A Big Super Cut of Saturday Night Live Cast Members Breaking Character and Cracking Up

Corps­ingaka laugh­ing inap­pro­pri­ate­ly onstage—requires far less skill than sol­dier­ing on when the actor play­ing oppo­site los­es con­trol, an occur­rence that almost always wins audi­ence favor.

The recent­ly released super cuts of Sat­ur­day Night Live cast mem­bers’ com­po­sure desert­ing them, above and below, sug­gest that the worst offend­ers are aware that view­ers will lap up these laps­es. Why strive to stay in char­ac­ter when bloop­er reel star­dom awaits?

It’s a fact that these crack ups have the abil­i­ty to loosen things up, recall­ing that free­wheel­ing peri­od before the show became the insti­tu­tion its cast mem­bers dreamed of audi­tion­ing for since child­hood.

It’s unclear what—if any—meaning we should ascribe to the evi­dence that the most indul­gent gig­glers are all male.

Could it be that women are fun­ny after all… enough to win the sort of punch­lines that’ll make the boys lose it on cam­era?

If so, per­haps we can arrange for aliens to abduct the next com­men­ta­tor who sug­gests oth­er­wise, probe him, then seat him oppo­site a bewigged Kate McK­in­non. No offense to guest host Ryan Gosling, the embod­i­ment of a good sport. His inabil­i­ty to stay in char­ac­ter was both under­stat­ed and heart­warm­ing, and he was­n’t pan­der­ing. SNL reg­u­lars Aidy Bryant and Bob­by Moyni­han strug­gled too. I still wager a lot of fun­ny ladies watched that Close Encoun­ters skit, and root­ed for McK­in­non to be giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to take down an old school chau­vin­ist pig.

But not every­one delights in watch­ing these guys run off the rails, as Slate’s Jes­si­ca Win­ter notes in a piece about SNL’s corps­ing phe­nom­e­non:

Tra­cy Mor­gan exco­ri­at­ed his fel­low cast mem­ber (Jim­my Fal­lon) for “laugh­ing and all that dumb shit he used to do,” explain­ing, “That’s tak­ing all the atten­tion off of every­body else and putting it on you, like, ‘Oh, look at me, I’m the cute one.’

It’s true that the cam­era nev­er could resist cast mem­ber Bill Hader’s elab­o­rate, utter­ly unsuc­cess­ful attempts to bring his face to heel. Wit­ness the dress rehearsal for the West Coast-fla­vored soap opera spoof, The Cal­i­for­ni­ans, below. Amaz­ing how lit­tle it changed en route to per­for­mance.

The writ­ers out­did them­selves when they bestowed a sig­na­ture ges­ture on anoth­er of Hader’s recur­rent char­ac­ters, New York City cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tor, Ste­fon. His new­found pro­cliv­i­ty for hid­ing his face behind his hands could’ve helped the actor pull it togeth­er, but instead it turned into a bit. Won­der what Tra­cy Mor­gan thought when Had­er attrib­uted his inabil­i­ty to keep a straight face to his straight man / Week­end Update foil Seth Myers:

A per­son being patient with an insane per­son is my favorite thing in the world…. You were being so patient with this mani­ac who had the sim­plest job in the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Don Par­do (1918–2014), Voice of Sat­ur­day Night Live, Sug­gests Using Short Words

John Belushi’s Impro­vised Screen Test for Sat­ur­day Night Live (1975)

Father Gui­do Sar­duc­ci Pitch­es “The Five Minute Uni­ver­si­ty”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est script, Fawn­book, is avail­able in a dig­i­tal edi­tion from Indie The­ater Now.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Hear the One Night Sun Ra & John Cage Played Together in Concert (1986)

It’s hard to imag­ine two fig­ures more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of two dis­parate direc­tions exper­i­men­tal music took in the 20th cen­tu­ry than John Cage and Sun Ra. Cage’s aleato­ry arrange­ments and instru­ments impro­vised from radios and TV sets left much to the dis­cre­tion of the per­former. And yet, odd­ly, he did­n’t think much of impro­visato­ry music, writ­ing in his 1961 book Silence that he con­sid­ered jazz “rather sil­ly” and “unsuit­ed,” notes Seth Colter Walls at Pitch­fork, “for ‘seri­ous’ con­texts.”

