If you have questions about the new album from Father John Misty, Pure Comedy, you are not alone. Are we supposed to collapse into a depressed stupor after listening to it, or are we supposed to laugh it off, knowing that everything will be okay so long as we don’t think about it too much? And who is Father John Misty now, how threadbare is the cord holding up the mask behind which Josh Tillman operates? Is he like Heraclitus who weeps openly at the tragedy of existence, or given the title of the album, like Democritus, still the ironist who publicly laughs at the absurdity? Is he a minstrel philosopher, or is Josh Tillman just full of sh*t?
Walking into the beautifully restored Kings Theatre in Brooklyn earlier this week, I had a certain amount of trepidation about how I would feel about these questions upon exiting the theatre. To me, the telling would be in the nature of the spectacle; from it I hoped to learn what he really meant by the word comedy. Is it simply a series of things at which to laugh, an ironic name for an album that seems to declaim the tragedy of the whole enterprise of Life, or something else, something a little deeper?
The show began with the title track of the album and a continuation of the iconic album art, which gives the album its atmospheric contemporaneousness almost as much as the music does. The cartoons, a revisiting of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights for the twenty-first century from artist Ed Steed, were projected behind the band, with a circle functioning, just as on the album art, as a Moon and Sun, as well as a magnifying glass for the grotesque but sadly familiar figures parading across the backdrop. Much like the Garden of Earthly Delights, you can’t look away. And I didn’t have to. The parade of cartoons continued through the first four songs on the album following the title track.
During “Total Entertainment Forever” we fell backwards through a VR screen and into the after party of the “permanent party.” Misty, our wriggling host, receding into darkness as the stage lights illuminated not him, but us, the audience. For “Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution,” we zoomed out from earth and watched it overheat, drums blistering into that primal scene, and then return to temperature — that “godless rock that refuses to die.” “Ballad Of The Dying Man” featured a kind of receding pinwheel of layers, much like the Seven Circles of Hell, at the middle of which was nothing but the mechanical gears turning the whole scene, and of course, the face of Death, smiling behind his hood.
As Tillman crooned those familiar “oohhhhs” that you either love or hate, underscored by a steel guitar riff for the apocalypse, I thought of Bergman, of The Seventh Seal, the traveling players, the game of chess, and the dance lead by Death. And as “Birdie” and “A Bigger Paper Bag” rolled by, and then the piano to “When The God of Love Returns” (a song which I could swear is some kind of final supplemental track to Dylan’s Saved), came lilting in, some thoughts began to coalesce.
When the band moved into Funtimes In Babylon I began to wonder if the confusion over Pure Comedy actually stems from the fact that most of us haven’t fully been paying attention. While I’ve never met Josh Tillman, as a person brought up in the fundamental evangelical tradition, I recognize some of the places he’s coming from: The allusions, the decision to be a singer of parables instead of psalms, the use of the mask, all these point to, among others, Nietzsche — who was also brought up by devoutly Christian parents.
Nietzsche taught that not only can philosophy only ever be done from behind a mask, it must first be done with a hammer. The nearly unconscious pedestals upon which we place so many of the beliefs we hold must be shattered. With each album, Tillman continues to do just that, from addressing the epic qualities we each endow our search for individuation and freedom with, through to our search for companionship, and now into our conceptions of history and the value of progress.
His debut album as Father John Misty, Fear Fun, was about much more than a funky folkster doodling at the edges of the deserts of post-modernity for our pleasure. It is more than delicious ironic commentary; it is a kind of Nietzschean genealogy, a journey outward beyond the Goods and Evils held by millennial hipsters. What I have discovered is that fear and fun are the real feelings that lie behind our notions of good and evil, fact and falsehood, right and wrong, progress or regress. Fear and fun are the ways we look at the world, and our time on it. But it is not an either or situation, they bleed into one other all the time.
