"Pop culture has long been obsessed with the prospect of male pregnancy, though it has mostly been used as a comedic gambit, as in the dismal 1978 farce 'Rabbit Test'...."

"[In] 'Rabbit Test,' Joan Rivers’s misanthropic comedy in which the aimless bachelor Lionel (Billy Crystal, in his first movie) miraculously conceives after a one-night stand with some pushy broad. Released at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, 'Rabbit Test' is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are. Its 'first pregnant man' conceit is just a setup for a carnival of broadly racist and sexist scenarios that evinces little interest in the reality of pregnancy itself. Lionel hardly looks pregnant, he hardly feels pregnant, and as his due date approaches, he is not concerned about how he is going to become un-pregnant. 'Rabbit Test' is so incurious about women’s experiences that it doesn’t even bother exploiting them. It’s just a movie about a guy with a pillow under his shirt."

From "Pregnant Men Were a Movie Punchline. Now They’re Horror Villains. The idea of the pregnant man has long been mined for Hollywood comedy. This summer, he becomes a menace" by Amanda Hess (NYT).

It was 1978. It was Joan Rivers. Shouldn't one try to gestate some viable reverence for our revered comedy foremother? 

Here, I found the whole thing on YouTube. Check it out. Is it really so bad? What if you had to appreciate it? Care for it. Nurture it:

"There is a whole vein of British music that usually gets called 'music hall' when bad critics talk about it..."

"... even though it owes nothing to the music that was actually performed in actual music halls. But what it does owe a great deal to is the work of Anthony Newley. One can draw a direct line from him through Davy Jones of the Monkees, Bowie, Syd Barrett, Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Blur… even a performer like John Lydon, someone who would seem worlds away from Newley’s showbiz sheen, has far more of his influence in his vocal inflections than most would acknowledge. Every time you hear a singer referred to as 'quintessentially British,' you’re probably hearing someone who is either imitating Newley, or imitating someone who was imitating Newley."

From a bonus episode of "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "'Strawberry Fair' by Anthony Newley."

This was a surprisingly interesting episode. It just came up in the order of things, and I was in no mood to get interested in Anthony Newley, but I let it run. Here's an old video I dug up on my own in which he and Joan Rivers are discussing whether it's good to be a rock star:

"I'm a very special human being. Noble. And splendid."

Says Burt Lancaster to Joan Rivers in "The Swimmer."



The movie came out 50 years ago — in May 1968. I saw it at the time, when I was 17 and interested in figuring out what the adults viewed as high-class film art.

And I DVR'd it when I saw that it was on Turner Classic Movies this week, and Meade and I ended up watching it straight through last night.

We laughed at it a lot — the Marvin Hamlisch music, the nature photography, the endless observation of the torso of Lancaster, the taking seriously of a type of man no one today takes seriously — but we've been talking about it seriously for a long time this morning, and I took the trouble to read the 1964 John Cheever story and a contemporaneous Roger Ebert review:

As "the swimmer" has a drink with his friends, it occurs to him that a string of other backyard pools reaches all the way across the valley to his own home. Why not swim every one -- swim all the way home, as it were?....

The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer's experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man's life.

What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. The journey Cheever's swimmer makes has been made before in other times and lands by Ulysses, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Augie March.

Joan Rivers has only a very small part, and this was her first acting role. She wrote in her autobiography:

"Frank [the director, Frank Perry] wanted a happy girl who then got hurt. Lancaster was going to be Mr. Wonderful who came up against a mean bitch, and was right not to go off with her. Trying to please both men, I was going back and forth between line readings, and nothing made sense."

That's quoted in Wikipedia, which also says:

After the film's restoration and re-release by Grindhouse Releasing in 2014, Brian Orndorf of Blu-ray.com gave the Blu-ray release five stars, commenting that "It's a strange picture, but engrossingly so, taking the viewer on a journey of self-delusion and nostalgia that gradually exposes a richly tortured main character as he attempts to immerse himself in a life that's no longer available to him", commenting that Lancaster gives a "deeply felt, gut-rot performance ... and communicates every emotional beat with perfection". Commenting on the same release, Ain't It Cool News reviewer Harry Knowles commented "This is also Burt Lancaster's journey to ... The Twilight Zone ... it is friggin brilliant! ... It is fascinating! Spectacular film!”

The aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 100%, based on 22 critic reviews.

Amazing really, because it seems just as likely that everyone could say it's a ludicrous, terrible mess. Where's the line between reality and fantasy? It's never revealed. You'll have to puzzle over it, and reading the original story won't hand you the answer.

I am still working on the theory that "the swimmer" was a sperm cell (or salmon swimming upstream to mate). Don't you think a sperm cell — if it could think — would think, "I'm a very special human being. Noble. And splendid"?

Back in the 60s, it was understood that literary fiction revealed the complexities of the mind of wealthy suburban males. We the theater audience spent 2 hours gazing at the near-naked and naked body of a 54-year-old man. Nowadays, Harvey Weinstein/Louis C.K. begs an audience of one to please look at him naked, and the theater audience is captivated by a swimmer who isn't a very special human being. He's not a human being at all.



Noble and splendid!

"People still love sex, sizzle and controversy — but the entertainment industry is too afraid to serve it up right now."

"It’s hard to believe, but 60 years ago entertainers had more guts. If you want proof, tune into 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' on Amazon, an excellent new show about a fictional woman named Midge — clearly based on Joan Rivers — who starts a risky career as a stand-up comedienne in Greenwich Village in 1958. On stage, Midge makes jokes about her sex life, her Jewish upbringing and even rips off her top, exposing her breasts. As the crowd laps up the routine, the police arrest Midge for breaking obscenity laws. That kind of courage, that willingness to shock and offend, is what made Rivers so exciting to watch. It’s what makes great comedy. But today’s comics are afraid to go too far, out of fear of the woke police....  Here’s another: How is show business going to survive if it suddenly censors itself?"

From "The woke police have ruined entertainment" by Johnny Oleksinski in The New York Post.

Random reactions:

1. I don't remember Joan Rivers ever whipping off her shirt and exposing her breasts, nor can I even imagine such a move, given that there would have to be a layer of undergarment, not susceptible to whipping off, and I've seen "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," which is, indeed, an excellent show.

2. Some people were modestly entertained over the weekend when a South Korean ice skater's costume got unclasped and threatened to fall off. "I was like, ‘Oh no!’ If that comes undone, the whole thing could just pop off. I was terrified the entire program.... I didn’t stop because you get a deduction if you stop in the middle of a program. In my head, I was thinking, 'Is it better to stop and fix it and get the deduction or keep going?'" She kept going and we kept thinking: Is that thing going to fall off? And some of us, I'm sure, will continue to watch ice skating, now thinking, will the lady's costume — the whole thing — just pop off?

3. I don't think you need to be obscene to entertain. In fact, it was much easier to be shocking with sexual things in the old days, when you could get arrested for obscenity. But half a century later, sexual frankness isn't shocking, and the "woke police" are out to ruin you not because of sex, but because they're vigilant about the subordination of women. It's not easy to figure out how to avoid committing the kind of offenses that will get the "woke police" after you, but you men who complain about it are like the Ken counterpart to the talking Barbie who said "math class is tough" — Women's Studies class is tough.

4. Hollywood entertain — and the culture of Hollywood celebrities — has been awful for a lot of reasons for a long, long time. Can't you please just continue to entertain us? is a pathetic whine.



Are you not entertained? You shouldn't be! Man, "Gladiator" is putrid. I knew it at the time and stayed away, but can anyone justify the adulation that movie received? The answer to Russell Crowe's famous question is: no!

5. Meanwhile, speaking of bared breasts and slabs of man meat, over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat says "Let’s Ban Porn."

