Accents Foreign

My son was about five years old when we took him to his first foreign country: in this case, the French speaking island of Guadalupe. A few days before we were to depart, we were sitting around the kitchen table trying to explain to him the concept of a foreign language. 

     The French, we told him, had a different word for everything. Instead of "water," for instance, they say "l'eau," and instead of butter, "buerre." 

     "Got it," said Jake, and he held up the pepper grinder. "Instead of 'pepper' they say 'peh,' and instead of 'salt,' they say 'sah.'" 

     Like his mother, Jake turned out to have a knack for picking up languages, which requires an ironclad memory with a willingness to look at least temporarily foolish. But all I got was the accent. 
     I'm pretty good at accents: terrible at picking up actual languages, but good at accents. This means that though I remember very few words in, say, the French I studied in high school, I can pronounce them with admirable accuracy. One of my French teachers was so wowed by my accent that she forgave my entire lack of vocabulary. 
     The problem with my excellent pronunciation is that once I have said my little piece, the native speakers with whom I'm conversing conclude that I must know the language as well as I pronounce it, and reciprocate with an avalanche of French. 
     I recognize that a multiplicity of languages has made for a world of richness and complexity, and that there are things you can say in one language that you can't quite say in your own. But the existence of any other language but my own seems as gratuitous a barrier as a jealously guarded national boundary: a hinderance to international comity and literary give-and-take. 
      Study another language for years, and you will still sound, to a native speaker, like a not very bright child. Study it for a year, and you might rise to the level of a shy, socially awkward five year-old. This seems a poor bargain to strike: a year of hard work only to regress to near infancy. And for what? So I can mingle with a lot of foreigners? 
     I have an American friend who has lived in Italy for the past forty years or so, speaking nothing but Italian. Despite a vast vocabulary and a perfect willingness to play the fool, he nonetheless speaks the language in such a way that his Italian-born teenaged daughter must issue corrections and make excuses for him. He reports that he has gotten used to this humiliation, but sometimes it makes him feel lonely.  
      The British understood that speaking with a bad accent not only alerts native speakers to your faulty grasp of their language, it also keeps the ball in their court. By speaking, say, Urdu, with a British accent, mangling the consonants and braying the vowels, they reminded their imperial subjects that an Englishman was an Englishman no matter where he might alight, and it was up to the rest of the world to make sense of him, and not the other way around. And yet mangling subject peoples' language is a tool of colonialism that historians have entirely ignored.
      My daughter and her husband speak a lot of Spanish to their toddler daughter, whose paternal grandparents are Mexican-American. I had hoped I might learn Spanish at the same rate she learns it, but it's not as though she's going to add a word a day to her vocabulary, and teach them piecemeal to her grandfather. Day by day, she is internalizing the language, and one day she's simply going to start speaking Spanish and crush her grandfather -- this grandfather, anyway -- under a foreign tongue.  

Sarah Silverman in the Boonies

I spent my adolescence listening to recordings by Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, Nichols and May, Shelley Berman, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. I think I internalized more of their material than anything I learned in school, with the exception, perhaps, of keeping to the right.

Comics submit themselves to a harsh and relentless test. They can’t fool themselves into thinking they have succeeded: not in the way the rest of us can. The proof of their success is in the laughter they elicit immediately, on the spot, standing alone in the spotlight. And if there's anything people are more humorless about than food, it's a bad comic.

Any other performing artist can mistake an audience’s polite or relieved applause at the end of a performance for approbation. But comedians can’t, for in the comedy clubs that have sprouted up all over America there may be such a thing as derisive laughter, but not polite laughter. Real laughter has to be grounded in the truth.

The comic arts embrace a wide variety of schools and styles: male and female; gay and straight, black and redneck; blue and born-again; blue-collar and blue-blood; slapstick and cerebral; insult and geek, ethnic and WASP, topical and day-to-day observational, to name the few I can think of at the moment. 

I saw it expand over decades of talk show viewing, watching pioneers of surrealist humor like Andy Kaufman and Albert Brooks emerge from the back-stages of such unconducive venues as the Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin shows and risk their all before audiences of housewives with the diciest material imaginable.

Fancying myself a connoisseur of standup comedy, a pretention I have cultivated for over half a century, I can’t watch even the best comics without wanting to walk over and hand up a helpful note or two to suggest a few small revisions to even their most successful routines. I know they'd really appreciate it if I showed them how a little syntactical tweaking could put some extra spin on their gags and punchlines. But, speaking of punches, I’ve never had the chutzpah.

For six months after I bought my car, Honda hooked me up to Sirius Radio for six free months, and I became so addicted to its comedy channels that I would have signed up when my free subscription ran out had my wife shared my enthusiasm. (I don’t know what it is about women, but they can be awfully prickly about standup comics, especially of the male variety. I wonder if there might be pheromones involved.) 

