I Want You To Be Happy

I want you to be happy. Al Green wants you to be happy. YouTube wants you to be happy. Reverend Al Green’s God wants you to be happy.

Press the button. Be happy.

No Joke

I doubt this clip is all that obscure. The statistics for it says it’s been viewed a quarter of a million times. That’s a lot for YouTube. It was one of those things that appeared when I was looking for something else. It’s funny. But it’s also instructive.

The reason it’s funny is not simple. The reason it’s funny is because it’s not a joke.

Jokes are not really funny. Jokes are a sort of catalog of shared foolishness. They’re a kind of checklist. The laughter at the end is either perfunctory, a roar of a mob with a shared worldview that generally approaches received-knowledge-psychosis, or a nervous reaction to the mildly disconcerting.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be using the word “funny” anyway. It’s “humor” we’re after, and that video has it. Why? Because it’s a story told in a humorous way, not a joke.

It’s much harder to tell a story in a humorous way than to tell a joke. Look at a young Kevin Spacey do two dead-on imitations in that thing, and the other fellow doing Richard Dreyfuss, and picture the amount of time spent watching the subject of the mimicry and then standing in front of the mirror to get it right. It would have been a lot easier to write a sentence or two that relied on R2D2’s height in relation to C3PO’s crotch and be done with it. But you’d just hear that once, titter a little –maybe– and then the thing is dead for long enough to forget the punch line.

There’s a kind of wonder you get from watching the distillation of a handful of absurdities into a little shot of humor, that gives the finished product a kind of half-life a joke never has. Until the people and the subject matter become obscure, you could watch that over and over.

Tell a story in a humorous way. Skip the joke.

(Update: The always culturally astute commenter Ruth Anne has pointed out the “other fellow” is Darrell Hammond.)

The Cobbler’s Children. Er….Wife

I gave my wife a piece of furniture for Christmas. Am I a great guy, or a jerk?

People often remark to my wife that our home must be swimming in fine furniture, since I have a furniture business. A look comes over her face that’s somewhere between bemused, and Where are the big knives?

You see, when you’re running a business, especially one involved in making things, you are not your customers. Your customers generally have more money than you. If you make the mistake, as many contractors do, that the things you see in the houses you build are appropriate for your own life, you can get in a lot of trouble. I’ve seen many such cases.

If I make a piece of furniture and sell it (I do) I get money to buy things. One of those things might be furniture, it’s true. But I’d like for us to be eating twice daily, four and a half days a week before I go splurging on the meubles. I’ll leave it to you to determine why one of the other definitions of meuble is “unstable,” and what that says about me.

Anyhow, when I’m makin’ that copie de meuble ancien, I have to sell it to make the argent. And so my wife does get furniture — rather a lot of it– but there’s a problem.

She gets the whoopsies. She get the prototypes that were a little too proto. She gets the one that I made while the Patriots were on the radio, beating the Steelers in the playoffs —off-tackle at the forty…the forty five… fifty… forty five… one man to beat…
Whoah… the sander!

She never complains much, my wife. I have to figure it out on my own. And so before Christmas, I rationed out a little time from the meager supply left after being the president and the janitor of Sippican Cottage Furniture, and Ernest “Goes To Camp” Hemingway, and somebody’s father, and made her something that isn’t made out of packing crate lumber, or has an odd number of legs, or any other thing that would make it hers normally.

I think she likes it.

I think she likes me.

Not Fat Elvis

You see them at every Tennessee Titans game. Every Vegas shindig. Every Halloween and costume Karaoke. Fat Elvis.

He’s iconic in that iteration. You could draw it from memory unless you’ve been under a rock for thirty years; the white spangled jumpsuit, the prop guitar, the greasy piled up pompadour and the sideburns. Glasses that could stop gamma rays with frames that could stop a sequin bullet–and have. It’s been odd to see that version of Elvis become the default, because I was alive then, watching him on TV in the late sixties and early seventies, sweating gravy and mumbling a handful of lounge numbers while doughy matrons with bad teeth and beehive hairdos in some Vegas audience threw their granny panties at him. He was a joke. A bad joke. And when he finally died, his heart hopping out of his chest after only forty two years, bloated and drugged in his bathroom, I figured he’d go away and stay there. Wrong.

The Fat Elvis costume has become as recognizable as Santa Claus or the Easter bunny. Hell, Uncle Sam. It screams: AMERICA. And not fussy America, or political America, or The New York Times Book Review America, either. He’s strip mall/chrome fin/corn dog/hayseed/ghetto blaster/swimming hole/fried chicken/AM radio/concrete block church/Vegas whore America. He’s the whole damn thing in Jesusland.

But I knew Elvis because I knew rockabilly. And Elvis Presley invented that. He personified that. He was the sun around which Sun records revolved in the fifties. Long before Elvis become the guy that showed up and was Elvis, he was great. Not just great. Important.

