CSotD: Doing bad taste well
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Francesco Marciuliano is at his best this time of year, when his penchant for incisive bad taste becomes a delightful antidote to the cloying sentimental dreck that, really, is equally bad taste only more cynically applied.
And Medium Large, his almost-always-funny blog, is currently featuring a riff on the Peanuts Christmas specials that was originally posted with an invitation to follow along as he live-tweeted along with the TV.
That precious moment has passed, but the above strip and several others remain on the site as an enchanting vision of what Christmas could be if we all went off our meds at once.
I say "almost-always-funny blog" with no intention of offense, because Ces tries such strange things there that it would be astonishing if they were all successful. But he hits the mark with such frequency that his misses are not simply forgiveable but forgettable, particularly in light of what else is out there.
There's a lot of bad taste around, and most of it isn't very good.
There is an art to bad taste and, as Justice Stewart said of hard-core pornography, it's hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
And, as with porn, the good stuff is good and the stuff that isn't good is depressing, sad and unpleasant to watch.
I think there are three keys to making edgy comedy work:
First, you have to understand your target. It is not for nothing that the Pythons were Oxford and Cambridge grads, or that, before them, the Beyond the Fringe gang was equally well educated.
Not that college is necessary; Of Sid Caesar's legendary writing stable — Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Neil and Danny Simon, Carl Reiner and Mel Tolkin — only Reiner had had more than a cup of coffee at college.
But they had the piercing intellects that differentiated them from the crowd and that allowed them to see behind the props and flats that make up society to truly understand its underpinnings. Like demolition experts, they knew where to place the charges.
And to know where to place the charges, you have to have a second element: Empathy with your target, even if it is mixed with rage. Good comedians are furious people. Some cover it well, others not so much, but they all carry wounds and scars and unresolved grudges.
The difference between The Best and the rest in comedy is empathy, the ability to understand and identify with your target.
Not "sympathy." You don't have to like them. You just have to be able to see inside their heads.
The kid who yells "Fat pig!" at his bully does nothing. The kid who draws blood is the kid who understands somehow that "Dumbo ears!" will skewer the one part of his anatomy that the bully is truly sensitive about.
He knows what hurts because he knows what would kill him, if he were that bully, and he's angry enough to disconnect the filter between his brain and his mouth.
The third, of course, is sincerity and originality. Pulling down your pants and leaping around the room may be in bad taste, but it isn't funny. Simply being offensive is not the same as performing "edgy comedy."
If you can't see the difference between the first two seasons of SNL and the most recent, you don't get it.
If you don't realize that Goldie Hawn was, on Laugh-In, a brilliant woman pretending to be a ditz, while Victoria Jackson, on SNL, was just a blonde pretending to be Goldie Hawn, you don't get it.
Medium Large is often in dubious taste, but it's sincere, original bad taste, done with sympathy, even affection, for its targets, and, if it misses from time to time, that's the price you pay for the laughs you get when it hits.
And the misses don't matter. The highlight reel never includes the bricks you threw up.
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