Lust is all around
Sex and the City; Eddie Izzard; Comedy Central
by Robert David Sullivan
The cast of Sex and the City
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You couldn't really appreciate Seinfeld unless you caught on that the
title character (as opposed to the real-life Seinfeld) was not a very good
stand-up comic and that his success was as absurd as any of Kramer's get-rich
schemes. Similarly, HBO's comedy series Sex and the City (in its second
season, on Sundays at 9 p.m.) works only if you realize that lead character
Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a fraud. Blessed with good looks, a
Manhattan apartment, and several more years before she hits 40, Bradshaw writes
a popular "sex column" and likes to quiz her dining companions about such
pastimes as anal intercourse, but she's never convincing as the master of her
domain. In an episode from last year, she decides to beat men at their own game
by using an ex-boyfriend as a fuck toy (no cuddling, no phone call the next
day). She brags about her success but later regrets the whole sordid
experiment. In her on-and-off affair with a master manipulator known to viewers
only as "Mr. Big" (Law and Order's Chris Noth), she repeatedly feigns
indifference to his piggish behavior, then tries to win him back.
Sex and the City is one long riff on a classic moment from The Mary
Tyler Moore Show: faced with yet another awkward social situation, Mary
assures Mr. Grant (Ed Asner) that she'll defuse it with strength and
self-confidence. Mr. Grant looks her over for a moment and scoffs, "You can't
pull that off." Mary immediately dissolves into her usual nervous slouch and
says, "I knooow." This is 1999, so Carrie Bradshaw doesn't blush easily
and doesn't have crying fits, but she does have Mary's lanky build (with a lot
more hair at the top) and that habit of referring to the most important man in
her life as "Mr." Her dilemma is neatly summed up in the packaging for Sex
and the City. In the print ads, "Carrie" is sitting in the nude with her
back to the viewer -- looking over her shoulder as if to invite us into her
world, but with a rather apprehensive expression. In the opening credits of
each episode, Carrie walks around Manhattan in a pristine white dress and gets
puddle-splashed by a bus (with her name on it, literally) in a slow-motion
sequence that plays as a nasty spoof of Mary Richards tossing her hat into the
air. The obvious conclusion is that we're dealing with the old madonna-whore
paradox here, except that the men in Sex and the City don't seem to care
about their girlfriends' sexual histories. No, the more immediate problem is
that poor Carrie never gets to wear anything comfortable on the series,
and certainly nothing like the black-sweater-and-jeans type of outfit that most
of us wear around people we don't need to impress anymore. The richest irony
running throughout Sex and the City is that the main characters have
every kind of sex imaginable except the comfortable, relaxing kind, and neither
the professional nor the amateur "sexperts" have a clue about what they're
missing.
Sarah Jessica Parker is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but Carrie's false
bravado works well as a comic thread through the series. In the season premiere
(repeated this Saturday, June 12, at 1:10 a.m.), she has a nice moment in the
bleachers of Yankee Stadium -- a cigarette in one hand and a cup of beer in the
other, with legs dangling over the seat in front of her -- in which she tries a
little too hard to appear as if she were enjoying herself without Mr. Big.
(Naturally, she's wearing a white outfit that could be ruined by an errant
flick of cigarette ash.)
The regular cast is rounded out by the three best friends -- also attractive,
single, professional women in their 30s -- who seem to be Carrie's only sources
for her column. It should be noted here that neither the column nor the TV
series works as a field guide to sexual practices or fetishes. In an episode
from last season, there's a lot of talk about threesomes, and Carrie's friend
Miranda (Cynthia Nixon, whose ability to look disgusted and titillated at the
same time provides some of the best moments in the series) goes so far as to
meet a couple through the personal ads before backing out of the deal, but
that's all we get on the topic. I wasn't waiting to be enlightened on the
mechanics of a ménage à trois (easy enough to find videos for
that), but I would have loved to see the husband and wife hash out the writing
of the personal ad over the kitchen table. Alas, the curiosity-deprived Carrie,
who says she has never participated in a threesome herself, is never shown
interviewing anyone for her column on the topic. Its home on pay cable
notwithstanding, Sex is rather lightly spiced. (Maybe the characters are
too young and lacking in experience. HBO should consider a spinoff starring
Carrie Donovan -- the former New York Times fashion columnist who now
shills for Old Navy -- and a couple of tough old Manhattan broads like Elaine
Stritch and Angela Lansbury. Imagine the dinner conversations you could get out
of them.)
