4 Seconds

Apparently, that's the secret.  That's what you need to know.  That's it.  That's all.

I don't know why it offended me the way it did.  I don't know why I was taken aback, soured, instantly priggish and resentful and almost insulted.  But I was.  I'm like that sometimes. 

I was at a rehearsal for a Gilbert & Sullivan roadshow.  I hate doing roadshows.  To me, they're like a pimple that becomes infected and then results in the immediate amputation of the affected body part.  Roadshows start out small, innocuous and barely problematic.  "Oh, it's just this and that and it'll be thus and so and then it'll be over."  And then it turns into more songs than you were comfortable with, songs you've never done before, then all of a sudden there's costumes and props and blocking and -gasp!- CHOREOGRAPHY.

(I don't do choreography.  Because it involves feet.  I do not have feet.  I have ankles, attached to biscuit-tins)

And then they tell you where the roadshow is.  It's in some godassfucked place you've never heard of and it's for a bunch of elderly people who'll be watching you while peeing in their pants, and not because they find Gilbert's searing humor funny.  They can't hear it anyway. 

And I know all this, but I agree to do roadshows because, well, I love G&S and I'd do it on the equator or inside a toilet bowl and because, you know, I'm an idiot. 

So, I'm at this rehearsal last night and a colleague of mine leans into me and proffers a tidbit of G&S trivia/advice after I'd just sung a patter song.  I guess I immediately got my back up because I don't like it very much when fellow performers give advice.  That's why we have directors, so other performers don't fillet each other in the dressing room.  Anyway, he was trying to be helpful, and I like him, so I suffered through the following well-meaning anecdote.

"You know, Kenneth Sandford said that in this moment onstage that he shared with Katisha in 'The Mikado' that if he waited four seconds before responding after Katisha said, 'My face is plain' with his line 'It is' that he got the most laughs.  So you should really wait four seconds before doing your bit in the 'Little List' song."

And I smiled politely and said that I would try it.  And I won't. 

I guess I just don't understand.  I guess I'm still a petulant, truculent, pain-in-the-ass boy who bristled at the Theatre Chair's suggestion that I go get an MFA in playwriting all those years ago.  ("Why should I do that?  Can't I write plays now?")  Don't give me advice, even if I love and respect you.  Your breath shall be wasted, I promise.  And don't tell me cute stories about world-renowned operetta stars, because I hate them-- the stories and the people-- because I will never ever come close to them, whether I wait four seconds or not.

Mediocrities everywhere: I absolve you.  I absolve you, all.

I suppose what annoyed me most was that, to me, comedy is so much more than that-- it's so much more than math.  Four seconds or three or six.  That's not comedy.  That's counting.  And I don't care if you're Kenneth Sandford or not but, if you're standing up there on stage going "1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi" or whatever English people say when they're counting, you're not acting.  You're not in the moment.  You're not up there having a conversation with Katisha and regarding her face.  Likewise, comedy cannot be distilled that way-- it's cheap and it's false and it's crude.  It negates all the other work that a performer does-- what about the slight cock of the head, the crook of the neck, the barely observable lift of the left eyebrow?  The thinning of the lip.  The blunted smile, the sideways glance.  Inflection, nuance, tone-- there is so much more.  It's timing, not time. 

I can't explain it.  I can do it-- sometimes-- and sometimes I can't.  Some nights a moment gets a laugh and some nights the same moment doesn't.  Maybe it works and maybe it doesn't.  And what defines a moment "working"-- five people out there cackling hysterically for six seconds or a quarter of the audience tittering while others sit with a satisfied, knowing grin?  And others, still in the dark.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it.  Maybe I take comedy too seriously.  Maybe it's just a quaint anecdote tucked away in a G&S bible, oft repeated by the minions and the minyans.  And maybe I'm just jealous.  Because nobody is ever going to quote a passage from this blog to anybody else as an example of what one should think or say or do about comedy. 

No, I'm definitely jealous.

