January 30, 2000

Here a Comic Genius, There a Comic Genius

By FRANZ LIDZ and STEVE RUSHIN

UMANKIND used to produce two or three geniuses per century. Now, it gives us a couple of dozen per month. Last November's Genius issue of Esquire showcased those men and women "transforming our civilization," including the N.B.A. point guard Allen Iverson and the brilliant Leonardo -- not Da Vinci, but DiCaprio. Today, everyone and his dog is a genius. (Literally: Barnes & Noble shoppers can buy "Caninestein: Awakening the Genius in Your Dog.") The coin of genius is now so frequently minted that it has all the value of the Botswanan pula.

	Columbia Pictures
	Charlie Chaplin, the Tramp, courts a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) in "City Lights" (1931) - a work of comic genius.

Nowhere is this inflation more evident than in current comic cinema.

"Comic genius" Jim Carrey (Time magazine) appears as "comic genius" Andy Kaufman (The New Yorker) in "Man on the Moon." Last year's "Bowfinger," starring and written by "comic genius" Steve Martin (The Washington Post) was powered by a dual-character performance by "comic genius" Eddie Murphy (USA Today). The malevolent ventriloquist played by "comic genius" Bill Murray (The New York Observer) menaced multiplexes in "Cradle Will Rock" while the malevolent scientist played by "comic genius" Mike Myers (Chicago Sun-Times) menaced his ventriloquist dummy of a sidekick in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me."

No C.G. has a longer C.V. than Robin Williams, the android star of "Bicentennial Man." A computer database search of his name turns up three times more published references to Williams as a comic genius than to any other actor.

When every comic actor becomes a genius, it seems, every genius becomes a comic actor: "comic genius" Albert Brooks (The Alberta Report) was born Albert Einstein.

"Genius is an overused superlative in show business," says "comic genius" Woody Allen (The New York Times) in a phone interview. "Lots of very talented comedians can make you laugh, but if you think of Mozart and Picasso and Shakespeare, it's difficult to find a comedian who rises to the level of genius. A genius is like a sudden mutation. It's not that you get very good and very, very good and suddenly you achieve genius. It's not achievable in a gradual or practiced way. Somebody's just born and hit with the magic."

In film, the number of genuine comic geniuses can be counted on one hand, or, at most, on the hand-and-a-half of Harold Lloyd, who lost several fingers to a prop explosive. Even Mr. Lloyd, whose final clock-clinging minutes of "Safety Last" (1923) are the most audaciously funny on film, does not make Mr. Allen's All-Star team: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Groucho and Harpo Marx and Peter Sellers. Mr. Allen had included Mae West, but called the next day and busted her down to "an enormously gifted performer like Bob Hope and Jack Benny, but not a genius."

John Cleese can think of only one living genius of movie comedy: Woody Allen. "The main thing that makes people laugh now is shock," says Mr. Cleese, the Minister of Silly Walks, from his car phone on the Pacific Coast Highway. "The film 'There's Something About Mary' had funny stuff, but lacked the classical structure, evenness of tone and precision of comic genius. I kind of ache for that."

Mr. Allen does, too. "I don't really want to put the knock on people, but many current comedies that are considered great are not," he says. "I don't find them funny."

They're both right. There are enough "comic geniuses" panhandling for approval in theaters these days to fill the Academy of the Overrated, the purgatory Mr. Allen created for the not-great-enough in "Manhattan" (1979). A performer, after all, can be clever and resourceful without being a genius.

Steve Martin, who excels at playing exaggerated oafs, can't help that an elephant caravan of blather now attends his every artistic endeavor -- in movies, theater and belles lettres. "His humor is more Flaubert than Dreiser," the New Yorker editor David Remnick has hyperventilated about the co-star and co-writer of (cough, cough) "Three Amigos!" But Mr. Martin's humor is also more Jerk than Tramp, more rimshot than Rimbaud. He often seems uncomfortable when not doing shtick.

The same goes for Mr. Brooks, who once told an interviewer that the overwrought exhibitionists he plays are not "insecure," they're "vulnerable"; they're not "whiny," they're "pleading." "Follow your feelings" is the Brooksian mantra -- in "The Muse" his noodge did, probing deep beneath a hardened pseudo-intellectual exterior to expose a gooey pseudo-intellectual interior. There's no there behind Mr. Brooks's despair, as there is with, say, Mr. Allen or Bill Murray, whose swaggering cynicism elevated "Groundhog Day" (1993) from a one-trick "Twilight Zone" episode into a pleasing meditation on mortality and misery. Sadness clings to Mr. Murray like a monkey on a racehorse, and still he wins us over with the sincerity of his world-weary insincerity.