Sun Ra, on the oth­er hand, while a mas­ter impro­vis­er, left lit­tle to chance. He embraced the role of band­leader of his Arkestra with unique vig­or, “com­plete­ly obsessed with pre­ci­sion and dis­ci­pline.” Cage pre­ferred the plain-spo­ken, unspo­ken, and word­less. Ra deliv­ered roco­co trea­tis­es onstage, dressed in glit­ter­ing capes and head­dress­es. How the two would, or could, come togeth­er may seem a mys­tery, but come togeth­er they did, for a one-time con­cert event at a Coney Island freak show.

The result­ing album is “one of the most sought after records in either discog­ra­phy,” writes The Vinyl Fac­to­ry in an announce­ment of the full per­for­mance’s recent release by label Mod­ern Har­mon­ic. Fans can final­ly pur­chase that dou­ble LP, or lis­ten to the live record­ing for free below. (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s soft­ware, down­load it here.) Though it may seem like a bit of a nov­el­ty, “the album grad­u­al­ly emerges as some­thing greater than a foot­note,” Walls writes, “despite the arms-length embrace, the over­all con­cert has a sur­pris­ing­ly seam­less qual­i­ty.”

Cage’s con­tri­bu­tions con­sist main­ly of word­less vocal­iza­tions and poignant silences. Ra recites poet­ry and unleash­es solo after solo on his Yama­ha DX7 syn­the­siz­er, blend­ing “sci-fi movie tones” with “spright­ly fig­ures” and “dense chords and drones.” The album’s trail­er at the top of the post offers some rare black and white footage of the occa­sion, which briefly includ­ed a cou­ple of addi­tion­al artists–Arkestra sax­o­phon­ist Mar­shall Allen and singer June Tyson. (Tyson’s inten­tion­al­ly strained per­for­mance “is beset by ampli­fi­ca­tion prob­lems,” Walls warns, “though the noise-dam­aged result works, in con­text.”

Through­out the one-off meet­ing, Ra and Cage trade solos, each respect­ful­ly yield­ing the stage to the oth­er in turn. While this set­up high­lights the two giants’ pro­found­ly dif­fer­ent approach­es to making–and con­ceiv­ing of–music, Sun Ra’s “abil­i­ty to meet Cage more than halfway… helps hold the entire gig togeth­er,” writes Walls. One of the few tracks on which the two col­lab­o­rate direct­ly, “Silent Duet,” is, well, exact­ly that. Since we can­not see the per­for­mance, we have to imag­ine the two of them, sit­ting side-by-side in silence, as the audi­ence seems to all but hold its breath.

The odd thump of a foot against the mic stand aside, the record­ing doc­u­ments almost total dead air. Then this gives way to Cage’s cryp­tic mum­bling and Ra’s restrained key­board taps in “Emp­ty Words and Key­board.” The effect is elec­tric, the moment sacred, and the col­lab­o­ra­tion, though fleet­ing, reveals itself as gen­uine­ly inspired, not only for its care­ful play of con­trast­ing avant-gardis­m’s against each oth­er but for the extra­or­di­nary instances in which Afro­fu­tur­ist free jazz and Fluxus min­i­mal­ism find accord.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Sun Ra Christ­mas: Hear His 1976 Radio Broad­cast of Poet­ry and Music

Sun Ra Plays a Music Ther­a­py Gig at a Men­tal Hos­pi­tal; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

The Curi­ous Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Com­po­si­tion 4’33”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra

With Twin Peaks com­ing back to our TV screens next year, fans want to know who’s com­ing back from the orig­i­nal cast and crew. The same could be said for com­pos­er Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, whose theme music for the series still evokes shots of sawmills, high water­falls, rustling pines, and a deep, dark sense of mys­tery com­bined with the pangs of doomed romance.

