Tag Archives: comedy

“Elbow,” he said.

It is the provisional answer to a question in the best TV series ever made. At least on my list.

The question? “What’s the loveliest word in the English language? In the sound it makes in the mouth? In the shape it makes on the page?” It is the kind of question a writer thinks about, but not so much a civilian. It is the hospitalized crime writer Philip Marlow in Dennis Potter’s 1986 BBC serial, The Singing Detective. “E-L-B-O-W,” comes the answer. Pronounced in the euphonious baritone of Michael Gambon as he talks to his Nurse Mills, played by the young Joanne Whalley.

I had avoided watching the series when it was first broadcast in the U.S. on PBS in 1988 because I thought the title meant it was an airy musical, perhaps in the Doris Day mode. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is dark and gritty and brilliant. And it is No. 1 on my list of greatest television series.

Of course, any such list, whether Top 10 or “100 Greatest…” are ultimately meaningless and catalog simply one person’s taste. Your mileage may vary. But I’m pretty secure in my choices, with the proviso that although I am 78 years old and was born roughly the same time as television, I haven’t seen everything ever aired, not even all that was broadcast in this country. No one has.

There are a number of popular and well-thought of series I have never seen. Game of Thrones — I am bored by quasi-Medieval post-apocalyptic fantasy. Lonesome Dove — I love Robert Duvall, but mostly gave up cowboys after Hopalong Cassidy retired from the 12-inch black-and-white screen. The Wire — I should probably watch it, but it sounds unrelentingly grim.

But of the things I have watched, here are my top five series of all time. There are some qualifying parameters. I’m not talking about long-running TV series, or notable sitcoms or dramas. So, I’m not including All in the Family or Seinfeld. There are plenty of those, and they would qualify for a different list. I’m talking about limited series presentations, usually with a direct beginning, middle and end, like mini-series or one-offs.

And my taste runs to character-driven shows rather than plot-centered ones. Very few gunfights or car chases and a lot of talking and psychologies. I have nothing against one-liners or action thrillers; they have their place. But I am more taken with more complex stories, something more akin to art than simply entertainment.

And so, here are my top five TV shows of all time, and can all, in their way, be talked about as sharing some of the depth and insight of, say, Shakespeare or Tolstoy.

The Singing Detective (1986) — The six roughly hour-long episodes follow an English pulp fiction writer suffering in a hospital ward from psoriatic arthropathy, who tries to fight his boredom and maintain his sanity by mentally rewriting one of his books — about a private-eye who moonlights as a dance-hall singer — but increasingly hallucinates about a traumatic episode from his childhood during World War II, the suicide of his mother, and a foul deed he committed in school. The episodes become increasingly confused and mixed, punctuated by popular songs from the 1930s and ’40s. The whole is a phantasmagoria of paranoia with some of the most brilliant writing ever put to screenplay.

“Mr Marlow, you can’t deny I’m paying you good money…” “Money. You’re paying me money. Why put ‘good’ in front of it? Who knows its virtue? I don’t know where it’s been. Do you?”

The mystery he is imagining concerns smuggled Nazis, Russian spies, and ladies of commercial morality, all played out in a cheap dive called Skinskapes. The writer’s West Country childhood, with the deep accents and vocabulary of the region, concerns his love for his father and the infidelity of his mother, which he witnesses. Then, there is the interaction he has with his doctors, nurses, and fellow ward patients and most notable with his psychiatrist who tries to fathom the roots of the writer’s hysteria. And then, there is his estranged wife, who visits him in the ward and whom he abuses most horribly. All Osterized into a grand, almost operatic imbroglio, rising to a peak and resolution in the final episode.

The cast is a who’s who of all the actors you will find in later British classic TV shows, such as Midsomer Murders or Downton Abbey. We get to see them younger, before they aged: Patrick Malahide, David Ryall, Gerard Horan, Ron Cook, Janet Suzman, Alison Steadman, Bill Paterson, and, of course, Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton. These are names well known to anyone streaming British TV on Britbox or Acorn or PBS Masterpiece.

The Sopranos (1999-2007) — Over six seasons and 86 episodes on HBO, we followed Mob boss Tony Soprano and his two families — domestic and crime — as they turned obscure New Jersey into a nationally familiar landscape. Hooray for Hoboken.

