USA: Writers; 5; Bruce Jay Friedman and Black Humor

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things carrier landing allied her what nature doesn't do to us we'll be done by our fellow man a little bitty which charlotte rae has song for us is a byproduct of a modern american phenomenon known as black humor it can be argued there's not much new about black humor except the label itself and the packaging its characteristic note of mockery

nihilistic laughter and outrageous rebel create sound through literature since their city's mark the pompous creepy rows of the trojan war humor in varying shades of black is woven through american fiction since eighteen fifty mark twain in some of his works and ambrose bierce in all is played withal a with the powers of darkness party anyone pigeonholed melville of hawthorne among our heroes but they both mingle strains of jet black rebellious farce with a solemnity of their major works and after them sure what anderson and faulkner found in american grotesque to raise a vision in which the enduring social pieties were distorted in a wild black mingling of pity and laughter but then the west as jay perlman interest in caldwell were among the black humorists of the nineteen thirties indeed they might turn out to be more

ancestors than the sentence if we put the names of the present black humor stars in a literary perspective or if we counted them as part of a general fleishman the entertaining and popular arts as literary counterparts of comedians like mort sahl cartoonist like charles addams the creators of unsold greeting cards or televisions monster commentaries they would appear in an even smaller minority nevertheless the swelling mood of black humor appears to be the most notable fictional phenomenon of the sixties black humor is no man's copyright a dazzling range of contemporary sensibilities can be fairly viewed as part of a phenomenon if we as readers look forward beyond the all too facile tags of identification two recent novels which have caused an unusual stir in the literary world are stern and a mother's cases they're the work of a brilliant novelist whose short stories are collected in the volume far

from the city of class roots j freedman black humor is jewish intellectual southern school of urban school and writers thank you get nervous when they're put into categories and groupings yet i think they get prices are dated when miller thought of them as for black humor but this time as a kind of pirates out there would be like let's use beer commercial what remains true is that if there is any black humor than the bible and main source of it has built the new york times we hailed for the new leader in viet nam won gold in all the major marshall he was enormous pride he announces at the man he admires more than anyone else in history as adolf hitler elsewhere some pop air force officers are angry because north yet managed to poorer countries have any really juicy palmer target and france general de gaulle cancels his twenty year old annual ceremony

honoring yanks win by liberating france and then announces that this is not to be construed as an anti american in this country is supposedly dead woman begins to stir with life and shoes rushed from the more back to the hospital back at the morgue the shop attendants is interviewed and says thank god she didn't fully recover in a place like that we're alone now is what would have happened that it confirms your belief that a new and powerful court of absurdity has been struck down the line but there is a new mutated style of behavior what one that can only be dealt with by a new one foot in the asylum style of fiction what's happened is that the journalist is that the cover the world of the sixties is has become today's setters and the novelist satirist the ground snatched from beneath his feet by today's jack ruby esque style public absurdity has had to

make an attempt to discover new territory that the new currency new filters for his vision has had to sailing to barber water somewhere beyond conventional sat and this may or may not be a definition of watching whatever the case it's the last year running on the subject from it maya no i tell stories at some point get people to read them an impulsive more than i can imagine spending my time doing anything else to discuss the work of bruce j freedman and the black humor movement in general we have a distinguished literary critic and novelist leslie a feeder many who whose works have become modern classics his latest novel is the last jew in america our other guest george menino was first novel flee the angry strangers helped initiate the beat movement infection is a close observer of the trends in the modern american novel we may agree that

the impulse the results in black humor as a kind of reaction to the anxieties and the disorders only the sixties the same time we haven't lived in a very comfortable or orderly century and i wonder if earlier decades of the century have not had comparable reactions of the day emerged infection wasn't the beat movement infection which you were a part at a reaction against the disorder of the barman and the alienation that followed the war yes i think that was very much similar in that respect we're responding the world war two and the specter of the atom bomb and looking around awhile listening writing about our environment which seems to be what the black unionists are doing them in a room on the road that the bear they're laughing and they're

marking more than the beats where well there was a lot of humor and a simple beat generation kill but there's a lot of heart we actually behind it leslie what would you say about the thirties at the time when hitler was coming up and the parishioners shaken americans' confidence when was there any comparable reaction in literature against these disorders well surely that was i mean all you have to do is think of nathaniel west or dental fuchs for instance in this and you realize that that momentum people responding in a way which is somewhat like clothing we're talking about now that is to say without denying the greenness of life there were suggesting that the only proper response was laughter but there's a huge demand even more important and consequential difference between the two parents which is based on the fact that in the thirties for instance everybody was responsible politically and yet nobody could foresee anything but failure person or common or uncollected whereas period