[W]e are supposed to be in the midst of a great sexual reassessment, a clearing-out of assumptions that serve misogyny and impose bad sex on semi-willing women.... It was only a generation ago that the unlikely (or was it?) alliance of feminists and religious conservatives made the regulation of pornography a live political debate. But between the individualistic drift of society, the invention of the internet, and the failure of the Dworkin-Falwell alliance’s predictions that porn would lead to rising rates of rape, the anti-porn case was marginalized — with religious conservatism’s surrender to Donald Trump’s playboy candidacy a seeming coup de grace.

Except it doesn’t have to be. Trump’s grotesqueries have stirred up a feminist reaction that’s more moralistic and less gamely sex-positive than the Clinton-justifying variety, and there’s no necessary reason why its moralistic gaze can’t extend to our porn addiction....

In many of them, you see a kind of female revulsion, not against Harvey Weinstein-style apex predators, but against the very different sort of male personality that a pornographic education seems to produce: a breed at once entitled and resentful, angry and undermotivated, “woke” and caddish, shaped by unprecedented possibilities for sexual gratification and frustrated that real women are less available and more complicated than the version on their screen....

Just when the prestige movies of Hollywood retreat from whatever entertainment they might have been providing, the social cons want to team up with the progressives — one more time, like it's the 80s — and scare you with proposals about banning pornography.

6. You don't have to actually ban pornography. Just have angry, righteous women go public about the  pornography habits various famous men and demand that they be fired from their jobs. I'm sure there are some members of Congress who can be Al-Frankened over porn. I'm sure a porn hysteria could be set in motion around various Trump men to generate an endless chain of headlines in the NYT like "Porn Claims Against Aide Further Roil White House." Could the White House be even more roiled that it already is? Yes!

Why had I never seen this hilarious Trump interview with Connie Chung?

I'm seeing it today because it happened to come up in the sidebar at YouTube. He's 43 in this interview, and Connie Chung is incredibly annoying. Before we see the interview in this video, we see Trump talking about it with Joan Rivers:



"There was a level of unprofessionalism. It was like you're being interviewed by a child."

"Everyone seems to be mourning your exit from office... I'm glad you're gone. I'm not delusional — you're not a saint."

"You were a mediocre president with unoriginal ideas.... I thought you would finally right this wrong..."

This wrong = the conviction of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.

"You didn't have to pardon him, only commute the sentence. You just had to let him come home. You didn't. You released others, like Chelsea Manning or FALN terrorists, who actually committed reprehensible crimes, but you failed to release an innocent man.... I am shocked at how bitter and full of hate I have become.... I truly thought you were a good person. I guess I was just as brainwashed as everyone else. At least now I can see the blood on your hands."

Wrote Rod Blagojevich's 20-year-old daughter, Amy Blagojevich.

Adding tags to this post, I see I have an old tag Blagosmear on Obama. That goes back to a time when I pictured Blagojevich dragging Obama down. That didn't happen, and I think Obama figured out how to keep Blagojevichishness off of him.

Here's my original "Blagosmear on Obama" post, from December 14, 2008, before Obama even took office. The GOP had put out this video, obviously intended to wreck Obama before he got started:



I'm not surprised Obama never did anything to help Rod Blagojevich. I feel sorry for the man's daughter, but look how her father undercut Obama on the eve of his honeymoon.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

Blagojevich's sentence was ridiculously long. Trump should commute to 6.5 years, which is what George Ryan's sentence was. The judge is an asshole who was pissed that Blagojevich got a hung jury on the first trial.

A few comments later, mccullough came back and said:

Trump fired Blagojevich on Celebrity Apprentice. It would be awkward for him to get involved now. So he'll probably get involved.

Ha ha. That made me go look up the old "Apprentice" scene:



Trump does fire him, but he also expresses respect for his tenacity and shakes his hand and wishes him well.

More "Apprentice" with Blagojevich (and Joan Rivers too):



"I'll do anything [PAUSE] legal and ethical and [PAUSE] honest."

"Why should a woman cook? So her husband can say, 'My wife makes a delicious cake,' to some hooker?"

