I just got my ticket to go see Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen on their Portlandia Tour. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen live comedy. If you don’t count the group from Second City Chicago I saw in December on vacation, it’s probably been since 2008 seeing the Kids in the Hall in 2008.
Speaking of the Second City crew, they were disappointingly weak. I saw two shows of theirs. One was mostly sketch with a couple of improv bits and the other was entirely improv. Their scripted sketches were fairly sharp. Unfortunately, their improv was flat. It was more than just bad suggestions from the crowd. The actors didn’t know what to do with the suggestions they had, and didn’t really seem interested in trying. Having spent many, many nights in the nineties at Atlanta’s Whole World Theatre enjoying a pretty good improv cast, I can say I was certainly disappointed in what was supposed to be the preeminent improv troupe. I miss that old Whole World cast.
The nineties makes for a nice segue back to Portlandia.
Portlandia seems to be born of the nineties, seeking to lampoon the remnants of nineties culture or counterculture. Its subject matter is generally what we would have called “alternative” in the nineties, but would probably be considered “hipster” in the current vernacular. The series begins with the song, “The Dream of the Nineties is Alive in Portland,” which mentions many of the touchstones of the culture from which the series draws its inspiration. It’s the idea that weirdness isn’t just accepted, it’s encouraged. Get that body mod. Go to clown school. Sleep late. Work at a coffee shop. It’s the paradise of the cynical slacker generation, going so far as to call Portland the place where young people go to retire.
That’s something that should be pretty easy to sell to me as a member of that generation; someone carrying nostalgia for his twenties. Anybody who knows me knows how stuck in the nineties I am. The long hair and beard I sport was grunge, then stoner rock, and now is considered beardo metal. Shit, I haven’t had to buy new clothes in twenty years other than occasional concert t-shirts.
But, as is common in sketch comedy, not every sketch works. Some are hits and others misses. Unfortunately, this show has more misses than I’d like to see for a series that is only nine episodes old. Yet, I continue to be drawn to this show: watching, waiting for the laughs.
That’s probably because I can somewhat identify with the scene they’re mocking. Sure, I don’t live in Portland, or Austin, or Ashville, or even Williamsburg, but every city has its own enclave like this. It’s the area packed with dive bars, coffee shops, independent record stores, and burrito joints: all staffed by the dyed, pierced, and tattooed set. It’s where you’re more likely to hear a local act on the jukebox than a top 40 hit. It’s where the urban pop artist is more heavily represented than is likely deserved. It’s where riding a bike everywhere is flaunted as a badge of pride.
The characters in the Portlandia skits are the stereotypes, nay, archetypes of the scene. They’re the militant proprietors of the feminist bookstore. They’re the members of the adult hide and seek league. They’re the locavores who will leave the restaurant to drive to a farm to see the conditions in which the chickens are raised: to make sure the chickens are happy. They’re the grocery store clerks who can’t believe you didn’t bring your own bag.
The set ups are great for skewering a whole set of personalities and behaviors from this generation: groups who sometimes take themselves entirely too seriously, who could use a good ribbing, and should probably take a moment every now and again to laugh at themselves. But the blows never land. Instead, there’s a noticeable twee component to the sketches. Punches are pulled and replaced by a smile and a wink. It’s almost as if they duo are saying, “You’ve had your own run-ins with people like this. Insert your own punch line. Laugh at your own similar experience.”
Is that an intentional strategy of the team to soften the blows of what could have been outright mockery? Are Armisen and Brownstein afraid to offend? Maybe. Their audience seems to be primarily the same types of people they would mock. For a show that seems to draw such a niche crowd it’s probably not a good idea to alienate your core audience. Would we, their core audience, be too thin skinned to laugh at ourselves and instead abandon the show?
Maybe there’s another reason for the soft comedy, and that could lie in the performers themselves. I don’t watch a lot of SNL, but when I have, nothing Armisen has done has been particularly funny or memorable. At least he comes from a background in comedy. Brownstein is known as a musician, playing guitar and singing for the band Sleater-Kinney. While it may be considered blasphemy to the indie crowd or this shows fan base, which are essentially the same group, I was never into Sleater-Kinney. What turned me off most was Brownstein’s voice. On many occasions it seemed like Brownstein was trying so hard to belt songs out that she lost all sense of melody. Her voice was just loud with a wild vibrato, reminiscent of the braying of some barnyard animal.
Despite not being particularly enamored with either of that cast members in the past, here I am following the show and shelling out money to go see them perform live in a venue in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood, one of Atlanta’s bohemian pockets that resembles the show’s targets. The area is replete with dive bars, a coffee shop, two independent record stores, a tattoo shop, a bike shop, and even a burrito joint, the one that spawned Mastodon, considered the standard bearers of the beardo/hipster metal scene.
All of this leads me to ask myself this one question: Is my desire to want to like Portlandia stronger than the material itself?
I don’t yet have that answer.
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