A Vulgar Blog
Hopefully, vaguely regular stand-up comedy musings.
So I started this thing and then haven't done anything in a week. But two things:
But away I go. I'll try and write while I'm gone, and I have a mother of a post if my current hush-hush situation goes as I hope. Meanwhile:
If you haven't done so already, watch Road Comics: Big Work on Small Stages. Produced by Susan Seizer (who is also the charming interviewer and host), it deals with stand-ups working the circuit in the Midwest.
Susan is an anthropologist at Indiana University, an all-around bud, and the first person to cite my work in peer-review, which grants her the academic equivalent of some kind of voodoo binding charm and / or prima nocta privileges. Go to Stigmas of the Tamil Stage to look at her previous work on the 'Special Drama' theatre tradition of Southern India
Watch the trailer. The film is available online, or you can download a copy for the price of a tweet. So don't be an asshole: go get your own copy.
Oh look:
Yep: it's officially a thing now
So in the past few days I've been shitting my pants. As I wrote last week, the book's title is based on a George Carlin quote, but when I checked the source, he doesn't use those words. He says "a vulgar act" and "the people's art." Did I misread "act" for "art"? And then title something for it?
The. Fucking. Title.
All that kept me in line was that (a) in this day of cutting and pasting when I found the quote I more than likely did that rather than retype it, and (b) the layout of the page is different now, which might have meant an intervening edit. But seriously: the title? The proofs are coming from the press very soon: was I going to have to cross out the "r" for the "c"? I'm not changing the title, but the hommage-ness of it just disappears.
Then I come across this interview in Psychology Today, and the following quote:
Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one’s chest, to sing one’s song. So that element is present in all art. And comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts—it’s a vulgar art, it’s one of the people’s arts, it’s the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form—it’s certainly artistry. So self-expression is the key to even standing up and saying, "Hey, listen to me."
So this is an idea that he was entertaining at the time as a new way of articulating the inevitable "what is stand-up comedy" question. Thus I googled the shit out of ["george carlin" "a vulgar art"] and he was saying it, or quoted as saying it with vague attribution, all the goddamn time his last year, like here and here and here and finally, in Last Words, his sort-of memoir compiled from interviews with Tony Hendra:
Long ago I described my job as being "a foole": that's still what I do. Once, this kind of comedy was called the people's art, a vulgar art. Maybe all comedy is.
BOOYAH!
Watch (or download or read the transcript the New York Public Library's tribute to George Carlin timed for the launch of Last Words. Or this thing.
They took down the video, and all that is left is either difficult to embed or not available in Canada: watch the full episode at the Charlie Rose site.
CR: So did you have the power of observation always: you just had to learn how to shape it and form it? I mean to see life with a comedic eye.
LCK: Yeah, I mean I guess that's just the way I look at things. And I'm very curious so I like to look at a lot of things. So I'm always out there looking at life and thinking about it, so I guess that's just observation. But it's being able to have people understand an observation even if it's really from a strange place or even if it's very personal.
Ethnography is the heart and soul of folklore (and anthropology, and [shudder] ethnomusicology). There are various definitions for what it is, but the simplest and most profound is one I heard from Guha Shankar of the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center. It is 'deep hanging out': you know what it is to go somewhere, figure out how things work there, and operate moderately successfully, even if you never entirely meld with a place. We all have those skills. The 'deep' part, what differentiates ethnography from 'regular hanging out,' is knowing that your aim is ultimately to communicate that experience to an absent third party, one unfamiliar with the ethnographic site. So you pay a little more attention, perhaps, trying to develop a communicatable understanding.
Although the aims of the stand-up and the aims of the academic are different, their shared project of communicating experience has a lot of overlap. The ethnographic adage of "making the strange familiar and the familiar strange" is as true for one as it is for the other. Both are using words to communicate a particular experience to their respective audiences, and both imply a certain amount of intellectual honesty and integrity; the stand-up is allowed more poetic license but there is the expectation that what is described in an idiosyncratic way is nevertheless grounded in reality.
I call what the stand-up does "vernacular ethnography": it is a description of culture that isn't intended to integrate with and contribute to an ongoing and established discourse on culture like the academic, but nevertheless draws on keen observation and creative word choice to communicate an experience to another (or, in the case of 'making the familiar strange,' providing an exoteric perspective on something so close to the audience that its oddities are not noticed). What is more, I feel that - understanding poetic license is in play - the academy can nevertheless draw on these forms of observation as ethnographic data. Like children's games:
