Local satire: coming or going?

"Impressions," TV Times, 8-14 April 1979

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I never made it to a Juan Tamad movie. Not once. Generations were marvelling at its social impact in times past, but I always found myself, for some reason or other, barred from the experience. I regret it now, realizing that much of Juan Tamad's appeal lies not with Juan Tamad himself, but with the mood of the times and the cast of men's minds.

That is how I find today's Juan Tamad, the weekly television series that premiered on Channel 4 the other Sunday. The premiere episode was hardly a remarkable television event. It was slow (and don't say it is simply living up to its title: cute); many scenes were unnecessary; the cast--while experienced--was not brilliant. The camera was efficient but stolid, like an ox going about its ways with little wish to change them (again with a literal excuse? ghastly).

Only in the intro did the episode show some slice of imagination. Even then, as a friend posited, the basic line to that intro had already been heard in varying versions from varying sources. The juxtaposition of folk joke with myth is also, at its best, melodramatic, and at its worst, absurd.

But Juan Tamad's value in this day and age--and the basis for considering it as television satire--is that it provides, for the individual viewer, a private exercise in judgment. Each viewer, sitting in front of his television set, is free--in seclusion--to struggle with his own questions and arrive at his own conclusions. At the end of the episode, he is also free to measure for himself, without fear or pressure, how relevancet Juan Tamad's pronouncements are to his life and the society in which he moves.

Like some other efforts at satire, Juan Tamad, too, may lose steam early in its season. The saddest rut for satire to fall into is a corridor of mirrors where its producers cringe at their own reflection. Already, Juan Tamad, in its use of a Muslim setting and a comfortably distant and isolated ambiance, is deliberately softening its irreverence and imparting to the show that curiously flat quality of reminiscence, like a reenactment of events that happened a long time ago and are, therefore, already divorced from today.

It could also, sooner or later, refrain from making immediately perceptible comments on the more questionable aspects of contemporary life. In which case and at which time, I suppose, it would either lapse into obscurantism or obscurity. The first is an obvious mechanism; the second has been, to paraphrase Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode, "the law since the time of Don Quixote."

What would I wish for a local attempt at satire like Juan Tamad? First, that it should acquire technical polish. There is no substitute for this. Second, that it should strive at striking roots in the intellectual and social milieu at the same time that it aspires for those fantastic flights of comic delight, without both of which satire has no reason to be. And third, that it should tighten up, speed up the action, gain timing, and realize that length can and should be sacrificed whenever it softens impact.

May I also suggest that perhaps the roles in Juan Tamad should be reexamined? Some of the characters appear quite extraneous to the purpose and the plot, their roles almost like afterthoughts that can be added or cancelled on a week-to-week basis and do not have to be made part of the regular cast.

And why not let younger, more adept performers flesh out some of the roles in succeeding episodes? I have nothing but respect for experience and age, but both qualities do not always make for spontaneity, contemporaneity, dynamism, freshness--qualities I expect from satire.

Or is the show trying to make precisely the point that we have become a nation of the old and the jaded?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Soap in excess

"Impressions," TV Times, 15-21 October 1978

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That much-ballyhooed premiere night of Tuesday Adult Comedy Hour passed us by, unwatched because there was a two-and-a-half-year-old little girl beside us who had already told us off many times, in her slightly aggrieved tone, that she had been watching too much kissing the nights past. So off the channel selector went to less adult fare.

But the week after, having missed the standard M*A*S*H intro, we plopped back onto our pillows and settled on a disarming comedy that elicited a considerable number of quite hearty and booming laughs from us. In many places, the humor is pungent and sharp, spilling over well off-center. The teleplay is an unusually confident one, fast-paced and bracing. The performers are definitely talented and winning, except for the nurse to whom Alan Alda had taken a shine. She looks too much the dumb-blonde, cheerleader type only television can perpetuate in an age of new and liberated women with more brains than boobs. And that aged running joke about communists on the operating table threatens to send the flighty war comedy into a nosedive, now that Vietnam has placed the POW boot securely on the other's foot.

Occasionally, the dialogue also quickens with fragments of attempted myth-shattering, the tone of merry irreverence unavoidably aimed against the pompousness of the army's image of itself. At times, too, the supreme self-confidence of the teleplay gives in to a faint moment of doubt, as if the show could not quite make up its mind whether to play for heartbreak or humor. Such a moment, when you catch it, is an infinitely precious one, offering an agile but still comprehensible glimpse of war as a horror-fantasy that tries man's true measure of humanity.

