Before I get to the entry proper, I should warn you that it’s 1) a stream-of-consciousness thing and not terribly polished, and 2) one of those writing-about-writing-type things, and I try not to subject y’all to these dissections too often, but I started writing it up for the Cherry page and halfway through my third paragraph I realized I’d have to do it as an entry instead, even though I’d planned to take the day off for my birthday and…anyway. Shall we?

All righty then. The other night, I finally got around to watching Comedian, the Jerry Seinfeld stand-up documentary (well, “documentary” doesn’t seem like the right word, but I don’t know what else you’d call it — “concert film”?). Netflix sent it to me back in October, and I really don’t know what took me so long to throw it in the DVD player, but I liked it. At least, I think I liked it; it interested me enough to sit through it three times total, for both sets of commentary, which ordinarily I don’t bother with because the stuff I hope gets commented on never does, or the director doesn’t have anything to say, so he says nothing for most of the movie (viz. Robert Altman, who had so little to offer on the subject of M*A*S*H that I suspect he’d forgotten directing it entirely), or it’s the editor totally not fascinating the pants off me with comments like, “Originally, this shot ran a lot longer…and now…it’s shorter. Than the master shot. Which ran longer than this one.” Oh. Well…thank you for that.

But I don’t know if I can really say that I “liked” Comedian. I like movies that show me process, especially if it’s the process of writing or the craft of humor, and I can learn something from that or get an insight I didn’t have before; Comedian does that well. I think it’s more accurate, though, to say that it got under my skin, and it did so because Orny Adams — the “other” comedian the film follows — is off-putting. And I mean thoroughly and immediately off-putting; he hadn’t had a full minute of screen time before I’d told him to shut up.

I sort of sensed while watching it, and had confirmed by listening to the commentary, that it’s not just me, that the filmmakers understood the effect he’d have — not that they set it up so that he’d seem more obnoxious, but that they didn’t necessarily expect the audience to like him. Still, it bugged me — I mean, he bugged me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, and it’s taken me several days to figure it out, but I think I’ve got it.

I don’t know Orny Adams personally, and I don’t want to malign the guy unnecessarily, because I also don’t know the stand-up world that well; I took one class and realized I should probably stay behind a desk. And he’s not unfunny, and he works incredibly hard; it’s not about that. It’s that he needs it so badly that he comes off like a difficult person to spend time with — that it’s probably hard to even have a conversation with him, especially if you try to make any jokes, that he’d talk right past it without acknowledging you, or kind of get irritated with you and not be able to take any pleasure in just the riffing itself, because he’s the funny guy, dammit, and don’t step on his shit. Now that I think about it, it’s part of what annoyed me — intensely — about Beteldouche. Beteldouche isn’t funny, but the issue isn’t that, or that he thinks he is funny when he surely is not, but rather that, as far as he’s concerned, he gets to do the funny thing — he does. Nobody else. I would crack a joke, and he would just…ignore it. Leave me hanging. Then he’d high-five me for successfully using my lighter, and it was like, what the hell?

I don’t get that, I guess. I mean, you get in a room with a bunch of funny people, you’re going to see a certain amount of jostling around under the hoop to see who gets to stuff the basket. I won’t sit here and tell you I’ve never stepped on a friend’s punchline; I’ve done it a dozen times just today. But when I’m sitting around with…I don’t know, let’s say Wing and Pamie and the Couch Baron and whoever else, and we’re just telling stories? Yeah, to a certain extent I’m waiting for a pause so I can take a shot. But in a group like that, you don’t always make the shot; you can’t always. Sometimes you just have to watch The Man From F.U.N.K.L.E. one-hand it from the three-point line and think to yourself, “Well, damn, looks like I’m out — nice shootin’, Tex,” and get on with the conversation.

