Innholdsfortegnelse for August 19, 2024 i The New Yorker

One Saturday evening in late June, the master of ceremonies at the Ice House, a comedy club in Pasadena, California, told the audience that they were in for a special treat: Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British scientist who was on a quest to determine the world’s funniest joke, was going to come out and enlist the audience’s help. The m.c., Debi Gutierrez, would tell jokes that particularly appealed to Americans who had visited Wiseman’s humor Web site, and he would tell jokes favored by the British. Wiseman bounded up and perched on a stool facing Gutierrez, a brassy woman in her early forties. “May I call you Richard?” she asked. “You can call me what you want,” Wiseman said. “Dr. Dick!” she said. The audience whooped, and Wiseman offered a…

When I consider men of golden talents,I’m delighted, in my introverted way,To discover, as I’m drawing up the balance,How much we have in common, I and they. Like Burns, I have a weakness for the bottle;Like Shakespeare, little Latin and less Greek;I bite my fingernails like Aristotle;Like Thackeray, I have a snobbish streak. I’m afflicted with the vanity of Byron;I’ve inherited the spitefulness of Pope;Like Petrarch, I’m a sucker for a siren;Like Milton, I’ve a tendency to mope. My spelling is suggestive of a Chaucer;Like Johnson, well, I do not wish to die(I also drink my coffee from the saucer);And if Goldsmith was a parrot, so am I. Like Villon, I have debits by the carload;Like Swinburne, I’m afraid I need a nurse;By my dicing is Christopher out-Marlowed,And I dream…

My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog. My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have it. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, “Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy’s girl?” The baby says, “Momma,” and she doesn’t just say it once, she says it repeatedly, “Momma Momma Momma.” I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.…

AUGUST 14 – 20, 2024 What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. The music that Nick Cave makes is often preoccupied with the unresolved. Whether fronting the short-lived Australian post-punk band the Birthday Party, working with his long-running project the Bad Seeds, or collaborating with the Bad Seeds member and multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, the singer-songwriter and composer has sung compellingly of death and dysfunction, in a gripping, broken-down voice that implies as much melodrama and sensitivity as acidity and malaise. The hauntingly poignant and transfixing music he’s made since the death of his son Arthur, in 2015, burrows deeper into that complexity, for subtle, sweeping records of harmonic detail. As Cave preps the new Bad Seeds album “Wild God” (out Aug. 30), he performs at National Sawdust on…

Inventory of the liquidation sale of the recently vacated headquarters of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., at Third Avenue and Fiftieth Street: Fourteenth floor. Three dozen assorted two-drawer lateral files. Ten workstations with acoustic panels. One case of booklets entitled “The Impact of Minority Presence in Girl Scouting on White and Minority Communities.” Animal footprints, acorns for special craft projects, toasting sticks whittled from fallen tree branches, packages of gorp, illustrated chart of bandanna tricks: none. Girl Scout cookies, assorted flavors: none. Twelfth floor. Orange Herman Miller Eames chairs, straight-backed wooden desk chairs, plastic stackable shell chairs in various colors. Troop Camper activity badges embroidered with little tents and trees, which Mom always promised to sew on when she had a free minute but never did: none. Cookies: ditto.…

SKIN FLICK Winter, 1973. Late afternoon: the entr’acte between dusk and darkness, when the people who conduct their business in the street—numbers runners in gray chesterfields, out-of-work barmaids playing the dozens, adolescents cultivating their cigarette jones and lust, small-time hustlers selling “authentic” gold wristwatches that are platinum bright—look for a place to roost and to drink in the day’s sin. Young black guy, looks like the comedian Richard Pryor, walks into one of his hangouts, Opal’s Silver Spoon Café. A greasy dive with an R. & B. jukebox, it could be in Detroit or in New York, could be anywhere. Opal’s has a proprietor—Opal, a young and wise black woman, who looks like the comedian Lily Tomlin—and a little bell over the door that goes tink-a-link, announcing all the handouts…

This is probably as good a time as any to say a few words about an appealing new comedy program called “Saturday Night,” which is broadcast at eleven-thirty each Saturday night by NBC and is definitely not to be confused with “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell,” which comes on earlier in the evening on ABC. The Cosell show and NBC’s “Saturday Night” are both mainly live, but there is a crucial difference between the two programs. Cosell’s show (as is the case with nearly all entertainment on commercial television), for all its “liveness,” is based on and defined by the standard vocabulary of American show business. Some of the acts are well done, others are not so well done. The essential texture of the show, however, depends on that…

