It will change your life.