As he mugged his way through “Bored In the USA,” and danced through a glittering and raucous version of “True Affection,” I considered how my concept of “Love,” and the context it arises in, is an example of how often this bleed happens, and how even Misty’s stage presence and gestures are all meant to remind us that this is a shell game. It is more than coincidence that “I Love You Honeybear” is followed by an 1800+ word introduction to Comedy that concludes with a mediation on the blind justice of that self-same mammal, “Bears, Man.”
It’s simply in our nature that fear and fun cannot be experienced in pure isolation from each other. What’s more, fear is the underlying reason for so many of the serious social issues of our time, the consequences not of what is happening, but will happen. Fear is always of a future experience, while fun is experienced in the present — that which we seek to occupy our minds to postpone the realizations of our fears, which is often the very activity that brings our deepest fears to fruition.
We live our lives in these movements of fear and fun as if there were an audience for which we are performers. Not just the other “ghosts in cheap rental suits” around us audience, but some sort of cosmic audience unknown in the future, hidden in the past, or omniscient in the present. This implicit belief in an audience is what we really mean when we talk about anything in the contemporary world that involves a “should,” a “better,” or any other imperative that involves a progression in a particular direction. But we’re just a blip in the nothing; there is no such audience.
This is where I think most of us would put a full stop to Pure Comedy, the cosmic joke of it all, and how at odds this is with our feelings about it and our fear of the ecclesiastical vanity of history. This fear that our successes and failures, our progresses are as meaningless as the budding of the trees, and the browning of the leaves. This fear that supersedes even the fear of our own individual deaths. But as FJM asked us to sit and listen to “So I’m Growing Old On Magic Mountain,” and the cartoons returned, and led into “In Twenty Years Or So,” where a priest strapped to a crucifix topped rocket flies through space towards the moon, with sad dopey grin on his face, I couldn’t help thinking about the serenity in those two songs, and that they are telling us there’s something more to Comedy than just the joke.
Comedy, in an archaic sense — what some would call its purest form — is something more than just a spectacle that evokes laughter, though laughter may be involved. It is a performance in which lines between high and low, good and bad, right and wrong, master and slave, performer and audience all melt away. It is an event in which fear and fun coalesce into another experience entirely — an abnegation of any pretense of superiority or uniqueness from the rest of Life. Not humorous, but a wild affirmation of the facticity of this strange spark, this blip in the nothing.
The final lines of “In Twenty Years Or So” rang out: “This must be the place, and it’s a miracle to be alive, one more time, there’s nothing to fear here,” followed by the stoic hum of stringed instruments coming from the players sitting just below the moon, and then the echoes of the final bell as the rocket priest impacted with the moon and then becomes the man in the moon. I thought: This is it, this is what I was hoping to encounter. A thing fully other than irony and sincerity, an absorption deeper than fear and fun. And I laughed.
And then I laughed again remembering that early on in the show, the guy behind me had been aggressively arguing with the guy in front of me about his choice to stand up for the opening song. They cursed, tussled hands, and vowed to fight after. Demented monkeys singing along about demented monkeys. But in the silence following that bell, I began to wonder if they were actually part of the troupe? Where did the performance really end and audience really begin? And that is the point — pure comedy.
So by the end of the show I had my answer: Josh Tillman is so much more than just another white guy jerking off across popular culture. He is a musical Montaigne. With this new tour, he reminds us, there is no audience, nothing to applaud us as a species or to tell us we were disappointing, or could have been a better version of a race of demented monkeys. This may sound bleak, but it isn’t, it’s actually liberating. These are scary times, to be sure. No one seems to know how close we are to fresh wars, potentially nuclear ones, or if we are the generation that has lit the fuse for the implosion of democracy, or the generation who simply exhausts the resources of the planet, one server farm and iced coffee cup at a time.
But this can’t be tragedy because tragedy requires an audience. The result of twenty years or so is that there will be no audience, this is it. We are the audience and performers, Pure Comedy, if you can bear it. If you can’t, that’s okay. Feel your fear and have your fun.
Zach White is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. He has a Masters in Philosophy from the New School of Social Research.