It is primarily the first two seasons that were memorable, changing American TV viewing habits permanently, and launching a new “Golden Age” of television. Over the quarter-century since its debut, streaming has taken over from network television and made CBS, ABC and NBC into also-rans.

It took great acting and great writing to do this, and we followed Tony as he suffered panic attacks over some ducks in his swimming pool, challenges to his leadership in the mob, various betrayals, both by him and against him, and, most importantly in the first two seasons, the absolutely awful behavior of his mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), who Rolling Stone magazine named as the “Third Greatest TV Villain of All Time.” I assume she is beaten only by Iago and Satan.

After Marchand’s death in 2000, the show didn’t exactly go downhill, but it never again had the norm-smashing impact it had at the beginning. It was still riveting, but less revolutionary.

Two of its best episodes came in those first two seasons. “College,” in which Tony takes his daughter, Meadow, to college and discovers a mob informant living under witness protection and proceeds to garrote him in the most realistic-feeling depiction of strangulation I’ve ever seen in a film or on TV. It took a long, agonizing time to accomplish and viewers felt every second of it. And, on the other side of the spectrum, “Pine Barrens,” in which Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti attempt to dispose of a Russian gangster in snowy South Jersey and get lost in the process. Both episodes are listed in Wikipedia as among the 30 best television episodes ever.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) — This is all down to Alec Guinness, who defines the role of British spy George Smiley so microscopically that no matter what great actor attempts the part — and Gary Oldman is not chopped liver in the 2011 movie version — it can never be topped or even equalled. Guinness can “say more with a slight parting of his lips than most actors can say while shouting from the rafters,” wrote The New York Times.

The seven-episode adaptation of le Carré’s 1974 novel did away with all the hokey James Bond razzmatazz and gave us slow, believable procedure as Smiley sniffs out a traitor in the British secret service. Le Carré made up all the slang and the spycraft, but made us believe everything must really work this way in the real MI6.

The story proceeds slowly and carefully, and the dramatis personae comprise some of the best and best-known British actors of the time, including Ian Richardson (House of Cards); Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation); Sian Phillips (I, Claudius); Michael Jayston (Nicholas and Alexandra); Michael Aldridge (Last of the Summer Wine); Warren Clarke (A Clockwork Orange); and other stalwarts of U.K. films and television, Bernard Hepton; Ian Bannen, Joss Ackland; John Standing; Anthony Bate and others. It’s a joy to watch them all doing what they do best.

Fleabag (2016-2019) — It isn’t just the Golden Oldies that count. More recently Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s extension of her one-woman stage show became nominated as one of the best TV presentations ever. It is comic, nasty, witty, intensely observant and a punch in the eye of Postmodern meta brilliance.

Her character, never named except as “Fleabag,” clumsily negotiates family, sex, relationships, and grief in ways embarrassingly both egocentric and clueless. And all the while speaking to us, the audience, in private asides — direct progeny of George Burns talking out of the TV at us in his 1950s sitcom.

Its second season may even be better than the first, when she develops a crush on the Sexy Priest (Andrew Scott). In that season’s Episode 3, the priest notices — for the first time anyone in the whole series has done so — that Fleabag is zoning out and talking to the camera, which is a way she has of disengaging from awkward situations. This disruption in the normal contract of fiction between the reality of the story and the reality of the story-telling is a shivering moment, and leads to the resolution of the entire series.

I, Claudius (1976) — I hesitated in picking No. 5 for my list, because there are other legitimate contenders (see below) for the spot. But finally, I have to pick the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’ two novels about the first four emperors of the Roman Empire (five if you count the foreshadowing of Nero).

It suffers from the early videotape technology, which required a bland sort of lighting. But it compensates by its psychological complexity, great acting and something not normally noticed — great directing.

There is a YouTube video by the name of Moviewise that offers a careful examination of the combined blocking and camera positioning and movement that keeps the action moving seamlessly (Link here). When it is pointed out, you can’t help noticing how craftily it is all done.

Yes, it all plays out as a kind of Roman soap opera, but that is the point — what we think of as grand history is really just today in togas. All the social climbing, back-biting, treachery, power grabbing and hidden agendas we come to see every day on cable news. Caligula seems all too familiar.

Then, there are all the great actors: Derek Jacobi, Sian Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, Margaret Tyzack, John Hurt, Bernard Hepton, Patrick Stewart — all familiar names from other shows on this list and elsewhere.

