Video store closure

Cape Breton still has - for now - video stores: not niche Tarantino-biography video stores but big ass family run ones. Glace Bay Video (on Brodie St.: represent!!!!) is closing. So I got me some. 

image.jpg

No obscurities or gems, but good enough. The DVD has been great for comedy, as it allowed the same benefits of tracking that the CD brought to audio, allowing the viewer much greater liberty in dissecting and rewatching routines. Its great contribution has been the anthology, either repackaging (like Comedy Club Greats or Best of Comedy Central Presents), or the curated anthologies like the Jamie Foxx Presents series. VHS never really delivered on or encouraged these forms.

And Dana Carvey is a 2-disc set: special features, you are a delight! 

With the shift to BluRay for film and television repackaging (but little stand-up among them) and with digital broadcasters like Netflix becoming the increasingly viable path for distribution, we may be seeing the end of the comedy DVD, along with its packaging and special features. Again, no Luddite me, but always a little sad to see the passing of something that has been a positive mediation of the form. 

Explaining things

I got copies of the upcoming catalogue from University Press of Mississippi: it's real now. So yes, I've googled myself some more and I'm seeing it listed places. (Fuck you: I have so little else in my life apart from my hot wife, amazing son, well-paid career and respect of my peers.) But then I came upon this thing, 

“Society has its talkers, but how rare the instances of refined and elevated conversational power! Talking is indeed a vulgar art everywhere, but how few make it a fine art! The endless repetitions of the commonest platitudes; its gossip - if not mischievous or malicious, yet empty of good - discover often a talent and a tact of no ordinary grade; but how unworthily employed!”
— Mrs. Katie Clark Mulliken, "Conversation as a Fine Art." The Ladies' repository: a monthly periodical, devoted to literature, arts, and religion. Volume 1, Issue: 1, Jan 1868, pp. 10-13.

I liked it because, in full on nineteenth-century lady style, it keyed into one of the things I'm getting at with the name of this book (and blog). My title was inspired by an interview George Carlin did for the HBO website prior to what was to be his last special, It's Bad For Ya.

“I am a stand-up comedian, and I love that title. Stand-up comedy is a vulgar act. It can be vulgar the usual way we use that word. But vulgar really means “of the people.” It’s the people’s art. Just stand up and talk about the things that are on your mind. Whether it’s shopping or credit cards or your wife or your kids, or if it’s stuff about America, it’s all stand-up comedy.”

My contention has always been that stand-up comedy is a form of talk not substantially different from the talk we all engage in in small-context settings. It is playful, non-instrumental, ludic. It is conversation, but really that moment in a conversation where one person kind of takes over for a while. The other people are there and are necessary for this person's verbal display, and their reactions are not only the goal but part of the performance itself, but it is that moment in conversation when focus is on one talker. It is talk among a small group of intimates.

Stand-up comedy introduces the complexity of the larger group, the specialised space that forces attention on the performer (as opposed to it being temporarily granted), the increased expectations of competence on the professional, performing in front of strangers, the spatial distances of broadcasting and the spatio-temporal distances of recording, all of which interrupt that 'small group of intimates' vibe and yet is the style of talk being enacted on stage. 

We all know good talkers (and bad talkers), but the professionalisation of stand-up is more than simply talking well: it is learning and mastering the skill sets required to bridge those various distancing mechanisms and, in collaboration with the audience, create the pretense of intimacy.

If you want an amazing discussion of the kind of informal talk I'm referring to, read Michael J. Bell's The World From Brown's Lounge: An Ethnography of Black-Middle Class Play. It will change your life.

Record shop

“Over the past dozen years or so, I’ve had many offers to do a comedy album and have always refused, because of one primary reason - I don’t want to do “just another” comedy album. If I ever would do an album, I wanted mine to be more than just a recording of a live performance. It would have to be something special, different - something that had never been done before by anyone.
So, either I’d think of a unique idea for a comedy album or would forget it. Well, for all these years, I’ve forgotten it, because I’ve never hit on that special idea, but my personal manager, Steve Reidman, recently did.
He suggested that I do a combination of dramatized excerpts from my book of autobiographical anecdotes, Soft Pretzels With Mustard, along with correlated routines from live stage performances. We would use sound effects, actors and even get my Mom and Dad to play themselves. I thought the idea was terrific and so did MCA Record Company.
We did it, and I think it is unique.”

I went to Taz Records in Halifax this weekend (new location!) and got some comedy LPs. I'm not a vinyl Luddite, but some of these things have yet to be digitized and, even for those that have, liner notes and the like are missing. 

That's Free Beer's Clueless at top left: Free Beer was the duo comprising Lorne Elliott of, among other things, CBC's Madly Off In All Directions and Kevin "Buddy Wasisname" Blackmore. Below is Robin Williams's Reality... What a Concept, which won the Grammy in 1980. 

But I'm most intrigued by David Brenner's Excuse Me, Are You Reading That Paper? (1983). The quote to the left is from the liner notes.

Perhaps with his recent passing people are remembering how big a comedian David Brenner was in the 1970s and early 1980s: he was one of the hippest around and a favourite of Carson. His early success on television might have meant that he never felt impelled to do an album for reputation cultivation. So the studied nonchalance towards the LP is perhaps justified.

But this is different: this album is a deliberate tie-in (promotional vehicle?) for his book, blending studio and live performance. One could compare this to George Carlin's A Place for My Stuff (1981), the only Carlin album to feature studio pieces, but that one wasn't intentionally of a theme. Both Carlin and Brenner were well into their careers, and the early eighties was seeing the cable special and, very soon thereafter, home video as the emerging stand-up media. So there was experimentation with the form, particularly from the older generation reclaiming relevance.

In the book I talk about Carlin extensively, using him as the prime illustration of the shift from the LP to the HBO special: I also talk about comedian's books and their relation to live performances. (I have an idea for an entire book on comedian writing and, particularly, memoir: what do you think?) I'm looking forward to listening to this record and putting it into some kind of context.

Plus: Brenner was funny as balls. Let's not nerd this up.

Googling myself

So this happened: 

University Press of Mississippi had told me that marketing was going to begin but didn't say exactly when. And golly, here it is. I'd been keeping the cover design close to the chest but now y'all can see it. There may be tweaks to come, but this is certainly the concept. And it's going to be available in paperback as well.

Yay me.

The First Post

I'm trying to be good, so I'm going to not break my ass trying to blog it all out on day one.

I have thought for a while that an ongoing space for writing short reflections on stand-up comedy would be useful. My original ambition was to review comedy recordings not when they come out (necessarily) but to go back and try to review some classic and not so classic ones.  

But the book is now in press, so I have the mercenary objective of bringing attention to that too, while also being a place for readers to keep up an ongoing conversation. There are also opportunities for putting performances online that, in book form, were only available through transcription. And sometimes there's simply funny stuff that I want to share.

So I'll keep it short and sweet for today, and I'll probably tweak the site until it looks pretty. In the meantime, here is what is currently my favourite routine. It is amazing how much this makes me giggle like a school girl.