If you can recognize the dude in the clown makeup from this “very special episode” of Blossom, actually titled “.38 Special”, circa 1993, about both kids with guns and the seamy side of show business, the tears behind the greasepaint, you’re one up on terribly amusing young wise guy Dashiell Driscoll, who wrote and narrates a YouTube sendup of this and many other nineties-era “very special episodes”, not to mention the delicious “Zack Morris Is Trash” series, also on YouTube, for the cutups at “Funny Or Die”. The dude is Dick Martin, clearly forgotten now, but once one of the more famous men in America, one of the hosts of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In”, the top-rated television show for 1969 and 1970, back in the antediluvian, not to say antecable, three-network era, the show that, among other things, introduced political humor as something you could do on TV (the show was against the Vietnam War) and launched the careers of both Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin.
When I watched this clip on YouTube, I knew I knew the voice, but couldn't place the dude, until the moment when “Frosty” makes his exit. Frosty is a “Crusty” style burn-out, even lower on the show biz food chain, working kids’ birthday parties and floating haplessly on a sea of schnapps, self-loathing, and despair. Through a series of incidents that I won’t go into, “Joey” (apparently, the kid who says “Whoa!” a lot—I never watched the show.) takes Frosty to meet recovering alcoholic Tony1 who Joey somehow knows (via Blossom, I guess) so Tony can sponsor Frosty. Tony agrees and then Joey leads Frosty out the door to finally drive him to his gig. (The kids can wait, right? Because who’s more patient than six year olds?) “Say good night, Frosty”, Joey says. “Good night, Frosty”, says Frosty.
“Still got it!” exclaims Dash on the voice over, supplying an ecstatic verbal rim shot. Indeed he did, but Dash didn’t get the “real” joke. Every episode of Laugh-In ended with Dan Rowan saying “Say good night, Dick” and Dick saying “Good night, Dick!” See? “Good night, Frosty”, Good night, Dick”? That’s resonance, baby! What is Dick Martin saying but “I am Frosty! We are all Frosty! This life, what is it but the tears of a clown?” Baissez le rideau, la farce est jouée. Bring down the curtain, the farce is over.
Afterwords
After Laugh-In ended, Martin appeared as a “guest star” through the seventies but made most of his living as a producer and director. However, he continued to appear in small roles until 2001. My impression is that he got these roles more or less as favors—surely he was no longer a name—but I don’t know if he needed the money, and I totally don't know if he actually intended his performance in “.38 Special” to be a “statement”, though the fact that his last line deliberately refers back to his glory days, when he was most definitely livin' the life, definitely makes one suspicious.2 Or maybe he thought it was funny. He last appeared in a 2001 updating of Herman Melville’s classic ode to despair, Bartleby the Scrivener, which ends with the nameless narrator exclaiming “Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanity!”
I naturally planned to bounce this piece off that film, but the preview revealed that this version, directed by Jonathan Parker, sets the story in “modern times” and basically turns it into The Office, “proving” that capitalism is shit. Martin plays “the mayor”, surely a bit part, since there was no mayor in Melville’s story. The preview was so over the top, in so many so predictable ways, that I had zero interest in spending $2.99 to rent the damn thing from Amazon.
Bartleby is quite similar to another Melville short masterpiece, Billy Budd, the narrator, a Wall Street lawyer, being the equivalent of Captain Verre, both men rational and sensible, and both hopelessly discomfited by an encounter with the irrational, with the mysterious Bartleby and the beautiful Billy, strange men who somehow seem to conceal within themselves both the light of Heaven and the fires of Hell. It is impossible not to run from the possibility of such knowledge, but also impossible to recover from having run from it. Both Bartleby and Billy Budd recall still another Melville piece, Benito Cereno, remarkably powerful but undeniably racist. The white-hot homoeroticism of Billy, unmatched, to my knowledge, but any work other than Othello, is almost entirely absent in Bartleby, but takes center stage in Benito Cereno, though here homosexuality is portrayed as unrelievedly nightmarish, a surrender to all that is evil, all that is “the Negro”. Poor Herman was not at peace with his desires.
You can catch up with all of Dash’s funny stuff here
1. “Tony” appears to be a standard “smart guy” character, like “Wilson” on Home Improvement, which I obviously did watch with some regularity, who advise the lead characters and allow the show’s writers to show off their knowledge of Nietzsche and, you know, Heisenberg and shit like that. In the hilariously lame Mr. Belvedere, the smart guy was actually the lead. I watched one episode. The dialogue was amazingly choppy. No character (except, of course, Mr. Belvedere) was allowed to speak more than one sentence at a time. Instead of “Have a safe trip! Drive carefully!” we got “Have a safe trip!” “We will.” “Drive carefully!” “We will!” It was like watching two people bat a ping-pong ball back and forth.
2. Sometime in the early seventies I read an article by Dick in Playboy, in which he gave the impression that his idea of heaven was playing golf with his show biz buddies for high stakes (and, of course, winning). He eventually married a “Playmate”, then divorced her, then married her again for keeps.
