Noir in Orange at the New York Times: I’d always rather read a newspaper that I hold in my hands, but sometimes I really love the features the Times rolls out that only tend to work online. One of my favorites went up today on the big orange cones that stick up out of New York City streets and “plumes of hot vapor [that] are as closely linked to the city as yellow taxis, the subway and 24-hour bodegas” they puff out. The reason? An antiquated underground steam system, of course. My guess is that it would probably be better if we didn’t need those big suckers that stick ten feet into the air, but then it would just be another very New York City thing we wouldn’t have any longer. That’s the trade-off you have to make living in the city: do you like the way they look or would you rather things function? Personally? I see those things and I think of After Hours or a dozen noirs and 1980s erotic thrillers and I can’t help but smile because those big plastic tubes are still jutting out from the ground. But, then again, I do everything in my power not to drive in Manhattan. Maybe if that wasn’t the case then I wouldn’t love the damn things so much.
I’ve been thinking a lot about humor this week. I don’t really think too much about what is or isn’t funny or what humor means, but I have been thinking a lot about how living in the most unfunny time is starting to really get me to turn to the classics more and more instead of engaging with anything presented as modern “humor.” I was thinking about it after seeing Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which I enjoyed. It was a fun film, but it wasn’t funny. I was thinking about how it’s very likely that I’m not the intended audience for the new version of the franchise, but given the fact that the audience at the theater was about 60 percent over 35, I’m wondering if the writers didn’t take into account that part of the thing that made the original Ghostbusters so great was that it was hilarious in a very post-National Lampoons way. It was irreverent and it championed the little guy vs. big bureaucracy, but it was also Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd refining the work they’d done at the famously offensive magazine that ended up also leading into the first few years of Saturday Night Live. Take the scene where Bill Murray tells the mayor that the guy from the EPA, “this man has no dick.” It is perfect and really harmless in the grand scheme of things, but I don’t think that it wouldn’t make it into a film hoping for blockbuster status today. There was funny stuff in the new Ghostbusters, but there weren’t any especially funny lines I could think of. I found the Murray line hilarious when I was 5, and I believe if you showed the kid version of me the new film in the franchise, I probably wouldn’t laugh as hard at any of the lines in it as Murray’s quip.
All that is to say that there’s a real tightness around what we think we can and can’t say. I know that’s been talked about a thousand times before by a thousand other people with newsletters, and I’m not going to bring anything new or smart to the conversation. What I am going to say is that when I got home from seeing Frozen Empire, I looked at a Times article that had been published a week or so earlier on the “22 of the Funniest Novels Since Catch-22” with the subhead “Because we could all use a laugh.” The list is filled with great books, a few I consider all-time favorites of mine including Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, and Portnoy’s Complaint. But the whole “Since Catch-22” thing was what got me thinking. Heller’s book came out in 1961, and I don’t know if that’s the spark that lit the fuse, but over the rest of the decade, you saw the emergence of writers like Thomas Pynchon, Stanley Elkin, Bruce Jay Friedman, and eventually Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, etc. To me, those are some of the funniest American fiction writers of the last century, and alongside their ascent, comedy also evolved, whether you’re talking standup, improv, or screenplay writing, people started pushing boundaries more.
Who knows if that will be the case this time, but I think we often greatly underestimate the impact that humorous literature can have on the larger culture. Take some of the funniest movies of the 1930s, some of Groucho Marx’s best lines in films like Monkey Business or Horse Feathers were either written or influenced by S.J. Perelman, and other humor writers connected to the Algonquin Round Table like Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman spent enough time in Hollywood that even if all the screenplays they wrote weren’t always great, I imagine their sensibilities rubbed off on other people around town.
That is all to say that funny writing is just as important as any joke or gag, and a hilarious book is one of my favorite things to read. The Times did a great job with their list, so I wanted to present a few more options to paid subscribers in case you’re looking for a laugh:
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