Text © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Nin

No Clown Alley
Pic: cartoon strip by Christo

Dorothy Parker

Fran Lebowitz

Michael Leunig
& his cartoon

Clowns are not humorists. Humor is not jokes. Does it require surgery to understand what this is all about?

And to add to the already labyrinthine concept of humor, it does not have anything to do with laughter; plus there is no direct relation with the thing we dub 'funny'. Too many factors are involved in the simple process of receiving humor, digesting it, and reacting to it. This we all know.

Yet, I believe there is good humor and bad humor, funny jokes and jokes of which saying 'boring' is already a generosity, and so on. You have your own standards, too.

I can't really tell what makes good humor to me, but maybe via examples then you could catch a glimpse of the thin red line sewing them together: the following are my favorite humor writers' ripoffs.

Dave Barry [from the book Dave Barry Slept Here]

As leader of the American forces, Washington faced a most difficult task, because the Continental Army was poorly equipped. Just to cite one example, it had no soldiers.

Jerome Klapka Jerome [from the novel Three Men In A Boat]

I felt rather hurt about this at first.....Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more disease after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

Dorothy Parker [from the book review Wallflower's Lament]

Despite its abominable style and its frequent sandy stretches, The Technique of the Love Affair makes, I am bitterly afraid, considerable sense. If only it had been written and placed in my hands years ago, maybe I could have been successful, instead of just successive.

Fran Lebowitz [from the column Modern Sports]

When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.

Woody Allen [from Remembering Needleman]

Authentic Being, reasoned Neddleman, could only be achieved on weekends and even then it required the borrowing of a car. Man, according to Needleman, was not a 'thing' apart from nature, but was involved 'in nature', and could not observe his own existence without first pretending to be indifferent and then running around to the opposite end of the room quickly in the hopes of glimpsing himself.

Oscar Wilde [when he was handcuffed under the rain, on his way to prison]

If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her convicts, she doesn't deserve to have any.

Email, 2000

Harlock

Emeraldas

Harlock Saga © 1999-2000 Leiji Matsumoto/ Shinchousha/Bandai Visual/81 Produce

Thanks to Andang Satyawan for the pix.

CLICK THE ICON FOR

A PICTURE GALLERY

Matsumoto Leiji is a scary name on Planet Anime. His characters and stories are so unlike any other known around the area; they are darker, leaner, and meaner -- and disturbingly beautiful. He splashed with Captain Harlock, the anime series released in 1978, based on his 1977 magazine entries. The captain never left the stage eversince.

In 2000 Takeuchi Nobuo made Harlock Saga: Ring of the Nibelung in a rather faithful Matsumotonian atmosphere, but with his own plans for the veteran characters. The Matsumotonian set is almost invariably dark, since it is about space pirates of whichever future time (2977, when Harlock started out); the good ol' lure of space odyssey is hereby exploited once more. I like another title about space pirates, Sol Bianca; there the Spanish stuff lends all colors to the screen, and the all-female characters are humans as we perceive this word to denote -- Harlock Saga isn't populated by such mundane characters. It's eerie, ethereal, like mist on top of a foreign mountain; the atmosphere smells of something deeply, hardly, repressed; something destined to be left unsaid; things understood but unseen. It is as if the characters know something we don't; they have a sphere of their very own. You'd like this series if your mental makeup is rather gothic. I do.

Though actually I only like the way Matsumoto visually depicts the main characters. Each has his and her own story, something spiffy for the Marketing Department, surely, something that promises spinoffs; chiefly among them are Harlock himself, a mighty (and) slim king of piracy up there in the outer space, and Emeraldas, the queen of the business -- 'queen', not like in 'Queen of England' or 'Queen Monique', but the Queen, manager and ruler of her own realm, which is a spaceship designed to the point of 'wow' by the animators, complete with an entirely useless and actually bothersome antique earthly pirate ship attached to the spacecraft, and named (what else but) Queen Emeraldas. The series' spinoffs also include Galaxy Express 999, in which the utterly feminine clone of Emeraldas -- her sister Maetel -- journeys on to no end in a night train to the stars (I'm out of words). The entire Matsumotonian gallery is relentless poetry.

