Category: Humor

The Patient Predator

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Those of us from an an agricultural area have all heard the tales about a parent, usually a mother, preparing a chicken for dinner. When we city-dwellers think of the preparations necessary for a chicken dinner, we think of the five-minute drive to the local supermarket, the time it takes to select the best frozen chicken, and choosing a batter (if it’s not pre-battered). We then sit down for our chicken dinner about a half hour later. That’s been the process for so long that most generations have never heard that for farming families, past and present, there are other steps involved that they’ve never heard about when mothers prepare a chicken dinner.

Disclaimer: Some might deem the following Not Safe for the Workplace, and if you are in anyway squeamish, I suggest you locate the ‘X’ in the upper righthand corner of this screen and exit stage right. Some might deem ‘the other steps’ violent and brutal, but they are a way of life on a farm. “It was just the way we did it,” they say. They way they did it, involved a mother entering a chicken coop to retrieve a chicken or rooster for that day’s meal. Once she catches it, she chops its head off and releases it to allow it to run around, headless, until the life runs out of the body, and it unceremoniously falls to the ground. It usually runs around, crashing and smashing into whatever is around it for about ten seconds without a head, until whatever nerves or final vestiges of their muscles finally run out of power. Some find this funny, others consider it sad, and still others find it so funny that it is kind of sad. Whatever the case is, the next time your mother says that you were “Running around like a chicken with its head cut off” you now know the origin of that phrase.

These chicken/rooster post-mortem displays prompt the question, do all animals do this? Do human bodies run around, crashing and smashing into things for ten seconds after the head gets chopped off, until the lifeforce drains out? There is no evidence that suggests human bodies run around in this manner, but there is some dubious evidence that suggests some consciousness remains in the head. The scientific data is about as far from conclusive as possible, but a researching physician in the French Revolution claimed, based on his observations, that a severed head could retain consciousness for 25 to 30 seconds.

As many times as I’ve heard these chicken preparation stories, over the decades, Ken’s version of this practice involved a twist I’ve never heard before. In his retelling, he remembers his mom stalking roosters in the coop. She would enter the chicken coop with a rooster in mind for their meal before she entered. We could write, “At one point, she caught the rooster,” but this does a disservice to the art of catching rooters, as they are notoriously difficult to catch. We could put them in the smallest of pens and coops, and they will still find ways to elude capture with exceptionally quick movements, tricky maneuvers, and some flying involved in their quest to escape. We could also write, right here, that they’re unusually crafty or surprisingly smart when it comes to eluding capture, but they’re not. They just have what athletes call quick-twitch muscles. As usual with animals at the bottom of the food chain, like the rabbit, roosters have quick-twitch muscles that allow them that first-step quickness and that quick change-of-direction speed and agility that athletes prize. These animals obviously need these abilities to avoid faster predators to sustain the species.

Ken’s mother knew this all of this course, and she knew she wasn’t fleet of foot. She knew she wasn’t quick enough to catch a rooster, because no one is. She knew her only path to success involved a patient pursuit. She could have a rooster cornered several times, in corner after corner, and she knew he would continue to successfully escape until eventually he tired out. “She never grew frustrated by her inability to catch the rooster,” Ken said. “It’s very difficult to catch a rooster, and she knew that.”

It would prove a difficult chore even if it were just she and the rooster in the coop, but what makes it even harder are all of the other eight to ten chickens in the coop running around and flying in short bursts to try to avoid their own capture. As such, Ken’s mother would have to watch her step in pursuit, to avoid stepping on any chickens. We can also imagine that with the effort she put into the pursuit, combined with the heat outside, she would sweat profusely throughout her chase, which would lead to all of the feathers flying around the coop to stick to her face. We have to imagine that this would only add to the frustration and anger of even the most seasoned rooster stalker, but she never showed it. “She never grew frustrated or overly impatient,” Ken said. “She knew all that was just part of it.” There were probably occasions when she caught the rooster fairly quickly, but for the most part she had to engage in this patient pursuit, until the rooster eventually tired out, stood in place and fell asleep. At that point, she grabbed it and twisted its neck.

