Last Week’s New Yorker Review: August 19, 2024: The Whole Enchilada 🫔
Last Week’s New Yorker, week of August 19
"is this ok for a ten year old, my skin does get dry and my undereyes sometimes get super dry, any other recamandations are good too! : ))))"
And now… presenting… one unwieldy assemblage… for one week only… it’s… The Whole Enchilada!
Must-Read / Three Malcolms:
“What Tweens Get from Sephora and What They Get from Us” by Jia Tolentino. cosmetics, consumerism, context collapse. Just straight up excellent blogging. It’s a classic trick – take an imagined scene of chaos and debunk or confirm it – and here there’s quite a bit of truth to the tales of wired tweens with blank checks and a rapacity for retinol. After a fakeout (beginning the second section with “Our Founding Fathers…” has to be trolling) things move toward memoir, and the “clusterfuck of pleasure, obligation, trap, and advantage which is contemporary girlhood.” It skims, but then again her whole body of work is a kind of memoir-in-essays; any individual entry need only provide a glimpse. Everything here is very plugged-in, and Tolentino does run the risk of merely presenting her algorithm, so to speak; of course, broad cultural analysis rooted in personal experience is basically her thing, and also the internet’s thing. We’re all introjecting in front of a projection box, back and forth forever. (More July.) Tolentino’s practice is rooted in that same recursion, but this doesn’t make her seem cynical; instead, she’s one of the few cultural critics whose form matches her subject. (Many strain for the effect, which doesn’t work – an individual simulating the feed just reads like a manic episode. Tolentino makes it look effortless, because individual.) The twist toward climate change is so last-second it doesn’t have a chance to feel contrived. There’s no need for some deep theoretical analysis; blogging is the right weapon when the truth is right in front of your face. And your face is the real shop front.
Cartoons
Cover: Addams is a legend, and this is clever enough. I find the guy’s sunglasses a bit distracting, though. They’re right in the center and they don’t do anything for the joke. Unless I’m missing some deeper joke completely.
Pg. 11: Yes, and there was light.
Pg. 14: A dated reference with a too-obvious spin.
Pg. 18: And thus was born Skibiditoiletocracy, the world’s greatest form of government.
Pg. 23: Interesting new terrain in the world of heterosexual marriage jokes that would never run with the genders swapped.
Pg. 26: I’ve heard of Bananaphone, but this…
Pg. 31 [Comic Strip]: Spiegelman’s wordy, somewhat mannered style isn’t for everyone, and it verges on didactic here – but I can take a lecture. Schulz and Spiegelman share a certain precision, but where Schulz chooses a zenlike gesture, Speigelman is a one man band in a three-piece suit, trying all sorts of things. He beat Schulz to the Pulitzer he mentions, but he could certainly never keep a daily strip going – it’s been twenty years since he’s had a book out! He’s a more natural fit for the Peter Bogdanovich “hypeman who knows whereof he speaks” role – which is basically what he inhabits here.
Pg. 37: That’s exactly the fur onepiece that a slimy salesman-caveman-man would wear.
Pg. 42: Long way to go for a pun. Well-drawn cat. MPJ today stands for Mild Physical Jeopardy.
Pg. 52: An oddball but well-suited presentation of a simple observation. Excepting the Spiegelman, which is playing a different game, this is narrowly Best of the Week.
Pg. 56: A better fit for The Out-of-Towner (a magazine I just made up) than this fine publication.
Poems
“So That’s Who I Remind Me Of” by Ogden Nash: Proof that Nash can fit a meter when he wants to. The title gives a bit too much away, and most of the references flew over my head, which may be time or just illiteracy. But one can float to heaven on this lighter-than-light verse, and I just might.
“The Seven Ages of a Newspaper Subscriber” by Phyllis McGinley: If the medium is the message, then the life-cycle is the lesson. Wonderful!
Fiction
“Chablis” by Donald Barthelme. One Jackson. worry, wary, temporary. A tender inner monologue, in Barthelme’s usual patter. The humor is all in the phrasing (“Romp? I can romp.” “She can eat a whole box of Crayolas and nothing much will happen to her.”) despite the slight tragedy and anxiety of the scenario. It’s not hugely ambitious, but it basically works; I wouldn’t want to overexplain it.1
Shouts & Murmurs
“Love Trouble is my Business” - Veronica Geng reads Time Reaganed. My favorite thing in this magazine. The conceit is fun enough, the choice to make it a hard boiled detective narrative with a musical interlude is truly inspired. Joyous witty lunacy – it doesn’t get any better. And as anyone who’s read Proust will know, maintaining prosody and momentum while executing at a high level requires as much fastidiousness as sorting jelly beans for Mr. Reagan.
None of the other Shouts are worth much mention – I’d read the Simon Rich before, and it loses something the second time through; the Ian Frazier is only a so-so Beckett impression; the Calvin Trillin is quite dire – who picked that one out?
Features
(No section breaks this time – it feels weird putting them in for an archival issue, plus nothing is awful or superb – but things are still roughly from best to worst.)
“Happy Pro” (Talk of the Town) - Brendan Gill throws a pie at Buster Keaton. I’m happy for any time spent with Keaton, and this lands on a final image of uncommon beauty and pathos. Somehow this piece is the oldest thing in the issue excepting the poems; the issue’s focus on the more recent past is really odd, since it’s the least funny era of the magazine by almost anyone’s reckoning.
“A Crack in the Greasepaint” - Michael J. Arlen shows how SNL put Some New Life in comedy. A single section of Arlen in full “interesting guy at a party” mode, explaining comedic styles with nothing so stale as research or evidence – at least, not that he makes clear – it’s more of a vibe dissection. It’s convincing! And the connection to England and concepts of the eccentric-as-funnyman do help explain what early SNL was going for.