From "61 Comedians Recall Their Favorite, First, and Life-Changing Jokes." That joke is from Joan Rivers, and the comedian who calls that her "favorite joke of all time" is Jen Kirkman. Most of the 61 comedians, by the way, don't identify a particular joke, so the headline is misleading. I chose Kirkman's joke for this post because it is a joke, it's funny, and it gives you something to think about.

You might think I chose it because CAKE! has been the subject of the week and the tendency of people to pay attention to CAKE!!! has been amply demonstrated. But I didn't. And I'm actually pretty sick of the cake-o-mania of the past week. I've got some really mixed feelings about this cake-focused exposure of the RFRA laws — laws I've studied and taught for many years. I feel as though I should explain things about which I have an overload of understanding, but I also feel hopeless about conveying that understanding. The political demagoguery will overwhelm the legal material. I'm absolutely convinced. I could do my professorly part, but why should I pour hopeless effort into the rehabilitation of RFRA laws, which I've never liked? When it's not hopeless, it's my practice to explain arguments for things I don't agree with. But it is hopeless here. The political noise is too loud.

Okay? Now, please acquire your cake somehow. Have cake and eat it and share it and stop being so obtuse about love.

 

AND: I wanted to replace that cake pic with a photograph of a cake that had "God is love" written on it. That would be a loftier ending for this post, but instead I'm going to return to the joke-y spirit I began with. Here's what Google gave me when I asked for a picture of a cake with "God is love" written on it:



What would Mitt Romney do?

Sarah Silverman as Joan Rivers on "Saturday Night Live."

From last night's show:

[EMBEDDED VIDEO REMOVED]

And, yes, all the tags for this post are correct.

AND: Even better is the trailer for "The Fault in Our Stars 2: The Ebola in Our Everything."

"But on this issue of um uh Obama's man... man... manliness... or manhood... what's your... what's your take on this?"

This is a strangely evasive and inconclusive effort at approaching a subject!

What's going on here?!

Bob is anxious about this topic.

Althouse has a bullshit topic she can't advance.

Both of them are padding and stalling for time.

Neither of them wants to confront Obama's weakness.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Johnny Carson learns the word "bustier" from Madonna, who presents herself "as a virgin" to him.

And here's Boy George's first time:

"I don’t want some rabbi rambling on; I want Meryl Streep crying, in five different accents."

The Joan Rivers funeral.

Also, here's Joan, back in 2011, advising her daughter to carry on after her mother's death, which, Joan anticipated, might come from surgery:



Joan uses words older individuals going into surgery often use to comfort their loved ones: "I've had a great life...."

"Joan would have loved how much she is loved. I think she didn’t quite know..."

"... and yet in a way she must have: You don’t have strangers light up at the sight of you without knowing you have done something. But we should try to honor and celebrate the virtues and gifts of people while they’re alive, and can see it."

Writes Peggy Noonan in a column that has a lot of interesting details in it, such as the fact that Joan Rivers was a big Reagan fan and that one time Peggy and Joan crash landed in a Steve Forbes hot-air balloon in a field in France and the farmer toasted them for what the Americans did on D-Day and that Joan preferred mob-run Las Vegas because they kept the hotel lobbies clear of men in shorts.

"She loved with her whole heart and she also hated with her whole heart, which I love."

Joan Rivers has died.

Goodbye to the great comedienne.

ADDED: "I am an actress — an actress playing the role of a comedian."

A new Van Gogh. Declared "100 percent genuine" now.

Back in 1908 it was declared a fake and stuck up in an attic.

Hey, if it's really a Van Gogh — from the "mature" period, no less — why wouldn't it be something you'd hang in full view even if you believed it was fake?

Let's contemplate the importance of authenticity. But don't start — as I tried — by Googling that phrase. You'll get bullshit about personal relationships, not art. I wanted bullshit about art.

Being who you really are. That seems like an old-fashioned subject. Something we talked about in the 60s, right?

This topic of personal authenticity took me back to "The Above Ground Sound" of Jake Holmes, specifically "Genuine, Imitation Life" (audio at link):

Chameleons changing colors,
While a crocodile cries.
People rubbing elbows,
But never touching eyes.
Taking off their masks,
Revealing still another guise.
Genuine, imitation life.