In this selec­tion from an August 19, 2016 con­cert from the Dan­ish Nation­al Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra, under the baton of Antho­ny Wee­den, Badalamenti’s score is giv­en a chance to stand alone as a com­po­si­tion with­out the visu­als. Bathed in red light, the orches­tra looks appro­pri­ate­ly Lynchi­an, and all that’s miss­ing is a large red cur­tain and zigzag floor­ing. The arrange­ment hews close to Badalamenti’s, though his small com­bo from the orig­i­nal sound­track gets expand­ed to a full orches­tra, with ket­tle­drums, glock­en­spiel, harp, and con­cert bells. How­ev­er, when “Lau­ra Palmer’s Theme” segues into the title theme, the two-note twang is still played on elec­tric gui­tar. (You can’t mess with that!)

In this con­text, Badalamenti’s nods to Bernard Hermann’s Ver­ti­go score are even more appar­ent, espe­cial­ly in the del­i­cate, swelling love melody that is always in dan­ger of sad col­lapse. The con­cert also fea­tured selec­tions from oth­er great tele­vi­sion sound­tracks, includ­ing Game of Thrones, Home­land, Break­ing Bad, Six Feet Under, and more. The whole con­cert can be watched here.

“We had a fab­u­lous time per­form­ing it —a very spe­cial part of the evening,” Antho­ny Wee­den is quot­ed as say­ing on the go-to Wel­come to Twin Peaks site. And he added, “I can’t wait for the new series!”

Nei­ther can we, Mr. Wee­den.

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Exper­i­men­tal Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Pizza Box Becomes a Playable DJ Turntable Through the Magic of Conductive Ink

Turns out Piz­za Hut is good for some­thing…

They’ve teamed up with the print­ed elec­tron­ics com­pa­ny Novalia to turn card­board piz­za box­es into playable turnta­bles. Spe­cial­iz­ing in tech­nol­o­gy that adds touch and con­nec­tiv­i­ty to every­day sur­faces, Novalia has cre­at­ed two scratch­able decks, each with con­trols that let you fine-tune the vol­ume, pitch, play­back, and cross­fad­ing. And it’s all done with the mag­ic of con­duc­tive ink.

Accord­ing to Live for Music, “the bat­tery-pow­ered box can be hooked up to a com­put­er or phone through Blue­tooth, then con­nect­ed to any DJ soft­ware like Ser­a­to or DJ Pro.” Right now, the playable piz­za box is only avail­able at a few Piz­za Hut loca­tions in the UK. Above, DJ Vec­tra offers a primer on using the new gad­get.

via Live for Music

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Tree Rings Get­ting Played on a Turntable and Turned into Music

How to Clean Your Vinyl Records with Wood Glue

Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Dou­ble as Playable Vinyl Records

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

Take a Virtual Reality Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

A muse­um which con­tains only works of art that nobody can find sounds like some­thing Jorge Luis Borges would’ve dreamed up, but it has twice become a real­i­ty in the 21st cen­tu­ry — or twice become a vir­tu­al real­i­ty, any­way. “The Con­cert by Johannes Ver­meer. Pop­py Flow­ers by Vin­cent van Gogh. Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. These are some of the world’s most famous and expen­sive paint­ings ever stolen,” writes Fast Com­pa­ny’s Mark Wil­son. And though their where­abouts remain unknown, you can see them at The Muse­um of Stolen Art, “a vir­tu­al real­i­ty exhi­bi­tion cre­at­ed by Ziv Schnei­der, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Tisch ITP, that puts stolen works back on dis­play.”