The power of the people made itself felt in a rewarding way in the past few months, after a Facebook petition was created calling for Betty White to host “Saturday Night Live.” Eventually, more than half a million people signed, and, in a move of great good sense and great good humor, Lorne Michaels, the show’s producer, duly invited White (or, rather, reinvited her—she had been asked several times before). The result was a lot of fun: an eighty-eight-year-old woman, with a sixty-year television career, kicking some energy and professionalism into a show that, while technically not dead, stubbornly refuses to really live. White obeys all the rules of good behavior except when it comes to what she says; you just don’t expect someone with her grandmotherly sparkle to be…

“J oan Rivers is giving a seminar?” said the man standing in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza in White Plains last Tuesday evening. He gazed at an army of suburban women storming through the ballroom doors. “So what’s it about?” he asked one woman as she hurried past. “It’s a ‘You Deserve to Be Happy’ seminar,” she told him. “Oh,” he said, pretending to get it. “Oh, right.” Indeed, it was so. Ms. Rivers, fresh from two similar gigs, in Minneapolis and Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was scheduled to give an hour-and-a-half-long inspirational disquisition on how she “got through shit—twice.” Having coped with the suicide of her husband, Edgar, and a major career crisis in the late eighties, only to find herself once more “in the toilet, careerwise,” just…

Between the unbewitching hours of seven and nine this Friday morning, the TV show “Today” will be devoted to a conversation with Buster Keaton, supplemented by an extraordinary assortment of sequences from old Keaton movies, including “The General” and “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” and the last two minutes of the first picture Keaton ever appeared in—“The Butcher Boy,” a two-reeler starring Fatty Arbuckle, which was filmed here, in a studio on East Forty-eighth Street, in 1917. Buster Keaton has long been one of our heroes—next to his friend Chaplin he was surely the greatest of the silent-film comedians—and we were delighted to accept an invitation from the “Today” people to watch, last Wednesday, in the Klieg-lit cavern of an N.B.C. studio, the taping of the program and to enjoy a few…

My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. He was a comedy nerd, though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth mentioning. Like most Britons, Harvey gathered his family around the defunct hearth each night to watch the same half-hour comic situations repeatedly, in reruns and on video. We knew the “Dead Parrot” sketch by heart. We had the usual religious feeling for “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” If we were notable in any way, it was not in kind but in extent. In our wood-cabinet music center, comedy records outnumbered the Beatles. The Goons’ “I’m Walking Back-ward for Christmas” got an airing all year long. We liked to think of ourselves as particular, on guard against slapstick’s easy laughs—Benny Hill was…

From infancy, from childhood’s earliest caper,He loved the daily paper. Propped on his grubby elbows, lying prone,He took, at first, the Comics for his own.Then, as he altered stature and his voice,Sports were his single choice. For a brief time, at twenty, Thought becameA desultory flame,So with a critic eye he would peruseThe better Book Reviews. Behold the bridegroom, then—the dazzled suitorTurned grim commuter,Learning without directionTo fold his paper to the Housing Section. Forty enlarged his waistline with his wage.The Business PageEngrossed his mind. He liked to ponder wellThe charted rise of Steel or Tel & Tel. Choleric, pompous, and too often vext,The fifties claimed him next.The Editorials, then, were what he scanned.(Even, at times, he took his pen in hand.) But witness how the human viewpoint varies:Of late he…

The job of World’s Most Popular Entertainer is not one that seems to lead to a modest estimation of one’s powers and a limited sense of self-worth. Elvis, a decade into his tenure, announced that he had seen Christ and Antichrist battling in the clouds above Graceland; John Lennon, six years into owning one-fourth of the title, was writing ballads about his imminent crucifixion; and Michael Jackson, keeping up the messianic ambitions, felt compelled to invent not just a new race but a whole new gender, of which he could be the only member. That Charles Chaplin, who got this strange job first and held it longest, never went much beyond planning to cast himself in a movie about the life of Napoleon is, in a way, a tribute to…

Barbra Streisand arrives on the screen, in “Funny Girl,” when the movies are in desperate need of her. The timing is perfect. There’s hardly a star in American movies today, and if we’ve got so used to the absence of stars that we no longer think about it much, we’ve also lost one of the great pleasures of moviegoing: watching incandescent people up there, more intense and dazzling than people we ordinarily encounter in life, and far more charming than the extraordinary people we encounter, because the ones on the screen are objects of pure contemplation—like athletes all wound up in the stress of competition—and we don’t have to undergo the frenzy or the risks of being involved with them. In life, fantastically gifted people, people who are driven, can…