The funny people that I know, they can do that. They can let you have that. Not all funny people can, though, and with some of them, there’s this stinginess of spirit where, ironically, everything is all serious, and competitive, and if you get in a good crack, it actually pisses them off, and I think Orny Adams is one of those funny people. Those funny people have to have the role of The Funny One all to themselves, and then they’ll have no sense of humor in the first place — they understand when a thing is funny, and how to make a thing funny for other people, how to observe it sharply, but they do it from a mechanical perspective, and they can’t take any joy in anyone else’s humor, because they think it’s a zero-sum game. If you’re funny, it’s taking something away from them, so you get a good line off and they’re like, ohhhh, so THAT’S how it is, and you’re like, look, I just added “-apalooza” to the end of the word, that’s all. I’m not going to come over and drink your beer. Relax.

Orny Adams is, as far as I know, not a bad person, but during his routine, he looks like he’s passing a kidney stone. It’s a compulsion; he’s not enjoying himself at all. He’s miserable. I do understand that it’s a job and that your job isn’t fun all the time — boy, do I understand that. But even offstage, when he’s ostensibly just cracking wise, you can practically hear his molars grinding, and it’s not just him that’s like that. A lot of comics come off like that, at least to me — you’ve got comics you could stand to get trapped in an elevator with, and then you’ve got Janeane Garofalo. I get stuck in an elevator with Conan O’Brien, okay, it’s not the most fun I could have with my clothes on, but I feel like, after a few minutes, one of us is going to start doing shtick about having to pee in a Snapple bottle, and then we’re going to make up a song about it to pass the time, and then there’s going to be a mock argument about who has to do the harmony parts, and it’s just not going to turn into a big tragedy, because Conan appears to have a sense of humor about things, including himself. The elevator stops between floors and it’s just me and Janeane? Out the roof hatch I go, pronto, because I will make a Donner party joke, and she will have absolutely none of it, and on top of sitting in an elevator that’s not moving, now we’re both uncomfortable and resentful. I just don’t sense that Garof has a sense of humor.

Which is a strange thing to say about a comedian, I guess, and I don’t want to open up the whole “angry woman = bad” can of worms either, because that shit bugs and it’s obviously not what I believe. I have a lot of anger myself, I get it, and enough people pile on Janeane for political stuff as it is. But when the anger is all there is — which seems to be the case with a lot of comics — I don’t like their work as much. The comedians I really dig don’t seem quite as utterly consumed with how much everything sucks. If something’s absurd, even in a bad way and even if it affects them adversely, it seems like they can still appreciate the absurdity. I wouldn’t call Chris Rock a mellow guy, and he’s not going to get up and read poems about flowers and pretty ponies, because he’s pissed off about a bunch of things, but if he and I are driving somewhere and the car catches a flat, I think he’s going to roll with it, probably. Same with Conan; same with Patton Oswalt; same with Laura Kightlinger; same with Eddie Izzard. Okay, Eddie Izzard’s version of “rolling with it” is probably going to be along the lines of “Sarah gets out and changes the flat, because I have a nicer dress on than she does,” but at least he’s not going to get all bent out of shape about running late.

I don’t know any of these people; maybe I’ve got it wrong. But the comedians I like the best as comedians are the ones I think I would like best as people, the ones I think I could hang out with. I don’t necessarily think I should hang out with them; I’m not riding around on elevators hoping to impress Conan with my material during a power failure or anything. It’s that if I have to sit on a plane in the snow for a frillion hours, I’d rather do it with the Couch Baron than with Orny Adams, because Orny Adams is probably going to sigh and huff and check his watch a thousand times and have zero fun with it even though he has no choice, really, because he’s stuck there and the whole situation blows so why not make fun of it, and when I put a Tic-Tac in my nostril and wait for him to notice because I’m incredibly bored, he’s going to look over at me and go, “That’s fucking disgusting,” and he won’t even laugh. The Couch Baron, on the other hand, is going to see my Tic-Tac and raise me a Wint-O-Green Lifesaver, and he’s going to do it deadpan, and unless I can bum a Jolly Rancher off of someone, that’s the ballgame, folks.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, really. I guess it’s that a lot of so-called funny people don’t really think anything is that funny, and that makes them less funny as a result, and it’s weird. I don’t know.

Okay, I’m done.

March 23, 2004

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