Eating the Dinosaur

  My first clue, I think, was hearing people talk about Muriel’s Wedding in 1994. I don’t think I saw Muriel’s Wedding until 1997. It did not seem like a movie I would enjoy.2 But whenever I heard people talking about how great it was, they inevitably used a very specific phrase when describing the soundtrack: “It’s all ABBA music.” They did not say, “All the music is by ABBA,” or “It’s nothing but ABBA songs.” They would always say, “It’s all ABBA music.” And what I came to realize is that these moviegoers were unknowingly making a critical distinction that explains why this group is so resilient and timeless. They weren’t just saying, “It’s all ABBA music.” They were saying, “It’s all ABBA Music.” The M requires capitalization. And this is because—more than any other group of the post-Beatles era—ABBA is a genre unto itself. It’s a brand of music that’s sometimes recognizable in different songs and sometimes glimpsed through other artists, and everyone naturally grasps the qualities that come with it; you sometimes hear elements of it in department stores or druggy foreign films or New Age religious services. But only ABBA could make ABBA Music in totality. They are the only group who completely understands what they do, including the things they do wrong. So if that is what you like, there is only one place to really get it. The rest of culture does not matter. The Grateful Dead were kind of like this as well, but not as singularly as ABBA; while it’s easy to think of artists who deliver a comparable sonic experience to the Dead, the closest equivalent to ABBA Music—probably the Bee Gees—doesn’t come close at all.

  The harder question, of course, is “What qualities does ABBA Music possess?” Its musical traits have been outlined ad nauseam elsewhere: Their records feature a wall of sound where overdubbing makes every detail bigger and brighter than it should be. The hooks are mammoth and the lyrics are unspecific. The songs are made for dancing in a very big room. Now, these traits can be found elsewhere (they’re just as present in ABBA replicants like Ace of Base, albeit recorded less artfully due to advances in technology). What makes ABBA different is time and geography; operating out of Stockholm in the seventies, they were (a) singing in a second language, and (b) living with real ideological distance from the trend-conscious worlds of New York and L.A. and London. They had an intense Tin Pan Alley professionalism (if Björn and Benny felt like writing an uptempo T. Rex song, they’d just sit down and knock off “Watch Out” in three hours), but they were also laissez-faire Scandinavian hippies who didn’t have to worry about crime or sexual mores or health care. It was impossible to tell if they were progressives or reactionaries.3 ABBA wanted to reach audiences in America, but they lacked a framework for what that entailed. Their best option was to make one up. They tried to create a simulacrum for how the American pop ethos appeared to objective Swedish outsiders. This is where we get the weirdness of ABBA: the Star Trek outfits, the histrionic onstage super-vamping, and the curious decision to consistently make Swedish women sing English narratives with Spanish4 themes. What ABBA built was a previously nonexistent pop universe: It was a serious attempt to embody U.S. culture, attempted by European citizens who weren’t remotely interested in being American. Consequently, it was always a little off. Sometimes it was too much. But it was successful. And everyone knew it. And that success became part of the sound. The fact that every human on earth (including their most vehement detractors) was keenly aware of ABBA’s magnitude changed how the songs came across. It validated the obtuseness and bewildered the inflexible. “ABBA was so mainstream,” Barry Walters would eventually write in The Village Voice, “you had to be slightly on the outside to actually take them to heart.” ABBA had figured something out about America that we could effortlessly hear but only partially comprehend. This was the supernatural element of ABBA Music—flawless, shiny, otherworldly songs that evoke both mild confusion and instantaneous acceptance.

  It was never, and therefore always, relevant.

  4 There’s no reason for me to tell you to listen to more ABBA. There are lots of other people more qualified (and perhaps more motivated) to do that than me: salt-and-pepper soccer moms, the members of Erasure, people who watch Mamma Mia! on JetBlue flights, dudes who shop at Crate and Barrel, Vladimir Putin,5 etc. I don’t think ABBA is a band you can really change anyone’s opinion about, anyway. It’s kind of like trying to convince someone that Coca-Cola is delicious—if they don’t agree with you immediately, they probably never will.

