Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television (18 page)

2:14 A.M.:
Never before have I been so well informed about VH1’s programming schedule. If you have any questions about upcoming episodes of
Driven,
feel free to e-mail me at [email protected].

2:41 A.M.:
“Girls, Girls, Girls,” again, again, again. What we learn from this video is that there are two kinds of strippers in this world: those who smile and those who don’t. The ones who don’t are apparently trying to seem sultrier, but I prefer the ones who smile. I get the impression the guys in Mötley Crüe spend less time worrying about this, though.

3:00 A.M.:
New (old) videos start in an hour. I am so … oh, I don’t know. Stoked?

3:05 A.M.:
The triumphant return of that thirty-minute KISS retrospective I already watched at 7:00 P.M. Paul Stanley compares KISS in 1972 to a “baby piranha.” Later, he discusses the concept of freedom and its application to the video for “Tears Are Falling.” He’s a goddamn prophet.

4:01 A.M.:
Oh my god. Oh my god oh my god oh my god. It’s Tom Petty’s “So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star.” This block of All-Star Jams is starting over again. This can’t be happening. But it’s happening. Oh my god.

4:41 A.M.:
I’ve now seen Paul Carrack’s “Don’t Shed a Tear” thrice, and it’s not getting any better. I hate this. I hate Paul Carrack. I hate myself. But I will not shed a tear, because Paul Carrack understands me better than I understand myself.

4:47 A.M.:
Some VJ named Eddie Trunk just implied that “Spill the Wine” by Eric Burdon and War helped end the Vietnam War.

5:42 A.M.:
The video for Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is not remotely akin to the way I remember it from
Friday Night Videos.
It seems to be set in a postapocalyptic haunted mansion, occupied by goth witches and tuxedo-clad warlocks wielding Darth Vader’s light sabers. I suddenly have an urge to locate my twelve-sided die and roll up some hit points.

6:02 A.M.:
At long last, a format change: since it’s now “officially” Tuesday, we have entered
Tuesday Two Play,
which means I get to see two consecutive videos by every artist who appears. We begin with Bruce Springsteen doing “My Home-town” (live, with Clarence Clemons on tambourine) and “Thunder Road.” Back in reality, the sun has risen in the east, and people I will never know are jogging outside my bedroom window. The world is a foreign place. I do not belong here.

6:29 A.M.:
I drift into shallow slumber and awake from a horrifying dream: a thin man is waving a bouquet of flowers at me, and I am struck into a coma. When the coma is shattered, I find myself half naked, confused about my sexual identity, and overcome by sadness. I think a train may be involved, and possibly a double-decker bus. But then I realize something else: I’ve been awake this whole time. These are just Smiths videos.

7:45 A.M.:
Neil Young and Pearl Jam keep on rockin’ in the free world. Van Halen asks me if this is love while swigging Jack Daniel’s from the stage, and I have no valid answer. An underage girl on the beach says she wants candy, and it seems dirty. And it is.

10:03 A.M.:
I’m running out of material. I just watched David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” and all I could think to write was, “Hmm … this looks like a
Dr. Who
episode.” I think I actually made the joke yesterday. Now I’m watching a pair of Steve Winwood videos and I can’t remember what these songs are titled, even when I’m hearing the chorus. I feel eight hundred years old.

10:17 A.M.:
Whenever I’d listen to Toto’s “Africa,” I always assumed the song was using Africa as a metaphor. However, this video suggests the song is literally about the continent itself (and maybe about an African American travel agent, although I can’t be sure), so now I’m confused. It definitely has a globe, though. Also, what does “Africa” have to do with the movie
Fatal Attraction
? I swore I just heard some VJ talking about that movie (and its relationship to Toto). I struggle.

10:55 A.M.:
Here’s an idea: Why doesn’t someone create a network called CNN Classic, which could be a twenty-four-hour channel of old news broadcasts? They could air old episodes of
60 Minutes
and the wall-to-wall coverage that was shown during memorable national disasters and random episodes of
World News Tonight
from the 1970s. They could rebroadcast all the news reports from the day Robert F. Kennedy was shot and the real-time news feeds from the 1986
Challenger
explosion. This idea seems unspeakably brilliant to me, and I honestly can’t believe I’m the only person who ever got high and came up with it.

11:35 A.M.:
Okay, we’re less than thirty minutes away from the end of this joy ride, and I’m watching a Bryan Ferry video that’s primarily composed of unicorn footage from the movie
Legend.
I should retire right now. This is undoubtedly the apex of my career as a journalist.

11:58 A.M.:
Well, this is it. The end of the road. And who do I see when I reach nirvana? No, not Nirvana; it’s Cher (“Heart of Stone”), and I think she’s singing about people who died in Vietnam. And—somehow—this makes perfect sense to me. Nature has created no being as irrepressible as Cher, a woman who keeps coming back in order to remind us that she used to be somebody (and will therefore be somebody forever). This is why VH1 Classic exists—it’s a network for people who live exclusively in the past and the future, forever ignoring the present tense. Which means it’s for pretty much everybody over the age of eighteen and under the age of forty-five. And when I see Cher again at 7:58 P.M., this will still be true, just as it was eight hours ago.

—
SPIN.com
, 2003

1
. And this band should come from Scandinavia and be called “Dungen.”

1
Sometimes writing is difficult. Sometimes writing is like pounding a brick wall with a ball-peen hammer in the hope that the barricade will evolve into a revolving door. Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who’s exactly like yourself in every possible way, only to realize that this stranger is boring as shit. In better moments, writing is the opposite of difficult—it’s as if your fingers meander arbitrarily in crosswise patterns and (suddenly) you find yourself reading something you didn’t realize you already knew. Most of the time, the process falls somewhere in between. But there’s one kind of writing that’s
always
easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle’s motivation and I would have watched
Medellin
in the theater. I read
Mary Worth
every day for a decade. I’ve seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to
The Day After Tomorrow
on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn’t do anything. I am open to the possibility that everything has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture. I always prefer to do the opposite, even if my argument becomes insane by necessity.

