On the durability of the inside joke.
Being the story of three men and their shared obsession with Rabbit's Kin, a 1952 Warner Brothers Looney Tunes short.
It was back in the late '70s-early '80s that My Close Personal Friend Ron G. and I first met Mr. Barre Duryea, a fellow we hit it off with pretty much right off the bat on account of several affinities, most of them relating to the musical and cinematic arts. As young men are frequently wont to, we were fond of quoting back and forth to each other our favorite bits from our favorite cultural artifacts. Lines from the Firesign Theater's "Continuing Adventures of Nick Danger" were especially well-trod—"You can wait here in the sitting room or you can sit here in the waiting room" and the like. This is the sort of thing that makes the woman, or women, in your life conclude that you are at the very least slightly mentally retarded, as I'm sure many of you know. Not that Barre, Ron, or myself were ever deterred by such judgment.
One cartoon we were particularly fascinated by was the 1952 Looney Tune Rabbit's Kin. It was actually one of the handful of '50s-era Tunes we were really into, being such Golden Age purists and all, and our enthusiasm for it stemmed from one thing: its villain, the uber-grotesque Pete Puma, from whom Bugs protects an adorably wide-eyed baby bunny. The Puma had a supremely goofy voice and a habit of punctuating his sentences with an extended, high-pitched whine that my cronies and I delighted in impersonating. (We did so frequently enough that the women in our lives were soon pursuaded that our mental conditions were far more serious than they had initially perceived.) Naifs that we were, we wondered how, precisely, cartoon voice maestro Mel Blanc had come up with the effect. As it happened, Blanc came to lecture at William Paterson College in 1980 and during the Q&A one of us asked him about the Puma. We were flummoxed that he had zero recollection of the character. Had Mel gone senile? No. I believe it was Barre, who had/has a fairly astonishing expertise in recorded comedy of the late '50s-early '60s, who unearthed the fact that is was Stan Freberg—who also conceived The Three Little Bops for Warners' cartoon division—who embued the Puma with the power of gnarled speech.
Cut to Winter 2008. Barre now heads up the road crew for The Patti Smith Group. (Point of fact, it was I and My Close Personal Friend Ron G. who got him on this career path—way back in the day, when Barre got a job at the Crazy Eddie on Rt. 17 in Paramus, we commended him to our acquaintance Bill in the amp repair department, a.k.a. Bill Million of The Feelies, for whom Barre started doing guitar tech shortly thereafter.) I read in one of my Sundance Film Festival updates or roundups or whatnot that there's gonna be a Patti Smith doc at the Festival. Now, as surely as night follows day, if you're a living musician and there's a doc about you at the Sundance Film Festival, you're gigging the Sundance Film Festival as well. So I give my friend Barre a ring. "I suspect you're going to be at the Sundance Film Festival," I says. "Yeah," he says, "it's gonna be a pretty tough gig to get into, so whatever ins you've got, or strings you can pull, you should start now."
What a funny guy.
Well, I did have ins, pulled strings, and got into the Music Lounge show, in which Smith presented off a nicely condensed version of her fantastically shamanistic show, and afterwards, I parked myself by the stage door and asked a publicist—one of my ins—if she could alert Barre to my presence so I could give him a quick hello and see what was up for later. She came back after some time, bearing a somewhat bemused look on her face. Behind that bemusement, I thought I saw a question. The question being, "Are you guys retarded?"
"Barre says I can let you in, but you have to answer a quiz first." I knew what was coming. "Complete the following: 'But I don't want no tea. It gives me a headache. 'Well, what shall we have then?'"
Of course I recognized the dialogue that occurs in the aftermath of the inevitable "one lump or two?" trick Bugs Bunny plays on the Puma at a fake tea-time, causing the predator, here "disguised" as the baby rabbit's mother who's been so WORRIED about the little feller, to adopt a new favorite beverage.
"'Coffee!'" I responded, almost on a reflex, and in the Puma voice as well. I think I whined, too. And was summarily ushered backstage. When I related this to My Close Personal Friend Ron G. later, he responded, as he will, "Well I'm glad you were able to meet up with Barre and take him to dinner, because I've been so WORRIED about him." It's reassuring to know some bonds are eternal...
Stop slapping me!