As I said, lists like this are fun, but they are arbitrary. There has been so much good on the airwaves over the decades. Picking the five best has meant not including Prime Suspect (1991-1996, 2003, 2006), one of the grimmest, most realistic police procedurals ever, which first brought Helen Mirren to a wider public (at least in America — in the U.K., she has been a known quantity since at least the 1969 Michael Powell film, Age of Consent.)

Then, there’s the Mike Nichol’s TV version of Angels in America (2003), with Al Pacino playing villain Roy Cohn. I saw the original Broadway production of the two-part stage play, and later two other versions live, and the filmed version cannot carry the visceral gut-punch of live theater, but it does as well as can be done on film.

And how can you not include Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), probably the funniest 12 episodes of sitcom ever put together, with John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs and Connie Booth. Ended after two short seasons because you cannot top perfection.

And a special mention to the most literate silly sitcom ever, The Good Place (2016-2020), with Ted Danson and Kristin Bell. Both smart and funny, it seems to have slipped past most viewers on its original airing, but plays with philosophy, life and death in thoughtful and playful ways. It counts for me as one of the best things TV has ever given us. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

Finally, there are two made-for-TV series that were later edited and released as theatrical films that most people think of as movies rather than television shows, but they are truly masterpieces and best seen in their multi-episode forms.

First, there was Scenes from a Marriage (1973), by directed by Ingmar Bergman, following the ennui and dissolution of an otherwise happy marriage, with Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. It was groundbreaking when first made, focusing on all the small details most stories elide past. (One also has to acknowledge the American TV series An American Family, from the same year, which takes a more documentary approach to the same themes, but has a more “reality TV” feel about it, more performative than deep.)

And there’s Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), which is perhaps the richest, warmest, most inclusive family portrait ever screened. Nobody doesn’t love Fanny and Alexander. At 5-hours long, it was shown on Swedish television in five episodes, but later edited to 3 hours for theatrical release. It is considered one of the greatest films of all time, but could equally be added to the list of greatest TV.

So there, you have a challenge. What would make your list of the five greatest TV series of all time?

The sitcom situation

December 30, 2025

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I want to put in a good word for TV sitcoms. They don’t get much respect. And it is true that many of them are routine, uninspired and forgettable. “Chewing gum for the eyes.” But the genre as a whole has both a long history (longer than you may suspect), and a significant role to play in the arts. Yes, the arts.

What we call art is a lot of things, and serves many purposes, but one thing all art, whether painting, music, theater or literature, is asked to do is entertain. There are different levels of entertainment, but even Joyce’s Ulysses or Berg’s Lulu offer an underlying level of amusement.

Comedy players, Mosaic from Pompeii

Some offer much more, but the base line of keeping us interested has been there from the earliest times we have record of. And much of it even fills university courses. We study Plautus and Terrence — among the earliest sitcom writers (Rome, 6th century BC), with plays full of dirty old men, unfaithful wives, clever slaves, mistaken identities and love-struck young men.

There are few actual characters in such plays, and a great panoply of stock figures. These kinds of figures, stuck in difficult and comic situations, populate the works of Italian commedia dell’arte, the comedies of Molière, and the plays of Shakespeare (who would sometimes borrow from Plautus and Terrence). Victorian novels — by Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray — now treated as literature, were at the time serialized in popular magazines and thought of much the same as we now consume TV shows. And all now deemed worth of academic study and even reverence.

So, why not the same for All in the Family or The Honeymooners? Are they any “lower” an art form than The Twin Menaechmi? Or The Braggart Soldier?

Remember, Shakespeare’s audience included the uneducated groundlings; he wrote also for them. And he was not above the traditional fart joke. It ain’t all Seneca and Henry James.

I am roughly the same age as television, and have watched the sitcom from its earliest TV days. I was one year old when The Goldbergs switched from radio to television (“Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Bloom…”). There was The Aldrich Family from 1949 to 1953 (“Henry! Henry Aldrich!” “Coming, Mother.”), and the first season of The Life of Riley, with Jackie Gleason originally taking over the title role from William Bendix, who had played the part on radio (“What a revoltin’ development this is”). Bendix took back the role for the rest of the series run. I don’t know how old I might have been when I first started watching these series. Probably in my playpen watching the images wiggle on the 12-inch screen of a Dumont television.

The 1950s brought the onslaught and the sitcom became a staple of the boob tube. These series I remember quite well: Beulah; The Bob Cummings Show; The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (the first Postmodern show, where George could watch what Gracie was planning on his own TV screen and comment to the audience); December Bride; I Married Joan; Private Secretary; Mister Peepers.

