Day: December 12, 2002

“Hey, remember way back in 1999? Did they even have music that long ago?”

My friend Rob once shared his theory of nostalgia with me: it’s catching up to us, and so as a society we’re growing more and more nostalgic for periods in time closer and closer to the present day. Soon enough, we’ll see commemorative specials on something that happened a month, a week, a day in the past. “Remember two hours ago?” we’ll ask wistfully. “Wasn’t that great?” And then, when nostalgia finally catches up to us, the universe will end.

I like writing the[se] columns for much the same reason that I like doing improvised material as a Pepperpot: you can say unbelievably stupid and awful things (like, oh, that Mother Teresa was a big fan of poor semen) that you wouldn’t dream of saying out of character. You can reference art and culture and philosophy, without having to pretend like you understand them. The only question is, is it funny?

In an interview yesterday with Salon, Eddie Izzard (quite possibly the funniest man alive, in my opinion), got to the heart of what I think I was trying to say. He said:

I’ve always been fascinated by history. It’s a family thing, really. My brother and my father are both history buffs. It could be that we have a history genetic thing going on. [Laughs] Also, I realized that nobody was using it in stand-up, and there was just tons of stuff lying around. It makes you look really intellectual, even though I’m just talking crap.

There’s a lot of name-dropping going on, and the ideas of art, literature, philosophy and history get introduced, but there doesn’t have to be any real comprehension. It’s a little like the Monty Python sketch where the Pepperpot competes for a blow to the head:

Michael Miles: Jolly good. Well your first question for the blow on the head this evening is: what great opponent of Cartesian dualism resists the reduction of psychological phenomena to physical states?
Woman: I don’t know that!
Michael Miles: Well, have a guess.
Woman: Henri Bergson.
Michael Miles: Is the correct answer!
Woman: Ooh, that was lucky. I never even heard of him.

Q: If you have 2 dollars in one pocket, and one dollar in the other pocket, what do you have?

A: Pants!

Thomas Mann, the Nobel prize-winning novelist who, through no fault of his own, was German, once wrote: “A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”

I tried to tell my wife this the other night when she discovered me having sex with our neighbor, Maureen, whose husband has apparently been out of town. I was, I said, unconciously living his life — although Maureen seized upon this as an opportunity to make a rather crude joke about comparative genital size, which I thought was as unfair as it was unflattering.

But, in truth, who hasn’t yearned to be someone else? At one point or another, I’m sure we’ve all imagined different lives for ourselves, envisioned new names and exotic locales, siphoned funds from that corporate account to pay for forged passports, travel expenses, and the inevitable hush money when the police discover you didn’t really die in that warehouse fire back in ‘87.

It’s a natural and healthy curiosity. One could, I suppose, take that curiosity too far and forget where one personality ends and the next one begins — which is also what I tried to tell my wife the other night (once Maureen had finished doing that special trick she does with her tongue), but I think I had already upset her too much by mentioning Thomas Mann.

My wife, to be fair, is not terrifically fond of Thomas Mann. She says that I use my knowledge of history and literature simply as an excuse to do whatever it is that I want at any given time. This, I try to tell her, is what history and literature are for, and there’s little point in studying them if they won’t get you laid, but she usually just storms off angrily and leaves me with my books.

Maureen says that we should try to find some common interest, an author whose body of work we both can appreciate. “That’s easy for you to say,” I tell her, but of course it isn’t with her tongue occupied elsewhere, and I have to admit that she’s right. But that would mean talking to my wife about her interests, and I’m not sure I’m ready to do that.