  That said, I also can’t think of any other band who needs my public support less. This, I suppose, is my essential point: ABBA succeeds because the rest of the world isn’t necessary. They operate within their own actuality. In 2002, ABBA was offered $1 billion to reunite. That’s a billion, with a B. That’s $250 million apiece. If someone reads this book in the year 2110, that will still be a lot of money. But they turned it down. “We had to think about it,” Bjorn told The Guardian, “because one could build hospitals with that much money … [But] we don’t want to go through the stress of disappointing people evening after evening.” This is crazy for lots of reasons. The first is that I’m sure the main explanation as to why this didn’t happen was because Agnetha (the blond one) did not want to do it (she now lives as a semi-recluse and never enjoyed fame, even while she was pursuing it). The second reason is that it would be funny to wake up from a skiing accident in a hospital named after ABBA. The third is that I cannot imagine ABBA fans being disappointed by even the lamest of cash-grabbing reunions (ABBA fans are not exactly authenticity hard-liners). The fourth is that—regardless of how awesome or unawesome these concerts might have been—any tour where a band is promised $1 billion would be doomed to financial failure (the total revenue from every single North American concert in the year 2002 was only $1.8 billion). The fifth is that ABBA is probably the biggest group I can think of that nobody ever talks about seeing live. (When is the last time you heard some old codger reminisce about how mind-blowing it was to hear “Hey Hey Helen” back at the Cow Palace?) I could go on and on with this list. But why? The reunion didn’t happen, and it won’t happen. Unlike just about every other act from their era, ABBA doesn’t need the money or want the attention (or want the money and need the attention). They don’t have to worry about the future of their music, because other people will make sure it never disappears. It doesn’t matter if the critical consensus surrounding their import changes, because no one who likes ABBA Music cares if it’s supposed to be good or bad. They’ll never have to reunite and pretend to be in love. They’ll never have to convince anyone of anything. They’ll never have to leave Sweden. They’ll never have to read this essay (or any essay like it); in ABBA World, this kind of discussion doesn’t even subsist. They are so much themselves that they’re beyond the rest of us. ABBA won, and the winner takes it all.

  Q: Is that how you explain your sense of morality?

  A: Christ, man. I can’t answer that. Who knows? It’s so confusing now. The world has shifted. Like, I now have all these friends who have kids. All my friends have kids now. Last year, one of them told me that he was sleeping with his kid’s babysitter. He was actually having sex with this sixteen-year-old babysitter. I was like, “Dude. That’s so fucked up. That’s so inappropriate. You’re her employer.”

  “Ha ha,” he said. “Ha ha.”

  1 Sometimes writing is difficult. Sometimes writing is like pounding a brick wall with a ball-peen hammer in the hope that the barricade will evolve into a revolving door. Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who’s exactly like yourself in every possible way, only to realize that this stranger is boring as shit. In better moments, writing is the opposite of difficult—it’s as if your fingers meander arbitrarily in crosswise patterns and (suddenly) you find yourself reading something you didn’t realize you already knew. Most of the time, the process falls somewhere in between. But there’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. A
nd for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle’s motivation and I would have watched Medellin in the theater. I read Mary Worth every day for a decade. I’ve seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to The Day After Tomorrow on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn’t do anything. I am open to the possibility that everything has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture. I always prefer to do the opposite, even if my argument becomes insane by necessity.

  But sometimes I can’t.

  Sometimes I experience something so profoundly idiotic—and so deeply universal—that I cannot find any contrarian perspective, even for the sole purpose of playful contrarianism. These are not the things that are stupid for what they are; these are the things that are stupid for what they supposedly reflect about human nature. These are things that make me feel completely alone in the world, because I cannot fathom how the overwhelming majority of people ignores them entirely. These are not real problems (like climate change or African genocide), because those issues are complex and multifaceted; they’re also not intangible personal hypocrisies (like insincerity or greed), because those qualities are biological and understandable. These are things that exist only because they exist. We accept them, we give them a social meaning, and they become part of how we live. Yet these are the things that truly illustrate how ridiculous mankind can be. These are the things that prove just how confused people are (and will always be), and these are the things that are so stupid that they make me feel nothing. Not sadness. Not anger. Not guilt. Nothing.

  These are the stupidest things our society has ever manufactured.

  And—at least to me—there is one stupid idea that towers above all others. In practice, its impact is minor; in theory, it’s the most fucked-up media construction spawned by the twentieth century. And I’ve felt this way for (almost) my entire life.

  I can’t think of anything philosophically stupider than laugh tracks.

  2 Perhaps this seems like a shallow complaint to you. Perhaps you think that railing against canned laughter is like complaining that nuclear detonations are bad for the local bunny population. I don’t care. Go read a vampire novel. To me, laugh tracks are as stupid as we get. And, yes, I realize this phenomenon is being phased out by modernity. That’s good. There will be a day in the future when this essay will make no sense, because canned laughter will be as extinct as TV theme songs. It will only be used as a way to inform audiences that they’re supposed to be watching a fake TV show from the 1970s. But— right now, today—canned laughter is still a central component of escapist television. The most popular sitcom on TV, Two and a Half Men, still uses a laugh track, as does the (slightly) more credible How I Met Your Mother and the (significantly) less credible The Big Bang Theory. Forced laughter is also central to the three live-action syndicated shows that are broadcast more than any other, Friends, Home Improvement, and Seinfeld. Cheers will be repeated forever, as will the unseen people guffawing at its barroom banter. And I will always notice this, and it will never become reassuring or nostalgic or quaint. It will always seem stupid, because canned laughter represents the worst qualities of insecure people.

  Now, I realize these qualities can be seen everywhere in life and within lots of complicated contexts. Insecurity is part of being alive. But it’s never less complicated than this. It’s never less complicated than a machine that tries to make you feel like you’re already enjoying something, simply because people you’ll never meet were convinced to laugh at something else entirely.

