Temporary classics

During the recent lockdown I was rummaging in boxes in the basement and attic for old books, trying to clean things up and I found a paperback play by Bruce Jay Friedman called Scuba Duba. I had remembered buying it from a used book dealer on Viger street in Montreal I used to haunt on quiet weekends when I was a student, having just moved away from home. I had paid 95 cents for it then. Probably would be worth the same today.

I put it by my bedside, to read later and then decide whether to keep it. I finally did read it in early June. Can't say it aged well. It would not be possible to stage it today. It has a late sixties sensibility, and although humour should be allowed to offend, the words offend in a way that has become unfunny, because the times have changed and relations between people that we thought would improve have not. I am talking about inequality, sexism, xenophobia and racism. Jokes can poke fun at these things when there is hope that they will expose their absurdity, but today, the risk is that some people will cheer. So we seem to have regressed in some ways, although we are more sensitive to the unacceptable. I hope this contradiction is a transitional phase on the helix of our cultural history.

After reading it I looked up the play and the author in a way that I could not or would not have done back then. Coincidentally and eerily, Bruce Jay Friedman had died the same week I had re-read the play. The play had run very successfully off broadway when first produced.

I had read other works by Friedman over the years and had liked his Terry Southern-like irreverence and teasing. He had worked in the magazine industry and in scriptwriting, in NYC and in LA. He was known in the literary and artistic circles of the day, and was one of the people who had the honour of getting into donny brooks with the blowhard Norman Mailer.

The seventies were the time I was getting out of high school and into the world, discovering the arts, going to concerts, looking forward to everything. Friedman had that optimism built-into his writings, it was gentle satire, pointed but not piercing, but that was because the times had a thick skin. Today the same stuff would just not be on at all.

This is what post-modern critique is all about I think. Very few pieces stand outside the culture, the few that do we call "classics", once we realize that we can re-read them and feel the same, time and time again, however much we change.

Anyhow, wanted to send out a RIP to Bruce Jay, and thank his writings for bringing back those no longer faint memories.