British humor 4: Daniel Kitson

I loathe sentimental comedians, at least openly sentimental comedians. “Heartwarming” comedy about kids, parents, and the good old days gets me very tired very quickly — the sole exceptions being the early Bill Cosby, who pioneered the kid’s tale told from the perspective of a kid, and Jean Shepherd, who brought a sharp, spoken-word slant to his stories of “kidhood” and adolescent adventure.

One modern standup is able to tackle these topics, however, and not sound mawkish or overly saccharine. His name is Daniel Kitson, and I discovered him though the constant recommendations of his work that appear in interviews conducted with his fellow “alternative” British comics, especially Richard Herring and Stewart Lee, who refers to Kitson in his new book as “the best standup I’ve ever seen.”

Kitson is a hard performer to get bead on, though, if you’re not physically in England or at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as he keeps a very low profile and is not represented on CD or DVD. He avoids appearing on television in the UK and when he does (as is evident from the snippets of his work that are on YouTube), he is not seen to best advantage. He did, however, decide back in 2009 to start giving away audio recordings of his critically lauded Edinburgh shows as mp3s on his website. Although he promptly stopped after two shows were uploaded, these two long-form examples of his work demonstrate quite well why he has been deemed a “comedian’s comedian.”

To start with, he has a stage persona that is comprised of contradictions: he sounds nervous (perhaps only a product of his having a stutter), but is in fact in very tight control of his monologues; he loves to tangent off into side-stories, but can effortlessly pivot back to his original narrative; and while he displays a cynical misanthropy at times, he also delivers touching points about friendship, aging, and family (Lee refers to him as the “sentimental misanthropist”).

One of the other aspects of his act that I am fascinated by is one utilized by a number of British alternative comics: he deconstructs his own act as he performs it. He has a deft way with words and continually lays bare the processes he’s using, at one point in one show referring to his act sarcastically as “deconstruction, deconstruction, deconstruction, whimsy, callback…”

Of the two shows that are available at danielkitson.com, the 2004 Edinburgh show that he calls “Dancing” is very good (showing he can deliver the goods even while sick), but the 2005 show taped at the Stand in Edinburgh offers a wonderful example of his work. He has two basic threads in the show: outrage over a review that called him a “misogynist bully” and memories of what he learned from a close adolescent friend. On these twin frames he hangs a number of tangents, including the joys of romantic failure, a story about sledding, learning to curse creatively and be “ironically racist,” and a philosophy describing the best thing in the world (doing a thing you love while looking forward to doing another thing you love) that is pretty much the best definition of bliss that I’ve ever heard (Kitson avoids that word, however).

Those of us in NYC will soon be treated to Kitson live, as he is scheduled to perform at St. Ann’s Warehouse throughout January 2011 with his 2009 Edinburgh show The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church. I look forward to seeing this talented monologist in person, but for those in the rest of the U.S. and other places that he doesn’t tour, I recommend that you check out his podcast and experience the show simply titled ”The Stand.”

Have Yourself an Atheist Xmas: "Nerdstock"

The Yuletide resounds with weighty, sometimes oppressive sentiments, so it is important to just settle back and have a good time. I can think of no better way to do this than to view the British TV special called “Nerdstock”.

The show, which is properly known as “Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People,” has taken place annually for the last three years in London. This week on the Funhouse TV show, I’ll be featuring a review of, and show short clips from, the DVD record of the first “Godless” event in 2008 (from the indie label Go Faster Stripe). Comedian Robin Ince hosts and organizes the program, taking care to balance the bill among standup comics, musicians and scientists. The intention is to create a “rationalist” celebration of the season that drops the supernatural religious aspect of the holiday in favor of a calm, optimistic view of this planet and those bright lights around us. And yes, the comedians are free to be downright sacrilegious — what fun would a rationalist holiday be without that?

Comparing the reviews that exist online of the live events, the Go Faster Stripe DVD, and the “Nerdstock” broadcast, it becomes evident that the last-mentioned was abridged and sorta carefully edited for telecast, and is thus missing some of the more lacerating (read: seriously atheist) comedians including Funhouse fave Stewart Lee (his former partner Richard Herring does a very sharp routine on the 2008 DVD, but is noticeably friendlier and fuzzier on the 2009 telecast), and one cult figure who appeared at the event (comics genius Alan Moore). Also not on TV special is Ricky Gervais, noted atheist celeb, who has done a number of these Godless gigs, since he is a friend of Ince’s (Ince served his opening act as his standup career began to skyrocket).

