How The Brady Bunch Damaged Him

January 27, 2024May 29, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“The thing about being human is,” Bob Peters said to initiate a conversation with my friend Arnold Glass.

“No, I am human,” Arnold said. “I’m standing right before you, two arms, and two legs just like you.”

That was funny, I thought, examining Arnold’s face for a break that would reveal the joke. It wasn’t award-winning funny, or even knee-slapping funny, but I considered it a fairly decent trap to set for Bob Peters for future jokes. Depending on where he took it from there, I thought he laid some pretty decent groundwork. The three of us were co-workers at a company, on break, shooting the stuff. I didn’t know Bob Peters. He was kind of a floater, who moved from person to person, group to group, but I thought I knew Arnold. We were co-workers who spent so much time around each other that I suppose I could’ve call him a best friend at work, but that just seems like such a grade school/high school designation. It just feels odd to call a grown man that I didn’t know before we started working at the same company a best friend, but we did a lot together over the years. Arnold could be funny occasion, but he was more knock-knock joke funny. This level of dada comedy, or what I thought might be intentionally irrational comedy without a base or direction was so out of character for him that I thought he might follow it up with, ‘Sorry, that just sounded like something to say. It didn’t work as well as I thought it would.’ Not only did Arnold not say something like that or give any cues that he was joking, he was all bowed up. I was almost positive that he wasn’t looking to throw down, during a 15-minute break on company grounds, over something as odd as this, but he looked so defensive. What an odd thing to say, I thought, and what a weird thing to get defensive about.

Bob Peters obviously dismissed Arnold’s comment as nothing more than an obnoxious attempt to interrupt him before continuing, “As I was saying-”

“No,” Arnold interrupted, growing uncharacteristically confrontational. “You called me out here. I’m a human being with all the same hopes and dreams as you. I’m going to need you to acknowledge that before you continue.”

“Fine, I acknowledge that you are a living, breathing human being with all the same hopes and dreams as the rest of us,” Bob Peters said. “Now, can I continue?”

***

“What was all that about?” I asked after Arnold and I finished our conversations with Bob Peters, and he walked back to the office.

“Cripes, I forgot to apologize to Bob for all that didn’t I,” Arnold Glass said. “He just happened to step on one of my land mines, but he didn’t mean anything by it did he?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think he just thought it was a clever intro … but what do you think he meant by it?”

“I don’t know. It’s that name thing,” Arnold said. “I thought Bob was trying to be funny, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure Bob even knows my last name. I know I don’t know his. We’re not on a last name basis.”

“Peters,” I said. “Bob Peters.”

“Okay, Peters. Well, God bless him for having such a normal last name.”

“Glass? What’s wrong with Glass?”

“We’ve never talked about this?” Arnold asked me with some fatigue. “You obviously didn’t grow up watching The Brady Bunch, did you?” I said I had, and the name George Glass immediately came to mind, but I feigned ignorance. “There was an episode where Jan Brady made up an imaginary boyfriend. When she was pressed for his name, she said, “George,” and then she looked around and saw a glass of water. “George Glass,” she said.”

“Okay, yeah, I remember that.”

“I’ve had nightmares about that scene.”

“You’ve got to be joking?” I asked with suspicious but confused laughter.

“I’m not. I’m really not,” Arnold said with a most serious face. “We were all too young to know the episode when it first came out, but, you know, reruns. I might’ve been in 2^nd grade when Mary Beth Driscoll said, “Are you even real?” I didn’t get it, because I never saw the episode, so she explained it. I didn’t think it was funny, but everyone else did. Everyone else did, and they joined in on the joke. It hurt a little, but mainly because I didn’t understand it. Then, every time they reran that episode, I’d get some semblance of that joke, and I probably took way too personal, but I was young, real young, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. ‘We’re just joking, for gosh sakes Arnie’ they’d say, and that never made it any better. Things like that are stupid, insignificant, and irrelevant, until they start to gather moss. Every time you meet a friend’s mom, they ask if you’re real, or they say it’s nice to finally meet you. We thought you were fake. It sort of petered out after a while. The harmless and stupid jokes never ended, but I didn’t hear them as often for quite a while there, until the 1996 movie A Very Brady Sequel came out, and then the internet picked that whole joke up as a meme for imaginary boyfriends, girlfriends, and imaginary friends, and it started all over again.”

