A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

Just on the off chance that anybody's wondering why yours truly has waxed so silent over the month of August, I can claim only the vicissitudes of business ownership and of course parenthood. That and a tendency to write putative blog postings that read more like entries for the Catholic Encyclopedia or some other such ponderous and all-encompassing work. I've scrapped a number of entries that started with a simple theme and just grew and grew. As I love to tell other writers (do as I say, not as I do!), any fool can make something complex of something simple, but it takes a true genius to make something simple out of something complex.

The subject of encylcopedias brings to mind out an interesting little tiff between two writers that I happened to read about recently. It started with Joe Queenan's review, in the New York Times, of The Know-It-All: A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing by A. J. Jacobs. Queenan savaged Jacobs's book, in which the latter set out (clearly with tongue in cheek) to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and then present the great knowledge he had thus obtained.

Queenan castigates Jacobs for a variety of sins, some of which I personally consider almost castigation-worthy: as JQ writes, "the premise of the book is completely wrong. The animating idea of this misguided endeavor is that corralling a vast array of unrelated facts will, in and of itself, make a person more interesting.... [But f]acts absorbed without context merely magnify the intellectual deficiencies of the autodidact, because a poorly educated person does not know which facts are important."

Besides his praiseworthy use of the word animating, one of my favorite terms (thanks to a book I basically inhaled as a voracious twenty-one-year-old, Contemporary Radical Ideologies by A. James Gregor), I agree with Queenan's antipathy for the superstition that acquiring what CNN used to annoyingly called "factoids"--useless information presented without context--constitutes some form of real knowledge. Long before the present media age, Hermann Hesse (pictured right) basically ripped such mentality a new one in his rather curious Magister Ludi. And I've long been a believer in the idea that wisdom and knowledge are far from the same thing.

One thing I found interesting about Queenan's article, though, is something he wouldn't necessarily care to point out: that at earlier points in his career, he too could be described in the same terms by which he paints Jacobs: "corny, juvenile, smug, tired." That was my impression of him years ago, when I first read him in the American Spectator (this was long before that publication began making headlines, by which point I had long since moved on.) Queenan seemed to me to embody the more base aspects of P. J. O'Rourke, without the latter's redeeming wit and deep common sense. And while I'm glad to see that Queenan has matured a great deal over the years, I still think he was a little "rough on the Beave."

Jacobs thought the same thing, obviously; hence his equally witty rebuttal in the same publication. It's always a tricky thing when writers respond to critics in print or otherwise, but Jacobs comported himself well, dealing out plenty of self-deprecating wit to balance the abundant Queenan-deprecating responses. And when it comes to authors vs. critics, I'm sorry, but I'm almost always going to be on the side of the authors, having experienced my own share of nasty reviews, either public or private (i.e., in the form of comments by advisors on scholarly publications for which I was writing.) For instance, there was this one... uh, person who gave my Beatles book such a blistering review that I decided he was simply setting out to find fault--and I confirmed this when a little research revealed that he'd written his own poorly received Beatles book years before. I sat down to write a withering response to the publication in which his review appeared, but thought better of it, and here these many years later it's still buried somewhere deep on my hard drive.

But Jacobs, on the other hand, did manage to write a rebuttal that makes his case effectively. In the process, he and Queenan together managed to put together the most entertaining literary pissing match (excuse my French) since V. S. Naipaul's dispute with Paul Theroux a few years back. And after all, isn't it much easier to argue about writing than it is to actually write?

Why I Like The Aristocrats--At Least Until I've Seen It

No, I'm not talking about the cartoon from the 1960s, The Aristocats. That one shouldn't be a matter of controversy at all: anyone who wouldn't like The Aristocats (at least once, as opposed to the hundreds of times kids want to see it) must be a misanthrope. I'm talking here about The Aristocrats, a film set for limited nationwide release August 12. Why limited, when it's one of the most talked-about movies of the year? Well, AMC Theatres, for instance, which controls 3,500 screens, rejected it on the basis of "limited audience appeal." The real reason, though, is that, as several critics have suggested, The Aristocrats--which features neither nudity nor violence--may be the most obscene movie ever released to mainstream America.