I haven’t mentioned the three most important shows of the time. The Honeymooners emerged as a sometime skit on Cavalcade of Stars, the Jackie Gleason variety show on the Dumont network, sometimes taking up most of the run time. But in 1955, the skit was spun off into a half-hour sitcom for 39 episodes, still run in syndication on various cable channels. (“To the moon, Alice”).

I Love Lucy ran from 1951 to 1957 and pioneered the three-camera filmed sitcom with live audience and laugh track. For its entire run, it ranked No. 1, No. 2, or No. 3 in the ratings. (I have to confess, contrary to the majority opinion, I never found Lucy very funny. Watching reruns, I still don’t). Those reruns can still be found in syndication on cable.

Alvin Childress, Tim Moore, Spencer Williams

But you won’t find Amos ’n’ Andy. It was enormously popular from 1951 to 1953. But reaction to the racial stereotypes changed markedly during the rise of the Civil Rights movement. It would be hard to complain about the series cancellation. In the context of its times, it was deserved. It can be hard to watch nowadays. But I have seen all 78 episodes on bootleg DVDs and must admit we have lost some brilliant comic performances, especially by ex-vaudevillian Tim Moore as the Kingfish. Yes, there are some awful stereotypes, but not everyone was shufflin’ and grifting. Amos was an upright citizen and family man, and the series showed quite a few Black doctors and judges, all horrified at the shenanigans of the series stars.

And it should be pointed out that most sitcoms, Black, white or otherwise, focus on less-than-admirable characters. Let’s face it, bland Ward Cleaver does not support a TV series. You need Archie Bunker, Ralph Kramden, or Larry David. Something out of the norm, but exaggerated. Getting past the particulars of Amos ’n’ Andy, basically the same stereotypes come back later as George Jefferson or J.J. in Good Times (“Dyn-O-Mite”) or Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son. Same caricatures, different generation.

I’m not suggesting we forgive Amos ’n’ Andy, but rather to see it in context, and recognize the talent that went into it.

The fact that even Millennials know who Lucy Ricardo was, or Ralph Kramden or Rob and Laura Petrie, means that some of the hundreds of sitcoms that have aired, from the last century and this, have a cultural staying power, very like the classics we read at university.

The foundational stereotypes — or archetypes — have persisted, too. How many sitcoms feature bumbling husbands, from Chester A. Riley and Ozzie Nelson to Curb Your Enthusiasm and The King of Queens? Conversely, the trope of the ditzy wife, from Gracie Allen to Married … With Children to The Middle? Mothers-in-law are a perennial butt of jokes, as are clueless bosses and gay best friends. They each provide a predictable set of familiar and comfortable jokes. (Although the limits of comfort can and have changed over time: Blonde and Polish jokes haven’t worn as well).

And most of these are just modern changes rung on the characters of the commedia dell’arte. Harlequin, Colombina, Pantalone, Pulcinella, Zanni and the lot. We aren’t looking for fully rounded characters so much as familiar types to build plots and gags around — the “situations” in situation comedies.

So, the sitcom has a long history. And I have a long history with them. And I have divided them into four roughly defined groups. The borders of these groups may be squishy — you may parse them differently — but the categories are defensible.

First, there are those that have had an effect on culture broadly. They tend to be the best written and acted, but they have wormed their way into the general consciousness. Class A includes I Love Lucy (my qualms not withstanding), The Honeymooners, All In the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, Murphy Brown, The Office (American version), Seinfeld, Roseanne, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Cosby Show (which now is hard to watch — both hard to find and hard to endure, knowing what we now know). And I would include both The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon. Class acts all the way.

But I would include also: Taxi, Barney Miller, Dick Van Dyke, Cheers, The Bob Newhart Show (the original one), and a few that I never warmed to, but still have a cultural significance, like Friends and Married… With Children. All are or have been in the national conversation.

I should also include a few British series that have had an impact, mainly Fawlty Towers, the British Office, and Absolutely Fabulous.