In any case, the show is well worth your time, because I can’t imagine it for a single second being aired in America, where we theoretically have “separation of church and state” — except in the minds of Xtian fundamentalists. Please do partake of ”Nerdstock”, and if you’re interested in the further adventures of host/producer Ince, check out his inteview podcast, cohosted by comedian Josie Long, called “Utter Shambles.” Ince and Long interview a mix of comedians and the occasional scientifically minded individual. Their guest list so far has included “alternative” comedy god Alexei Sayle, Stewart Lee, Mark Steel, podcast duo Richard Herring and Andrew Collins, and the one and only mystery man of Northampton, Alan Moore. Listen here. And here again is the "Godless" "Nerdstock" special:

A wise cop and a silly German psychiatrist: Deceased Artiste Steve Landesberg

Steve Landesberg is best known to TV viewers for his terrific turn as the erudite and obliquely sarcastic police detective Dietrich on the sitcom Barney Miller (1975-82). In this tribute, however, I want to also celebrate him as a standup comic and a really fine sketch performer.

His obits underlined a bunch of his professional achievements and were focused on the fact that his stated age when he died was 65, but he was really 74, as has now been revealed by his daughter. I think it was quite wonderful that Landesberg was fooling casting agents with a younger age (actresses do it all the time), as he was not the kind of a gent whom you could easily guess the age of anyway.

He started in show business in his 30s, working as a standup and appearing for the first time on The Tonight Show in the early Seventies. I have a tape of an early Seventies Dean Martin Show episode that he appeared on doing his great routine about visiting a small Southern town (where they happily introduce the sole, solitary town Jew to visitors), and he also had regular berths on the short-lived Bobby Darin variety show and the Paul Sand sitcom Friends and Lovers.

I first knew of Landesberg from a comedy LP my dad and I enjoyed called Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Godfather… But Don’t Ask that featured Chuck McCann as the Godfather and Landesberg and a group of NYC stalwart comic actors (J.J. Barry, Marilyn Sokol, Mike Preminger, Mina Kolb, Dick Lord) playing various parts. The record was written by Mad contributors and folks who wrote for Fernwood 2-Night later on: John Boni and Dick DeBartolo, Ken Friedman, Nick Meglin, and Mike Preminger. Yes, all right, so I fucking loved that record as a kid (I was, and remain, a big comedy record fan).

I became familiar with him from that one-off LP (wherein he did several different voices) and was happy to recognize him on Barney Miller when he showed up for the first time in ’75. Dietrich was a deadpan character who got the show’s weirder conversations going, and Landesberg was perfect in the role.

I met Landesberg in the street when he was walking in the Village with some friends back in the early Nineties, and did have to tell him how much I enjoyed his work on TV and on that old comedy record (his response to that being, “that was a long time ago!”). I didn’t bug him for an autograph or an interview (I wasn’t doing the Funhouse back then), but he was a perfectly nice guy, whom I wish we had seen a lot more of on TV and in the movies. He did get some decent guest roles in his later career, appearing on The Golden Girls and That ’70s Show, as well as scoring a supporting role in the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I had no interest in seeing (but wouldn’t mind checking out his scenes in the pic).

In tribute to Steve L., I offer you a few plum clips and one that I myself added to the YouTube “pool.” First, Landesberg doing a Southern character on a Dean Martin roast of Barry Goldwater:



A panel segment on The Mike Douglas Show with his comedy-club colleague David Brenner:



The first four seasons of Barney Miller are up on YT, thanks to the Crackle folks. Here is a short scene that shows off Landesberg’s deadpan delivery beautifully. In fact, it oddly was linked to in his New York Times obit — I didn’t know the NYT had gotten to that level of interactivity with “illegally” uploaded material!:



Landesberg did very good impressions. Here’s him doing an impromptu Al Jolson (acting Jolie, not singing Jolie), and here is the golden moment on Barney Miller where he did Gregory Peck outta the blue. This scene made an impression on me as a kid, because I had never had seen anyone do a Peck impression (and I think Steve pretty much had this territory to himself). His deadpan carries the whole scene:



And here is my contribution to the YouTube Landesberg library. The track from the Godfather comedy LP that I loved as a kid. It features Landesberg as a crazy German psychiatrist and J.J. Barry as his Mafioso patient:



Thanks to Jim G. of the Vintage Standup Comedy blog for the MP3 version of this album.

Sui Generis: Deceased Artiste Don Van Vliet

Don Van Vliet’s death this past Friday spelled the final departure of one of the 20th-cenutry’s greatest “uncategorizable” musicians. Sure, he’d been out of the music business since 1982, and it had been made public years ago that he was suffering from multiple sclerosis. Still, I think some of us wondered if some new material might not be released — certainly not new music, but perhaps new poetry, since that had been the final forum for his uniquely surreal verbal excursions.

