Burning Answers #7: Late Night Round Robin

Paddling upstream in the middle of an Atmospheric River.

It’s been a long week.

My usual means of locomotion is on three wheels; any of you who live in Santa Monica, I’m the guy on the red trike endlessly pedaling to and from various grocery stores and hamburger joints. But last Monday eve, this quiet little beach town was changed forever when my seemingly sturdy trike broke in two pieces underneath me.

HOLY SHIT.

Yes, you read that right. My steel tricycle weighing about 100 pounds just…snapped. Actually to be precise, the weld connecting the front wheel assembly to the frame tore like paper. This happened utterly without warning; no weird sounds or vibrations. Thankfully, I wasn’t hurt, but it was a terrifying reminder of mortality—if I’d been moving when it happened, they’d be naming a stretch of Montana Ave after me.

It has made me think: what stories do I want to tell before my time runs out? I do have a few, and I hope to write them down, if I can figure out a way to pay my bills as I do so. Stories of being young in New York hunting for a few millions for a magazine; a glimpse into my mystery illness at its very worst, when I thought for sure I was a goner and my wife Kate took such good care of me; and perhaps some vignettes from my less dramatic later life, stories of brunch and penury. It may be hard to convey many of the things that are most meaningful to me now, ineffable experiences like the feeling of qigong and acupuncture, or the truly remarkable people I know, or how I get cradle cap because my immune system is still slightly jacked up. (Excuse me while I scratch my chin.) But I do hope to get it all down on paper, if only to further irritate my impoverished heirs. “The S.O.B. left us nothing but 20 loud ties and a pile of self-dramatizing garbage? Man, I wish he’d gone to Harvard Law School.”

Me too, fictional heir. Me too.

The rest of the week was spent 1) calling the bike company and intimating dire consequences a la Monty Python’s Dino and Luigi Percotti, 2) hauling my cerebral palsy-riddled carcass up and down the extravagantly cracked pavements of downtown Santa Monica, and 3) beginning to line up fundraising for The American Bystander II: Electric Boogaloo.

Brian McConnachie’s death has made Alan and I pause and consider whether it’s time to shutter this grand adventure. The good news is that people do seem to really value the print mag and, while I can’t keep doing it in the crazy Japanese salaryman drop-dead-in-front-of-InDesign way I’ve done it since 2015, I’m starting to gather some magazine professionals and deep-pocketed individuals. Plus, we’ve figured out a way to make donations to The Bystander Fund tax deductible.

Anybody who wants to hear more, holler in the comments. Conscience-stricken drug dealers are not simply welcome, but encouraged.

I spent this evening in the most Mike Gerber way possible: after watching Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend, I whipped up a bunch of graphic design based on the colors in that movie. Now it’s late, and there’s an atmospheric river wooshing outside, and I can’t even see through my contacts, but I think there’s just enough in the tank for me to answer a few questions. Is there? Only one way to find out.

Could you name a few of your favorite recent examples of really effective and/or really funny satire? In any medium? 
I’m sure there’s a ton of good satire; the endless appetite for content has made all subsidiary forms of comedy much more common than they used to be, and satire is no exception. Whether all that stuff is doing what satire is supposed to do, is another question entirely. (Answer: It’s not.)

It’s not super-recent, but what came to mind immediately was The Death of Stalin, which I think is an example of a brilliantly written and beautifully acted satire, with the proper angle of attack on a topic that was really worth the effort. Too much modern satire tends to be a pile of silly jokes grafted onto a serious subject. Because these jokes don’t come from a place of logical rigor—they don’t derive from a deep and thoroughly digested understanding of the subject—rather than exposing the poleaxing absurdity of something serious they tend to make something serious merely silly. Looking at you, Jojo Rabbit.

