David Lynch - Classic or Dud

heh... you are going to love season 3

well, as that piece says, it's been a pretty constant trope for him through his career. (i stopped reading before the Dougie content.)

this is a great read. i like this bit about the botched comedy hitman scene in Mulholland Drive:

Just as the act of cleaning up won’t end, neither will the scene. It should have ended when he accomplished his goal, but once the accident is introduced, an intrusion of contingency that has no plot meaning, we are moved sideways rather than forward. We are made aware of the things going on in this building that are not important to the plot, and that therefore we should never have known about, or that at least should never have become part of the action.

it really captures one of the ways in which he sort of pushes against the edges of the frame where most directors let the holy narrative dictate things

What are some non-TP examples of this (comedy of duration)? I'm drawing a bit of a blank and the piece moves on to talk about Lynch's approach to comedy in general. The Cowboy & the Frenchman has some of this iirc but in general it seems to be something he saves for this show.

Yeah, the elevator door in Eraserhead that takes juuust a little bit too long to close comes to mind.

xpost to morbs but an example for wins, too

The hitman scene is more in line with a typical comedy crescendo of complications than something like the bank scene imo

The fight scene in the missing pieces is a great companion piece to the Andy floorboard scene in the same way that the bank scene is to the waiter scene

Family Guy chicken fight gag maybe the lowest common denominator version of this

idk what that is but there are like thousands of examples (I think there's an ilx thread "the joke goes on too long & that's the joke"), sideshow bob stepping on the rakes, Stewart Lee standup, loads of monty python but I always think of the "bring out yr dead" bit

just so you know why the waiter and the bank clerk remind me of Lewis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvrmgJHltGY

Ha good catch. I wouldn't be surprised at all if both lynch & frost (who I suspect has more input into these types of scenes than ppl assume) are Lewis fans

well, they're the right age! Werner Herzog is.

My personal favorite in this vein:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAaifw-cVoQ

Family guy chicken sequence > Lewis tbf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gnZN4SEhjA

Family Guy [insert any skit here] < literally anything that's ever been created throughout history

Eric eternally correct on this

Hmm *studies next move*

Lewis so much better than wretched family guy but of course lynch is a recurring player in the Cleveland show so the inspiration could be running in all kinds of directions

and Herzog has been on American Dad!....

the relevant scene i think of first in the first hour of TP s3 is the protracted delay and frustration rhythms leading to the discovery of the head and body in South Dakota (woman and her dog, idiot in the alley, etc).

lynch is a recurring player in the Cleveland show

This fact is still weirder than any of Lynch's work.

the relevant scene i think of first in the first hour of TP s3 is the protracted delay and frustration rhythms leading to the discovery of the head and body in South Dakota (woman and her dog, idiot in the alley, etc).

While it's true that's a type of reliable comedy scene -- eg, the guy who comes to WC Fields in the middle of the night looking for "Carl LaFong" -- when Lynch does it, he usually leaves out the jokes, I think? I mean, Hank Worden giving the thumbs-up and the ancient bank office fetching water is kinda funny, but not really. Or funny-strange, not funny-haha (which is also how some categorize Jerry Lewis).

*ancient bank officer

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Shaggy dog story
This article is about the joke. For the television program of the same name, see Shaggy Dog Story (TV). For other uses, see Shaggy dog (disambiguation).
In its original sense, a shaggy dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax or a pointless punchline.

Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of joke-telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner.[1] A lengthy shaggy dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the end resolution is essentially meaningless.[2] The nature of their delivery is reflected in the English idiom spin a yarn, by way of analogy with the production of yarn.

Archetypal story Edit

A shaggy dog, the archetypical subject of long-winded, pointless stories
The commonly believed archetype of the shaggy dog story is a story that concerns a shaggy dog. The story builds up, repeatedly emphasizing how shaggy the dog is. At the climax of the story, someone in the story reacts with, "That dog's not so shaggy." The expectations of the audience that have been built up by the presentation of the story, that the story will end with a punchline, are thus disappointed. Ted Cohen gives the following example of this story:[1]

A boy owned a dog that was uncommonly shaggy. Many people remarked upon its considerable shagginess. When the boy learned that there are contests for shaggy dogs, he entered his dog. The dog won first prize for shagginess in both the local and the regional competitions. The boy entered the dog in ever-larger contests, until finally he entered it in the world championship for shaggy dogs. When the judges had inspected all of the competing dogs, they remarked about the boy's dog: "He's not that shaggy."

However, authorities disagree as to whether this particular story is the archetype after which the category is named. Eric Partridge, for example, provides a very different story, as do William and Mary Morris in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.

According to Partridge and the Morrises, the archetypical shaggy dog story involves an advertisement placed in the Times announcing a search for a shaggy dog. In the Partridge story, an aristocratic family living in Park Lane is searching for a lost dog, and an American answers the advertisement with a shaggy dog that he has found and personally brought across the Atlantic, only to be received by the butler at the end of the story who takes one look at the dog and shuts the door in his face, saying, "But not so shaggy as that, sir!" In the Morris story, the advertiser is organizing a competition to find the shaggiest dog in the world, and after a lengthy exposition of the search for such a dog, a winner is presented to the aristocratic instigator of the competition, who says, "I don't think he's so shaggy."[3][4]

Examples in literature Edit

A typical shaggy dog story occurs in Mark Twain's book about his travels west, Roughing It. Twain's friends encourage him to go find a man called Jim Blaine when he is properly drunk, and ask him to tell "the stirring story about his grandfather's old ram".[5] Twain, encouraged by his friends who have already heard the story, finally finds Blaine, an old silver miner, who sets out to tell Twain and his friends the tale. Blaine starts out with the ram ("There never was a bullier old ram than what he was"), and goes on for four more mostly dull but occasionally hilarious unparagraphed pages. Along the way, Blaine tells many stories, each of which connects back to the one before by some tenuous thread, and none of which has to do with the old ram. Among these stories are: a tale of boiled missionaries; of a lady who borrows a false eye, a peg leg, and the wig of a coffin-salesman's wife; and a final tale of a man who gets caught in machinery at a carpet factory and whose "widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in..." As Blaine tells the story of the carpet man's funeral, he begins to fall asleep, and Twain, looking around, sees his friends "suffocating with suppressed laughter." They now inform him that "at a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep [Blaine] from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram — and the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had heard him get, concerning it."

