THE ART OF SUCCESS
I’ve been reading The Compass, Janet Coleman’s new book about the Compass Players–that bunch of Hyde Park misfits whose experiments with improvisation 35 years ago “revolutionized the art of comedy in America.” It’s a sad book, in a way. David Shepherd conceived the Compass as a people’s theater, a reborn commedia, where actors would ad-lib plays about the events of the moment and the lives of the masses. He planned on performing in factory cafeterias.
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And that’s pretty much how American comedy’s been ever since. From Nichols to Woody Allen, from May to Sandra Bernhard, and from Berman to Spalding Gray, Freud beats Marx out every time. Our most sophisticated, politically aware satirists choose to frame their satire in purely personal terms. There’s no real acknowledgment of class, history, economics, social constructs, vested interests–no dialectic at all: just this sense of a free-floating ego bumping up against an alien world.
Hogarth’s adultery is at once economic, artistic, and sexual. He’s attracted to sordid subjects–painting a poor murderess in her cell on the expectation of selling the image after she’s been hung. He’s attracted to sordid women, too, playing coprophiliac games with a whore he loves in his common, guilty, dirty heart.
