In Which We Still Have Not Recovered From This Particular Hangover

The Docile American Bachelor Party

by ELEANOR MORROW

God forgive me in advance for what I am about to write. A.O. Scott chickened out; it had to be me.

It is a phenomenon, it is the new Big Lebowski, it has everything we require from entertainment and more. "I haven't seen it, but I heard it's the new Old School" crooned Bill Simmons. Shut up, Bill, you're over forty with two kids and no grasp of English.

Men can't express their true feelings, so they express themselves by being away from women. That is the sterling message of Todd Phillips' 90 minute attempt to kill comedy, The Hangover.

A dentist loses a tooth. A loser schoolteacher almost forgets his head. The guy from the Kanye video acts slightly irregular. These are the "wild" dreams of middle-aged men. They are not wild, no more wild than a 16 year old's spring break, or a vibrant afternoon of text messaging. Our idea of the crazy has became crazy.

In Judd Apatow's seminal boy-on-boy-on-boy-on-boy love story, Knocked Up, Leslie Mann believes her husband Paul Rudd is cheating on her, perhaps with Phoebe Buffet. She tracked him to a magnificently empty house in the Valley, where he's participating in a fantasy baseball draft with a bunch of other repressed homosexuals. She's upset at finding out she's married a gay man? I couldn't think of any other reason she started crying in the driveway, on a movie set, in front of Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen. Maybe she really had her heart set on seeing Spiderman.

According to this way of thinking, women are just prostitutes waiting for kind and generous dentists to walk into their lives. Heather Graham looks too much like a Barbie (or admittedly a whore) to be anything but Ed Helms' paramour; a comic actress on the level of Rachael Harris is a high-strung betch who can't cheat and get away with it like Bill Clinton. Justin Bartha was in a fucking Geico commercial and NBC's horrific sitcom Teachers. He deserves no second life in the American cinema just because he banged Ashley Olsen and Lydia Hearst.

A woman places obligations on a man. Her job is to look good and hold hands at a wedding. A woman is capable of forgiveness but not of understanding, and that is the terms the "men" of The Hangover must deal with their women on. At this they don't have much of any success. That is why they are men to treasure: they can't even excel at having a good time.

Men when reduced to their primordial urges, get married and promise to take care of whores. What sorts of men are these? Where can they be found? Everywhere: capitalism has compromised their masculinity, like the eunuchs of Greek times. Men used to be able to play with boys, ask Camille Paglia and Sophocles. Now they just play with themselves.

Now they play with baseball players on Yahoo! and ESPN and they draft Hideki Matsui even though he's an aging slugger who can't play the field. Paul Rudd has two kids and wants to bang models; Bradley Cooper hates being a teacher, gets laughs for it. Seth Rogen can't grasp the good fortune that is putting his penis inside of an E! reporter -- he has to whine about it to his father, who is even more of a joke. Ed Helms can't even tell his girlfriend he's going to Vegas for a bachelor party. By the end, he wrests free of her to be the babysitter for some other, identical woman.

Erstwhile poker player Todd Phillips directed this return to more pedestrian fair. It came from a real life hangover suffered by a friend of one of the movie's producers! Just when you thought it was impossible, Entourage is becoming more like real life in retrospect. Men love stories about other men going to Las Vegas, Las Vegas likes this as well, tourism goes up, women go down. Eventually we will be sexually segregated by preferred form of entertainment. Shouldn't the sexes become more like each other instead of less? Wasn't Ellen Page an inspiration to us all?

Then again, there is a passivity bred into these creatures. They just want the weekend; the rest of the time they are totally psyched to cave in, to live a life of small-time, Adam Carolla-esque complaining. We can assume despite his history as a boxer, despite his puffy grandstanding on Los Angeles-area radio, that Carolla is a total pushover for his wife. They're family men at heart, "some guys just can't handle Vegas." In between we must suffer every measure of overdone joke imaginable.

Here are some jokes I can do without going forward:

A strange animal approaches a drug-addled male as in Harold and Kumar. A tiger isn't funny simply because it's a tiger. It's even less funny if it's Mike Tyson's tiger, especially in light of the loss of his daughter in recent weeks.

When a person is saying something inappropriate about another person and they are present, he says, "Excuse me! I'm right here!" I'm pretty sure Neil Simon wrote this joke, and I'm just as sure it's not funny.

