Neglected Art: Random Thoughts on Shakespeare, The Simpsons, and Stand-up Comedy

Akshay over at The Occasional Review has a post up on stand-up comedian Louis CK that got me thinking. His main thesis is that many artists working in low prestige genres will later be recognized as among truely great. For him, Shakespeare is an example of how this happened in the past, and The Simpsons is an example of how it might happen in future.

Here are some of my own thoughts:

I.
The best work on The Simpsons actually comes from a relatively small team that coalesced around the 2nd season. There was of course Groening, who set out the broad vision for the show. But the tightest episodes are almost all directed by Rich Moore or Jim Reardon and most of the really classic episodes seem to come from a relatively small stable of writers: George Meyer, Jon Vitti, Jeff Martin, John Schwartzwelder, and the duo of Jay Kogen and Wallace Wollodarsky. By the end of the second season this team had picked up a lot of creative momentum and going into the third and fourth seasons were all working on an extrodinarily high level. But, from the fifth season on, the show started to slowly lose some of its focus, not coincindentally, I think, as some of these people started to drift away. A few great episodes aside, it hasn't ever fully regained its glory.

I do think, however, that televsion shows, especially those with long story arc are not, on the whole, very conducive to creating great art. The main factor is the need to pump out product. The best art almost always comes out of the vision of one man, and there is just no way that any one person can sustain the necessary creativity through the hours and hours of programming demanded by the format. Even the greatest artists have had trouble sustaining creativity at that high a level. Look at Wagner. Though uncontestably a genius of the highest order and an artist of amazing stamina, no reasonable person can fail to note that his Ring cycle, beautiful as it is, contains a fair amount of stuffing. Dickens too. Great as he was too, many of his novels are rather padded. And if this caused trouble for Wagner and Dickens, how much more so for the lesser mortals who create television shows?

Parcelling out the creative responsibility wouldn't seem to be much better. Unless everybody is equally talented, the quality will be uneven, with good directors being undermined by bad writers and vice versa. Given the hours and hours of product needed, there are just that many more opportunities for things to go wrong. Furthermore, great art almost always needs a unified vision. Unless everyone is on exactly the same page creatively, the tone will be uneven too. This can be managed by having one "creator" oversee everything, but even then individual risk taking, the stuff out of which really great art is so often made, will inevitably be discouraged, lest it upset the flow. So, if each individual follows his genius, the show might be occasionally brilliant, but will tend to lack unity. However, if everyone subordinates themselves to the creator, the show will tend to be mediocre. Even worse, all of these factors tend to make television a writer dominated medium, and this too is not conducive to great art. As I wrote earlier:

If you just want a decent popcorn flick [or television episode] , you're much more likely to get it with a solid screenplay and a good journeyman director. But if you want a piece of art that someone is going to remember 200 years from now, you're best to see if a directorial genius can manage to spin some gold out of a piece of fluff.

Television production techniques seem almost exclusively geared to achieving, at best, a kind of high level mediocrity; it is extremely difficult to break out of that mould.

The Simpsons, however, seems to have avoided most of these traps. The show is almost entirely episodic, so the effect of one bad episode doesn't carry over into another. The tone of the show is satirical, so it can make do with more stereotypical characters and doesn't have to worry about long term character development. And, as I noted before, it was essentially created by a relatively small and unusually cohesive group of people, including two great directors. Everything fell into place.

As for Shakespeare not being fully appreciated in his lifetime, I think this had something to do with the fact that his texts were not fully available to the public until after his death. Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of lacking art during his lifetime (though he always insisted that he loved the man). David Riggs, Jonson's biographer, suggests that it was only after Jonson got ahold of the texts being prepared for the first folio, that he realized just what Shakespeare's achievement was, resulting in Jonson's famous poem in which Shakespeare triumphs over Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Kyd, Beaumont, Aristophanes, Terence and Plautus. Only Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes are his equals. I would further note that Shakespeare was easily the most influential writer among his peers: Ford, Webster, Tourneur, Beaumont and Fletcher, all show more of his influence than of anyone else. So, it can hardly be said that he was that neglected.

More generally, the myth that many great artists were thought of as mere popular entertainers during their lifetime and only later enshrined as immortals is just that, a myth, or at the very least a wild exaggeration. Though there are a (very) few exceptions, it is much more usual for great artists to be recognized in their lifetime. Popular writers like Balzac and Dickens were recognized for their artistry. Even a less popular artist like Wordsworth may have started out as a literary pariah with only a small band of fanatical admirers, but by the end of his career he was poet laureate. At the most, great artists will have to wait one or two decades for members of the cognizati to catch on. With regard to The Simpsons, I think we can see this process happening before our eyes. People are starting to recognize just how good the show was and critical opinion is starting to coalesce around seasons 3 and 4 as the shows peak. We should remember that season 3 only started airing in 1991, only 16 years ago, hardly an eternity for people to catch up.

II.
As for standup comedians, I think Akshay is right. Some of them undoubtedly will come to be seen as great artists; as writers and performance artists they deserve to be taken as seriously as anyone. But you have to be careful; some humour really dates. Is Lenny Bruce funny anymore? I (and a lot of other people, apparently) aren't so sure. I remember, in particular, the scene from Lenny where Bruce rants about how ridiculous it is that gays aren't allowed to become teachers. "What, do you think they are going to start teaching two minutes of cocksucking before recess?" Setting aside the merits and demerits of gays becoming teachers, its ironic that that is often exactly what happened, as anyone familiar with the sex ed wars can tell you. The same with that preachy bore George Carlin. A rant like "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" loses something of its lustre in an age where even toddlers feel free to come up and tell you to "fuck off," and where sites like www.shitforyou.com cater to every vile perversion you can think of and are now available in every household at the click of a mouse. In a world overflowing with cuss words and digital vaginas, a little decorousness would be nice.