Posted by: Sam Adams | January 30, 2008 at 12:42 PM
I like the idea of cartoons better than actually watching them. Hugh Kenner's book on Chuck Jones was more interesting than anything Chuck ever did with the exception of Duck Amuck and some of the Road Runner stuff, which, at its best, can be placed next to Beckett on the existential/white humor shelf. The only cartoon I ever watched with any regularity as a kid was Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. I liked it, I think, because it was monochromatic and the laugh track was minimal, like the fake studio audience was collectively hooked up to a Quaalude drip. Speaking of 714, my dad was a pharmacist and I dreaded waiting for him to come home. The drive from Long Beach to Encino can turn even the most sanguine of people into a character from a Larry Cohen movie. I'm going to repeat what I just said to someone else and hopefully they will disseminate this information to the general public.
Posted by: Chad Channing | January 30, 2008 at 01:43 PM
Hilarious! But you clearly don't know enough women. I've never known ANYONE of any gender who could resist quoting their favorite film or tv references - even in a funny voice.
Posted by: oakling | January 30, 2008 at 08:06 PM
Omigod. My friend Joe Busam and I found ourselves briefly doing Pete Puma routines last November when we got together for a memorable sushi dinner in Louisville. Incidentally, the voice Freberg did was based on that of Frank Fontaine's popular character, Crazy Guggenheim. I thought it was Fontaine that did it, until you corrected me.
Incidentally, I happened to meet Mel Blanc on that same college tour, and he refused to admit that Foghorn Leghorn's voice had any basis in that of Kenny Delmar's radio character Senator Claghorn, a fixture of Fred Allen's show. "I do voices," Blanc insisted, "I'm not an impressionist."
BTW, my own particular Firesign Theatre fixation is actually the Porgie Tirebiter sketch from DON'T CRUSH THAT DWARF, HAND ME THE PLIERS. All it takes to get me started is the real thing -- poweful gasoline, a clean windshield, and a shoeshine.
Posted by: Tim Lucas | January 31, 2008 at 12:04 AM
I don't know that it was the quoting per se, Oakling...it was more like the insistent frequency of the quoting—to the extent that out conversations consisted at times of almost nothing else—that maddened our consorts.
Ah, Porgie Tirebiter...
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | January 31, 2008 at 03:50 PM
Swordfish.
Glad you were able to come in out of the cornstarch and dry your mucklucks by the fire.
Posted by: jim emerson | January 31, 2008 at 06:42 PM
Speaking in movie quotes is ingrained in our systems. Last summer at Slapsticon, I was at breakfast with two friends and the wife of one of them. She was telling us about how well-traveled their 11-year-old daughter was, noting she'd recently been to Niagara Falls. Right on cue, all three of us males shouted, "Niagara Falls! Slo-o-owly I turn, step by step..." She began slapping herself on the forehead and sighed, "When will I ever learn?" Never, apparently.
Posted by: cadavra | February 01, 2008 at 02:47 AM
I have no idea what any of you are talking about. It all sounds like the same person, or, six people in one room all sharing the same computer.
Posted by: Chad Channing | February 01, 2008 at 12:33 PM
"It all sounds like the same person, or, six people in one room all sharing the same computer."
And you're one of them! Kind of bone-chilling, isn't it?
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | February 01, 2008 at 12:49 PM
Monsieur Kenny, your last 2 or 3 posts have illuminated what is bound to strike any conscientious French person (yes, I include myself) as the ultimate cinema dilemma. To wit, are all of us -- even or especially critics -- merely more or less happy creatures of our time and environment, with special pleasures we know deep down will not stand the test of time? Or are we Sainte-Beuve, grimly guarding the gates of immortality? A response indicating that it is possible to be both will be understantable and very American, but less than satisfying.
Posted by: crazysummerswithbrigitte | February 01, 2008 at 08:07 PM
I love you, Crazysummers, but I resent you backing me into a corner. I suspect you know exactly what you're doing, though. Because having properly deemed the "both" answer to be less than satisfying, you know I'm gonna rise to your challenge, and you know I'm gonna own up and say we are Saint-Beuve, grimly guarding the gates of immortality. To which sentiment I will append Camus' immortal envoi: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
So there.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | February 01, 2008 at 11:12 PM
Pah. Sisyphus is happy at Cannes. Will you be going?
Posted by: crazysummerswithbrigitte | February 02, 2008 at 07:37 PM
Don't know yet. Don't jinx me, CSWB.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | February 02, 2008 at 08:08 PM