“Make America laugh again,” comedienne Julia Sweeney tells herself in front of an audience during her new one-woman show, “Older & Wider”, which I recently saw at LA’s Geffen Playhouse. Despite being afflicted with a case of laryngitis, the artist took the Westwood stage last week with a good blend of realism, wit and humor. By the time she’d said it, Ms. Sweeney had the audience laughing.
This is no small feat. Julia Sweeney, a former cast member on NBC’s decrepit Saturday Night Live broadcast, who writes and performs her own material, including bestselling monologues and memoirs, makes everything better. From her asexual SNL character Pat and her needy character on NBC’s Frasier to her Showtime program Letting Go of God, the cervical cancer surviving atheist from Spokane displays a keen sense of timing and a biting sense of humor.
Julia Sweeney’s “Older & Wider” builds on her brand with refreshingly rogue results.
Beginning with a hilarious tale about going to the theater while growing older and the perils and advantages of feeling invisible, she launched into a recap of her professional and personal life. The wife and mother says she took a break from Hollywood to move to a Chicago suburb north of Evanston called Wilmette. Stay at home parenting gets skewered, as does everything else, including Tesla’s eccentric Elon Musk, to whom she not disparagingly compares to John Galt from Atlas Shrugged.
The show takes off with a dig at vagina-themed spaceships and other modern peculiarities. It’s easy and natural to follow. The material is often unusual. In crisp lines, Sweeney delivers thoughts with her signature searching, freeing tartness.
After referring to President Trump as a “petulant circus clown”, Sweeney turned to the DNA test to satirize behavior by her mother, husband and child. Whether sharing her experience of telling alcoholic jokes to an Irish audience or having Chicago’s SNL alumni Don Novello officiate her wedding as Father Guido Sarducci, she’s more lively and emboldened than bitter and cruel. The show’s middle portion, which includes stories about her leaving LA like Homer in an Odyssey minivan, culminates with sharp and hilarious observations about the pleasure of having a glass of wine countered by the risks of having another…and another.
This is balanced, integrated comedy for people with brains. It’s neither an anti-Trump tirade nor a pop culture palooza.
When Sweeney recalled the time she contemplated resurrecting the non-binary Pat for a brief return on NBC’s Today Show with Matt Lauer — with Pat emerging either as looking the same following sex reassignment surgery or as totally homophobic — she sends up the utterly ridiculous. When she cleverly contrasts the selflessness of mass at St. Monica’s Roman Catholic Church with the implicit virtuousness of selfishness at an Al-Anon meeting, Julia Sweeney takes on the status quo.
But that Sweeney does so with skill, tact and fidelity to facts is an amazing accomplishment in a world going — some might say already gone — mad. The self-described secular humanist, who does funny bits on driving with her kid, whose blond boyfriend voted for Trump, for which someone dubs him Rolf from The Sound of Music, and watching The Wizard of Oz with Syrian refugees, roots her show in passion for life.
Julia Sweeney: Older and Wider, part of the Geffen Playhouse’s Spotlight Entertainment series, closed this week but catch her act if you can. Hopefully, Older & Wider leads to new career turns for an actress and comedienne, currently in a show on Hulu, whose witty and satirical insights are exactly what Americans need.
By satirizing the coarsened culture’s vulgarity, Office Christmas Party, like Ant-Man and Deadpool, uses wit and crude comedy to score a point about simple human decency. It’s disgusting and it’s preposterous, but, packed with a talented cast topped by Jason Bateman (Zootopia), it works.
The movie’s meaning, wispy as it is, lies in the movie’s generic title, which is generic to make its point. So, the movie’s based on an annual celebration which political correctness has stamped out, one of scads of sad facts that makes otherwise decent people want to overcorrect and overcompensate and trash the need for any fundamental rules for civilized people (i.e., President-elect Trump). Trump as leader is what happens when you say ‘screw having rules!’
Office Christmas Party provides a version which happens only in the movies.
Perfectly, it happens in that Windy City, Chicago. This allows for its pathetic, bureaucratic and fictitious tech company that’s going down the tubes, the sameness that pervades Chicago and its urban industrial Midwestern bluntness. Everyone in the city and at this company is to some extent cold, biting and miserable. They barely work, let alone communicate about work, and when they do it’s with severe profanity and headphones. The women are especially disgusting and domineering. The men are like mutants amid the matriarchy, ruled by Jennifer Aniston (reuniting with Bateman 10 years after their Chicago-based romantic comedy, The Break-Up) as the ice queen psychobitch who reads The Girl on the Train and cuts everyone down. One office male has been reduced to fetishizing his heterosexual desire in pure infantilism and mother-lust. And he’s one of the good guys.
Thus, it becomes clear off the top that Office Christmas Party exists to send political correctness up, way up, and bring crudeness back to earth in service of something, believe it or not, more like Christmas. With biting humor, repulsive sight gags—see Bateman’s boss character go down on an ice sculpture that dispenses egg nog—and hilarious lines skewering everything from boss ladies and feminism to so-called white privilege, the party gets started, keeps going and comes to an outrageous end.
