RIP Barry Humphries (1934 – 2023)
Tag Archives: humor
RIP Teun Hocks (1947 – 2022)
RIP Wim de Bie (1939 – 2023)
RIP Joe Frank (1938 – 2018)
This happened two years ago but I only found out today.
Also, I had never heard of Joe Frank.
Today, I googled for Ken Nordine and ASMR (one of my guilty pleasures) and I found Joe Frank.
I listened and liked immediately and immensely. Frank is an absolute genius.
Up there in absurdity with the likes of Roland Topor.
Joe Frank was a French-born American writer radio performer known for his philosophical, humorous, surrealist, and absurd monologues and radio dramas, says Wikipedia.
Typical radio dramas include “Bad Karma” (2000) and “That Night” (1994).
“Bad Karma” opens with:
“I’m sitting at a dinner party attended by Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Seated at another smaller table are Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, Pinochet and some others I don’t recognize. And then there’s a third table, sort of a children’s table, it has shorter legs and smaller children’s chairs. And sitting there are Richard Speck, Gary Gilmore, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson.”
Synopsis from “That Night”:
“Joe’s uncle drowns while fishing a week after retiring, urban animal criminals, voyeur complains about a nude woman, sex with nuns in a limo, an elderly marching band and homecoming parade has been lost for 40 years and is being chased by homecoming queen’s fiance, creating life-size maps, to Jesus: why is there so much suffering, we’re on the edge of chaos, it’s great to feel a part of nature monologue with traffic background, monologue on sleep (repeated in other programs).” [3]
“That Night” also mentions maps on a 1:1 scale, just as Borges did in his one-paragraph story “On Exactitude in Science”.
RIP Gahan Wilson (1930 – 2019)
In the United States, Gahan Wilson died. I saw his death announced on the Facebook page of Tim Lucas.
Gahan Wilson was an American author, cartoonist and illustrator.
I was unacquainted with the work of Wilson. Dave Letterman introduced him in the 1980s as the “guru of gruesome, wizard of the weird and the Michelangelo of the macabre.”
Me being European, Wilson reminds me of Tomi Ungerer (1931- 2019) or Roland Topor (1938-1997) and perhaps more of Topor, since like Topor, Wilson was not political.
Wilson is regarded as the only heir of Charles Addams (1912-1988) and often mentioned in one breath with Edward Gorey (1925-2000) .
The epithet ‘sick humor‘ sometimes pops up, although I have to disagree on this one, as, as a European, I am used to Hara Kiri, most likely the epitome of 20th century sick humor.
Since I found out about his death, I watched the “The Waitress” episode of The Kid (2001) and Wilson’s appearance at David Letterman’s (March 30, 1982) when he published Is Nothing Sacred?. I also listened to a reading of the wonderful story “The Sea was Wet as Wet Could Be” (1967).
His cartoon “I am an insane eye doctor and I am going to kill you now…” is frequently cited as of his best work. In it, a non-suspecting man reading an optometrist’s ‘eye examination’ with the text cited is approached from behind by a knife wielding optometrist.
There are body horror elements in his work and the cartoon “Harry, I really think you ought to go to the doctor.”, in which Harry is a regular man with the head of a prawn, is positively Lovecraftian.
RIP Henry Jacobs (1924 – 2015)
Via the death of Ken Nordine I find out that Henry Jacobs died.
Henry Jacobs was an American sound artist and humorist, known for the radio program Music and Folklore, the TV program The Fine Art of Goofing Off (1971–1972) and compositions such as “Sonata For Loudspeakers” (1955).
He also invented the fictional characters Sixt Von Arnim, Sholem Stein and Shorty Petterstein.
Of these three, Sholem Stein is my favorite. I used him as a mystification in my book on the history of erotica in which I put the following words into his mouth:
“Man reveals his true nature in his fears and desires. Show me what he is afraid of, show me what excites him, I will tell you who he is.”
I use Sholem Stein off and on nowadays, I usually have him cite dicta I don’t know who to ascribe to.
RIP Ken Nordine (1920 – 2019)
Ken Nordine (1920 – 2019) was an American voice artist, best known for his series of spoken word jazz poetry albums, the first of which was Word Jazz (1957).
He also recorded a version of Balzac’s risque story “A Passion in the Desert” (1955).
There’s the ball! There’s the ball!
More philosophers in film, Monty Python’s The Philosophers’ Football Match (1972).
Brilliant.
‘The Way Things Go’ is World Art Classic #463
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RProlO-KvKw
The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli & David Weiss is World Art Classic #463.
Peter Fischli & David Weiss’s work is unclassifiable. Which is a good thing. Yet despite this quality of being genre-defying, their work is defined by playfulness and humor absent from 90% of contemporary art.
I rather enjoy wit and humor in art.
The absence thereof, seriousness, is, in my view, one of the faultlines in 20th century art. Modernism, for example, was reigned by a detrimental “cult of seriousness”.
I first realized my predilection for humor in art somewhere around 2006, when I saw the painting ‘Man weeping, his tears form a waterfall‘.
The humor of Peter Fischli & David Weiss reminds me obliquely of that of The Chapman Brothers, minus the Chapman’s fondness for painfullness.
I’ve recently canonized Fischli and Weiss.
As I said in the title of this post, The Way Things Go is ‘World Art Classic’ #463. Its alphabetical neighbors are The Unswept Floor, a second century AD mosaic and The Witch by Salvator Rosa.
Finding Nemo
Illustration: Little Nemo sitting upright in bed
When we were children, there was a joke about three boys sitting in a boat. One was called biteme, another one pinchme and a third hitme.
Hitme fell out of the boat. Who remained in the boat?
You can guess what happened next.
In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin describes a somewhat similar word game.
A 13th century medieval monk searched all biblical and patristic texts for sentences containing the word nemo, Latin for nobody.
He then interpreted phrases such as “nemo deum vidit” (“Nobody has seen God”), along with many other references to nobody, to mean that Nemo referred to a proper noun and thus was a certain person and that the phrase actually meant “Saint Nobody has seen God”.
That text, known as the “History of Nemo“, is now lost, but its story is not and it is easy to see why it so fascinated medieval everyman.
Bakhtin remarks: “everything impossible, inadmissible, inaccessible is, on the contrary, permitted for Nemo. Thanks to this transposition, Nemo acquires the majestic aspect of a being almost equal to God, endowed with unique, exceptional powers, knowledge (he knows that which no one else knows), and extraordinary freedom (he is allowed that which nobody is permitted.)”
I am reminded of another childhood memory. I have younger brother who is called Joost. There is a Dutch expression which says “Joost mag het weten,” (literally “Joost is allowed to know [it]”) meaning “heaven knows” or “God knows” (nobody knows).
When we were children, many people used to say jokingly to my brother “Joost mag het weten.”
One day — apparently fearing that some big secret was being kept from me — I asked my mother. “Mother, when am I allowed to know it?”
PS 1. If you like these word games, I recently posted on the medieval nonsense word blituri[1].
PS 2. Nobody is also a subcategory of the void and a sister category of nothing. I recently mentioned the void [2].