Class B includes all the quality shows that came and went, with funny characters and solid jokes, but never buried into the Zeitgeist in quite the same way. All solid entries. You can add quite a few to this list and it will depend on your taste and funny bone. I would include: 3rd Rock From the Sun; Black-ish; Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Frasier; Golden Girls; The Good Place (should be in Class A, but not enough people watched); Happy Days; Malcolm in the Middle; The Middle; Mike & Molly; Modern Family; The New Adventures of Old Christine; Parks and Recreation; Scrubs; Two and a Half Men; Veep; WKRP in Cincinnati; and your choice of others. Among my favorites are Mom, Night Court, Reno 911. Individual taste may vary. (I have not included many of the old shows from the ’50s and ’60s that few people have had a chance to see: My Little Margie, Private Secretary; Topper.)

The next rung down, in Class C are the workaday shows, sometimes OK time-wasters, but full of cliched characters and tired jokes — the kind that have the familiar form of jokes, but seldom the wit or laughs. Writing on autopilot. This is the vast majority of TV sitcom bulk. The roughage and fiber of the viewing diet.

When we watch these, it is often more out of habit than desire. The forms are familiar and the laugh track tells us when a joke has passed by. Did anyone ever think The Munsters was prime comedy? or Gilligan’s Island? McHale’s Navy? Saved by the Bell? Mediocrity incarnate. Hogan’s Heroes? I could name a hundred, propelled by laugh tracks and the need of writers to fill air time. Networks toss them on the screen, hoping they’ll stick. Some do, but only because they are gluey.

Wikipedia lists hundreds of sitcom titles and I would guess some 75 percent of them fall into Class C. At least half of those are gone in a single season, un-renewed, or cancelled after a few goes. The rest stick around because they are not overly offensive. They may feature actors we like, even if they have to spout insipid dialog.

Bewitched; The Brady Bunch; Chico and the Man; Community; Ellen; F Troop; The Facts of Life; The Flying Nun; I Dream of Jeannie; Last Man Standing; The Monkees; Perfect Strangers; That ’70s Show; Who’s the Boss? Go ahead: Make a case for any of them. Tube fodder.

Three’s Company is the epitome of Class C, although my son, deeply knowledgeable in the ways of film and media, assures me it is a classic. He loves it. De gustibus.

Then, there is the bottom feeding Class D, those shows so bad they have become legend. My Mother the Car is the type specimen for this class. A series only a studio executive high on cocaine and bourbon, and distracted by facing an expensive divorce and maybe a teenage son in jail could have green-lighted. Quite a few of these were meant to be vehicles for aging film stars given their own sitcom series. The Doris Day Show, The Debbie Reynolds Show, The Tammy Grimes Show, Mickey (with Mickey Rooney), The Paul Lynde Show (in which he is an attorney and family man), Wendy and Me (with George Burns and Connie Stevens), Shirley’s World (Shirley MacLaine as a photojournalist), and The Bing Crosby Show. Most of these didn’t make it past the first season.

Also at the dismal bottom: Hello Larry, New Monkees, She’s the Sheriff, The Trouble with Larry (“not just not funny, but actively depressing”), Cavemen, Homeboys in Outer Space, The Ropers. Most cancelled after one season.

In England, Heil, Honey, I’m Home with Adolf and Eva never made it past the first episode. (currently unavailable on streaming or disk. Too soon?).

Among the abject failures are most of the American remakes of popular British comedies. Many of them never made it past the pilot stage.

And so, you have four general classes of television sitcoms. The best worthy of saving for future generations, the worst best left for whatever is the digital version of the bottom of the canary cage.

The past wasn’t so different. What we remember of classical Roman comedy are what is extant. Much isn’t. A good deal of it was probably just as banal as most bad TV. We don’t know: It didn’t survive. The Victorian novel was largely a serial enterprise, like seasons of a sitcom, weekly chapters published. But for each Dickens or Trollope, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of lesser works now mostly forgotten. In time, we will no doubt continue winnowing the TV past, saving the Norman Lears and perhaps the Chuck Lorres and ranking them as our Plautus and Terrence. Perhaps.

The low arts can still be art.

RIP PDQ

January 18, 2024

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Professor Peter Schickele has died, and there is one less star twinkling in the sky.

Schickele, who was the creator of PDQ Bach, was 88 and had been ill.

I have a long history with PDQ Bach, and I will miss his music and wit terribly. He came from a notable line of musical satirists and clowns, including Spike Jones, Anna Russell, Victor Borge and, of course, the Hoffnung Festival in Great Britain. But, at least initially, his target was Baroque music in particular.

