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Jerry Lewis Needed the Applause

August 20, 2017 in Age Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Film Matters, TV Matters

It’s hard to believe Jerry Lewis is really dead because he survived so many health traumas he seemed indestructible and because he’d been around since Moses so why die now? Normally I’d not comment on his passage beyond that because when you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything. (That voice alone, Jesus!) But it occurs to me that, by allowing himself to be cast as the most odious version of himself in the distinctly avant-garde The King Of Comedy, he not only let some extraordinary talent off the leash (Scorsese, De Niro, Bernhard), he created the prototype for basically half the films and TV shows we see today. Until TKOC, shows based on comics always sweetened their subject up; it’s not like The Dick Van Dyke Show showed raging alcoholic DVD blotto drunk, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show showed MTM spewing the retrogressive garbage she spewed off-camera. Would we have Louie, Seinfeld, The Larry David Show, The Larry Sanders Show, Master Of None, Funny People, Difficult People, 30 Rock–the list of meta comedies about churlish comics is endless–without Jerry Lewis as our sacrificial lamb? For better and worse, the answer is no. As he liked to point out: “He had great success being an idiot.”

‘Don’t Blink’: The Legacy of Dick Gregory

August 20, 2017 in Country Matters, Essays, Past Matters, Spirit Matters

It’s 3 am and I can’t sleep though I usually am dead to the world by 9:30. I keep thinking about Dick Gregory, who gave us so much and lit up even more. I have a theory that public people pass over just when the world most needs to receive the message of their lives. So when figures I deeply admire die, I try to hear what’s being said.

In Mr. Gregory’s case, he had jokes but was not pop culture; he was culture, pure and sharp. Sharp-dressed and sharp-toothed with kind, sad eyes that scarcely blinked when it came to taking it all in. “I’m not a comic; I’m a humorist,” he said, and showed us the difference. With his kindly, kindling wit, he never sang for his supper but cracked on love and hypocrisy, diet and addiction, and, always always, race. He talked about our blood legacy, the generations of backs that refused to break, the greed and loutishness that was as American as apple pie. He was a bridge who assessed the toll already taken. Continue Reading →

Alt Delete

August 16, 2017 in Country Matters, Essays, Past Matters

Today at the coffee shop, the mansplainers who always hold court while I roll my eyes– three left-ish, bearded dudes who’d rather be heard than be just–effortlessly folded the term “alt left” into their discourse. Jesus it all happens so fast. Obstensibly they were using 45’s latest malapropism to blame the actions of the alt right (read: Nazis) on the left, as they so often do. But really these dudes seized this term, jumped on this bandwagon, because it resonated with something fetid in them even here in Brooklyn.

It’s always such mishegos when Northerners act like white supremacy is relegated to the South. With the men in this story, I resorted to mockery. If people are laughing at not with such types, it does embarrass them into watching their words; their brand may be nonconformity but they’re self-conscious conformists at heart. But this worked only because of context. There, I had enough social capital to be the bullies’ bully. G-d knows this is not always the case in these alleged united states.

My family is small on my dad’s side because we were Polish Jews and everyone knows how few of us survived World War II. Those of us who could fled to America and thus inherited its complex story of liberty and oppression. Today the past is so painfully present. After all, Hitler didn’t create the third reich in a vaccuum. He tapped into an evil already lurking–an ugly entitlement rotting at the core. Nothing untreated ever heals.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy