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WHEN UNFUNNY PEOPLE SAY FUNNY THINGS

4/26/2009

Funny is distance. To be funny, you must have distance on yourself and the whole creaking project of your personal vanity. You also must have distance on the clichéd mental machinery of our daily narrative.

Funny is Woody Allen saying: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”

Funny is Steven Wright saying: “I have large collection of seashells. I keep it on beaches all over the world. Maybe you’ve seen it.”

Funny is Calvin Klein’s daughter saying: “How come every time I have sex, I have to read my father’s name?”

Funny is a young Larry David saying: “I want to break up with my girl friend but I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I’m waiting till she dies.”

Celebrated people who aren’t funny lack such distance. They are just too busy being themselves. So when one of the famous but unfunny utters something amazingly witty, it is a moment worth celebrating.

Howard Stern isn’t funny. Howard Stern is a fourteen-year-old-in- Queens operating in a fifty-five year old body. I know what this means because I was once a fourteen-year old in Queens. But that changed. It changed when I turned fifteen. But for Howard Stern, it never changed, and he has turned the unfunny adolescent vulgarity of fourteen year olds in Queens into pure gold. But he did once make an enormously funny observation about rock n roll musicians.

He said bass players only have to play four strings, but they get laid just as much as guitar players.

Tina Brown isn’t funny. She’s simply not brilliant enough, beautiful enough or dazzling enough to become what she so desperately aspires to be: the wow girl at the throbbing heart of the media universe. She began as a hyper-ambitious British gossip girl who married well and stormed New York in the eighties. She successfully elevated Vanity Fair to a niche in the buzz pantheon and managed a controversial but not unsuccessful stint as editor of the hallowed New Yorker magazine, eventually leaving that mecca of wit and writing panache without having permanently damaged it. Then she floundered, and is floundering still, trying digitally and desperately to be the “innest” of them all. Desperation is not funny, especially British desperation. But she did say something funny once.

George W. S. Trow, author of a bizarre and quirky cultural commentary called In the Context of No Context (which is an inspiration to this column) was one of the posse of posh and precious writers around the New Yorker who saw her celebrity-obsessed ascendancy as the death knell of The New Yorker. So he quit. Whereupon Tina Brown sent Trow a note: “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”

Frank Sinatra wasn’t funny. His swinging songs and “Ring-a-ding-you-bet-your-bippie-send-in-the-broads” swagger was a million miles from genuine humor. But once, as a young architect working on a casino in Atlantic City, I heard his performance at Resorts International and he told the following joke.

A man enters a monastery where he must take a vow of silence, but every seven years he’s allowed to say two words. So he labors silently in the garden for seven years, whereupon they tell him he can say two words. “Bed hard,” he says. They nod and he returns to work, another silent seven years and they tell him he can say two words. “Food stinks,” he says. They nod and back he goes for another seven years of silent labor. Finally they say he can say two words, and he says: “I quit.” “We’re not surprised,” they tell him. “You’ve done nothing but complain for 21 years.”

Donald Trump isn’t funny. Only in America could a real estate developer become a cultural celebrity, and not a good real estate developer at that. After all, he never masterminded a Rockefeller Center or a United Nations or a Central Park, or even a South Street Seaport. He never built a building of any architectural distinction or helped an iconic architect plant a treasure in the skyline of New York. He simply made his name and made money. Some even dispute that, but figuring out Donald Trump’s pay grade is way beyond mine.

But Donald Trump did say something funny once….wait a minute. He never said anything funny. Sorry.

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THE PUTT AND THE PAUNCH

4/19/2009

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Where else could flabby white guys in their forties be considered supreme athletes?

Golf is either a sport, a game, boredom framed in green, or as close to religion as it gets for secular guys with bad fashion sense.

We do know golf is the official pastime of the White Anglo-Saxon Ascendancy. Ironically, it is now dominated, as is America, by a semi-black man of near superhuman talents.

A New Age guru once spoke of golf. He said life is a game and in order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else. A golf course is just a field. So in order to create a game, you have say that mound is more important than this mound. Now, you could throw the ball over there, or simply walk over and drop it, but that wouldn’t be fun. So you hit the ball to the mound with a stick, because that’s fun. Except the guy who has the most fun loses.

Anyway, this is a column about meanings, not birdies, bogies and paunches. So I go for the idea of golf as a re-enactment of the primordial archetype of hunting. A group of men go off together into the woods of a beautiful morning. There is camaraderie and healthy masculine competition. The women have been happily and safely left behind in the cave (or split-level). The men carry their clubs on their backs and venture out with a single-minded fervor to hunt the prey. The clubs are gleaming metal (or forged from space-age composites) and the prey is nothing but a series of holes with flags sticking out. But the archetype holds. Men wouldn’t devote so much time, energy, money and vanished family time chasing a white ball unless an archetype was involved.

I have always found golf annoyingly hard. After all, there is so much world and so little hole.

Apparently, Mark Twain agreed. He called the sport — or game — of golf: “A good walk spoiled.”

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VOLVOS AND VULVAS

4/8/2009

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It is a rite of passage.

It is a rite of Spring.

It is a right of college students to debauch en masse in sleepy beach towns.

