Performance Thanatology: The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen

I have recently been ushered into the underground world—where lurk the less popular of the popular entertainments—of improvised comedy. It is generally unfunny, though an absurd exchange orchestrated by an actor hip to the general unfunniness of what has already been established as funny—i.e. those formulas that make the improvised joke possible at all—will happen from time to time, and this by way of a very specific kind of event, a poetic event. Thus, I propose, it is our poet/performers that bear the responsibility of relieving all the poor fumbling virgins, the helmeted handicapped, the cops momentarily forgetting not to act gay etc. etc. of their tireless attempts to make us happy.

Comedy is rarely funny. Movies are never funny. When Ali G speaks in a language that we recognize (and that only for its comic foreignness) baffling his guest—Newt Gingrich or Buzz Aldrin or whoever demonstrates enough fogeyish confidence to expect to be respected—it is fucking funny because of the infinite room that the perfectly staged situation leaves for misunderstanding. Comedy is in the postponement of agreement or resolution, and resignation to the impossibility of final understanding always elicits the wordless expressive act—the scratching of the chin, the straightening of the shirttails, the exasperated departure, the laugh—in both the victim and the spectator.

Performance Thanatology’s The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen (which had its final show last Saturday at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s) offers its audience ENTERTAINMENT; that is, a self-consciously entertaining gesture toward the collective vague memory of the promise of pure entertainment made by the vaudeville show, which few of us can say we know much about while most of us can recognize the errant signifiers it has left in its wake; for instance: the “come one come all” banter of the fast-talking emcee, the crescendo of the live soundtrack signaling applause, the spotlight, the magic trick, the sad clown face. Thanatology’s show offers us these traces of a specific though barely recognizable, receding cultural phenomenon and opposes them to the technology of new entertainment—e.g. video, recorded sound, and television. We have, then, the perfect comic duo—that device which derives humor from the uneven exchange between two partners.

Comedy happens at the convergence or divergence of different signifying systems and in Thanatology’s scheme those systems unfold infinitely toward the far reaches of the linguistic beyond and find there us, the audience, The 50 Greatest Ladies and Gentlemen. Reminiscent of both the variety show and our reminiscence of the variety show, this performance includes its audience of post-modern-minded art enthusiasts in such a fashion that we don’t quite know whether to laugh or to cry: the nostalgia is so colored with self-conscious theatrics, the comedy so contingent upon its tragic other—e.g. Ric and Lucas’ loony merrymaking against the recorded soundtrack of 8 year-old Sarah’s dogged piano performance of “Wild Horses” and her simultaneous deadpan announcement into the mic “the song is long gone”—that emotion appears as an amorphous ether reacting dementedly to the desperate incomprehensibility of the world and the impossibility of its representation/remembrance. It is David Lynch’s starry-eyed diva singing “In Heaven Everything is Fine,” oblivious to the enactment of her own ugliness, her hideous incongruity with the stage and its shadowy theatrical outside.

The show is at once comical and terrifying, its farce always threatening to tumble over into the terrain of existential despair. We are given magic tricks without magic, jokes without punch lines, tales without resolution, and other events of mounting tension and consistently denied denouement. And, suffering from the repeated disappointment of bad comedy, I applaud Thanatology’s recognition of the fact that funniness can only occur once Thalia realizes that she is hopelessly driven to meet Melpomene in what is doomed to be an endless game of phone tag. Poor muses. Mel’s phone is blowing up with drunk dials from Thal: “wish you were here, girl! I came out for some air—it’s so loud—and now all of a sudden everything’s spinning and I’m sooooo wasted” and Thal’s voicemail’s all “I know we never get to hang out but you know I’m so busy and I just was looking at pics from our trip to the Keys and it made me miss you sooooo much.”