Some years ago, back when I was a glum bureaucratic hack living in our capital, I flew to Melbourne to join a one-day comedy screenwriting class held by Robert McKee.
A guru, they said, but I went not so much thinking he could save me – nothing so dopey or desperate as that – but rather as a pleasant distraction from my day job and a reminder to myself that I took this writing caper seriously.
Life in Canberra was wretched, my job loathsome. I was now beached upon the shores of an obscure cubicle, very far from my city, my girlfriend, and my sense of competency. I writhed on these shores not with starvation and sun-stroke, but self-loathing and the retinal pain of erratically flickering tube lights.
Most days, the accuracy of Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” was confirmed to me: “Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”
I sought emotional relief by raiding the stationery cupboard, illicitly stashing pens and notebooks – resources for screenplays and memoirs I’d scratch down on evenings and weekends – and by taking long lunches that no-one noticed. I was lonely, depressed, and bitterly projected my despair upon everything – the very building I worked in, for example, which in its beige, pre-fabricated slabs seemed like a wilful testament to the spiritual torpor contained within it.
I was self-pitying, and I could feel depression throttling my charm and generosity. But I felt helpless to reverse it, and if I was ever generous, it was only in being careful not to repel others with my bitterness.
At the pub I transformed my hatred into comedic monologues, profane and exaggeratedly righteous performances. Transforming my contempt into entertainments was also a way of reminding myself that I could still turn a phrase. Then I’d light a cigarette, punctuating another lyric-burst of misanthropy.
And so, Robert McKee. By this point, I’d been transforming my rage into a TV comedy series about life in a bureaucracy. The goal was to leaven the cynicism with good gags. It was difficult, but it gave me purpose. It gave me a dream.
McKee’s is a strange career. Since the early 1980s, he’s travelled the world giving the same three-day course on screenwriting (later, he would offer one-day, genre-specific courses). He published a book in 1997, called Story, which became a kind of Bible for countless aspiring and established scriptwriters alike – but also attracted mockery from those who saw a man selling formulas for art and whose credibility was undermined by the fact that, despite having plenty optioned, not one of his own screenplays was ever made.
McKee retired from his circuit recently – he’s 82 now – but in the decades before he did, many tens of thousands of people paid good money to sit in one of his lectures. Plenty would have been people like me – dreamers and amateurs frustrated with their current gigs – but McKee also attracted plenty from showbiz: David Bowie, Julia Roberts, Faye Dunaway, Peter Jackson, and Ed Burns have all taken his course. Hollywood studios used to send staff every year; Brian Cox played McKee in 2002’s Adaptation. On the day I went, Geoffrey Rush was sat in the row in front of me.
McKee – famously gruff, profane and intolerant of audience interruptions – teaches tradition. “Classical Design” he calls it, and his seminars are effectively re-purposed Aristotle. What he teaches, he says, are “eternal, universal forms, not formulas”. In a 2003 New Yorker profile, he said:
“What I teach is the truth: you’re in over your head, this is not a hobby, this is an art form and a profession, and your chances of success are very, very slim. And if you’ve got only one story, get the fuck out of here. Writers are people with stories to tell. I think I do a great service, by sending the dilettantes out of the door. The amazing thing is that, no matter how hard I try to drive them out of the art, the reputation I’ve gained by being honest brings them to the course. They know I’m not a phony, I’m not selling them a dream.”
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So it’s 2011, and I take my seat in a Toorak movie theatre behind Mr. Rush. In his typical three-day course, McKee shows Casablanca in full. But for that day’s comedy course, the movie screening was A Fish Called Wanda. John Cleese wrote it, a man who also happens to be a serial student of McKee’s – he’s taken the course at least three times. The two had become something like friends, McKee explained, and it was what he said next that stayed with me for a time. In fact, it’s the only thing from that day – besides pissing next to Rush at the urinal during a break – that I remember.
The best comedy writing, McKee said, derives from disturbance. Take Cleese, he said, a man who’d been in therapy for years. From my notes at the time, McKee said that Cleese had a genuine, abiding hatred of Englishness. He loathed its polite manners and the reticence and false rectitude its culture encouraged. He loathed its subsequent hypocrisies and inarticulacies. Its intolerance of play and silliness. And against this idea of England (and perhaps against his own natural introversion and repression) he squirmed with anger and resentment. At 36, Cleese told the BBC:
“There is something manic somewhere in me, and I think it’s something to do with being trapped in a shell of lower middle-class reasonableness, politeness… Sometimes I get very angry and I find it frightfully difficult to be angry… I have fantasies of picking things up, cheese dips and [mimes rubbing the dip in someone’s face]… But I’ve never had the courage to do it.”
