James Brown and Wilson Pickett In a Cold Sweat

James Brown once performed "Cold Sweat" with Wilson Pickett also known as the Wicked Pickett. The video shows the performance along with a rendition of one of the songs that made Pickett famous in the 60’s, “In the Midnight Hour.” The rendition is almost iconic because it depicts maybe not an oedipal rivalry, but an Oedipal triumph though it is unclear who is Oedipus and who the unfortunate Laius in this case. Brown is giving one of his concerts and he calls Pickett up from the audience. Pickett is dressed in black tie and tails and the King of Soul sports a more heterodox attire, a glitzy regal looking jumpsuit which enables him to bare his chest both physically and metaphysically. If you notice any video of James Brown, he is a commanding figure. His diminutive but muscle bound form is a Napoleonic presence on stage. However the minute Wilson Pickett take the mic, he overshadows Brown. In fact his rendition of “Cold Sweat" is not only compelling, but aficionados might even think better. Brown seems to slink away and you can detect an unmistakable envy even jealousy in his body language. He is bobbing and weaving, but he is like a fighter who isn’t punching back as Pickett totally overshadows him. The battle might have been won when Brown offers him an encore, but once Pickett unleashes “In the Midnight Hour" it’s like a team experiencing home field advantage. The war was lost. Neither Pickett nor Brown are alive so we’ll never know what either was really feeling, but like the "Thrilla in Manila" or the "Rumble in the Jungle,” or Monty Python’s famous, Mr. Creosote projectile vomiting scene, this is one video you don’t want to miss.

Who Wants to Play Second Fiddle?

                      United States Department of State

Bank of New York Mellon has produced a laugh out loud funny commercial. Audience members are waiting to hear Itzhak Perlman begin a concert. You can see the look of anticipation on their faces and then all of a sudden, it’s announced the comedian Rhea Perlman will be sitting in for him. A few bars of cacophonic violin playing follow. The idea is that you don’t want surrogates handing your money. Rhea is, of course, the wife of Danny DeVito and not  the famed musician. However what is most interesting is the shared name and the not so subtle implication infusing the comedy and relating to marriage. However, glamorous it is to be married to a successful person, no one likes to play second fiddle. But, let’s imagine if Bank New York Mellon’s advertising agency had chosen the Clintons for their  commercial. This scenario might be slightly reversed in terms of the sexes. The audience is waiting for Hillary to appear, but at the last moment it’s announced that Bill will be taking her place. What would the equivalent of the out of tune violin in the context of a political campaign. Remember Monty Python’s, “Nudge nudge. Wink wink. Say no more.” But that’s too obvious. What could really happen would be something even more discordant with Bill, as he has on some previous occasions, acting like a runaway horse. For instance here is a Times report “Now on the Campaign Trail, a Reined in Bill Clinton,” (NYT, 2/27/08) dealing with how Clinton botched up Hillary’s earlier campaign for president. No one wants him to play that tune again.

A Divine Comedy

Portrait of Dante by Botticelli

Dante famously began The Divine Comedy with these words, “Midway upon the pathway of our life/Ifound myself within a forest dark/For the straightforward pathway had been lost." Sounds a little like The Confessions of St. Augustine, no? Dante's journey comprises hell, purgatory and paradise and is filled with illustrious saints and sinners. But what is the modern equivalent? What is our hell, our purgatory? What is the paradise to which we aspire? Hell Sartre says is other people (“L’enfer, c’est les autres”) and he has a point, but maybe not in the sense that he meant it when No Exit was written in 1944. Today hell is depersonalization of the kind that Thoreau foreshadowed when he stated “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Let’s say you’re on Medicare and you’re one of those people whose occupation in life is travelling from doctor to doctor. The assembly line of impersonal health providers, with their cant salutations, which are like worn out clothes, is one version of the modern hell that most human beings attain when they reach a certain age. Purgatory is a no brainer. It’s just life. Youth is wasted on the young and when we weren’t peddling our bodies to caregivers, we could have been accomplishing great things, if we hadn’t been so concerned with greatness. "Nudge nudge, wink, wink, say no more," Mony Python wisely injures. And Paradise, what is the modern equivalent of Dante’s Paradise. Cialis commercials warn, “if you get an erection lasting more than four hours seek immediate medical help, to avoid long term injury.” But pharmaceutical manufacturers are always trying to protect themselves. How many Cialis takers have faced the prospect of penile gangrene due to priapism? If you have an erection lasting more than 4 hours, call all your friends and you will be in paradise.

The Gag Reflex

Henri Bergson did write  Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic and Freud wrote Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, but it’s hard to believe our current generation of academics can effectively take time out of their Husserling to make salient points about the gags, word play, inflexibility (one of Bergson’s ideas) and farcical cases of mistaken identity (that characterize Roman Comedy for example). Even Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of consciousness, who is one of the authors  of the volume under consideration, Inside Jokes, in Tim Lewens TLS review, “What’s so funny?” (12/7/12) is suspect. The basic theory is summarized by Lewens as this: “we find things funny when our expectations are overturned.” Lewens finds that the theory “performs best” when the authors who also include Matthew M. Hurley and Reginald B. Adams, Jr. deal with “jokes and riddles.” But the authors are “on less secure ground when it comes to the comic effects of mimicry.” And Lewens proves his own mastery of humor when he takes them to task using Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles as an example. “Brooks’s cowboys are a rough, uneducated and vulgar bunch. It would be hard to argue that the audience has a committed expectation that these cowboys are the sorts of people who wouldn’t fart in company. Perhaps instead we have committed expectations for the frequency or loudness of farts, which the cowboys’ exuberance overturns.” To begin with this is a masterful analysis of an iconic scene and shows that philosophers can foster useful discussion even on a subject as defying of philosophical analysis as humor. It also brings to mind another great moment in the history of humor and that’s the famous Monty Python vomiting scene in which one person'a hurl produces a chain reaction. It would be hard to say that expectations are overturned in this piece of over-the-top vulgarity. Quite the contrary, “the gag reflex,” which is more at work in its physiologic than humorous form, is what makes the scene so believable and the viewer is left with only two choices: to laugh, or begin throwing up him or herself.