Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Meditiation on Formal Perfection

*kramer walks through a wall without flinching* jerry i,m home *jerry's knife-wound filled corpse sits on the couch* jerry tell me a joke;
If this stopped at the first line or independent clause or whatever it would still be a kind of hilarious that I could never hope to duplicate. It cracks me up still; it is cracking me up right now. Do we enter mid-PCP binge? What sport if this is the case! Kramer stalks the streets, bugs out, refuses to put on an AIDS ribbon, has business ideas such as beach-scented cologne or maybe a sort of coffee table book about coffee table books, slides, disappears, subsists in New York City without a job or any apparent purpose in life and then CRASH, without flinching even, drywall and paint chips littering Jerry's once-orderly apartment, he has walked through a wall, the greatest of his vaunted entrances. Through a wall, jittering though unfazed, oblivious as always (indeed, none of this makes sense--never mind comedic sense--if one is unappreciative of Kramer's just sort of like, Zen-like, mystical obliviousness), bleeding but unflinching even though there's something very obviously wrong. What is it? He isn't greeted with a stinging bon mot or a friendly groan. It is dark, the apartment is a deep shadow tempered only by the suggestion of a soft and distant streetlight, casting its stale glow from another world. A gaseous, fetid quality pinches the air, but Kramer is on PCP so he smells and notices nothing. God, he is on so much PCP. He sees nothing but the back of a hanging head and hunched neck and everything appears as normal, except that Jerry's corpse is positively filled with knife-wounds (although if Kramer knows that, of course, the humor of the situation is sort of totally lost, unless you find humor in someone expecting to hear a joke from a wound-riddled corpse. Which I sort of do, now that I think about it!). Jerry tell me a joke;--this isn't even the punchline of this situation. That I believe is off somewhere else, perhaps far off, occupying some indeterminant point deep in a vast unwritten Beyond. And this is funny only insomuch as tragedy at its cheapest and cruelest and most flippant or most reducible is funny. Take the Twitter handle Weed Hitler, for instance. See that's exactly what I'm talking about.

This might be the greatest tweet of all time.