I could’ve, and probably should’ve, expressed some sort of sympathy, but I couldn’t help but find it so harmless that it was cute and cute-funny. The general idea of a man being mentally badgered about anything calls for a sympathetic response, but to hear someone say that a Brady Bunch joke was the source of his pain was so unprecedented that I couldn’t help but find humor in it. I managed to keep a straight face, a solemn, sympathetic face, until he said:

“I’ve even considered changing my name more than once. I’m serious. Totally serious,” he added when I ‘C’mon’ed him’. “If my dad didn’t talk me off that ledge, talking about breaking the long, storied history of the Glasses, and their proud British heritage, I would’ve gone through with it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said when I laughed. “It’s just the words breaking the Glass got to me,” I confessed. Those words weren’t funny, but it didn’t take much to tip me into laughter, and I considered it a decent excuse for laughing.

“It’s really not funny, and it’s not a joke,” Arnold said defensively. “When I was in my teens, and I’d meet my girlfriends’ families, their sisters would jab me in the shoulder with their finger and say things like, “I just wanted to make sure you were real.” Another person, a mom, a nice, sweet maternal mom said, “We thought it was like that time Jan Brady made up a boyfriend, and she said his name was George Glass. We thought Julie did that with you. Sorry, but we thought she made you up.”

“My guess is that’s probably happened a million times,” I said after I achieved some level of control. “Nerdy girls and boys have made up boyfriends and girlfriends since, probably since the cavemen.”

“I get that,” Arnold said, “and if it happened once or twice, I’d say it’s only happened once or twice, and that’s normal, as you say, but it’s happened so often that … that you can’t help but question your identity and your existence.”

“Your existence?”

“Well, I never thought I wasn’t real, if that’s what you’re asking,” Arnold Glass said, “but these things, these little tiny, and seemingly insignificant things, can have a cumulative effect that can, regrettably, end up all over someone like Bob. Remind me to apologize to him when I see him.”

“Example?”

“Example, let’s see,” Arnold said. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your nose. Let me make that clear, because I’d hate to put you through what I’ve been through. I mean it’s not too long, too big, or crooked. You have a very normal nose on your face, but imagine if someone joked that there was something wrong with it. Imagine if it was nothing more than a dumb, insignificant and untrue comment on your nose. You’d tell them to shut up, or some variation thereof that allows you to swat their comment away, like a pesky mosquito. Now imagine that someone else, someone who had no relation to that first person, says the same exact thing. You might start to think there’s something to it. You might be a little paranoid about your nose, right? Maybe? Now imagine that this silly, stupid thing is the same thing your grade school peers hit you with when you were young, very young, too young to know how to deal with it properly. It has a way of chasing you into adulthood, until you’re impulsively launching on someone like Bob. Do you think it could lead to a cumulative effect equivalent to wanting to change your name, like getting a nose job or something? And the whole time, you know you have a perfectly normal nose, because everyone says there’s nothing wrong with your nose, like I had a perfectly normal name, until some writer on some stupid show decided your last name would be the perfect name for an imaginary person.

“See, what you saw was a one-time, seemingly insignificant incident,” Arnold continued. “But you didn’t see the buildup, the accumulation, and you probably just think it was bizarre, and all that, but it was the result of a cumulative effect. Have you ever heard of the Chinese Water Torture effect? They strapped a guy into a chair so tight, he couldn’t move, under a slowly dripping water faucet. Now, we can drop anywhere from one droplet of water to a million drops of water on a person’s forehead, and it won’t cause any physical damage to that forehead, but psychologically? Psychologically, it’s been documented as one of the most cruel, brutal, and inhumane forms of torture ever invented. Why? It is the accumulation of seeing the next drop of water, knowing it’s going to hit your head, and it finally hitting. It’s the same thing here, but my slow drip has occurred over the years, the decades, and it can manifest in ways you saw today with Bob Peters. Some say it can be stressful to the point of panic-inducing attacks. That’s never happened to me, those final stages, but it could. Some say it could.”

