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California demon
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________laughing _ I N__T H E__D A R K
+++BY LAURIE STONE +++ECCO PRESS +++304 PAGES +++NONFICTION BY SARAH VOWELL | " so Whoopi Goldberg walks into a bar ..." No good joke begins that way, because all the great humorous themes are things like death, injustice, poverty and pain. It is nearly impossible to be funny talking about comedy. Take Laurie Stone -- please. Her collected pieces of comedy and performance criticism from her Village Voice column, "Laughing in the Dark," only elicits yucks when she's quoting subjects like Denis Leary and Emo Philips. Her column, and by extension, this book, was sparked by a night spent watching earnest, unappealing performance art in the mid-1980s, during which Stone had this revelation: "There are comedians in clubs doing better monologues than this." She astutely set out to write about comedy as performance and vice versa, seeking only "sass and craft." She was in the right place at the right time; her critical sensibility just happened to mesh with the way performers like Sandra Bernhard, Lypsinka and John Leguizamo were smudging the lines between art and laughs in downtown New York. She claims that her book isn't a survey, "but something closer to what all heartfelt criticism probably amounts to: autobiography." Actually, this collection is a good survey of everything from the rise of gay humor to the influence of (especially cable) TV on stand-up comedy. If it's meant as autobiography, the only thing I learned about the author is that she has a crush on Jon Stewart. Who doesn't? Stone is a good critic: She knows her subject matter, writes opinionated prose and has healthy, catholic tastes in art. She makes interesting connections, like pointing out that monotoned verbivore Steven Wright's real ancestor is mile-a-minute physical comedian Buster Keaton because of a shared "mimed resignation and passivity." She's delightfully complicated at identifying the many shades of misogyny in the boys' club of stand-up, noting that overrated Eric Bogosian's world is "vacant of women" while Jay Leno merely comes off "not as a man who dislikes women but as one who has nothing to say to them." And she has no problem poking at revered cultural icons like Johnny Carson and Bill Cosby, whom she calls "a tyrant who wants to come off cute."
But Stone's not a great critic: She's not weird enough or funny enough or even pretentious enough to transform arts reportage into literature. As Premiere's Libby Gelman-Waxner -- the greatest critic to emerge from Stone's hometown in the last 10 years -- wrote about film in 1994, criticism's not just about analyzing form and content, "It's about wondering if Woody Allen's marital problems can be traced to his obsessive use of beige, years before last summer when beige became the new denim." Good criticism gives you Laurie Stone's brand of insight, but great criticism extends an artwork's story, wrapping its insights in Libby-style shenanigans, if you ask me.
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