This is the “Wait a second, what?” twist in story. When someone tells a story that is consistent with everything we’ve heard before, we tend to drift a little. We don’t mean to be rude, but we’ve heard this story so many times, and we all know how it ends. Every time I’d heard this story, it ended with an ax, a knife, or some other sharp instrument applied to the member of the fowl family. The entertaining part, if that’s what you want to call it, usually involves the portion of the tale that describes the rooster running around with its head cut off. So, when Ken added the following, the glaze over our eyes lifted, and we said, “Wait a second, what did you say?” to help the rest of our senses catch up. 

“She would hold the rooster over her head, by the neck, and spin it, until she felt its neck snap,” Ken said. “She then released it and allowed it to run around the coop until the life drained out of it. Then she picked it up, stripped it of its feathers, put it in water, and took it inside to continue preparing it for our meal.” 

“Wait a second, what did you say about spinning?” his open-mouthed audience asked. Ken repeated the bullet points of it. “Did she do that to be … theatrical?”

“My mom didn’t do anything to be theatrical. That was just the way she did it.” When asked if he considered her method in any way inhumane, violent, or brutal, Ken added, “Again, that was just the way she did it. My guess is that that’s probably the way her mother and her grandmother taught her to do it. If you asked her if she considered it theatrical, violent or brutal, she wouldn’t understand why you do. It was just the way it was done as far as she was concerned.

“All you need to do is give the neck a quick jerk,” Ken clarified. “Something to snap the bone. It’s really not as difficult or as violent as you might think.”

***

Flash forward, a couple years, and Ken is a teenager. Ken admits that he was a particularly naughty kid, in his youth, and he met the back of his parents’ hands “More times than I can count. My parents were never ones to spare the rod.” As a teenager, it had been a number of years since any of his punishments were physical, but he upped the ante on one particular occasion. “I can’t remember what I did, but it was above and beyond the typical teenage tests of parental patience.”

“I’m going to have to give you the switch for this one,” his mother informed him. “You have to learn your lesson.”

“That’s all well and good,” Ken said, “but I’m a teenager now mom, and I’m a lot faster than you now.”

“You do what you have to do, and I’m going to do what I have to do,” she said, “but we both know how this ends.”

“We’ll see,” Ken said, as he eluded her and sped out of the house. Out on the farm, we can imagine that Ken found so many hiding places that he had a few favorites that he couldn’t wait to use on this day. He probably heard her calling out to him from his favorite hiding place on the farm, and he probably giggled when he heard the frustration in her voice, but she eventually found him. When she did, he managed to elude capture again, and he hid in another one of his time-tested hiding spots. When she found him again, he ran away and hid again. “I don’t know how long this lasted, but it lasted a pretty long time, hours I think, until I eventually got tired of running.  

“I had it coming, and we both knew it. I didn’t fall asleep, like the rooster, but at some point, I just tired out. To be honest with you, I didn’t see the correlations between her patient pursuits of the roosters and me until much later in life, and when I did, I realized it was pretty funny. She never gave up, she was like a patient predator, and I saw it with the chickens and the roosters. She just never gave up. It was just her way.” Ken’s mother did not further Ken’s punishment by lifting him over her head and spinning him, but Ken never forgot that day with the switch. “It hurt like hell. I still remember how bad that hurt to this day, which was kind of the point. She only swatted me a couple of times, and she was done when she thought I learned my lesson.”    

Bill Murray is Funny

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“It can’t be that easy for him,” Steve Martin is reported to have said about friend and fellow actor Bill Murray. “It just can’t.”

Some guys are just funny. We hated them in high school, because they could effortlessly do, what the rest of us worked so hard to do: Make people laugh. Was there a super-secret formula to their success? Not that we could see. They could just lift an eyebrow in a particular situation, or smirk in a somewhat sarcastic, somewhat serious way, and put everyone on the floor. It was frustrating to those of us who’ve had to work our way through the dark and mysterious halls of funny to find that which they just had sort of attached to them at birth. Everyone wanted to be around them to hear what they might say next, and they hoped that he liked them half as much as they liked him. Why? Because he was funny, naturally and effortlessly, funny. “Some guys just are,” we might tell our kids facing similar circumstances, “and there’s nothing you can really do about it.”

