For Once, I Wrote Something Serious

A friend of mine at the Observer, unaware of the fact that my normal prose style is blithe foolishness, asked me to write something about escapism and national tragedy, in response to the Newtown massacre. Comedy is more my beat than tragedy, but escapism I understand.

It did not take long for me to turn off Twitter, to shut down Facebook, to ignore NYTimes.com. The Internet can be marvelous—for real-time presidential debate snark or instant updates on the latest Lindsay Lohan trainwreck—but for tragedy, it is entirely too small. I could not bear to watch the reported death toll rise, to see the hand-wringing that came when the press realized it had misidentified the shooter, or to wade through the now-predictable howls for stricter gun control. So I did the natural thing. I turned off my computer, and started watching movies.
I watched Harper, a middling Paul Newman P.I. flick, the ever-delightful Shop Around The Corner and, at my girlfriend’s stern insistence, Love Actually. During the intermissions, I glanced at Twitter for news of the impending R.A. Dickey trade, taking pains to avoid reading about anything of actual importance. For seven or eight hours, Paul Newman chewed gum, Jimmy Stewart sold music boxes, Hugh Grant made puppy dog eyes. And the outside world stayed far outside.

If your hunger for gravity isn't sated, read on. Or just scroll down and read more about The Simpsons.

News Broke; They Fixed It: 'The Daily Show's' Early Days

Last night, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert did a panel together on what appears to be a very comfy living room set. Third Beat has a recap of the talk, but the highlight is definitely Jon Stewart's recollection of the Daily Show's rather ugly early years. I remember when the Daily Show premiered. As a kid, I liked Craig Kilborn's silly hair and his slightly silly Five Questions, and even though I'm sure that era of the show doesn't hold up, I've always wondered why Stewart & co. never mention The Host What Came Before. Here's why:

“I had, before taking [the job], some conversations with the powers that be there about the direction I thought we could move the show…. I wanted it to be satirical in the classic sense of the word, not the Spy magazine sense of the word where you just add adjectives like ‘pepperpot’,” he said.
When said when he met with the writing staff the month prior to taking over the show, he “got the impression that that had been discussed,” and he was met with strong resistance.
“I walk in the door, into a room with the writers and producers, and the first thing they say is ‘this isn’t some MTV bullshit’…. And then I was told not to change the jokes or improvise,” he said.
He immediately phoned his agent, James Dixon, telling him to “get me the fuck out of this. These people are insane.” 

Also remarkable is the link to a 2001 interview where Stephen Colbert did a (whiteface) impersonation of scheduled guest Al Sharpton, who had canceled at the last minute. I always like seeing clips or pictures from the show's early days, nearly as much as I enjoyed Colbert's recently surfaced Rube Goldberg report from 1997. They're so skinny! Their timing is so terrible! Their set is so cheap!

In Which I Unfairly Rip On A Totally Whatever Show

I've spent the last couple of months trying very hard not to write a rant about How I Met Your Mother. No one cares about that show. Even people who like it only sort of care. I've been trying hard to keep my feelings at bay, but no. They burst out, in an insane, sloppily-edited rant over at Bullett. 

Yep. I’m talking about Ted Mosby, superschmuck.
I’m not going to get too deep into how unbearable the show’s narrator and hero is. Anyone who’s seen the pilot knows that this brain-dead mediocrity’s search for The One got tiresome after 22 minutes, nevermind nearly 4,000 of them. I used to think that the only way to watch this show was to ignore the man at the center, to forget the framing story of an aged dweeb’s rambling attempt to explain to his children how they were conceived, and focus on the comparatively delightful supporting cast—Willow from Buffy, Nick from Freaks and Geeks, and Doogie Howser. But I’m here today to tell you that that’s wrong. You can’t watch How I Met Your Mother without focusing on Ted. Like a mutilated cat, he’s impossible to stop staring at. The only way to watch this show that I and nine million others are, for some reason, still watching is to focus on his awfulness, and accept one miraculous truth.
Ted Mosby is a psychopath.