At the beginning of what was called the “Baroque revival” in the 1960s, Schickele devised PDQ as a way to parody some of the excesses, cliches, tropes, and habits of the newly popular historical style. His first concert was in April of 1965 at Town Hall in New York. I did not attend that one, but in December of that year, he brought the program to Philharmonic Hall, and I was there for the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn, and the Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons. Schickele was there as narrator and explicator; he arrived late at the hall, and swung onto the stage, Tarzan-style from the balcony.

It was one of the funniest things I ever saw or heard.

“In general, the dance music of PDQ Bach suggests that one of his legs was shorter than the other.”

The cantata — “Scholars are unaware Iphigenia ever was in Brooklyn” — has Orestes “being chased … by the Amenities” and he sings the sorrowful aria “Who knows what it is to be running? Only he who is running knows,” followed by “Run-running knows, run-running knows, ru-u-u-u-u-ning running knows.”

It was all a bit goofy, but made fun of things familiar from Baroque music. (Anyone familiar with actual Baroque opera will realize this “running knows” isn’t that much sillier than the real thing.)

The Hardart was a vast instrument made up of bells, whistles and gongs, each tuned to a different pitch, and with little windows on its front from which you could get pie. The second movement was a theme and variations, but “the variations have nothing whatever to do with the theme.”

I was a teenager then, and attended the concert with my high-school girlfriend, who became a professional bassoonist, and, in fact, later played with Schickele in PDQ concerts, and even occasionally appeared with him on radio interviews promoting concerts.

We came the next year to the second season of PDQ Bach, then at Carnegie Hall, to hear The Seasonings, The Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments, and Eine Kleine Nichtmusik.

In fact, through marriages, break-ups, divorces and remarriages, I attended a PDQ Bach concert every year for more than 20 years. Schickele took his act on the road, and wherever I was living, whether Greensboro, N.C., Seattle, Wash., Norfolk, Va., or Phoenix, Ariz., Schickele found his way and I found a ticket.

In Norfolk, I caught up with him backstage after the concert and we talked about my bassoonist ex-girlfriend. Unfortunately, she wasn’t part of the Norfolk performance. I would have loved to catch up.

PDQ Bach always functioned on two levels. Even those who knew little about classical music could enjoy the slapstick and the bad puns; but anyone with familiarity with music history could catch the often sophisticated in-jokes.

Schickele in Phoenix

I, of course, bought all the albums, and later, CDs. The last time I got to hear a PDQ Bach concert was in Phoenix in March, 2001, when Schickele and the Phoenix Symphony performed Oedipus Tex with Michèle Eaton as Billie Jo Casta, and Schickele as Tex. The program also included Swing Sweet, Low Chariot.

As his career-shtick progressed, Schickele widened his target to include the Classical era, giving the treatment to Mozart and Rossini with such things as The Civilian Barber, and The Abduction of Figaro, and into the Romantic era, with a parody opera, Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice.

Schickele and his sidekick Robert Dennis famously gave a sportscast of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “I can’t tell if it’s fast or slow because it keeps stopping.” In one live performance of this, in the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War was still an issue, the “game” began with what started as the National Anthem. Half the audience stood up, hand over heart; the other half, self-righteously in protest, sat motionless. Except that the arpeggiated beginning of the anthem ended immediately with a descending arpeggio ending after a couple of bars. The whole thing took less than five seconds. Everyone in the audience, standing or sitting, was caught red faced.

He took on contemporary music, also, with Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach turned into Einstein on the Fritz. and Koyaanisqatsi became Coy Hotsie-Totsie.

The titles of his schlamperei are enough to draw whoops, especially for anyone familiar with the originals. Among them: Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra; Fanfare for the Common Cold; Goldbrick Variations; Hindenburg Concerto; Liebeslieder Polkas; No-no Nonette; Notebook for Betty-Sue Bach; Royal Firewater Musick; Safe Sextet; Schleptet in E-flat; The Short-Tempered Clavier; Traumarei for Unaccompanied Piano; The Triumphs of Thusnelda. Wikipedia lists more than a hundred titles.

In fact, he had leftover titles, ready to attach to newly “discovered” works: Rosenkavalier and Guildenstern; The Passion According to Hoyle; the Half-Nelson Mass; and Famous Last Words of Christ.

The Hoffnung Music Festival in London lasted for only seven concerts. PDQ Bach lasted from 1965 through 2015 (with a break in the 1990s) and encompassed 20 albums, 2 video recordings (many more on YouTube), and the definitive biography of PDQ Bach, titled The Definitive Biography of PDQ Bach.

