The Beatles of Comedy

Monty Python's Flying Circus Complete and Annotated edited by Luke Dempsey

In 1968, a group of young English comedians made a TV special called How to Irritate People. Pitched for the U.S. market, the show was meant to get Americans excited about a new wave of British comedy. It failed in that aim, but one of its sketches retains high interest for the archaeologist of humor. Written by a couple of Cambridge graduates named John Cleese and Graham Chapman, the sketch is set in the workshop of a shady car salesman. A disgruntled customer, played by Chapman, returns his new car and registers a few complaints: The gear lever is loose. The brakes don’t work. Before the sketch is over, the vehicle’s doors have fallen off. 

But the dodgy salesman—played by a promising comedian named Michael Palin—has an answer for everything. “You must expect teething troubles in these new models,” he says. In real life, Palin had been sold a defective car himself, and he had entertained Cleese with impersonations of his stonewalling dealer. The resulting sketch, which can be dug up on YouTube, took a few comic liberties with Palin’s real-life experiences—a few, but not enough. Like a lot of apprentice work, it’s too respectful of convention and literal truth to strike a distinctive note. [Read more]

Forty-four candles

The Longest Way Home by Andrew McCarthy
When it Happens to You by Molly Ringwald

The 1980s were the golden age of almost nothing. But to give the decade its due, it was a good time for teen movies. In the early part of the decade, the actors Andrew McCarthy and Molly Ringwald were giants of the genre. Both were members of the Brat Pack, which also included the likes of Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. But unlike the more trivially good-looking members of that troupe, McCarthy and Ringwald had character. McCarthy was sensitive and exceedingly wide-eyed: he looked like a bush baby with a mullet. Ringwald was famous for her red hair, lush lips, and willowy frame.

Depressingly for those of us who grew up with them, both actors are now irrefutably middle-aged. McCarthy is 50, Ringwald 44 ... [read more]

Both Genius and Not

Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, November 24-25, 2012

It’s been four years since the American novelist David Foster Wallace took his own life at the age of 46. The Wallace industry has been busier since his death than it ever was while he lived. In 2009 it gave us This is Water, a padded-out version of a graduation address delivered by Wallace in 2005. In 2010 somebody published his undergraduate Philosophy thesis. In 2011 we had his big posthumous novel, the characteristically brilliant but annoying The Pale King. D. T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, came out earlier this year. 

Now we have Both Flesh and Not, a compilation of Wallace’s uncollected non-fiction. Mark that word “uncollected.” Wallace published two books of essays during his lifetime: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005). The bulk of this new book consists of early essays that Wallace chose not to reprint in those volumes. In almost every case it isn’t hard to see why. This book is drastically uneven, but then so was Wallace’s entire oeuvre. That was always the conundrum about him. Why was it that the most gifted prose writer of his generation never produced a wholly satisfactory book?  

Fans of Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest will contend, hotly, that he produced at least one. I wish I shared their ability to read that book all the way through. It shouldn’t be hard, in theory, to resist the charms of a novel containing sentences like “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.” But Wallace, it turned out, had a few theories of his own, and some of them had to do with the supposed undesirability of old-fashioned things like narrative drive and closure. His novel therefore got harder to love as it went on – and it went on for over a thousand pages. It was all brilliance and no structure. It didn’t develop; it just got longer.    

Non-fiction was a better forum for Wallace, because it imposed a few useful constraints on his huge but undisciplined talent. When his tireless, frisky intelligence had something solid to apply itself to, the resulting prose could be breathtaking. Riffing on more abstract themes, he had a bad tendency to drift into mannerism and self-indulgence. He could remind you of a stoned guitarist taking a thirty-minute solo. Writing about reality, for magazine editors who at least notionally wanted him to hew to a given word-length, Wallace had a few objective reasons to rein himself in.    

This third book of essays isn’t in the same league as the other two. How could it be, when it has been largely cobbled together from their respective reject piles? Still, it has to be said that around a third of the pieces preserved here rank with Wallace’s very best. Unsurprisingly, a couple of these keepers are about tennis. Wallace played the game at rep level as a youngster, and he wrote about it peerlessly. His description of Roger Federer dressed “in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring” is composed with a typically deft flick of the calligraphic wrist. The prose isn’t showing off; it effortlessly catches the shape of the fleeting thought. It gives you the illusion that you’re being talked to, one on one, by an extraordinarily perceptive and intelligent friend. 

Writing about a match between Pete Sampras and an 18-year-old Mark Philippoussis, Wallace casually flips on his afterburners. How’s this for a resonant word-sketch? “Sampras, poor-postured and chestless, smiling shyly at the ground, his powder-blue shorts swimming down around his knees, looks a little like a kid wearing his father’s clothes.” Meanwhile, at the court’s far end, “the malevolent but cyborgian Philippoussis hasn’t betrayed anything like an actual facial expression yet.” Between points he likes to “dance a little in place – perhaps to remind himself that he can indeed move if he needs to.”

