by Sheila Heti
Written for You Are in a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different, the recent Daniel Cockburn monograph (2009).
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What is being funny all about?
Why does Daniel Cockburn speak so dispassionately about subjects which he is so passionate about, subjects which he knows are too annoying and tiny to be passionate about?
Daniel Cockburn stands beside himself and looks at what repeats in himself. Then he tries to communicate the tininess of what repeats in himself. There are certain comedians whose delivery his delivery resembles. These comedians pretend that they do not want a laugh. Maybe they don’t actually want a laugh. Maybe they want everyone to sigh alongside them. Maybe they want the audience to actually put its head down into its folded arms. Maybe they just want a warm pat on the back, or a hug after the show. Maybe for these comedians a laugh is always an insult.
The comedian plays with tempo and timing in order to make the joke work. What would it mean for Daniel Cockburn’s videos to work? Does he want to make a joke or does he want to make us miss the joke?
If he wants us to miss the joke, what is the joke he wants us to miss all about?
A joke wants to make the bigness of the world small, compacted into the size of a joke. Daniel Cockburn seems afraid that the world will never be any bigger than the smallness that his obsession makes it. A big world reduced to something small: just a tempo. How to make the small big again? How to make the joke unfold beyond the joke? How to make the world-made-small-into-a-joke into something big again, like the world?
Maybe it’s not a question, if the world doesn’t actually feel big to begin with, if it feels constrained within the boundaries of one’s own obsessions and preoccupations. A single sentence from Wittgenstein. A beat hit onto the chest. A lined grid.
But there’s something sad about the comedian who doesn’t even want a laugh. There’s something lonely about the comedian who starts off not even wanting to produce a laugh in his audience.
When the subject of the joke is one’s own smallness, one’s inability to see the greater things – knowing they’re there, but one’s thoughts always reducing themselves, endlessly, into the smallest fragments – then a laugh is not necessary. Because someone who tells this sort of joke does not want a laugh of complicity from the audience. That will just make him sadder and lonelier. What he wants is for the audience to say, No, it’s not true at all – look, see this! And to show the comedian, standing there on the stage, all the millions of colours that the comic is talking about missing and having missed, and living his life lonely for.
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On the internet there’s a page that shows X-rays of people with strange things in their skulls: nails from a nail gun, a pair of scissors lodged in the nose, the leg of a chair smashed, in a fight, down through the eye socket, out the back of the neck. Most of these people know that they have things lodged in their skulls, but some of these people don’t know. They’ve had a cold for twenty years, then they go into the doctor’s office and the doctor says, You’ve got a three-foot nail lodged in your sinus. The patient replies, I thought I took that nail out. Or, I thought I felt something go in twenty years ago, but I wasn’t sure.
Daniel Cockburn – what do you have lodged in your skull that you don’t know about? What is occluding the rest of the world? Do you have twenty-four razors, all lodged in the strangest parts of your skull, that you don’t even know about? You should get an X-ray.
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A lonely man, preoccupied with the little things – for everything big reduces to the little things – doesn’t even know that for fifteen years he has had a magnet in his head that reorders everything. This magnet reorders whatever comes into its proximity. So if a beautiful sunset is seen by the man with the magnet in his head, the magnet’s force reorders it into the shape and outline of a grid. Same with new love. Same with a cat crossing the path. The man doesn’t know about the magnet; all he knows is that everything always comes out feeling and looking the same, no matter what the input, no matter what the stimuli. If he knew about the magnet, or where it was located – if he only went to get a fucking X-ray! – he could maybe take it out. But art takes a lot of time, and doesn’t pay well, and he only goes to medical clinics. He hasn’t had a family doctor since he was a boy.
So he tries to figure it out himself. He thinks, Maybe my art will solve this problem, or if not solve it, then at least express it – for expression, for an artist, feels like a solution.
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