I Like to Watch

Dec. 16, 2007 | Grok didn't trust fire. It was "too bright" and "too hot" and "too unpredictable." Florence didn't like the radio. It was "too loud" and the radio hosts "never shut their traps" and sounded like "a bunch of angry mockingbirds." Lois hated the television set. It was "big and ugly" and "served no purpose" and made people into "drooling halfwits." Dick didn't trust the Internet, the graphical portion of the World Wide Web. It was "full of nothing but junk" and "too hard to read."

Heather didn't like Web shows. They were "too short" and "not funny enough." She didn't want to wait for the shows to download, and she didn't want to keep adding more and more plug-ins to her already-beleaguered computer. Plus, the shows she watched kept stalling in the middle. Her computer kept crashing. She kept searching massive "comedy" sites, watching "comical" shows about wisecracking singles, and not laughing.

And besides, she didn't want to sit at her desk to watch narrative entertainments, she wanted to lie completely prone with only her empty head propped up, like a misshapen eggplant leaning against the weedy garden of her unmade king-size bed.

See how grandiose Heather's prose got when Heather got frustrated? Heather, like Grok and Florence and Lois and Dick before her, was old and crusty and slow to adapt, but still arrogant enough to think that her personal preferences were somehow more salient than the preferences of a whole new generation of portable media users. In truth, she always felt a little sad whenever she saw them, on the sidewalks and in the cafes of her city, connected to their musical pods and gaming consoles, watching Yugoslavian teenagers dance on YouTube or texting each other or using their onboard navigational systems to locate other hot young pieces of ass wandering around in the same ZIP code. Seeing youngsters so consumed by their little electronic micro-worlds filled Heather with contempt, but it also made her worry about her increasing irrelevance, a lone Luddite meteorite floating aimlessly in the big, busy media universe.

"How did this happen?" she asked herself. You see, back when she was young and full of hope and still smelled fresh, Heather used to read Wired and Macworld and make pointless animated movies with Macromedia Director. She leapt headfirst onto the Internet bandwagon. She embraced blogs in all of their haphazard glory. She gleefully posted stupid puppet shows online.

Somehow, over the years, Heather went from early adapter to reticent, sluggish fish, fighting against the tides of change, soon to get beached on the Island of Has-Beens in the Sea of Insignificance, just north of the Ocean of Obsolescence.

Don't be afraid of the dark
Then Heather discovered "The Maria Bamford Show" and everything changed. This strange Web show, which appeared on the comedy Web site Super Deluxe with a bunch of other strange but less funny shows, appeared to be filmed entirely in the attic of this person named Maria Bamford's parents' house in Duluth, Minn. According to the opening screen of the show's first episode, Bamford had been doing stand-up for several years in Los Angeles when she suffered a breakdown onstage in 2006, and eventually retreated to her parents' home to regroup and regain her sanity.

Bamford spins a strange comic web indeed, playing all of the characters in the sad little drama that is her life as a lost, half-crazy, sometimes depressed single woman in her late 30s. Among the other characters Bamford inhabits with total conviction and authority are her passively judgmental but supportive mom ("Listen, if you want to get breast implants, we will support you"), her skeptical sister, her nerdy dad and a selection of odd but disturbingly familiar acquaintances from the town of Duluth. My personal favorite is her archenemy from high school, who tells her, "So we saw you on TV or whatever. It's just like in high school -- it's like you're not funny, you're weird."

But no recap of Bamford's weird tales or the clever dialogue she writes can do justice to "The Maria Bamford Show," because Bamford herself is such a good performer, churning out hilarious impressions with convincing accents, verbal tics and great comic timing. Her central conceit -- that she's crazy and something of a loser -- is a common one these days, but it works because Bamford is so inventive and giddily odd in her presentation. She manages to expose the most interesting quirks and flaws of her entourage without actually coming out and suggesting that she has a nasty attitude about any of them. Bamford's family, friends and enemies usually get the upper hand, while Bamford herself is continually kicked in the teeth by life's little foibles.

Like the gullible, dumb hunk of literal-minded astral rock that I am, after watching all 10 episodes in a row, I wondered if Bamford's Web show was a funny but sincere cry for help from some poor thirtysomething in the Midwest. Maybe I should e-mail Maria Bamford at her parents' house in Duluth, to tell her to hang in there, because, damn it, this little dog-and-pony show she'd created for the World Wide Web was the best thing I'd seen so far ... not that I had looked for very long, since that required sitting upright at a desk like someone who has a job.

Well! Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that Maria Bamford was actually a reasonably well-known, successful stand-up comic right here in Los Angeles! Why, she's probably sane and fun-loving and I bet she even pays rent and has friends and a full set of teeth in her mouth, damn it! Why can't she be a loser who lives with her parents? It's so much more exciting if she's a sad little shut-in, making these desperate videos for the world.

But I bet Maria Bamford isn't even unhappy. I bet she's a quirky genius who's totally hot in Hollywood right now, maybe she even made up the name "Maria Bamford" on a road trip with her boyfriend, and her real name is Jill Jones but she's very spunky and special because she's under 30 and she has cool tattoos and her whole life is totally random -- in an ironic, self-conscious, premeditated way -- like she became a stripper because she thought it might be good for her blog.

Or maybe she's actually a 23-year-old actress named Kimberly who totally loves playing "Maria Bamford," because even though "Maria" is depressed, her vulnerability is totally inspiring.

Next page: "quarterlife" breaking new ground on the Web?