I hereby admit to belonging to a pathetic cadre of "Mr. Show" devotees. We've hosted sedentary marathons in our apartments, stockpiled Bob and David bootlegs bought on eBay, and incorporated the "lessons" from the show's skits into our lives like parables from some foulmouthed, existential Tele-Talmud. I also admit to having developed a strange, extra-textual concern for David Cross. Likeminded futon-psychoanalysts fret over his fluctuating weight, his fitfulness and despondence, his drinking and drugging, and the degree to which he seems either to be "really trying" or "just getting by." We even think we've detected some anxiety in him regarding his age and an apparent prolonged adolescence, a tension common in indie-folk old enough to remember when a Buffalo Tom t-shirt (Cross sported one here and there back in the day) was a Friday night staple.
I recently got a chance to impose my assumptions on Cross in person, when "Mr. Show"'s "Hooray for America" tour came to DC. The day of the show, I was in a posh glasses shop, begging the clerks to fix the specs I'd destroyed the previous night. I'd already spotted Henry Fool's Thomas Jay Ryan that day, so by the cosmic idiotic rule of three, I was due for two more brushes with unbridled famousness. My friend was staring at some cyborg-shades that fit over your skull, like a mohawk blended with that Bespin robo-slave's digi-headwrap. That's when I saw a wiry David Cross sneering through the shop's doors. We pursued him, noting that he was smaller than we'd dreamed (a fragile flower). Flinchy and downcast, he looked miserable between his headphones, which we imagined he might be wearing as some form of protection. We stalked him until he went into an international news store, and gentle giant Ralph Nader came striding from the opposite direction, fulfilling the trinity and forcing us to recalibrate our gawking.
On his new double CD, David Cross trashes President Secondbush's leadership by claiming that even Nader would have bombed Afghanistan. He also gives his would-be nannies many, many reasons to worry about his "wellness." Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! could be subtitled Portrait of the Atheist as a Ranting Phantom. David Cross's latest comedy project will elicit laughter, but without the uplift: his drive to amuse via rage is, ultimately, a colossal bummer.
Slathering fangeeks-- the people already trafficking in the album's punchlines instead of being independently funny; the ones who bought up the depressing heap of catchphrase-merch at the Mr. Show concerts-- are too quick to make a guru of Cross and his sharp, protean mimicry of Odenkirk's nonlinear child-man. The comic principles in Cross's stand-up and on "Mr. Show" work, though they're so exciting at first encounter, they threaten to become crutches. These elements are amusing, but not new: they're not what we non-slathering-- but still sick and needy-- "Mr. Show" disciple-scum expected from this long, long player. You decide:
A) Profanity. See the title! See the warranted explicit content sticker! See the cuss-pocked liner notes that end with an apology for all the "lazy" swearing! I love me some potty mouth, but after repeated plays of this CD, the listener begins to understand that profanity is nihilistic, a kind of anti-language: utterances that eliminate themselves. The fucking planet's full of fucking fuckers, according to this fucking disc, and fuck, man, are they fucking fucked. Will future cultures view our profanity as a generational cry for help, since so many funny and intelligent folks' response to our global predicament is to flee to the sweet, default comfort of obscenity's shitty asshole? (See also The Onion and Get Your War On.)
B) "Breaking whatever walls are left, now that everything's meta-." Like a scrappier Letterman, David Cross loves to leave piss-stains on the parameters of sketchy comedy and stand-up. On this mammoth, career-defining statement, he includes an audience member's apparently drunken interference, and an impromptu trashing of people who forgot to turn off their telecommunications revolutions during his performance.
C) Reading from sources. Like his earlier readings from Goodpussy or spurious dating guides, Cross presents some anecdotes from a Promise Keepers handbook, an Atlanta newspaper, and an ad for Squagels. The riffing is exquisite, but not singular: the world's full of material so painfully absurd that it can speak for itself. Cross comes off like a kid throwing a pebble at a charging pit bull; I'd assume most of us spend a good part of our dayjob hours spotting similarly maddening minutiae, as a salve against the ways it overwhelms us.
D) Risking alienating your audience. Squint in bastardized awe as Cross confidently offers his sickest Catholic-blast since the raped-by-Mary bit in his much tighter HBO special "The Pride Is Back". It involves children, duh, and it needn't be repeated by anyone who believes their soul has a Velcro underbelly to which crud could stick. A moment involving the n-word is the boldest mock unveiling of concealed prejudice since Denis Johnson's African breakdown in his essay collection Seek. In "The Pride Is Back", Cross had even made fun of losing his audience, saying, "Yeah, get to the comedy, enough of this 'I don't like Jesus'."
By the second disc of Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!-- which is much more vitriolic than the comparatively frivolous first-- Cross has obviously passed the point of no return, and is so clear in his convictions/aversions that he can tirade and judge as if atop a soapbox in the center of a Kurtzian compound. Cross even mines the ruins of the World Trade Center for comic zirconium, preferring to call "the events of September 11" "the week football stopped." The package's most glorious image comes in his description of a New York rollerblader outfitted with a deluxe gas mask-- what a perfect icon for this age of perfect icons. Though I find his spiel about the WTC rubble's foul smell almost inhumane, he is brave to tiptoe, then stomp onto terrain viewed as off-limits for comedy, which is still a very hypocritical stance for a country that freely circulates jokes about Helen Keller, Anne Frank, Ethiopians, dead babies, and the Challenger astronauts.
E) Lengthy, impassioned skewering of marginal celebrities. Rickey Henderson gets it this time! And the VH1 non-band Harlow! Before you can think "who's next, Rhea Perlman?" remember that Cross knows these aren't moving targets, and that's his point: look how much !#@%!&$ mental space these "stars" take up.
F) Disdain for mass gatherings/trends. A running theme in his career, from the days when he'd harangue the Aspen Comedy Festival, to his anti-award-show rants, to his Tampa Bay story about the abused elephant's galactic vagina. Now comes this album's impaling of Atlanta street parties and the flag fad. Cross is the portrait of homeland insecurity, doomed to a state of Ashcroft-ordained heightened alertness.
G) Disdain for religion. He even admits to being "obsessed," and he sounds it, more so than ever. At some points his voice trembles, he yells, and even repeats himself-- just like the preachers he's excoriating. The irony of sounding preachy about being preached to is heavy, unfunny freight.
Again, you might enjoy bits of this ("missile defense shields work by magic," Cross explains) but it's hard on the spirit. Cross slings invective, sometimes witlessly, only to end on "that's so stupid" or "that's fucked up." Anyone who shares his politics and sensitivities will probably already have thought of the things he says here. At one point, Cross acknowledges he's in a rut of beginning topics with "Another thing I hate..." He's aggressively curmudgeonly, and skirts losing composure as his observations accumulate. Self-deprecation remains a subtext. I love him, but he sounds defeated. Is the title aimed at his targets or at himself? I've been one of the multitudes asking "where's the anger?" lately, but now that I hear it, I feel just as confused, empty, and emotionally homeless as Cross.
