James Wolcott > Quotes

“That vervey spontaneity became encounter theater therapy under the direction of the Marquis de Paar, who was peerless at grittily vapid chatter, misty bathos, and scenery-chewing controversy. Dick Cavett, who wrote for Paar, said that working for him was like having an alcoholic in the family.”
― James Wolcott, Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs

“For GQ’s Andrew Corsello, Louis C.K.’s qualification to be considered El Supremo is that he is more than a comedian—he is a bug zapper of white lies and dark impulses, an urban shaman receiving and transmitting warped vibrations, a psychic surgeon delving into our shifty, cloaked selves.”
― James Wolcott, King Louie

“As NBC pages seat us cattle, members of the Tonight Show band trickle from the wings. Gray of hair and ashen of skin, the band members look like the board of directors of an insolvent bank.”
― James Wolcott, Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs

“disparity between Louie and Woody is most pronounced. In Woody Allen comedies, the Woody protagonist or surrogate takes it upon himself to tutor the young women in his wayward orbit and furnish their cultural education, telling them which books to read (in Annie Hall’s bookstore scene, Allen’s Alvy wants Annie to occupy her mind with Death and Western Thought and The Denial of Death—“You know, instead of that cat book”), which classic films to imbibe at the revival houses back when Manhattan still had a rich cluster of them. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, it’s a 14-year-old female niece who dresses like a junior-miss version of Annie Hall whom Woody’s Clifford squires to afternoon showings at the finer flea pits, advising her to play deaf for the remaining years of her formal schooling. “Don’t listen to what your teachers tell ya, you know. Don’t pay attention. Just, just see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really gonna be like.” A more dubious nugget of avuncular wisdom would be hard to imagine, and it isn’t just the Woody stand-in who does the uncle-daddy-mentor-knows-best bit for the benefit of receptive minds in ripe containers. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow’s dour painter-philosophe Frederick is the Old World “mansplainer” of all time, holding court in a SoHo loft which he shares with his lover, Lee, played by Barbara Hershey, whose sweaters abound with abundance. When Lee groans with enough-already exasperation when Frederick begins droning on about an Auschwitz documentary—“You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz.”
― James Wolcott, King Louie

“Maybe I'm telling you what you already know, but I don't know what anybody knows anymore.”
― James Wolcott