Clive Davis

FINGS AIN'T WOT THEY USED TO BE

"Audiences nowadays are so used to being spoon-fed the most simplistic material, they don't recognize good comedy anymore. You can read them stasimon after stasimon of the funniest chanted poetry ever, and they still sit there like so much stone statuary at the Oracle of Delphi." Washed-up old timer Aristophanes takes a swing at the young generation in an exclusive, byond-the-grave interview with The Onion. [Via The Playgoer] Wait till he hears that Charlotte Church picked up the Best Newcomer prize at that grim gathering, the British Comedy Awards.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Having survived Ramadan, my expat American friend, Patti McCracken (alias The American Lady) is struggling with an over-sized turkey in Algiers: "Are you sure this isn't an emu?"  Meanwhile Cinematical gets into the holiday mood with a list of favourite foodie films: Chocolat and Delicatessen are there, but what happened to that ultimate gastronomic treat, Babette's Feast? I'd go for A Private Function as well, although you really have to be a devotee of overcooked Yorkshire pudding to get the joke.

MICHAEL RICHARDS' LENNY BRUCE MOMENT

As a Seinfeld fanatic, I’m not sure which is more painful: watching "Kramer’s" rage-fuelled meltdown during a stand-up routine or the halting apology he gave later on the Letterman show. When you see Richards start spewing abuse at black hecklers in the club audience, and then start digging himself even deeper into a hole, you wonder if he’s somehow going to turn it into some ingenious, post-modern critique of the N-word. He almost manages it, in fact. But he can’t. Who could? (BTW, I'm not sure it's correct to describe Richards' targets as "hecklers". From his own comments on the tape, I get the impression it was their chatter that irritated him. But I could be wrong.)

I hope he's forgiven in the end. In the meantime, all those deeply irritating pundits and bloggers who like to complain, in that irritatingly faux-innocent way of theirs, that white people aren’t allowed to use the N-word ought to watch this little episode just to acquaint themselves with real life.

The last time I saw a comedian flirt with danger so brazenly, and still get laughs, was Johnny Vegas. Before he was famous. Belly-achingly funny. Last time I saw him on TV he was being paid to be crude and stupid for the Friday-night, post-pub TV audience. Not funny at all.

DAVID FROST'S DAVID FROST MOMENT

Is there ever a second when he's not performing?

Frost is an amazing survivor - now making headlines on Al Jazeera - and a genuinely warm, and famously hospitable, man. My favourite anecdote about him is how Peter Cook was staggering home past Frost's house in the early hours, after an evening's drinking, picked up a rock and threw it through the bedroom window, smashing the glass. There was a pause, before the lights went on, David leaned out, and said: "Peter! How LOVELY to see you!"

HITCH -1

God, I struggled to write a 350-word review just now, and the minute I go on-line I'm reminded that Christopher Hitchens can turn out six articles in his lunch-hour. Here he is, first of all, striking a contrarian note on Borat. He thought the comedy was too excremental, and as for the politics, well, read on:

I pick up my copy of the New Statesman... to find a review of Borat, bannered on the table of contents as "Sacha Baron Cohen's exposure of crass Americana" and on the review page itself with, "The Kazakh ace reporter uncovers uncomfortable truths about the US."... Oh, come on. Among the "cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan" is the discovery that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse....

"The violence that Borat encounters on the New York subway after trying to greet male strangers with kisses is frighteningly real," writes Gilbey, who either doesn't use the London Underground very much or else has a very low standard for mayhem.

WATCHING BORAT

The minute the lights went down and people in the audience started chortling at the Cyrillic titles (ho ho ho, a funny foreign language...) I was afraid I might be in for a hard time. Being the one person in western Europe who thinks Ricky Gervais is a drag has made me a little wary of comedy hype lately.  So I was mightily relieved to discover that Borat's misadventures are as funny as Cosmo said they would be. OK, maybe the humour is too cringe-makingly broad to qualify as all-time classic fare, but I'm happy to settle for 80 minutes of loud guffaws. I see that Jeff Jarvis wasn't anywhere near as amused. Nor was the New Culture Forum's Peter Whittle:

The joke – hey, look at these dumb Yanks – rebounds completely, and in an odd way, ends up at the expense of the European audiences watching. Could this be why, at the end of the screening I went to, there was an oddly mirthless, joyless atmosphere?

THE BORAT EFFECT

I still haven’t seen the film. Looks as if I’ll have to wait till the weekend. Rod Dreher loved it. He couldn’t help thinking of a family funeral twenty years ago:

One distant relative of mine, an old man I had never met, drove in from far away... He was as country as a brown egg. After the funeral, the out-of-town relatives gathered at my folks' house, and I began serving coffee. This old coot, whose name I can't remember, said, "So, yer a college boy. They got many n--gers down thar at LSU?" I froze, and said something like, "They have all kinds of people there," and moved on. It would have done no good to have chastised this old man, and everybody's emotions were on edge anyway, given that it was a funeral. So I chose to overlook his remark, and that was the right thing to have done.

I suppose I would have made an easy mark for Borat, because if confronted by a bumbling, bigoted foreigner, I probably would have put on a rictus smile and tried to endure him until I could get away, for the sake of keeping the poor foreigner from feeling bad.

And he's intrigued by reports that Sacha Baron Cohen is to star in a re-make of Diner des Cons. A very droll movie. There was a none too successful West End stage version, as I recall: See You Next Tuesday. A rude title that foxed a few people.

LOW TECH

There's even a pipe to take the surgical waste direct to the compost heap... The Spine provides a satirist's eye-view of the new, GP-friendly operating theatres. Anyone for Hewitt Huts? The Health Secretary is really keen on the idea:

Asked if she would like to have a delicate haemorrhoid operation performed with a rusty pair of pliers, Hewitt replied: ‘I think if I was in pain, I wouldn’t care what the doctor used, but you can also be sure that the government is committed to provide every doctor in Britain with their own pair of pliers and that is a real improvement, in the surgery, for real patients..."

PRESIDENT WHATSHISNAME

Me too. I stumble over Ahmadinejad's name almost every time I say it. Although I'm not sure Martin Peretz's suggestion is all that, er, diplomatic:

Apparently, lots of other people also have trouble pronouncing his name--including people at the British foreign office. To remedy this embarrassing situation, the ministry some months ago issued a memo instructing its staffers that, when they had actually to say "Ahmadinejad," they should think: "I-am-a-dinner-jacket." I heard about it and I've never faltered since.

In case anyone thinks this is an example of anti-Iranian prejudice, I'd better add that, after twenty years, I've never really got the hang of "Jay McInerney" either.

PS: On an entirely different subject, it's worth noting that Peretz is quite taken with the idea of John Reid as a future prime minister. Tough on jihadism, tough on the causes of jihadism...

HUEY & CO - 1

If scribbling a weblog can be a tiring chore, how much more perspiration is used up on a daily strip cartoon? Seems The Boondocks, one of the sharper, if more PC creations of recent times has reached the final frame after six years - a long, long time in politics, but the mere flick of an eyelash in the life-cycle of a strip. (I've never been a regular reader of the vintage Gasoline Alley, but I'm fascinated by the way it works its way through one generation after another. Learned about that from the wonderful Penguin Book of Comics, given to me as a present aeons ago.)