WHAT IS COMEDY?

MORT SAHL

I have written before about Mort Sahl and his comedy.

http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs/mort-sahl-and-david-cross-17207

He still survives my idea of a triumvirate of genius.

Mort was and still is philosophical, ironic, political and sane, as far as I can tell.

Yet Mort suffered from some ups and downs as they say.

But don't we all?

Can you imagine that he is actually 87 years old.

Another 12 years and he can do George Burns.

BADADUMP!

I worship this man and I have written about my love for him before.

I saw Billy Crystal making fun of Mickey Rooney the other day. BILLY was making fun of his own age and his asperations and his hopes and his willingness to admit his own mortality.

It was goooooood.

I cannot imagine another 23 years on this planet let alone 35 more years on this planet.

Life is tough with or without drugs, with or without booze or with or without depression.

If Mort had died twenty years ago would it really have made that much difference?

I know it would have made a lot of difference to Mort and his family and I am not that callous.

I mean my Dad went into WWII as a Mommy's boy and came back all screwed up; eventually dying of alcoholism at the tender age of 38.

Post Traumatic Syndrome is my diagnosis.

Simmons from the long tongued KISS just put his foot in his kisser; which is not a strange thing since Simmons is a repub prick. If a 20 year-old kid is threatening to jump from a tall building in a single bound...well...jump you arsehole!

Simmons has a defense.

His Mama survived the NAZI concentration camps.

Simmons is full of hate and I understand where he is coming from even though I WOULD NEVER DEFEND HIS BULLSHITE.

http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2014/08/gene-simmons-kiss-tells-depressed-people-commit-suicide/

Getting back to Mort.

I worship this guy or this guy's work.

I really do.

And he has actually survived to the point that he could see 90.

But if he had died thirty years ago, I still would admire his work anyway.

We are all going to die.

I, frankly, do not see if it makes a whit of difference if I die tomorrow or twenty years from now reaching my mama's age of death.

GEORGE CARLIN

I viewed about 8 hours of George over the last few days.

I admire his work.

I lost my 'love' for him years ago but damn, a quarter to half of his shticks just got to me. I mean they either angered me or made me laugh till I had to turn him off.

Like many actors, his memory was impeccable. I have to check Wiki or some dictionary all the time and I cannot even remember most of my own blogs so I have to go back in Mike's library to recheck what I have written.

And George could just memorize his lines (that he wrote) word for word and go on for 90 minutes or more.

How did he do that?

But George advocated this nihilistic hate for humanity.

Did he advocate such a nihilistic philosophy in order to make money?

Or did he just hate people?

His defense for this 'conduct' was that a comedian or philosopher must create some structural distance between himself and others; like a doctor or lawyer or EMT.

He has a point but then, he 'over does it' in my opinion saying that he actually prays (as an atheist) for the end of the world and the end of humanity and....

He sounded so damn hateful all the time and he had nothing good to say about anybody....well that is not true.

He would appear on Maher's show and then defend Obama in his waning years.

And the enemy of your enemy is your friend, supposedly, and George would rant against the corporate pricks I hate and the rich who refused to give an inch and repubs who just supported the bastards who rule us. And he hated hypocrisy. Especially repub fundamental Christians.

But frankly I think George's messages amounted to:

Oh the dog was taken to a wonderful farm and he runs through the grass and...oh forget it, your dog is dead dead dead.

He is in a better place now and....THE GUY IS DEAD, DEAD, DEAD.

Our failures become important parts of learning and...YOU LOST MOTHERFUCKER AND YOU WILL HAVE NO WINNINGS FROM THOSE LOSSES EVER.

If you do what you are supposed to do....YOU WILL PROBABLY FAIL AT ANYTHING YOU ATTEMPT TO DO, EVER.

There are wise folks out in this world and you must seek out their advice....and if you do so YOU WILL FAIL MISERABLY.

There is an order to this universe and you must work hard to discover this order...THERE IS NO ORDER TO ANYTHING AND LIFE IS A WASTE OF TIME!

Democracy is an important instrument of societies and if you do not enrich yourself with the issues presented and vote intelligently....OH FUCK THIS, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DEMOCRACY AND THE ENTIRE ELECTORAL SYSTEM IS A FARCE!