The insincerity of Robin Williams's cloying sincerity -- in films from "Good Morning, Vietnam" (1987) through "Patch Adams" (1998) -- has won him a worldwide audience of enablers. Even President Clinton cannot speak Mr. Williams's name without first conceding his C.G., as if he were a Supreme Court appointee, entitled to the honorific. But then Mr. Clinton, with his I-feel-your-pain sanctimony, is practically Mr. Williams's alter-ego.

The politician in Mr. Williams has won out over the manic Jonathan Winters manqué of "Mork and Mindy." "Williams wants to save the world with laughter," wrote the film critic David Denby. "He has tried to free the spiritually imprisoned, loosen our tongues, loosen our bowels -- he's become a purgative of second-rate feelings, a twinkly, husky-voiced leprechaun, funneling counterculture mush through New Age mush." Mr. Williams is free to make his own career choices, but his attendance is not required at the genius ball.

Saving the world with laughter is so powerful a pretension that Mr. Williams, Jerry Lewis and Roberto Benigni have all accepted the ultimate double-dare -- finding comic expression in Nazi oppression. It worked better for Mr. Benigni ("Life Is Beautiful" won him an Oscar) than the others (for sheer chutzpah, the Polish ghetto-blaster Mr. Williams played in "Jakob the Liar" was topped only by -- there is no other phrase for it -- the concentraton camp counselor Mr. Lewis portrayed in "The Day the Clown Cried," a 1972 film so egregious and exploitative that it has never been released). The critic Andrew Sarris has argued that when Mr. Lewis became conscious of his own art -- about the time he became a génie comique in France -- his aspirations exceeded his ability.

This messianic impulse, Mr. Cleese says, is almost always "doomed to failure." (The director Frank Capra on how the silent screen comedian Harry Langdon lost his innocence and his audience: "The trouble was that high-brow critics came around to explain his art to him.") Mr. Myers is eminently aware of his art -- he can recite Da Vinci's "Seven Tenets of Genius" in Italian -- but has so far resisted the impulse to become an artiste. "When a comedian tries to do more significant things, very often he strikes out," agrees Mr. Allen, who has himself sometimes seemed lost in half-baked homages to foreign masters. "The urge to try to do more, is healthy. In comedy, the quickest way to death as an artist is to repeat a successful formula over and over. The other is a slower way to death."

M R. Allen started reaching for significance about the time of "Annie Hall" (1977). "I don't want to make funny movies any more," says the melancholy filmmaker he plays in "Stardust Memories" (1980). "They can't force me to." He became so immersed in the claustrophobic culture of New York that when he attempted an amiable confection like "Manhattan Murder Mystery" (1993), he was like a pitching ace who had lost his rhythm. It was a little painful watching him and Diane Keaton become middle-aged, acting out his favorite old movies. One Ingmar Bergman per century is enough.

United Artists
Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardiner in "Being There" (1979). "Sellers goes to the deep core of what's funny," says Woody Allen.

All art is the same, said Samuel Beckett: an attempt to fill an empty space. Great art -- say, Beckett's tragicomedy "Waiting For Godot" -- is inherently subversive, shaking us out of our cozy assumptions, forcing upon us fresh perspectives. German funnyman Bertolt Brecht wrote: "Don't be comfortable." But art requires more than discomfiting an audience. No comedian disturbed a crowd more than Andy Kaufman, subject of the current biopic "Man on the Moon." He was less interested in amusing his fans than in abusing them, by turning the conventions of television comedy inside-out. Of course, subverting the traditions of television gag writing is hardly worth the time or energy. One might say Mr. Kaufman staged a devilish coup, elaborately plotted, to oust a third-grade class president. In doing so, he aspired to show, as Mr. Carrey told Newsweek, that comedy "doesn't even have to be funny. It can be weird or ironic." This is preposterous. "If it's not funny," says Mr. Cleese, "I don't think you can call it comedy."

No one is quite sure whether Kaufman was deliriously subversive or merely delirious. "There's a connection between neuroses and great comic talent," says Mr. Cleese. "There's also a difference between comic genius and mental illness."

