The Pratfall Remains: A Dialogue of Improv Comedy & Tone Synesthesia with Chase Griffin

Unofficial Metapsychosis correspondent Christina Quay here, crusty-eyed and cowboy-hatted, typing you this intro from the Om Home, the Griffin-Quay family abode nestled deep within Florida layline number ∆@+

Let’s get started, why doinnwee?

Psychedelic fiction author / comedy writer / fallen trickster angel Chase Griffin, the original Gaucho Schlemiel, is attempting to finish Schlemiel, Gaucho, a coming of age story about a young man doomed to collect Florida fairytales. Chase has let me read parts and pieces of this dripping, oozing thing a few times and, once I’m able to banish the tentacles back to Netherland, no wait that’s Holland, I mean the netherworld, the novel reads exactly like it’s been through some shit, rain, lightning, gators, salt water hallucinations, like Chase actually traveled down the Hillsborough river in a pirate ship bookstore with a man who looked and sounded just like Rip Torn.

This book has everything. There’s Iggnïs, Florida. This is a town that doesn’t appear on any maps, may be a colonial remnant of a long lost European empire, and seems to function as a decaying stage set erected by some eldritch dramaturgical intelligence. Bureaucrats hand out koans. Road signs change fonts mid-word. Some of the locals have wind up keys on their backs.

And if it sounds absurd, it is. Duck, reader! I mean, flamingo! There’s a flamingo, weaponized?, flying right at you. Oh no, not weaponized. That flamingo is a doctor.

Sorry about that.

Anyway, this version of Schlemiel, Gaucho isn’t going to be the one you’ll read.

He’s starting it all over. Again. For, like, the billionth time.

Chase

Who are you talking to?

Christina

The reader. I’m setting the mood.

What makes this novel more than a book, and why it matters, is… is… is? Honey, what is this thing? Why do you keep throwing this one out?

Chase

I don’t know. I spent the entire year of 2006 listening to Bob Dylan. Only Dylan. It was a dare I made with myself. I don’t know why I did it. I couldn’t listen to Dylan for about 10 years after that dare.

Christina

What’s your favorite Dylan record?

Chase

Desire.

Christina

What’s up with your deranged numen?

Chase

I don’t know. I guess I never gave up on being eccentric.

Christina

You’re like Bernie. There’s only one you.

Jesus Christ, is that flamingo back? What is up with that thing?!

What was I saying?

Should we cut this part from the transcript?

Between diaper changes, endless errands, an existential amount of laundry, and the cutest avalanche of baby dilemmas, Chase and I somehow found time (mostly in the dead of night when our brains were at peak delirium) to talk about finishing a book and then throwing it away, comedy as anti-authority spellwork and what it means to be a schlemiel in the age of algorithmic dramaturgy.

Is it ethical or conflict-of-interest-y to do an interview with someone you are fucking?

Chase

Probably. But who cares. I’m not running for office or something like that.

Christina

Griffin, for a chaotic future and a deranged numen.

Chase

Let’s transduce main street USA into funky street Iggnïs FLA.

Christina

Where did you go to school?

Chase

I went to DVD commentaries.

Christina

DVD commentaries. What are you saying? Is that a cut-up technique thing you’re doing? Like, did you open a book, flip to a random page, and point to the words DVD commentaries?

Chase

No, I mean my writing school was listening to Simpsons, Monty Python, etc DVD commentaries. I mean, I read Kafka, PKD, RAW, Joyce, Rabelais, and all the other single named and acronym people too, but maybe the cult classics were my minor. DVD commentaries were my major.

Christina

This wasn’t a conscious thing, was it?

Chase

That’s right. It’s my accidental school.

Duck! I mean, flamingo! Duck!

Can you believe that thing?

Christina

That’s how you do your thing, huh?

Chase

Yes, it’s all accidental. I see what I have to work with and then I find the oddness.

Christina

You like to find quirks in that non quirky. You like weirding.

Chase

Yes. And I find very non deep things very deep. Examples: I think the Weird Al film UHF to be deep. I think Jumanji is deep. Tommy Boy is very deep. Big Trouble In Little China might be the deepest film of all time.

Christina

And this isn’t one of your pranks?

Chase

No, I’m being earnest. For real. I think I have tone interpretation condition. I want to call it tone synesthesia.

Christina

You don’t fit in many tribes?

Chase

Lol. People want neat little boxes. They say, be the critical theory box. Be the political radical box. Be the thanksgiving table Marxist box. Be the modernist lit revival box. Be the prestige horror box. Be the such and such box. God, I feel like I’m starting to sound like ♫ don’t you ♫ forget about me ♫. And I guess I know how to do the proper stuff, and I’m not being a contrarian. And those boxes move my heart and soul. But not when I mess about with those boxes.

