Trololololo, Memeabago Man

A few months ago, I was reading "Car and Driver", like a dutiful little motorhead, and I came across a small blurblette, reviewing the documentary film, "Winnebago Man". It sounded entertaining-- a film documenting old outtakes of a supremely angry Winnebago pitchman trying, in vain, to make an industrial film back in 1987, and said clips winding up on YouTube as an internet sensation.

So, I rented the film, and I came away from it feeling somehow unsatisfied, though it was difficult for me to put my finger on exactly why. I found the film's pacing to be a little laconic, and self-serving for the director at times-- that he made too much of his own existential struggle with the protagonist, ex-Winnebago pitchman, Jack Rebney. The filmmaker sought out Rebney, who was, at first, bewildered at all of the attention he was receiving all of a sudden, courtesy of YouTube, the internet, and its legions of meme-hungry attendants.

"I just cannot comprehend what possible interest you could have in any of this," Rebney said in a recording left on the filmmaker's answering machine. Clearly, Rebney did not comprehend the power of the internet. If he didn't understand it then, he's since gotten the message loud and clear.

Memes that announce themselves with intensity have a tendency to pass me by, and I don't mind. I suppose you don't mind what you miss because you've missed it. I pick things up, or people send me things, or I don't, and they don't-- that's sort of just the way it goes. I can remember one of the last arguments I had with my former best friend was over a clip of an SNL skit featuring Natalie Portman cursing, rapping, being a total badass, and then breaking a chair over an interviewer's head. I mentioned to my friend that I had seen the clip and enjoyed it, and he laughed at me. And not in the way I was used to being laughed at, in a snarky, derisive way, that hurt. For good measure, he added:

"Wow-- that came out, like, last year. Where the hell have you been?"

Well, I thought, obviously not sitting at the cool kids' table.

Not that I ever have sat there, at any point in time, but this was another acute reminder that I never would. A few nights ago, a coworker of mine sent me the "Trolololololo" video, of Russian singer Eduard Khil singing his famous song. I was captivated, as I'm sure you were, too, by not only the bizarre music, but principally by Khil's disturbingly psychotic grin, his moving-through-Jell-O choreography and his stalwart refusal to play to the camera-- one envisions him performing the song for the *ahem* benefit of some poor, frightened woman tied to a chair with electrical cord with an apple stuffed into her mouth. To cheer up a friend, I shared the clip with her, and ended up feeling sepia once again, as if I had been cryogenically entombed for the last year, only to emerge with no internet-based cultural knowledge whatsoever.

The fact of the matter is, you don't just have to observe a meme, you have to be amongst the first to see it, to be the discoverer in your circle of friends, or your enjoyment doesn't count for anything. There are people who have seen "The Book of Mormon", and paid exorbitant amounts of money to do so, and the rest of us who've heard some of the songs in passing. We'll get around to seeing it when the touring company comes around.

Maybe.

When my wife and I saw (the touring company production of) "Next to Normal" I ran into one of my private monologue coaching students on the steps of the Academy of Music, waiting for rush tickets. She is sixteen years old.

"Oh," I asked stupidly, "have you seen this before?"

"Yeah," she answered, raising a perfectly-groomed, judging eyebrow at me, "this'll be my fourth time."

Ah. Yes. Back at the schdork table, where I belong.

It's funny-- when I started writing this post, it was originally going to be a critique of meme-culture: how vacuous and vapid it is, how we as a society are content to supplant carefully-constructed, scripted entertainment that takes months to prepare with a cheap laugh at the expense of some Russian singer from the 1970s, or a Winnebago pitchman swatting furiously at fuckin' flies, or some moron orgasming over double rainbows, but it's turned into a post about my own inferiority, and maybe that's where my anger is most properly directed. Maybe it's just another thing that I just don't get.

I'm not alone, though. Eduard Khil didn't get it either. His son says that Eduard "keeps asking, 'Where were all these journalists 40 years ago?'"

The fact of the matter is that the type of journalist who would be interested in Eduard Khil for the purposes that we are interested in today wasn't alive in the nineteen seventies. That's a product of modernity, or memedernity, and only the cool kids are apathetic enough to give a damn.

At least until the next status update.

My Memesonic Apron

In addition to working at a psychiatric hospital, I also teach theatre to impressionable youngsters.

(Of course I do.)