museum of stolen art

At the moment, Schnei­der’s project exists on Google’s vir­tu­al real­i­ty plat­form Card­board, and you can down­load it as a smart­phone app for iOS or Android. Its cur­rent exhibits include “a col­lec­tion of pho­tographs list­ed as stolen in the FBI’s art crime data­base”; the pri­vate col­lec­tion of Fer­di­nand and Imel­da Mar­cos, for­mer pres­i­dent and first lady of the Philip­pines, now “being searched for by the PCGG – a Philip­pine gov­ern­ment office in charge of seiz­ing the Mar­cos’ ill got­ten wealth and bring­ing it back”; and “a large col­lec­tion of paint­ings stolen in some of the world’s most famous art heists, includ­ing the Stew­art and Isabel­la Gard­ner Muse­um in Boston.”

But even before Schnei­der’s insti­tu­tion opened its vir­tu­al-real­i­ty doors, writes The Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Becky Chung, “halfway across the world anoth­er insti­tu­tion — also called the Muse­um of Stolen Art — was debut­ing its gallery exhi­bi­tion of works cur­rent­ly report­ed stolen or miss­ing.” This Muse­um of Stolen Art, in the Nether­lands, presents the Pop­py Flow­ers and Water­loo Bridges of the art world in not vir­tu­al but aug­ment­ed real­i­ty: its vis­i­tors raise their phones or tablets up to its mean­ing­ful­ly emp­ty walls, and on their screens see the pur­loined works restored to their right­ful frames. William Gib­son, in some sense the Bor­ge­sian vision­ary of our tech-sat­u­rat­ed time, has described aug­ment­ed real­i­ty as the nat­ur­al evo­lu­tion of vir­tu­al real­i­ty. It’s made vir­tu­al art recov­ery pos­si­ble; can vir­tu­al art theft be far behind?

museum of stolen art 3

Reminder: You can down­load The Muse­um of Stolen Art smart­phone app on iOS and AndroidThe app is ide­al­ly designed for those with a Google card­board view­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

Vis­it The Muse­um of Online Muse­ums (MoOM): A Mega Col­lec­tion of 220 Online Exhi­bi­tions

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,634 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the 1913 Exhi­bi­tion That Intro­duced Avant-Garde Art to Amer­i­ca

Take a 3D Vir­tu­al Tour of the Sis­tine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca and Oth­er Art-Adorned Vat­i­can Spaces

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

What Are the Most Stolen Books? Book­store Lists Fea­ture Works by Muraka­mi, Bukows­ki, Bur­roughs, Von­negut, Ker­ouac & Palah­niuk

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century (So Far) Named by 177 Film Critics

Mulholland Drive Cover

When prompt­ed to think of the cin­e­mat­ic peaks of the 20th cen­tu­ry, or of spe­cif­ic decades like the 1930s, the 1970s, or the 1990s, we can usu­al­ly thread up spe­cif­ic exam­ples in the pro­jec­tor of our mind right away. Grand Illu­sion and Gone with the Wind! Taxi Dri­ver and The God­fa­therPulp Fic­tion and Far­go! But in this cen­tu­ry it gets trick­i­er. This prob­a­bly does­n’t have to do with a pre­cip­i­tous drop in the qual­i­ty of cin­e­ma itself, nor with a lack of films to con­sid­er — indeed, the 2000s and 2010s so far have bur­dened cinephiles with more crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed pic­tures than they can get around to see­ing.

