CSotD: Keeping it real, in a comedic sense
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Darrin Bell brings a deft, expert touch to Candorville: He manages to take some of his own experiences and then fictionalize them until they are universal.
The required balancing act is the key to successful fiction, and something that often comes up in the plethora of semi-autobiographical strips that are out there, mostly on the web but also in syndication.
It's a sense of proportion that all storytellers have to develop: If you tell the story the way it actually happened, it is mundane and self-important and nobody wants to read it. But if you exaggerate too much, it just becomes silly and, again, nobody wants to read it.
To some extent, all successful fiction is semi-autobiographical, because all compelling characters are drawn from the author's self. As Stephen Dedalus — himself a more than semi-autobiographical character — says on the topic, "Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."
And occasionally meeting college crushes who have gone on to marry other fellows. Not long after my divorce, I heard through a mutual friend that an old college girlfriend was still single and managed to track her down, which took no small effort in those pre-Internet days.
She was delighted to hear from me after more than a dozen years, and told me all about what she'd been up to, including the news that she was about to get married.
Timing, timing.
In the right hands, such romantic bathos becomes comedy gold.
For stand-ups and comic strip creators, the key to the universalisation of real-life experience is to repeat things we've all done but in a way that imparts a humorous sort of moral to the story. This is what observational comedy — "Did you ever notice?" — is all about.
The trick is to assume the "we've all done that" part in a way that makes the audience assume it alongside you.
So Bill Engvall talks about how his wife uses twist ties to reseal the bread wrapper, while he — "like every other man in America" — simply spins the loaf of bread and tucks the wrapper underneath.
He's drawing a distinction between people who mindlessly follow instructions and those who follow instinct, and, yes, my experience is that women are more likely than men to do it "right" rather than to simply do what seems handy and functional at the moment.
And even as I'm typing those words, I know that isn't true and that the same comedian can get as big a laugh talking about how his wife doesn't operate some piece of machinery — the lawn mower, the car, the computer — in the prescribed way, and, rather than making it seem "manly" to come up with shortcuts, he makes it seem silly and giggly, and suddenly, doing it right becomes the manly thing we all sit there and identify with.
The other approach to the process is to talk about things people in the audience have never done and make it seem to them as if they have.
Carol Leifer would get a laugh with: "Remember the first time you did heroin in front of your parents?"
Her audience would break up over the apparent "inappropriate revelation" about her own life, but there is also a foundation for the joke in memories of trying to keep your parents from smelling cigarette smoke on your breath or coming home from underage drinking and trying to walk through the livingroom to your bedroom without stumbling — which she then ramps up to a ridiculous level.
Candorville is like Engvall's "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" in that Bell identifies a core audience and then tells stories that, while exaggerated, appeal to a shared experience that may be specific or may be aspirational to the group. If we haven't done that, we've been around it and wish we had done it. And if we aren't still young and single, we remember when we were. And if we aren't hip now and weren't hip then, well, let us remember it our way, okay?
Woody Allen's hopeless schlubs make us writhe, because we fear being that inept and uncomfortable. Like shooting heroin in front of our parents, it's not that we've done it, but we can feel how it would multiply the shame of the things we have done.
But we're comfortable identifying with Lemont. He isn't that hopeless. In fact, h'es pretty hip, and he's often clever and insightful, too.
So we get readily sucked into the stupid things he gets himself into.
And the Sasha Mitchell portion of his life is starting to spin further and further out of control as new layers are added.
We've all wanted to reconnect with a love interest that didn't quite pan out but never quite flamed out either.
And, after all, the cooling distance of the Internet makes it seem harmless.
The fact that she's married makes it a bit uncool.
The fact that her husband harbors some jealousy makes it doubly uncool.
And then the caught-you-hiding-in-my-closet layer brings the guffaw.
Lemont has well and truly lost his mind.
I can't wait for the next chapter.
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