other which like humor comes as a period of relative prosperity great prosperity expense of prosperity and yet people realize that with everybody making it and irresponsible setting the tone to the age things are just as bad or maybe a little bit worse or at least this summer and i don't think it's an accident say that that will fix his books are set in the tenements away and birds and let us turn for instance a book about which were talking takes place in world and in suburbia this set of approaches to know has very little to do with the black humor now like humor novel as a novel of non protest exactly or at a photo protest having become absurd projects well one more assertive in a lizard set in nineteen sixty two was j freedman published the highly provocative novel stern which is possibly his best known were stanley had your hymen wrote at that time that friedman has greatly gifted fiercely honest and very welcome news indeed we will

hear a synopsis of the novel with a series of line drawings specially prepared for this program human it's journalism modern day shortly after several generations it was really have a pattern of the caterpillars prevailed in his long the camera captured in and it's time for all the analysis build t shirted heavy on labor for for bad as child complainants

times blog and worst of all a man had quote palestine is white shane stone was a troubled man another a dog escort situation everyday when <unk> the train station his house right across a rather largest big huge dogs would involve offensive name for a little whistling sound one talks during his wrist between his teeth and the two animals having close to his eye locked in between them as though they were guards to him and a prison what about you the site was definitely

but the encounter his wife had had with the forgotten man trouble and the most that preoccupation became more and more an obsession he would often that his wife about the pushing down singing sometimes he would become part of the general is an exercise of radio inflamed and why was his obsession with them and somehow seven and reveries about even remembering that is baseball heroes of the past charlie keller and ultimately johnny marr is they all had in common hugely why hadn't he confronted the man this whole experience this weekend on terror and this internet creating another this time and it

will material something that stern and visualize it was in lanham military horst tough team and his boss the fabulously wealthy developers sympathize with some of his old videos by gout was waiting until january a salary wire away our long as it takes care of its three weeks or so stern of his ulcer speaking spanish and the bubble is so pervasive mother is an aging certainly auditory or bands and uses the ultraconservative of all things a family concert

very evil she protested kissing as a show biz thing to do thank you first time it is prosecutions coming close to collapse amy apocalyptic confrontation your demands a

tie to my life you shouldn't say that i wouldn't fight it wasn't much of a fight you feel exhilarated hour but strangely disappointed that his nemesis hadn't killed them a one punch also revere efface destruction the abyss trial by fire and survive with great emotion and perhaps new strength you know precisely the voices of the late blues his wife came into something doesn't you'll learn why we were this army we tried a fraction longer than you can get in occurs to me that what we now call black humor infection may be a sort of popularization of ideas and visions whether that have been

apprehended day writers throughout the century for instance the young central situations during his problem with his wife and the man who pushed her down strikes me as being very much likely situation in james joyce's ulysses in a nightgown singing you know leopold bloom does it have some thoughts about the relation between his wife molly and blazers bordelon undone are also the young our earlier bit and the encounter with the other semi is in some ways a parallel between leah the fight between bloomberg and that the citizens in the bar it in an earlier episode of ulysses the do you see these extensions of modern black humor running back into literary history well as soon going back at least as far as joyce and the two elements which are pickup of joyous are surely there when

one is the perilous element involved in both those episode to talk about and the other and that seems to be even more important is the insistence on me at a heroic nature of the episode that is the encounter between a relatively good man would say balloon for the sake of argument and a really wicked won the anti semite instead of being rendered as pathetic or tragic or even no dramatic is rendered as a kind of a job well because human self is downgraded so the pitch goes and sofas incorporated in the sardonic notable right which is still present in ulysses and i don't think you have a what i think of his black humor proper into louis' gone is a memory of a past tradition against which this is being measured the very name of the book ulysses is measuring these on heroes non heroes anti heroes always against a heroic figures outside of the us and the whole legend of greece is still very much alive in the book store and played with ironically the one that legend disappears it isn't even evoked anymore and all you have left is the

berlusconi happy heroism and i think you've come into the area of stern proper yes i suppose that we found what you were in for fear we would also say that there'd be at the present is so ironically against the us the image of the heroes of the past not mythological heroes that well in terms of american mythology lays out an associate the civil war but of the letter with the idea also that there may be a sort of metaphysical extension in black humor and in the work of someone like flannery o'connor for instance you you find out the central character of being rendered absurd way by his relation not merely to the social disorder around him but the job who do the year very condition of man and i suppose this is no law uniquely end on end surely and somebody like flannery o'connor what you get is this the