Now, today, Cleese strikes me as a diminished force and a grumpy reactionary. But that’s okay – for these purposes, I thought of the creative usefulness of disturbance. Though I think it’s better if I now use the word “anger”.
Comedy and disturbance. Anger as creative fuel. It all seems rather dull and obvious to me now, but at the time it struck me as particularly interesting – the skill of creatively taming flames – and no doubt I thought it interesting because it resonated with my situation at the time. I was seething with contempt, wan with depression, and convinced that I was squandering whatever talent I might have but baffled about how to change this.
And so it was: I sought to creatively transform my anger and disappointment. Lemons to lemonade, and all that. Eventually, I did. First, I quit my job and the city. And then I used those early scripts as the basis of my comedic novel – which, unthinkably, won our country’s only award for funny books last year.
Anger – disturbance – is a useful fuel, hot and pungent. But it’s also volatile and potentially consumptive. It can inspire self-absorption, destroy subtlety. It can damage your musical ear, the one which monitors the tone and rhythms of your writing. Transforming rage into comedy is a spooky and delicate process, and probably, somehow, the rage needs mediation.
All of which is a long prelude to the new Netflix specials by two of the world’s largest comics, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle. Gervais’s Armageddon was released on Christmas Day; Chappelle’s The Dreamer on New Year’s Eve.
Here are two men who retain their platforms to creatively express their considerable anger, but who’ve now become disastrously captive to it. There were some laughs for me, but the overwhelming sense was of men no longer creatively empowered by their grievances, but rendered terribly fucking dull and predictable by them.
Now, I see neither as villains. They’re comics, whose work I once enjoyed but don’t so much anymore. That’s all. I have several things to worry about, and stand-ups aren’t one of them. I share their frustrations with contemporary puritanism. Share their commitment to the anarchic joys of comedy and the sacredness of free expression. I too loathe the hyperbole and language-twisting of the militant and humourless.
But in both specials, their anger is also married to laziness. Often, puerility is used as provocation – not as something joyful, but a stick to poke in eyes. Dave Chappelle impersonating “Asian” and “black American” faces to show how to trick a phone’s facial recognition just seems lame to me. Even if it is done with a basic self-awareness, or an embedded commentary on itself. But it just feels like Chappelle simply declaring his truculence – Hey, I can and will do this – without any regard for whether it’s good material. In other words, whether it’s funny. Again, I’m not offended. It’s much worse than that. I’m bored.
Gervais complains about comics who prefer applause to laughter – “I don’t like it when a comedian just spouts his own political views and relies on the audience agreeing with him to get a round of applause” – but then goes on about those who fake mental illness, sexual desire, and refugee status while riffing on Greta Thunberg and the intolerable fragility of woke kids. He’s having his cake and eating it too, and to me his crowd’s applause sounded more impassioned than the laughter.
Chappelle opens with an anecdote, about his life 24 years ago when he was last on this same stage in D.C. And it promises – as he knows it will – something strange, digressive and beautiful. It involves grief, Jim Carrey, Norm Macdonald and the weirdness of artistic process. But then the whole thing is revealed merely as a set up to a trans punchline.
I can almost admire the perversity. The decadence of using this story merely as a bait-and-switch. Chappelle’s aware that we’re caught in this anecdote – aware of our expectations of a story, and how it might go. And then he stops it – throws it away, effectively – to declare his defiance.
Chappelle’s special is also oddly self-regarding. It opens with shots of him smoking backstage in sombre black-and-white, a moody Radiohead song playing: an image of the artist made lonely by his own courage. Certainly, Chappelle may well feel besieged – the man was attacked onstage last year, an incident he speaks about at length in the new special, and plenty of people would love him denied a platform. Feeling besieged by jackals, one may have an instinct to lift the middle finger. Fair enough. But this self-regard is just not funny. Nor his flirtation with self-martyrdom in his long, and often confusing final part, in which he discusses himself as a powerful dreamer who has had the wit and will to manifest his dreams.
My wholly subjective take is that they’re just not very funny anymore. Were they younger and hungrier, perhaps those flames might be more interestingly exploited. But today, their disturbance seems to me less like a powerful fuel, and more like a sour captivity.
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[P.S. I compiled my 12 favourite albums of 2023, and had intended to write about them for this piece. But I found I had little to say — little of interest, anyway. But here, at least, are 15 of my favourite songs released last year.]