If you haven't kept up with the New York Times, then that's fair, because the paper doesn't keep up with the times, either. However, somebody named Alex Halberstadt decided that it's time those Times readers wake up on a Sunday morning, and along with their "bagel and a shmear" from Zabar's, understand that Rodney Dangerfield was NOT just a comedian. Time for, what does the Times call it...oh yes, a "Letter of Recommendation."
"LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION." Sort of what the Times readers need when they try and get their 4 year-old into a prestigious private kindergarten.
It's awfully nice of the New York Times to bother with a simple New York-born dead comedian. They may have "New York" in the title, but this, the newspaper offering "all the news that's fit to print," is usually international. You want to know that some woman in your neighborhood was mugged, or the deli robbed, you'll find it in the Post or the Daily News. It's in the New York Times that you'll find an article with the headline: "Nose Flute Used to Awaken Tongans."
I did NOT make that up. That was news fit to print.
As you'd expect from The Gray Lady, the piece by Alex Halberstadt is dreary and dry. So let's skip over most of the tedious drivel, such as the opening few paragraphs of this "letter of recommendation" as opposed to any kind of simple APPRECIATION...
Alex (Alexander would be too formal) Halberstadt eventually gets around to describing Dangerfield's style. To do it with simple logic or insightful language would NOT be in the style of the New York Times, so we get this:
"Most comics use the setup and punch line like a nail and hammer, but Dangerfield used them as a theremin player uses her hands, to bring forth strange, unexpected effects. Some were so masterful and odd that they transcended linear logic. My favorite joke of his — “I told my dentist my teeth were going yellow. He told me to wear a brown necktie” — barely makes sense at first. It’s a bewildering piece of misdirection. But it works as a marvel of dream logic, a joke Kafka might have liked."
Ah, Kafka. Of course. Why should a Kafka reference be confined to an appreciation of Woody Allen? Of a theremin merely to music? (PS, you did enjoy how Alex Halberstadt made the politically correct choice of writing up the theremin player as FEMALE? "...theremin player uses HER hands..."
From now on, anyone enjoying Rodney Dangerfield's one-liners can, via a verbal "letter of recommendation," now tell HER friends that the laughter comes from his "strange, unexpected effects..." and "transcended linear logic" and "bewildering...misdirection."
Here's another bit of pure New York Times revelation. Alex Halberstadt describes Rodney sitting on the couch on "The Tonight Show" and knocking off what, to most anyone including Rodney) would simply be a string of one-liners: "The effect is of a tennis pro wrong-footing his opponent. The laughter is strangled, then builds....the tendrils of comprehension are still making their way through the audience....achieving quantifiable perfection..."
Somehow, when I'd see Rodney around the neighborhood, walking into a local bodega in robe and slippers on a Sunday morning, I don't think he was expecting "quantifiable perfection" from the coffee and donut he was ordering.
When I'd see him in the local health club, he wasn't like "a tennis pro wrong-footing his opponent." He'd swim maybe a lap, then go up to the whirlpool and hope some babes would be there, and with "tendrils of comprehension," recognize him as not an old fat guy but somebody well worth chatting up and admiring.
Rodney's catch-phrase was "I don't get no respect." Getting "too much respect" didn't thrill him either. All he wanted was to get laughs, get girls, smoke some dope, and NOT be pestered or analyzed. He didn't want to hear about how he reflected the common man, or "the loser," or that his work was Chaplinesque or somehow conveyed the trope of the zeitgeist of today's hapless cogs in society's wheel. On the latter point, he'd simply ask, "Why not just say that I'm funny?"
In the end, I wondered, who IS this Alex Halberstadt, what are his comedy credentials, and why is he writing about my pal Rodney 14 years after the man died?
The bottom of the piece told me:
Alex Halberstadt is the author of the forthcoming family memoir “Young Heroes of the Soviet Union.”
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