Late one night five years ago, standup comic Paul Provenza and magician Penn Gillette (of Penn & Teller) were discussing the idea of improvization in comedy and its relation to improvization in music, particularly jazz. Gradually they began to formulate an idea: find as many comedians as they could, some of them superstars but many more of them journeymen and -women of the comedy circuit, and film each one of them telling the same joke. Actually, "story" might be a better word, because this joke couldn't be a one-liner, but rather an open-ended routine that would allow the teller considerable leeway in fashioning his or her own unique tale. For this they chose "The Aristocrats," described thus by Gregory Kirschling in Entertainment Weekly:

"The Aristocrats" is an ancient dirty joke out of vaudeville days.... Audiences rarely get to hear it. Rather, old-school standups crack each other up with it, usually after sets, while hanging out next to the beer kegs in the dank back rooms of comedy clubs, or at coffee shops till dawn. It's an inside joke, a comic's secret handshake, and it's always dirty.

The joke itself revolves around a would-be comic's pitch to a talent agent for a
new routine. The agent asks him to describe the routine, and here is where the
improvization begins. Quoting again from Kirschling's excellent article, which
unfortunately isn't available online:

"The Aristocrats," as the movie points out, is a bad joke. Its skeleton is this: A guy walks into a talent agency and announces he's got a family act. Let's see it, says the agent. Here it's up to the comic to make up a family show so sick and debased, it's gold. At the end of the disgusting pitch, the agent asks for the name of the act. The answer is the punchline: "The Aristocrats!" In the movie, Drew Carey recommends spicing up the delivery by forming your arms at a right angle and dashing off a stylish Spanish-dancer finger snap.

Carey is just one among an array of comedic stars who tell their own version of the joke in the course of the film; others include Jon Stewart, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, Jason Alexander, Andy Dick, Paul Reiser, Fred Willard, George Carlin, Don Rickles, Phyllis Diller, and many, many others. Kirschling singled out the performance of Bob Saget, best known as Danny on the sitcom Full House in the 1980s, as "the most galvanizing display of vulgarity" in the film.

There has been a big build-up to this release in terms of touting the excessive grossness of the stories contained therein, and there have been the almost inevitable protests by Christian groups and others--protests that of course only serve to give the movie tons of free publicity. And Michael Elliott of ChristianCritic.com, who wrote a blistering critique of the film in terms of morality and aesthetics, nevertheless admitted to Kirschling that he laughed when he watched it: "It's undeniably funny."

I have no doubt that much of it will be hilarious, as well as an intriguing exploration of the storyteller's art. And I have no doubt that there are things in there so disgusting and offensive as to make one angry, defensive for loved ones and friends and fellow human beings who might be construed as targets of humor that goes just slightly over the edge. (In any case, being a parent of small children I probably won't see it until it comes out on DVD, especially because, even if my wife and I did have a "date night" at the movies, I can't imagine using it for this film.)

At heart The Aristocrats is, as Provenza told Kirschling, "about creativity, about individuality, about freedom." It is an entirely different class of creation from the infamous Piss Christ of Andres Serrano or the virgin in elephant dung that caused such a flap in New York City a few years ago. Although all sorts of right-thinking people would no doubt have lots of reasons why these are works of art, it seems pretty obvious to me that they're really little more than attempts to provoke as a means of getting publicity. I remember reading one earnest defense of Serrano back in 1992, in which the critic attempted to equate his "experiments with biological materials" to Leonardo's detailed anatomical drawings. That got a big chuckle out of me.

As for the desire to provoke on the part of these "artists," Jesus and the Virgin Mary are pretty easy targets, as would be Uncle Sam or any number of other traditional Western symbols or personalities--Ronald Reagan, for instance, or Margaret Thatcher. Speaking purely from the standpoint of desiring to offend, if these artists had really possessed any cojones, they would have shown Martin Luther King in urine, or depicted a mosque smeared in dung. But of course the first of these would have gotten their work consigned to oblivion so quickly that their names would be forgotten now, and as for the second--well, ask Salman Rushdie how cool it feels when you offend a constituency who does not take offense lightly.

Compared to these lame works of "art," The Aristocrats sounds like something that genuinely possesses value. An equally important distinction is that the makers of the movie are not trying to help themselves to your tax dollars so as to promote a message you might not like. Theirs is a commercial venture, one in which they are free to succeed or fail--but from what I've read about The Aristocrats, I think they're bound to succeed.

[Check out the listing for The Aristocrats on the IMDb, as well as the film's official Web site and an Entertainment Weekly review.]