Loss as material
While doing dishes tonight, Seinfeld plays in the background like ambient sound. I know the words to practically every episode at this point. I've always been a person who pays attention to words and what people say, and Seinfeld is a language show. Not situation comedy but the situation(s) of language and the language of situations. I think about what Jerry Seinfeld said to Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais, and Louis C.K. about his comedy in HBO’s Talking Funny (Talking Funny could easily be another name for Seinfeld). About why his stand-up is “clean;” how he crafts and constructs distant and reflexive meaning and humor. And I think, Louis C.K. could never have been a 90s zeitgeist comic. Why C.K. is the comedian for and of now—the 21st C. The 90s were still about repression, distance, evasion, and discomfort—not talking about things as a way of talking about them—while C.K. is all about self-degradation, humiliation (something George Costanza, Larry David’s alter ego, catalyzed and took to a whole new level), and shamelessness as shame. Being shameless about shame (After all, C.K. even has an HBO comedy special called Shameless). Lena Dunham has a similar approach with Girls. You are apparently only as funny, smart, talented, desirable, successful, or feminist as you are willing to be humiliated or chronicle your humiliation. This is the way most mass entertainment and art functions now. This is also our current form of truth and honesty. "Failure used to be unthinkable; now it's almost a point of pride. Today, people are failing bigger, failing better, and living to profit from it: how did this happen?," asks Kaitlin Fontana in her article "How We All Became Failures." "We’ve always failed," Fontana goes on to write, "and yet contemporary humans celebrate our smudge-like, failure-ridden lives with relentless bravado, on social media, aloud, on television. We’re all ugly, boring, screaming maiden aunts at a wedding running for the bouquet, falling in the cake; we stumble and fall ad infinitum, but we now perceive those stumbles differently—we have forgotten to be embarrassed by them. The very culture around failure is changing… Humans once placed a great premium on success (read: not admitting to failure)." What is the line between a healthy admittance to and exploration of failure and shame—particularly the relation between failure and success—and our desire to disclose and depict every shitty thing we think, feel, and do? Shamelessness is not inherently or automatically transgressive, yet the only solution or alternative to shame (and repression) that we seem capable of is shamelessness, as though there is nothing in between. For me, Louie is the most interesting stage of C.K.’s comedy because it is mediated, punctuated, and deepened by fiction and broader influences, both personal and cultural. C.K.’s stand-up, especially pre-divorce, was often cocky, macho, and crude. Before his divorce, C.K. was mostly just a talented frat boy whose life view was lacking in empathy, humility, pathos, nuance, and self-reflection. But loss and sadness changed that. In fact, loss is, in many ways, the best thing that ever happened to C.K.’s comedy. In despair, C.K. finally found his humor and his voice. Having said that, so-called transgression—both artistic and commercial—has hit a wall with showing all, or what I call abject identification. This new style/model/approach is not inherently more progressive or honest. Most of the time it isn’t either. Rather, what is at work is an exteriorization and expulsion of repression and experience. Shamelessness becomes a defensive stance. If you shame yourself, no one else can. Moreover, there is a sense that shame and experience exist only (and are only meaningful) to be theatricalized, commodified, performed, narrated, spectacalized. What we have is a rearrangement of inside/outside. Into inside-out.