Bradley Cooper is not funny, at least not unless Ryan Murphy is writing his dialogue. This rule also goes for Joe Rogan, but I don't think he was in The Hangover.

The all-star comedy super special cameo: I am tired of Mike Tyson, of Valerie Bertinelli (not relevant here, but still), of Frank the Tank, of Snoop Dogg in Starsky & Hutch. I blame test audiences for all of this, I blame them for being surprised so that we can't be surprised. I blame test audiences for Star Trek and The Dark Knight. It is actually possible to make a work of art that is not offensive to any particular sensibility, and not challenging to any of them. The fact that we can all agree something is entertaining is the number one indication that it's not very good.

This does not make The Dark Knight or The Hangover bad per se; it doesn't make them art either.

One comedic sensibility is learned from the previous generation. If middle-aged men find their childish man-boy escapes to the city of sin a welcome release from the economic grind of this age, fine. But good for Todd Philips for imposing an R rating. I'd rather our kids be Pixar funny than Old School-funny.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and tumbls here.

"Heavy Cross" - The Gossip (mp3)

"Pop Goes the World" - The Gossip (mp3)

"8th Wonder" - The Gossip (mp3)

In Which I Just Don't Trust Anybody

Schulz and Friends

by BILL WATTERSON

The comic strip Peanuts was more than a decade old when I started reading it as a kid in the mid-1960s. At that time, Peanuts was becoming a force of pop culture, with best-selling books and a newly burgeoning merchandising empire of plastic dolls, sweatshirts, calendars and television specials. The overwhelming commercial success of the strip often overshadows its artistic triumph, but throughout its 50-year run, Charles Schulz wrote and drew every panel himself, making his comic strip an extremely personal record of his thoughts. It was a model of artistic depth and integrity that left a deep impression on me.

While growing up, I collected the annual Peanuts books and used them as a personal cartooning course, copying the drawings with the idea of someday becoming the next Charles Schulz.

At that time, most of the strip went over my head, and I certainly had no understanding of how revolutionary Peanuts was or how it was changing the comics. Peanuts pretty much defines the modern comic strip, so even now it's hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humor, the unflinching emotional honesty, the inner thoughts of a household pet, the serious treatment of children, the wild fantasies, the merchandising on an enormous scale -- in countless ways, Schulz blazed the wide trail that most every cartoonist since has tried to follow.

David Michaelis's biography, Schulz and Peanuts, is an earnest and penetrating look at the man behind this comic-strip phenomenon. With new access to Schulz's personal files, professional archives and family, Mr. Michaelis presents the fullest picture we have yet of the cartoonist's life and personality.

Born in 1922, Schulz always held his parents in high regard, but they were emotionally remote and strangely inattentive to their only child. Schulz was shy and alienated during his school years, retreating from nearly every opportunity to reveal himself or his gifts. Teachers and students consequently ignored him, and Schulz nursed a lifelong grudge that so few attempted to draw him out or recognized his talent. His mother was bedridden with cancer during his high-school years, and she died long before he could prove himself to her -- a source of endless regret and longing for him. As a young adult, he disguised his hurt and anger with a mild, deflecting demeanor that also masked his great ambition and drive.

Once he finally achieved his childhood dream of drawing a comic strip, however, he was able to expose and confront his inner torments through his creative work, making insecurity, failure and rejection the central themes of his humor. Knowing that his miseries fueled his work, he resisted help or change, apparently preferring professional success over personal happiness. Desperately lonely and sad throughout his life, he saw himself as "a nothing," yet he was also convinced that his artistic ability made him special. An odd combination of prickly pride and utter self-abnegation characterizes many of his public comments.

Peanuts launched in 1950, appearing in just seven newspapers. The comic strip grew slowly at first, but as its vision expanded and the characters solidified, it caught fire with readers. Schulz's fixation on his work was total, and his private life suffered as a result. Mr. Michaelis uncovers quite a bit of Schulz's more personal tribulations.

Schulz's strong-willed and industrious first wife, Joyce, grew disgusted with his withdrawal, and she often treated him cruelly. As the marriage finally unraveled, Schulz had an unsuccessful affair, and he later broke up the marriage of the woman who became his second wife.

Schulz's life turned more peaceful after he remarried, but he never overcame the self-doubt and dread that plagued him. Work remained his only refuge. At the end, deteriorating health took away Schulz's ability to draw the strip, a loss so crushing that it can only be considered merciful that he died, at age 77 in 2000, the very day his last strip was published.