The huge cast includes Olivia Munn as the love interest, a true producer whose idea may save the failing company, and T.J. Miller as the daft but kind division lead, the Aniston character’s brother, which drives the plot. Standouts include Kate McKinnon as a minivan-driving human resources manager. What makes her funny is that she plays everything stupid and ridiculous about HR and its PC regimen exactly as it is, down to her non-denominational holiday sweater. Other standouts include Courtney B. Vance as a client being wooed, Karan Soni as a tech geek and, hliariously, Jillian Bell as a gun-toting pimp named Trina.
Bateman as a divorced but romantic and idealistic taskmaster is the glue that holds the thing together, delivering his lines with an everyman’s blend of irony and optimism that’s not too dry for a change. Aniston (Love Happens, The Iron Giant, She’s Funny That Way), too, a seasoned sitcom performer like Bateman, knows how to play this super-villain role with archness and sincerity. Together, they make this Office Christmas Party seem as though it might be slightly more plausible, which isn’t entirely possible.
If you don’t mind laughing at a movie that makes fun of HR, PC, Jesus Christ, kinky sex and calling God “Her” and, more to the point, you like the idea of prayers for Prince and David Bowie, having an office party and saying “Merry Christmas!” this might be the movie to see this weekend. For what the world needs right now—a laugh out loud—Office Christmas Party serves a fine shot of black humor.
Mr. Funny Face, the great actor, comedian and writer Gene Wilder died today. The star of Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein (which he also wrote) and Silver Streak was 83 years old. And, though he is associated with a streak of absurdist comedy brought forth chiefly by his frequent creative partner Mel Brooks, a wonderful source of silliness grounded in seriousness has been lost.
Gene Wilder in ‘The World’s Greatest Lover’
The screenwriter Wilder supposedly took his name from writers, too, blending a character from Look Homeward, Angel and the name of an American playwright, which suggests his thoughtful nature. The literary tie-in was apparent throughout his remarkable career, which was remarkable for its many failures, which he constantly overcame.
Gene Wilder broke out at the peak of the counterculture in 1971’s weirdly brazen yet reassuring adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Paramount’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, though he had made an impression in smaller roles, too, such as an innocent victim in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Wilder played Wonka, of course, in the box office musical flop, one of many of his commercial failures that nevertheless influenced movies, ideas and culture. I think it was the first motion picture of his that I saw in a movie theater. I was transfixed, not by his weirdness, which forged a path for movie stars such as Johnny Depp.
I was captivated by his oddly severe benevolence. This unique quality, Wilder’s strange seriousness gilded with kindness, is his defining and most enduring screen persona. He displayed it, too, in his triumphant 1980 movie with director Sidney Poitier (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?) and another famous comedian, Stir Crazy. I don’t think I had ever laughed so hard in a movie as when I watched his pairing with the late comic genius Richard Pryor (and, oddly enough, that movie was my first experience of seeing a movie being filmed; it was at the Tucson, Arizona hotel where I was vacationing with my family).
Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor are Hollywood’s first interracial comedy duo. The hilarious pair made four movies together. A look, a squeal, a facial expression, a line, a gesture, everything they did was comic chemistry on screen as they mined an audience and story for wonder, laughter and satire in everything they did. Though it’s not perfect, 1976’s Silver Streak teamed the Pryor-Wilder pair again, this time with liberated woman Jill Clayburgh in one of the rare madcap comedy capers of the 1970s to successfully integrate drama, suspense and humor with something semi-serious at stake. I know that many remember Wilder best for his roles in two 1974 Mel Brooks movies, which I never cared for, though Wilder is brilliant in Young Frankenstein. I prefer his other movies.
Gene Wilder made me laugh in Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) with Pryor, Wilder’s last movie I think I paid to see in a theater. Who can forget 1986’s silly Haunted Honeymoon with his then-wife, the late Gilda Radner, who preceded Wilder in death by ovarian cancer, and the late Dom DeLuise in drag? I think his best role was as innocent convict Skip in Stir Crazy, which still makes me laugh when I think about it. Gene Wilder went on to play in a television movie of Alice in Wonderland and his own TV series. He could play characters that were in turns biting, cruel and vapid. He was an amazing writer and actor of ability whose rubbery or stone face could fill a movie with enough humor to make it seem funnier than it was and, while it turns out that his legacy is to have been lampooning a world gone mad, Gene Wilder somehow managed to do it without sneering at the good.
His seriousness made it easier to take the silly less seriously. As Willy Wonka, his silliness made it easier to take goodness more seriously.
Gene Wilder is for this reason alone already sorely, deeply missed. He is survived by his friends, family and wife, Karen, and, I know, childlike people everywhere who cherish his depiction of a strange, kind industrialist who, with “pure imagination”, dramatized that it is possible to be good in a world going bad.
Author’s Note
Thank you for your interest in my writing.
I write fiction and non-fiction. Read my blog at left for informal posts on news, ideas and the culture. I am available for contracting, so if you're interested, please start here.
I welcome feedback. To let me know your thoughts, please feel free to contact me.
The movie’s meaning, wispy as it is, lies in the movie’s generic title, which is generic to make its point. So, the movie’s based on an annual celebration which political correctness has stamped out, one of scads of sad facts that makes otherwise decent people want to overcorrect and overcompensate and trash the need for any fundamental rules for civilized people (i.e., President-elect 