The False Dichotomy of Jokes vs. Serious Shit

Just recently I discovered that James Franco played a character named Franco on the long-running ABC soap opera general hospital. I found out about this at the supermarket, looking over the various magazine racks as I waited to buy, I don't know, Macaroni and Cheese. On the cover I saw James Franco and just stopped and stared for a few moments. Like many, I initially thought it was some sort of elaborate joke. After all, Franco is involved with that art meta-film project Erasing James Franco in tandem with filmmaker Carter.

So I decided to search for any clips of the events on YouTube. In a particular stroke of genius, one user did some quick video editing, so the only parts of any episode of General Hospital that remain are the parts that actually involve James Franco's character. Judging from the YouTube comments, it seems that these were mostly created to ogle James Franco who is, apparently, a hottie. It also serves to illustrate this blog post's point.





There's nothing in Franco's performance as, um, Franco, to suggest that he took his stint on General Hospital anything less than seriously. In interviews with Franco himself and the show's staff, it seems as though James tried his absolute hardest to do the best job he could playing a deranged, murderous artist. Recently Franco said that a lot of it was done sort of as research into playing a former soap opera star for an upcoming movie role, but he also expressed genuine love of the genre.

That's not to say there isn't something innately hilarious and joke-y about the entire thing. His laconic, continuous double entendres, his hazy glare, his melodramatic phrasing, all make you want to inexplicably laugh. Even though he might be doing this seriously, he understands how a lot of people view soap operas and, in playing to that, it's funny. It's funny soap opera acting as performance art, in a way.

If anything illustrates the way serious things translate into high comedy, Andy Kaufman does.



Best known by my generation as "That guy Jim Carey played in Man on the Moon," Kaufman was brilliant in how he could take something with no comedic value and turn it into something both brilliant and hilarious. Kaufman became most famous as the character Latka Graves on the sitcom Taxi, where he essentially played his "Foreign Man" character, a guy who got major laughs with his accent, particularly his "Thank you veddy much" line.

One of his gags that depicts the funny/serious nature of all of his best bits was when he would do performances and begin to read the audience the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald after being heckled for not doing his Foreign Man character. Audience members would leave or groan as he continued, until he reached a point where he would ask the audience if they would rather continue listening to him read, or if he should play a record. When the audience requested the record, he would put one on - a recorded version of him reading The Great Gatsby from where he had just left off.

Of course, there's nothing inherently funny about reading The Great Gatsby, but by playing upon the expectations of the audience, he found something incredibly brilliant and funny in doing so. As Franco was funny soap opera acting as performance art, Kaufman was something like the opposite, serious performance acting as high comedy.



The title of this blog post, "The False Dichotomy of Jokes vs. Serious Shit", is a taken from a Village Voice interview with Brooklyn rap duo Das Rascist, where the Voice asks the group about the song of theirs that became an Internet meme, "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell". Check the remix by Oakland's Wallpaper.



In the song, the duo basically switch off saying the lines "I'm at the Pizza Hut/ I'm at the Taco Bell/ I'm at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" over and over. As the intro to the Voice interview puts it, "it passes from grating to absurd to hilarious to poignant to transcendent."

In a way, "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" is the musical equivalent of Franco, a sort of sequel to Kaufman's "Mighty Mouse" performance. There's something hilarious about two grown men shouting back and forth, over and over, that they're at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, but there's also something serious about, well, the existence of combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bells.

Just as Franco's performance isn't a commentary on soap operas, the Das Racist song isn't a political commentary on obesity. At least, it's not the overt intention. Because, even despite of how much either one makes you want to laugh, they also make you want to think. Franco's appearance in General Hospital, though unsubtle and fairly cliche, makes you think about the soap opera genre, about acting in general. Das Racist's song, though at its core a single, meaningless phrase, finds profundity in its repetition, because of how it can simply make a person think about food and our society, food and gluttony, without really making comment about either of them.

"Why are you validating the false dichotomy of jokes vs. serious shit?" A member jokingly (or seriously?) asks during the interview, and it's a good question. Kaufman demonstrated overtly, and Franco has demonstrated perhaps accidentally that even the simplest joke is a complex thing, or that the most complex things can be reduced to a simple joke.

Even a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell can become too complex to order from, much less explain.