That was not a joke, but 100% genuine in 1967. Or... I'm reading the Jake Holmes article at Wikipedia and I'm now not sure that it wasn't a joke. Was he making fun of serious folksingers, making fun of authenticity? A picture from that article raises questions:



What's going on here? Caption: "Jim Connell, Jake Holmes and Joan Rivers when they worked as the team: 'Jim, Jake & Joan.'"

Holmes also wrote the song "Dazed and Confused" (recorded by Led Zeppelin) and many famous advertising jingles, notably "Be a Pepper" and "Be all that you can be." This is blowing my mind. Just that the same guy urged us to "Be all that you can be" (in the Army) and to "Be a Pepper." I'll bet the Army kicked you out back then if they found out you were a Pepper. That's weird. But that he also wrote "Dazed and Confused." And worked with Joan Rivers (and looked like he looked working with Joan Rivers).

Now, I'm questioning the authenticity of that Wikipedia article. But here's a 2010 NYT article about Holmes suing Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement.

Anyway, back to Van Gogh. Think that's a real Van Gogh?

What do you think of that "Van Gogh"?
	Authentic and bad — that's why it was mistaken for fake.
	Authentic and good — experts are experts and Van Gogh is Van Gogh.
	Fake and bad — why else would it have been stowed in an attic for decades?
	Fake but good — but then why did they put it in the attic?
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I found — on YouTube, not in my attic — some Jim, Jake & Joan (from a 1964 movie called "Once Upon A Coffee House"):

"Comedian Amy Schumer says that Comedy Central steered her away from making a suicide joke on her TV show."

"This prompts Emma Garman to wonder whether suicide is the last taboo in comedy. But Michelle Dean suspects Schumer’s set-up just wasn’t funny enough."

More here, with examples of suicide humor in pop culture, including:

Oh my gosh, you can’t consider suicide humor with Joan Rivers, who began making jokes about her husband Edgar almost immediately after he took his own life. She has continued to so, and it was a theme of her roast.  Not too long ago, she made Terry Gross almost speechless with her comic references to it.

And let me add the original movie "MASH." On the TV show, they used the theme music without the lyrics, which were:

Through early morning fog I see
visions of the things to be
the pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see...
that suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please....

It goes on. Read the plot summary if you don't know sequence about suicide:

Walt Waldowski, the unit's dentist... tells Hawkeye that he suffered a "lack of performance" with a visiting nurse and now believes he has latent homosexual tendencies. He wants to commit suicide, and asks advice on a reliable method. Hawkeye, Trapper and Duke suggest that he use the "black capsule," a fictitious fast-acting poison. At a farewell banquet that apes The Last Supper, Walt takes the capsule (actually a sleeping pill) and falls asleep in a coffin. Hawkeye persuades Lt. Maria Schneider to spend the night with Walt and cure him of his "problem."

I think suicide is an especially apt subject for comedy, and not just because it's a release to be frank or even mean about something serious. I think it's helpful as a deterrent to the suicidal logic that says this will punish those who hurt me or everyone will see how sad I was and feel so sorry for me. If suicide is sacrosanct, it leverages that logic. I know, no one wants to hurt the family and friends of those who have already committed suicide, but on that reasoning, we should never joke about car crashes, cancer, and murder.

Robin Givhan is sick of hearing about Michelle Obama's clothes.

Robin Givhan. If the robin is the first sign of spring, Robin Givhan being sick of the topic of Michelle's clothes is the last sign that the Obamas are about to depart the scene.

"This is a store that sells 300 rolls of toilet paper at the same time."

"And I say any customer that buys 300 rolls of toilet paper deserves a funny book to sit on the toilet and read."

Joan Rivers protests Costco, which banned her book, supposedly because of 2 "parody quotes" from Marie Antoinette and Wilt Chamberlain.

Is this like the fake Bob Dylan quotes that led to the publisher's pulling copies of Jonah Lehrer's "Imagine"?