The director Michael Curtiz once said: "Nobody should try to play comedy unless they have a circus going on inside." By that definition, Mr. Carrey, alone among contemporary comedians, appears possessed of the genius gene. The clinical insanity that seems to afflict him onscreen is itself a form of subversion. A high school dropout with a truly wretched childhood, he is the lone contemporary comedian with a pedigree to match the geniuses in Mr. Allen's pantheon. All six came up from poverty, had little formal schooling and sandpapered their technique in music halls. Mr. Carrey is the only working actor save Mr. Murray who can keep a sinking comedy afloat. Mr. Williams ("Mrs. Doubtfire") and Mr. Martin ("The Out-of-Towners") just punch holes in the hull.

Mr. Carrey exerts his own gravitational pull on the often ordinary films he appears in, defying moviegoers to take their eyes off him. Stanley Kubrick may as well have been speaking of Mr. Carrey when he said, "The quality that distinguishes him from other great comic actors is his ability to transform the horrifying and grotesque into unforgettable comic invention."

In fact, Kubrick was speaking of Peter Sellers, whom he directed in two of the actor's masterworks, "Dr. Strangelove" and "Lolita." His work in the latter was the most richly subversive comic performance in film history, undermining the work of two other geniuses. In the minor role of Clare Quilty, Sellers ignored the script of Vladimir Nabokov, and so seduced Kubrick that he made the movie his own. "He wasn't like you and me," Lolita says of Quilty in the penultimate scene. "He wasn't a normal person. He was a genius."

In assuming three sharply different characters -- playboy playwright, ingratiating cop, and the school psychologist Dr. Zempf riffing on "the irrationality of rationality" -- Sellers seizes the production by its ankles and shakes out all its change. No one is more unsettled than James Mason, who plays Humbert Humbert: faced with Quilty's genius, he is faced with Sellers' genius, which makes both actor and character profoundly uneasy. The audience can fairly feel his flop sweat, for the classically trained Mason spends much of the film looking terrified -- as if, at any moment, he will be ground in the gears of Sellers' diabolical mind.

Playing Chauncey Gardiner in "Being There," Sellers somehow filled the screen with his emptiness. His absence of personality made him a formidable presence. The dichotomy is difficult to deconstruct, but then so is the theory of relativity. "Sellers goes to the deep core of what's funny," says Mr. Allen. "His funniness was the funniness of genius. What he had to offer was clearly gold."

	Larry Morris/The New York Times
	Andy Kaufman at The Improvisation in New York in 1974: deliriously subversive or merely delirious?

In comedy, of course, one man's gold is another's (Shecky) Greene, which makes isolating the genius gene all the more difficult. "I saw 'Broadway Danny Rose' and sat for 45 minutes waiting for the film to begin," Mr. Cleese says. "It seemed to me an extremely boring movie. Yet it's Steve Martin's favorite Woody Allen film."

Mr. Allen himself is unawed by Laurel and Hardy. "I appreciate Hardy because there's something amusing to me about his constant intolerance of and disgust with and hostility toward his partner," he says. "The other guy, scratching his head and crying, never made me smile."

W HEN Stan Laurel can be dismissed, by one who should know better, as The Other Guy Scratching His Head, what hope have Jacques Tati or Mel Brooks of ever sitting at comedy's grownup table? Mr. Brooks's gift is in mining a genre -- the western, the horror film -- for every mote of comic possibility, just as Mr. Myers's "Austin Powers" movies are a comprehensive package tour of the 60's spy caper. "Mel Brooks is an intellectual gentle giant," offers Mr. Myers. "He uses his intellect to be wonderfully and deliciously stupid."

Certainly -- or should we say, "soitainly" -- there is such a thing as lowbrow brilliance, or what's Curly Howard for? The best dipstick for gauging a comic's depth is involuntary laughter. By that standard, Mr. Myers's Austin Powers is a formidable comic creation, as was the Nutty Professor. "Jerry Lewis has the capability to be very, very funny: physically, charismatically," Mr. Allen concedes. "You see how deeply audiences have responded to him."

Even allowing for a nyuck-nyuck knucklehead like Curly, our candidates for geniushood are all white males, few of them still drawing audiences, and almost none still drawing breath. What's more, they are white American and European males, the only kind that are approved in any great number for worldwide audiences. Surely there is some unknown Cantinflas of comedy out there, the beacon of his or her talent hidden beneath a bumblebee suit on Mexican television. But we have yet to see that C.G., and quite likely never will. This reflects, more than anything, the bigotry of American movies and culture. It has nothing to do with ability, and everything to do with access and opportunity. This unhappy fact was not lost on the actress and screenwriter Mae West, whose saloon singer purrs in "She Done Him Wrong" (1933): "Men's all alike, married or single. It's their game. I just happen to be smart enough to play it their way."