I should mention that Schickele was also a serious composer, with many works published under his own name, and wrote the film score for the 1972 movie, Silent Running.

So, it wasn’t all tomfoolery. But even his parodistic work is well crafted and full of memorable tunes. PDQ will likely last a very long time.

I will miss hearing new works and weird concerts.

Stuart frames the issue

January 26, 2015

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“All great love ends in death,” Stuart said.

“Maybe in literature, but not in real life,” I said.

“Yes. All love ends in death. On one hand, sometimes it’s love that dies and then you are stuck. But even if love doesn’t die, the lovers do.”

“You mean like Romeo and Juliet?” I asked.

“Yes, like Romeo and Juliet. Like Tristan and Isolde.”

“But can’t love end happily?” I put forward that possibility; I’ve been married 30 years.

“Yes, but even the most successful love ends in death,” Stuart said. “Either for one or the other and eventually, both. They may be 80 years old, but eventually, love ends in death.”

“Oh. I see what you mean. It’s a trick. Like a trick question.”

“No, it’s not a trick, except that it is a trick the universe plays on all of us. I don’t mean it as a trick.

“Romeo didn’t have to die the way he did,” Stuart went on, “but he had to die eventually. Even if they got married and lived long lives, he would have to die some time, and then, Juliet loses him anyway.”

It is the underlying metaphor of all tragic love stories, he thought. His own, for instance. Stuart had never seen a great gulf between literature and his own life. Others, well, they may be banal and ordinary, but his own life had all the electricity of a great book or epic myth.

The one thing that separated Stuart most from the accountants and dentists of the world was that he recognized in himself the hero of his own life — the sense that he was the main character in a story of infinite significance. When something happened to Stuart, it happened to the universe.

The joke was, of course, that this is true. But there was a stinger, too: Although it was true, the universe is so vast that no matter how big it was to Stuart, it added up to zilch in the big picture.

“That is truly depressing,” I made a sour face.

“But that is not the real issue,” Stuart said. “The real issue is the frame.”

“The frame?”

“Yes. This is something I’ve been wondering about for a while. Every comedy ends in a marriage, it is said. The curtain drops and the audience goes home enjoying the happy ending.

“But, if we followed Beatrice and Benedick after the end of the play, in a few years, at least, there would be divorce — or more likely, murder. Happy endings are always provisional. So, there is an artificiality to comedies that is ineradicable. The happiest comedy, if drawn out to the uttermost, ends in dissolution.”

“So, you’re saying that the frame — the curtain — reveals any art as an artifice.”

“Yes. And not just in theater. Take the photographs of Garry Winogrand. We are meant to see the frame — the edge of the photograph — as an arbitrary border drawn around some episode, but beyond the frame, there are other people doing other things. This has become something of a trope in photography.

“It used to be that we understood the frame in a painting — say a Renaissance crucifixion, or a Madonna — as merely the point at which our interest in the visual matter evaporates. It is the Christ or Virgin that sits in the middle that is meant as an object of contemplation. A frame could be larger or smaller and still contain the essential action.

“In Baroque painting, there is often the growing sense that the frame cannot contain the action, but that there is something worth knowing just beyond the edge. That sense has become central in certain strains of contemporary photography. A photograph may contain an image of someone looking back at the camera, over the photographer’s shoulder, at something behind him that we can never see.

“The first kind of frame serves as a kind of fence, or corral in which the important information is contained. The second is more like a cookie cutter, which sticks into the welter of existence and excises this small bit for us to consider.

“That is the frame, the ‘beginning, middle and end’ that gives us such satisfaction in a play or opera.”

My concern at this point is that I could see that Stuart was unwinding his own life from the bobbin, and holding it out in his fingers to examine, and what he was finding was deflating. What set Stuart apart from most people was about to be undone.

I had known Stuart since college, and what made him glow from the inside was not just his energy — or jittery intelligence — but his sense that he was the star in his own movie. Or rather, that he saw in himself a larger, mythological version of himself playing out among the chess pieces of the universe. He was Siegfried voyaging down the Rhine; he was Odysseus; he was stout Cortez.

Don’t misunderstand, please. He was never grandiose — in his exterior behavior, he was as normal as you or me. But inside, was something larger, bursting to get out. He saw the world swirling the way Van Gogh did. For Stuart, every bush was the burning bush. Take away that internal furnace, and what would be left of Stuart? He would have grown up. Not something that any of us who knew him would wish for.

