19/08/2002 - Entry #24
So, another day, and yet more idle distractions stopping me from updating. One of these days I really will get back into the habit of updating every day, or thereabouts. It's not that I'm necessarily busy, I just slipped out of the habit of doing it, and now I'm in a lazy rut where I wake up, do nothing, then go to sleep. I'm constantly online, see, because I just don't turn the computer off. When I go to sleep, I just slap the messenger programs on 'Away' and leave it. So it's pretty rare that I'm actually away from the internet, and so it's inevitable that I'll run into the people who read this site. I mean, there's about 7 people who actually do read, if that, and I speak to at least 5 of them on instant messengers. I almost always have something to say on this diary, but I come online and my readerbase are already there, engaging me in real-time conversation. So I inevitably tell them what I would normally have left for this place, and therefore don't ever get round to writing. Obviously I'm not suggesting nobody should speak to me, but I do need to work a way round it. I'm shirking my responsibilites to this place, and that's no good. When I die, this'll be my legacy. This will be the standing testament to who I was (that's the point of Elegy, over there. When it gets written). It just won't do to leave it as sparse as it is. I need A) more readers, and B) to update a lot more. The two, incidentally, are inextricably linked. I'd even go so far as to say A leads to B, but there you go.
Oh, and when I say "when I die", I of course mean "when I reach 30". The two are essentially the same thing, after all. I mean, it's a fairly concrete fact that I'll be slightly different in 10 years time, right? It'd be naive to think that I won't learn, change, adapt, all the usual social evolutionary stuff. My opinions have changed drastically over the last 3 or 4 years alone, so if that trend continues, I'll be a new man by the time I'm 30. When I was 17 I was impossibly liberal and wishy-washy. Everyone was equal and the world could be a happy place. I got bored of that, though, and found authoritarian fascism to be much more enjoyable. As well as being an entirely more realistic system of government, come to mention it. But anyway, if I'm to be a different person, for all intents and purposes, then I want this to show what I was previously. I'll no doubt regret it, just as I shudder to think of the naive, cloying young 17 year old I once was, but that's the price you pay for nostalgia, I guess. If you're to have a so-called legacy, then you have to prepare yourself to be embarrassed. When people keep diaries and journals, it's so they don't forget their past experiences. What goes cheek by jowl with that, is their character at the time. Your personality becomes embedded in the records of your experiences, and when you reminisce, you're likely to see how much you've changed. For better or for worse? Who knows. Maybe that's the fun. Place your bets now, people.
So I'm finding more and more that I have to justify my interests. Why is that, you miserable shower of bastards? When I say you, I naturally mean everyone. I mean...to be perfectly honest, I actually understand having to defend my likes and dislikes. That's acceptable. If you're going to state your approval or disapproval for something while I'm around, then prepare a defence for it. But to be expressly told that what I consider funny just isn't, well sod that!
The reason I bring this is up, is the conversation I had about Noble&Silver on Friday night. I made a post on the 4later forum recommending said comedy programme, and remarkably about 10 or so people responded. For that I'm grateful, in a way. But sadly they all came back and said "that wasn't funny. It was shit". Now, let me explain what Noble&Silver is, for those who don't know.
