The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America - George Packer
Given his smash hit one-liner about African mothers telling their kids to eat up because "there are children starving in Mississippi," we can assume that our boy Trevor is familiar with the empty promises of the American dream. Still, a comic can never know enough, so The Unwinding is essential reading. Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for non-fiction, Packer's work is memorable for its rendering of characters that never made it into the top 1%.
"Winning and losing are all-American games," the author informs us in the prologue, "and in the unwinding winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do".
For a foreign comedian with a talent for choking Americans on their own myopia, sentences like these should serve as inspiration because we really are lucky down here in the developing world that the game of life is played for lower stakes.
Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen's 2010 Freedom, a sweeping work in the tradition of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, is a master class in the deconstruction of American neurosis. Trevor, if he can't be bothered to read all 562 pages, would do well to read at least the back flap: "Freedom captures the temptations and burdens of too much liberty; the thrills of teenage lust; the heavy weight of empire."
Deep in the land of the uncouth we have a two-word response to that: "Ag, shame".
The Hero With a Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell
But what, Trevor might be asking himself, is the ultimate source of this myopia? In what mythic pond is the collective American consciousness admiring the glory of its reflection? Here the new host of The Daily Show need look no further than the opening line of the book that iconic screenwriter Christopher Vogler deemed "the most influential of the 20th century".
Written in 1949 by a young Joseph Campbell, the first sentence goes like this: "Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some redeyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse "¦"
And there you have it, the gospel according to one of America's cultural patron saints, which is nothing for an African comic if not a call to shake his stick at those who purport to own his soul.
Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts! - Lynn Marguiles and Bob Zmuda; Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce - Albert Goldman & Lawrence Schiller; Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences - Richard Pryor and Todd Gold; American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story - Cynthia True
The all-time greats of US comedy, the comedians' comedians, the grand masters of transgression, are essentially four in number: Andy Kaufman, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Bill Hicks.
In comedy, as in rock 'n' roll, there's a line that separates the major talents from the immortal pioneers of the form.
Trevor, we assume, knows this. He has so far chosen not to cross that line. He has told interviewers that he doesn't go too heavy on giving offence, that people never walk out of his live shows.
Here's hoping he is just playing possum.
Source: The Times, via I-Net Bridge
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