My parents shared their favorites- Animal House, Monty Python, Mel Brooks-and were disinclined to censor anything they found funny. And at some point, you’re exposed to Sophisticated Humor, some of which you will like, regardless of whether you understand it. Childhood laughter is provoked by words and rhymes and books and movies. A baby will throw their head back and cackle over the goofy face you’re making-it’s literally the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. What’s more, hit comedy can be highly topical, a feature at odds with longevity.Īnd then there’s the way an individual’s innate sense of humor grows and changes over a lifetime. Standards of speech and behavior change, with contradictory effects: What once was mainstream becomes unacceptable, and what had been provocative is now tame (these days you can say practically all of George Carlin’s seven words on television). While some comic texts endure for centuries, the mode is typically so specific to its era-either because of what it critiques or how it delivers-as to become irrelevant, offensive, or incomprehensible with the passage of time. When he died, I hadn’t yet learned how to grieve.Ĭomedy only occasionally ages well. On my rush out of childhood, I loved Chris Farley instinctively. His comedy was broad-pratfalls and manic energy-not far off from The Three Stooges shorts my dad showed me when I was a little kid. While our parents remembered the Belushi era, the early- to mid-’90s cast was our cast, and Farley was its twinkling star. For years, my brother and I had been staying up late enough to watch SNL, and it’s hard to know where to delineate our enjoyment between the humor itself and the thrill of knowing we were watching something that wasn’t for kids. The truth, though, was that I had loved Farley with an ardent and adolescent passion. When Chris Farley died, my parents shook their heads and said, “Just like Belushi,” and I repeated this pronouncement in the sixth-grade cafeteria, as if I or any of my friends knew what the hell I was talking about. Farley had idolized Belushi, even while recognizing the signposts as he traversed the same path. The connection between Farley and Belushi is acute and tragic: Belushi was part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live, the show that launched Farley’s career, and both died at age thirty-three by overdosing on speedball. John Candy had met the same fate three years earlier, but the seminal example was John Belushi, whose performance as Bluto in Animal House was canon in my comedy-loving family. I was familiar with this narrative: a brilliant but troubled comic actor, unable to navigate success and straining his body with drug and alcohol abuse, gone too soon. “It’s shocking, but not surprising,” I knew to say, with an air of studied detachment. When Chris Farley died in 1997, I was twelve and somehow already blasé.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |