Judy Prince wrote:
> Agreed, completely.
> Stand-up, Barry? Surely you jest.
>
> Judy
>
>> More "hooks" available than ever before--why not use them. Which
>> reminds
>> me of the border between stand-up comedy and performance art, along which
>> I've been
>> known to walk.
>>
>> Barry Alpert
>>
Of course the original statement plus attacks on non-Japanese Haiku are
the acts of an agent provocateur looking for a fight. Maybe they are
themselves a form of performance art. That said, Barry's comments are
provocative because of the weird line here that I gather David Antin
also walks or walked: when are you performing and when are you doing
stand-up Something?
I had the experience--for it was that--yesterday of viewing (finally) an
extremely odd documentary film called The Aristocrats. Few people will
admit to knowing the film or the joke itself. In one version or another
it probably is the dirtiest story ever told. For myself, an old friend
of mine told me ONE version of The Aristocrats back in 1962. It was
tame compared to the joke as it's evolved over the years. Nevertheless,
I'm not sure how I got home. Stand-up *and* performance art...both, I
suppose. The dancer and the dance? I can't tell a joke to save myself
but yesterday I heard/saw the joke told AS a joke and then, via other
performers, as performance art. I was particularly entranced by Sarah
Silverman, an exquisitely beautiful young lady with a potty mouth that
beggars description unless you quote her, which I will not. She was
reclining on a couch or loveseat like a Goya Maja--the posture was
certainly not like Gilbert Gottfried's classic schtick-worthy foul but
riotous delivery at the Friar's Club. Silverman was playing instead of
just telling a dirty joke. She said the joke was about her and her
family. "We ARE The Aristocrats." It ended with her whispering of an
encounter with an old-time radio broadcaster, Joe Franklin, concluding
with "And then he raped me." She went about as far from the original
story as you could go--the one requirement for the story is to end with
the words "The Aristocrats!" Instead her ending was both absurd and
truly grotesque.
So you tell me: when to schtick turn into performance art or shall the
twain never meet?
Ken
--
Ken Wolman http://bestiaire.typepad.com http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"I have been watching you; you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with a strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in sunlight, in a beautiful garden."--Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas et Melisande
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