Selling out with a smirk - lessons from David Letterman, Susan Sontag and David Byrne.

AuthorMcGowan, William G.

SELLING OUT WITH A SMIPK

The deadpan humer of David Letterman, host of the TV show "Late Night,' is enjoying a vogue. Letterman's on-air pranks have included spray-painting the ankles of Bryant Gumbel, the host of the "Today' show; crushing a franks 'n beans dinner under a hydraulic press; covering himself with Alka Seltzer and being lowered into a tank of water; and, most famously, inviting viewers to demonstrate "stupid pet tricks.' Such put-ons have won Letterman a wide following (ad sales for "Late Night' are outpacing those of "The Tonight Show') and even a recent Newsweek cover story. The formula is simple: a slight raise of the eyebrow here, a mock-ponderous vocal inflection there, and suddenly the homely realities of everyday life acquire a tinge of the absurd. "We do a lot of what we call "found comedy,'' Letterman explained to Newsweek. "Things you find in newspapers. Viewer mail. The fact that January actually is National Soup Month, so we're saluting soup all this month.'

This new brand of minimalist irony has enormous and increasing appeal in our culture, and not just among viewers of "Late Night.' Films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark quietly burlesque the conventions of adventure serials of the 1930s even as they revive them. Rock stars like Madonna and David Byrne of Talking Heads mockingly defend materialism and conformity. Jay McInerney's novel, Bright Lights, Big City, satirizes but also glamorizes the New York night life. Artists in lower Manhattan carry on the tradition of Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup can--at one gallery you can buy a silkscreen of a 99-cent grape jelly jar for $150--parodying mainstream culture through mimickry.

In this increasingly conformist age, such cultural artifacts might at first seem vaguely subversive, or at the very least, confusing. But even as we laugh at the new style of irony, it's easy to see that it's completely unthreatening. It may be fun to savor the little banalities, non sequiturs, and incongruities of American life, but when we fail to distinguish between what is truly ridiculous and what merely can be made to seem so, irony loses its bite. The result is something worse than a lot of sophomoric jokes and bad art.

Gray-flannel wink

If David Letterman can be said to have an antecedent in American fiction, it is Frank Wheeler. Wheeler is the antihero of Richard Yates's 1962 novel, Revolutionary Road. Columbia College, class of '49, director of sales promotions at the Knox Business Machine Company in New York, Wheeler discharges his "lazy duties' with a "secret astringent joy.' Wheeler is a bohemian secreted inside a gray-flannel suit, a Connecticut suburbanite and World War II veteran in ironic...

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