Based on an actual New York Observer column and book by Candace
Bushnell and created by Darren Star (Melrose Place), Sex and the
City does excel at Seinfeld-like silly moments. Among my favorites
from last year was a phone call that caused one guy to dump his girlfriend,
shall we say, prematurely ("You're breaking up with me while you're still
inside me?" was the stunned response) and another guy's sensitive
request that his girlfriend expand her sexual repertoire ("I'm planning on
getting a lot of blow jobs in the future, and I hope you're around when I get
them"). The first two episodes of the new season feature a few so-so recycled
plots (like a guy with an unusually small penis who, implausibly, isn't aware
of his problem) and at least one home run in this Sunday's episode, in which
the inhibited Miranda learns to talk dirty but quickly finds cause to regret
her new talent. Sex and the City just can't stay away from the idea that
a little carnal knowledge is a dangerous thing.
THERE'S A LOT MORE COMEDY, but not much subtlety, coming up on cable
this month. On HBO, Sex in the City is being paired with the frantically
paced Arli$$ (in its fourth season, Sundays at 9:30 p.m.), which stars
Robert Wuhl as an agent for professional athletes. The horn-and-whistle
"background" music more than compensates for the absent laugh track in annoying
viewers, and the parade of celebrities playing themselves only emphasizes that
this is an affectionate (rather than funny) satire of the sports world. The
season premiere (repeated this Friday at midnight) also features a lot of fart
jokes.
At the other end of the quality scale is Eddie Izzard: Dress To Kill
(this Saturday, June 12, at 11:30 p.m. on HBO), a concert special that has more
laughs in 90 minutes than Saturday Night Live has given us in the past
five years. Izzard, a stand-up comic from Britain, is a self-described
transvestite who does his act in high heels, make-up, and a tasteful blue
blouse, but little of his material has anything to do with sexual identity. The
bulk of Dress To Kill is a splendidly Pythonesque history lesson ranging
from Stonehenge to Margaret Thatcher. (As an English settler meeting American
Indians in Plymouth: "You have no system of ownership, eh? Well, that could
come in handy later.") Izzard also acts out the discovery of the Heimlich
maneuver (after much trial and error), demonstrates how to sing the American
national anthem if you don't know the words, and shamelessly segues from the
Holy Ghost to the recurring haunted-house motif of Scooby Doo cartoons. Tape
Dress To Kill even if you're home to watch it, because it's just as
funny the second time around.
Sexual content won't be hard to find on Comedy Central's summer schedule,
which includes two new series on the network made famous by South Park.
Both are spinoffs of Win Ben Stein's Money, which won Comedy Central a
daytime Emmy for best game show a few weeks ago. (Susan Lucci finally won, and
Jeopardy! finally lost, so the Apocalypse must be near.) Each episode of
the louder and cruder VS. (weekdays at 5 p.m. and Thursdays at 10:30
p.m.) pits two different teams of "real people" against each other to answer
trivia questions. As on Ben Stein, all the category titles are bad puns,
but in this case the puns all involve sex or other bodily functions
(e.g., "When She Greased Down My Chassis, My Axl Rose," for rock-music
questions). On next Thursday night's episode, Harvard graduates face
community-college students (guess which side is familiar with Guns N' Roses
album titles); the following week, it's bikers versus prison guards. You can
probably find a wrestling match with more decorum.
Meanwhile, Ben Stein sidekick Jimmy Kimmel moonlights as co-host of
The Man Show (Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m., beginning June 16), a low-budget
vaudeville series with girls in bikinis and sketches that include monkeys
re-enacting great moments in history (at least the fart jokes are more
imaginative here than on Arli$$. The other co-host is Adam Carolla (of
MTV's Loveline), who explains in the premiere that the purpose of the
show is to stop "the Oprah-ization of America" and to "dam the river of
estrogen" that's been flooding American culture. Because the logo of The Man
Show is a fat, balding man with wrinkles, we know that this is really a
spoof of misogyny and that it's okay to laugh at Amelia Earhart crashing her
plane while trying to put on lipstick. We also know that women's lib is old
news, that what really makes men nervous these days is sexual orientation;
indeed, in the second episode, Carolla has a "nightmare" in which a bikini-clad
Kimmel flirts with him by a pool. The Man Show is about the war between
the sexes in the same way that M*A*S*H, airing during the Vietnam War,
was ostensibly about Korea. That said, the show is sometimes amusing, and
Kimmel in particular is fun to watch in the street-theater segments (when the
two hosts collect signatures to repeal "women's suffrage," plenty of
vocabulary-challenged women not only sign up but actually commend Kimmel and
Carolla for their attention to the problem).
Next week, Comedy Central also begins new episodes of Dr. Katz,
Professional Therapist (Tuesdays at 10 p.m.) and The Upright Citizens
Brigade (Mondays at 10:30 p.m.). Katz is as dry and funny as ever,
with 25-year-old Ben in crisis mode because a former classmate called him a
"sissy" during a chance meeting; and Upright is looking more and more
like Monty Python, with sketches on "baby races" and a parody of Karate
Kid-type movies that ends at the "World Dialect Tournament."