The rel­a­tive recen­cy of the movies of the 21st cen­tu­ry presents some­thing of a chal­lenge, since the zeit­geist has­n’t had quite enough time to digest most of them. And what now con­sti­tutes the “zeit­geist,” any­way? We live in a post­mod­ern time, we often read, and that usu­al­ly seems to mean that a greater vari­ety of aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties, his­tor­i­cal peri­ods, and world cul­tures now coex­ist for us on an essen­tial­ly lev­el play­ing field than ever before. The expe­ri­ence of the mod­ern movie­go­er reflects this con­di­tion, as does the BBC’s list of the 21st cen­tu­ry’s 100 great­est films (so far), the top ten of which fol­low:

  1. Mul­hol­land Dri­ve (David Lynch, 2001)
  2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
  3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Ander­son, 2007)
  4. Spir­it­ed Away (Hayao Miyaza­ki, 2001)
  5. Boy­hood (Richard Lin­klater, 2014)
  6. Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
  7. The Tree of Life (Ter­rence Mal­ick, 2011)
  8. Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
  9. A Sep­a­ra­tion (Asghar Farha­di, 2011)
  10. No Coun­try for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)

To pro­duce the list, the BBC sur­veyed 177 crit­ics “from every con­ti­nent except Antarc­ti­ca. Some are news­pa­per or mag­a­zine review­ers, oth­ers write pri­mar­i­ly for web­sites; aca­d­e­mics and cin­e­ma cura­tors are well-rep­re­sent­ed too.” They note that they include the year 2000, though not tech­ni­cal­ly part of the cen­tu­ry, since “not only did we all cel­e­brate the turn of the mil­len­ni­um on 31 Decem­ber 1999, but the year 2000 was a land­mark in glob­al cin­e­ma, and, in par­tic­u­lar, saw the emer­gence of new clas­sics from Asia like noth­ing we had ever seen before,” not just Yi Yi and In the Mood for Love but Ang Lee’s Crouch­ing Tiger, Hid­den Drag­on a bit down the list.

France, though a coun­try close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with mid-20th-cen­tu­ry cin­e­ma, makes an admirable show­ing here with the likes of Agnès Var­da’s The Glean­ers & I, Michael Haneke’s Caché, Claire Denis’ White Mate­r­i­al, and Jean-Luc Godard­’s voy­age into 3D, Good­bye to Lan­guage. Some films shame­ful­ly over­looked at their ini­tial release, like Ken­neth Lon­er­gan’s Mar­garet and Andrew Dominik’s The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James by the Cow­ard Robert Ford, appear here as per­haps a pre­lude to their right­ful redis­cov­ery. We can tell which auteurs have defined the cin­e­mat­ic cen­tu­ry so far by the pres­ence of more than one of their works: the late Abbas Kiarosta­mi’s Ten and Cer­ti­fied Copy both appear, as do three films by Thai­land’s Apichat­pong Weerasethakul and six by those still-ambi­tious once-wun­derkinds of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma, the Ander­sons Wes and Paul Thomas.

Most of these movies exploit, to a deep­er extent than the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed pic­tures of decades pre­vi­ous, the cre­ation of dream­like expe­ri­ences pos­si­ble in film. None do it more vivid­ly, per­haps, than the occu­pi­er of the top spot, David Lynch’s Mul­hol­land Dri­ve. The selec­tion will sur­prise some read­ers, and oth­ers not at all. What makes that par­tic­u­lar movie so good? Con­ve­nient­ly, the BBC pro­vides on the side­bar a link to an arti­cle by Luke Buck­mas­ter explain­ing just that.

Buck­mas­ter com­pares Mul­hol­land Dri­ve to Cit­i­zen Kane, “writer/director Orson Welles’ esteemed 1941 fea­ture film debut – BBC Culture’s crit­ics poll of the 100 great­est Amer­i­can films last year put Kane at num­ber one. If Kane can be viewed as an essay on the nuts and bolts of film-mak­ing – a mas­ter­class in tech­ni­cal process­es, from mon­tage to deep focus, dis­solves and the manip­u­la­tion of mise en scèneMul­hol­land Dri­ve’s appeal is more the­mat­ic and con­cep­tu­al. It is less a demon­stra­tion of how great cin­e­ma is achieved than what great cin­e­ma can achieve, its capac­i­ty for ideas seem­ing­ly end­less.” May the remain­ing 84 years of the 21st cen­tu­ry find that capac­i­ty more end­less still.

