Good Riddance to Bad References

We may have heard our last archetypical voice

For long and boring reasons, I had a song from the Disney cartoon Aladdin in my head, which put me in the mind of Robin Williams’ riffing, specifically his Jack Nicholson impression.

My grandkids (if they’ve even watched Aladdin) don’t know Jack Nicholson (or Robin Williams for that matter), which is OK and expected. After all, when my kids saw it they didn’t recognize Williams, let alone Nicholson. My kids grew up on YouTube with their own icons (most of whom remain alien to me today). Double that for my grandkids, I guess.

We’re in a weird place in pop culture after 100 years of iconic cinematic mimicry even as monoculture shatters around us. There’s so much this suggests about the wider society that I’m not to tackle it all, but I want to talk about the death of archetypical character accents. That is, original voices that transcend time might be a thing of the past.

Screwy Wabbit

My grandmother grew up with people who would “burl water” and “go to woik.” My grandson calls it “talking like Bugs Bunny.” This isn’t the kind of iconic accent I’m talking about. Mel Blanc didn’t talk like Bugs anymore than Robin Williams talked like Jack Nicholson. Both would “do” voices (including celebrities) to evoke a pop-culture archetype. Celebrity enhanced the comedy, but it didn’t create it.

Not everyone recognizes “stars” as they did even a decade ago, let alone in the last half of the 20th century as American monoculture jelled and solidified.

Since he was working in the early Hollywood Golden Years, Blanc’s impressions reinforced at least a couple of stereotypes in a way Williams couldn’t 50 years later, and not because he wasn’t talented enough. That’s really what I’m getting at. Williams chose Nicholson’s voice (one supposes) to evoke “iconically conspiratorial,” but those kinds of jokes can’t hold up in a world of disposable fame.

It’s improbable that we’ll recognize Jack’s voice in another hundred years. With the possible exceptions of Arnold Schwarzenegger (brawny doofus) and Morgan Freeman (folksy omnipotence), we may have heard the last of voices that have taken on their own life.

I don’t mean there aren’t any original voices, only that the archetypical ones are already set in stone.

“Velcome to My Home”

Using only my memory and the few cartoons I see with my grandchildren, I can think of few real “voices” that have outlasted their people and the roles associated with them. The only indisputable one is Bela Lugosi, best known for playing Dracula. And by “best known” I mean that when people do a vampire voice, they’re doing Bela whether they know it or not.

A close second is Margaret Hamilton’s “witch” voice. Even if she was “doing” a voice in The Wizard of Oz (like MacBeth’s witches or something), it’s immaterial because since 1939 hers has been the witch voice people emulate.

Finally, (and a little speciously) Peter Lorre, “creepy mad scientist.” This is separate from “Teutonic mad scientist,” which seemed to have a voice even in the silent era Dr. Calagari. That mad scientist is loud and aggressive, the Lorre mad scientist has a sense of quiet, diabolical menace.

I guess an honorable mention is due Edward G. Robinson for “30s mobster” but “gangster patter” is blurred by number and ubiquity. Similarly, the stereotypical “cowboy” both made and was changed by guys like John Wayne and Slim Pickens, but those were actors who came to archetypes rather than creating them. That is, they sounded like cowboys, not the other way around; witches sound like Margaret Hamilton. It’s an important distinction. After all, by the time three generations of American kids learned to count from a puppet doing a bad Bela Lugosi impression, countless (sorry for the pun) people had played Dracula. Lugosi’s stuck.

It’s important to say that I don’t mind. Even though it’s a little bumpy out there as monoculture crumbles, driving guys my age who used to be water cooler sages out of their tiny, empty minds. It must be infuriating for people whose entire social currency was built on the three-channel system, tied to Johnny Carson and SNL, but them’s the breaks.

(A quick sidebar, there’s something significant about SNL’s decision to start casting people who resemble the pop culture figures they are sending up. Dan Ackroyd’s Nixon was no less funny just because he looked nothing like the president and had a mustache. It’s not an original insight to observe that SNL moved closer to lookalikes with the rise of the internet and still has the characters introduce themselves. There’s often no assumption we recognize who’s being mimicked. Pop culture references have become inside jokes.)

Note: I’m editing this the morning after the Super Bowl, which reinforced but also extended my point)

At least partly because of my age I only recognized about a third of the Super Bowl ad celebrities, but the generational disconnect seems a lot sharper. Put another way, if I watched TV with my grandfather in the 1980s, we would both know most of the people on the screen, though we would have divergent opinions about them. By those lights, popular culture might be better understood as voter turnout. Well fewer than half the people care about any show and among that fraction, about half think the show’s stupid.

More than 15 million people watched the Grammys, down 10 percent from last year. That’s about four out of every 100 people. Quadruple that for the hell of it, (and to account for social media, memes, etc.), and still fewer than one in five people even engaged with it. About one third of America watched the Super Bowl (which featured nearly as much Taylor Swift as the Grammys).

All of that to say, while a meme might slip through occasionally, there’s no central reference point anymore, and that’s fantastic.

Out with the Old

Monoculture has to undermine itself. Like a cartoon character who can keep running in the air as long as it doesn’t look down, self-reference is doomed to collapse.

I’m sure I’ve written before about the Bugs Bunny “Nimrod” joke, but it’s my best example of this. Bugs often referred to Elmer as “Nimrod,” which at the time was akin to referring to a fool as “Einstein.”

“Nimrod” was a famous hunter in the Bible, so it was a joke from back when everyone read the Bible enough to know it contained a character named Nimrod. Few people seem aware of that, though. Most think of “nimrod” as a way to insult incompetence. For us, Elmer Fudd is a nimrod. He isn’t the Nimrod (it makes you wonder how we’ll be using “Einstein” in another hundred years).

Nimrod the Bible guy has been much improved as a slur for boobery. Now, I love etymology as much as the next guy, but there’s much to be said for taking the useful and discarding the wrapper. Like the voice of Bela Lugosi or Margaret Hamilton, Bible (and Shakespeare) references have passed beyond sense or meaning in popular culture. The books are still there (just like Dracula or The Wizard of Oz), but the effect is completely separate.

I remember seeing the historical western Tombstone with my daughter, who was an adolescent at the time. In the quiet following a pivotal shootout scene (not at the O.K. Corral), Texas Jack asks Doc Holiday where Wyatt Earp is, to which Holiday responds, “Down by the river, walking on the water.”

My daughter turned to me and asked why people say “walking on the water.” Now, she was precocious and relied heavily on context clues, as bright kids tend to do. It wasn’t a new phrase for her. She knew what it meant, but not why it was an idiom.

In case you don’t know, either, it’s also from the Bible. Jesus walked on the water during a storm before turning the storm off. (Which is kind of a show-off move. I mean, if you can calm the water, why go through the trouble of walking on stormy seas?)

Also, how long is the O.K. Corral going to hold up as a cultural reference?

In the America where I grew up, it would be unthinkable for a reasonably well-read adolescent to not know a ton of Jesus stories, even if they were Jewish since the Bible was still a massive, massive part of popular culture.

That was such a small, closed world, and I don’t miss a bit (80s nostalgia baffles me). We were culturally stunted and happy to be so. I don’t want to give you the impression that I don’t treasure Bela or Margaret, but insofar as art and culture aren’t hobbled by monoculture references, we’re all better off.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

PostScript

I chopped a lot of fat out of this, including a passage on celebrity impersonator Rich Little that was too wander-y. Rich Little was still doing his Jack Benny impression in 2015, well past when either of those names rang the pop culture reference bell. Follow the links if that last sentence didn’t make sense. I only even mention it because I wanted to salvage this sentence, and it has no place else to be:

Speaking of Jack Benny, the “Rochester” accent, (sassy Black man-servant) for better or for worse, is also permanent and iconic. When people “do” it, they’re “doing” Eddie Anderson, who originated that role.

If you know any more, you can comment below or in the chat.

Object History

It is my fervent hope to have the last chapter of Oscar Pens out next week. I hope to turn it into an hour-long (or so) podcast episode before April. I know we have some new friends here has Twitter empties out. Welcome. Object History is a separate thing I did. Here’s a link to the first story in the series.

Bailed

I bailed earlier this month on the first book review I’ve ever bailed on in my life. I don’t want to write about it at length because what I have to say is potentially hurtful, but since I already started the review in the chat, it’s only fair to let you know that “Raised by a Serial Killer” is not a true crime book. It’s a trauma memoir.

I’ve come to understand that the book sprung from a famous true crime podcast, but it’s focus is on how sadistic a serial killer can be to his children. The answer is “VERY,” and although I finished it, I can’t recommend it as a true crime read.

Toward the end of this book about child torture and people murder, the author quotes someone saying “fucking” like this: f@cking. After 250 pages of routine physical and psychological abuse and humiliation, it turned me off a book I wasn’t glad I read.

I’m still making my goofy “Sentence of the Day” videos on YouTube and doing my weekly funeral news show.

Day Drinking on Delmarva will be back in two weeks.

That’ll do for now.

TR