Bill Murray, I have to imagine, was one of those guys we all hated in high school. He was the fifth of nine kids in the Murray family, and we can imagine that some of his comedy came from striving for some attention in such a crowded home, but we also have to imagine that comedy was a way of life in that Irish, Catholic home. Regardless how it came about, Bill Murray became one of the best comedic actors of his generation, and as his stint on Saturday Night Live shows displayed, he had great improvisational skills too, but I’m sure if we saw him attempt to do standup, we might see through his otherwise bullet-proof veneer. We’ve heard man-on-the-street stories of him engaging in improvisational acts that prove hilarious, but those are based on his good guy graciousness as a well-known celebrity. If we could somehow remove his status, and read through these stories, would he still be funny? Impossible to know, because they’re built on his iconography, as well as adding to it. Bill Murray movies, however, are almost all funny, some hilarious, and others are enshrined in our personal hall of fame of funny. 

What is the super-secret formula to Bill Murray’s success? My guess is that there isn’t one, and that might be his secret. Bill Murray does have an undeniable everyman appeal in that he’s not gorgeous, he doesn’t have great skin or hair, and while he’s not fat, no one would say he’s fit and trim. He is just a funny man. He is the embodiment of the annoying “It is what is” principle. I go to see his movies, because he’s funny. Why is he just as funny, or funnier, than his peers? “I don’t know, he just is.” 

Anytime we discuss the merits of one actor over another, there is always the question of presentation. Everyone from the lighting guy to the director and the editor plays some role in the way Bill Murray is presented to the audience. Murray, as has been reported, can be difficult to work, because he doesn’t feel like certain people know how to do their jobs. Does this have anything to do with the idea that Bill knows how all the players need to work together to form this presentation, because he’s seen quality players do it? If that’s the source of his reported obnoxiousness, then he obviously knows how to cultivate and foster his presentation, which is more effort than that which we accredited to him.

To everyone from the frustrated peer to the casual fan, it appears as though Bill Murray just coasts through his movies, and he isn’t even trying to be funny or dramatic, depending on the role he’s playing in a movie. He’s just Bill Murray in the way Tom Cruise is just Tom Cruise and Clint Eastwood is just Clint Eastwood. Bill Murray is also so consistently Bill Murray that we know what to expect from the productions he participates in, in the same manner we know what to expect in a Starbucks franchise or an AC/DC song. 

Now we have Steve Matin, one of Murray’s peers and colleagues, a man who began around the same time, has attempted to do as almost as many comedic and dramatic movies, and TV shows saying he basically agrees that it doesn’t appear as though Bill Murray is even trying. Regardless the actual number of movies, or the debate over comedic quality, the two can be viewed as colleagues in many ways, and he views Murray’s career as so effortless that it’s almost frustrating to him. 

It’s not our intention to belittle Steve Martin’s brilliant and influential career, as we think it speaks for itself, but he’s obviously worked very hard to achieve everything he has. Bill Murray, on the other hand, has achieved similar heights without seeming to try near as hard. We’re sure that Murray does his due diligence, research, mental preparation, and everything else it takes to make a quality production, but it doesn’t appear that way. In terms of perception alone, it appears as though Bill Murray rolls out of a hammock shortly after someone yells, “Action!” delivers his lines, and goes back to his hammock funnier than the rest of us will ever be no matter how much work and effort we put into it. 

If you have to try that hard, you’re probably not very funny, you might counter, and you’d be right, but we have all had to learn how to be funny. Learning the beats, rhythms, and everything else it takes to be funny is often done by osmosis. We don’t learn how to be funny in the same way we learn math, how to play baseball, or how to be an electrician. We pick up various elements of our presentation from our peers, that crazy-funny uncle, and our TV shows and movies. If you were around during the Seinfeld/Friends era, you saw how they influenced what it takes to be funny, and you picked up some tips and copied the actors’ mannerisms, their tones, and sometimes we stole the lines their writers wrote for them. They, and numerous others of course, defined funny in our era. Other eras had Abbot and Costello, The Honeymooners, and The Lucille Ball Show define funny. We’ve also had others tell us “That’s not funny!” and we adapted and adjusted to the current cultural norms of funny, and in some ways, it took some definition of work to do so. Others, it seemed, didn’t have to go through all those trials and errors. They just seemed to fall into funny, because that’s who they were.     