The man better known to music fans as Captain Beefheart left us, though, with eleven amazing albums (that discounts the two he truly hated, and adds in Bongo Fury, his collaboration with Zappa) and many paintings, since fine art was his true love all along. In reading items about his life to prepare to write this, I noticed that all of the obits rightly hailed him as an unbridled, (again) uncategorizable genius, but that the longer pieces on his life went into the “cult-like” way in which his most unique album Trout Mask Replica was made.

It’s hard to tally those accounts of a dictatorial madman who verbally and physically abused his bandmates with the exceedingly nervous and mellow gent we see in the three on-camera interviews he gave later in his life (two of them sadly with David Letterman, who you can see didn’t a crap about who the guy he was talking to was). Watching Van Vliet in the superb short “Some Yo-Yo Stuff” (see below), one can’t imagine that that humble, weird old genius (who’s only about 51 in the film) is the same guy who supposedly terrorized the Magic Band for the eight months they lived together and made that amazing record.

Well, such schizo rifts are the very stuff of artistic genius. As my favorite line on the subject from John Waters goes (a propos of Fassbinder in Waters’ case), I hear he was a monster, but I don’t care, I never had to live with him. What Van Vliet left behind is a singular musical legacy that is diminished by the label “outsider music,” which puts him, a sophisticated musical innovator, with the likes of “primitives” like Hasil Adkins and the Shags (both acts I enjoy the hell of, by the way — “no more hot dogs!”). Creating that kind of umbrella label for acts so radically different, and on such different sides of the creativity spectrum, is merely a handy way to create a bailiwick for certain musical archivists.

Van Vliet/Beefheart existed in some sense “outside” the music industry, since his work remains uncategorizable to this day, but all his albums were on major labels, he did have a rather sizeable cult following during his lifetime (especially in, natch, Europe), and he was, most importantly, aware of his musical eccentricities. If his albums sound out of key to the average ear that’s because he was exploring new musical territory, not because he didn’t know how the melody would’ve conventionally been played, as is the case with with the “primitive” outsiders.

But, enough about labels, since Beefheart’s music escaped them all. It was rock, it had a blues foundation, it was unpredictable as the finest jazz, and had lyrics that certainly rate as pure surreal/Beat poetry. He was one of a kind, and while some music critics have done a good job of explaining verbally what he was doing, nothing beats listenting to the music. Thus, I will abandon all attempts at a conventional obit for Van Vliet and will instead just make one media-minded remark: in going through the tapes that exist of Beefheart through the years, I think it’s pretty safe to say he made less than 10 appearances on American television over the close to 20 years he was in the music business (again, on major labels). I can only count seven myself, but if anyone can think of any others, send ’em on.

The seven I come up with are: his appearance on Dick Clark's crappy evening show Where the Action Is (lip-synching “Diddy Wah Diddy” on a beach — god, were Clark’s shows cheap-ass productions!); his “call-in” to American Bandstand (see below); a 1971 live appearance with the Magic Band on the Detroit show Tubeworks; the 1980 Saturday Night Live appearance that introduced a lot of us to what he was like live; the “Eye on L.A.’ interview (see below); and the two Letterman segments. I don’t think I need to add that all of the other TV appearances you can find are from Europe and England. It is a pure and simple fact that the best American culture does attract major followings in Europe while it is ignored by the mainstream over here. Beefheart was yet another shining example of that.

On to the clips! His best TV appearance in my opinion is his spirited performance of “Upon the My Oh My” on The Old Gray Whistle Test. Not his best song, but boy, is he commandeering the camera:



And the perfect melding of his true love, painting, and his music, was the music-video he put together for his song “Ice Cream for Crow”:



The single best extended intro to his life is this British TV docu, "The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart," narrated by legendary DJ John Peel:



The first great performance on film is this rather odd gig on the beach at Cannes in January 1968. Here Beefheart and the Magic Band perform “Electricity”:



Thanks to his high school friend Frank Zappa, Beefheart made his full-blown masterwork Trout Mask Replica, which can’t ever date because it isn’t rooted to the time it was made. It is a radical album that is joyous, catchy, disturbing, and sometimes even a bit scary. Here is the song “Ella Guru”:



And an instrumental from the album that supplies a perfect example of the disjunctive and brilliant sound Beefheart kept pursuing until the final album, Ice Cream for Crow.:



Beefheart’s TV ad for the album Lick My Decals Off, Baby, which never aired because it’s so fucking surreal. Best element is, no question, the conventional radio-voiced announcer:



A raw TV performance, the Magic Band doing “I’m Gonna Booglarize You, Baby” on German TV in 1972:



A cover never performed on LP, “Sweet Georgia Brown”:



A rare live version of “Willie the Pimp” from Zappa’s Hot Rats album with Beefheart on vocals:



A very odd bootleg LP that mixes live Beefheart and Zappa tracks with them hosting a radio show where they played their own rare records:



