Modified On April 30, 2008
We’re still wincing over this article on Dane101.com (which is a website devoted to the happenings in Dane County and Madison, WI… Not Dane Cook… didn’t the Bucks usta play at Dane County Colliseum? And they had that horn to signal the end of the periods that sounded, appropriately enough, like one of those alpine horns in the Ricola commercial? We digress).
Anyway, it’s by John Mendelssohn who, according to him, has “gone on stage as an actor, an orator, a musician, and a solo comedian.”
He went to an open mike, then he wrote a review of it. And it’s an unrelentingly negative review. He mercifully leaves the performers anonymous in this graf:
But curb your enthusiasm. Mostly their jokes go thud, thud, and thud. One comic points out that a lot of rock singers sound as though they’re being anally raped. Ta-da-DUM! Another observes that New York’s new governor, David Paterson, who’s legally blind, could have truthfully told his wife that he wasn’t seeing any other women.
Seeing. Legally blind. Get it?
Ouch, we say! Isn’t open mike night all about potential? Isn’t it unfair to review the performances as if they’re all fully-formed artists? Isn’t it more reasonable to regard the entire evening as an experiment? Shouldn’t Mendelssohn be cutting all the comics a break, rather than holding them up to an unreasonably high standard? It’s kinda like sitting on a folding chair at the finish line at the Special Olympics with a stopwatch and slowly shaking your head as each pack finishes. Sure, you could measure things in hundredths or tenths of a second, but why bother? Zoom out, look at the big picture. (Did we just compare a bunch of budding standup comics to mentally handicapped children? Perhaps. But, more importantly, we just analogized a ham-handed writer to a supercilious prick.)
We could understand a review like this from someone who doesn’t quite understand what an open mike is, or who has never actually gone up onstage before, but Mendelssohn fancies himself an artist. He even mentions that he was part of a sketch comedy troupe. He’s written for Rolling Stone, for crying out loud. So why the unnecessary roughness?
Less annoyingly, the next generation of Madison Standup Comics is also relentlessly self-referential, forever commenting on our reactions to them. Well, that’s the last time I’ll tell that one, I guess. (Promises, promises!) When they forget where they are in their routine, they are likely to muse into the microphone, “What the fuck else I got?” Charming!
At times, he sounds more like an ancient, prissy NYC theater reviewer than a bi-coastal, hipster blogger. Actually, we seem to be dealing with an accomplished author– one who wrote rock reviews for RS as far back as 1969. Which makes this scenario all the more puzzling– A veteran rock journo, sitting in on an open mike in Madison, WI, on a Wednesday night, then penning a savage review… and all for free.
Local comedians are no less slavishly imitative of one another than their counterparts in Madison’s countless dozens of indistinguishable T-shirts-‘n’-guitars bands; nearly all come on stage dressed as though fresh from changing their own oil. Nearly all, as noted above, are potty-mouthed; nowhere else in life would anyone but a sociopath speak like this in front of strangers. At the Klinic, though, Fuck, shit, fuck, shit, cock, dick, pussy, menstrual period, fuck, shit, fuck seems as de rigueur as using the microphone.
Notwitstanding the sprinkling of French into his prose, the writer seems to be channeling Peter Griffin rather than Lester Bangs. Did he actually use the term “potty-mouthed?”
We hate to go all Freud on this guy’s ass, but, in paragraph three of this piece, when he lays out his what’s funny/what’s not matrix (funniest being 10 and not funny be a 1), the 1 is “the irrepressible loudmouth kid back in high school who regarded himself as the class clown, (though everyone else regarded him the class asshole).” Mr. Mendelssohn, it seems, has “issues.” Sometimes, it’s just too easy!
Sure, last Tuesday we wrote about related matters, but we like to think that we did so with some restraint and that in the process, we made some observations about the business and the craft at large. (And the discussion it has set off continues to this day and is, we hope, enlightening and entertaining.)