I knew those records, right from “That’s All Right.” Scotty Moore’s clean and nimble guitar, Bill Black’s percussive upright bass — it was the most insistent thing I ever heard. Elvis was great, and a good singer, and an important synthesizer of styles. But he was much more than that, long before he became a caricature of himself. He was not a caricature, but a comic book super hero, simultaneously absurd and wonderful. He was vital.

I got Image/SOFA Entertainment’s 3 DVD set of Elvis’ appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, and it’s wonderful. I began watching it thinking it would be a kind of dumb fun — the best kind– but I realized I was watching something else too; something that I never would have seen because I wasn’t alive yet. I saw America and the world’s odometer turn over.

The DVDs are the whole shows. Three of them, from late 1956 into 1957. And it’s fascinating stuff, even the dreck, because it’s the context. It’s the whole America-centered world as it sat– confident, salubrious, muscular, on the go, the engine of the world with the Marshall Plan and Soviet containment carried lightly on its back. First Ed Sullivan assembles it willy-nilly and points a camera at it. Then Ed rolls a grenade in the middle of it.

There’s a long succession of artists and performers you can point to that encapsulate the zeitgeist of their times. Their replacements show up long before they’re ready to leave the spotlight, generally, and they hang around long after they’re hip. They become… well, Fat Elvis. I remember disinctly watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan when I was a child, and I imagine Elvis knew that he was good for broads and booze and pills and Vegas shows and B movies until the day he died, but he wasn’t the lead dog anymore. He knew it because he had done it to others himself.

You watch the luminous black and white TV dubs of the shows, and you’re struck by the encyclopedic nature of the proffered fare. Ed is a newspaperman still, jarring in itself — TV is second fiddle! — and like some bizarre librarian in the school of uncool. He’s the Noah of TV, rounding up a couple of everything, and floating it on the public.

It’s all there, all the things that faced Elvis like a wall to get over: vaudeville acts, European music hall ginks, Broadway singers and ballet dancers, dogs and ponies, lounge singers and clowns, eccentric actors, semi-exotic performers from anyplace that didn’t have the big red boot on their face. If it wasn’t hackneyed enough, there was half a dozen assorted acts straight from the circus; and the circus is entertainment straight from the middle ages.

The artist of the age that superseded the middle ages carved his David, to tell the Doges the world belonged to man. In 1956, our own hillbilly David climbed down off that pedestal and sent his ration of squares to oblivion. You’ve heard so much about Elvis and the frenzy he engendered, but when you see him there, in front of a phalanx of Jordanaires in checked coats, Elvis seems like everything and nothing. You can’t tell if he’s so self assured he’s bulletproof, or so self-conscious he can’t get through the song without laughing at himself. He tosses that impossible shock of a shock of hair, the girls scream, and he laughs — at himself, at them, at the whole damn thing — but he’s as serious as a heart attack about the thing too. He seems to be all glass, like a windowpane, but he’s a deep pool somehow, instead. You don’t know why he’s all that. You wonder if he does.

I pictured the Conn and Mack tap-dancing duo watching Elvis from the wings for a while, and then going out in the alley to find a pay phone and see if their brother-in-law still had a job opening or two at his dry cleaning store.

Get Elvis – The Ed Sullivan Shows, and watch empires crumble into the sea when Elvis twitches.

The Woodpile At Night

You’re out there on the edge of it, you know.

You can smell it of course. The winter’s just a hand on the shoulder, not a fist in the face, and the dull swampy flavor of the place washes over you when the wind shifts. Rotten and fecund. When it freezes over, the wind tastes like metal, or an ice cube that’s been in the freezer too long.

It rustles from time to time. A bird in a branch. A squirrel in the leaves. A possum or a raccoon or a bear or a griffon or a tyrannosaur, for all you know. They never announce themselves.

The good wood clanks when you drop it on the splitting stump. It sounds ceramic. You know it’ll split along the medullary rays in one quick stroke, a few stringy tendrils left to cleave the splits together until they tumble to the hard packed dirt and wait for the stack, the gentle arc of the bark side always up to shed the water that sneaks under the pile cover.

The raptor goes overhead. In the winter the sun is too low in the southern sky to put you noticeably in their shadow. The first you know of them is the shriek they emit, cruising way over the tall pines. No fish today. Something soft and furry that the cat missed.

Come out here at night, with the chilly stars pricked in the slate firmament, the wind abated. Come out to the edge of the forest and fen to the woodpile. That edge has moved with the sunset, and you realize the new edge of the wild was the doorknob. You’re in it now, not at the margin of it.

You can stand there a quiet minute, and all the sound is gone but the blood in your veins. The air is redolent of woodsmoke already, but something else, too. You’re just another beast, without claw or tooth to speak of, and you’re among them. You’re not afraid; you’re attuned to the place your kind once kept in the order of things. You turn back to the path you crushed in the frosted dormant turf, and know the stuff of the cave.