I still couldn’t see it, and in many ways I still can’t. The whole idea of it obviously still fascinates me, but no matter how well Arnold researched what happened to him that led him to his unusual outburst, and how persuasive he was in the moment, I still couldn’t wrap my arms around the idea of what he described as a cumulative effect, even under the umbrella of Chinese Water Torture effect. It was hard to see through the bizarre, silliness of the idea, and it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that a person could be so damaged by a Brady Bunch joke that he’s reflexively lashing out at anyone who even hints that he might not be real, imaginary, or in this case not human. The only thing I can come up with is it’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is something we feel for someone experiencing something foreign to our experience. Empathy is almost a shared sentiment we have for someone who is experiencing something for which we experienced ourselves to such a degree our knowledge of it can be intimate, and the only people who can understand The Brady Bunch Glass effect are those who have experienced themselves.

At the Movies

January 20, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

No matter how hard they try to wreck movies, I still love them. I love a great book, a fantastic album, and even a mind-blowing painting, but nothing beats spending ninety minutes in the hands of a master movie maker. Thanks to the VHS, and every medium before and since, I’ve watched more movies than just about anyone I’ve ever met. I write “just about”, because I had a “Who’s watched more movies” showdown with a fellow movie freak who cut the debate short by asking, “Do you watch porn?” I said I didn’t. He said, “I win!”

Nobody ever died wishing they watched more movies, and it’s not something we normally lord over someone to a point of superiority. When comedians start dropping references from movies, however, movie freaks enjoy getting those jokes that the others –who didn’t waste so much of their life watching movies–don’t.

“Before we go to a movie, we have to get to the movie theater, and is there a better way of getting there, or anywhere, than in a Jeep Wrangler? (Cue the video backdrop of a Wrangler managing various rough roads, icy snow, and large rock terrains.) “Hi! I’m somebody famous, but I have a moderately-dressed family (cue the entrance of the wife and kids and remind the paid spokesman to put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder), who need a reliable automobile to get them places. We put some serious consideration into purchasing a sensible family sedan, and then the snowstorm hit.

“When hazardous conditions hit, the 4-wheel drive (4WD) drivetrain of the Jeep Wrangler will go from a luxury to a necessity. We don’t always need it, of course, but hazardous conditions strike, we can push, pull, or otherwise engage the 4WD to the supermarket, the drugstore, or the movie theater with comfort. The comfort 4WD owners know can be so great we might consider it a little weird. Most of us don’t care if others have a faster car than we do, and we don’t care if they think have a better car, and we never have. We’re not car guys. When that snowstorm hits, however, and it brings ice and everything else that defines hazardous conditions, there is something embarrassingly unusual that happens to us when we’re not only able to manage hazardous conditions but dominate them.

“We all learned how to drive in the snow and ice in other cars, and those cars taught us to be cautious and never over-confident in hazardous conditions, no matter what we drive, but how often have you felt so intimidated by the “here/there be dragons” roads that you decided not to leave home. If this was you, the makers of Jeep have the antidote. The 4WD Jeep Wrangler not only provides the piece of mind that comes from making a decision that protects your family, but it can lead to some feelings of masculine machismo as you conquer nature. (Cue the son’s growl.) And now back to the show.”

