Jose Vergara (see this LH post) did an interview with Mo Rocca which focused on Rocca’s early work as a writer for the PBS show Wishbone, which “retold classic stories, introducing them to children by dropping the eponymous dog with an instantly classic theme song into their plots.” Introducing the interview, Vergara says:
Rocca wrote on the show’s two seasons, including the episode “Rushin’ to the Bone,” which was based on Nikolai Gogol’s play of mistaken identities, The Inspector General. Given my own interests, I was eager to speak to him about this Russian connection in particular.
A relevant exchange:
Why the Inspector General in particular?
I wish I could remember. I think it’s that I went through a bunch of different candidates. I guess you’d call it absurdist, right? Gogol. I think you’d call it absurdist, right?
Sure, I would say so. The true absurdists from the 20th century certainly looked back to him and pulled a lot from his texts, so in that sense, he’s part of that canon.
It felt like a great way to say, “Well, this is classic, but it’s also this sort of tradition of absurdist comedy.” I thought it would translate well for kids and to a half-hour format. Many of these, I’m guessing, would have had to have been in the public domain; it was definitely an episode where much more of it was in the flashback sequences, because the way that Wishbone worked is there were twin plots: the contemporary fictional world of Oakdale intertwined with the story with a piece of literature. But this was weighted much more heavily to that, because I think the feeling was kids will like this, and we can spend more of the time in this world, really getting a sense of the rhythm of the language.
I watched it this morning before our call. I hadn’t seen a full episode of Wishbone in many, many years, and I hadn’t seen this one probably since it first aired, and boy, the production design is out of this world. They wanted to do something perspective skewing. I’m not sure this really means anything, but it kind of looks absurd, the lines on the set. Everything’s kind of askew in a comical way. I think we hadn’t done anything that was Russian. Stephanie must have had something to do with this, my friend. It might have just honestly been that I was on a jag of reading plays from that period, because, as I said, it was like going to grad school. I mean what a luxury to get paid to read these works and try to figure out which is the best candidate.
I recommend watching the YouTube video of the episode (linked above) if you’ve got a half-hour to spare; it really is a well-done version of the play — they manage to keep all the important plot points, the staging is indeed impressive, and the actors are hilarious. It’s great that kids occasionally get such good introductions to the classics. (I got to the interview via Vergara’s FaceBook post.)
If you want absurdist in a smaller package, you might try “What time is it Eccles?”.
(Clip seems to start in the middle, you have to scroll it back to the beginning.)
Missing link!
Just to be insufferably pedantic, there is only one mistaken identity in Inspector General. All other identities are so clear that czar Nicolas reportedly said after the first showing “Everone got their own and most of all I”. I can see though how after 150 years or so the play can be seen as absurdist (Gogol of course is grotesque, which is not the same thing).
Also you can usually find a bit in the URL that looks like “&t=999” and remove the “t=999”, then it will start from the start.
(This will result in a URL that technically is not well formed, but servers will normally do the right thing if the browser didn’t normalize it already).
Just to be insufferably pedantic, there is only one mistaken identity in Inspector General.
Well, if we’re going to be insufferably pedantic, there are two: Khlestakov is mistaken for an important official, and Osip is mistaken for the servant of an important official. This is not a distinction without a difference, since he gets treated a lot better than he would otherwise.
Sorry about that. I hope this works:
https://teachrock.org/video/the-goon-show-starring-spike-milligan-peter-sellers-and-harry-secombe-what-time-is-it-eccles/
Works fine, and very absurdist!
Sometimes I think absurdist humour hasn’t aged well. (Much of Monty Python, for example. And Milligan definitely declined in later years.)
And then “hang on, this piece of paper ain’t going”. And I dissolve into helpless tears of laughter.
Sometimes I think absurdist humour hasn’t aged well.
If it’s sufficiently absurdist it can get quite timeless, just on the account of not being too strongly rooted into the realities of the time. Kozma Prutkov and Edward Lear come to mind…
(Monty Python, in particular, “failed” here by making sure to deeply ground their stories into contemporary realities even when they really didn’t have to – which of course made it biting parody at the time, but also meant that a lot of their references are falling flat on modern viewers who don’t know much about the UK in the 70s and/or 80s.)
I think quite a lot of Monty Python wasn’t particularly funny even to begin with; probably an inevitable consequence of their experimental/scattershot technique. And Sturgeon’s Law has wide applicability. (Most of Charles Wesley’s huge output of hymns has been – quite deservedly – forgotten. 90% would be overkind. But the 0.5% is sublime.)
I there’s a lot of Monty Python’s humor that is pretty timelessly absurdist (mosquito hunting, to mention an example I’ve mentioned before). However, there is also an awful lot that it specifically being cynical about 1960s and 1970s Britain. My mother once opined that it was too bad that the Flying Circus ended before Margaret Thatcher’s time, since they could have had a field day making fun of her. (Actually, it turns out that Thatcher was already the Pythons’ favorite political target, even though the show ended in 1974—but that only amounted to about one joke about her per season.)
There are also frequent references to mining and problems related to the mining sector, and that is something that is clearly not unique to Monty Python, among British entertainment of the period. Problems in the mining industry also come up repeatedly in classic Doctor Who serials. It’s one of the political topics that the show alludes to most commonly, along with colonialism. I imagine that references to the growing difficulties in the once-fabled British mining sector could be found in lots of other programs as well.
Yet even among the sketches that are clearly based around critiques of contemporary British culture, there are some that transcend the setting through their absurdity. The one about the subculture of people who dress as mice, for example, is in that category, I think. Even if you don’t get that it is specifically parodying mainstream British responses to various counterculture movements, it’s funny on its own.
(Added: It turns out, naturally, that I had already said most of this in another thread.)
Conversely, those works that aren’t dependent on contemporary realities have become classics: The Life of Brian, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Our daily paper is running Doonesbury strips from the ’90s, which is absurd; I enjoyed them at the time, but even I have forgotten some of the news stories that prompted them, and I can’t imagine how anyone younger than, say, forty could get anything whatever out of them.
No problem at all: nobody under forty reads newspapers.
You’re right, of course. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Our daily paper is running Doonesbury strips from the ’90s, which is absurd
Doonesbury only produces new strips for Sundays for years now. Putting up re-runs as filler on the web makes some kind of sense, but I’m astonished print papers go along with that.