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June 28, 2004
TT: I'd rather be wrong (almost)
Lileks is rocking today. First on the bossa nova:I'm listening to Bossa Nova these days, as if it will somehow bring back the summer we've lost so far. Most of what I'm listening to is ersatz Bossa Nova, I fear. The Americanized version. but a friend of my wife gave her some real Brazilian BN the other day, and it was some of the most narcoleptic music I'd ever heard. The singers all sounded as though they could barely keep their chins off their sternums, and they couldn't sing very well, either. They sounded out of breath, like beautiful hungover waify fashion models propped up in front of a microphone after a night of dancing and smoking unfiltered cigarettes....
Next on the Marx Brothers:
"Airplane," a very funny movie, would have completely baffled people in 1917. it's all so subjective that it's hard to believe anything can be established empirically as FUNNY, in the sense that it's amusing to most people in most places in most times. Some day, eventually, the Marx Brothers will be NOT FUNNY, just a strange manic artifact full of allusions to conventions we've lost and forgotten....
Groucho – well, even when the movie is bad and the lines are lame and the performance just more of the same, at least it's the same Groucho. Venal, lazy, irascible, horny, prickly – he's always living by his wits in situations that require anything but. He's a series of contradictory characteristics – valor / cowardice, nobility / cravenness, promiscuity / uxoriousness, selfishness / camaraderie, and every one of them is genuine, as the situation demands. An utterly unique American comic archetype; remove him from the troupe and you have nothing....
[I]n the end I think he'll be doomed by the way they paced his jokes. Couldn't be helped – to the audiences of the day he was so hilarious that his routines brought guaranteed laughter, so they had to hold the scene for a few seconds to accommodate the laughter. Stage pacing translated to film - poorly. When you see the movies alone, at home, it seems peculiar to watch Groucho deliver a zinger then look up and hold the pose, waiting for the laughter to crest and fall. You were meant to experience these movies communally. They counted on it. They required it. In the theater, we laugh when others laugh. At home, we laugh to ourselves, which takes half a second. Disorganized group laughter takes a while to disband. Groucho is always waiting for the laughter to die down, and nowadays when these movies are seen in different circumstances, there's no laughter to evaporate. Which makes them somehow seem less funny than they think they are.
He's all wet and a yard wide about bossa nova, much less so about Groucho. But right or not, who cares? I still wish I could write like that.
Posted June 28, 2004 5:17 AM