The Action Movie

“Jason Statham is our new action hero!” they say with all sorts of exclamation points. I yawn. Action movies? Does anyone still lust after a great action flick? I have nothing but compliments for Jason Statham. He’s a quality actor who picks some quality movies to star in, the Crank movies stand out as his best so far, but action movies as a whole are just dead to me? We all loved what Stallone and Schwarzenegger did to and for the genre, in the 80’s and 90’s, but didn’t the whole action movie format kind of peak in that era? How many twists on the genre can we put on this otherwise tired genre? The John Wick movies supposedly proved I am wrong. People were a buzz about them. “You have to see this next one. Do you want to see it? Do you want to see it with me? If this one is anywhere close to the first one, it’s a must-see.” So, I saw it, and as action movies go, it was really good, but I couldn’t have been more bored. Maybe there was a time when I found choreographed fight scenes exciting, but I can’t remember it. All scenes in movies require some suspension of disbelief, but we all know they’re going to win the fight. They are all so formulaic.

To introduce his guest action-hero Steven Seagal to his show, Arsenio Hall had a great line, “This man could probably whip your tail with a french fry.” I’m sure Steven Seagal could probably beat me up, and I kind of don’t care,, but we’re talking about a man who played a character in a movie, and most of his physical exploits were choreographed with players executing moves that allowed him to punch them or kick in pre-planned moves. Does that mean he could beat me up with a french fry in real life? We all know they’re not fighting for real, of course, but we suspend our disbelief long enough to enjoy the choreography involved. If it’s not real, and all the moves by the main character and his adversaries are choreographed, aren’t we basically watching a ballet with some punching, kicking, and bullets thrown in? “But you’re male, and every male has just been intoxicated with fight scenes since about Bruce Lee. Why, because we’re males. It’s as every bit apart of us as our ring-a-ding-ding.” Well, then, I’m obviously not as male as you, because I’d prefer the verbal, cerebral exchanges we can hear in even the most average Woody Allen film over the finest choreographed fight scenes of the best Van Damme flick.

The Car Chase

Some say that the greatest car chase scene that ever took place in the history of cinema occurred in 1971’s French Connection. People still talk about this scene as if it’s one of the greatest scenes in movie history. They talk about how dangerous it was, and Screenrant.com writes that director “William Friedkin had no permission to film the car chase the way it was done, which is why The French Connection could never be made today.” They also drop a note about how the car accident in the scene was real, and Friedkin kept it in the movie to add to the scene’s gritty realism. I drop a big “who give a crud” thud. When I saw that that scene for the first time, before I knew anything about the hoopla and the hollering, I thought the scene ran too long. After hearing people gush about the scene in the decades since, I watched it again with a renewed sense, and I thought it ran too long. That scene, one car chase scene, runs approximately six minutes. About five minutes too long. “But you have to understand how difficult the logistics of the scene were,” they say. “You have to sink yourself into the drama of the moment, and how well it was edited to a perfect pulse pounding pace.” No, I don’t. I don’t care about the particulars of the artistry of the film-making, I just want to sit down and enjoy watching a movie. I also don’t plan on ever shooting a car chase scene, so why would I be influenced by anything involved in the shooting of it? I watch a movie to be entertained, and when a chase scene, or a fight scene, interrupts the pace of that movie, “because that’s what we love”, I now have the luxury of fast forwarding through it to see what happened.

The Bad Guy

Our familiarity with portrayals of bad guys began in preschool when our teacher put on a puppet show and introduced the bad guy, “And here’s comes mean Mr. Johnson,” “BOO!” we all shouted in unison. “All I care about is money!” she has mean Mr. Johnson say in her mean guy voice, as our throng of boos strengthened. It was fun and funny back then, but we fully grown, mature and responsible adults are still doing that today. When the bad guy enters our adult productions today, the writers will introduce him by having him kick a cute, little puppy down a flight of stairs, light a physically-impaired individual’s house on fire, or do some other equally heinous act such as declaring there are some virtues to profit. At some point in the production, he will declare that a side character isn’t pulling their weight in the company, and he will do it in such an over the top, mean, bad and dastardly way that it’s almost embarrassingly cheesy to watch. Enter our good guy, “C’mon man, that’s no way to talk to a person.” We all but cheer our good guy for saying what needed to be said, but doesn’t anyone else see this as the movie’s obnoxiously obvious way of endearing the main character to the audience?