The eerie thing about Wallace is that he was capable of writing prose as perceptive and funny as that for pages at a stretch. He was like a sausage machine that could churn out endless lengths of fillet mignon. But his prodigious gifts were accompanied by a strange strain of immaturity or petulance. Sometimes, apparently just for the hell of it, he seemed bent on writing whole pages that might have been composed by a person with no talent or taste at all.  

Why? Perhaps Wallace drops a hint while discussing Sampras’s habit of losing sets in order to win matches. “You got the impression,” he writes, “that Sampras was sort of adjusting the idle on his game, trying to find the exact level he needed to reach to win.” Wallace was the Sampras or Federer of writing: he could perform brilliantly at will. His problem was deciding when and why he should do so. For tennis players the criterion is straightforward: they need to beat the other guy. But what was Wallace’s purpose or end? What was his game? 

Wallace spent an awful lot of time overthinking that question in college writing workshops, first as a student and later as a professor. Clearly he didn’t write merely to be read and enjoyed, or to create shapely works of art. The whole thing had to be much more complicated than that. If it wasn’t, why did you need to go to a university to think about it? 

Wallace’s answer, as a fiction writer, was to sign up with the experimentalists. Unlike his contemporary and friend Jonathan Franzen, who has argued that fiction’s proper job is to record the texture and peculiarities of the social here-and-now, Wallace was sceptical about the conventions of social realism. He felt that the really fruitful thing to be interested in was language itself:

[T]here can be seen one deep feature shared by all the cutting-edge fiction that resonates with the post-Hiroshima revolution. That is its … loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread. 

Imagine thirty straight pages of that and you have “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young”. Originally published when Wallace was twenty-six, the essay is reprinted here in all its gaucheness. You can see why Wallace declined to resurrect the piece in either of his authorised collections. In his mature work, he was way too hip and ironic to risk such earnest cadences. But here he is using phrases like “cutting-edge fiction” with a perfectly straight face. Wallace’s theories about his wider mission as a writer never stopped reeking of the undergraduate workshop. The theme brought out the worst in him: it made him lose touch with his sense of irony at precisely the moment when he needed it most. 

If only Wallace did things the other way round: if only he'd been more sceptical about literary theory, and less sceptical about the usefulness of simple readability. If only he wrote fiction that was as full of light and air as his best essays. Far from rendering his fiction more “fertile” and “forward-looking,” his hyperawareness of technique only served to hobble his great talent. We know now that he came to find fiction-writing almost intolerable towards the end of his life. He talked about giving up and running a dog shelter instead. He had become, as Franzen has phrased it, “bored with his old tricks.”

But it would be wrong to end any discussion of Wallace on a note of complaint. After all, one’s impatience with his worst habits is a function of one's awed affection for what the man could do at his best. Loving his work can be an exhausting business, but it can be exhilarating too. If you don’t know Wallace already, start with the title essay of his first collection, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again". You’ll meet a man who could play his contemporaries off the court whenever he wanted to, and you’ll wonder why he didn’t want to all the time.

Peace Off!

The John Lennon Letters

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, October 21-28, 2012

From the outside, The John Lennon Letters looks like a feast for Lennon buffs. The book is 400 pages long and as heavy as a paver. If Lennon really wrote this many letters, this isn’t merely an “international publishing event.” It might also be a significant and revealing contribution to cultural history.  

Unfortunately, the Letters is less full of letters than you might think. Its editor, Hunter Davies, initially dreamed of discovering “large, hidden-away caches” of unknown Lennon correspondence. In the event, he unearthed only a handful of substantial letters. To fill the book up, Davies has, by his own admission, “rather expanded the definition of the word ‘letter’.” He’s expanded it, apparently, to include any piece of paper or cardboard that bears Lennon’s signature: shopping lists, memos to domestic staff, postcards to fans (“Dear Toli, Hi! Bye! Love, John”).  

So this isn’t a collection of letters in the usual sense. To make up for that, the book is sumptuously designed. It’s beautiful to hold and look at. It even smells good. With a few exceptions, each letter or note is photographically reproduced, and flanked by a typed transcription of its contents. Davies provides generous chunks of background information between exhibits, so that the book almost qualifies as an illustrated biography.

The more revealing letters raise the usual question. How much about the private lives of our favourite artists do we really want to know? In Lennon’s case this question becomes especially pointed. Without doubt the man wrote some of the most sublime songs in pop history. But behind the scenes, the avatar of peace and love often went out of his way to be verbally cruel. Reading his letters, you need to keep Lennon’s virtues as an artist firmly in mind, perhaps by playing his records in the background. If you don’t, there’s a risk you’ll end up not liking him very much at all.   