The supernatural is often alluded to, here, and the place the ships roam is still shown to us as infinite. I guess as far as I have known, Matsumoto's outer space is the best in bottling the essence of The Unknown for instant rethinking -- the animated version of the tale is also the same. If you happen to be in the mood for dark brooding or so, this anime will feel like a voyage to the bottom of the self, or whatever you might call that sort of soul-searching activity; it still feels like that even though Harlock Saga digs none other but the innermost Germanism (Richard Wagner's The Ring of Nibelung, for instance) to shove itself on.

Regardless of the obvious noir worldview, Harlock Saga makes a good evening. It makes me wonder for the six hundred zillionth time why there is anybody addicted to Star Trek, at all.

Michel de Montaigne

The term and perhaps even the 'personal essay' didn't exist before Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). I usually can't find anything good to say about anything French, but this is clearly no time to hold fast to that habit. Without Montaigne, I would have probably taken medical courses and been nursing unhappily-married rheumatic Germans who keep complaining loudly about how they're gonna die of emphysema and how they're gonna live by TV quiz shows.

Montaigne, like most heavily educated persons of his era, spoke Latin even when ordering breakfast. He also studied what such people of his time somehow always did, i.e. the Law, in total oblivion of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton's cases and the birth of Microsoft. The young Michel eventually joined in the Bordeaux Parliament. In 1571 he decided it was time to withdraw to his estate of Montaigne, and only then he wrote his first essays. He kept on writing even though been elected Mayor of Bordeaux in 1581 and 1583. When he died, he was busy preparing publication of the fattest collection of his essays.

What's so cool about a Middle Ages blue-blooded law-counselling Frenchperson?

The style he invented would, in time, become the richest of all prose-writing genres. It kicked out the stiff-upper-lipped-ness of such tomes, it sliced open the watertightness, it broadened the playground. That's what the word 'personal' in 'personal essay' is all about.

The only consolation when I'm in the darkest of all moods and wetting my pillows over the fate of never being able to write like Montaigne is that he, titanic as he is in this folder, wasn't blessed with effective brevity. But everything else in his essays shines like midday sun. He, my dear, is great. I still say this despite the fact that he's not a humorist in whichever sense.

A few lines to illustrate this shameless accolade, cut from his essay On The Art Of Conversation:

Stupidity is a bad quality: but to be unable to put up with it, to be vexed and ground down by it (as happens to me) is another, hardly worse in its unmannerliness than stupidity.........Any man may speak truly: few men can speak ordinately, wisely, adequately. And so errors which proceed from ignorance do not offend me: absurdity does.

There are a few things that you could get nowhere else but in the Middle Ages. The ozone layer was presumably intact, there was no P. Diddy to 'sample' people's songs and pollute your oxygen, and ignorance back then was innocent.

Garrett King's soundworks

Related piece:
Beyond Antares

[From the album Silent Partners © 1997 Garrett King & Jim LaDiana]

I never cared about the horn section of any musical assembly. I mean, what's so spiffy in putting your carbon emission into things and make them sound like something else? My 5 year-old niece has reached sophistication in this and yet she never demands us to call it music.

There was a time when everybody in Indonesia went nuts about Kenny G., and some were dangerously crazy when it comes to Dave Koz, plus there's always, for eternity, those who actually build temples for Miles Davis and such -- these never touched me. Not a scratch. In fact sometimes I think an orchestra would be better without anybody blowing things onstage.

But that was before I listened to Garrett King.

I listened, because he owned a cat.

With this indecent motive in mind, I got his CD's Silent Partners (1997) and Shalimar (1993) played in an excessively, abnormally, hot monsoon afternoon.

And the magic worked on my hitherto rather smug immune system.

Gary plays, of all instruments God had let to be despite the existence of among others me, a flute.

So simple. So small. Indonesian rural kids always play a bamboo flute on water buffaloes' backs, according to the National Tourism Board. So the instrument itself isn't strange at all, and familiarity breeds contempt, and -- it didn't work that way this time. It was the other way around.

Shalimar (written by Garret King, Jon Francis & Bruce Conaway) is good; Beyond Antares (written by Jim LaDiana) is good, Timbuck Six (aha, wordplay from the name of the place I often thought of sending my Mom to; written by Garrett King) is good. And this is a stringwhanging-maniac speaking. The flute parts are good.

I still have no idea how come. My aversion to the horn section stays intact, to begin with.

But I still listen to Gary today, and my opinion about it hasn't changed as years have gone by. It must have been the same reason as why the ancient Greeks had a god named Pan.