I’ve seen a few episodes over the years, but now I have a one-month subscription to HBO and am watching from the beginning. Is Larry’s monologue at the beginning of the show supposed to be funny, or be funny in a Rupert Pupkin kind of way? I remember Garry Shandling from his first appearance on the Tonight Show , the bit about the cows - the cow is supposed to think, as a driver in the country sticks his head out the window and moos at the cows in the field, “Wow, there is a cow driving that car. How can he afford that?”
This is absolutely amazing, as I am writing this, with the show playing, Larry’s producer on the show mentions Rupert Pupkin!
I don’t think the monologues are intended to be particularly funny, just as a lot of the scripted desk pieces and sketches inside the show-within-a-show parts aren’t particularly funny. We already know that Phil and Jerry, the writers, are notoriously lazy. I think the not too subtle point is that The Larry Sanders Show isn’t supposed to be all that good. The Larry Sanders Show, however, was one of the best shows ever on television.
I think Larry was also supposed to be self-obsessed and narcissistic and continually preoccupied with how he would be perceived by his TV audience. He wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box; he had Artie for that. The contrast between the artificiality of the TV show and the much grittier real life sequences had me laughing out loud all the time. A great early contribution by Peter Tolan to the word of comedy prior to doing the Job and Rescue Me. The Larry Sanders Show was brilliant at times.
This. The monologue was pretty much as funny as the average Leno, Letterman or Carson monologue. Writing 5 minutes of topical standup 5 days a week is just going to be a little lame but we’re used to it. That’s why they each had a pretty standard “well, that joke flopped” reaction ready.
OP answered above. A brilliant show by most any measure, with a cast and writers that knocked it out of the park throughout all six seasons. Jeffrey Tambor and Rip Torn were real standouts.
Actually not even that much of a parody. David Letterman is on record as saying that it was actually a pretty realistic vision of how talk shows are produced and the personalities in them, and many of the ongoing story lines are clearly drawn from reality, such as Sanders obsessing over not getting the ratings of “Leno” or Hank Kingsley always looking for side jobs hosting second-rate ceremonies and promoting cheesy prodcuts to pay for his ill-advised investment ventures and ex-wives, which was basically Ed McMahon’s personal life. The only main character that was really over the top was Rip Torn’s producer Arthur, and for all I know even that may be how a talk show producer has to keep things going. Gary Shandling’s portrayal of Larry Sanders as not particularly funny and lacking social graces has its roots in many talk show hosts from Ed Sullivan to Johnny Carson (who famously refused to mingle with guests pre-show and had a rule about not talking between camera breaks so as not to waste good conversation topics when the camera wasn’t working), as was his hitting on every female guest.
I used to have acquaintance with a woman who was a booker for a well-known daytime talk show not to be named, and she was adamant that Janeane Garofalo’s Paula was exactly her experience in booking and dealing with guests, except that there was less shouting and insults than she experienced. In fact, to hear her tell it, The Larry Sanders Show was an underexaggerated presentation of the actual toxic backstage workings of a talk show.
I’d be surprised if the show didn’t reference The King of Comedy because that movie is all about the Rupert’s desire to be not just a celebrity, but a celebrity that other celebrities aspire to meet versus the reality of the miserable bastard that Jerry Langford actually is (and that Jerry Lewis was purported to be in real life). While not involving kidnapping by a crazed would-be comic and an oversexed fan, it pretty much falls into the same cabinet.
total derail - I’ll disagree about the Langford character being a miserable bastard - I thought he was portrayed as basically pragmatic, and prior to his abduction, had perfectly fine bonhomie with staff. And even during abduction - what can you say? His only miserable assholish (brief!) moment I can think of was when he hilariously chewed out his butler about opening the front door of his house.
I miss that taking-a-catheter smile of Shandling’s. Isn’t that where “squirm humour” originated? (meh, actually KoC could be.)
to quibble, I think the way Langford talked to his butler was indicative of his character. The poor guy was scared to death -“They are touching everything, he is giving me a heart attack.” And Langford yells at him because the door is locked. And the way he talked about his fans, and the job, and what a pain in the ass it was to be rich and famous.
BTW Carson was originally going to play Langford but eventually turned it down, it was a little too close to the bone. If he had played himself, even with a different name, viewers would have thought it was really about him, just like Woody Allen in Stardust Memories was criticized for criticizing his fans. It was a character he was playing, nothing more
Heh - to quibble even further on your KoC point - I thought the door opening thing was way too isolated an incident for anything more to be read into it - a basic heat of the moment thing. And being cool with colleagues helps.
Actually, JL was merely confirming RP’s “asshole” accusations in hopes to simply expedite the intruders’ exit. Or, if you’re referring to this scene, I thought the Langford character laid it all out quite reasonably, without, in any way, at all, trying to pander or sweet-talk with that gun pointed at him the whole time.
Anyway, hopefully putting that whole derail behind - even with the intentional lameness of Larry Sanders monlogues, replete with self-deprecating dismissals of the previous joke, he did the worn shtick as well as anyone, maybe giving it an extra little bit of ‘run-down-ness’, (for lack of any better way of putting it), which I found all the more appealing.
(Heh - wonder if it’s worth a “Which Talk Show Host Did the Best Monologues?” thread.)
I am. And the lines, “the show, the pressure, the groupies, the autograph hounds…there are wonderful pressures that make every day a glowing, radiant day in your life.” Maybe Langford made all that up under the pressure of a gun pointed at his head. I don’t think so, I think that is the way he really felt.
As a lot of celebrities do. They want to be famous and adored, almost all of them since they were kids. They don’t realize the pain in the ass autograph hounds and the papparazzi that will happen. And I don’t think many of them, almost none, would give that up and go get a day job. They learn to live with it. Which I guess Langford did, obviously he did, because he wasn’t going to quit his job. Wasn’t it Gwenneth Paltrow who said a while back that being an actress was hard work, and she got excoriated about that from people who did really hard work and were not getting paid millions? But being a great actor (not saying she is one) is hard work. These actors that we love and that make movies and shows that are a big part of our lives, a huge part of our lives, they are just human beings.
And here we are analyzing the character of Jerry Langford, I never even looked at the film from that POV, the film to me has always been about the quest for fame, not the negative consequences of achieving it.
There should be a sequel. Rupert gets the fame he wanted, then tuns on his fans. Rupert Pupkin - The Revenge. B movie horror film. Or Rupert Pupkin-Be Carefull What You Wish For. A sensitive drama about fame and the American culture of celebrity worship. Rupert Pupkin - My LIfe. An autobio about a creative child raised by alcoholic parents, but he rose above it to achieve the American Dream , which, bringing it all back home to the Larry Sanders show, resulted in telling lame jokes 5 nights a week on a talk show.