There’s such a thing at being too good at what you do.
Oh, naturally, I’m thinking of me (heh), but let’s ponder for a moment on a grander scale. There are artists-visual, musical, performance-who excel so thoroughly at one thing, that they are then trapped into it for all eternity.
Brad Pitt went there for a while playing the sexy-yet-untamable younger brother (“A River Runs Through It,” “Legends of the Fall...”). Keanu Reeves has made a career out of trying not to be “Bill and Ted” for the rest of his life. (Alas, Ted peeks his irrepressible little head out in most of dear Keanu’s roles.)
In music, artists often complain that their record companies slot them into the mold in which they first “broke,” and then give them little freedom to explore other musical themes. Unless you’re Sting, you can get trapped forever in the “American Idol” type of mass-production, assembly-line hit music.
Make too indelible a mark in your field, and you may find your audiences unwilling to see you in any other light.
Take comedian Gallagher, for instance, who played last week at Captain Brien’s Off the Hook Comedy Club. When he called to book the comic, owner Brien Spina was offered two choices: with Sledge-o-Matic or without.
Guess which one he chose?
The wild-maned comedian made his mark in the eighties with his famous act, smashing vile concoctions of foodstuffs that would generate the messiest, most far-reaching spray patterns he could muster. It was different, it was shocking - it generated legions of fans who would show up to get front-row seats - on purpose - wearing ponchos and garbage bags so that they might enjoy maximum splatter factor.
Now, says a somewhat world-weary Gallagher standing beside his goo-besmeared set after his Saturday-night performance, the act is “both the best and the worst thing” that ever happened to him.
His frustration is understandable - Gallagher spends the first half of his act on societal observations, Carlin-esque intellectual musings about the vagaries of language, and God’s flawed design of the human body (he demonstrates the difficulties of defecation with a plastic jar of peanut butter in a display that’s fascinatingly, disgustingly evocative).
“I’m a lot smarter than my audience,” he declares postshow, claiming to spend his days studying subatomic-particle physics. (Is he telling the truth or yanking your chain? Hard to know - he’s Gallagher.)
But at the midway point of his act, with the folding table behind him tantalizingly laden with pie crusts, milk cartons, mustard and giant cans of corn, he abandons the patter and moves into what most of the plastic-sheeted audience is there to see: “So much for being smart - you want me to just smack food,” he announces-and the audience roars its approval.
I fully expected to enjoy his verbal humor and be bored by the food-smashing portion of the evening. But let me tell you something, folks: There is just some good, childish fun. Gallagher builds the suspense by first walking the audience through the creation of his homemade pie bombs.
You want aerodynamics, he explains: grapes on the edges, for instance, because the diced tomatoes in the center will push them out and send those suckers flying. Flour sprinkled generously inside a head of iceberg lettuce makes a delightful explosive with both dust and shrapnel.
He describes, he deconstructs, he delays...until finally, out comes that giant sledgehammer and he lets loose, sending brilliantly colored fountains of Jell-O, strawberry syrup, duck sauce and Rice Krispies sailing out into - and all over - his delighted audience.
And I squealed like a happy five-year-old watching (safely out of range, of course) the food bombs explode. That man was on to something with this gimmick - you can’t help laughing your head off at the sheer ultimate audacity with which he breaks the “don’t play with your food” taboo.
Only one irate audience member gets up the first time some food shrapnel hits her white shirt in the second row (what was she thinking?). The rest of his audience shouts for more, the amount of food they can wind up sporting on their ponchos and garbage bags an apparent badge of honor for Gallagher fans.
It’s only when the Sledge-o-Matic breaks out that they really come to life. They’ll listen to the shtick, but only if the pot at the end of that rainbow is filled with SpaghettiOs and sauerkraut. Perhaps that’s part of the reason for the comic’s dark edge. Gallagher seems like a man who is frustrated and unappreciated for the thing he wants people to appreciate about him - trapped by the phenomenal success of a party trick he pulled out almost three decades ago.
Later that night, at Starbucks, the comedian is approached by two female fans who saw the show and want to rave to him about how much they enjoyed it.
“How do you like Marco?” they ask, giggling.
“I don’t,” he responds sarcastically, before going on to banter with the women.
It’s a bit ornery, but hey, give the man some credit for restraint: when Van Gogh felt unappreciated he cut off an ear.