Mostly, I do private audition coaching and monologue work, on an individual basis which, I guess, the word "private" implies. Just me and the student, one-on-one, sparring intellectually, dodging each other's witticisms and engaging in the kind of reparte that, I suppose, college professors find stimulating during office hours.

Occasionally, we also do scenework.

I'm fortunate enough, pretty much, to have my pick of the litter. A student gets recommended to me, or referred to me, or suggested to me, and I get to give thumbs up or thumbs down whether I want to work with him or her. For the past year, I've been working one-on-one with a fine, upstanding young man whom I will call Jack, because that's not his name. Jack is a rabbi's son, comes from a pretty well-to-do family, and travels quite a distance for our lessons, which is kind of flattering. I have little doubt that there are perfectly suitable and competent acting instructors closer to his front door, some of whom would probably be willing to travel to his front door. But I'm not. I make him schlep out to see me, and, for the past year, he has done just that.

Apparently, it's paid off. Last month, he applied to and auditioned for, and just got accepted to my alma mater. And I didn't even have to grease a single wheel.

Jack works hard, and he works on hard material. I throw challenging playwrights his way-- Sam Shepherd, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, Israel Horovitz, just to name a few. He doesn't blink, he doesn't say "I can't," and he never comes to class unprepared. He knows I would kill him.

We have a great relationship. I'm casual in demeanor with him, loose with my language, but, when it's time to work, it's time to work-- I'm supportive and encouraging, but I'm also firm, demanding, and, when I spy bullshit, I call him out on it. If he's mugging or indicating or phoning it in, it does not continue. He likes to be called out. "Nobody's ever done that to me before," he says. Well, welcome to Hell, son.

Sometimes, the hour we have together stretches into an hour and fifteen minutes, or an hour and a half. We philosophize, we story-tell, we talk shop, but also we talk life. I remember one conversation recently we had about television. I was in the midst of enjoying a significant amount of "The Carol Burnett Show" sketches on YouTube, and I asked Jack,

"As someone who has grown up completely saturated by and with reality television, can you tell me honestly, from your perspective, why television is all shit nowadays?"

He smiled at me.

"Uh-oh, I just said something cantankerous about television, and I also just used the words 'nowadays' and 'cantankerous.' Did I just age in your eyes by forty-five years?"

Jack laughed.

"Yeah, you did. You talk like my Zayda." Then, like in our lessons, he got serious. I could tell it was coming by the way he furrowed his brow. "Look, what is reality TV? Shows like 'Teen Mom' and 'Jersey Shore'? They're people behaving badly-- like idiots. Assholes. And what is everybody obsessed with? The latest YouTube clip of some asshole doing something idiotic."

"Right, or it's a cat belching the French alphabet," I chimed in, "or a baby creating a telescope out of a paper towel roll."

"Yeah," Jack said, "and that's all bullshit, and I think the television producers and execs see us going ape over this dumb, mindless crap and they say, 'That's it-- that's what they want to see!'"

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of his day off watching Tim Conway breaking up the late Harvey Korman with just a knowing, sideways glance before an expertly-placed bit of improv, this precient statement by my pupil struck a chord in me.

"It's as if there's nothing well-crafted anymore, like, the market for that has simply dried up," I complained, as an elderly man might when confronted by a poorly-constructed corned beef sandwich at a faux-deli.

"Right, that's because there's nothing well-crafted online either. It's all drug-addicted retards doing crappy animation in their basements being funny or 'Shit My Dad Says' or blogs that are all just pics and videos or other shitty user-generated content, like, I don't know if you know what a 'meme' is--"

I stared at him.

"I want to murder you right now," I said. He cracked up.

"Okay," he said, "sorry, but, like Double Rainbow guy-- like, that's just total bullshit and, in two weeks, nobody's going to give a shit about that,"

"Right, because this culture is so vapid and ridiculous that a video of a 4-year-old ballerina dancing with a terrier is going to take the country by storm."

"Right," Jack agreed, "we're all about the next meme. Who can share what with whom first. That's what we're all about."

And that talented sonofabitch is right. And that gave me pause. What also gave me pause was that an eighteen-year-old high school senior suddenly suspected that I might be too old, no, perhaps too out-of-touch to know what a "meme" was.

Though he sometimes places his foot strategically inside his mouth when he's in my company, he is a smart kid. But I'm sure my alma mater will fix that.