TO BUILD A FIRE

A rabbi, a priest, and a zebra go into a whorehouse. The facade of this Romanesque (frequently misidentified as Beaux Arts) building brilliantly aping the best work of H. H. Richardson (1836–1886), a neighbor and sometime collaborator of Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Central Park…

That’s how most films are written.^I They are assemblages of ideas (he wants to get the girl), and effects (a big, fat, scary monster descends from a cloud).

But every stand-up comedian knows that the extra syllable destroys the joke. These most practical of psychologists must learn the connection between their creation and the audience’s attention span, or fail onstage.

The overlong setup and the delayed punch line bore the listeners, who have loaned their attention in return for the promise of amusement or surprise. The comedian not only structures the twenty-second joke but builds upon its success and nature to form a set that, like its component jokes, will raise, lower, and then astound expectations.

For the audience is learning, through the individual gag, what to expect from the developing set. They may, for example, appreciate a change of tempo or tone, having learned that the performer may be trusted to reward what is, after all, their faith in his ability to deliver.

Example:

Comedian:… and the cow was returned to its rightful owner (AUDIENCE LAUGHS).

Comedian: No, but seriously, folks, can we get serious for a moment. I’m up here “joking around,” and you might think, Ha ha, but what’s the point…?

One wouldn’t open a set with “No, but what is the point?,” but the audience, having laughed at “the cow,” has learned that the comedian is changing the tone merely to delight them with a surprise, AND THEY HAVE GAINED THE FAITH THAT HE WILL DO SO.

How did the comedian come by his education? Did he learn it in “Comedy School”? Should such exist, they can’t teach the lesson; they can only, at best, describe or simulate it (like film schools) in a protected—that is, make-believe—setting.

The comedian does not read books on structure and delivery; he watches other performers, and then tries out his act onstage. And only there, and through his humiliating and thus unforgettable failures, does he develop skill.

During the westward migration myriad advice books were written on pioneering, homesteading, prospecting, and so on. But the neophyte when tired, lost, or confused was faced with imperative, baffling, and often terrifying situations which the books may have described, but did not prepare him for.

See Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire.” Here our hero, lost and shivering, manages to build that fire which alone can save him from freezing to death. He uses all his strength to gather the scant fuel, and his last match to ignite it. But he has built it under a snow-laden tree; the fire melts the snow, which falls and extinguishes it, and our hero dies.

But had he lived, there is no way on earth he would have again made the same mistake. So with the performer. The confession “I was dying up there,” is as close to truth as one may get with metaphor.

The filmmaker may begin with intuition, and imitation, but his personal vision both of film and of “this” film can only develop through trial and painful error in front of an audience. Unless, of course, he doesn’t care.

If he’s working to please bureaucrats or their cronies, the Press and the Awards Committees, he can make his film a construction or amalgamation of elements designed to appeal to their popular prejudices: pornography, diversity, action sequences, deeply felt explications, and so on.

This is like the adolescent boy’s fantasy of constructing the Perfect Mate: “The ____ of Mary; the ____ of Sue; with Betsy’s ____ but Joan’s intelligence.”

The unschooled and virgin boy doesn’t realize that any eventual mate or partner will be an actual human being, and his ignorant timidity expresses itself as a wise Epicureanism.

So it is with the dolt producers, virgin of union with an audience, employing their intelligence to fashion, like the boy, a lifeless amalgam.

I. See “Belinda Raguesto Returns from Switzerland,” from Recessional (2022), by this author.