whole metaphysical business raised really to a religious level and has the confrontation between the man and the absurdity of his situation is destiny is finally in and flannery o'connor and that's where i think she passes out of one hundred and now the tradition is finally in christian terms are standard in christian jensen i say it but that is to say as soon as you get a suggestion that this encounter is someway christ like warren imitation of christ in one sense or another then you're out of the world of black humor which from my point of view is a nihilistic world those are the only real on a launch would be in a really bleak place of shakespeare is so no comedies like measure for measure and the trial as a press conference yes vote i wonder why we should narrow it even though instead of trying to expand out from the present seem in too oh i suppose i just heard the ig noble critics are concerned for preserving the curators joe about you know michael well i like to say the atmosphere around the thing i suppose

george hope that when we can see on the relations between the fiction is called black humor and a great many other things over or wrongness in the air your hands well it relates to human and it's essentially a particular approach to you or rather my mind and one of them approach to the world those lazily suggested of a while ago it it is a sort of it is not a protest but rather a disengagement of disenchantment beginning were disenchanted because it becomes an as you suggested an anti protest rather than a protest there with you see any connection between this am and the sick joke cs only does the new sci fi staples way back and more more recently than fields we had the year

what seems to be the origin of the st jo in the shaggy dog stories of world want to a few members of the year that are so ugly that they don't really bear repeating it and then a family of the same young and then you're a cartoonist to now we've mentioned jules pfeiffer and leave the bigger black cartoons that he draws in a few drops that did you find as a stylistic connection between black humor fiction and the simple for patients in the cartoonist actually a that simplification of life into where football former and then a formal one i would react with the spare room it is a very caught like no disparity in black you know bruce friedman improvise a sense so that there's no despair noble religion and the distinction between cool addresses and black your sight through certainly and in this way that black

humor attitudes that contains suffering not the spirit of the suffering of very obvious whereas corporate pensions a lack of suffering and we were furious we've been talking so much about the atmosphere around black humor there that perhaps we should ask lesley to to sum up what he feels to be the very special quality and why you were that distinguishes it from a satire of the past or other things in american literature that may have some similarities now a lot have begun to move on this in various ways but maybe it would get would play at this point if i stepped back and then came out the whole problem in a new direction and then maybe cut close together some of those things are very clear ways in which we've been moving out i think the one thing we haven't talked about which is always in my mind when i think about black humor is its relationship to be our ideas better a jewish tradition it seems to me especially if you're thinking of stern and a joseph heller for

instance and ugly antecedents in the nineteen thirties we talked about before nathaniel west than daniel few cents over a month and has determined it surely on if you're thinking about those things and what becomes apparent to you is that somewhere behind black humor there lies the form or especially the attitude or the tone of the jewish joke i'm the kind of joke which was invented by eastern european jewry of its moment of intense is suffering their suffering was intense as a word which we can before but there was no hope there are to get maximum suffering a minimum hope that you get a kind of joke which on the one hand attempts to destroy through humor the world that oppresses and makes them do suffer unnecessary job i know of a job which leader lake or are our to silence and then on the other hand kind of job which doesn't unravel the teller of the joke against his victimizer doesn't make the victims in the winter that undercuts and mocks the victim at the same moment that that does a victimizer until

finely you know both are cut away and you're left with a great and the black hole into the center of the universe at which point you either laugh or will not done that i would suppose the black humor is it is it is is a kind of humor which has i think bruce friedman said his introduction one foot a madhouse i think i would say to feed a madhouse and maybe just the tip of the man's most of the window looking at another kind of world outside of the term black humor is to mean anything worth the readers serious consideration it must be a category large and flexible enough to contain elements emerging in the work of john hawkes saul bellow and norman mailer if jp donnelly and jerry southerner black heroes as a popular magazines tell us they are and whatever is worthwhile and their work will be broadened and stabilized by acquaintance with the black

variations and james b hall and kurt vonnegut thomas berger stanley open joseph heller mr garren belong in the spectrum it's at least partly up to readers and critics to help defend the larger implications of black humor from the narrowness of commercial exploitation i think it still to be determined what black humor will finally amount to our conception of it may be narrowed so that will soon appear to be a fad so like batman by wiley entrepreneur is taking advantage of the sick and offended spots in our lives thank you oh really

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