Read on if you dare.

Interestingly, the article got picked up by Meaghen Hale, over at TV Consultants, who responded to my unbalanced jabbering with a very reasonable, very sane response. 

Ted is romantic and sentimental. He makes grand gestures. He puts his heart on the line. He breaks into Robin’s apartment to serenade her with a cerulean symphony.
Maybe it is insane—but not in the way you think.
Ted is possessed by the insanity of love.
Hear me out. There is a certain point where the cost of love seems to outweigh the benefit. You have to put yourself out there. You have to wait. You have to try and fail, sometimes with a lot of people. You have to take a risk on someone. You have to be vulnerable. You have to give yourself fully and receive wholeheartedly. You have to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things.

Fair point, Meaghen! One thing, though—you say that Ted's "eidetic memory" is evidence of his sanity. I think it's the exact opposite. No one can tell such vivid stories accurately. Either he's embellishing the narrative to make himself the hero and not the villain, or the whole story has been fabricated by his twisted, broken mind. His memory isn't eidetic—it's hallucinatory.

Or it's just a totally pleasant TV show that I maybe shouldn't make such a big deal about. That could be it too.

Dear God! Why Isn't Everyone Screaming All The Time?

"Oh look. A body." Ginny Mayo, the dumb girl who talked.

A young woman is captured by gangsters and marched down an apartment building's stairs at gunpoint. When the police appear, the gunmen try to use her as a human shield. In a hail of gunfire, she's shoved face forward down the stairs, miraculously surviving as her captors are gunned down. Two minutes later, she's walking down the street with her best beau, cheerfully ruminating about the experience.

"You know," she says, "in his own way, I think saving my life was [the bad guy's] attempt to make things right."

This is the limp climax of Smart Girls Don't Talk, a 1948 Virginia Mayo job that I just caught on Insomnia TV. It's a classic bad ending, necessitated by the structural demands of an 80-minute thriller. We need a big shootout at the end, but everybody's gotta be smiling and lovey-dovey for the thirty-second final scene. Do you know how I would react if I were caught in the middle of a firefight? 

I would scream like a Godzilla-nibbled toddler.

Showing the reaction to trauma is a tricky balance. Subjected to the kinds of things that characters go through on stage and screen, real-life people would be reduced to a quivering pile of sweat, tears and shit. But no matter how frightened, your hero has to be back on his feet in a few minutes, ready to crack wise and keep fighting. 

I've always had a soft spot for movies that let their characters show fear. The car chase in Risky Business, for instance, is great not just because everything that features Joe Pantoliano is awesome, but because Tom Cruise—an ordinary boy in a terrifying situation—looks shit-scared. My favorite Bond movie is (no kidding) On Her Majesty's Secret Service, primarily because of the epic alpine chase that ends the film's second act. By the time Lazenby gets away, he is scared to death. This isn't Bond as Superman—it's Bond as human being. 

I like that.

(God the music in that scene is great. The dialogue, not so much.

Henchman: He's making for the village.

Blofeld: All right. We'll head him off at the precipice.

Positively crackling.)

Lots of terrible things happened to the characters in my last play. People got shot, emotionally abused, sexually trifled with and kicked in the shins. I wanted to be honest about how my characters would react to these horrors, but I couldn't have them shut down. Even though it's realistic, a shut-down character is a useless character. (See: Schuyler, in the last season of Breaking Bad, who spent the whole season too angry to talk, and basically turned into an inert mass of scowling jelly.) So by the second act, all of my characters were either in a very active form of shock, too stupid to realize what was happening, or sociopaths who were simply bemused by the horrors around them. Having them react to the trauma they were suffering made them more extreme characters, and made the whole thing a hell of a lot funnier.

If you're chugging through a script that's got action—and if you aren't, you should be—and your characters aren't scared to death by what's happening them, either your action isn't terrifying enough or your characters are inhuman. Life is scary. Life on stage or screen is even worse. React accordingly.

So there's your unsolicited playwriting advice for the day. As you were.