Roger O Green

Is ‘laugh resistance’ against the regime funny?

Pottersville is our reality.

Recently, writer Mark Evanier made this suggestion after that Saturday Night Live sketch that set him off, the It’s a Wonderful Life “remake” —which “wasn’t even the harshest thing they’ve done about him.

“The cold open I’d like to see them do would go something like this: They’d have an Oval Office setting and they’d trot out all the usual players… — and right in the middle of it, Alec Baldwin stops in mid-sentence, everyone on stage freezes and Baldwin breaks character…

“He pulls off the wig, turns to everyone and says, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore. This man is no longer a clown to make fun of. This man is doing so much damage to the country I love and causing so much anxiety and pain among the poor and the non-white that I can’t make fun of his hair anymore. This is much more serious than that.’

“He walks off, the other cast members look at each other to ask ‘What do we do now?’ And then they all realize he’s right and they start pulling off their wigs and appliances and in unison, they tell the camera, ‘Live from New York…’ etc., and the show proceeds with no more Trump imitations. Until he’s no longer a threat.”

Larry Wilmore

Evanier’s not wrong. The trick here for me is that it has already been done, three years ago. The Nightly Show, starring Larry Gilmore, which followed The Daily Show on Comedy Central, did this skit in December 2015.

In case you can’t see it in your country, actors Mike Yard and Ricky Velez each start doing a piece mocking Trump and then quit mid-skit, suggesting that the guy isn’t funny. Gilmore is initial “surprised” but then agrees that his cast is absolutely right. Unfortunately, The Nightly Show was canceled a few months later.

This is why the comic shows I watch that skewer Trump are, for my money, only purportedly funny. I’m not laughing ha-ha, only at the absurdity of the situation. If he’s upset when “idiot” is trending on Google, the humor factor is mitigated by the noise of him and his sycophants. As Ken Levine noted, “‘Pottersville’ – named after the evil businessman Mr. Potter – is our reality. The nightmare has come true.”

I think most of the late-night shows are “a sort of ‘laugh resistance'” against the regime. This IS quite useful and informative, especially from Seth Meyers, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and John Oliver. But some of them – Stephen Colbert being prime among them – I agree with philosophically yet I find usually unwatchable.

Variety suggests that the trick for the late-night hosts “is to make sure their content is fueled mostly by humor.” That is a fine line to track – be both funny and relevant.

John Belushi would have turned 70

Saturday Night Live was the platform from which John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd launched the Blues Brothers.

John Belushi.Rolling Stone Since John Belushi (January 24, 1949 – March 5, 1982) was only 33 when he died, he’s been gone longer than he was alive.

I watched Saturday Night Live religiously for the first quarter century. While that original cast was quite gifted, I’ve always balked at the notion that that all the subsequent groups were inadequate by comparison.

It’s unsurprising that Jane Curtin recently talked about sexism at SNL. “‘There were a few people that just out-and-out believe that women should not have been there and they believe that women were not innately funny,’ said the first female anchor of SNL’s ‘Weekend Update’ segment.” And one of those was Belushi.

Nevertheless, in lists of the greatest cast members of all time, Ranker has John Belushi at #3 and Rolling Stone dubbed him #1. “‘Samurai Hitman,’ where Belushi proves he doesn’t need words — just a robe and a sword — to turn a one-joke premise into a savage comic ballet.” He did a great Henry Kissinger, and the Greek owner of the Olympia Café always fascinated me.

SNL was also the platform from which Belushi and Dan Aykroyd launched the Blues Brothers. I suppose I was nervous about their sincerity – I didn’t know at the time that Aykroyd had played with a blues band in Canada – but having such luminaries as guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn from Booker T and the M.G.’s well as Matt “Guitar” Murphy, gave me comfort.

I was pleased when I bought the four-CD set Atlantic Blues in the 1990s and found Hey Bartender by Floyd Dixon and I Don’t Know by Willie Mabon. The Blues Brothers’ covers were surprisingly credible, I discovered.. Now the Blues Brothers MOVIE (1980) was loud and messy and pretty much critic-proof. And it had Aretha, Ray Charles sand Cab Calloway.

Belushi’s previous film, National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) practically invented the raunchy college comedy. What it lacked in script – “food fight!” – it more than made up with energy and panache and a great Elmer Bernstein score. It was wildly successful, and generated spinoffs on all three TV networks, none of which lasted more than a few months.

Animal House was endlessly quotable – “double secret probation.” But never more when Bluto Blutarsky (Belushi) gave the Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? speech.

The other John Belushi movie I saw was Continental Divide (1981), with him playing a tough Chicago reporter who “gets a little too close to the Mob.” For his protection, his editor sends him to Colorado to investigate an eagle researcher (Blair Brown).

I remember enjoying the movie, with Belushi playing against type. Though I recall that the reviews were mixed and the box office tepid, Roger Ebert liked it.

There’s often a desire to play “what if” when performers die tragically young. But it’s a futile task.

Reverend Bob Lamar (1922-2019)

Bob Lamar had become the senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Albany in 1958, and served in that capacity until 1992.

Long before I started attending First Presbyterian Church in Albany in 2000, I knew Bob Lamar. My previous church, Trinity United Methodist, only two blocks away, was part of something called the FOCUS churches. FOCUS was where faith communities of different backgrounds (initially Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist) worked together to create a food pantry and other needed functions. Bob Lamar was instrumental in bring that about.