But a comedy book is different from the kind of nonfiction pop science stuff that's written by semi-serious authors like Jonah Lehrer — the Malcolm Gladwell-type book. Comic writers make up quotes all the time. Is the Onion in trouble? They're always running with fake quotes, like, for example, Michele Bachmann expressing relief that "not a single American died" in the recent temple shooting. It should be okay in the realm of comedy. People get what comedy is, especially when there's a well-known it's-a-joke brand like "The Onion" plastered on it. Except they don't.

People can be pretty dumb. Should we set up the world for the safety of the dumb?

"I think if I work very hard, I should be able to gather the fruits of my labor."

"And I think if you’re not about to work, you should get minimal and leave me alone. I think if you don’t wear a helmet and you fall off your bike, you pay for the doctor."

Says Joan Rivers, who denies she's making a political statement. She hates politics.

"They’re all a bunch of garbage... I’m definitely in favor of a monarchy because they’re there, they look good, and they always have good gift shops when you leave the palace. … I feel that it’s just all about party affiliation and it’s all about voting the way your party wants to vote and it’s not at all about what we should be about."

(Here's a movie about Joan Rivers. It's really good. One of the very few movies I've seen in the theater in the last 3 years. )

"Everywhere you look there are jokes... I mean, my life is just... jokes."

A clip from the excellent documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work":



We saw this movie last night at Sundance in Madison. I have a special love for the documentaries in this niche. Show this new one as a triple feature with "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" and "Grey Gardens." Here's the trailer for "Joan Rivers." Watch for the insult to Wisconsin, which got a huge laugh here in Wisconsin.

There was a line I tried to memorize, for me, the most interesting line in the movie. It was something like: "I am an actress — an actress playing the role of a comedian." When she was in high school, Joan was in all the plays. We see her in Shakespearean costume. She still sees herself as an actress. She says: You can say anything about her as a comedian, but don't criticize her acting. That's the one thing that hurts. That may seem very odd, because do you think of her as an actress (other than in the sense that when she's doing her comedy she may conceive of herself as playing a character that isn't really her)? She had a dramatic role in the movie "The Swimmer" (with Burt Lancaster)? And in the 90s she starred in (and co-wrote) the Broadway play "Sally Marr ... and Her Escorts" (a play about the woman who is mostly famous for being Lenny Bruce's mother). The NYT said:

Is Ms. Rivers also a great actress? No, she is not. But she is exuberant, fearless and inexhaustible. If you admire performers for taking risks, then you can't help but applaud her efforts. "Sally Marr" asks her to dig down deep and dredge up some elemental emotions. Ms. Rivers backs off from none of them. In her portrayal of a gutsy woman who has hit the skids more than once in her 80-odd years, there is a childlike sincerity that exerts its own spell in the end. Between Ms. Rivers and Ms. Marr an understanding obviously exists.....

[E]arly on, when Sally goes into her theory of comedy. "You don't start with funny and make it funnier," she explains. "Comedy comes from pain."...

It is the play's contention that without Sally Marr... there would have been no Lenny Bruce. Her outspokenness blazed the way for his iconoclasm; from her hatred of hypocrisy sprang his. She was even there when he made his first tentative steps as an M.C. in strip joints to coach him on the intricacies of comic timing and lend him some of her material. "Lenny Bruce opened the door for every modern American comic, right?" she says, putting her checkered past into perspective for us. "So, in a way, you could say I gave birth to George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams and Bill Cosby and Gilda Radner and David Letterman."

So is she an actress, and if so, who is the real person? I don't think you get the answer in the "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work." There's a scene where she's doing a radio promotion for her new book — "Men Are Stupid . . . And They Like Big Boobs: A Woman's Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery" — and the interviewer goes on about how, whatever a woman does to herself to try to look beautiful, she must, in the end, want to be loved as the person she really is. Joan's response: Who is the real me? Perhaps when the real person is an actor, there is a hollowness that must be filled with a written character.

***

Note to commenters: Please say something more interesting than that you don't like her surgically destroyed face. We can take that as a given. Don't be boring. It's worse than being ugly. Around here.