See the BBC’s com­plete list here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Star Trek Postage Stamps Coming Soon: Celebrating 50 Years of Exploring the Final Frontier

star-trek-stamps

The orig­i­nal Star Trek TV series took to the air­waves near­ly 5o years ago–on Sep­tem­ber 8, 1966. Poor rat­ings meant that the show did­n’t last very long (only three years). But every­thing changed once the show went into syn­di­ca­tion. It achieved cult sta­tus. And a fran­chise was born. The orig­i­nal Star Trek has now spawned five addi­tion­al tv series, 13 fea­ture films, and a num­ber of fan-made sequels.

To cel­e­brate 50 years of Star Trek, the US Postal Ser­vice has decid­ed to release a com­mem­o­ra­tive set of stamps inspired by the orig­i­nal show. The four stamps (shown above) depict the fol­low­ing:

  • The Star­ship Enter­prise inside the out­line of a Starfleet insignia against a gold back­ground.
  • The sil­hou­ette of a crew­man in a trans­porter against a red back­ground.
  • The sil­hou­ette of the Enter­prise from above against a green back­ground.
  • The Enter­prise inside the out­line of the Vul­can salute (Spock’s icon­ic hand ges­ture) against a blue back­ground.

The stamps will be offi­cial­ly avail­able on Sep­tem­ber 2, though they can be pre-ordered here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Star Trek Con­tin­ues: The Crit­i­cal­ly-Acclaimed, Fan-Made Sequel to the Orig­i­nal TV Series

How Isaac Asi­mov Went from Star Trek Crit­ic to Star Trek­Fan & Advi­sor

Nichelle Nichols Explains How Mar­tin Luther King Con­vinced Her to Stay on Star Trek

The Com­plete Star Wars “Fil­mu­men­tary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Doc­u­men­tary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Com­men­tary

Hard­ware Wars: The Moth­er of All Star Wars Fan Films (and the Most Prof­itable Short Film Ever Made)

Star Wars Uncut: The Epic Fan Film

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Penn Jillette Makes the Philosophical & Pragmatic Case for Libertarianism

For an anar­chist like Noam Chom­sky, lib­er­tar­i­an­ism as it’s under­stood in the U.S. is a cor­rup­tion of the term. Through­out their polit­i­cal his­to­ry, Chom­sky argues, “real” Lib­er­tar­i­ans have been anti-Capitalist—and he includes under this head­ing such clas­si­cal lib­er­als as Adam Smith and Thomas Jef­fer­son, as well as mod­ern anar­cho-social­ists like him­self. Mod­ern U.S. Lib­er­tar­i­ans like Ron and Rand Paul, Mil­ton Fried­man, and Robert Noz­ick have all meant some­thing very dif­fer­ent by the term, and cer­tain­ly haven’t agreed on what that is. So what exact­ly is Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism?

Giv­en pop­u­lar misconceptions—and some less than stel­lar pub­lic rela­tions moments—one per­haps gets a clear­est idea of what Amer­i­can Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is by read­ing about what it isn’t, as in this essay from one of its most con­trar­i­an the­o­rists, Mur­ray Roth­bard. Or we can spend a few min­utes with that vol­u­ble comedic magi­cian Penn Jil­lette, a well-known face of Lib­er­tar­i­an and athe­ist thought for many years. Jillette’s the­sis in his eigh­teen-minute Big Think video above comes down to this: “we think you should take as lit­tle from oth­er peo­ple by force as pos­si­ble and you should be able to do what­ev­er you think is right.” Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism, Jil­lette elab­o­rates, “is the strongest sense of ‘please, do what you want, try not to hurt me.”