I suppose I'll grow up one day-- maturing, they call it-- and I'll forget what I know because I use it so infrequently, and I'll turn to the tomes to read about what others who came before me knew, and I'll quote their quaintness to young and lithe performers who will be my age now.  And I'll forget to trim my nosehairs, too, because that's the way these things go. 

1 Mississippi.  2.

Sometimes I'm sure I know what funny is-- I can make my wife laugh after nearly ten years.  I can make strangers laugh-- old friends who know the innuendo before I do, and newish ones, too, who are just figuring out my stilted, self-effacing delivery.  Sometimes the humor's Jewish, sometimes it's vulgar, sometimes it's in rhyme while I'm prancing around like the English prat I wish I could be and be paid for it.  Sometimes it's an accident. 

My face is plain.  And I want to ride the bike myself like a big boy.  Look, ma.  No hands.  Look at me go.

I know I'll never be as funny as Kenneth Sandford, or John Reed, or Martyn Green or George Grossmith-- and I guess I don't want to.  Because I don't listen to my elders, or yours.  I don't have four seconds these days anyway.

3 Mississippi.

Four. 

Floored

Trying to force himself to remember a moment from his childhood, Tommy Fawkes squints at Katie Parker.

"I had a little red car..."

"Yes," Katie says, in her charming, French accent as she smiles in the slightest sympathy at Tommy, "and you drove it into everything!"

"Funny Bones" is my favorite (non-Wes Anderson) movie, because it is as funny as it is painful as it is charming as it is dark as it is passionate as it is flawed.  It's everything life is-- or should be.  And I knew, when I first saw it, almost half my life ago, that I wouldn't see a film that touched me the way this one did, that filled me with fun and hope and despair like this one did.

And I haven't.  But I still go to the movies when I can anyway.

I still go to my parents' house when I can anyway, too, although, with twins, it's hard to go pretty much anywhere.  "Oh, yeah," parents of one muse gently, "I guess it would be harder with two..."

Yeah.  Only twice as hard there, duck-shoes.

I went to my parents' house yesterday because they'd just gotten new flooring put in, throughout the entire first floor.

"It's beautiful," my mother said on the phone earlier in the week, "there's shades of green and purple and it looks just like stone-- it's going to feel like we're eating outside on some patio."

My father, speaking to me on the phone later in the week, had something slightly different to say.

"It's fuckin' floor-- I put my fuckin' feet on it and walk around-- what?  I'm supposed to care about it or something?!  Who gives a shit?!"

My nearly three-year-old nephew, a clear moderate, said, "I like this floor" as he ran his fingers over it when I came by yesterday to see it.

I mean, it's sheet linoleum made to look like stone.  They did a good job with it, it almost looks like real grouting in between the large square "tiles", but it's all one flat sheet of linoleum.  It's ugly.  Unless the people who buy my parents' home when they die are in their seventies already, the floor will be the first thing they'll replace when they move in.  Sure, it's nicer than the linoleum it replaced, but it's still ass-ugly.

If I'm honest with myself-- and, by turn, with you-- it's not so much that I don't like the floor, it's that I'm always kind of insulted when a change is made to the home in which I was raised.  I remember being ten or eleven and putting up quite a protest when the time came to replace the sofa and chairs in the living room, which, admittedly, looked as if they'd been through a hurricane and a pogrom.

"They're FINE!" I'd insist, "and so COMFORTABLE!" as I'd do a head-first dive into the warped sofa cushions that had virtually no filling left in them.  The next thing on their agenda, after the floor is finished, is to replace all the carpeting in the living room, and the staircase, and, of course, all the furniture in the living room.

Again.

Every time I go there, it seems, it's less and less, um, mine.

Not that it ever was mine-- it's not-- and not like I have any right to it, because they offered to will the fucking house to me and I said no, but it's mine in memory.  And the memories are still there, but the reality is changing.  It would be easier if some random family were living in there now, gutting it, making additions and deletions, trashing it and rebuilding it to greater glory.  But that my parents are there doing it themselves, it's like they're trying to erase the past we'd all built together that, in my head at least, was so happy.  Most of the time.