  2A I am not the first writer who’s been perversely fascinated with fake laughter. Ron Rosenbaum1 wrote a story for Esquire in the 1970s titled “Inside the Canned Laughter War” that chronicled attempts by Ralph Waldo Emerson III2 to sell American TV networks on a new laughter device that was intended to usurp the original “Laff Box” designed by Charlie Douglass for the early fifties program The Hank McCune Show. Rosenbaum’s piece is apolitical, mainly memorable for mentioning that the voices heard on modern laugh tracks were often the same original voices recorded by Douglas during pre-ancient radio shows like Burns and Allen, which would mean that the sound we hear on laugh tracks is the sound of dead people laughing. As far as I can tell, this has never been proven. But it must be at least partially true; there must be at least a few people recorded for laugh tracks who are now dead, even if their laughter was recorded yesterday. People die all the time. If you watch any episode of Seinfeld, you can be 100 percent confidant that somebody chuckling in the background is six feet underground. I assume this makes Larry David ecstatic.

  During the height of the Laff Box Era (the 1970s), lots of TV critics railed against the use of canned laughter, so much so that TV shows began making a concerted effort to always mention that they were taped in front of a live audience (although even those live tapings were almost always mechanically sweetened). At the time, the primary criticism was that laugh tracks were being used to mask bad writing—in Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s self-styled character chastises a colleague working in the TV industry for adding counterfeit hilarity to a terrible program (“Do you realize how immoral this all is?”). Less concrete aesthetes argued that the Laff Box obliterated the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, although it’s hard to imagine how realistically invested audiences were ever supposed to feel about Mork and Mindy. I concede that both of these condemnations were accurate. But those things never bothered me. Laugh tracks never detracted from bad writing, and they never stopped me from thinking the cast of Taxi weren’t legitimate taxi drivers. Those issues are minor. What bothers me is the underlying suggestion that what you are experiencing is different than whatever your mind tells you is actually happening. Moreover, laugh tracks want you to accept that this constructed reality can become the way you feel, or at least the way you behave. It’s a concept grounded in the darkest of perspectives: A laugh track assumes that you are not confident enough to sit quietly, even if your supposed peer group is (a) completely invisible and (b) theoretically dead.

  1A I lived in eastern Germany for four months of 2008. There were a million weird things about living there, but there was one that I didn’t anticipate: Germans don’t fake-laugh. If someone in Germany is laughing, it’s because he or she physically can’t help themselves; they are laughing because they’re authentically amused. Nobody there ever laughs because of politeness. Nobody laughs out of obligation. And what this made me recognize is how much American laughter is purely conditioned. Most of our laughing—I would say at least 51 percent—has no relation to humor or to how we actually feel.

  You really, really notice this in German grocery stores. When paying for food in Leipzig, I was struck by how much of my daily interaction was punctuated by laughter that was totally detached from what I was doing. I would buy some beer and cookies and give the clerk a twenty-euro note; inevitably, the clerk would ask if I had exact change, because Germans are obsessed with both exactness and money. I would reach into my pocket and discover I had no coins, so I would reply, “Um—heh heh heh. No. Sorry. Ha! Guess not.” I made these noises without thinking. Every single time, the clerk would just stare at me stoically. It had never before occurred to me how often I reflexively laugh; only in the absence of a response did I realize I was laughing for no reason whatsoever. It somehow felt comfortable. Now that I’m back in the U.S., I notice this all the time: People half-heartedly chuckle throughout most casual conversations, regardless of the topic. It’s a modern extension of the verbalized pause, built by TV laugh tracks. Everyone in America has three laughs: a real laugh, a fake real laugh, and a “filler laugh” they use during impersonal conversations. We have been trained to connect conversation with soft, interstitial laughter. It’s our way of showing the other person that we understand the context of the interaction, even when we don’t.

&n
bsp; This is not the only reason Germans think Americans are retarded, but it’s definitely one of them.

  2B Part of what makes the notion of canned laughter so mysterious is the way it continues to exist within a media world that regularly rewards shows that don’t employ it. Virtually every high-end, “sophisticated” comedy of the early twenty-first century—Arrested Development, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Simpsons, 30 Rock— is immune to canned laughter, and it’s difficult to imagine any of those shows supplemented with mechanical, antiseptic chuckling. Very often, the absence of a laugh track serves as a more effective guidepost than the laughter itself—audiences have come to understand that any situation comedy without canned laughter is supposed to be smarter, hipper, and less predictable than traditional versions of the genre. This comprehension began with the Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H, a series that started with the removal of canned laughter from scenes in the hospital operating room (so as not to mitigate the reality of people bleeding to death) and eventually excluded it from the entire broadcast altogether (in order to remind audiences that they were watching something quasi-political and semi-important). But this collective assumption raises two questions:

  1. If TV audiences have come to accept that comedic shows without laugh tracks are edgier and more meaningful, is it not possible that the reverse would also be true (in other words, does removing the laugh track change the way a viewer preconceives the show, regardless of its content)?

  2. If all the best comedies are devoid of fake laughter, why would anyone elect to use them at all (under any circumstance)?