“This is the fundamental fallacy of American conservatism,” he went on, making another 90-degree turn.

“They seek to enforce a static vision of society, of law, of human behavior. They keep telling us, that if only we would do things their way, everything would finally be peach-hunky, into eternity — the happy ending that we know (and they don’t admit) is always provisional. They see a — excuse me for the exaggeration — ‘final solution’ for something that has no finality to it.

“Politics — real politics — is always the flux of contending interests. You want this, I want that, and we wind up compromising. Conservatives see compromise as surrender, precisely because they see politics with a frame. Get the picture right, and then it is done. Deficits are erased; the wealthy get to keep what is rightfully theirs; order is established. It is the underlying metaphor of all Shakespeare’s plays: The establishment of lasting, legitimate order, final harmony.

“Only, we know that after Fortinbras takes over, there will be insurgencies, dynastic plots, other invasions, a claim by mainland Danes over island-dwelling Danes, or questions of where tax money is going. It is never ending. Fortinbras is only a temporary way-station.

“Existence is a seething, roiling cauldron and sometimes this bit of onion and carrot comes to the surface, and sometimes it is something else. It is never finished, there is no frame, no beginning, middle and end.”

“So, where does this leave poor Juliet?”

“Juliet?”

“Yes, where does this leave us all, we who are all bits of carrot. We who are married for 30 years, we who entered the field of contention, worked for our required decades and left the battlefield to become Nestors — or Poloniuses. All this washes over us and we see that, in fact, we have a frame. Existence may not have one, but I do. I am getting old. I just turned 67 and I feel it. And I know that my Juliet will die, or I will go before her. We do have, in fact, a frame, a curtain that draws down and leaves us — as Homer says — in darkness.”

“Exactly,” Stuart said, “and this is my point. Every one of us lives two very different lives. You can call them the external and internal lives. The first is the life in which we share the planet with 7 billion others. We are a tiny, insignificant cog in the giant machine. The second is the mythic life, the life we see ourselves as central to, in which we are the heroes of our own novels or movies, and everyone we know is a supporting actor. If we live only in the first life, we are crushed and spit out. But if we live only in the second life, we are solipsists. Sane people manage to balance the two lives. A beautiful counterpoint.

“We are most engulfed by that second life when we fall in love. We are certain that we invented this condition. No one else has ever felt what we feel. It’s comic, of course, but it is also profound. Without this feeling, life is unbearable. We have to have meaning, and meaning is created by how we imagine ourselves.

“Politics hovers oddly in the intersection of these two worlds. We need to sober up and consider the other 7 billion people if we are to create useful policy, but we mythologize those who lead us, and those who lead do so most effectively when they mirror back some version of mythology. The most extreme example I can think of is Nazism in Germany. A whole nation bought into the fantasy. Disaster follows.

“But all ideology is ultimately built on mythology: on a version of the world with one or two simple dimensions, when existence is multi-dimensional. The political myth is always a myth of Utopia, whether right-wing or left-wing. And it is always a static myth: Racism ends and everything is great, or government spending is curtailed and everything is great. That simply isn’t the way existence is.”

“The world is always bigger and more varied than our understanding of it, and it will always come back to whack us upside the haid.”

“Right. The conservative sees the world only with his ego eyes, not from outside himself. That frame — his death — is something he cannot see beyond. There is something egoistic about conservatism. Often selfish, also, but the selfishness isn’t the problem, it is the egoism — the frame they put around the world, the static sense of what is finally right — the so-called end of history. In this, the conservative — or at least the tin-foil-hat variety — is no different from the dyed-in-the-wool Communist. Both see the establishment of their Utopia as the endgame of human existence.”

“You’ve been reading Ovid again.”

“How did you know?”

“The Pythagoras chapter.”

“Right again. Panta Horein, as Heraclitus said: ‘Everything is flowing.’ As Ovid has it, even landscapes change over time, and Hercules’ brawn withers and Helen’s breasts sag. Cities grow and are demolished; Mycenae gives way to Athens, to Alexandria, to Rome, to Byzantium and Baghdad, then to London and now to Washington, with Beijing waiting in the hopper. ‘Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?’ “

“How’s that?”

“In saecula saeculorum: World without frame.”

—Richard Nilsen

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