Periodically, there would be joint FOCUS services, so I got to sing at First Presbyterian, my current church, and see the then-current pastor, Reverend Lamar. I wouldn’t know for another decade and a half why he was so interested in the folks in the other choirs. It was that he himself had a beautiful singing voice – I saw him perform with his old quartet when he was in his eighties, and he sounded quite good – and had other musical talents as well.

His oldest son Paul is quoted in a news article that his father “knew from when he was a teenager he wanted to go into the ministry.” Robert Clayton Lamar graduated from Yale University (1943) and Yale Divinity School (1946).

After a stint in a Connecticut church, Bob had become the senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Albany in 1958, and served in that capacity until 1992. He was instrumental in developing an interfaith community in the Capital District with then-Bishop Howard Hubbard of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany and the late Rabbi Martin Silverman. After leaving the first Pres pulpit, Bob became executive director of the Capital Area Council of Churches. He was a lion in the ecumenical movement, not just locally but nationwide.

A bit of his history I only discovered recently is that Bob Lamar rose to become moderator of the United Presbyterian Church in 1974. He was co-chair of of the Joint Committee on Presbyterian Reunion from 1969-83 that resulted in the unification of the southern and northern branches of the church. Being a Methodist, I knew that denomination had its own racial and geographic skeletons before the United Methodist Church was created in 1968.

He was always very active in social justice concerns, both locally and nationally. He served as an officer and/or board member for a slew of organizations way too numerous to mention here. So he had a lot of amount of gravitas by the time I was attending First Pres.

But I never found pompous or self-absorbed. He was genuinely interested in what others had to say, even this former Methodist. As his obituary read, he had “lived a life of faith, gratitude and grace.” I’m pleased to be part of the choir honoring him on January 25 at 11 a.m. at FPC.

Calendar faux meme – “every 823 years”

The year 2100 is NOT a leap year.

Several people I know IRL, intelligent people, have said they got a text or saw a Facebook message. It reads, e.g. “The month of December 2018 will have 5 Saturdays, 5 Sundays, and 5 Mondays. It only happens once every 823 years.”

When I first saw this meme a half decade or more ago, I knew instantly that it had to be untrue. The reason was that, as a kid, I devoured the World Almanac every year.

About a third of the way through was the calendar section, and it indicated that there were only 14 ways a calendar year could be constructed. January 1 starts on one of the seven days; it’s a leap year or it’s not. Seven times two is fourteen.

In a non-leap year, if January 1 is on a Sunday, we had experienced that same pattern in 2006, 2017 and will again in 2023. Calendars repeat. 2018 looks just like 2007; 2029 and 2035 will be carbon copies.

(I’m talking calendar days, not moving holidays such as Easter or Yom Kippur.)

In general, a calendar will repeat every six or eleven years, depending on whether it hits one or two leap years in between. So 2002 is the model for 2013, 2019, 2030, 2041, 2047, et al.

Even leap years repeat, obviously less frequently. The calendars for 1992, 2020 and 2048 are the same.

One way to prove that the specific meme is a myth is to go to Time and Date for “When is Saturday the 1st?” Eliminating the months with less than 31 days:
May 2010; January 2011; October 2011; December 2012; March 2014; August 2015; October 2016; July 2017; December 2018; August 2020.

Basically I look at the perpetual calendar for 1801 to 2100 and see the repeating patterns.

Note, BTW, the year 2100 is NOT a leap year. “Any year evenly divisible by four is a leap year, except centesimal years (years ending in two zeros) which are considered common years and thus have the typical 365 days, unless they are evenly divisible by 400. Therefore, 1600 and 2000 are leap years, while 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2100 are not.”

For ABC Wednesday

Movie review: The Favourite (2018)

The acting in the Favourite by Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone was excellent.

The Favourite Yorgos Lanthimos — Weisz, Stone, Colman

Unless you’re paying close attention to movie releases, it may have been confusing to see two costume dramas released about the same time frame. One was The Favourite, set in the early 18th century with England is at war with the French, and Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is unwell. The other was Mary, Queen of Scots, with the titular character (Saoirse Ronan) struggling to regain the English throne against Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie).

My wife and I opted for the former at The Spectrum in Albany because it fared better with the critics (94% positive) than Mary (62% positive). Moreover, people whose opinions I value also liked it.

The Favourite is, I gather, supposed to be comedy posing as a historical drama with a touch of palace intrigue. The humor (humour?) presumably was supposed to come from these British historical figures who one would think would be stuffy and reserved. Instead, they’re bawdy and crude. The concept I think is a valid one.

It didn’t work for me. Perhaps the film was just too weird. I didn’t laugh very much, though the disco dancing – seriously – was entertaining. The ending had several of us in the theater after the lights came up discussing it with WTH bemusement. The revenge of the bunnies?

This is is not to say that it was without merit. The acting, by Colman; Rachel Weisz as aide de camp Lady Sarah, who often acted as head of state; and Emma Stone as Sarah’s cousin Abigail, who had fallen on hard times and finesses her way into the Queen’s good graces, was excellent. The class struggle narrative was interesting, though it fell apart. My wife noted, correctly, that Weisz is “a very handsome woman,” and Rachel and I share a birthday.

I wish I had seen The Lobster (2015), which Yorgos Lanthimos not only directed but also co-wrote. I recall that most people either loved or hated it. It also featured Weisz, and in a small role, Colman.

The Favourite is going to get all sorts of technical nominations, maybe for cinematography, costume design and other categories. My wife mused that it was a movie for which we were somehow not privy to the code. I don’t regret seeing it, but I shan’t watch it again.