The con­cept he refers to is one Isa­iah Berlin wrote of as “neg­a­tive lib­er­ty,” or the prin­ci­ple of non­in­ter­fer­ence, a sta­ple of all Lib­er­tar­i­an thought. The heavy stress on indi­vid­ual rights has come in for cri­tique as naïve, but as Roth­bard notes, “no indi­vid­u­al­ist denies that peo­ple are influ­enc­ing each oth­er all the time.” Lib­er­tar­i­an thinkers have wres­tled with the con­flict (if not con­tra­dic­tion) between max­i­mal indi­vid­ual free­dom and free­dom from harm. Robert Noz­ick, for exam­ple, extend­ed his dis­cus­sion beyond our respon­si­bil­i­ties to each oth­er to a moral case study of our duties toward ani­mals. Respon­si­bil­i­ty stands as a key term in Jillette’s artic­u­la­tion of Libertarianism—a sine qua non of a Lib­er­tar­i­an soci­ety.

But is there such a thing as a func­tion­ing Lib­er­tar­i­an soci­ety? Or does Jil­lette describe an unre­al­iz­able utopia that depends not only on most peo­ple act­ing respon­si­bly, but also on most peo­ple act­ing ratio­nal­ly? As he him­self says, “Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism is tak­ing a right on mon­ey, your first left on sex, and look­ing for utopia straight ahead.” This lan­guage aside, he doesn’t seem to oper­ate under the illu­sion that peo­ple always make the best choic­es for them­selves or their fam­i­lies. As part of his argu­ment, how­ev­er, he admits he isn’t qual­i­fied or desirous to make those choic­es for oth­er peo­ple when he can often bare­ly dis­cern the right course of action for him­self. As it gen­er­al­ly does, this course of rea­son­ing brings us to the prob­lem of tax­a­tion in Lib­er­tar­i­an thought.

Jillette’s appeal seems com­mon­sen­si­cal and prag­mat­ic, and after his gen­er­al pitch, he launch­es into a cri­tique of cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism that could come right out of a Chom­sky talk—in some small part, that is. Jil­lette believes that, absent most gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence, we would have such a thing as a “true free mar­ket” in which every­one could com­pete fair­ly and with­out coer­cion. This is a posi­tion even Noz­ick soft­ened on many years after his clas­sic Anar­chy, State, and Utopia, call­ing it “seri­ous­ly inad­e­quate” and admit­ting that many demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions Lib­er­tar­i­ans want to abol­ish pre­serve “our equal human dig­ni­ty, our auton­o­my and pow­ers of self-direc­tion.”

What­ev­er we make of Jillette’s lais­sez faire ide­ol­o­gy, his cri­tiques of gov­ern­ment speak to Lib­er­tar­i­ans on either side of the eco­nom­ics divide. He makes an inci­sive case against Clin­ton, then tears into Trump’s will­ing­ness to “give easy answers.” Hold­ing up career politi­cians Bernie Sanders and Gary John­son as “paragons” may seem a bit much, giv­en Jillette’s force­ful argu­ment for a healthy and thor­ough­go­ing mis­trust of gov­ern­ment. As he says in the ear­li­er Big Think inter­view above, “part of the joy and the won­der and the bril­liance of the ideas of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca that whoever’s in pow­er is ques­tioned and beat up.”

He does not, of course, mean that last part in any lit­er­al sense. While Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism has per­haps been tarred by asso­ci­a­tion with an increas­ing­ly vio­lent right, it would be a mis­take to lump Jil­lette in with cer­tain polit­i­cal oppor­tunists who at one time or anoth­er have used the term to describe them­selves. His com­mit­ment to anti-war and drug legal­iza­tion poli­cies is unwa­ver­ing, and he makes a strong, well-rea­soned case for his pol­i­tics. It’s one worth hear­ing out whether you agree or not in the end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

A The­o­ry of Jus­tice, the Musi­cal Imag­ines Philoso­pher John Rawls as a Time-Trav­el­ing Adven­tur­er

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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