Anyway, one of the comedians I discovered on Sirius was Brian Reagan, a brilliant bard of boyhood, a vigilant observer of embarrassing moments, with surefire timing and a hangdog Irish-American delivery that seemed to me just about perfect, and whenever he came on I would shush my passengers and crank up the volume.

But some comedians are better heard than seen. You know how it is when you first lay eyes on the person whose disembodied voice you’ve been listening to for a long time? Isn’t it always a little jarring? NPR newscasters, for instance, never look the way I conjure them. In fact, I'm considering suing some of them for false advertising.

So maybe I should have known better than to look up Brian Reagan on YouTube. I imagined Regan as a shambling, slightly overweight young man with an expression of perpetual bewilderment. But he turns out to look more like a smug and merry frat house bully. What he says is still terrific, but it seems to me that what he does on stage sabotages his material from the get-go. He does a lot of pacing and goofy pivoting, he grins and chuckles at his own material, and his pauses, which seemed so perfect over the radio, he undermines with a lot of sweaty mugging that only serves to accentuate what comes off, in contrast to his self-deprecating material, as self satisfaction. He’d be a lot funnier if he’d lose the grins and chuckles and stand there looking as perplexed and embarrassed as the rest of us. But will he listen? Probably not.

Another fine comic I’d been following on Sirius is Jake Johannsen. When I finally laid eyes on him on the Letterman show, he did not disappoint, because the man understands what it means to stay in character. Offstage he’s kind of a tough guy, but onstage he comes off as a mild and decent man living in an almost continual state of perplexity and alarm. His off-kilter observations on everything from voting booths to Chinese food jibe completely with the jittery persona he’s adopted. (But rather than try to analyze why he succeeds, I’ll append one of his appearances on Letterman so you can judge for yourself.)

I was thinking about all this when Debbie and I went to UC Davis’s Mondavi Center a couple of weeks ago to see another of my favorite comics: Sarah Silverman. There is no one else quite like her. She’s absolutely brilliant and fearless in her ingenuous expression of the unthinking bigotry, backhanded liberalism, and ignorant fatuity that afflict a certain kind of American twenty-something.

She’s also disturbingly great looking, a quality for which I otherwise find it hard to forgive a comic. There may be such a thing as okay looking comics, but there better be something a little wrong with how they look, or they risk inspiring in their audiences not the laughter of recognition but sighs of envy and grumbles of resentment. 

Silverman first came to my notice while she was curled up on a loveseat and delivering an extended riff about her childhood as the youngest of a showbiz family troupe called the Aristocrats in the movie of the same name. She seemed at first to look back on it all with nostalgia, but as she described one after another of her family’s impossibly obscene stunts, you could see her character gradually realizing that what she had always regarded as a normal childhood was actually a horrendous barrage of nonstop, Olympian child abuse. 

You had to be there, I guess, but she just about killed me. I'd never seen anyone like her. I wondered how that warped sensibility that could elicit appalled laughter with jokes about rape and child abuse and recovered memory could issue from that elegant frame. Much of her material is like that, mischievously dragging us into forbidden territory and with her wide-eyed narcissistic persona skewering not just racism, antisemitism, sexism, lust, greed, death and body hair, but our own assumptions and unseemly obsessions.    

Her show in Davis began with her enthusiastically introducing her warm-up act, a comedienne whose name I didn’t catch, and whose face I could hardly see from the back row seats for which I had cleverly paid top dollar. I always applaud warm-up acts because I feel badly for them. The only thing worse than following someone like Silverman would be preceding her. But this woman’s riffs on her promiscuity, loneliness, and general alienation seemed to me to beg an awful lot of questions.

Maybe Silverman championed her because she reminded her of herself or something, or because she's fun on trips. Or perhaps she selected her out of no doubt subconscious narcissism, so we would look forward to her own act all the more. But the effect was to put not only her acolyte’s but her own material in doubt.

After the warm-up, Silverman came onstage and rather wearily trotted out a few of her old routines and a couple of not very strong new routines, and read from what she billed as notes toward some future routines. Then she took questions, and as her warm-up walked around the audience with a microphone, she called an admittedly disrespectful young questioner a four-letter word for the primary female reproductive organ, and then she and her warm-up exchanged a lot of cracks that basically translated to “we’re-us-and-they’re-not.” 

The last thing in the world I want to be is the guy who doesn’t just find someone unfunny but takes actual offense at anything less than the troglodytic routines of comics like Andrew Dice Clay or Lisa Lampanella. And I don’t mind at all when comics go blue, because I tend to go blue myself. But I found myself souring on Sarah Silverman. 

Maybe as she alighted in this agrestic corner of the Central Valley, she didn't think that an audience in a university town focused on agronomy would be worth her trotting out her best stuff. I still wish her well, and believe that her best stuff is yet to come, so I prefer to think she was just having an off night. But if not, Silverman betrayed a kind of contempt for her audience that suggested to me that success, which can descend on a comic’s shoulders like a wet blanket, may not be doing her act any favors.