Hollywood's leering overlords let West strut her stuff for only a few films before the Hays Office stepped in and made her an honest (and far less humorous) woman. "Women in general have been kept in a different cage over the years," Mr. Allen says, "and it is only comparatively recently that they've been given the freedom and social acceptance to be comedians. It's the same with blacks."

Richard Pryor -- the profane Jackie Robinson of comic cinema -- was devoured and mainstreamed by Hollywood's makeover machinery. That same machinery was implicated in the industrial accident involving Eddie Murphy, Pryor's protégé, whose sharp corners were sheared off by a buzzsaw of buddy flicks.

Mr. Pryor's most memorable work was in standup; his best films are footage of his uncinematic stage act. Which raises another point. There have, undoubtedly, been comic geniuses in other performance fields. But Jonathan Winters, whom Mr. Allen anoints as the peerless genius of standup, "didn't have an ambition to be in movies," Mr. Allen says. "He just never seemed to be interested."

Television's most inspired sketch artists (Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Butthead) were often dazzling in the fierce run of five minutes, but exhausting and impersonal for much longer. Mr. Cleese claims the only "true" comic genius he ever met was Peter Cook of the satiric revue "Beyond the Fringe." "In stage monologues, Peter could saw it off by the yard," Mr. Cleese says. "To me, genius has something to do with doing it much more easily than others. Peter's problem was that it came too easily." But Cook, who died in 1995, could not transfer his genius to film, the most difficult parlor trick and, for the comic actor, the ultimate test of comic genius.

Mr. Cleese's Monty Python troupe was even more giddily sublime on film than on television. The Flying Circus performed its convention-defying loops and turns in three features, launching aerial assaults on pomposity, gentility and the odd wet fish. "The Pythons were a periodic table of the elements of comedy," says Mr. Myers. "If you distilled almost any of my comic ideas down to its molecular level, you'd be left with something from Python."

Mr. Cleese seems to have distilled his comic ideas down to sub-atomic quarks. He laments that the film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" was "terrific for the first 40 minutes and the last 30, but soft in the middle." And he reckons structuring a movie that lasts 90 minutes is 30 times harder than plotting a five-minute sketch and 20 times harder than a half-hour sitcom. "It's difficult to be consistently funny," he says. "The great geniuses each only produced two or three movies tops that were classics."

C HAPLIN learned to make comedies when there was no one to learn from. He was comedy's Columbus, discovering new worlds that comedians will still be colonizing for as long as pratfalls are projected on screens. Today, the Little Tramp's influence runs like a shared memory through nearly every film comedic creation, from Ace Ventura to Deuce Bigalow. "I don't believe Chaplin was aware of creating a new vocabulary for film comedy," says Mr. Allen. "He just happened to be that gifted, that superb. Very few have taken that extreme leap into a realm that is undefinable and unexplainable."

The Tramp made his transcendant leap in "City Lights" (1931). "Chaplin tried to do something a little more dimensional than slap-around Mack Sennett comedy," says Mr. Allen. "City Lights was funny and also tragic. Some think it's sentimental, but to me, it's an honest film about love."

"City Lights" is an ostensibly simple tale: the Tramp courts a blind flower girl and tries to impress her by pretending he's a millionaire. At the end of the film, she finally sees the mysterious benefactor who paid for the operation to restore her sight. The flower girl watches in amusement as a newsboy pulls a rag from the tattered trousers of the Tramp, who scolds the kid, blows his nose on the rag, folds it neatly and tucks it into his vest pocket. "She recognizes who he must be by his shy, confident, shining joy as he comes silently toward her," James Agee wrote in 1949. "And he recognizes himself, for the first time, through the terrible changes in her face. The camera just exchanges a few quiet close-ups of the emotions which shift and intensify in each face. It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and the highest moment in movies."

"City Lights" is, to be sure, a work of comic genius, but even that phrase proves inadequate. With its final close-ups, it sheds the modifier like a baby does its umbilical cord and becomes, alone among film comedies, a work of just-plain genius.

Franz Lidz, the author of "Unstrung Heroes," and Steve Rushin, the author of "Road Swing," are senior writers at Sports Illustrated.