Song Of The Day: I Still Love You, Judas / Firewater
Word Of The Day: Favillous / Like ashes
Went to see Dave Attell last night in Denver. Funny, as always. Comedians I love tend to fall into three categories:
1, Super fucking smart. These are the Jon Stewerts and Stephen Colbert's of the comedic World. In each of these cases (Jon and Stephen) you get an extra bonus: They have the capacity to be sincere (especially Jon). And that's what's beyond irony, see? Comedians, take fucking note. You can be funny one moment, and sincere in another, and it doesn't diminish your humor, it increases your humanity. It's stunning how rare that gift is. Some of my favorite episodes of the daily show are when they have segments of outrageous sacriliege and taboo, and then Jon interviews someone and gets real and sincere with them. That's all it takes to get beyond post-modernism, gang. Step up to the plate. You can be vile, crude, inflammatory, and still be sincere and give a shit too. I believe Jon and Stephen are two of our very first 2nd tier comedians. Jon is obviously. One might be tempted to think Stephen is more of an ironic deconstructor. Always poking fun at conservatives and religion -until you learn that he actually goes to church. Yes. There is space for both in his being, and that is profoundly human.
2, Idiosyncratic-Charismatic. These are the Steven Wright's, the Maria Bamford's, the Lily Tomlin's. There's something angular, surprising in their being. They take us into a kind of altered state, a perspective shift, it's a very particular kind of gift. You can't really learn it, I don't think, you have to be born this type of odd. This is why Christopher Walken is deacon in the church of (good) wierd. Hang around these types of people (comedians), and you feel like someone slipped a kaleidoscope behind your optic nerve, or salvia divinorum in your double shot of espresso (which you dumped into a large extra bold coffee). It's not over stating the case to call the best of this type Shamans. They are. If they only KNEW they were, they would be so much more effective. I think Lily's got it, Chris has got it. Maybe Steven. But to push through to second tier comedic shamanism, I think Maria Bamford needs a tantric trist with David Byrne. Don't shoot the messenger. I don't control hybrid breeding, I just command it.
3, Taboo / Shadow. Possibly the most mystical and -HOLY- (i mean that literally) of all three types, these comedians consciously, intentionally challenge our assumptions, beliefs, and perspective. Even more importantly they integrate shadow. All the repressed, marginalized, disowned aspects of our self that for whatever reason we do not have the balls to own, these comedians hold for us. They're the EMTs of the collective Psyche, without them, we'd all be fascists fucks. The taboo / shadow type is alchemical comedy, transformative hyjinx. The best of this bunch are prophets doing the work of the divine. If you understand anything about the phenomenon of shadow in psychology or anything about subject / object boundary in development through stages of consciousness, you know why these artists are actually accellerating the evolution of consciousness on Earth. Nothing is sacred, everything is fair game. Incest, death, rape, politics, religion, etc. They transgress the forbidden, go where we're not supposed to go. Success in this realm requires a particular inter-subjective genius, because they're not just doing that fucking inane observational shit ("ever noticed how girls do X and guys do Y ? Ha ha ha..."), they are unveiling the uglature (hey, I just made up a word!) of our own refracted original face. Ever heard the saying 'a Devil is a Angle denied' ? Well it's TRUE. Love has no opposite, but if we oppose any aspect of it, we position our selves against our selves, and the delusion of division, the distortion of divininity, takes our native endowment of ubiquitious ubiety and turns us into demented deities. It's a choice (just stop it, you sick fucker). Without the aid of this type of comedy (which is deemed "sick" by much of conventional society) we would be much, much sicker than we are. See, shadow comedy is HEALTHY, it is literally curative -if it comes from a post-rational being. That's medicine. If it comes from a pre-rational being, it's poison. Some, like Andrew Dice Clay, try to do this, and they're just crass, foul-mouthed fucking loser assholes. Others, like Dave Attell, or Chris Rock, Amy Sedaris, and Amy Pohler (when she was on Upright Citizen's Brigade, although I love her on Saturday Night Live, that show doesn't challenge viewer's perspectives and guarded World views like Upright did on a good episode) know it's an artform, a sacred practice, and they develop the necessary technology. That technology?
PERSPECTIVES. It's all about perspectives. How many perspectives do we have access to? The technology of transformative comedy is perspectives. Taboo comedians have access to perspectives we have disowned or repressed. They put us back into contact with them, and if we (wisely) respond willingly, we become more whole, expanded- INTEGRATED.
That's the simple case with any artistic medium; Music, film, literature, comedy- what the best and deepest of them have in common is access to perspectives. By any spiritual or psychological model, the more that is included in the radius of "I" (which is to say, the greater and deeper the perspectives available to our ever present awareness) the more evolved the consciousness is. So what the fuck are we waiting for ? That's what integral is. Perspectives. Period. Let's get in them. They're fun, like ATVs in the astral plane, like jet skis in the subtle, like causal ferris wheels. Dig it. Get integrating, mofos.