But sometimes I can’t.

Sometimes I experience something so profoundly idiotic—and so deeply universal—that I cannot find any contrarian perspective, even for the sole purpose of playful contrarianism. These are not the things that are stupid for what they are; these are the things that are stupid for what they supposedly reflect about human nature. These are things that make me feel completely alone in the world, because I cannot fathom how the overwhelming majority of people ignores them entirely. These are not real problems (like climate change or African genocide), because those issues are complex and multifaceted; they’re also not intangible personal hypocrisies (like insincerity or greed), because those qualities are biological and understandable. These are things that exist only because
they exist
. We accept them, we give them a social meaning, and they become part of how we live. Yet these are the things that truly illustrate how ridiculous mankind can be. These are the things that prove just how confused people are (and will always be), and these are the things that are so stupid that they make me feel nothing. Not sadness. Not anger. Not guilt. Nothing.

These are the stupidest things our society has ever manufactured.

And—at least to me—there is one stupid idea that towers above all others. In practice, its impact is minor; in theory, it’s the most fucked-up media construction spawned by the twentieth century. And I’ve felt this way for (almost) my entire life.

I can’t think of anything philosophically stupider than laugh tracks.

2
Perhaps this seems like a shallow complaint to you. Perhaps you think that railing against canned laughter is like complaining that nuclear detonations are bad for the local bunny population. I don’t care. Go read a vampire novel. To me, laugh tracks are as stupid as we get. And, yes, I realize this phenomenon is being phased out by modernity. That’s good. There will be a day in the future when this essay will make no sense, because canned laughter will be as extinct as TV theme songs. It will only be used as a way to inform audiences that they’re supposed to be watching a fake TV show from the 1970s. But—right now, today—canned laughter is still a central component of escapist television. The most popular sitcom on TV,
Two and a Half Men,
still uses a laugh track, as does the (slightly) more credible
How I Met Your Mother
and the (significantly) less credible
The Big Bang Theory
. Forced laughter is also central to the three live-action syndicated shows that are broadcast more than any other,
Friends, Home Improvement,
and
Seinfeld
.
Cheers
will be repeated forever, as will the unseen people guffawing at its barroom banter. And I will always notice this, and it will never become reassuring or nostalgic or quaint. It will always seem stupid, because canned laughter represents the worst qualities of insecure people.

Now, I realize these qualities can be seen everywhere in life and within lots of complicated contexts. Insecurity is part of being alive. But it’s never less complicated than this. It’s never less complicated than a machine that tries to make you feel like you’re already enjoying something, simply because people you’ll never meet were convinced to laugh at something else entirely.

2A
I am not the first writer who’s been perversely fascinated with fake laughter. Ron Rosenbaum
¹
wrote a story for
Esquire
in the 1970s titled “Inside the Canned Laughter War” that chronicled attempts by Ralph Waldo Emerson III
²
to sell American TV networks on a new laughter device that was intended to usurp the original “Laff Box” designed by Charlie Douglass for the early fifties program
The Hank McCune Show
. Rosenbaum’s piece is apolitical, mainly memorable for mentioning that the voices heard on modern laugh tracks were often the same original voices recorded by Douglas during pre-ancient radio shows like
Burns and Allen,
which would mean that the sound we hear on laugh tracks is the sound of dead people laughing. As far as I can tell, this has never been proven. But it must be at least
partially
true; there must be at least a few people recorded for laugh tracks who are now dead, even if their laughter was recorded yesterday. People die all the time. If you watch any episode of
Seinfeld,
you can be 100 percent confidant that
somebody
chuckling in the background is six feet underground. I assume this makes Larry David ecstatic.

During the height of the Laff Box Era (the 1970s), lots of TV critics railed against the use of canned laughter, so much so that TV shows began making a concerted effort to always mention that they were taped in front of a live audience (although even those live tapings were almost always mechanically sweetened). At the time, the primary criticism was that laugh tracks were being used to mask bad writing—in
Annie Hall,
Woody Allen’s self-styled character chastises a colleague working in the TV industry for adding counterfeit hilarity to a terrible program (“Do you realize how immoral this all is?”). Less concrete aesthetes argued that the Laff Box obliterated the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, although it’s hard to imagine how realistically invested audiences were ever supposed to feel about
Mork and Mindy.
I concede that both of these condemnations were accurate. But those things never bothered me. Laugh tracks never detracted from bad writing, and they never stopped me from thinking the cast of
Taxi
weren’t legitimate taxi drivers. Those issues are minor. What bothers me is the underlying suggestion that what you are experiencing is different than whatever your mind tells you is actually happening. Moreover, laugh tracks want you to accept that this constructed reality can become the way you feel, or at least the way you behave. It’s a concept grounded in the darkest of perspectives: A laugh track assumes that you are not confident enough to sit quietly, even if your supposed peer group is (a) completely invisible and (b) theoretically dead.

1A
I lived in eastern Germany for four months of 2008. There were a million weird things about living there, but there was one that I didn’t anticipate: Germans don’t fake-laugh. If someone in Germany is laughing, it’s because he or she physically can’t help themselves; they are laughing because they’re authentically amused. Nobody there ever laughs because of
politeness
. Nobody laughs out of
obligation
. And what this made me recognize is how much American laughter is purely conditioned. Most of our laughing—I would say at least 51 percent—has no relation to humor or to how we actually feel.