_ _ .. --- 0 U S The Michigan Daily-Sunday Page 4-Sunday, January 27, 1980-The Michigan Daily The New Comedy may still be unny, but lately we're forgetting to laugh By Owen Gleiberman C HEVY CHASE once dubbed Satur- day Night Live "the Off-Broadway of television," a bit of modest ballyhooing that pretty well summed up the show's astonishing appeal. From the beginning, everyone (or, at least, kids) knew it was funny, but what gave Saturday Night that extra zing was that it came out of nowhere and spit on the rules of mainstream TV entertainment. The show's main set resembled nothing so much as a grimy New York back alley. And the comedy, at its best, was a deliciously naughty thrill. We'd seen plenty of tasteless, wildly off-the-wall humor before, but never on television. Saturday Night Live seemed to recreate the idea of a counterculture, even if it was harmless next to the coun- terculture of the sixties, and even if its jovial accessibility meant that nearly every high school and college kid in the country belonged to it. That other, forgotten counter- culture-the serious one-came from an opposition to war, so it preached love. Ours came from an opposition to work, and so if preached play-silly, wasteful, and, above all, funny. Funny was suddenly an end in itself, magically split off from everything else. Steve Martin was given commercial canonization for turning mind- less into a sort of comic religion. Andy Kaufman was sometimes so fun- ny you forgot to laugh, but his humor's utter lack of redeeming social value (it had less than Martin's, if that was possible) was cause enough for accep- tance. Even Woody Allen, whose string of brilliant comedies had already made him the popular comedian of the - decade, rode' the wave of the mid- seventies comedy renaissance to new heights. Annie Hall was,among other things, a "good film," but there was the underlying message that Alvy Singer, far from another pretty face, got the girl because he was funny. He had a slew of hang-ups and a streak of narcissism a mile wide, but with that wry comic charisma, he couldn't miss. These days, though, funny doesn't seem quite as important (or nearly as much fun) as it did back then. It used to be that John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Steve Martin and the rest were our Sid Caeser, Carl Reiner, and Imogene Coca-SNL was our Show of Shows. As the show drags its way along its fifth season, the Not Ready For Prime Time Players are beginning to look as listless as the pop-eyed zombies on Barney Miller and One Day At a Time. (Is it Woody Allen's self-deprecating com- ment on how we've put too much faith in humor that the TV show his charac- ter in Manhattan quits out of highbrow disgust appears to be modeled off of Saturday Night Live?) It's taken a while, and it didn't happen in quite the way they might have expected, but the stars of our midnight comedy oasis are finally ready for prime time. The show even has its own spot at the safe, domestic hour of 10 p.m.-The Best of Saturday Night Live now airs weekly on Wednesdays, just after Gary "squeeze my cheeks" Coleman's Different Strokes-during which one can catch unseen episodes and die-hard addicts can relive some of the livelier mome4- ts. at 1:00 a.m., might even do well to ex- change titles. Something like SN Dead's The Valley of Gwange, a post-Roger Corman sci-fi schlocker I caught a few weeks ago, in which ya-hoo cowboys battled a jerkily animated tyran- nosaurus rex with their lassos; was livelier and more back-breakingly fun- ny than just about anything I've seen on SNL this season. Is the departure of Belushi and groping his way through even more bit- part straight-men than before, with his druggy, impro-troupe amateurishness. (Although, to be fair, the guy can sing like a bird, and as Michael O'Donoghue once pointed out, nobody looks funnier in a dress.) With the exception of Bill* Murray, Aykroyd and Belushi were the most wildly creative comedians on the show. Listening to D.A. reeling off ad- jectivesin one of those order-before- mpow- idi tei th as de thi Cc no y - 1 suppose cynical ex-sixties ealists would say thdt a coun- rculture built around ome- ing as silly and amorphous the Joke was doomed to ath by overkill. So perhaps e disintegration of New omedy was foregone, and major disappointment.' would have anyone who's logged hours in front of the tube in a stupor of giggles. The problem is, Saturday Night Live, Steve Martin, and even the Woodman (at least, as a comedian) just don't matter anymore. Did they ever? I think so. Before, they represented a shared youth culture that can only be likened to' the kind-of communalism that springs up around rock and roll performers and maybe a film or two. (Rocky Horror, not so incidentally, has rock and comedy.) They were all silly and min- dless and frivolous, especially com- pared to the heroes from the decade before. (For all its pro-life vivacity, the sixties could probably' have used a few more laughs.) But it was precisely their frowzy vulgarity and amorality that made the comedy so liberating. There's been a sour streak of moralism running down the center of Woody Allen's last few films, but the essential counterpoint of an Allen joke-that distinctive juxtaposition of the normal and commonplace with the utterly ab- surd-runs deeper and rings truer than the didactic, decay-of-Contemporary- Culture Allen glimpsed in Manhattan. And it's that amoral comic instinct we go to his movies for. I suppose it's refreshing that none of the major seventies comedians have really gone the exploitation route, like that monthly masturbatory journal the National Lampoon. It's just that their comic styles have ceased growing, and they've lost touch with the sense of revolutionary absurdity that made their comedy an implicit assault on the Not comedy's future, but something s future A NDY KAUFMAN PROUDLY exclaims how "I never told a joke in my life," but when he's onstage that's the least of the forces work- ing against him. Here's somebody who absolutely begs to be loathed, who reads The Great Gatsby-the whole thing-to his paying audience . and offers it as his complete performance, who has become such a figure of national hate after