No Lazarus

Several decades ago, Mel Brooks appeared on William B. Williams’ radio show on WNEW New York. Brooks regaled Williams and his listeners with the story of the Resurrecting Rabbi.*

I will give a rendition of the tale—unfortunately without Brooks’ Yiddish accent and shtick.

A very wealthy Jewish man dies suddenly. His family had heard of a Resurrecting Rabbi living in Vilnius, Lithuania, and so they hire a private jet to rush said Rabbi to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. 

The Rabbi arrives at an apartment filled with people who want to behold the miracle. He goes into the bedroom where the deceased is laid out and begins to daven. “Baruch etc.etc yada yada . . . (imagine Brooks doing this). Morris Reshevsky, listen unto me. Arise ye now from this bed and join your family and friends. Baruch etc etc yada yada. Sit up now!”

Nothing.

“Too many people in the room. Only the close family.”

The friends and neighbors file out.

“Morris Reshevky! [Davens] Baruch yada yada etc etc. Hear this: ye are to arise from the bed, return to life, and have a glass tea with your loved ones. At the count of three. One. Two. Three. Arise now!” 

Nothing.

The Rabbi shrugs his shoulder. “Now that’s what I call dead.”

*

The New York Times printed a front page today with the names of 1,000 of the 100,000 American victims of the coronavirus. No Resurrecting Rabbi can bring any of them back to life. They are what you call “dead.”

*

Almost since the peril of the virus to human life became apparent, shtarkers have been volunteering others to face the dangers lurking out in the world. An early recruit to shtarkerdom (almost exactly two months ago) was the lieutenant governor of Texas,** Dan Patrick.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) seems to think that if given the choice, Americans 70 and over would be willing to risk getting coronavirus and possibly dying if it means stores re-open and the economy rebounds.*** 

The chorus of shtarker voices has only grown louder over the past months. “Yeah, people will die—but the economy will live!”

I’m waiting for the shtarkers to man up and say, “Me, Sarge. I’ll go first. I’m willing to die so the economy may live.” Rather, they’re like their leader, who was spurred to take to his heels during the Viet Nam war.

Oh, the economy won’t die. Even on life support, it will be fed intravenously by Treasury bailouts. 

The shtarkers can rest comfortably behind their desks. No way they’re delivering groceries or flipping hamburgers. 

They are proof of the truth of the old song: “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”

***

*  I may have the only tape of the tale in existence. Now, if I could only find it . . . .

**  What qualification do you need to be lieutenant governor of Texas?

  Answer: An IQ equal to that of a rock.

  What qualification do you need to be governor of Texas?

  Answer: An IQ just slightly higher than that of a rock.

***  https://news.yahoo.com/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-021600858.html

Before You Wrap the Leftovers

Two Greetings

1A—If you say, “Good morning, little schoolgirl . . .” and you’re carrying a guitar—you’re under contract.

1B—If you say, “Good morning, little schoolgirl . . .” and you’re not carrying a guitar—you’re under arrest.

2—If you say, “Hey, little girl . . .”—you’re Jack Jones winning the 1964 Grammy Award for Best Vocal Performance, Male.

*

Greeting number 1 (A & B) is my bad joke riffing on the famous blues song recorded by, among others, Muddy Waters.

Greeting number 2, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David(1) is an unintentional bad joke of a song that competes for top spot in the Crappiest Song League, Sexist Division.

The song is entitled “Wives and Lovers”—here are the lyrics:

Hey, little girl, comb your hair, fix your make-up

Soon he will open the door

Don't think because there's a ring on your finger 

You needn't try any more

For wives should always be lovers too

Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you

I'm warning you

Day after day, there are girls at the office 

And the men will always be men

Don't stand him up with your hair still in curlers 

You may not see him again

Wives should always be lovers too

Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you

He's almost here

Hey, little girl, better wear something pretty

Something you wear to go to the city

Dim all the lights, pour the wine, start the music

Time to get ready for love

It's time to get ready for love

Yes, it's time to get ready for love

It's time to get ready, kick your shoes off, baby

There are three groups that are insulted in this 1960’s bundle of stereotyped sexism. 

The first—and most obvious—are stay-at-home wives. They have achieved their great goal—a ring on your finger. But they have turned into frumpy, disheveled little girls, who can be summoned with a demeaning Hey, be lectured to about how to please their husbands, and—most importantly—be warned that there are girls at the office. 

If the women who don’t work are insulted, so too are working women, the second stereotyped group. Unmarried, they are not submissive weaker halves to their hubbies; they are wanton(2) hussies, Loreleis, who, coldheartedly, lure faithful husbands onto the rocks of extra-marital dalliances. 

And that brings us to the third insulted group: men— And the men will always be men. Are these 1960s men counter-Harvey Weinstein types who have such a low libido that they have to be lured into making love at home by the hair-curlered drabs turning themselves into sexpots who can rival those man-eating typists—Hey, little girl, better wear something pretty

Something you wear to go to the city

Dim all the lights, pour the wine, start the music?

