Send out the clowns
Cut drug- and wife-abusing,
motorized scooter-driving,
multiple sclerosis-suffering
Richard Pryor this much slack:
At least the former funny man
and first-ever Mark Twain
Prize-for-American-humor
recipient has a shaky handful of
reasons why he hasn't really
made anybody laugh since 1980,
when he spontaneously combusted
while freebasing cocaine.
Indeed, despite the regrettable
decision to share his great pain
with audiences by making films
like the compassion-eroding Jo
Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling,
it was nigh impossible to watch
the recent Comedy Central
telecast of the Twain award
tribute and not want to upgrade
the cinematic neutron bomb
Superman III, in which Pryor
played a nebbishy computer whiz,
to at least a half-star rating
in movie guides. Even Pryor's
starring turn in the trilogy of
terror that is The Toy, Brewster's
Millions, and See No Evil, Hear
No Evil didn't fully earn him
the fate he's currently
suffering.
But where Pryor has a doctor's
note to excuse the last couple
of decades, other comics who
rose to prominence around the
same time as he did and, like
him, aspired to the rank of
social satirist—or at least a
notch up from Jerry Lewis—are
not so easily forgiven. It's a
world gone mad: a world in
which the phrase "presidential
seal" has become a Three's
Company-level double entendre, a
world in which ultra endomorph
Representative Henry Hyde could ever have
gotten married let alone laid by
a woman not his wife, a world in
which people are recklessly
partying like it's 1999. Well,
somebody ought to pay. And it
might as well be a bunch of
middle-aged clowns who no longer
inspire anything but pity and
its kissing cousin, contempt.
If it is heart-breaking to see
Pryor wheeling around in
electric carts best left to
retirees browsing at Wal-Mart
and prop comics such as
Gallagher, then what sort of
misery does it induce to see
George "Shit Piss Fuck Cunt
Cocksucker Motherfucker Tits"
Carlin slide into
ponytail-wearing senility? Back
in the Pleistocene Era, Carlin
occasionally got a rise out of
audiences with his outraged
attempts at speaking truth to
power. Now, though, after years
of playing straight man to
Thomas the Tank Engine on
Shining Time Station and
starring in a mercifully
short-lived Fox sitcom that
featured fewer punch lines than
a typical episode of When
Animals Attack, Carlin has taken
on an even more important
mission: speaking truth about
long-distance savings. Shit,
piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker,
motherfucker, and tits, indeed.
Carlin and Pryor are not lacking
companions at the Rest Home for
Toothless Old Comics Who in
Retrospect Actually May Never
Have Been Funny. They can while
away the days with the likes of
Cheech & Chong (the former now
playing second banana to Don
Johnson's Nash Bridges; the
latter still doing pot jokes for
ever-dwindling audiences),
Robert Klein (semi-fresh off his
long-running zhlob role on the
mercifully canceled Sisters),
and Lily "One Ringy-Dingy"
Tomlin.
Or they might amble over to the
wing built especially for the
original cast of Saturday Night
Live, the once-upon-a-time
"dangerous" program that
prominently featured both Carlin
and Pryor and has proven to have
a shelf-life longer and more
radioactive than a pound of
plutonium. While John Belushi
and Gilda Radner had the good
timing to shed their mortal
coils before completely
destroying their reputations
(though both tried gamely by
starring in films such as
Continental Divide and Haunted
Honeymoon), the others have not
been so lucky. They survive as
comic Nosferatus, dead but still
with us, haunting late-night
reruns and video remainder bins
across the country. Barring the
infinitesimal chance that the
next sequel to Vacation will
reverse public opinion, Chevy
Chase's comic legacy is his
unintentionally hilarious
attempts at rehab and a
late-night talk show. (It's hard
not to picture the Oh, Heavenly
Dog! star passing most evenings
playing Russian roulette while
tearfully mumbling his SNL
signature line: "I'm Chevy Chase,
and you're not.") Then there's
Dan Aykroyd, who climbed so high
with Ghostbusters only to fall
so far with Blues Brothers 2000 and a
Super Bowl half time appearance
with Jim Belushi and John
Goodman that was the same sort of
spectacle people leave Bosnia to
avoid. Aykroyd's most recent
"project," a sitcom in which he
plays a minister, may still be
airing, but only those among us
with a taste for traffic
accidents would know for sure.
The other regularly employed SNL
original, Third Rock from the
Sun's Jane Curtin, late of Kate
& Allie (a show whose multi-year
run was still not long enough to
establish fully who was Kate and
who was Allie), is simply
marking time until the
International Court of Justice
swears out its arrest warrant.
Here's hoping that the two other
original SNLers, Laraine Newman
and Garrett Morris (Bill Murray
filled the seat vacated by Chevy
Chase), are being treated well
at whatever homeless shelter
they currently call home.
Another early affiliate of SNL,
Steve Martin, has beaten a
slightly different path to the
same dreary destination. The
ex-wild-and-crazy guy, who once
spoke in a stoned manner of
"getting small," devoted album
sides to banjo playing, and made
clever movies such as Dead Men
Don't Wear Plaid and The Man
with Two Brains, has fully
achieved his goal of becoming
Woody Allen West. That is, he's
a "serious" artiste now, having
appeared in a Broadway—yes,
that serious—production of
Waiting for Godot, penned his
own dramedy about Einstein and
Picasso meeting in Paris, and
contributed to The New Yorker,
all without ever once inspiring
laughter, amusement, or
entertainment—or for that
matter, any insight whatsoever
into the existential human
misery to which he has
contributed significantly (Sgt.
Bilko is a surer sign that God
is dead than anything Jean-Paul
Sartre could cook up). In short,
Martin has become every bit as
mummified—and in
clean-and-sober hindsight, every
bit as unfunny—as the King Tut
he once sang about with such
reckless abandon.
Twenty years ago, back in the
days when Richard Pryor still
did recreational drugs, Martin
released a poorly received album
called Comedy Is Not Pretty. It
has taken us this long to
appreciate the fuller truth of
that title, to understand that
however homely these people
might have been back then, they
have aged with all the grace of
a jack-o'-lantern left out on
the porch long past Halloween.
If comedy is not pretty to begin
with, then aging comics,
especially crying-on-the-inside
clowns, are positively ghastly.
For further proof of such a
claim, you need only turn your
gaze to the local multiplex,
where Robin Williams darkens the
night as one of the great screen
villains of all time,
laughter-is-the-best-medicine
advocate Patch Adams. If it has
already been a long, strange
trip from playing Mork from Ork
to an enema bulb-wearing
healer, we can only shudder when
contemplating what comic
ugliness is in store for us in
the 21st century.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.