When I was around 5 or 6 years old, I received what I recall to have been my first albums: “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Dare to be Stupid and “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D, both on cassette tape, both as Christmas stocking stuffers.
Previously I had exhibited a preference for certain pop songs, intolerably insisting that my parents play The Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” and Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve” for me ad nauseum on the turntable in the dining room while I would sprint around the table (which I suppose was the only arrhythmic way I had available of expressing my approval). But this was different. Dare to be Stupid and “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D were my personal property; I had the means—a desktop tape recorder, excellent fidelity—to listen to them whenever I wanted to; and I learned them from front-to-back: “King of Suede,” “Like a Surgeon,” “Yoda,” “Theme from Rocky XIII” aka The Rye or the Kaiser, and so on.
What interests me in retrospect about this is the fact that—with the exception of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” parodied as “Eat It”—I do not believe that I was familiar at the time with the “straight” versions of any of the songs being razzed by Al. For years afterwards, then, I would hear, say, Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” or ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” and something would snap into place, and I would suddenly be transported back to a few familiar bars from one of Al’s polka medleys.
I was wide open to receive by the time Al’s 1989 chef-d’oeuvre UHF came to movie theaters, a work that was fairly of a piece with my taste in film comedy at the time. This was shortly after 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad! had raised the bar for hilarity, although—are you sensing a pattern here?—I had a limited-at-best familiarity with the police procedural tropes that were being sent up by the Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker combine. Pledging allegiance to the Z.A.Z. brand, though, I took in Hot Shots! before Top Gun, Top Secret! before any Bond spy picture and—not shying away from off-brand satire—Repossessed before The Exorcist.
Additionally, the Bruce LaBruce-approved Pee-wee’s Playhouse was my favorite kid’s show; FOX’s Brechtian It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and Dada-violent Get a Life (at long last available on DVD courtesy of the good people at Shout! Factory) my favorite sitcoms; and who on earth would stay up and suffer through Carson doing “Aunt Blabby” on the Tonight Show for any reason other than to get to Letterman? For playground reading, I was quite partial to Mad Magazine, and to this day I hardly ever encounter a film title without the temptation to subject it to a Mad-worthy parody treatment—notable auteur-related examples of which include Throw-Up (for Antonioni’s Blow-Up), In the Out Exit (for Robert Mulligan’s Up the Down Staircase), Borey Lyndon (for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon) and, the most indelible that I recall from the period after my subscription had lapsed, Errant Bra-on-Bitch (for Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich.)
Around the same time that I was counting the days between issues of Mad, I waited out the interval with What the–?!, Marvel Comics’ in-house, self-parodying (and thus self-promoting) “mag of mirth and mayhem,” whose Alfred E. Newman-esque mascot was a critter called “Forbush Man” that wore a costume consisting of a pair of fuzzy pajamas emblazoned with a “F,” and an upside-down pot with eyeholes for a mask. Far and away my favorite comic, however, was Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier’s Groo the Wanderer, which teed off on the dull-witted barbarian heroes re-popularized by the niche sword-and-sorcery boom of the early 1980s (when Gary Gygax begat Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, Ironmaster, etc.).
Taking the measure of these various early enthusiasms—certainly they are not the only ones, but they are important ones—a clear pattern emerges: a distinct preference for the funhouse mirror reflection to the original object, even at the price of an ignorance of the genuine item.
I have recently acquired and read with pleasure Fantagraphics Books’ The Sincerest Form of Parody, released this year, which collects the cream of the Mad Magazine knockoffs of 1953. Parody of parody! Pleasure of pleasures! New York Review of Books, meanwhile, has reissued an anti-authoritarian work of another sort, a new edition of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, a title that often rattles around in my brain along with certain rap couplets. In that spirit, I ask: What are the implications of growing up parodic? What does it mean to get one’s formative glimpses of pop culture through, as it were, the wrong end of the telescope? What does it mean to know “Because tomorrow… is another day” from Victoria Jackson in UHF long before hearing it from Janet Leigh in Gone with the Wind? What does it mean to speak irony as one’s first language?
I thought of this last week when writing about a director’s final films, films in which, I surmised, one could see “a signature style and preoccupations winnowed or gnarled to their essence”—or, put in slightly less generous terms, when the signature style has winnowed or gnarled to approach self-parody. (Haven’t we all entered an artist’s body of work ass-backwards, from the least-promising avenue? A topic for another week.) I thought of it also when I finally got around to reading David Thomson’s latest polemic, The Movies are Not Dead: They are Dying, published last September in The New Republic, which looks back to the author’s particular Golden Age:
“In hindsight, it’s easier to be impressed by movies from the 1930s and the war years, not just because the medium had acquired a technological immediacy closer to naturalism, but because the experience of Depression and war united the population and the audience… World War II produced a community at the movies, and an innocent immersion in fantasy when there was no shame or irony to curb it.”
I am not certain if this encapsulation of the period is meant to include the likes of Victor Fleming and Jean Harlow’s self-reflexive 1933 Bombshell, Olsen & Johnson’s 1941 fourth-wall wrecking ball Hellzapoppin’, horror pastiches like1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (the “straight” targets of which—James Whale’s Universal Frankenstein films—contain more than a measure of camp of their own), or the Warner Brother’s Looney Tunes—another formative favorite—which frequently lampooned the treasured innocent fantasies of the war years.
(On an only-tangentially-related note, the ongoing conversation about movie theater etiquette stirred up by Matt Zoller Seitz on Indiewire has gotten me to thinking of a passage from The Fall’s Mark E. Smith’s rambling, discursive “autobiography” Renegade:
“Whatever you say about Hammer Horror films, at least everybody used to have a good laugh. I used to watch them and go ‘Aaarrgghh!’ when Dracula appeared. If you did that now you’d be booted out, people take it so seriously. When characters used to get shot, we’d shout out, ‘That’s a lot of tomato ketchup, that!’ and the audience would laugh. Nowadays people think it’s art.”)
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody has responded quite smartly to Thomson on his own blog—albeit while skimming over the more hopeful (and interesting) latter half of Thomson’s argument. I will only add that the feeling of having been thrust into an After the Fall state away from some essential lost innocence or perfect pliable credulity has never, I suppose I should be sorry to say, had the slightest bit of relevance to me, or presumably to anyone who has grown up parodic.
I qualify my regret because, naturally given my upbringing, I’ve never been of the binary mindset that sees a healthy sense of irony as antithetical to a capacity for engagement; though I recognize that there are people who have built entire careers around serving the “Up with Sincerity” point-of-view. For articulating a pop perspective outside of the traditional, tired paradigm, I am particularly indebted to the idea of “Pest groups” that W.T. Lhamon, Jr. elucidates in his peerless Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950’s, which does not deal with Mad, but probably should. Lhamon, Jr. articulates the manner in which the era’s coalescing, accelerated Mass Culture, rather than reaching the homogenized, Chinese finger-cuffs state of “Society Without Opposition” described by Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (and Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd), began instead to resolve its tensions in a contentious dialogue between new permutations of “host” (generally, “mainstream”) and “pest” culture. “The absorption of oppositional agency within the middle class had generated its own resistance,” he writes. “Everything within the culture became charged with potential subversion, became a potential flea ready to bite the hand that fed it.”
If there is a single symptom that I could trace to growing up parodic, I suspect it is a particular predisposition for the most invidious sort of “pest” culture, the sort that burrows, mite-like, under the skin of the culture that’s hosting it. Whatever the case, I loved this.
And, to depart on a note of high spirits:
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.