Or are they spineless creatures who, forgetting their vows, let uncombed hair turn them into workplace predators?

*

I was quite surprised in doing research for this post to learn that “Wives and Lovers” had preceded Marabel Morgan’s best-selling book The Total Woman: How to Make Your Marriage Come Alive by a decade. That notorious tome proclaimed, "It's only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him.”(3) As Wikipedia puts it, the book was famous for “instructing wives to greet their man at the front door wearing sexy outfits; suggestions included ‘a cowgirl or a showgirl.’” This idea was expanded (apparently by a reader) to include greeting hubby while swathed in Saran Wrap. 

It was 35 years after The Total Woman was published that blogger “Bonnie” at “Peculiar Beauty” related that her search for the origin of the Saran idea led her to 

“Perfect Bodies Equal Perfect Sex” on Christianity Today. Teri Looney (which would totally be my pen name if I wanted to write about keeping sex alive in Christian marriage) writes:  "I remember feeling queasy the first time I heard the idea: if your love life seems stale, send the kids to a neighbor's house, prepare a candlelight dinner, and greet your man at the front door swathed only in Saran Wrap. First of all, Saran Wrap isn't cheap and I'm a size 12. Second, do I really want to send my husband the subliminal message that I'm just 'leftovers'? And third, what happens if I get too close to those candles?”(4)

*

Saran Wrap as a sexual come-on. Even Mel Brooks (as the 2000-year-old man) didn’t think of that:

[Carl] REINER: In the 2,000 years you’ve lived, you’ve seen a lot of changes.

BROOKS: Certainly. 

REINER: What is the biggest change you’ve seen?

BROOKS: In 2,000 years, the greatest thing mankind ever devised, I think, in my humble opinion, is Saran Wrap. You can put a sandwich in it. You can look through it. You can touch it. You can put it over your face and you can fool around and everything. It’s so good and cute. You can wrap it up. I love it. You can put three olives in it and make a little one. You can put 10 sandwiches in it and make a big Saran Wrap. Whatever you want. It clings and sticks. It’s great. You can look right through it.”(5)

***

(1) They also wrote "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head,”  "I Say a Little Prayer,” "Walk On By,” "What the World Needs Now Is Love,” “Alfie,” and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?"

(2) Bad speller that I am, I first typed “wonton”—I like that image better.

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marabel_Morgan

(4) http://peculiarbeautyblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/saran-wrap-isnt-cheap-and-im-size.html

(5) https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2009/11/16/carl-reiner-mel-brooks-2000-year-old-man/?utm_term=.58f31a514ff1

Usurpation (Brief Look at Satire, Part 2)

----------------------The Galton Case:
“Your son has been missing for a very long time.”
“I’m better aware of that than you, young man. I last set eyes on Anthony on the eleventh day of October 1936. We parted in bitter anger and hatred. I’ve lived ever since with that anger and hatred corroding my heart. But I can’t die with it inside of me. I want to see Anthony again, and talk to him. I want to forgive him. I want him to forgive me.”

----------------------"Garish Summit” Episode 2:
Agatha
I have something preying on my mind that I need your help with, Bodin. A man has turned up here in Garish Summit who claims to be my long-lost elder son, Caldwell.
Pardew
That’s shocking, Agatha. We’ve known each other for forty years, and I always thought your weak-willed son, Rodney, was an only child.
Agatha
Well, I thought so, too. That’s the strange part I don’t understand.
Pardew
Well, you’re a fabulously rich widow who’s inherited the world’s largest chain of lead mines. The man’s probably a fortune hunter.
Agatha
No. I’ve encountered those before. But this chap definitely claims to be the son I never knew I had. So, of course, it’s just his word against mine.

***

A short time ago, I indulged in a binge of reading (or re-reading) half-a-dozen novels by Ross Macdonald. Although his private eye, Lew Archer, is not as famous as Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Macdonald is generally recognized as holding the third spot in the trinity of American writers of hard-boiled detective fiction. 

At the same time as I was gorging myself on the Byzantine intricacies of Macdonald's Californian family sagas, I was also getting re-acquainted with the output of Bob and Ray. Although Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding did some television work (and even had a hit Broadway show), they were men of radio; they not only worked on radio, they used radio as the basis for most of their material—such as, the stilted language and formulaic plots of soap operas, the banality of advice givers, the obliviousness of newsmen and sportscasters, and the boasts of commercials. 

*

Satire, as I noted in my previous blog post, “X-raying the Soul (Brief Look at Satire, Part 1),” can be general or specific. For example, Bob and Ray's “Jack Headstrong, All-American American” was a specific parody of the serial “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy,” while their “The Life and Loves of Linda Lovely” was a parody of the soap opera genre at large. “Garish Summit,” created in 1982, was a rather late addition to the Bob and Ray stable of soap opera take-offs. Although performed on radio, “Garish” was based on the hot-house rich-family television primetime soaps, such as “Dallas” and “Dynasty.” It was while reading the script of a “Garish” episode that I was reminded of something I had recently read in Macdonald's The Galton Case, written in 1959 (see above). Which I will get back to shortly.

* 

I enjoyed Star Wars when it first came out in 1977, and I enjoyed it even more when I went the second time and actually saw the movie—having been afflicted by a dodgy contact lens the first time I went. I also enjoyed the second in the series to be released, The Empire Strikes Back, which I also saw in a theater (thankfully with both lenses working). However, when the third of the series, Return of the Jedi, was released in 1983, I never made it to the movie house. I did catch up to it when it was later aired on television, taping it for viewing at some future time. Somehow in the next five or six years I couldn't seem to find that future time. And in the meantime, Spaceballs happened. 

When I finally rolled the tape of Return of the Jedi, I couldn't take the movie seriously. For me, the Mel Brooks parody Spaceballs, although rather broad and hit-and-miss (like most of Brooks’ work), had usurped its place in the Star Wars canon. 

*

There was a riddle a few economic recessions back that went like this:

What's the difference between a pigeon and a yuppie?

A pigeon can still leave a deposit on a new BMW.

*

Bird droppings have their place in two excellent parodies: the 1968 short film De Düva: The Dove and The Birds episode in High Anxiety, Mel Brooks’ homage-cum-parody of Alfred Hitchcock films. 

De Düva takes on two of the most famous films by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman: Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. Conflating the two Bergman works, De Düva has an angst-filled Strawberries professor accosted by a Seal-like figure of Death, and they engage in a contest for the man's life. In the original, the protagonist is a medieval knight, and the contest is a game of chess. In the parody the professor and the black-robed figure of Death engage in a game of badminton. While a grim game of chess—that most mental of contests—seems quite appropriate as a cinematic battleground to determine life or death, badminton, with its airy, floating shuttlecock, swerving this way and that, forcing the players into all sorts of contortions to follow its flight, reduces the confrontation to absurdity. 

And there is a dove to leave its deposit.

In High Anxiety, bIrds mass on a school's monkey bars behind an oblivious bench-seated Mel Brooks (like Tippy Hedron in Hitchcock's film). And then they swoop—but instead of attacking and pecking the bodies of the running adults and children as in the original film, in Brooks' parody the birds relieve themselves on the frantically running protagonist, who ends up so smelly that the patrons of the dry cleaner shop he escapes into quickly exit the premises holding their noses. 

Bird droppings are nature's way of making everything else at the time unimportant.  Perfect for the deflationary role of satire.

*

It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it? The consciousness of dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut enough to outline the figures on what she had called his "horizon," between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality somewhat intimidating. He had run up, in the course of time, against a good number of "teasers;" and the function of teasing them back—of, as it were, giving them, every now and then, "what for"—was in him so much a habit that he would have been at a loss had there been, on the face of it, nothing to lose.
(Max Beerbohm's parody of Henry James “is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.” Brendan Gill, The New Yorker, October 24, 1970)

Parody ranges from broadest (e.g., Spaceballs) to the subtlest take-off of the original work. Beerbohm's parody is so subtle that it is, as Gill puts it, “almost” indistinguishable from James' own prose style. If one were to imitate perfectly the style and select the same sort of content as the original writer, there would be no satire. A carbon copy is not satire. The satirist exposes the flaws of the original author to our scrutiny by deliberately exaggerating—subtly (the "almost" effect) or broadly—his stylistic tics and mannerisms and the formulaic content of, and ideas in, his work.

A gift for comedy seldom comes to a writer unaccompanied. . . .Sometimes, as in parody, it is coupled with the flinty disposition of the critic.
(Donald Malcolm, The New Yorker, November 8, 1958)

When the parodist has done his job well, his work—the “flinty” examination of the original—supplants, in the audience's mind, the original work, and he has himself progressed from critic to creator.

*

And so back to Ross Macdonald and Bob and Ray.

Unlike the other parodies discussed, which were all specific satires, Bob and Ray's “Garish Summit” was aimed at an artistic (if we can called it that) category—the rich-family's-got-a-lot-of-entanglements-and-strange-passions soap opera. After reading the script of the episode above, I had a flash memory of something I had read shortly before in Macdonald's The Galton Case (written 23 years earlier). It was, it seemed to me, the stilted dialogue of soap opera. And the convoluted storylines of his mysteries, I realized, were soap operas with a hard-boiled detective on the chase. 

The net of general parody captures a lot of fish (even unintended species).

***

Notes:

1—The dialogue in De Düva: The Dove is in mock-Swedish—basically English with fake “Swedish” suffixes appended.

2—Coincidence: Madeline Kahn is in both De Düva: The Dove (her first movie role) and High Anxiety.

Video Evidence:

Bob and Ray

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnm6kRZhous&list=PLQGNr2fhiKu29qMBWAVBpUoaHnqSW-ol7&index=6

Bergman: The Seventh Seal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oj9JkcRGc 

De Düva: The Dove

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2QmLWWxq4  

Hitchcock, The Birds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydLJtKlVVZw 

Brooks, High Anxiety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scgO8Vfh1qU