These funny people weren’t great looking either. Bill Murray, for example, does not have what we consider “leading man” looks. I’m not trying to diss the man, as he’s probably better looking than I am, but if we were to take headshots and show them to citizens of another culture, with the headshots of a couple of great looking character actors and ask them to, “Pick out the leading man in movies in our country,” Bill Murray might be the last chosen. I don’t know if he’s ugly, but he has an unmade bed look about him. He doesn’t have great skin, and he barely has any hair left, and he rarely changes facial expressions in the course of his movies, but movie directors flood his 1-800 number to try to get him to lead, or at least appear, in their movie.   

Most of us worked hard to be funny, shortly after we realized we didn’t have anything else going for us, and it was so frustrating for us to see someone roll out of bed funny. We can all identify with Steve Martin’s complaints, because we all know someone who achieves what we worked so hard for with such apparent effortlessness. If you’ve ever watched camp counselors, teenagers, try to MC an event, you’ve seen them try to work the audience (of camp goers and their parents), you’ve seen them try to act crazy, nuts, and fun, and you’ve walked away thinking, they could really use a natural speaker with some unusual levels of charisma, a Tripper (Bill Murray’s character in Meatballs). If you’ve ever seen a grown man sing with a full stage show, with dancers, pyrotechnics, and anything and everything to entertain an audience, you know that there are just some men and women who, armed with nothing but a microphone, can sing a song called Star Wars, and produce one of the funniest things ever seen. How does he do it? No one, not even one of the other funniest men of his generation, knows. He just does. When we watch it, we send out Steve Martin’s “It can’t be that easy!” complaint sent out to the unfairness of the universe.   

Seinfeld’s Unfrosted was … Not Bad

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Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted was … not bad. Screech! Spit coffee! Swear word! Screams! Car Crash! It is shocking, I know, to hear that coming from a Jerry Seinfeld fanatic. If you’ve read any of the articles on this site, you know how often I source him as one of the greatest comedic minds alive today. I consider him one of the best standup comedians of his generation, and his observations on what makes us weird have had a huge influence on this site. The show Seinfeld was my favorite sitcom of all time, I loved Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, and I even enjoyed his Bee Movie. I didn’t love it, but I really liked it for what it was. Oh, and I laughed so hard during one of his standup shows that Jerry Seinfeld looked over at me with a look that suggested he was comedically concerned about my health. If the difference between fanatic and fan is excessive and intense, uncritical devotion, I am a fanatic. I never wrote to him, collected dolls, scripts, or took tours, but if there’s a hip term I don’t know for a passive fanatic, that’s me. I’m probably his idea of the perfect fan, a guy who quietly buys and watches anything to which he attaches his name. Which is why it pains me to write these five words: “Unfrosted is not as funny as I thought it would be.”

Watching the movie reminded me how we all want more of everything we love. We want more from our favorite artists, athletes, politicians, and plumbers, until they give us so much that we realize it probably would’ve been better if they left us in a state of wanting more. That’s the advice seasoned entertainers often leave young upstarts, “Always leave them wanting more.”  

And Seinfeld warned us, numerous times, that more is not always better. He’s said it in relation to why he decided to prematurely end his show Seinfeld, but he’s applied that principle to his career too. He’s informed us on so many days, and in so many ways, in the numerous interviews he’s done throughout his career, that he’s learned that he’s best when he stays in his lane, his lane being standup. He’s learned what he’s good at, and what he’s not, and he has proven to be the opposite of what makes some comedians so great, in the sense that he’s not daring, risky, or experimental.

If I were to pitch him a project, I would say he and Larry David should develop a sketch comedy in the Mr. Show vein, but we can only guess that he’s had hundreds of similar pitches from friends, fellow writers, and corporate execs, and he’s turned them all down. Some of those projects may have proved embarrassing, some may have been so far out of his lane that he didn’t even consider them, but we have to guess that some projects that were so close that he had a tough time turning them down. He did it all, because he knows who he is, what he’s good at and what he’s not, and he’s learned how to stay in his own lane.   