I would submit that the characterizations of bad guys haven’t progressed much beyond that preschool puppet show portrayal of the mean Mr. Johnson bad guys. “Hey, if you don’t think money is important, I’d like to see you get along without it!” mean Mr. Johnsons say in modern, adult movies. “Boo!” we shout in unison. Most adults don’t openly boo in theaters, but do we avoid openly booing because we’ve matured past that impulse, or does decades of movie going let us know that the writers and directors of our beloved productions are going to make something awful to him? That’s what separates us from preschoolers, we know the movie makers are going to expose him as the bad guy he is, and we know he’s going to get his comeuppance. We’re not talking about comedies either, where it’s more acceptable to have exaggerated characters for comedic purposes. We’re talking about otherwise complex dramas that basically write Scooby-Doo bad guys as actual characters. “He’s going to get his comeuppance,” someone in the audience says, as if they’re watching a sporting event. He’s one of those “I told you,” guys who love to say they knew what was coming, even though it is as obvious as it was in our preschool puppet plays. As I wrote I don’t need, or even want, a complex, deep narrative on par with a Dostoyevsky novel, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some writers shake up these tedious, bullet point tropes that adhere to the 80’s cookie cutter characters that Scooby Doo made famous.

My favorite illustration of this point comes from Quentin Tarantino:

“Critics always really preferred Bill Murray movies to Chevy Chase movies,” Tarantino said. “However, it does seem as if the point of all the Bill Murray movies is that he’s this kind of hip, cool, curmudgeon, smartass guy, who in the last 20 minutes gets a transformation and becomes this nice guy. And almost apologizes for who he was the entire movie before that happened.”

Tarantino continued with examples: “Stripes, Groundhog Day, Scrooged. The whole thing. For instance, Stripes. How does he go from where Warren Oates kicks his ass, deservedly kicks his ass…to where now he’s rallying the troops? Now, he’s getting their army on during the parade and now he’s leading a secret mission. Same thing with Groundhog Day. I mean, does anybody really think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray? Maybe it’s better for Andie MacDowell, but not for us as the viewer.”

“Yet, Chevy Chase movies don’t play that s***,” Tarantino said. “Chevy Chase is the same supercilious a**hole at the end of the movie that he is at the beginning. He never changes in his stuff…I mean, unless they have him playing a dope like he is in the Vacation movies. But when he’s playing like a Chevy character, he never apologizes for who he is, stays the same way through the whole film, and even if there’s a slight change, that’s not the whole point of the movie, like changing him into a nice, cuddly guy.”

Information Age and Movies

Another huge component of watching modern movies is all of the insider information we have at our disposal. Thanks to news aggregators, the internet in general, and the other chairs on late-night talk shows, we now know so much about movies that we crossed a tipping point of too much information about the production of a simple 90-minute movie. I used to find the information actors, directors, and everyone else involved in the production provided in the other chairs on late-night talk shows somewhat fascinating, but somewhere along the line I realized it’s all just self-imposed deification, and their sign to them that they made it. For some reason, we all want to know everything we can find about our definition of our royalty, and the roles they play in movies, and we can never get enough. I did. When the actor told me that they put weight on to play the role, I didn’t really care, but I considered it a worthwhile dedication to the role. When the host began to ask questions about the diet they used to add weight, I turned the channel. When the person in the other chair informed us that she didn’t wear make-up for their role, I didn’t care. When the host said, “You are very brave,” and he appeared to mean it, I turned the channel. When it was revealed in an aggregator, that this actor didn’t get along with that actor, their onscreen lover, we all learned that many considered working with that actor difficult. When we learned that the actor became so immersed in his method acting that he demanded everyone on set call him Weasel, because he’s playing Weasel, I found that fascinating at first. Then, when everyone copied that immersion technique, I found it trite, redundant, and a little pathetic and dumb. We learn that some actors aren’t nice, but others are. “It’s true. I know he’s a good guy, because he asked me my name when giving me an autograph, and he called me Harley from then on, and he even winked at my kid.” That director used this technique, this setting, those cameras, that soundtrack, and the movie studio budgeted it at such and such an amount, but as usual the artistically demanding director burned through that the first week. We still care about the quality of a movie, of course, but all these other late-night talk show talking points enhance the movie experience for us. Why? I honestly don’t understand how any of this information enhances your cinematic experience. You like a movie better, because you found out she’s nice, and you won’t go to see another movie, because you heard a report about how one time that star didn’t hold an elevator for an old lady carrying groceries? You might be a victim of too much information.