It's a strange and interesting story, and Mr. Michaelis, the author of a 1998 biography of artist N.C. Wyeth, paces the narrative well, offering many insights and surprising events from Schulz's life. Undoubtedly the most fascinating part of the book is the juxtaposition of biographical information and reproduced Peanuts strips. Here we see how literally Schulz sometimes depicted actual situations and events. The strips used as illustrations in "Schulz and Peanuts" are reproduced at eye-straining reduction and are often removed from the context of their stories, but they vividly demonstrate how Schulz used his cartoons to work through private concerns. We discover, for example, that in the recurring scenes of Lucy annoying Schroeder at the piano, the crabby and bossy Lucy stands in for Joyce, and the obsessive and talented Schroeder is a surrogate for Schulz.

Reading these strips in light of the information Mr. Michaelis unearths, I was struck less by the fact that Schulz drew on his troubled first marriage for material than by the sympathy that he shows for his tormentor and by his ability to poke fun at himself.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

The cartoons are also terrifically funny and edgy, even after all these years. The wonder of "Peanuts" is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously. Children could enjoy the silly drawings and the delightful fantasy of Snoopy, while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip's stark visual beauty. If anything, I wish Mr. Michaelis's biography had devoted more space to analyzing the strip on its own terms as an art. Knowing the sources of Schulz's inspiration does not explain the imaginative power of the work.

I was also surprised that Mr. Michaelis largely glossed over the later years of the strip, despite major shifts in its focus and tone. As newer characters developed into dominant voices, Charlie Brown receded, becoming almost avuncular, and Peanuts abandoned much of its earlier harshness. It would have been interesting to learn how Schulz's conception of the strip changed over the years and what Peppermint Patty, Spike and Rerun offered him in the way of new expressive possibilities. I was not always enthusiastic about Schulz's later choices, but it says something for Schulz that he resisted the simple, robotic repetition of a successful formula. In this, too, "Peanuts" was unlike most other comic strips.

For all the influence that Peanuts had on me, I was content to admire Schulz from afar, and like most of his millions of readers I never met him. Mr. Michaelis has done an extraordinary amount of digging and has written a perceptive and compelling account of Schulz's life. This book finally introduces Charles Schulz to us all.

Mr. Watterson is the creator of the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes."

"The Sound of Your Heart" - Eskimo Joe (mp3)

"Childhood Behavior" - Eskimo Joe (mp3)

"Losing My Mind" - Eskimo Joe (mp3)

In Which Absolute Fame Corrupts Absolutely

The Aura of Prosperity

by MOLLY LAMBERT

The King Of Comedy came out twenty four years ago and it rings like a truth bell more than ever. Martin Scorsese's criminally underrated dark comedy is about fame and its pursuit. Not the lovingly sepia-toned version he rolled out in The Aviator that keeps chumps like me interested in the VF Hollywood Issue. ("Ooh! Hitchcock!") The King Of Comedy is interested in focusing on the chumps. What happens to the lowly consumer of culture who tries to reciprocate.

The King Of Comedy was written by Paul D. Zimmerman, who once said "If you're not cynical, you're stupid."

Fame is a one-way mirrored monologue masquerading as a conversation. Celebrity Worship Syndrome is a recognized psychological condition. Some people think it's at an all time high in America, corresponding with insecurity about the impending recession. I buy that, but it's not just America. The epidemic is worldwide. Celebrities represent our cultural Jungian archetypes.

Adult child beauty pageant queen Britney Spears is busy demonstrating the full spectrum of psychological conditions in the DSM IV on a world stage. Angelina Jolie is practically a fertility cult and Jennifer Aniston is the patron saint of jilted women. Whether you see yourself in Anna Nicole or Alan Rickman, no one is immune to identifying with celebrities.

They are our Olympians. They act out the same basic emotional dramas as mortals. Through invasive media we get to watch voyeuristically and make judgments from home. It's the concept behind social networking sites, blogs, American Idol and the election. That bizarre desire to be judged, to be evaluated and approved by strangers, is somehow innately human.

Scorsese's made a lot of films about celebrity. His Mafia films are about the localized version; neighborhood notoriety. It's basically the same idea. You get recognized and receive special treatment. People help you out and want to give you things.