Christina

The stuff you muck about with don’t fit into neat boxes. Robin Williams, Chris Farley, John Carpenter and his misfits, etc. These are people who seem to exist outside of ideology. You seem to be attracted to people who don’t even need to have the veil lifted or wear the special sunglasses. They dance about the stew that exists under everything.

Chase

Yes. Add Bowie, Andy Kaufman, the Pythons to that list. We’re talking about a gift that goes well beyond deconstruction. They didn’t need to deconstruct. These are figures who have what I call neverending, wordless answers. There’s probably a really schweet Taoist word for this.

Christina

It kinda sounds like you’re describing de (or te) which is sorta the embodiment of the Tao. It sorta means innate spiritual presence and charisma.

Chase

That’s the te-cket.

Christina

Do you have a religion?

Chase

I’m an in-betweener. I come from nowhere. I’m basically not a real person except at home. Literary fiction often wants to grieve properly. Which is fine for anyone who wants to grieve properly. I’m not knocking what works for others. I’m talking about what works for me. I need to grieve incorrectly. It helps me feel things very deeply, like deep deep down in my marrow, to grieve incorrectly. I know there’s no way to grieve correctly. So I guess I mean an avoiding of grief, but I don’t mean that either because then it sounds like I’m going to come back around to the grief. Comedy lets me grieve wrong with pratfalls and fake documents and pareprodokians. And satire’s tricky. Satire gets co-opted. It gets turned into upper middle class mofos clinking wine glasses at Daily Show punchlines. Although, to be honest, most daze I do miss the status quo. Daily Show punchlines are way better than nazi scumfucks, so I’ll take the Daily Show punchlines. I wonder if we lost the status quo because we lost the Colbert Report. I think the combination of DS and CR held the hearts and minds of US inside a stasis chamber. I doubt we can ever have some non-hyper-mediated-monoculture driven civilization. Maybe civilization works best when monoculture is the surface and the fringes live in Netherland, no sorry that’s Holland, I mean nether-realm. In the depths. The psychic battles for the individual and the society should happen under the surface. So, I guess, fine. Bring on the glass clinkers.

What the hell?! That flamingo is on our side of the paper now! Run!

Christina

Do you believe in God?

Chase

Yes, but not bearded sky man God. More like panpsychist God.

Christina

What happened?

Chase

I had a Lutheran/Catholic/Jewish upbringing. This says a lot about me, doesn’t it? Then, in my teens, I became a Richard Dawkins style atheist. This was probably a good move. I, like most who took on this snarky persona, was protecting my psyche during the evangelical Bush years. But I grew tired of that persona performance. It’s exhausting to act exactly like the other Dawkins people. So then shed that identity and just stopped caring about belief. I guess I was still atheist but I no longer felt the need to shit on people. Who said the thing about letting the mother who believes she will be reunited with her dead child in heaven believe that? I didn’t want to be cruel, you know. And then something very supernatural happened to me. It’s a long story but basically I was singing to myself in bed one night. I was joking around with myself and sorta doing a Weird Al style parody song. The song was My Sharona, which I’m pretty sure Weird Al already parodied. My version was the plot of the Disney version of Robin Hood. It was a spectacular parody and totally improvised too. In the middle of this the song this green orb, about the size of a basketball, appears in the corner of my dark bedroom.

Christina

So, drugs? Drugs, right?

Chase

No, I was sober. And there was no way this was a headlight. There were no windows in my room.

Christina

What happened next?

Chase

A gust of odd smelling wind hit me in the face and then the Orb rushed toward me. I freaked out and jumped to my feet. I pulled the light cord of my fan and the Orb disappeared. I kinda nervously cackled to myself and turned the light back off. The Orb was gone but there was a green glowing streak on the wall. It looked like a ghost had wiped its ass on my wall. The Orb never appeared again. But that glowing green ass streak remained on my wall the rest of my time in that apartment.

Christina

So that’s the origin of your improv comedy magick thing.

Chase

Yes, and to anyone reading this it might sound like I’m having a laugh right now. But I swear I’m not messing around. It’s hard to be a comedian and try to say serious things because no one ever knows when you’re being serious. God, what a strange path I chose. I’m like, I want to write Bruno Schulz Kafka Philip K Dick books that worship mad magazine Mel Brooks Chris Farley. But yeah, that’s the origin of my obsession. During the rest of that time in the apartment, I tried to bring the Orb back with more parodies. Again, I am being earnest. I swear. And I am not doth protesting too much. This is so ridiculous that I should be doth protesting every other sentence. The parody songs didn’t bring the Orb back so I figured maybe it was the comedy in general that manifested the thing. Maybe it could be any kind of joke, it just needed to be super funny.

Christina

You never brought it back.