Even with all that, I still love movies. I find a trip to the theater, a night at home with Netflix, Prime, etc., and a quality movie, a great evening. No matter how hard they try, they can never take that away from me.

Rilalities XIII

January 16, 2024January 16, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“80% of success is showing up,” Woody Allen once said.

“So, what you’re saying is if I want to succeed, I should show up?” you ask. To answer that question, we ask another question, how many people don’t? How many apathetic and self-destructive types didn’t show up for the opportunities-of-a-lifetime Woody Allen received? Was Allan Stewart Konigsbeg (Woody Allen) the most talented person in his troupe, or did he show up so often that he got the job, the jobs, and the career that the apathetic and self-destructive did not, because they weren’t there.

In his book I’m Dying Up Here, author Arthur Knoedelseder suggests that Woody Allen’s 1978 Annie Hall winning numerous Academy Awards that year opened up all kinds of opportunities for standup comedians, comedic actors, and writers of comedy. Most of those who would land multiple picture deals would go onto be the faces of comedic humor in the ’80’s and beyond. The question is was Woody Allen funnier than those peers, or was he in the right place and the right time in Hollywood history?

To listen to modern screenwriters tell their tale, Woody Allen’s story isn’t the type of story we enjoy. We’d much rather hear the story about “the kid,” “the natural,” or the one everyone agreed was the most talented person in the room who finally got his big break, and in the next scene, they’re asleep or dead with a heroin needle hanging from their arm. It happens so often on screen, that it’s a trope, but is it true? We’re sure it’s happened, but has it happened so often that it’s a truth, or do we just love to cringe so much that screenwriters feel compelled to write about it.

I can only imagine that the screenwriter tries to sell his script pitching about “the kid,” “the natural”, and the potential Hollywood producers asking “Okay, but where is the arc? What does the American public love more than anything else, the rise and fall. We build him up as the kid, the natural, and then, on the cusp of him finally realizing his talent on a national, worldwide scale his dysfunctional, self-destructive traits rear their ugly head. It’s the Freddie Prinze story. People love that story. They love to cringe.”

It can be a little scary to put all of our potential to succeed, and all of our hard work, on the line. How many of us have the potential to succeed, and how many can stand before others, relatively anonymous and proverbially naked, to showcase our potential? Are you a fraud, or are you so confident that you’re just waiting for an opportunity to show your talent? Are you the type who creates your own opportunities, or do you wait for them to happen? If you’re the latter, will you not show up, because you’re afraid you’re not ready? Even if you’re “not ready” in a relative sense you’ve defined, that might just be your opinion. If Woody Allen’s quote holds any weight, it might redound to your benefit to show up anyway to see what happens.

Some of us cringe when we hear tales of the dysfunctional and self-destructive types, others laugh, and we all feel sorry for them, but they’re the ones we replace. We’re the ones who show up and do it so often that we might overcome whatever relative level of talent we might have.

Showing up is also starting up. How many of us think about doing something, how many of us daydream, and how many of us actually do it? Showing up suggests that you’re ready to make it happen. You’ve surpassed the dream stage, and you’re there. You’ve shown up and you’re ready to work with others to make it happen.

Stop Letting Your Bullies Bully You

There are few things that bother me more than watching a victim of bullying make their problem worse by the manner in which they deal with a bully. When I hear, read, or see a member of an audience become so offended that they’ve become outraged at something a standup comedian says, I say, “You’re going about it wrong! You’re doing it all wrong!”

