Highlights for Adults: David Rakoff

HFA is a feature where I look on my bookshelf, take down one of my excessively highlighted books, and share some passages to see if anyone else thinks it was worth all the yellow/pink/orange/green ink involved.

Episode Two: David Rakoff, Fraud

Author David Rakoff is a member of a trio of NPR commentators that are so witty, so effortlessly, so often, you want to punch them in the face out of jealousy.  His colleagues Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris are much more famous, but I’m sure Rakoff will get his due one day – especially if he keeps writing essay collections as chock full of trenchant insights and quotable passages as Fraud and Don’t Get Too Comfortable were.  He’s not quite as warm as Vowell, nor as self-consciously comedic as Sedaris.  He’s a more detached observer, with a wit as dry and cold as the martinis you can imagine him sipping on while he judges all he sees from his perch.  And like all the best misanthropes, he saves his sharpest barbs for himself, especially in his first collection.  Fraud is full of him taking on things far outside his skill set and comfort zone, and generally congregating around people he can barely stand.

“The Best Medicine” essay finds him at the Sixth Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, an event that he sees as an overt attempt for comedy to overcome its inferiority complex against drama, to set “clownliness next to godliness”.  The organizers and attendees let their intense need to be taken seriously coat the entire proceedings in a sheen of pompous congratulation and obsequious fawning.  In their effort to show how Making People Laugh is nothing to be ashamed of, they overshoot and end up burdening comedy with all manner of moral baggage and sociological importance.  Rakoff takes issue with their implied conflation of being funny with being a good person:

This brings up yet another, far more important misconception: that being comically generative and having a sense of humor are one and the same thing.  The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is one of the most.  One is a handy social tool, the other is an integral component of human survival.  It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person.  Not having a sense of humor does.

The piece moves from general to specific discontent when he endures Dan Castellaneta’s one-man show, Where Did Vincent Van Gogh? The fourth-grade level pun work of the title, along with the words “one-man show” serve as a gigantic red flag, but still – this is the guy who brings Homer Simpson to life, one of the greatest comic creations of all time.  How bad can it be?  A: The worst.  It’s an “ethereal and sanctimonious snooze” involving an alien and seven other characters and some hokey ham-handed message.

The nebulous, New Age-y notion of the show is that all these sterling souls are being gathered to restore our faith in some unnamed thing (presumably not one-person theater).  It’s a bad sign when I start counting the unused props on stage.  Only two wigs, one stool, an easel, and a dropcloth to go.  I begin to pray to an unfeeling God to please make Castellaneta multitask.  The damnably overdue conclusion, a we-are-all-one-and-you-are-me-and-I-am-the-alien bit of jetsam is vacuity dressed up as depth.  If I were sixteen and stoned, my world would be rocked. (Ecstatically, I am no longer either.)  Castellaneta takes his curtain call with the earnest face and noble purpose of one who has been called to Teach.

Another piece, “Including One Called Hell”, deals with a more explicitly New Age gathering, the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhineback, New York.  Rakoff is there for a workshop entitled “Cultivating Compassion and Charity”, led by none another than action star – well, I guess, former action star – and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, Steven Seagal.  Seagal, who the organizers inform attendees they can call Rinpoche, or Precious Jewel, is in what Rakoff calls “a large phase, with a bit of the late-model Brando girth about him”.  The newly rotund guru/puncher appears as lax about time as he is about his diet.  Applying the dramatist’s dictum – Enter Late, Leave Early – to his social obligations, the guest of honor nearly outwears his welcome with the attendees with his tardiness.  But the biggest surprise of the piece is that, when he is present, Seagal is gracious and intelligent, holding forth on a subject he clearly knows inside and out.

Fortunately – at least from a satirist’s standpoint – the attendees have enough ego, idiocy, and overall flakiness to give David Rakoff more than enough target practice.  Rakoff notices that, for a retreat focused on a belief system centered on altruism and compassion, the only centering done here is around the self.  He points out that, like a lot of Q and A’s, there are very few actual Q’s (a huge pet peeve of mine), and the ones that are asked “don’t get bogged down with a lot of heavy thinking about others”:

The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism.  I have ended up for the weekend at a spa that refuses to call itself a spa; an “institute” with a terror of the world so crippling as to have no newspapers.  No surprise, really, had I but taken the time, prior to my arrival, to seriously parse the terms “self-help” and “retreat”.  The former unabashedly egocentric, the latter alluding to defeated flight.

Rakoff finds an almost unbelievable treasure trove of space cadets: from a man who says a bought Chevy Lumina because it sounded like “luminous”, to women who prayed for organic yogurt and wept when it was miraculously served at breakfast, and a girl who thought all those angel songs she was hearing on the radio were a divine sign in her life.  I wouldn’t believe it, had I not meet too many people like them in my own life.

Fraud is a brisk tour of every place you never want to go, led by maybe the only guide entertaining enough to make it bearable.  For a 3-D taste of his wit in action, check his interviews with Jon Stewart, where he comes off as almost parodically urbane.