The single longest document we have of Beefheart and the later Magic Band in concert is the French TV show Chorus from 1980. Several songs from the band were included in the show. Here is the unforgettable “Bat Chain Puller”:



And the only other TV interview he ever did beside the two Letterman appearances. Here he’s nervous as hell on camera, but says some very quotable things, including the fact that his music is “non-hypnotic”:



Anton Corbijn’s 1992 short “Some Yo-Yo Stuff” is Van Vliet’s last testament to his public. It is brilliant and touching, with “interview” questions by a wisely abstract David Lynch:



The very final time the Captain sang for an audience, a phone recording of him warbling “Happy Earthday” released on a charity album:



And the single rarest item on YT, the time he called into American Bandstand, one of the most important pop-music shows in American TV history and also one of the most cheaply produced *EVER*:

The Return of the Son of the Trail of the Curse…: Deceased Artiste Blake Edwards

Blake Edwards, who was often hailed as the “next Billy Wilder” (but never really was), died on Wednesday at 88, causing film fans to reminisce fondly about his best films and try to forget about the many (many) bad ones that followed.

Edwards’ career was a study in indulgence, and indulgent moviemaking can be a superb thing (Fellini) or a very painful one (Vincent Gallo). When Edwards received his honorary Oscar — back when they showed the Lifetime Achievement awards on the program! — he thanked his wife Julie Andrews and omitted two of the people without whom his legacy would’ve been a hell of a lot poorer, Audrey Hepburn and Peter Sellers.

Ther are several rock-solid comedies and drama in Edwards’ filmography, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) was a seminal work that added much to the “dream” aspect of NYC (“…she’s a phony, but she’s a genuine phony…”). Hepburn became a style icon more for that film than any other, despite its awful interludes (Mickey Rooney as a cartoon Japanese character that makes Jerry Lewis’s Asians seem politically correct).

Interestingly, my favorite snatch of dialogue from an Edwards film comes from Tiffany’s but was not scripted by Edwards — instead it came either from the original Capote novella or the marvelous Sixties filmmaker George Axelrod, who scripted the film. It comes when John McGiver finds out that there are still prizes in Cracker Jack boxes and says, “That's nice to know. It gives one a feeling of solidarity, almost of continuity with the past, that sort of thing.” I think about “continuity with the past” quite a lot (as regular readers of this blog already know).

And Sellers! A comic actor of boundless energy, he did what he had to do (silly French accent and pratfalls) in The Pink Panther (1963) and stole what was otherwise a pretty mediocre jewel-thief comedy. The follow-up, A Shot in the Dark (1964), was much better, but the later entry The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) was probably the most enjoyable pic in the series.



It’s been well documented that Sellers and Edwards couldn’t stand each other, but both gents needed each other very badly in the mid-Seventies. Neither man had had a hit in several years when The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) came along, and both gentlemen rode the character for a few years until the underwhelming Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978).

But Sellers’ death didn’t stop the series (and thanks, Steve Martin, for wasting our time sullying Sellers’ legacy, twice, once you’d finished burying in the dirt Phil Silver’s finest comic creation). Edwards went on to create a trio of horrible Pink Panther films without Sellers. Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) is a godawful “search” for Inspector Clouseau that is simply an excuse to show Sellers outtakes. (I remember Edwards’ excuse for the film being that Sellers had once said to him that the public should see the outtakes from the three preceding films — but he never mentioned framing them with a plot!) Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) was an attempt to create another Inspector Clouseau, this time an NYPD detective played by Ted Wass. And Edwards’ very last theatrical feature, Son of the Pink Panther (1993), was an unbelievably bad English-language vehicle for the otherwise wonderful Roberto Benigni.

Yes, there were a lot of very bad Blake Edwards movies. Remember when he decided to remake Laurel and Hardy’s Music Box with Ted Danson and Howie Mandel (A Fine Mess)? (This after trying to top the longest pie fighter ever, from a silent L&H comedy, with a much, much bigger one in his cute and well-cast but endless The Great Race.) Or when he made a cheesy sitcom-like farce with randy jokes, including one featuring a glow-in-the-dark condom (Skin Deep)? Or when he remade Goodbye Charlie for no perceptible reason (Switch)?

Rather than dwell on how many of the later Edwards films were outright embarrassments (basically anything after Victoria/Victoria, 1982), let’s remember his true talent with one of my favorites of his pictures, and surely his most acidic outing, the attack on major-studio Hollywood he called S.O.B. (1981). In that film, he finally got to show his prim and proper wife’s raunchy side, got to resurrect a famous Hollywood urban legend about John Barrymore and his poker buddies, and got to have his movie stolen by veteran comic wildman Larry Storch, as a goofy guru.

If there’s one moment that Edwards did seem like Billy Wilder — albeit the latter-day curse-happy Wilder of the Seventies — it was in S.O.B.: