In this week’s Boston Globe Ideas section (which is wonderful every week, by the way), James Parker briefly considers “Wrestling with the American Dream,” whose author, Florian Keller was a guest on The Sound a few weeks ago.
Keller in his book goes at this ”anticomedy” with the tongs of academe; but where contemporary commentators registered their bafflement in woolly references to European avant-gardism (”…like Ionesco doing stand-up,” ”comedy’s stand-up Pirandello,” ”the Dada of ha-ha,” etc.) Keller is committed to Kaufman’s Americanness-specifically his relationship to the American Dream. The moment in Kaufman’s set when Foreign Man, who has been nodding placidly along to a recording of the theme from ”Mighty Mouse,” suddenly raises his arm and lip-synchs the line ”Here I come to save the day!” is for Keller a ”primordial scene”: It ”basically re-enacts,” he writes, ”the most fundamental myth about America as the land of opportunities where immigrants can reinvent themselves.”
Also considered: the week that Kaufman opened for… wait for it… BARRY MANILOW.
TSOYA: “The American Dream” with Florian Keller, Louis CK, and Neil Hamburger (MP3)