On the greatest sitcom of all time, Jerry Seinfeld surprisingly (to me anyway) credited the three actors (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Michael Richards, and Jason Alexander) for making the show so brilliant. He does not shy away from the idea that the writing on the show, of which he played a huge role, was great, but he admits that the actors brought that writing to the next level.  

“I did get caught in a beautiful, cyclonic weather event,” he said in an interview. “The actors, Larry David, the thirteen phenomenal comedy writers, and everyone on both sides of the camera was a killer. You know when you’re a part of it, but you know it’s not you. You’re a part of it, but if you’re smart, you know it’s not you. It’s not all you.”   

On Seinfeld, Jerry played the Alex Rieger of Taxi, the Sam Malone of Cheers, the center of the storm. He’s always been great at adding that final comment, lifting that eyebrow to exaggerated levels, and saying, “ALL RIGHT!” at the end of another character’s hilarious rant. He knows how to put a cherry atop the pie in other words. As long as that pie, or the acting required to nuance it, was filled in by someone else. He can write funny, he can deliver a short, crisp line deliver as well as anyone, but the nuances in the acting craft required to build to Seinfeld’s punctuation were always best left to others. I heard him say this so many times that I saw it, until I accepted it, but I always thought there was a bit of humility attached to it. Some of us were so blinded by enthusiasm that we never learned how to curb it completely.

When he decided to end Seinfeld after the ninth season, it felt similar to an athlete retiring at the downside of their peak, not the prolonged, sad tail end, just the other side of the peak. There were hints in seasons eight and nine, after Larry David left, that the show was on the downside of its peak, but it was still the best show on TV. Why would an athlete, or a successful showrunner, quit prematurely? I understand not wanting to outstay your welcome, or allowing us to see glaring levels of diminishment and not wanting to go out like that, but if you’re lucky, you might still have forty years on this planet. What are you going to do in the rest of your life to top that? Some of them, I think, are too worried about what we think. They don’t want us to see their downside, or because they love the game so much that they can’t bear playing at anything less than their peak. They can’t bear someone saying, “If you just called it quits after season nine, it would’ve been a great show beginning to end. Season ten was probably one season too many.” They, some of them, don’t want us to remember them as someone who stayed around too long.

When we were kids, we ached for another Star Wars movie, then we got one later, much later, and it ruined the legacy of Star Wars. After the second trilogy was complete, the almost unanimous opinion among those I know is they probably should’ve left us wanting. As Led Zeppelin did. Zeppelin broke up after the untimely death of their drummer John Bonham, in 1980. We spent our teens and early twenties talking about the possibility of a reunion and another Zep album. I understand they said it wouldn’t feel the same without Bonham, but the remaining band members were still in their early-to-mid thirties when they broke up. How do you leave a juggernaut like Led Zeppelin in your early thirties? The Beatles were in their twenties when they broke up. As Theodore Roosevelt said of being president so young, “The worst thing about being president of the United States so young, is that there’s nothing you can do to top that for the rest of your life.” Led Zeppelin left us wanting, and it was probably for the best. What could they have done to top those first six albums? They most likely, and in all probability, would’ve only disappointed.

In a career studded with comedy gold, Gold Jerry! Gold! Unfrosted has the feel of a sequel. It’s not a sequel, but how many of us walked out of a killer comedy, talking about how that movie just screams out for a sequel. We didn’t talk about how great that comedy was, we instantly wanted more. Then, when the sequel came out, it was, “That wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good as the first one.” That was the impression Unfrosted left on me. It felt like all the players were trying to recapture something that used to be really funny, and we were all prepared with our preparatory smiles on our faces, until the smiles slowly faded away.  

The characters have this feel of trying to repeat something that worked before, but it just doesn’t for all the mysterious reasons that some movies work and some just don’t. The jokes have a feel about them that suggests to us that they’re brilliant, but they’ve been done so many times before that we no longer need to figure them out. As someone who doesn’t know one-one hundredths of the knowledge Jerry Seinfeld has about comedy, I think the figuring out part is the reward of comedy. 