Chase

I haven’t made a funny as golden as that Robin Hood song. I have never topped myself. Oh well. I probably don’t want to conjure it. It felt friendly to me. But then again, Cthulhu feels friendly to the people overtaken by its powers.

Christina

It’s sounds like you’re making excuses.

Chase

LOL! Quay for the zinga!

Christina

It’s a compelling origin for sure.

Chase

Maybe it was a formless state me from an upper realm telling me to try as hard as I can to bring people joy through my zaniness.

Christina

So that’s your belief system.

Chase

I know it’s naive as fuck, but maybe the best ideas are naive, what happens when we try to bring each other joy? Wholeness joy. Non sexy joy that asks for nothing in return.

Christina

Do you think cities are cargo cults for Eldritch beasts?

Chase

Yes, kind of. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Christina

What’s with Tampa?

Chase

Tampa is the set from a forgotten Eurotrash dream movie.

I once saw the parking lot of an open-year-round Halloween store turn an old man into a puff of smoke. Poof! He was gone!

Also, the sets of Suspiria and Inferno are the greatest actors of all time.

Christina

What are you thinking?

Chase

I try not to think. I try to simply do. Thinking and method get in the way most of the time.

Shit! What is up with this crazy flamingo?!

Christina

If you were a Python, who would you be? Jones? You feel like Jones. You even kinda look like Terry Jones.

Chase

If I had to pick one? I’m the Terry Jones/Terry Gilliam hybrid. Jones was the heart. Gilliam was the chaos. And Schlemiel, Gaucho needs both to work.

Christina

In a world allergic to sincerity, where heart is flattened and monetized, how do you protect yours?

Chase

I want to say mis-clucking-direction, that I decentralize it, that I scramble it, that I prank it. But that would be a lie. I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam. I guess I’ve given up on protecting it. I think my heart and my soul are strong enough to handle society.

Flamingo.

Christina

What are you avoiding?

Chase

Dogma. Yes. It’s a bit like pyrrhonism. I’m allergic to dogma. What can I say? Call me Thomas Pyrrhon.

Christina

So you’re just going to keep going? You’re writing it live?

Chase

Yes. I threw Schlemiel out again. For the fiftieth time. That’s the ultimate pratfall I think. I guess I’m afraid that the new version was too dogmatic. I sabotaged myself again. Which I guess is a part of the process. This is how I complete the novel. I’m rough drafting live to see how writing/improving/caffeining through hyper mediation affects the creative faculties of my psyche. So far, I’m having fun. People have been nice.

Christina

Favorite actor and why.

Chase

Cary Grant. Because he is the ultimate symbol of the true and good individualist. He’s got that classic ran away from home and joined the vaudeville backstory. He’s super funny and an improv expert. His sexuality is fluid and he doesn’t care. He always treated women like complex, multidimensional people and never like sex objects. He doesn’t know how handsome he is. He never takes himself too seriously. When bad stuff happened to him, he just kinda shrugged it off. He dropped LSD 100 times and well before the hippies got a hold of it. His personality was already right on before the LSD but after the LSD he was even more amazing. He’s British but he gave himself a mid-atlantic accent. Every movie he ever did is perfect. He’s the great screwball.

Christina

What are your top Cary Grant films?

Chase

North By Northwest, His Girl Friday, Arsenic & Old Lace, Bringing Up Baby, and Charade

Christina

Any complaints?

Chase

Kinda but not really. I have wishes. I think I care too much about entertainment. But then again, most cultural things are pretty much entertainment. That’s not a bad thing. I think Ligotti said that in a interview and that’s one of the few things I agree with him on. And if entertainment is all we have, we should be more wary of what we consume. And our entertainment should be coming from carny-ish, gipsy-ish, vaudevillian, immigrants like it did in the old days. The old movie studios were built by people who came from nothing. Their stories, their constraints, their style, their cultures made for better entertainment, better art, better experiences, better presence.

Christina

Yes, nepo people should not be allowed to run anything.

Chase

Exactly. I think people who have had to work hard their entire lives should be running things. Politics, culture, everything is in the hands of nepo twits. And twits should only be allowed to do twit things in their twit manors.

Christina

Wow, you did that with your barehands.

Chase

Yep, the flamingo is dead.

Christina

And you’re wearing it around your neck.

Chase

Is the allusion too much?

Christina

I dig. It’s your burden.

Chase

Hopefully it’s a funny burden.

Christina

Ohp, there goes the flamingo. What a sweet bird. You trained it to do that.

Chase

Yes, you knew the whole time.

Christina

Yes.

Chase

Yes, we can’t kill the flamingo. Readers, I think, maybe have grown accustomed to it.

Christina

It’s a good gag.

Chase

Let’s follow it home.

Christina

Onward!