An Awards Show With Too Few Winners

What about these American Comedy Awards? Is this show George Schlatter’s attempt at an opulent black-tie Hollywood extravaganza designed to rival the Oscars and the Grammys and televised live coast-to-coast? Or is it an ironically empty example of just how far our culture has descended into an ongoing orgy of ceremonial self-congratulation?

Certainly Schlatter has to be commended for his attempt to institutionalize a form that by nature prizes the rebel, the iconoclast, the ironist, the outsider--even when comedy operates within the fetid confines of television (and even though comedians draw some of our top show-biz salaries and are right up there with our highest-visibility celebs). In this regard, the show (the second anniversary of which aired May 17 on ABC) is like throwing out a fish net through which everyone escapes.

There has to be a delicious dada-ist tension, unknown among big-time awards shows, in which virtually everyone gets up onstage to disclaim everything while carrying off an award.

As George Carlin, one of the smoothest and best-prepared comedians on the show, said, “This is my second straight year as a presenter. I haven’t gotten anything yet, but that’s all right. As everybody knows, these awards mean absolutely nothing.”

As well they should. The true comedian knows only one reward--the immediate response to what he or she is expressing. The rest, at least as far as awards like this are concerned, is a decorous lure to come home, to lighten up, to hide the fangs, to get with the Establishment. In other words, to deaden the vocal opposition.

Some of the comedians, such as Carlin, Roseanne Barr, Judy Tenuta and Garry Shandling, understood that the joke didn’t end when one stood up to be among this year’s anointed (“Suffah!” said Tenuta, to the others in hers and everyone else’s category who were nominated and didn’t get anything, expressing the secret wicked thrill every winner of every award show has to feel).

Many others, by playing it straight and looking somewhat confused, didn’t. The insufferably vain Chevy Chase came on like a sleepwalker mimicking his waking self. Madeline Kahn and Betty White sang a Broadway-style production number called “Teams” that seemed so anomalous that it might as well have been played in the Palladium parking lot.

Tracey Ullman exposed her relentless, bludgeoning cheer by taking it all too seriously and telling us, “I guess this really does mean I’m the funniest woman in the universe.” Jack Lemmon, who has labored lo these many years for acceptance in the Hollywood inner sanctum, like a show-biz George Bush, seemed a bit nonplussed when mimic George Carl never left him free onstage to commemorate Blake Edwards as this years’s winner of the Lifetime Creative Achievement award. (He turned to Carl as if to say “Enough is enough,” and he was right. Should his whole speech have been subject to ridicule?)

That category, incidentally, points up one of the several areas in which the show is poorly conceived. Edwards got the creative achievement award, George Burns and Imogene Coca got the Lifetime Achievement awards. The word creative implies a poor distinction (are Burns and Coca comedic mules?). There has to be another way of categorizing special awards, perhaps by naming the biggie after a comedic innovator, the way the Oscars bestow an Irving Thalberg award. And maybe the lifetime award should be left out altogether as long as we keenly feel the absence, even as nominees, of Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Mort Sahl, Bill Cosby--some of the many troupers who are still out there.

The categories in general are a mess in their attempt to encompass too much and by confusing who is to be awarded for what. This year’s show was, of course, launched in the face of the writers’ strike, and it was impressive to see how ill-equipped so many of the comics were when they couldn’t do their routines and didn’t have lines written for the occasion with which to cover themselves.

In fact, one of the more interesting sidelights of the show was its exposure of the generation gap, in which older comedians, such as Sid Caesar, could address a large gathering with an eye for ceremonial fashion, while so many of the younger comedians, raised in the hothouse privacy of TV viewing, used superciliousness to disguise their lack of social grace.

But it wasn’t the absence of writers that made the show gather in a slow wave of desperation that crashed towards the end in a shambles of abandoned film clips, abbreviated categories, awards winners’ names yelled from the deck of a sinking production rammed against the edge of its time-allotment. It was Martin Pasetta Jr.’s sloppy direction and Schlatter’s lack of focus about what he really wanted this show to be--awards extravaganza or satire.

If it’s a straight awards show Schlatter’s after--and there is, after all, an esthetic even to this kind of self-important ornamental Hollywood tackiness--then his is the runt of the seasonal ceremonial litter.

But if he’s after something else, a celebration of talent couched in an exquisite parody of the awards show format, then he may be on to something. The authentic comedian, when elected to anything, will always demand a recount. Schlatter knows, like the rest of us, that there’s an awful lot of talent out there that deserves more acknowledgement than the evanescence of a laugh or the collective fondness of private memory. There’s nothing wrong with public tribute. Schlatter just hasn’t found the way to do it yet. I hope that he’s given the freedom to keep on trying in comedy’s anarchic spirit. We don’t need another dumb awards show.