Slog News & Arts

Line Out

Music & Nightlife

« Galluping Past McCain | American Insult »

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Reading Last Night: Richard Russo

posted by on September 18 at 11:01 AM

Last night, Richard Russo gave a lecture titled “The Gravestone and the Commode” as the inaugural event of Seattle Arts and Lectures’ 2008-09 season. The lecture was on the nature of humor and comic writing.

(First, though, a note about the SAL format itself: I was pleased to note that the talk wasn’t preceded by the SAL video “trailer” that played before every event last year. The trailer was incredibly embarrassing: it was a montage of photos of past SAL authors talking, set to music. The only one I remember is Stephen King, in a faux-humble bow. The trailer was so self-congratulatory and had a “You’re at a Great Event” air that it put a too-cultured stank on the events that followed. The one great sad thing about the loss of the trailer is that one of the final images, that of Charles Mudede in a chair, explaining something to students as part of the SAL’s Writers in the Schools program, will no longer fly toward the audience like a demon claw in a 3-D movie. I always thought that part was hilarious. But I digress.)

Yes, the lecture. It was pretty good. Russo spoke about an abandoned gravestone in his back yard (“How many reasons can there be for not using a gravestone?”) and why you shouldn’t put carpets in bathrooms. He talked about sitting in a waffle house in North Carolina and watching his waitress (who was about to have all her bottom teeth removed after her shift) handle a customer’s dentures as kind of a test drive. His point was that more people see the serious in life, but that comic writers certainly aren’t weaving humor out of thin air.

The best part came at the end, as Russo defended laughing at stutterers and people with speech impediments. It’s mean, he said, and there are inappropriate times to do it, but stuttering, in the proper context, is definitely funny. He also talked about cruel jokes and whether it’s okay to tell them—sometimes, Russo said, he feels nervous at the way certain men laugh at misogynist jokes, but he believes telling those jokes isn’t a wrong or bad thing in and of itself. And then there was the question and answer session, which, to be frank, was not very good at all. The last question was “DId you invent Sarah Palin?” “No,” Russo responded, “But I did invent Tina Fey.” It was sad that the talk about humor, that was so roundly amusing and had moments of high hilarity, had to end on such a forced, weird note.

RSS icon Comments

1

Russo's Straight Man is the funniest novel I've read in years. It's the kind of book you feel self-conscious reading on a bus because a solitary passenger suddenly bursting into laughter makes everyone else nervous. "Straight Man" is as funny as "Lucky Jim" was supposed to be, but wasn't.

Posted by Eric in Boulder | September 18, 2008 11:25 AM
2

Did anyone else feel like his talk was never ending? Every time he came back to the gravestone metaphor, I thought to myself "thank christ, he's finished". But alas, he would go into some other story that inevitably made the large old woman seated in front of me nod and say "uhhuh, he's right" every 10 seconds, and then proceed go into histerics with the punchline of the story.
My rule of thumb for these lectures is that if the buzz from my two pre-lecture martinis at Shuckers wears off while the lecture is going on, it has lasted too long.

Posted by john cocktosin | September 18, 2008 1:43 PM
3

@2: What a wise rule, I believe I will adopt it myself.

In general: I wanted to go to this (being from Maine, I'm required to like Richard Russo), but I knew I couldn't sell w7ngman on going and didn't want to to alone. Thanks for posting a recap!

Posted by Aislinn | September 18, 2008 2:18 PM

Comments Closed

Comments are closed on this post.