I am thinking of Spring Break, as the plane noses down into Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale, where the boys are. Fort Lauderdale, where post-adolescent livers have marinated yearly in alcohol since the Thirties.

I myself have never partaken in the explosion of sand, sun, sex and hangovers known as Spring Break. But I wrote a commercial for it once. Actually, it was a commercial for Volvo. (See Paul’s Work at paulwolfeideas.com to view the commercial) The commercial was created to begin elevating the legendary Swedish bastion of safety and solidity up the ladder of sex and luxury.

Granted, this was no easy task. Volvos were boxier than a cardboard carton and as sexy as colon therapist.

But one day, in the charming old Swedish town of Gothenburg, the captains of Volvo woke up and realized safety only got you so far. To be precise, it got you to $30,000. Above that, you had to be sexy. You had to circumvent the cerebral cortex. You had to offer something far more ephemeral and mysterious than a good, solid car that saved your life. You had to seize people in the depths of their reptilian brains, where the alchemy of dream and desire mixes with strange, invisible passions and moves people to spend more than they should.

So where do you begin such an evolution? Volvo began it with a sedan called the Volvo 850. Dowdy by today’s standards, it was nevertheless a streamlining of the bunker on wheels college professors and proto-environmentalists had been driving around in since the 60’s.

So that was the car. What was the idea? This is where Spring Break reared its crazy, youthful head. How better to change perceptions of a boring car for older people than for four strapping youths to motor it into the maw of Spring Break? A young man forced to transport his buddies to the Dionysian Dreamland in his mother’s Volvo. Would it be a fiasco? Would the girls be turned off? Or would Volvo, and these healthy young men, triumph? Stay tuned.

To further upset expectations, we chose as director of the film, not an expected earnest, talented commercial director who would capture happy people and shoot the sheet metal in the gleaming liquid light that sends car clients into ecstasy.

We chose Bruce Weber, the famous fashion photographer. Bruce Weber had made a name for himself capturing young people (well, mainly handsome young men) in intriguing, candid, spontaneous black and white moments. He had only dipped his toe into the film arena, with a few black and white documentaries, notably a cool capture of the jazz trumpeter and heroin addict Chet Baker.

The challenge, of course, was that Weber, as talented and unique as he was, had never done a commercial for a real product. In fashion, there is no product, except your imagination. In fashion, it really doesn’t matter what happens on the screen. You like it. That’s enough. It’s cool. That’s enough. It’s weird. That’s enough.

Fashion is the implication of a secret world far cooler and sexier than the one you inhabit. Of course, look at a model on the subway without her makeup, or speak to one of Bruce Weber’s handsome young men, and you will see immediately, there is no such secret world. And if there were, it is not any cooler than the one you live in. The illusion of fashion is a flimsy one indeed.

Oscar Wilde said: “We must forgive fashion everything, for it dies so young.”
But I digress.

So we had to move sheet metal. Selling a car involves engines and transmissions and side impact protection systems and warranties and leasing rates.

Bruce Weber would make the boys and girls look good in black and white. What would he do for Volvo?

Ultimately, the spot was successful. But not before some dramatic speed bumps on the Volvo trail. Hundreds of LA’s choicest specimens lined up in bathing suits along the streets of Newport Beach (an expensive resort masquerading as a cheap one) and four young men drove a white Volvo 850 past the gauntlet of smiling girls.

Then an instruction came down from the Volvo client: “Don’t show the kid’s tattoo on camera.” The comment wasn’t necessary. We were shooting about a thousand miles of film, and it would be easy to edit out any shot of the tattoo. No director likes client instructions. Unfortunately, Bruce Weber didn’t only dislike it. He freaked out. He considered the anti-tattoo injunction “homophobic”. How you conflate a family car not wanting to show a tattoo in a TV commercial with prejudice against homosexuals is anybody’s guess, but it was enough, as they say in the lurid parlance of show business, for Bruce Weber to storm off the set. Cameras, grips, hundreds of nubile girls and a concerned band of advertising people stood on the streets of Newport Beach, wondering.

Of course, he returned, but the stage was set for upset. The blow-up came in a conference room that night at the hotel in Laguna Beach after a simple request for more collaboration on the shoot. He had, frankly, a tantrum that was scary to anyone outside the medical profession. He finished the shoot, but there was little communication, and for a while, he actually refused to turn over the film.

Finally, he presented his edit, and the difference between the world of fashion and the world of ideas was laid bare. The commercial as finally edited would be a story, with a point and with humor. The boys’ wildest fantasy is enacted, the mother’s Volvo is a hit, and each step of the way, as youths mob the car, standing on the trunk and roof, necking and hula hooping, the driver’s mother calls to make sure they’re taking care of the car. At the end, on a cell phone on the beach surrounded by dozens of girls, Adam says into the phone: “Hi, Mom. Yeh, I’m wearing sun block.”

In Bruce Weber’s cut, there was no story, no arc, no humor and no point. He had taken his beautiful film and made a rock video. The kind of montage of images with no point that might run on a monitor in Banana Republic and be ignored by shoppers.

It was the beginning of Volvo’s ascent into luxury status, the end of Bruce Weber’s forays into real products, a lesson in the limits of fashion, and a memorialization of youth binging on the fruits of, well, youth. All in thirty seconds.

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