The show, "Noble&Silver: Get Off Me!" is the weekly sketch version of the stand-up routine of two comedians: Kim Noble and Stuart Silver. Last year they won the Edinburgh Festival's Best Newcomer Award, and this year they won the Perrier Comedy Award. Together, those are probably the two most acclaimed awards in modern stand-up comedy. In their show, the pair mix state-of-the-art visual technology with comical dialogue seamlessly. When you enter the room to see them perform, the previous showing is just finishing, with credits rolling on huge TV screens and melancholic music playing, fragments of the previous show flitting across the screens as a reminder of what you're about to see. Then the pair appear on stage, and begin a 45 minute multimedia extravaganza, incorporating video, recorded sound, live performance, planted participants in the audience, the full works. This is clearly comedy with a bit of a difference. It's half comedy, half art. Two giant TV screens intersect with one another, the events overlapping between them. Noble and Silver themselves interact with recorded versions of themselves. Planted members of the audience provide the punchline to jokes the comedians set up. Recorded dialogue finishes off sentences and leads into the next skit. All of this happening at a lightning fast pace just goes to show how disorienting the entire show is. I read a review in the Guardian which mentioned how, as they were leaving, a woman slipped and fell down the stairs, causing everyone to laugh until they realised it wasn't still part of the show. Such is the nature of Noble & Silver's brand of comedy. To call it JUST comedy is an injustice. It's artistic expression and a critique of modern alternative comedy all wrapped up in an impossibly self-referential comedy routine. When the show ends, both TV screens display the audience from the beginning of the show, inviting them to watch themselves watching the show, as part of the show. The credits roll and the audience leave. Full circle, from start to finish. It's comedy that sets out to destabilise just as much as it tries to be funny. It has a definite purpose which goes well beyond simply making a few people chuckle for thirty minutes. It's more than that. It deconstructs comedy and tinkers with all the elements, like some kind of mad inventor who's cracked the secret of how to turn an ordinary household toaster into so much more. You can call this post-post-modern comedy, or self-parodical comedy, or self-self-parodical comedy, or whatever you want. They could all be argued as describing elements of Noble & Silver. The fact is that they're acutely aware of all the constituent parts of comedy, and their aim is to play on those. It doesn't make for the most rip-roaring belly laugh comedy, I wholeheartedly agree, but to call it shit is just stupid. To actually criticise them for the very effort they're making, as LG did, and to hold it against them as though it's a bad thing, is even worse. I began this rant with the issue of defending or attacking people's interests, and I still hold to that. If you don't think it's all that funny, then fair enough, I can appreciate that. But I think the only way you can fail to appreciate something like Noble & Silver is if you just don't understand it fully. I'm really loathe to say that, because I think all of you are very intelligent people. I really don't like facing the possibility that you just don't get the joke, because I really want to think that you do. I have faith in you, as intelligent people, to understand the very essence of this incredibly intellectual comedy and to appreciate it accordingly. But when the very people I put my faith in come back and say "is this meant to be funny?" and "that they put so much effort into it just makes it sad", I'm kind of disappointed. Like I said, if you put me in front of an episode of Noble&Silver and then in front of an episode of Black Adder, I'll most likely laugh more at the latter. But which do I think is the better comedy? Noble&Silver, without a doubt. Which would I be more likely to create myself, if neither existed already? Noble&Silver, every time. Which would I pick, if only one of the two could ever have come into being? I'd happily sacrifice Black Adder from the annals of time, to keep Noble&Silver around. See, there's plenty of straightforward comedy out there. League of Gentlemen, Phoenix Nights, The Office, People Like Us. All of those I enjoy, and if you sit me down in front of them I'll laugh my arse off. But they're entirely visceral programmes. You sit, it tickles your funny bone, you laugh by rote. It doesn't make you think and it doesn't challenge your preconceptions. I long for intellectual comedy. I long for intellectual anything!. The likes of TVGoHome and The Onion are often clever with their observations of society and culture, but do they really make you think? When I read TV Go Home, do I contemplate the makeup of society, or do I just laugh and say "ha! I had a taxi driver like that once"? How different is that to Seinfeld saying "Paper? What's that about?!" and the audience urinating over their flaccid genitalia? Brass Eye is one of my favourite comedies, because it was highly aware of everything it satirised. It was expertly done, and blurred the lines between satire and real-life so well that it managed to deeply offend thousands of people. But even that, is it really all that clever, or is it just very good satire? Surely the next step is to do what Noble&Silver are doing and satirise satire? Eventually that too will probably become commonplace, and there'll be another student sitting somewhere writing on his website with an oh-so-clever title about how satirical-satire has become stale and unintellectual, and the only way to rise up out of the dregs of stagnant comedy will be to become pre-post-post-pre-post-pre-pre-post-modern. But that's the nature of this stuff. It's all cylical, and all wraps around eventually. Finnegan's Wake was probably the pinnacle of post-post-modern comical literature, and nobody had a clue what it was on about. Everybody sat around scratching their heads and castigating Joyce for being an idiot. Of all the reviews I've seen of Noble&Silver, the most prolific response has been along the lines of "Well.....it's.....it's certainly different." Are these people just not understanding the amibition of the comedy, or are they fully aware of it but are somehow happy to ignore it when assessing the show? Call me pretentious all you want, but when something becomes stale, I lose interest. As far as I'm concerned, that's pretty human. You can tell me to "stop moaning and just laugh" til you're blue in the face, and there are times when I do just laugh at comedy, as I've mentioned above. But at the end of the day, anything so acutely aware of its own nature, and so intellectually determined to challenge that nature and our own conceptions of comedy, is a winner with me. It makes me laugh and it makes me think. I still find it funnier than most comedies, and it's most definitely more intellectual than probably any other comedy I've ever seen. It's easy to confound someone's expectations, but to challenge them and possibly even change the expectations of people who didn't even know they had those expectations, is another level higher entirely. I think that this weeks episode, shown on Friday night after the repeat of Phoenix Nights, is their greatest moment of pure genius. The whole episode follows them driving around London, in a loop, where the same events keep happening over and over again, with slight variations. You have to see it to understand, but it's an absolutely ingenius piece of comedy. The dialogue has equal footing with perplexing and impressive visuals, so the viewer has to strive to keep up. I've always said that in most of my work, whether the viewers understand what I'm trying to do or not is irrelevant. What matters is that the concept was there all along. Noble&Silver becomes an excellent example of that principle, of concept over simple aesthetics. If you're not prepared to work to understand and fully appreciate a work of art, then what's the point?