That old, peeling, yellowed, disgusting linoleum floor was mine.  And I had a little red car.  And I drove it into everything.

So Zany It'll Make Your Asshole Hurt For Days

We've all got our little pet peeves now, haven't we?

Some folks carry that no-bread-with-the-crusts-on thing well into adulthood, when it just isn't cute anymore, Goddamnit. And it is hardly prudent, either, for that matter. Just ask anybody over thirty who's tried to eat an Uncrustables in the break room in front of colleagues.

You will surely not be surprised to learn that I have lots of pet peeves.

Some of them are too annoying to mention in this blog, for fear, mostly, that it'll totally turn you off. Some of them are actually too annoying to even remember so, if I wanted to include some or all of them in this blog, I wouldn't be able to. Not completely, at any rate. They're just too damned annoying and, really, there's just too damned many of them. A lot of shit gets on my wick, don't you know, which makes for a rather challenging existence. Not to mention a, frankly, malodorous little wick.

To spare you unending agony (and, let's be honest, to avoid another emotionally-charged un-following) we're only going to chat about one of my pet peeves today. If you're interested in learning what some of the other ones are, drop me a line.

Trust me-- the cornucopia's full up.

Pet Peeve for Today: Zany

"Zany" might just be one of the worst word in the English language. For me, it ranks up there on the Shit List with awful, nasty, buggery little words like "zoster," "elephantitis," "torsion," and "oprah."

The word "zany," along with words like "crazy" and "hot" and "whatever" is a word that has been so train-fucked by common usage and misappropriation that it no longer carries with it any meaning whatsoever. I have no research to back this up (which is true of most things that I say and write-- caveat emptor) but I'm willing to bet that, if research were done on this topic, said research would be likely to prove that the word "zany" can most commonly be found in the paragraph or two of text used on the back of VHS, Laserdiscs, DVD, and Bluray cases describing comedies for the general public.

Not that the general public actually reads the backs of movie cases, but we persist in some traditions without actually thinking about why we do it. Look at the missionary position, for example.

I try my best to not purchase, rent, or view a movie that features the word "zany" in either the synopsis on the back, or any hand-plucked review quotes from "The Washington Post" or some schmendrick working at an ABC affiliate in Atlanta. If some idiot thinks this film is "zany" then, chances are good that I'd rather stick a funnel into my left ear and pour a pot of freshly brewed coffee inside it than watch said "zany" movie.

I might have liked "zany" movies back in... I don't know... 1991. Ironically, that's when "Drop Dead Fred" came out, which I recall enjoying very much when I was eleven. The scene where Phoebe Cates is in the restaurant on a date and the invisible (to the guy) Fred is making Phoebe Cates do Dr. Strangelove-like motions with her hands and then makes her fling a plate of pasta across the room is classic. Well, it was classic. And, probably, zany.

........

Aw, hell-- I just watched the clip on YouTube. And it's. still. both.

Anyway, I looked up the definition of "zany" and "zaniness" and it just never quite seems to fit the media it supposedly defines.

"Ludicrously or whimsically comical; clownish."

I mean-- does that sound like Monty Python's Flying Circus to you? I don't know-- maybe at times, and I've heard the boys described as "zany" but it just is a word that feels so irrevocably... cheap. And insipid.

One of my favorite films-- maybe my favorite film is called "Funny Bones." It's a little movie that most people have probably never heard of (that makes me sound like a zany fucking little snob-bitch, but I think it's true) that was filmed in Blackpool. A long time ago, a friend of mine showed me the film, and I fell in love. Only after viewing it did he show me the box for the VHS tape. And I saw that word "zany." It wasn't zany at all. It was funny, yes, desperately and painfully so, and that's part of the film's message-- about how dark and twisted and, frankly, sad comedy can be-- but it wasn't at all zany. Even though there were clowns. And pratfalls. And sightgags.

It was... I don't know. Beautiful.

You can call me a lot of things. Just don't call me zany.