I figured out from a Freudian view that George got on my nerves because as a child I would watch my drunken papa sitting in the King's chair and just spew out the line that:

IT'S ALL BULLSHIT!

To me that line is part and parcel of a perspective that I call Nihilism.

Ironically that expression is the expression of Nihilism.

However, and this is a big however, George turned Nihilism into an art!

Carlin retro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PowoFf76kRs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDrZwRUaAng

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZGo6mWjk4Y

ROBIN WILLIAMS.

Robin to me was an example of what the French call Joi de Vie.

This man had a lust for life, a love of life and that is what he expressed for forty years!

The line should not be as Dr. Frankenstein recites:

IT'S ALIVE, IT'S ALIVE.

No according to Robin the correct line is:

I'M ALIVE, I'M ALIVE, I'M ALIVE!!!!!

Maybe I am a sap, but I have never seen a fellow funnier than Robin Williams.

Ever.

Certainly there are a hundred videos of other comedians who had their minute or minutes and I do not discard their relevancy. I mean Bill Burr and Louis CK and

Robin, unlike George did not work on structural distance for chrissakes, he celebrated life.

A hundred years from now are the critics just going to eschew his work because he killed himself?

Poe died in his forties.

Socrates chose suicide.

Oscar Wilde died at age 46, does that really diminish his poetry and prose?

Shakespeare died in his fifties. Who the hell cares?

Hell Lincoln died in his fifties.

The beauty of Robin Williams was that he was instructing the audience:

WAKE UP, YOU ARE ALIVE. IT IS WONDERFUL TO BE ALIVE. DO NOT JUST SIT THERE, DO NOT JUST SOAK UP THE ART OF OTHERS.

CELEBRATE YOUR LIFE!

Mort and George and Robin made me think.

But Robin made me feel somethings.

Robin made me celebrate the small things, the small things that the least of us witness every damn day.

Robin made me feel alive.

If Robin lived to be fifty or sixty or seventy or eighty, I doubt there would be any difference in his

Here are some of Robin William's presentations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqdSagycCWc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qquQNxKJxw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKc-8svruIU

POSTSCRIPT

The only thing that can be said with certainty is that Williams arrived at the same terrible place 39,000 other Americans reach each year, and like them, he concluded that the only way to annihilate a terrible despair was to annihilate the self. All anyone can do responsibly is reason back from there — reverse engineer the tragedy — and see what that might reveal.

http://time.com/3107468/robin-williams-dead-suicide-psychology/?xid=newsletter-brief

I somehow missed this suicide figure.

There is some other link later on that recites 30,000 suicides in this country every year and I am sure about 10,000 suicides per gun fire every year in this country.

Stopping people short of that point — or pulling them back from the brink if they’ve reached it — can sometimes be a matter of simple preparation. For anyone who has flirted with suicide, Draper recommends putting together a safety plan that can be used in a time of crisis — a list of friends, family members and professionals to contact for help, as well as reminders of self-calming activities or short-term distractions that have worked in the past. Keeping the instruments of self-harm out of reach is important too. About 60% of the 33,000 gun deaths in the U.S. each year are suicides.

http://time.com/3107468/robin-williams-dead-suicide-psychology/?xid=newsletter-brief

In conclusion there are existential spirits attacking me right now.

When I am 86, death is coming no matter what I do.

A real tragedy comes upon us with the death of Heath Ledger, I mean he died at 41?
 

I dunno, obviously we do not have 'exact' figures regarding suicide.

We know that ten thousand or more Americans die every year from guns or gun shots.

Some rotten reactions to the death of Robin Williams.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/14/1321685/-Lewis-Black-Slams-Rush-Limbaugh-With-A-Big-Ol-F-CK-YOU?detail=email

On a lighter note, catch Mr. Smith or Ducky sometime.

And I point to their comments which are hard to catch.

Between these two guys, a lot of our history was seen in person.

Amazing.

I might just go through my own blogs for the last six years and find some of these comments.

But damn, these people saw history first hand.

I just recall what I have seen on TV and film and the internet.

I have probably missed much.

The end.

I lost another song.

Here it is:

There it is!