There might be some exceptions to the rule, but my bet is every standup comedian was a former class clown/bully. The essence of the craft is such that it attracts guys and girls that someone, somewhere once called a class A jerk. (A class A jerk is someone other than the class D jerk who pokes fun at others for sport and backs down if anyone informs them they’re offended in anyway.)

When real life darkened their door, most standup comedians admitted they didn’t know what to do. They were as lost, or more, as the rest of us. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if my predecessors didn’t do what they did in this craft to make it what is it today. Not only am I not good at anything else, I didn’t particularly like doing anything else.” What is it they’re doing, on stage, every night? What is it they enjoy doing so much that it saved them from the depths of despair? If we dig through all the particulars of the craft, we find that making fun of other people is the core of standup comedy. Where do you think they discovered their talent, and how did they hone it? They did it on your back, and your delicious tears told them they might be onto something. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.

One other special ingredient that defines the difference between most great comedians and the ones who never made it to the main stage, pushing boundaries. What does that mean? We think pushing boundaries is about filmmakers teaching us what we don’t want to hear, and it is, but it’s also about standup comedians telling us what we don’t want to hear. They’re mutually exclusive, diametrically opposed, and the same. Tell a standup that they can do anything they want except this, and this will be the only thing they want to do. Tell them that they can make fun of everyone, except these people, and a joke about those people will probably make it into their intro. My problem is not with standup comedians. We all know who they are. They’re bullies. The problem is with the offended. If the standup comedian is wrong, tell them why, and do it from a position of power not weakness.

If we ever effectively find a way to diminish, deter, or defeat bullies as a whole, the one detriment might be our inability to deal with bullies. The only solution we’ve found at this point is to inform them that we’re offended by something they’ve said. Who cares if you’re offended? Some do, of course, and there are probably more now than ever before who aren’t afraid to say that they’re offended, but I can tell you one person who doesn’t care, the offender. I’ve been offended by something a comedian said, and I always think that’s just one man’s opinion, and it’s not an informed one. (I use the term offended, here, for the purpose of illustrating a point, because I can’t think of any comedian who has ever offended me.) You getting offended is exactly what the offender wants. It’s what their audience wants too. How many nice guys finish first in the world of standup? What is it .0001% The nature of the beast is such that if a comedian goes clean and tries to avoid offending anyone, the audience might chuckle politely, but the chuckle will be soft and almost internal, as they wait for that hurtful haymaker to punctuate the joke. Most good guy, clean comedians are widely regarded as too safe to be truly funny. We, as a whole, want our standup comedians risqué, we want them to push boundaries, and we want them to speak out against unsafe targets. Who are the unsafe targets though? That’s the question skippy, and that’s the point Howard. The unsafe targets have shifted from my guys to your guys, and from my issues to yours. We didn’t handle it well, claiming offense and outrage, and now you’re doing the same.

If this is true, wow do we stop the mean-spirited comedian then? I don’t think you do. I think they love it so much there’s nothing we can do or say to stop them. You can see it on their face. They were born to do this, they love it, and they wouldn’t want it any other way. They define your offense as effective penetration. Their audience, comprised mostly of former bullies and class clowns, love it too. Do we get in their face and try to mow them down? Have you ever been bullied by a class A jerk? They’re unusually very good at what they do. They’re often unusually smart, and not only are they smart, they’re quick, and not only are they quick, they’re funny. It’s often that final nugget, funny, that just tears into our soul. They come up with material quick, and how do we defeat them? If it’s a class A jerk, we’re on their turf when we’re trying to outfunny them. The only way to defeat them is to switch the playing field to our internal home court and outdo them there. If we can convince them, there, that they’re not getting in, we’ll take all their fun out of it for them. That’s all I got, and I know it’s not great, but it’s obviously better than everything you’ve come up with thus far. You’re encouraging them and making them think they’re onto something when you declare that you’re offended. You’re making it worse.