Unfrosted seeks the opposite tact. It goes for familiarity, and we all love familiarity. Familiarity with actors, themes, concepts, and all that. Unfrosted displays this level of familiarity in the beginning, to establish a through line to the audience, but it never branches out into that unique spin that kind of shocks us into laughter. The setting of the movie is the 60s, and what a foolish time that was, and even though this has been a million times before, we still think it could be great in the minds of geniuses.

It’s a mystery to us why some movies don’t work, because we don’t make movies, but you’ll often hear moviemakers, actors, and all the other players say, in interviews, that they don’t know why either. “We thought it was funny, but we had no idea how huge it would get.” We don’t often hear the players involved say, “We thought it would be huge, but we had no idea people would consider it a little boring.” What works and what doesn’t is a mystery to us, and it’s a mystery to them. Generally speaking, dramas and action movies are probably a lot easier to predict for those involved, especially when the star actor signs on to the vehicle. Comedies and horror have a super secret formula that even those involved in the finer details of the production involved don’t know whether it will hit or not.  

Unfrosted gave us all a be-careful-what-you-wish-for feel, because you just might get it. As much as we cried out for a movie, or any project, from Jerry Seinfeld, we walked away from it thinking that Unfrosted, unfortunately, should never have been made. What could they have done to make you feel better about it? “I don’t know, I don’t make movies, but they probably should’ve left me wanting more instead of giving it to me.”

Watching Unfrosted, reminds us of that elite athlete who retired on the downside of a peak, not the bottom, just the downside, and we clamored for his return. How can he retire at 37? He still had what two-to-three years left? If he lives to eighty, he’ll spend the next 43 years reminiscing and thinking he should’ve played two-to-three more years at least. Then he comes back, and we see how much his skills have declined. He didn’t do it for the money, I can tell you that much. He did it, because he loves the game, and what’s wrong with that?

The point some people make on various websites is that athletes and entertainers run the risk of ruining their legacy by staying too long. This line right here makes me almost fighting mad. So, you’re telling me that the athlete who made so much money for the league, the city, and the franchise shouldn’t be able to sell his wares to anyone who will take them? He shouldn’t try to get another paycheck for the punishment he put his body through for your entertainment, because you want to remember him the way you want to remember him? Isn’t that a bit myopic, even selfish? He wanted to get paid for his efforts, of course, but he didn’t necessarily do it for the money? Seinfeld, and most modern athletes, have so much money that that’s not why they’re doing it. They’re doing it for the love the game so much that they want to play at least two more years? What’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with you for wanting to deny him that?

Did Seinfeld ruin his legacy by doing Unfrosted? No, first of all, it wasn’t that bad, but, then again, I never expected to say that a Seinfeld project “wasn’t that bad”. I don’t remember any of the elite athletes who “stayed one year too long” for those latter years, and I don’t begrudge them for taking as many paychecks as they could before they called it a career. I also don’t begrudge them the idea that they loved the game so much that they couldn’t walk away, until it was obvious to them that they truly couldn’t play the game anymore. I actually respect it, as I say it was for the love of the game. I respect the fact that Seinfeld’s friend pitched him on the idea of Unfrosted, and not only did he like the idea, but he didn’t think he was done yet. He thought he had one more big project in him, because he loves doing the things he does so much that he wanted to try it at least one more time. Good for you, Mr. Seinfeld, I say, and if he feels like doing another project, or projects, I’ll be there on the first day it’s released.  

Jerry Seinfeld has admitted that he doesn’t expect to be remembered after he’s gone, and he’s even gone so far as to say he doesn’t care, or that’s not his driving force. I’ll remember Jerry Seinfeld as a great, almost perfect standup comedian, the cocreator of one of the greatest sitcoms in TV history, and as a gifted natural when it comes to observational humor, but Unfrosted doesn’t do much to either lift or damage his legacy. It was just a marginally entertaining movie that they probably won’t list in his very lengthy resume when that final wave off arrives.