Tuesday, December 21, 2004
your trouser cuffs are dirty and your shoes are laced up wrong
i got this email from, ed z, from the the disunited kingdom:
the subject of Lenny and the sixties came up so I say, "Every time the
woman got her Leonard Cohen album out you knew you were set up for the
night" and the room goes quiet then a woman says icily, "It wasn't like
that."
and i thought, yeah, humour isn't the same for everybody, and above all it isn't the same for men and women. lenny even had a piece where he compared men to dogs and women to cats. then i thought, hey, but ed z isn't even talking about lenny bruce, he's talking about lenny cohen. then i thought, yeah , but it's the same thing, if the joke had been about lenny bruce the reaction of the woman would have been the same.
then i started thinking about how gender-based humour is. oscar wilde writing plays where only gay men could get the jokes. and this guy in the 60s:
taking it up one notch: straight guys could understand what was going on but they sure weren't laughing like the gay guys.
orton was the funniest guy around in the 60s. he even wrote a sceenplay for a beatles film. it was never made, epstein freaked when he saw the truth. now that film would have summed everything up. it would have been blow up, but funny. which was what the 60s was. blow up, but funny.
then thinking about joe, i thought about kenneth williams:
who was a friend of orton's and acted in the first production of loot:
.
then, as usual, i got to thinking about peter cook, who invented the 60s. he was writing for kenneth williams when he - cook - was 17: when the 60s was still the 50s. he gave lennon space, on prime-time television, to demonstrate his comic abilities, rather than just squeezing a song out of him to up the audience. you can even throw lenny bruce into the equation because peter invited lenny over to london in the early 60s to perform at his satire club, the establishment.
seems like wherever you start with comedy you end up with this guy:
what was that i was saying about orton being the funniest guy of the sixties? make that the second funniest.
the subject of Lenny and the sixties came up so I say, "Every time the
woman got her Leonard Cohen album out you knew you were set up for the
night" and the room goes quiet then a woman says icily, "It wasn't like
that."
and i thought, yeah, humour isn't the same for everybody, and above all it isn't the same for men and women. lenny even had a piece where he compared men to dogs and women to cats. then i thought, hey, but ed z isn't even talking about lenny bruce, he's talking about lenny cohen. then i thought, yeah , but it's the same thing, if the joke had been about lenny bruce the reaction of the woman would have been the same.
then i started thinking about how gender-based humour is. oscar wilde writing plays where only gay men could get the jokes. and this guy in the 60s:
taking it up one notch: straight guys could understand what was going on but they sure weren't laughing like the gay guys.
orton was the funniest guy around in the 60s. he even wrote a sceenplay for a beatles film. it was never made, epstein freaked when he saw the truth. now that film would have summed everything up. it would have been blow up, but funny. which was what the 60s was. blow up, but funny.
then thinking about joe, i thought about kenneth williams:
who was a friend of orton's and acted in the first production of loot:
.
then, as usual, i got to thinking about peter cook, who invented the 60s. he was writing for kenneth williams when he - cook - was 17: when the 60s was still the 50s. he gave lennon space, on prime-time television, to demonstrate his comic abilities, rather than just squeezing a song out of him to up the audience. you can even throw lenny bruce into the equation because peter invited lenny over to london in the early 60s to perform at his satire club, the establishment.
seems like wherever you start with comedy you end up with this guy:
what was that i was saying about orton being the funniest guy of the sixties? make that the second funniest.
# posted by manho @ 8:53 PM 
