Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Topic 120: Living Caricatures

Carol:
Live from New York, It’s…..
After Marc’s graduation from law school in 1974, he got a job that took us right back to the same area of west Los Angeles where I had lived as a kid. By the fall of 1975, we had begun our careers, bought our first a home half a mile from Santa Monica beach, and settled into a comfortable routine with a constellation of college friends who had also gravitated to the LA area after college. Weekends we played softball or volleyball at one of the local parks. Evening get-togethers involved marathon, cutthroat monopoly games or Pictionary.  By 11:00 p.m. we would settle around whichever apartment’s  television set  and get ready for our favorite group ritual – watching a brand new NBC comedy show called Saturday Night Live and its cast of “Not Ready for Prime-Time Players” that included  Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and Chevy Chase.

What I loved most about the early SNL was its spot-on caricatures of political figures and its lampoons of current affairs on “Weekend Update.” On the national scene, it was Year 1 for Gerald Ford and Year 1 for Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford. All it took for President Ford was one stumble debarking from an airplane, and Chevy Chase turned the incident into a signature, weekly pratfall that usually opened the show.  Chevy  Chase as Gerald Ford the bumbling klutz.  The skits worked because the audience became part of the joke, anticipating that whatever political situation of the week was satirized, it would always lead up to a crazy, slapstick moment with Chevy/Ford on the floor. What a relief after the Nixon years to be able to laugh at national politics.

Over the next few years, our little SNL fan club broke up as we pursued careers,  started families and gradually moved out of LA.  Despite his popularity as the stand-out of the first-year cast, Chevy Chase didn’t last. The cast and quality of the show changed over its first ten years, and although SNL still seemed to be a star-maker (Eddie Murphy, Joe Piscopo, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Phil Hartman in the early 80’s), I don’t really remember much political humor until Dana Carvey joined the cast in 1986. He may be best known for “The Church Lady,” but he also revived the political satire with caricatures of George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot.

We lost patience with SNL after a while, too hit-and-miss with the humor, too many commercials, too late at night.  The current version of “Weekend Update” seems embarrassingly lame compared to the consistent quality of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I never watch SNL on Saturday night, only the recorded version to  catch the opening monologue, fast-forwarding  through the commercials, mediocre skits, and ear-jarring musical guests, all in hopes of catching a glimmer of that satirical brilliance that poked fun at a parade of Presidents and political campaigns: Darrell Hammond as both Clinton and Gore, Will Ferrell as George W, Tina Fey as Sara Palin, and now Fred Armisen as President Obama (a somewhat controversial casting choice, I understand, but I like him). 

Caricature is about exaggeration, not imitation. It’s about capturing and stretching the essence, the humanness of public figures, whether their big ears, their verbal or physical klutziness, or their speech patterns and facial tics. And I think good caricature of a living person can’t step too far over a line towards meanness or sarcasm.  Especially at SNL where this Saturday night’s caricature may end up on next Saturday’s show.

Live from New York, it’s….Sarah Palin!




Sources:
Wikipedia: Saturday Night Live. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Live

Megan:

Family Caricatures

I can’t remember whether I mentioned this before, but my brother – who has always been my harshest critic when it comes to the things I write – told me I was being too hard on Merriam-Webster. He believes that it is unfair of me to judge them (it?) for using a variation of the word being defined in the definition if the word being defined is not the root word itself (read that slowly, out loud and it will make sense). Maybe he is right, but then they go and do this:
Definition of CARICATURE
1: exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics
2: a representation especially in literature or art that has the qualities of caricature
3: a distortion so gross as to seem like caricature
For the purposes of this essay, I am going to utilize the 3rd definition – and write about something that seems like a distortion, but is in fact a truthful representation. 

One of the unexpected pleasures of this  project has been the opportunity to make fun of my parents on a regular basis. In real life, my father is a serious man, he is an excellent lawyer and he cares about people. Everyone who knows him knows he is a good and interesting man, if somewhat easily distracted.

But, I am not exaggerating when I say that yesterday afternoon  he read aloud to me from Consumer Report for 45 minutes. It was the automobile edition, and according to him, the 'most important issue of the year.' I guess it was an odd coincidence that  both the top rated and lowest rated cars (Nissan Altima and a Volkswagen Passat respectively) happen to be sitting in our garage at this exact moment, but still I was not interested in hearing the rankings of all the cars in between.

I decided to distract him. He’s not great about making repairs around the house, and he will literally run away when insects are involved, but when it comes to disposing of dead animals he usually takes care of business.
 “Dad, did you get the dead mouse out of the laundry room?”
“I completely forgot.”
“How could you forget? Don’t you know that mouse has kept us hostage all day, prevented us from entering the laundry room and that I had to wear ill-fitting and unattractive clothes today – clothes that looked so weird that the friend with whom I had lunch asked me, after a bathroom break, if I had changed since we’d met  because she’d suddenly realized how weird I looked and that it was all the dead mouse’s fault and also yours for not taking the time to remove the body before going to work this morning when it was first mentioned to you?” (Where dead animals are concerned, I am prone to soliloquy).

So, he put down his magazine, went into the kitchen and returned with an empty bag – the kind that used to contain a loaf of pre-sliced whole wheat bread. He puts the bag inside out on his hand and used it to talk to me like a puppet: “This is a good bag to pick up a dead mouse,” said the bread bag puppet.   And then he walked downstairs to the laundry room.

He couldn’t find the mouse at first, so he shouted up to me and I shouted up to my mom in her office to find out where it was (this is like the 9th dead animal to be found in or around the house since I’ve moved back here, but the only one I did not discover myself). After a series of directions yelled from upstairs to me and relayed down to him, and a comment about the surprising softness of the mouse,  he came back up the stairs empty handed.
“Where is the mouse?” I asked him.
“I put it in the pail where we put the lint from the dryer.”
“So… it is still in the laundry room?”
“It is in the plastic bag.”
“That doesn’t matter. You have basically wrapped it like a present and laid it on a pillow. It will attract other creatures. Other creatures will come to the place where we clean the clothes and they will chew holes in the bread bag and use the lint to make nests inside our clothes. There will be a smell. And the clothes will remain unclean.”
“I’ll empty the pail tomorrow.”
But he won’t. He will forget.  I bet you a billion dollars.

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