Buy Jupiter and Other Stories, a collection of stories by Isaac Asimov, contains a tale whose title is "Shah Guido G."[6] In his background notes, Asimov defines the tale as a shaggy dog story, and explains that the title is a play on "shaggy dog".

Examples in music Edit

Arlo Guthrie's classic anti-war story-song "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a shaggy dog story about the military draft, hippies, and improper disposal of garbage.[7]
David Bromberg's version of "Bullfrog Blues" (on "How Late'll Ya Play 'Til?") is a rambling shaggy dog story performed as a talking blues song.[8][9]
"Weird Al" Yankovic's "Albuquerque," the final track on his 1999 album Running with Scissors, is an over-twelve-minute digression from one of the first topics mentioned in the song, the narrator-protagonist's longstanding dislike of sauerkraut.
See also Edit

Anti-humor
The Aristocrats
Chekhov's gun
Feghoot
Information overload
No soap radio
Red herring
Shaggy God story
References

Further reading

Last edited 6 days ago by Staszek Lem
RELATED ARTICLES
Shah Guido G.
short story by Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor
Anti-humor
style of comedy that is deliberately awkward or experimental
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"the Aristocrats" is pretty close, but it has a punchline!

Eric, the Buddy Lester hat thing is way too action-packed and breathlessly funny to qualify!

the Godot thing is straightup Laurel & Hardy as Sam himself wd admit

given how manic a lot of ILX is about Lynch I'm surprised that there's been no reference (to my knowledge) about this new biography/memoir "Room to Dream". I'm actually surprised there hasn't been a wider cultural spasm about it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Room-Dream-David-Lynch/dp/1782118381

I looked at it in the bookshop today and it seems to have a biographical chapter/ memoirial chapter alternating structure.

personally, I don't know if there's anything in this book that I'm not already tired of or that hasn't been hashed out in multiple video extras/ interviews tv and print/lynch on lynch's etc.

i am surprised at how under-the-radar it is.

actually, it seems to have been released/published today but i'm still surprised.

I may check it out, but Lynch has a certain number of stories he tells over and over again.

i've thumbed through books of his in stores before and i've never been that impressed with the way he writes. i do find his life interesting, and have a few other bios on my shelf, but i kind of prefer to have his stories filtered through other people's writing voices

stories he tells over and over again.

he seems to be something of an the obsessive, so this fits.

I read a review. He's someone I don't particularly find compelling in terms of life story/art dynamic. Maybe someone will write a good bio 20-30 years from now.

My wife gave me a copy Tuesday as a late Father's Day present. I'm about 240 pages in and enjoying it. I really like the structure -- alternating sections of well-researched biography by Kristine McKenna with sections by Lynch reacting to, embellishing and occasionally rebutting the previous section. Loads of anecdotes that are new to me.

I wasn't aware of the bio until a friend told me he got it a couple days ago. Lack of publicity and enthusiasm is surprising. I just ordered a copy, that sorta structure sounds really enjoyable.

lol it's like how many people bought The Final Dossier and don't know about this

Ahh, I didn't understand that the bio part was not written by Lynch. That actually makes me more interested.

Same here

It’s kind of interesting - I’m not sure I’ve seen a similar bio structure?

I got the audiobook - I’d be interested to see what the print version looks like cause lynch’s sections seem pretty off-the-cuff a lot of the time, full of ad-libs, saying something & then correcting himself and so on. I’d guess they use a cleaned-up transcript of these in the physical book.

It’s entertaining, like WilliamC said there’s a decent amount of new stuff along with stuff you’ve heard a million times (he prefaces a couple of things with “I’ve told this story so many times”). The lynch sections get more scant the closer we get to present day, as you might expect, so it’s up to the McKenna sections to provide the detail.

There isn’t much in the way of “rebuttal”; the wives, girlfriends and children will say some pretty revealing stuff about his personal life in each chapter and Lynch won’t address any of it and just tells a couple of stories.

But yeah I enjoyed the audiobook as a kind of companion to the art life film (which btw anyone who’s seen that might be interested to know that we get the end of the “Mr Smith” anecdote in this book) and he also has a kind of quasi Dr Amp outburst at one point

i just want to know if he ever popped the cow (the one stranded on a ski trail in idaho)

He's someone I don't particularly find compelling in terms of life story/art dynamic.

Yeah the details of both his upbringing and his professional life seem pretty banal. Grew up squaresville but has always been a weirdo, has spent the last 50 years or so obsessed with making art. Some personal drama here and there, plus the Woody Woodpeckers, but he's definitely someone where everything interesting in the work itself.

...is in the work itself.

Lynch gave up toxic anger 20-30 years ago for meditation. Couldn’t give up smokes tho lol so yeah. Yeah

Lack of publicity and enthusiasm is surprising.

An interview piece in the Guardian today on the back of the book. I really like that main b/w portrait photograph of him. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jun/23/david-lynch-gotta-be-selfish-twin-peaks