his Saturday Night Live put-down of women that to talk about him in any number of circles has become a dangerous thing. That he's the most gifted funny- man around today hardly means shit. Nor does the fact that he's one of our greatest performance artists, right up there were Joseph Beuys and Abbie Hoffman. Maybe what does matter, though, is that Andy Kaufman is probably the first totally non-person the popular arts have ever known. You dig beneath what Andy's making up onstage and you find a black hole snickering at you. Popstars from the Beatles to Andy the painter have been obsessed with working out a persona that is both ubiquitous and blank, fumbling over hurdles to keep up a running commentary with their audience on the way society slobbers up snippets of personality from everyone and makes us all will-o-the-wisps comprised of visceral traces of character. Kaufman onstage is Elvis Presley; he is this hopelessly cretinous ethnic fumbling over every syllable; he's a bloodsucking nightclub performer who dumps water and obscenities on his audience; he's Uncle Andy, taking the crowd at his summer Carnegie Hall show out for milk and cookies afterwards, and meeting them the next morning for a ride on the Staten Island ferry. And although you could never understand if you haven't seen him, one thing is important to stress: THIS IS ALL HE IS. There is no person named "Andy," no comic who unwinds for Johnny on the Tonight Show and tells behind-the-scenes stories of all his latest spoofs. More? He works part-time anonymously in a Los Angeles diner as a busboy and has been slogging through 6 show which does not deserve him, Taxi, as a bit character. He once-achieved the formerly impossible feat of making Tom Snyder seem funny when the two conspired to begin a Tomorrow show interview with a fascinatingly interminable discussion of the weather. It comes down to two things. First, there are those eyes, beacons of coldness that out-terrorize David Byrne's, and make Warhol's icy set of clam cakes seem as if nothing. And if that doesn't help pin down the ex- perience of Andy Kaufman, then imaginie a person coming on a nationally- broadcast variety show and reading from The Great Gatsby .for ten minutes or so. If that makes you laugh for reasons you could never ex- plain, then you are as in on the secret of Andy Kaufman's genius as anyone. If you think that is boring, or dull, then you are as in on the secret of Andy Kaufman's genius as anyone. -RJ Smith Aykroyd to blame for the show's moribund hijinks? In part. It's cer- tainly a bother (and, on occasion, a little embarrassing) to see Garrett Morris midnight-tonight offers (faster, in fact, than you ever believed a human being could speak) was to witness a crazy celebration of junk culture that Of course, it's hard to guffaw or even chuckle with the same slap-happy spon- taneity we did just a year or two ago. The Wild and Crazy Guys used to be a scream; now, they're a national monument, part of the bedrock of pop cultural history, and sitting through one of their sketches is a little like being dragged to Mount Rushmore on the family vacation: It becomes an obligation to laugh, to convince yourself you're having a good time, and wouldn't be doing just as well to haul off to the library for a bout with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Gilda Radner isn't so'much a comic actress these days as she is a grinning, apple- cheeked dress-up doll, with matching outfits and accents. Friends of mine have stared at the tube in blunted misery, dumbranded at the relentless Roseanne Roseannadanna cult. "She does the same shtick week after week," they complain bitterly. But of course' she does. That's precisely the point of Roseanne, and of the Samurai and the Coneheads and Baba Wawa and that play-dough castrati, Mr. Bill: To make audiences laugh at the simple recognition of humor. It's comedy like the assertion, week after week, that Barbara Walters is a cotton-mouthed dodo-rather than the small satirical revelation of it, which is what we laughed at the first and, perhaps, the second time-that's become the back- bone of Saturday Night Live. More im- portant than the joke itself is the fact that we're in on it. Saturday Night Live and Saturday Night ' Dead, the late- night horror movie feature that follows Real World. Of course, it's hard to even imagine a media darling like Steve Martin as any sort of revolutionary figure these days. Next to the modest comic torpedo of Belushi's "But nooo! ," Martin's "Excuuuuse me!" was turned into an atomic bomb, saturating the country in sickeningly zany fallout. Martin's movie, The Jerk, is not only laugh-less, but a disturbingly provincial pastiche of racist and sexist stereotypes (particularly the ballsy- butch girlfriend, who could use a life sentence in finishing school). Yet there was a time, maybe for only -,a few months, when Martin's loopy wise-guy shenanigans made him some sort of-yes-hero. He certainly took comedy a pratfall or two forward by eliminating jokes (try to find a pun- chline in "Happy Feet"). More than that, Martin dared to be an utter, shameless asshole. If anything, his only natural enemies were the women who frequented singles bars and suddenly had to contend with all those wild and. crazy guys on the make. Martin's flaw was that he never really developed as a comedian, though in a way he's hardly to blame; Is it really a performer's fault if his best bits have been so bandied about that when he does them on his first tour, they sound about as fresh as "Take my wife-please"? Mass popularity can squeeze out all the creative juices. It's probably a blessing that Lenny Bruce never had to contend with an audience of 40 million adoring youths; if he had, some of his best routines might have been reduced to banal catch-phrases fit for fanzine consumption. Saturday Night Live faced a similar dilemma once its huge, extremely un- cultish audience was established. It Owen Gleiberman is a frequent contributor to the Sunday Maga- line. must be when 1 saying see. Wh good tI privileg is no lo ding pi What w and "da latest c female juiciest Kaufma few sex honest- chauvir him. 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