The magazine has obviously re-fact-checked all the pieces in this issue, so a good number of them have minor corrections appended. This one is my favorite: “A previous version of this article mischaracterized the actions of a character in the sketch about Gerald Ford, and also the background of the female character in the ‘Black Perspective’ sketch.” Some fact checker had to watch a lot of ‘70s sketch comedy this week.
“Dead Man Laughing” - Zadie Smith inherits her humor. A charming remembrance of Smith’s father, which segues into a more scattershot review of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, of all things. The internal logic is there, I guess – Smith’s brother was performing at the festival – but I read the piece’s second half skeptical that Smith could tie everything together, and, indeed, she mostly can’t. The first three sections work perfectly well on their own; Smith conveys her father’s depths while focusing on his bits. Smith’s writing is (almost) always a wonderful place to spend time, which her detractors would probably say is evidence she’s lost her bite; her willful calm and focus on the craft of the sentence fits this subject pretty well, though. You don’t want the audience smashing the watermelons. (Speaking of comedian brothers.)
“You Have to Laugh” - Adam Gopnik lives a little fellow. A shame that Gopnik’s appreciation of Chaplin gets derailed so he can dissect the terrible Red-bait biography that’s under review. That dissection itself gives Milton too much credit, with Gopnik calling Communism an “evil ideology” and saying Chaplin was just trying to “look like an intellectual” – and, weirdly, that his lefty politics were “probably the one significant thing in his life that had nothing to do with his early trauma”, which suggests only a deficit of Freudian imagination on Gopnik’s part. And it was only a few months ago that Louis Menand was debunking most of these same myths in an excellent piece in the magazine. (Even when the pieces in this issue are good, the selection chosen to be republished is very odd.) You can mostly ignore that third section and focus on a fairly compelling reading of Chaplin as pairing an attractive “grace” with a childlike quality. It’s a little too focused on Chaplin the performer – he was also a great director! Gopnik’s act is everlasting, though; unlike with Chaplin, he’s aging into the role he’s built.
“Workouts” (Talk of the Town) - Lillian Ross shoots the shazbot with Robin Williams. Ross is the TotT GOAT; she makes this work even as none of Williams’ bits land on the page… and a few are wildly offensive.
“Pryor Love” - Hilton Als has a Pryor commitment. Speaking of a comedian whose work doesn’t land on the page, woof. Every time Als pauses his somewhat florid appreciation to quote the man himself, it becomes clear that the opaque undercurrent of self-hatred powering Pryor becomes crystal clear when you stop to read the exact words he’s saying. That kills the joke. And, unfortunately, Als loves an interminable block quote. He also loves Lily Tomlin doing moderate ebonics. Still, while this doesn’t exactly work as an appreciation of Pryor, it will leave you with a far better understanding of Pryor. If Als actually interviewed Pryor, you certainly can’t tell; these days, the magazine will only run a profile without an interview if it’s of, like, Mitch McConnell. (Even then, it’s filed under A Reporter At Large.) Als writes his way around this without addressing it directly. This piece was eventually published in Als’ acclaimed White Girls, so it’s not as though it needed rediscovering. There, it was paired with a 75-page experimental screed, also kind of about Pryor. The writing here is fantastic, of course. But why is it always the buttoned-up Als in the magazine?
“Talking Dirty” - Nancy Franklin can Handler the truth. I just reviewed an old, randomly selected Franklin theater review at length. This is another weird selection – it’s a pan; its contextualization of Handler is period-accurate, but not in an especially revealing way. (Did you know that “female comedians… tend to be examined closely for what their appearance and their performances ‘say’ about women”?) Handler’s show ran for quite a while without making much of an impact; judging by this review, that’s about right.
“Bravo!” - Pauline Kael brings around a cloud to rain on the parade. I get that part of the Point of Pauline Kael is that even as you disagree with her judgements four out of five times, even as you sometimes find the way she renders those judgements to be blunt and a bit mean-spirited, you adore her anyway, because she has a voice – she’s smoking a cigarette with you after the movie, talking shit. It basically works, but I’ll never have the affection for her that would come with contemporaneousness. Here, she has her usual tics – did you know she doesn’t like Charlie Chaplin? – and her thesis about talent and beauty is compelling but not totally cogent. (Surely that’s exactly what people mean when they say the message is that “you do not need to be pretty to succeed”, something Kael calls “nonsense”.) In this case, I do agree with her take that Streisand is the soul of an otherwise “stodgy” flick – that’s not much of a stretch. I wonder what she’d make of the Lea Michele incident. Would Kael like Glee? She’d probably say it’s wretched – but Matthew Morrison is a revelation.
“What’s So Funny?” - Tad Friend has one for you. I think the kind of pop-science featured in this piece runs the risk of completely misinforming people as to how science actually works. An open web poll where you can vote on jokes has less to do with science and more to do with the early internet, when goofy ideas could find an audience – the same way those beer-drinking apps were on everyone’s iPhone at first. It doesn’t interest me at all, and neither does most of Friend’s jocular flailing toward a theory of humor. Surely a formula for comedy, though, is different from a theory of why things are funny – a distinction Friend never really articulates. I did like the moment Jon Stewart inadvertently provides a perfect example of the joke formula he was just arguing against. Otherwise, I was mostly stone-faced. You don’t have to be kidding me.
Letters:
Nothing in the mailbag, which is a shame, as last week’s issue had a lot of great pieces with plenty to discuss, I thought. What did you think of Clare Malone’s RFK profile, for example? How far she’s come from being the most sane contributor to the 538 politics roundtable to today…
all the newsletter
that fits. To print!
Obviously I would want to or I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter. I’ll restrain myself this once, anyway. ↩