Crazy Joe Davola

Crazy Joe Davola (actor Peter Crombie) has died, and Fox News reports that his friends suggest that even though “he was cast as a bad guy on Seinfeld, and he played numerous interesting and complicated characters, including Bernard Goetz, he was very sweet in an old-school way. When not working as an actor on stage or in front of a camera, he was genuinely humble, preferring others to talk and take main stage. He was always helpful, giving and funny. He was one [of] the kindest, soft-spoken, loving and caring people I have ever met. A gentle giant.” It’s a fitting tribute, but it’s not funny? We might not want funny to be on site forever more, but in private, on stage, I think Peter Crombie would’ve loved it if someone, someone like Lewis Black, offered Crombie a comedic sendoff. “It wasn’t much of a challenge for Peter Crombie to play the awful characters he did, because he was awful. He was an awful human being. I remember one day he saw a kid with ice cream, and he stole it. He didn’t want their ice cream. He didn’t even like ice cream. He would pitch it in the nearest receptacle. He did it just to do it. Just so he could say he did it. He said that he liked to hear kids cry. “The younger the better,” he said.”

Review of Self-Reliance

If there’s one thing an aspiring writer can learn from the movie Self-Reliance, it’s that your audience doesn’t want anything bad to happen to the fictional characters of your stories, until they nothing does. Leaving out all of the other particulars of the plot, the primary plot of this movie is that a bored, lonely man is offered a proposition. If you can survive for thirty days, with murderers trying to murder you, we will give you $1 million dollars if they are unsuccessful. There is a catch for the murderers, however, they cannot kill him if he’s within three feet of another person. The need to have someone near him, leads the character to realize that in his life before the contest he forgot to make real, human connections throughout his life, and he forgot to live life to the fullest. That underlying theme would’ve been engaging if, IF, it was properly balanced with the character narrowly escaping harrowing threats. The problem with this movie is that this viewer (you might be different) never feels the threats are anything more than an excellent plot device to sell the movie. There are some threats made on the character’s life throughout the movie, but they are easily, too easily, vanquished. This reveals to us that the threats on the character’s life are basically ancillary to the underlying theme. It’s as if the writer said, I want to write a post-COVID script that reminds the audience of the need for human connection and companionship. The problem is how do we go about writing about that without getting too gushy? I got it. Let’s develop a contest for the character in which he needs to have people around him. All of that would be fine, except the writer/director forgot to concentrate enough on the threat therein.

Anyone who watches this movie will realize as much as we don’t enjoy cringing, we enjoy cringing. We want to see scenes where the character stupidly gets into harrowing situations that he can’t possibly escape, until he does, and we’re awash with relief when he does. We want to experience the ups and downs of what it must feel like to have people trying to murder you. We want to scream, “Don’t go in there!” when he approaches the wrong door. We want to see pianos fall behind him while he’s talking on the phone, comically unaware of what just happened. We want to grip the arms on our chairs when a gigantic ball comes rolling after him, as he runs through a cavernous region in which there’s no lateral escape, and we want o see a poison-tipped arrow hit a guy standing somewhat near the main character after the main character bent down to pick up a piece of garbage that some rube just threw on the ground. “Hey, it’s called littering man!” The main character shouts at the litterer, as the man with the arrow in his neck, behind him, slowly falls gurgling to the ground. There can be humor intermingled in the tension, but we want/need the tension. What we get from Self-Reliance are all of the hypotheticals a man who must survive a scenario might have to go through to insure his survival. The movies is really about the social interactions a person might not go through if there wasn’t an ever-present, or in this case never-present, threat of death. My takeaways are that the movie accomplishes two things: It teaches writers what not to do with a thriller, and it leaves you with the weird, uncomfortable feeling that you actually want bad things to happen to fictional characters. Those of us who know and enjoy so many of Jake Johnson’s projects, enjoyed this one too. He’s a funny, interesting actor, and Self-Reliance is not a bad movie in anyway, except for that lack of threat, and the ending is more of a wrap-up than an exciting conclusion. The character basically tells us what happened at the end, and he shows us some shots that visualize what he’s saying.