These paradoxes–love as sheer void, experience as innocence–are classic expressions of Feifferian man, the urban neurotic whose life is a St. Vitus’s dance through streets potholed with uncertainties. When Joanna (Christine Baranski) turns up, Elliot’s dance becomes a pas de deux, doubling the anxiety and the comedy. Feiffer is the best at this kind of fusion, and Mike Nichols is the perfect director to ignite the laughter of psychic pain. As the exquisitely mismatched couple wait for an elevator that will carry them to a party where she will meet his friends, Joanna goes into a protracted toilette that escalates into her terrified departure. Feiffer then gives us two party scenes–first without Joanna, where we meet Elliot’s friends, three variations on the theme of macho infantilism. Joanna then turns up, having girded her loins so that she manipulates these woeful lechers like Silly Putty.
The play’s emotional texture thins out in this central party section but foams up juicily in the final scene, a funny and scarifying telephone conversation between Elliot and Joanna. This scene is Feiffer’s definitive statement on the tortuous nature of love among the urban animals. Talk about reaching out to touch someone–these frightened, angry, yearning, spurning lovers tear each other to bits and then try to put the pieces together again. It’s a tie score between genders as Baranski and Heald trade buried resentments with wrenching changes of emotional pace.
“I don’t have values,” says Elliot. “I have sentiments–they’re like visitation rights to values.” Such people are no longer wholes, but collages pieced together from a tattered moral universe. Feiffer makes you laugh like hell–and you can taste the brimstone–at the slapstick of self-revelation. He’s been called misanthropic, but this play is driven by a savage compassion. It isn’t Chekhov or Strindberg, but it’s Feiffer. He’s our man, and he speaks our sad and loony language.
title: “Laughing Until It Hurts” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-14” author: “Daniel Bernhard”
The exercise was originally intended as research for an article on self-defense equipment for skateboarding magazine Big Brother, but after Knoxville’s editor saw the footage, he included it in a compilation of similarly idiotic stunts. Now, cult following in tow, Knoxville has taken his peculiar talents to MTV. “Jackass,” a new, completely and utterly insane half-hour show starring Knoxville and his band of merry pranksters, debuts this Sunday at 9 p.m., EDT. Comparisons to Tom Green are inevitable, but Green is merely silly. Knoxville is crazy. The self-defense-equipment demo is the crown jewel of the first episode, and there are other golden moments, including a bit where Knoxville puts on an orange jumpsuit with L.A. county jail stenciled on the back, handcuffs his hands and feet, then goes to a hardware store and tries to buy a hacksaw. He’s coy, though, about the contents of later episodes. “I’ll tell you this: I get the crap beaten out of me–while on crutches–by a professional boxer.” How’d you wind up on crutches? “Oh, just a stupid stunt at the L.A. River. You’ll see.” “I know a lot of really crazy people,” says coproducer and former Big Brother editor Jeff Tremaine. “But Johnny takes it to a whole new level.”
In person, Knoxville, 29, cuts a different figure than you’d expect from a man who once put on a Kevlar vest and shot himself in the stomach with a .38-caliber pistol (it was for the self-defense video; Knoxville and MTV agreed that it shouldn’t be aired). A born and bred Southern boy–his real name is P. J. Clapp; Knoxville, Tenn., is his hometown–he is warm and unfailingly polite, calling every woman “ma’am” and smiling near constantly. On location in Miami, where he’s costarring in “Big Trouble,” a new Barry Sonnenfeld movie, his trailer rocks with sounds of Ella Fitzgerald and he passes the long waits by reading–swear to God–Emile Zola. “I guess if I thought about the things I do too much I’d probably stop altogether,” says Knoxville, who has a wife, a 4 1/2-year-old daughter and terrific insurance. “Some people collect state thimbles. I like this type of humor. And to be involved in it is… I don’t know if ‘rewarding’ is the right word. But it is fun.”
It’s also a Clapp family tradition. His father, Phil, now semiretired, still delights in crank-calling people. He’s 64. Mr. Clapp began preparing his son for his career destiny early, training him, at the age of 4, to pop his father’s buddies in the groin when they stopped by the house. “He was just tall enough to get a real good shot in,” says the elder Jackass. “Boy, after that my friends were on guard as soon as they walked in the door.” The son’s clear affection for his dad, meanwhile, warms up the room. “He’s good,” Knoxville says with a giant smile. “He’s real good. And he’s been doing it for years.”
Neither parent, however, has seen all of the “Jackass” premiere, and Knoxville is a little worried about how his mother will take one particular stunt involving a portable toilet. (We’d explain more, but Johnny wants his mother to see it for the first time Sunday with all her friends from church.) “For another week I will be her son,” he jokes. Fear not, Mrs. Clapp, the doctors say your son will be just fine.
