“Is This S**T for Real?” Adorno, Benjamin, and Anti-Comedy Dennis Golin

“Is This S**t For Real?” Adorno, Benjamin, and Anti-Comedy Dennis Golin German cultural theorists Walter Benjamin and Teodore Adorno were outspoken in lamenting the industrially-churned sameness produced by the culture industry, yet both men also saw the power of truly authentic work to deliver moments of introspection (or, as is often the case in modern art, to highlight the absence of them). Te visual technologies of the twentieth century have the power to lull us into submission, but also to politically energize mass audiences through propagating absurdity, imperfection, and confrontation. According to Benjamin’s theories, flm may even have the power to form a window into the unconscious. Te philosophy sustained and elucidated by these two men has had a profound infuence on modern American comedy, particularly in the work of comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. Troughout their oeuvre of surreal comedy sketches, Tim and Eric take up the complex themes of alienation, greed, inadequacy, and a Freudian obsession with paternity (and by extension patriarchy), and feed them roughly through the meat grinder of lowbrow comedy. Te result embraces the derivative, the faulty, and the profane, creating authenticity by pointing out the hopelessness in trying to achieve it. In the process, their comedy expands our sensibilities and sensory vocabularies, challenges our relationships to reality, and redefnes the scope of artistic expression. Dennis Golin is pursuing his Master's Degree in Media, Culture, and Communications at New York University. A lifelong resident of the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, his research interests include alternative comedy, Public Access Television, the Cold War, and social media manipulation. Feel free to send comments and weird internet videos to [email protected]. gnovis • 3 Volume 18, Issue 2 • Spring 2018 et me remark, by the way, that there Today, Kaufman’s unique performances on is no better starting point for thought stage and in life, which include reading than laughter; speaking more precisely, pages of Te Great Gatsby in a British spasms of the diaphragm generally ofer better accent (“Andy Kaufman Reads Te Great Lchances for thought than spasms of the soul. Gatsby” [1978] 2016), eating a bowl of ice (Benjamin [1966] 2003, 101) cream while canned applause comes out of a cassette player (“Andy Kaufman - Eating Ice On a 1975 episode of the comedy program Cream” 2007), or “forgetting” the rest of his Saturday Night Live, a strange looking act—his staccato cries of anguish gradually man named Andy Kaufman applied a morphing into a bongo-infused scat—fall phonograph needle to a vinyl record and within a genre often dubbed “metacomedy” stood in silence. A scratchy recording of or “anti-comedy.” It’s a term that can an old cartoon theme song began to play as Kaufman continued to stand still with a further be applied to some of Kaufman’s kind of dazed look about him. Te audience contemporaries like Michael O’Donoghue, chuckled nervously. Ten, at the crucial progenitors like Ernie Kovacs, and moment of the song – “Here I come to save successors like Eric Andre. Cultural theorist the day!” – Kaufman broke the tension and Philip Auslander defned it as “a practice boisterously mimed along, returning to his focused on the vulnerabilities and potential awkward silence at the line’s completion. ‘failures’ of public performance… comedy A few seconds later, he almost jumped that is explicitly about the art of comedy in early, missing his cue, but collected itself, a foregrounding of its expectations, his bearings and hit his mark with gusto conventions, and execution” (Sconce 2013, when it returned (“Mighty Mouse - Andy 75). Whereas dry traditional humor, Kaufman” [1975] 2014). Te audience in according to philosopher Simon Critchley, the studio seemed to enjoy it, but perhaps is “a consequence of city life, maybe even of without knowing quite why. Audiences at metropolitan life… what civilized people home heard the confused but enthusiastic do, share, have in common” (Dillon & reception and were largely left questioning Critchley 2005), anti-comedy elevates the the reality and the meaning of what had just provincial, the unpleasant or disturbing, and occurred: “Was this meant to be ‘funny’ or the unfamiliar (it is worth remembering ‘not funny,’ or was it funny precisely because that Kaufman’s most successful character it wasn’t actually all that funny?” (Sconce was named “Foreign Man”)—to fnd 2013, 75). Trough the subtlest of acts, a comedy in the uncommon and to experience long tradition of narrative and, therefore, humanizing laughter rather than fear when didactic comedy, had been upended and assigned an almost dialectical character, faced with the idea of the Other. In keeping joining other art forms and genres in the with the iconoclastic spirit of Adorno and post-modernist mode of expression. Much Benjamin, it eschews conventional delivery like the spectator of Dada and Surrealist and subject matter by heightening just how art, the reader of French Symbolist poetry, vapid those conventions can be. It also speaks the listener of a Minimalist musical piece to the grouping of the comedic avant-garde by John Cage, or the viewer of a Beckett of 2018, as the most notable of Kaufman’s play, the comedy audience member was now heirs are a prolifc duo from Philadelphia given interpretative agency and was elevated with a predilection for the grotesque—Tim to the status of co-star. Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. 4 • gnovisjournal.org "Is This Sh*t For Real?" Since 2004, Tim and Eric have created he dubbed “epic theatre” which employed a number of shows that have aired on unconventional methods to destroy the the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim illusion of straightforward representation: programming block. Te most infuential “Actors spoke as if they were reciting of these, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, someone else’s words; they went in and Great Job! has been described as “like out of character on stage; scenes formed a outtakes from a public-access channel that’s discontinuous montage, and were, at times, broadcast only in hell… full of shoddily frozen into a tableau vivant” (Ezcurra 2012). produced, sloppily edited talk shows Adorno seemed to dislike it, claiming, about acne and commercials for utterly “Brecht distrusts aesthetic individuation as unnecessary gadgets, and populated by an ideology. Tis is why he wants to turn people who should never stand within 50 the gruesomeness of society into a theatrical feet of a camera lens” (Itzkof 2008). While phenomenon by dragging it out into the slyly skewering the consumerism of late open” (1991, 82). Benjamin, on the other capitalism through their “CINCO” brand’s hand, was entranced by the possibilities infomercials (“Every Cinco Product Ever of this form “to alienate the audience in a | Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great lasting manner, through thought, from the Job!” 2017) and the shadowy “Channel 5” conditions in which it lives” (2003, 101). it controls, the very look and feel of their Te weirdness of modern anti-comedy can show experiments with perception itself, trace its history to this principle. Tim and playing with Walter Benjamin’s convention Eric frequently use non-professional actors, that “the audience’s identifcation with degraded video, and abrupt edits to break the actor is really an identifcation with through the artifce of conventional sketch the camera” (Benjamin 1969, 230). As premises. As Eric Wareheim told the New comedian Scott Aukerman recalled, “Tey York Times, “It added to the mystery. It makes were using editing and sound efects in a people think: Is this real? Is this acting or way I had never seen” (Zinoman 2017). not? Tat’s exciting to us” (Zinoman 2017). Tese efects usually include a crescendo of Benjamin was strongly in favor of such gurgles, static, lip smacking, and still frames trickery, recalling how “Brecht talks about that always seem to get stuck on the most epic theatre, and mentions plays acted by unfattering pose. Certainly, a casual TV children in which faults of performance, watcher who came across one of their early operating as alienation efects, impart epic episodes found himself in the same position characteristics to the production. Something as that SNL audience 40 years ago, asking, similar may occur in third-rate provincial “Are these people for real?” Te line between theatre” (2003, 115). art and reality wasn’t just blurred, it was smeared. Obviously, a well-funded show on a national cable network is not “third-rate Another duo, the critical theorists Teodore provincial theater” by any means. Just Adorno and Walter Benjamin, were because the aesthetic of the program takes themselves no strangers to the cutting on a provocative quality doesn’t mean it edge. Playwright Bertolt Brecht was a is not in service to what Adorno called friend to both men, having spent time with “nothing but business as an ideology to Benjamin in Sweden as exiles and in Los legitimize the trash they intentionally Angeles with Adorno. Beginning in the produce” (Horkheimer & Adorno 2006, 1920s, Brecht created a theatrical technique 42). Indeed, the very editing style that Tim gnovis • 5 Volume 18, Issue 2 • Spring 2018 and Eric (along with their longtime editor incomprehensible—to the lower classes that Doug Lussenhop) pioneered is a feature in art was disconnected from market demands many advertisements, some of which are and was thus more “pure.” To put it plainly, directed by Tim and Eric themselves (Tim “as long as it was expensive, art kept the & Eric 2014). Benjamin and Adorno would citizen within some bounds. Tat is now likely be skeptical that someone ensconced over” (ibid., 67). within the capitalist mode of production could efectively critique it. However, Tim Likewise, Benjamin sees even the most and Eric were given complete creative challenging works as having their origins control by Adult Swim, something of a in bourgeois circles: “Te extravagances rarity in Adorno and Benjamin’s day of and crudities of art which thus appear, studio systems in the 1930s and 1940s.

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