The thing that probably pissed me off the most in the whole thread, was when I said the I liked it because it was different to most comedies, and made a refreshing change. Someone then said "You try too hard, Muff". Oh fuck you. Fuck you, cock-end. I don't try anything, you dick. I HATE it when people accuse me of artificially engineering my fucking personality! Any opinions I have regarding concepts and banality are the result of a steady growth throughout my entire adolescence. The films and music that I've always instinctively liked have shaped my persona gradually, just as they do with everyone. All the little influences built upon my character and moulded me. But it was always natural. When I was in my teens, I was always the odd one out who thought Alien was better than Aliens. Nobody else could see past the guns and explosions, while I was telling people about this great film I'd seen on channel 4 called 'Seven Samurai'. Then I got the internet and suddenly I was opened up to a whole world of knowledge. Very slow knowledge, at the time, but it was there all the same. There were suddenly new people who shared my views and opinions, and had recommendations for other stuff to look out for. I could find out who was the guy behind 'that thing I liked', and what else he'd done. I could read interviews with writers and find out what they were doing with their stuff. I could dig up concepts behind artwork, read reviews of all these things. I understood the "information" part of "information superhighway" (I still don't understand the "superhighway" bit). All these things that I'd never really had access to before, I could suddenly find. I remember my Stepdad once asked me "Just what is it you do on the internet all day? Surely there's only so much you can read about". And I found it really hard to answer him properly. I couldn't really put my finger on just what I read about, and I still can't. I mean, right now I have open a bunch of diaries from various people detailing their various lives; a thesis on hylomorphism and entelechy; a kind of conspiracy report regarding the Philadelphia Experiment; a biography of George Clinton; and the PACT report on child disappearances in the UK last year. But if someone were to ask me what I use the internet for, I'd simply say "oh, all sorts of stuff". Because that's precisely what I do. I ingest as many sources of information as possible and it all goes towards making me who I am. Don't you fucking dare accuse me of manufacturing my personality, because that's the last thing I do. I'll be the first to accept that I'm a freak, and won't object to people calling me that. But my character is entirely natural, even if it does seem like it could only occur via a deliberate process. I genuinely resent the accusation that I'm not a natural person. If there was one quality I'd say I had that defines the majority of my opinions and actions, it's "awareness". I'm under no delusions, and manage to see most things for exactly what they are. At least that's the way I feel. You're welcome to disagree. But it's precisely that awareness that's responsible for most of my feelings, and I can't stand the implication that I don't know my own personality. If there's one thing I hate in life.....well, it's the French. But if there's two things I hate......probably the French and the Irish. But if there's three things I hate in life, it's the French, the Irish, and fucking psychobabble! Bunch of amateur psychiatrists thinking they know me better than myself, coming out with utter tripe as to why I say the things I do. Go fucking kill yourselves, you fat gaggle of cunts. I can't stand that. I do not fucking try too hard! I don't try anything! I am who I am and that's that. Yes, I like obscure things. They hold more appeal for me. Is that engineering my tastes? No. Don't tell me to simply like what I like and ignore the reasons, because I like obscure things. I'm not fucking pretending to for someone's benefit. It's like when people say "try anything once". I am. I'm trying not trying anything all my life. Don't fucking speculate as to my reasons for doing something, or assume what's going on in my head, because you'll invariably be wrong. The fact of the matter is that I do like what I like, and everyone else can fuck right off.
Really pisses me off.
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