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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 11, 2014

Dark laughter (with some further thoughts on Robin Williams)

August 11, 2014 by Terry Teachout

A friend writes:

I watched your last two embedded video clips together—Jonathan Winters and Louis Armstrong—and I was struck with the occasional unhappiness in both men’s faces. You could assemble a collage of momentary Armstrong stills that would look like rage, torture, you name it. Winters turned his unhappiness into comedy and blankness (the blankness was funny, of course, but I think it was also truly blank). Your man turned it into joy—much harder, much more worthy.

My friend is a veteran biographer, so I expect him to be shrewd about the niceties of personality, but even for him this was an acute observation. Winters, of course, was a man who could be fairly described as emotionally troubled, enough so that his once-great career more or less disintegrated, though he kept on working to the end of his life. And while Armstrong was a fundamentally sunny and optimistic person, his moodiness was sufficiently well known to his friends and colleagues that Time mentioned it in its 1949 cover story: “He has occasional fits of sullenness and sometimes falls into a temperamental rage.”

Person to PersonIn Winters’ case, his private sorrows were arguably characteristic of those drawn to his profession. It’s no secret that much comedy—maybe most of it—is driven by anger and aggression. When I reviewed Mad Cow Theatre’s 2013 revival of Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor, I was struck by the honesty with which Simon acknowledged that fact in what amounted to a roman à clef about the writers with whom he had worked in the Fifties on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows:

The excellence of this revival lies in the kill-or-be-killed ferocity with which the actors tear into the script, taking their cue from this exchange between Val (Tim Williams), the head writer, and Kenny (David Almeida), the show’s resident egghead: “A little aggression is good for writers. All humor is based on hostility, am I right, Kenny?” “Absolutely. That’s why World War II was so funny. Schmuck.” Everybody in the cast, especially Mr. Williams, throws their punches savagely hard, knowing that the Jewish humor in which Max’s writers specialize is rooted in anger–and honesty.

Jazz is (often) a different story, and Louis Armstrong a very different sort of artist. When I portrayed him on stage in Satchmo at the Waldorf, I made a point of showing his capacity for rage, since it’s an aspect of his personality of which most of his fans were and are unaware. But I also allowed my fictionalized Armstrong to describe what I believe to be the truth about his character, in words that are largely his own:

I don’t think folks wanna hear all that angry shit when they lay down that good money to come hear me play. They ain’t paying for me to make ’em feel bad. I’m just an old ham actor—blow a tune, tell a joke. I’m there in the cause of happiness. Like when I play the blues, maybe I’m thinking about one of them low-down moments, like when your woman don’t treat you right. Hell of a thing when a woman tell you, “I got me another mule in my stall.” But when I sing about it, I smile. Make you smile….To me, jazz got to be a happy music. Even when it’s about the bad part of life, it’s happy down deep. Even when it’s about the bad part of life, it’s happy down deep—and that’s what makes it good.

2armstrong200_mediumYes, there are other ways to turn life into art, and there were those who thought that his sunny-sided aesthetic was naïve. But Armstrong was no naïf: he was a man without illusions who had seen the worst that life has to offer. His commitment to hope was serious, just as all first-rate comedy is serious, and as I’ve said many times in this space and elsewhere, I believe deeply that comedy, with its honest acknowledgment of the unintended absurdities of human existence, is at bottom truer to life than tragedy. That’s what makes it good—and that’s what made Louis Armstrong great.

UPDATE: I wrote this posting before learning of Robin Williams’ suicide—an eerily appropriate coincidence, and not merely because he had been influenced by Jonathan Winters and worked with him on Mork and Mindy. I can’t say that it came as a surprise to me. I always found his manic brand of comedy to be disquieting, enough so that I actually wondered early in his career whether he might possibly have suffered from some form of mental illness, though there was never any question of his great gifts.

Seeing Williams play a creepily pitiful bad guy in One Hour Photo left me in no doubt that he had real talent as a dramatic actor, in part because he had immediate access to the feelings of rage and self-loathing that so clearly drove his comedy. Would that he had turned to legitimate theater (he only appeared in two straight plays in New York, Mike Nichols’ 1988 revival of Waiting for Godot and Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo) instead of settling for what Hollywood had to offer an aging comedian. Perhaps stage acting, especially in dead-serious comedies like Godot, might have given his anger a cathartic outlet. Instead, it consumed him.

* * *

Louis Armstrong and the All Stars play “Back o’ Town Blues” on the BBC in 1965:

Just because: Suzanne Farrell on Sesame Street

August 11, 2014 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERASuzanne Farrell does twenty grand battements on an episode of Sesame Street:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

Almanac: Thornton Wilder on clichés

August 11, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”

Thornton Wilder (quoted in Time, Jan. 12, 1953)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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