I’m showing my age (when am I not?), but to me the sine qua non of modern satire will always be Dr. Strangelove and Life of Brian. Strangelove was so dialed into the reality of its subject that the US government thought Kubrick had a mole inside SAC. And with Life of Brian, just last year I learned that some seemingly throwaway jokes about Brian being sired by a Roman centurion were actually referencing a real theory about the historical Jesus (the centurion’s name was supposedly “Pantera”).

I am torn by a conflicting desire to write scathing satire about everything I hate…and a desire not to write anything that is going to hurt people. Is this possible? Or do you have to choose one or the other? 
Satirists tend to overestimate the power of satire; this would be cute if it didn’t occasionally get satirists killed. My rule of thumb is, anybody worth truly vicious satire—say, Elon Musk—cannot be injured by it. If the courts can’t touch them, satire is simply comfort for the afflicted, a fine thing. On the other hand, someone like Musk might be baited by satire into doing something ruinously expensive… which is what I’d be aching to pull off, were I working for “Weekend Update.” I’d long to set some ego trap for the world’s biggest sucker.

I think if you are genuinely concerned that some satire you write will hurt someone, you aren’t aiming your satire high enough.

In that vein: Have you ever written anything you really regretted later on, and would you be willing to share that?
Yes. Many of the characterizations in the Barry Trotter series were undigested in the way I mention above, too broad and, while solidly within the “rules” of the comedy of that era, I wish for a do-over. This is impossible without a time machine, so I hope no young person was discomfited by my silliness. One young fan wrote me about a joke I made about Parkinson’s, and I remember writing her back very remorsefully.

The Trotter books are all rough drafts, which is a damn shame because I was in the fullness of my imagination and physical strength then; I think with the right editor, I could’ve reached the heights of a Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, with my own touches of Beatles deepcuts and magpie dada. I was attempting to do things artistically within parody that I wanted to develop. But as ever, I had such a difficult time getting my work seen, I was too fatigued and harried to find the right people to support me.

The next time my trike snaps in two and I take that Final Header into the asphalt, I will be remembered—if I am remembered at all—for books I wrote as quickly as possible, absolutely certain that I would get a chance to go back and fix ‘em before anybody read them. Tonight’s dashed-off entry aside, I am an exceedingly careful writer (and person), and this is how Fortune shows me who is boss.

I remember Sean Kelly telling me a story: Sean hated William Safire, the former Nixon speechwriter who used to write the "On Language" column in the NY Times, so he did a hit piece on him with the stated intention that “Safire would read it and kill himself." Instead, Safire wrote Sean to say how much he enjoyed the piece…I didn't know Sean all that well, but I loved him as much as you can love someone you barely knew, and still struggle with the fact that he's gone.
Well said, Reader, and me too. Sean has been visiting me in dreams, and seems to be well. He may have buried the hatchet with Safire…or in him. I guess I’ll have to wait to find out which.
Just last week a friend of mine who is a witch said, “You know you can still talk to Sean, don’t you?”
”Really?”
”Yes. Just fix him a coffee the way he likes it, and put out a pastry if you know his favorite, and go into meditation.”
I plan to try this. Sean was the most entertaining person to talk to.

I believe I read that you're Sicilian and Irish—have you ever been to Sicily or Ireland, and if so, what did you think?
I have been to Ireland, but only for a weekend, a long weekend. I was in college, and was meeting a girl whom I broke up with the moment the plane landed at Shannon—rookie move, Gerber. She was well rid of me, to be sure. This is a story I may tell in future, if I am not too embarrassed.

I play my Sicilian heritage mostly for color—I have a great-grandfather who was almost certainly a “made man“—but am genuinely intrigued about that island. I tire of living in a place where everyone is taller than me, so I suspect I will go to Sicily someday when my self-esteem needs a boost. There is an ancient Roman site I need to make a pilgrimage to; a certain goddess looks after me (see: last Monday night), and I’d like to pay my respects in person. ◊

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Every so often, The American Bystander’s Editor & Publisher Michael Gerber answers questions from readers just like you. To add your question to the pile, email publisher@americanbystander.org and put “Question” in the subject line.