But there's a malevolent flip side, which is that people want to tell you about themselves. They are helping you in the hope that you will give them something in return. You most likely can't and they will be disappointed. Fame is both convenient and a curse.

Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) is neither funny nor talented, but he wants to be a famous comedian. He lives in his mother's basement with a cardboard cut-out of Liza Minelli. He is sidesplittingly pathetic, which makes his drive to be recognized fucking hilarious.

Fabulous ginger dykon Sandra Bernhard, as Masha, gives DeNiro a run for his money in the 'genuine psychopath' school of performance. Masha's masking tape seduction of Jerry Langford is as uncomfortable as you imagine being forcibly raped by your lesbian stalker might be. (Unless you are Alex, who is gunning for lesbians to start stalking him.)

Scorsese excels at depicting the interior lives of poignant losers. Pupkin and Masha may be his most blindly confident losers and by that token, the most poignant. The film's "happy" ending is perhaps the darkest touch of all.

"I make you laugh, I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?"

You know the saying Kill Your Idols? Sometimes just meeting your heroes can be enough to destroy the positive illusions you've built up around them. You're generally better off not meeting them without a proper introduction.

Success begets other people trying to leech off that success. If people came up to you every day wanting something you can't really give them; the aura of prosperity, I imagine it would get tiresome really fast.

Jerry Lewis; Money, Cash, Hoes

But fans feel like celebrities owe them the courtesy of an encounter. Especially in the case of a comedian or a talk show host with a 'friendly' public persona that is supposedly also your 'real' one. How do you be a dick to someone badgering you for an autograph when you're, say, Conan O'Brien or Ellen DeGeneres?

Like the true cliche, a lot of comedians are deeply unhappy people. Sad clowns abound. It makes you suspicious of funny people. Humor is often a more socially acceptable form of more uncomfortable emotions like anger or sadness. Charismatic people are generally hiding some kind of insecurity or fatal character flaw behind their great personality.

no one knows what it's like to be the sad clown

Jerry Lewis seems like a testy enough guy to start. To coax this great performance out of Lewis, Scorsese had DeNiro shout anti-Semitic shit at him in character before shooting a scene. Lewis never finished his own jaw-droppingly offensive magnum opus, 1972's The Day The Clown Cried. The complete script is online.

TDTCC tells the story of a self-centered circus clown, Helmut Doork, who is sent to a concentration camp after a drunken impersonation of Hitler. There, he befriends the Jewish children of the camp, and performs for them, angering the camp Commandant. He is sent with the children on a train to Auschwitz, and there, he is expected to lead the children, like a Pied Piper, to the gas chambers.

The Larry Sanders Show really picks up where The King Of Comedy left off. I can't recommend that show enough. Judd Apatow (who wrote and produced Larry Sanders) has his own Pupkinesque anecdote about Steve Martin that he is surely sick of telling by now:

Apatow regaled an audience at the New Yorker Festival this weekend with the tale of how, on vacation in California as a boy, he had spotted Martin washing his car in front of his home. The young Apatow jumped out of the car and asked for an autograph, but Martin said he didn't give autographs at his home. "Please, we won't tell anyone," Apatow begged. Sorry, Martin said, but no.So Apatow went home and wrote Martin a nasty letter, in which he gave an early glimpse of his now well-documented talent for profanity. Three months later, he received a package from Martin that contained a copy of his book Cruel Shoes. "I'm sorry," read Martin's inscription. "I didn't realize I was speaking to THE Judd Apatow."

Top Twenty Movies About the Corrosive Nature of Fame

1. A Face In The Crowd

2. Sweet Smell Of Success

3. Ace In The Hole

4. All About Eve

5. Stardust Memories

6. Zelig

7. 8 ½

8. Opening Night

9. Nashville

10. This Is My Life

11. Being There

12. All That Jazz

13. I Shot Andy Warhol

14. Mulholland Drive

15. Boogie Nights

16. Cecil B. Demented

17. Showgirls

18. To Die For

19. Valley Of The Dolls/Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls

20. Glitter

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She lives in Los Angeles, and she tumbls right here for your pleasure, and she twitters right here for mine.

"Kundun! I liked it!"

"Rock and Roll Nightmare" - Spinal Tap (mp3)

"Warmer Than Hell" - Spinal Tap (mp3)

"Gimme Some Money" - Spinal Tap (mp3)