After Love & Friendship in the early afternoon, I was gearing up for a night of comedy. Checked out the first episode of Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite (featuring Patton Oswalt), then watched Patton Oswalt’s great new standup special Talking For Clapping. Patton is super funny, but whenever he mentioned his (recently deceased) wife or their daughter I got a little sad. Deciding to follow that up with something lighter, I put on the great Bobcat Goldthwait’s documentary on his comedian friend Barry (which of course also ended up featuring Patton), forgetting that Bobcat movies are never light, unchallenging fun. So when Cindy Sheehan showed up, and Barry appeared at a Senate hearing shutting down an AOL lawyer, and none of this is funny (but it’s a hugely better film than I imagined it’d be), I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Barry Crimmins goes way back with the director. Barry used to call himself “Bear Cat,” so as a spoof, some of the young comedians who frequented his club nicknamed themselves “Tomcat” Kenny and “Bobcat” Goldthwait, and one of these names stuck. For a comedian I’d never heard of, he has some powerful fans: Marc Maron, David Cross, Steven Wright, Louis CK. But you don’t think of comedians and artists as literal heroes… sure, Lenny Bruce went to jail and George Carlin and Frank Zappa went to court to protect freedom of speech, but Crimmins made a different sort of legal impact, getting the ball rolling on prosecution of online child pornographers, a pet issue of his since surviving child abuse. So the movie goes to very dark places and comes out cathartically on the other side. I loved it.
I looked up whether Barry’s got any stand-up specials, and there’s one being taped three hours away a few days after I watched this movie… hopefully I won’t regret skipping that (couldn’t get anyone to come along, can’t spend the night because of birds, and that’s a long way to drive alone) but I’ll buy the video version the minute it hits Louis’s site.
Back to straight comedy the next day, I watched Hannibal Takes Edinburgh. I was more listening than watching, but I kept looking up to see if Buress visited any locations I recognized, distractedly forgetting until halfway through the special that I’ve never been to Edinburgh.