Sunday…

You know the drill on Sunday posts. Nothing of note as I’m sleeping in.

There’s only so many ways I can tell you that I’m a fan of showmen. I’m a fan of those types of people that go out in the middle of a crowd and stand apart. The type that the crowds tend to form around instead of the other way around. Almost every single person I’ve listed has distinguished themselves in their field (as far as I’m concerned.)

Why should music be any different?

I don’t remember which one of my siblings owned Queen’s Greatest Hits. At least one of them did. So when the recraze of Queen happened in the early 90s with the rerelease of Bohemian Rhapsody due to the popularity of Wayne’s World, it wasn’t altogether unfamiliar. Shortly thereafter I went and bought my own copy of their Greatest Hits (and ‘Classic’) and knew half the songs already. I went Queen crazy. Within a few years I owned all of the albums, knew their entire discography, and could sing as many B-sides as I could hits.

Freddie Mercury was a showman, if not a touch flamboyant. (Silver jumpsuits, who didn’t know, really?) Add in Bryan May’s frenetic guitar riffs and once again, I was hooked by another set of folks who help define eras. Now, whether or not you agree that Queen was an era defining band or not is actually completely secondary to the fact that they did. (See what I did there?) Distinct guitar, a singer with a voice that ranged from rocking to operatic, and stage presence that even watching on old videos carries with it a certain electricity.

To this day, when I’m in a horrendous mood, even with my ever expanding musical tastes, I can still throw in Stone Cold Crazy and feel awakened, Seven Seas of Rhye and feel empowered, or Who Wants To Live Forever and find myself introspective and reflective. If that can’t qualify as a major influence on my life, what can?

“Listen all you people, come gather round
I gotta get me a game plan, gotta shake you to the ground
Just give me what I know is mine,
People do you hear me, just give me the sign.”

(Brief update: IHL will be returning to schedule 03/04. The blog will explain the brief hiatus.)

“Because when I’m good, I’m great… but when I’m bad, I’m better.” - Piper

Up until this point in time, the people I’ve posted about have tended to be more obvious figures. Whether it be because of the fact that they are writers or have some comedic influence, they make sense. This one might throw a few of you for a loop. (Those that don’t know my outside IHL activities, that is). I’m a professional wrestling fan and I have been since I saw Hulk Hogan lose the world title on Saturday Night’s Main Event due to ‘an evil twin referee’.

The theatrics of prowrestling have been with me forever. The good guy versus the bad guy. The anti-hero. The redeemable villain. These are all standard archtypes of any story, good or bad. It just so happens that you never see Sherlock Holmes give Moriarty a suplex or Luke Skywalker throw the big boot to Palpatine. The characters fight it out in mock combat in the hopes to prove their point. Sometimes in this, wrestling is great. Other times, it’s one of the most horrendous and base things on television.

During the 80s and stints during the 90s though, there was a character that I couldn’t help enjoying. Whether he was a good guy or a bad guy, when he talked - I listened. He came up with some of the craziest explanations as to why he wanted to hurt his opponents. He then would talk circles around them and in the end… get his ass kicked by the biggest names in the business. Rowdy Roddy Piper, the crazy scotsman.

Piper’s name is fairly well known in pop culture. It’s probably a mix of his wrestling, and his acting (Ok, specifically They Live) - why does he qualify so strongly to be listed in this influence list? It’s because of his attitude. His fire. He played the crowd when he was a bad guy and made them hate him. When he was trying to get under the skin of his opponent, he would take any piece of their character and pick it apart. The speed that his brain worked just to verbally massacre someone was incredible. Now imagine watching that as a chubby pre-teen in a middle school, surrounded by kids that mocked and teased… a little hero worship for a smooth talker might be kind of expected.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gone and revisited the old tapes and promos that Piper did. They still mostly hold up. At times, when I’m on some sort of verbal tirade, I can even catch little cadences that I’m sure I took from my hundreds of hours dissecting prowrestling, and more specifically Rowdy Roddy.

Whether or not you like professional wrestling or even Piper himself, it can’t be denied that there is a raw charisma there. That charisma and almost insane elocution helped me get through at least a little bit of the worst years of my life - and in turn helped me find my own voice which is really all this is…

“Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased—thus do we refute entropy.” - Spider Robinson

In High School you have to discover yourself. The sporty types are moving into sports. The well developed girls are heading towards the sporty types. The dramatic are heading to the stage. I don’t think it’s a far off mark to say that I was a big huge frakking geek in high school.

Have I shocked you? Have I surprised you? I didn’t think so.

I read science fiction and fantasy and played dungeons and dragons and acted in a rennasaince festival. I’m not shooting these things down. I still do most of them. You figure out which ones I don’t… but, the fact is I was exposed to a lot of things and people. Hell, I was probably exposed to more than most, if only because I’m kind of charming so I slip into a crowd easily.

During these strange eclectic and wonderful times of my life I was introduced to Spider Robinson. He’s the sci-fi writer you’ve never heard about. Part Robert Heinlein and part Piers Anthony, the majority of his stories take place in Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, a bar hidden on Long Island where people go to find out what they need. Some of the regulars are time travelers and aliens, Nikolai Tesla, and Pixel, the cat who walks through walls, but each of them has a story to tell eventually.. and they will.. eventually.

I won’t ruin how fun and silly and sarcastic and punny these stories are, because there are some mind-bending groany puns in there - but, the attitude of the book always felt right with me. If you need help, we’ll listen when you are ready to talk about it and share a drink to commiserate. If your life is overflowing with good, we’ll listen and drink with you to commend your good fortune. It’s a thought process that would make the world a better place. It’s a set of books that helped define who I am as a person, and inspired me to want to write.

So for those of you that are familiar with Callahan’s, please watch as I step up to the line and raise a toast to Spider Robinson for trying to refute entropy… somebody’s gotta do it.

‘…and the tumultous crash of shattered glass shook the God & Devil from their panel.’

“You’re doing it again…”

 That’s what Bill of Silver Rage fame said to me as he read the ‘IDOL IDOL’ storyline.  I had no idea what he was talking about, but he gestured to the Horsemen sitting in the front row and mocking Poseidon and whatever else is going on.  Whether or not I (or any of you) realized it, there is another, more simple, story going on right underneath the main plot.  The Horsemen have to sit and watch this… so they mock it.

If that’s not a small homage (one of many, mind you) to Joel, Mike, Dr. F, TV’S Frank, Pearl, and the Bots… nothing is. 

I’m fairly certain my audience is pretty geek-savvy, but for the one or two of you who missed the MST3k boat, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was a cable show (Comedy Central, Ha!, Sci-Fi Network) that featured the sillouette of a guy and his two robot pals mocking the best of the worst sci-fi, horror, and action flicks.  Whether it was Sandy Frank, Toho Studios, or Ed Wood, they picked the creme de la crap and beat the hell out of it.

Raised in a sarcastic family, with a sarcastic brother and mother, and learning that shared pain is halved and shared joy is doubled leads you to the belief that runs hard in me today.  If I laugh at it, it can’t be so bad.  Ignoring the emotional ramifications of this (which are 100% accurate.. I laugh at the most horrible things), MST3k was the same reaction to cinema.  It’s easy to tolerate anything when you can laugh about it with a friend.  The show was meant to be watched by people like me… and whether it’s in IHL, or my wrestling reports, MST3k has continued to be a driving force behind all that I do.

If any of you Misties are out there and don’t know - Mike Nelson is currently doing RIFFTRAX, where he mocks big blockbuster hollywood movies - and Joel has joined back up with many of the team to do CINEMATIC TITANIC. I highly recommend them to all.

“If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes,
and other science facts…
Repeat to yourself it’s just a show,
I should really just relax…”

Welcome to the next installment of IN HIS LIKENESS: The Influences.

Having discussed my love of Muppets, Jim Henson, and more specifically giving a nod to the proverbial camera, I felt the next topic for this series of essays should be about the man who not only stared down the camera, but did it so we could laugh later. Andy Kaufman.

When I was a wee bairn (notice how most of these stories start with childhood. I’m the eternal 12 year old.) Nick At Nite and HA!, the precursor to Comedy Central, would play the original Saturday Night Live episodes. More than one of the models for my sense of humor came from watching those. I don’t want to ruin the surprise on the rest of them, but one in particular threw me for a complete loop. He walked out on stage with an old style phonograph, and listened patiently to the Mighty Mouse theme. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the bit. I didn’t know why it made me laugh though. It was probably because he didn’t say anything before he came on stage. He didn’t say anything afterwards. That was his act. The fumbling and almost lip-synching at the wrong time, the immediate face change as he became the announcer, the fact that he drinks a glass of water during the song as if he was straining himself… it all confused the hell out of me, but there I was cackling away at it.

Something inside me got Andy Kaufman right away. I know a lot of people just don’t get him or, at least, didn’t then. I over-analyzed that sketch for a long time. This all being before the web was an easy commodity, when Andy’s name came up (primarily on Ha!) I would watch with intense wonder. It was where I first saw I’m from Hollywood! which was a retelling of some of Andy’s stranger bits and his stint with Memphis Wrestling. My intrigue grew. How did pissing off a crowd get him jobs? How could he alienate his fans at times? I couldn’t have been the only one that got the joke, he was infamous!

That’s because Andy wasn’t just a comedian. He was a performer. That’s the big distinction. He did it in the character of Andy Kaufman playing Andy Kaufman, but when he was on stage, the end result was to make you feel something. That was the joke to him. People would pay (or watch on TV) to see what weirdness he might throw out there, but the end result was the same. He forced you into a position where you had to feel an emotion, and probably not an emotion you expected; which as far as I’m concerned, is the genius of the act.

I’m not sure if Andy’s work has ultimately inspired anything I’ve done up until this point creatively, but I’m damn sure he has inspired the way I treat an audience. The idea that you go up on stage, or someone lies down with your book, or any number of other creative activities that engage a person is fantastic. The act of pulling them into your personae and characters shows strength in what you do. BUT! The power that you can take laughter, which is a freeing emotion, and transform it into rage, or confusion, only to make the people that trusted you with a portion of their time have to reflect on it later to see that it was all part of the act in the first place… well that’s just brilliant.

From everything I’ve seen and read about Andy Kaufman, the thing about him that I most see in myself, is that there is still magic to be had. There is always a new joke to tell, even if nobody gets it at first.

I wanted to do something with this space right here, so I’m going to take my friend David Gallaher’s advice and post a little bit about me and my influences. The man behind the dots.

If it’s a well liked feature, it will stay. If not, off it goes into the dev/null.

I figured since the question was specifically about my comedic influences, I’d over a couple of the major ones over the course of the next few weeks. Seems always best to start these things at the beginning with my youngest influence. Jim Henson.

When I was a youngin, I would go to the library at my elementary school with the amazing Miss Friedman. She gave music to Shel Silverstein poems and read us Riki Tiki Tembo and even made up a few ditties about the dewey decimal system. Miss Friedman was like our very own in house Schoolhouse Rock. One day, during library time, she showed me a book called ‘The Muppet Show’. Now, I was a worldly 9 year old, of COURSE I knew who Kermit and Fozzie and Gonzo were. They were the special guests on Sesame Street! Second fiddle to none other than Big Bird, Burt, Ernie, the Count, Grover, and endless others. (Elmo never had to deal with a customer because there was a fly in his soup.. DID HE?) Not to mention reruns of The Muppet Show were playing on Nick At Nite and I never missed an episode! I took the book out and read it cover to cover that night. (I was a reader, admittedly)

The book was taken out at least another dozen times by the time I left Van Holten Elementary. It was amazing. It was part comic book, part novel, all of it was just drawn out scripts of various Muppet Show skits. The Day The Furniture Attacked. Vincent Price’s Cooking Show. Pigs In Space. All of them hand drawn and retooled to fit into this big book. My love of the muppets was really born in that very book. (Though I’ve been told that I would glue myself to Sesame Street as a child, and it was the reason I read at such a young age.)

As I grew older, I kept finding myself enjoying Henson’s work, whether or not I KNEW it was Henson’s. If you watch Dark Crystal and Labrynth back to back, the artistic fingerprint is obvious, but to a kid in the 80s… maybe not as much.

There was something about the muppets not having humans with them like most puppet/ventriloquist acts. Kermit and the gang didn’t need a guest star nearby to make me laugh. Who cares that they were rarely seen with legs. They were real characters who existed in this horrible back studio lot, trying to put on this crappy entertainment show week after week.

As I got older and I absorbed as much muppet as I could, I came home one day from middle school to find out that Jim Henson had died. It tore me up inside. It wasn’t until years after he passed that I realized how much the muppets had been an influence on my life, my sense of humor (cute with a constant wink to the audience), my love of REAL special effects (as opposed to CGI), and the art of Henson himself.

I’m not sure how much IHL is influenced by the Muppets. Maybe it’s the ease of the simplistic. Maybe it’s because of The Muppet Show that I constantly need to recognize my audience is there. I have no idea, but I do know that Henson and a cast of hundreds of fuzzy monsters and animals alike shaped me through my addicted to video games & tv period of my life. (Which still goes on to this day…)

‘Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,
the lovers, the dreamers, and me…’

Happy Friday everyone.

I have no idea if this is appearing just live on the site or on the RSS, but we’ll learn together, won’t we?

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned in the comic blog, I have this space here and I’m not sure what to do with it. Admittedly, keeping it blank is always an option as it’s been for quite awhile. It makes the page smaller, so you guys can get to the links and all that happiness quicker, but there is also the option here to do some other things.

For those who don’t know, I’ve wrote reviews over at Comics Nexus for a couple of years, and still do my wrestling reporting over at their mother-site. I also am an avid video game player, and flash game player.. but it just seems that webcomics and video games in the same forum has been overdone at this point. I’ve also considered the idea of taking some of my advertisers and reviewing their comics, but that doesn’t seem altogether a great thing to do. What if I read it and hate it? I don’t want to slam on someone who was kind enough to throw me a little scratch…

So what to do with this space? I’m asking you. Any of my ideas sound strong? Have one of your own? Or just delete it and go back to blank slate so the page is nice and compact and you don’t have to mix up the comic with the dumb writer’s opinions, which I admittedly have complained about other people doing in the past. (No, I don’t want to read a 3 page blog to UNDERSTAND your comic… yuck)

It would be completely seperate from IHL except that it would be me writing both.

Comment along and let me know,
Jamie