Lennon had a flair for acrimony. When the Beatles broke up, he and Paul had their famously bitter public feud. The Letters confirm one’s suspicion that the bitterness and aggression lay almost entirely on John’s side: he was the Mike Tyson to Paul’s startled Holyfield.

When Paul released his solo album Ram, John thought he heard some sly digs at himself and Yoko in some of the lyrics. He retaliated with the viciously unsubtle “How Do You Sleep?” (“Those freaks was right when they said you was dead ...”). After Paul voiced some relatively mild objections to that song in the pages of Melody Maker, Lennon replied with an open letter in which he proposed that it was typically dull of the “conservative” McCartney to take the lyrics “so literally.” Apparently they were meant to be funny. People were often misreading Lennon’s tone, but it never seemed to strike him that this might be his fault rather than theirs.

In his private letters to the McCartneys, John was even less inclined to be nice. Linda, writing to Lennon in 1971, upbraided him for quitting the Beatles without telling the press. John replied that others, including Paul, had persuaded him to stay silent. “So get that into your petty little perversion of a mind, Mrs McCartney – the cunts asked me to keep quiet about it.”

Adept at detecting insults, Lennon always had an alarmingly deep well of venom to draw on in reply. In 1971, the Beatles’ genial former producer, George Martin, made the mistake of short-changing John on some songwriting credits during an interview. Naturally, the man who urged the world to “imagine no possessions” was not about to let that slide.  

“When people ask me questions about ‘What did George Martin really do for you?’” Lennon wrote to Martin, “I have only one answer, ‘What does he do now?’ … It’s not a put down, it’s the truth.” For good measure, Lennon took a swipe at the obscure band Martin was currently producing. “By the way, I hope Seatrain is a good substitute for the Beatles.”

Lennon knew how to wound. No doubt this talent was linked to his having been deeply wounded himself, back in his early childhood. Raised by his selfless Aunt Mimi, John always felt that his bohemian mother, Julia, had coldly abandoned him. He grew up thin-skinned but cocksure: a good combination for a rock-and-roller, but bad news for people who encountered him on an off day.

In 1971, a well-meaning fan sent him a pamphlet about Christianity. John shocked the poor guy by not only writing back, but by giving him both barrels. “Why don’t you Jesus Freaks get off people’s backs … Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. Your peace of mind doesn’t show in your neurotic letter, son … Peace off!”

Naturally it didn’t occur to Lennon that the same critique, minus the word “Jesus”, was uncannily applicable to his own spiritual stances. Lennon was no stranger to proclaiming, very loudly, that he had all the answers to life's ultimate questions. But if his restless leaping from one mystical fad to another ever brought him peace of mind, it didn’t show.

In 1968, he declared that the key to “Absolute Bliss” lay in India, at the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. When the Maharishi proved to be human, Lennon took his revenge with a song: the White Album’s “Sexy Sadie.” “You made a fool of everyone …” As usual, Lennon’s blame radar pointed strictly outwards: he declined to explore the possibility that submitting himself to teachings of the bearded one had been a foolish act in the first place.  

After that it was primal scream therapy. (“I think this is the last trip,” he wrote to Pete Townshend.) This gave Lennon pseudo-scientific licence to scream at his aging loved ones and then not quite apologise for it. “I seem to remember you being upset by my screaming at Mimi …?” he wrote to a cousin in 1975. “Well she and I are both well over that. I hope you are too.” Take it or leave it, mate.    

On the artistic front, the screaming craze did give us the remarkable, howl-drenched “Mother.” But did meditation or primal yodelling change John’s personality one little bit? By the mid-seventies he’d done a lot of both, and he was still carrying a lot of rage. Estranged from Yoko, he drunkenly and violently disgraced himself in an L.A. nightclub. When the musician Todd Rundgren chipped him for that in an interview, Lennon again proved himself the master of the malevolent public retort. “Turd Runtgreen … I think that the real reason you’re mad at me is cause I didn’t know who you were at the Rainbow.”    

Lennon finally found contentment via the least revolutionary of paths. He became a househusband in New York, with Yoko and their son Sean. At this point the letters mellow. There are cosy domestic memos and notes for the maid. “Milk (3 cartons.) Oranges. Grapenuts (not flakes) …” On the page after that, Lennon fires off a searing complaint against injustice and oppression – to his dry cleaner. “What is your excuse for turning my brand new white shirt yellow?”

In 1980 Lennon delivered the Double Fantasy album. “Starting Over,” “Beautiful Boy,” “Watching the Wheels” – the songs were mellowing too. As an artist, he was far from finished. Three weeks after the album’s release he was shot dead.

Lennon could be a charming and decent man, but his personal virtues rarely come across in his letters. In mere prose, he lacked the talent to access the less cranky aspects of his personality. He needed melody and lyrics to do that. Lennon was only human, but he was also the only human who wrote “Imagine”. That’s the thing to remember about him. Give him a guitar and he had the power to persuade you, for the length of a song, that anything was possible.