Eddie Pepitone is not for the faint
of heart. His brand of hyper-self-loathing belted out relentlessly with his
signature eardrum shattering vocal cords––while hilarious––is not the type of standup
act that a mass audience is going to find suitable for their entertainment-as-escapism
needs. In his album “A Great Stillness,” E.P. pretty much shatters that already
weak boundary between comedy and tragedy, and then he invites you to laugh
along with him as he stomps angrily on the pieces. Which is to say, Pepitone is
fucking brutal. Not everyone is going to appreciate his self-deprecation and
madman outbursts that don’t let you forget for one second how absurd and
horrific life in the post-industrial American wasteland can be. The album is a
barrage of road tested bits and gags that show off his talent for producing
material designed precisely to tread uncomfortably between the lines of the
persona/clown onstage and the vulnerable man behind the crying clown make-up.
Pepitone is a master at revealing just enough of the actual man behind the
persona to make you uncomfortable, and that’s exactly what good comedy is
supposed to do, make you squirm just a little.
I have had conversations with friends
who totally disagree with me on Pepitone’s effectiveness, though. They just don’t
get why Pepitone is funny. I posit to them that the reason they just don’t “get
it" is because Americans have been conditioned to see the main purpose of comedy
as entertainment/amusement. The typical comedy in American media culture is a
type of existential pain-killer designed to wink at the audience with hip-fatigue and irony and reassure them that everything is OK, "the world is as it should be." But of course, Pepitone’s brand of humor is a totally different animal. Pepitone
uses comedy in the way that L. Wittgenstein understood it, as a way to speak of
things so terrible that the only way to address them is through a joke. Pepitone’s comedy is a sledge hammer of angst and darkness that is both personal and political. His act has this almost a religious quality to it in that he is able to
deal with despair in a communal setting that is both powerful and hilarious.
In his book “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche used the voice of a madman to announce to the world that “God is Dead,” but his point was that the world just didn’t realize it yet. Nietzsche’s madman was screaming to his audience a truth they were not yet ready to hear: God was dead and his blood was on their hands. Pepitone’s madman is similarly designed truth teller but with a different message. Pepitone invokes his audience to “be still and know your God” because yet another deity has risen from the ashes of the old one, the celebrity. Pepitone’s madman is telling us something that is difficult to admit, that no matter what God passes away we will still worship, and now we worship amusements and irrelevance. Our new Gods are the talking heads on our TV screens; the names and faces we all know and are disconnected from but wish to be near. Celebrities derive their power from their ability to nurture our ennui not with meaning but with amusement. They are the ultimate empty spectacle.
Pepitone knows this, that at the heart of corporate entertainment there isn't a soul, or an implicit belief system, or a telos, or anything like that––there's just another bottom line. And the angst Pepitone oozes on stage is partly due to the fact that he is conscious of these things and, at the same time, can't help but want himself to be worshiped too, as it were; he is in the entertainment "business" after all. But Pepitone is an authentic artist; he has a refreshing lack of the contemporary bad faith that plagues most mass entertainment in corporate media culture. In his act, beneath all the laughs and giggles, one can feel a real person driving at, and dealing with, some of the most basic themes of the human condition: things like pain, sadness, death, personal failure, and political powerlessness. Indeed, Pepitone is screaming about some of the most absurd and horrific things imaginable, and he is there to help us laugh in the face of them. If you want a stand up album that is going to make you acknowledge a little despair in order to get the joke, then Eddie Pepitone has some things to say to you.
In his book “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche used the voice of a madman to announce to the world that “God is Dead,” but his point was that the world just didn’t realize it yet. Nietzsche’s madman was screaming to his audience a truth they were not yet ready to hear: God was dead and his blood was on their hands. Pepitone’s madman is similarly designed truth teller but with a different message. Pepitone invokes his audience to “be still and know your God” because yet another deity has risen from the ashes of the old one, the celebrity. Pepitone’s madman is telling us something that is difficult to admit, that no matter what God passes away we will still worship, and now we worship amusements and irrelevance. Our new Gods are the talking heads on our TV screens; the names and faces we all know and are disconnected from but wish to be near. Celebrities derive their power from their ability to nurture our ennui not with meaning but with amusement. They are the ultimate empty spectacle.
Pepitone knows this, that at the heart of corporate entertainment there isn't a soul, or an implicit belief system, or a telos, or anything like that––there's just another bottom line. And the angst Pepitone oozes on stage is partly due to the fact that he is conscious of these things and, at the same time, can't help but want himself to be worshiped too, as it were; he is in the entertainment "business" after all. But Pepitone is an authentic artist; he has a refreshing lack of the contemporary bad faith that plagues most mass entertainment in corporate media culture. In his act, beneath all the laughs and giggles, one can feel a real person driving at, and dealing with, some of the most basic themes of the human condition: things like pain, sadness, death, personal failure, and political powerlessness. Indeed, Pepitone is screaming about some of the most absurd and horrific things imaginable, and he is there to help us laugh in the face of them. If you want a stand up album that is going to make you acknowledge a little despair in order to get the joke, then Eddie Pepitone has some things to say to you.
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