So I took the various recommendations for stand-up comedians (thanks to all who commented), but I’m left (mostly) feeling like Noah with Achewood. Mostly obvious jokes delivered with the assumption that being on stage is a virtue. Demetri Martin, Zach Galifainakis, pretty flat I thought.

Even Patton Oswalt, who’s likable enough, seems to base his routine on statements of obvious facts? Like his 80s metal bit– metal has always gleefully parodied itself. His descriptions aren’t as funny as the music videos.

I liked Jim Gaffigan, though. His routine doesn’t seem like an audition for a sitcom. And it’s intricately designed for the stage, which I appreciate.

More generally– he also seemed like the only comedian not just taking shots at people. He layers it so he’s often the butt, or you can’t tell who’s the butt. But Patton Oswalt just seems like this guy who makes fun of people different than him (getting back to what Miriam said) while standing above it all.

I could be wrong, as I’ve only watched three or four clips for each. But I can say it’s a trend in American humor. The Daily Show, say, does a lot of media commentary, but on slow news days they humiliate civilians on the street. I think it’s rather American– I recall an essay in the English film journal Sight & Sound about a rash of American indie docs that ridicule their subjects. (American Movie, Michael Moore, anything set in the rural South, the camera loves rubes and freaks.)

So the comedian/filmmaker’s in control and unassailable. Feh. I’d rather watch them suffer as the fee for my attention.

So, Downtown.

Japanese comedy duo, did manzai standup until ’91, now mostly variety shows. Brilliantly inventive & cruel variety shows.

I like their “No Laughing” year-end specials. Like 2007’s “24 Hour Absolutely No Laughing Hospital,” with punishment games if someone laughs. Plenty of ridicule and humiliation, but all aimed at the show’s hosts, who dress as nurses and get whipped whenever they laugh.

Scores of comedians gang up on them to make them laugh. Elaborate gags, huge production numbers, random appearances by Black Jack. What’s not to like?

Comics connection: early in the show, UMEZU Kazuo, author of The Drifting Classroom and Cat-Eyed Boy, shows up as part of the hospital’s Special Rescue Team. The training drill requires him to sprint to a dummy & revive it. (He’s in his 70s.)

While running, he falls into a concealed pit. Hilarity ensues.

Then, a bunch of black-clad nurses show up and beat the hell out of the show’s four stars who laughed at this poor guy. That’s comedy!

Issue #295 of The Comics Journal is now out online and maybe in a day or two to the stands. Our contributors have several articles in:

• Tom has a great column on a few books that try to breed superheroes with fashion for horrific results. Tom, I sat next to a madcap costume designer friend at the opening of one of his shows, where he bewailed the fact that they’d tea-stained all his costumes to dull the eye-melting colors. Months later, I found out he’s an X-Men fanatic. Hmm.
• Noah with a long article on “Comics in the Closet” and reviews of Zot! (the first paragraph’s a gem) and Donald Dewey’s survey of political cartoons
• My own column on Dousei Jidai (?????by Kamimura Kazuo (????), which is the other great living-in-sin manga from the early 70s, so if you’ve read Red-Colored Elegy, read this. And shorts on the comics movie Independents and Tatsumi’s Good-Bye— I’m still perplexed that it’s Best-Of fodder, read article for why. And I’ll have links & notes for Dousei Jidai on my other blog on Thursday.

Not only that, but I was delighted to see NG SUAT TONG back! He hasn’t lost a step: “Now if this bland listing seems somehow unfair to El Rassi’s artistry, let me assure the reader that the author has none.”

And when did Frank Santoro start doing the minicomics column? This issue? He’s a great choice, and I’m glad to see him there. Frank, welcome, but don’t be surprised if everyone starts assuming everything you say comes from a secret earpiece back to Gary Groth’s command center. (Also glad to see Tender Loving Empire reviewed.)

Reading Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Abhay Khosla confirmed why I don’t read Khosla: I don’t know 90% of the comics he covers. But I do like the tension in these two quotes:

[#1] With art comics, the conversations that I tend to see, it’s not as much about actually caring about what happens to the characters who live in the four-corners of the page. … I’ve never seen anyone go nuts on the internet over what happened to Crying Asian Man from some Adrian Tomine comic. “I’m going to predict what happens to Crying Asian Man in the next issue of Optic Nerve.” Never seen that. I’ve never seen a Crying Asian Man fan-site, or anyone dressed as Crying Asian Man at a comic convention, or Crying Asian Man slash-fic.

(Now, since “Crying Asian Man” sounds like “Crying Freeman,” from now on I’ll see Adrian Tomine’s deathly still hipsters threatened by a yakuza assassin’s speedlines.)

And:

[#2] Comics, animation, both seems to dis-empower the artists even though they’re art-driven media.

(He’s drawing a distinction here between writer-as-creator and artist-as-creator, but I think the former point informs the latter in a slanted way.)

Think of Nancy. There’s Bushmiller’s Nancy, the Gilchrists’, and John Stanley’s comic-book Nancy. Bushmiller’s defines the character, but didn’t create her. She’s almost Platonic:

She doesn’t need the artists who drew her, or the writers who wrote her: model sheet immortality.

That’s seemed to me like a condition of cartooning. The characters tend not to change, and actively resist it. So they transubstantiate into models, toys, and character goods, and any one artist’s intentions are just a footnote. (Cartooning as iconography, as opposed to drawing as record-of-seeing).

But prose fiction, Optic Nerve‘s model, can be read as a record of a character’s change. The payoff’s often enough the character realizing the change, epiphany at the end. In comics, as in genre fiction, I think the stability of the characters works against this– Optic Nerve and many of the 90s wave of literary graphic novels have paralysis as a theme, full of characters frozen in ice.

This could be a fundamental difference in the media. The comics that deal in time have done so over decades: Cerebus, Gasoline Alley. Even the Palomar stories seem to return to state whenever Gilbert does one of those episodes where all the characters show up for a big party.

(Nitpick: Edmund Gosse was a hack just as a scholar! Father & Son lives on.)

I hope everyone reads this interview with Frederik Schodt by the intrepid Electric Ant tribe (cf. Same Hat!). Topics covered: translating Tezuka with whiteout & typewriter; not realizing you couldn’t just waltz up to Tezuka Pro and ask to translate stuff; being terrified by protofandom; and not knowing citrus industry vocab (yuzu? mikan?). And comics industry stuff, like whether manga’s a bubble or not, shojo etc, but that’s just the drapes.

Either because the chat’s not related to a PR cycle, or because I’m just interested in why Westerners ended up in Japan in the 60s/70s, it seems like a rare interview where the speaker’s personality shines through.

(An aside: it’s interesting that Schodt first wound up in Japan through his father’s diplomatic work: so many of the Americans who settled there, like Donald Richie, Oliver Statler, and Donald Keene, went on military coattails; of course, Schodt’s younger than those guys. Either way, I can only imagine how much things have changed.)

Criterion’s got a clutch of new giclée posters; I especially like the Amarcord one. Three are by comics luminaries: Bill Sienkiewicz, Darwyn Cooke, and Xaime: