By David Ross. You’ve heard of yo-yo dieters; I’m a yo-yo subscriber to the New Yorker. Some clever piece by Adam Gopnik (solitary throwback to the versatile, stylish intellectualism of the New Yorker’s heyday) will catch my eye in a dentist’s office and I will subscribe once again. I will read the thing for a year, mostly on the toilet; grow increasingly annoyed with its coastal smarminess and inability to interrogate its basic assumptions about the world or even recognize them as assumptions; flush the toilet; cancel in a huff; re-up a year later; etc. This pattern has governed my entire adult life.
With each renewed subscription, I notice changes that are probably invisible to those who read steadily. My latest return leaves me appalled. The old champagne fizz of the New York mind is gone; the metropolitan dandyism embodied by the magazine’s Eustace Tilley mascot is caput. The cartoons are crudely drawn and often just crude. David Remnick, who became The New Yorker’s fifth editor in 1998, began as a dowdy geopolitical journalist for the Washington Post and has lately become a starry-eyed chronicler of the Obama millennium. Presumably in Remnick’s image, The New Yorker has become clunky, earnest, wonkish, didactic, and condescending. Just like the president whom Remnick so much admires, it seems desperate to clarify ‘the big picture,’ to sweep away all those stubborn, uneducated misconceptions that interfere with the progressive renovation of the world.
Even worse, the New Yorker has brought in Tina Fey for comic relief (see here and here). Woody Allen and Steve Martin have long wasted space in The New Yorker, but you could dismiss their pointless little sketches as vanity material designed to gussy up the table of contents and burnish their own idea of themselves as intellectuals. Tina Fey is both a better writer and a more ambitious contributor: she is not merely trading on her name, but attempting to bring her personality to bear, to stage a theatrics of the self. This makes her harder to ignore, while not making her any less cloying.
Fey’s New Yorker activities presumably intersect with her recently published memoir call Bossypants (see here), though I’m not sure which feeds into which. I can only say that ten pages of Fey leave one feeling queasily exposed to a messy and germy psychology. Three hundred pages … I can’t imagine. I would have to dunk my entire brain in Listerine.
Fey’s problem is that her self-deprecation so obviously veils a raging sense of superiority. She plays the role of mousy, underappreciated nerd for laughs, but also with a kind of subtle accusation and resentment. She self-loathingly assumes the role created for her by the shallow stereotypes of society and demands that we do the work of seeing through this role and recognizing what she really is. It becomes our responsibility to redeem ourselves by elevating her to her proper station. Her style of comedy is really a manner of whining, a vast construct of narcissism and self-entitlement.
How different the satire of Woody Allen in Annie Hall and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Their inability to adjust themselves to modern mores and conventions is not fake and wheedling self-deprecation in Fey’s mode, but subtle social criticism. They want to say something like, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will naturally seem like a weirdo.” Rejecting the Baby Boomer dispensation – holding stubbornly to their fifties-era Brooklyn traditionalism – Allen and David always have a conservative and reactionary gist. It doesn’t take much to recognize the familial resemblance between Alvy Singer and Bellow’s arch-conservative Mr. Sammler (both of whom, by the way, derive from Kafka’s K, the original black-comic schlemiel forced to navigate a mad society).
Fey, of course, is all in favor of the Baby Boom dispensation. No reflexive Jewish alienation for her. Her only complaint is that she’s not lording over it, though in fact she is. Apparently, no amount of mainstream acceptance will satisfy her wounded nerd ego or release us from perpetually having to exclaim that the ugly duckling is really a swan.
For my little disquisition on the ‘golden age of the nerd,’ with related comments on Allen and David, see here.
Posted on April 28th, 2011 7:15pm.
She plays the role of mousy, underappreciated nerd for laughs, but also with a kind of subtle accusation and resentment.
I always got the same sense from two other SNL alumnus, Chevy Chase and Will Ferrell. A subtle nod and wink during the performance to communicate they really weren’t buffoons – just damn fine actors.
Maybe it’s something the SNL producers select for when they pick prospective comedians.
That is easily the best — and most accurate — dissection of Tina Fey I’ve ever read.
Of course, the current state of her career is embodied by her Sarah Palin performances. I just find it so funny that she has to pretend to be someone else to get all that attention. Conversely, the woman she loathes is far more accomplished, and doesn’t have to do photos like the one here (which is definitely fine) in order to get notoriety.
What many seem to have forgotten is that prior to Sarah Palin’s emergence on the national scene, Fey was just another in the long line of forgettable, interchangeable, SNL female alums. A few movie flops, a low rated TV show and she was ready to disappear into small supporting roles, a footnote in TV history. But her impression of Palin and its constant replaying by an industry anxious to denigrate a true Republican phenomenon have made Fey a supposed icon, winning awards, accolades and New Yorker bylines.
Now apparently she’s decided that her impression has cost her show viewers, realizing that 40% of the country despises her for it. Poor Tina.
Have you read American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent? This article and the ‘golden age of the nerd’ both seem to be probing at ideas addressed in the book. I highly recommend it as a source for greater understanding and plenty of validation on the trends you’ve pointed to, both the “wounded nerd” and the connection between nerd-dom and Jews.
Thanks very much for the recommendation. I will certainly hunt down this book.
I’ve never been able to understand the hostility leveled at Fey for her Palin impression. She’s a comic. Poking fun at political figures is what comics do (and what they should do in a healthy democracy).
SNL has featured mocking impersonations of every presidential/vice-presidential candidate since it started, and I can’t recall anyone taking it so personally before. Are people more protective of Palin because she’s a woman? Do they identify with her, and therefore feel personally insulted by Fey’s impression? Whatever the reason, it’s bizarre.