At such a time, however fast the laughs may come, we feel a poignant kinship with men who, like the essential clown, manifest both the sublime and the ridiculous in the comedy of human life. Luckily for those whose only wish is an uncomplicated half hour of laughs, such moments came infrequently in the episode we watched. In fact, only once.

Soap, though, is something else. Comedy, it is not; parody, it is. The sex jokes smack of malice, the double entendres are transparent, the naked humor is often silly, and everybody seems to have taken up sex so seriously it has now become the family business. Everybody, that is, including the faceless narrator who must, from his introductory lines, make it known to the viewers that the whole tale is of two families who are so hung up on sex.

I will not add that whoever watched it with true contempt must be so hung up on sex himself, because it can also be true that whoever watches it with real enjoyment must have already outgrown all his sexual hang-ups. But I believe that if one were to harp only on sex in a weekly series, as if it were the only interesting thing about two families, the viewer would reach a point of satiety when one sex situation becomes just like all other sex situations. Besides, would not the weekly laundering of sex take all the secret fun out of it?

We must applaud the first-rate cast, though. We especially like Billy Crystal, who takes on the role of the homosexual Campbell with charming panache. Even in M*A*S*H, the homosexual soldier is a knock-out. Why is it that when American-type queens are written out of their closets, they manage to acquire a lot of sharpness and wholeness? Is it because they then become less pretentious about their pretensions? Or is it because, in the grand tradition of all comic characters, they are the only ones who probably believe passionately in their own folly?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Loving Lou to the last laugh

"Impressions," TV Times, 5-11 November 1978

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On Monday nights, we doff our critical hat and prepare ourselves for a few hours of gleeful entertainment. After all, what else can beat that 8.30 P.M. slot for true escapist fare: Bionic Woman on 2, Future Cop on 7, Wonder Woman on 9? The sked sounds like the best of the Sunday comics.

But after 8:30 P.M., what else is there to see that extends your genial mood through the night? Well, there's Lou Grant in the city room of the Los Angeles Tribune.

We like Ed Asner. He looks, to us, a very sensible actor. Perhaps it's because of age. Age works like a very good, very effective put-down. When you're as old as Ed Asner and you still haven't made it as the new Olivier or the second Newman, then you know you never will. When you're as old as Asner and you find yourself still working the weekly grind on the small screen--like Telly Savalas, Jack Klugman, or Lorne Greene--then you learn to take yourself and your role with less seriousness and more camp. And camp, we find quite delightful.

Besides, who can hate somebody who looks like Asner? With that heavy paunch, a balding forehead, a face that looks like somebody's favorite mongrel's, and that bruising aggressiveness, he comes closest to our idea of a favorite uncle. Not the smooth, cultivated uncles with the no-touch air. Just the everyday loudmouth with the worldly-wise ways. Beats the first one, anytime.

Of course, it means we like Lou Grant, too. The other week's episode, "Hen House," pitted the city editor against the Sunday supplement editor in a classic bout between male chauvinist and dedicated feminist. A male chauvinist is a male chauvinist and a feminist is a feminist and rarely the twain do meet. But Ed Asner makes the attempt seem screamingly funny. She tried to change his position; he lost his.

We have no doubt that many men will agree with us--and many women will not--when we say that, at least in that episode, Ed Asner really put one over every other actor in the cast. His was a gem of a performance, a fountainhead of wild sarcasm, like a two-fisted brawler whose pursuit of journalism looked rather like prizefighting. In the role of prejudiced city editor loudly protecting his own kingdom against the cackling hens in what he called the Women's Section--already dignified to the status of Sunday supplement with the title "Today"--he rounds out the comic portrait of the male editor as an old tough.

It is, of course, Asner's achievement that while in principle, we must side with the woman editor of the Sunday magazine, our sympathy reached out to this misdirected man with the swift cutting tongue. Agitated, confused, later contrite, he comes out the best of the cast. Beside him, the woman editor appeared colorless, forgettable, uncharismatic, heavily playing a role, not living it.

And so what if the ending was contrived, dogmatic? Sure, we felt a little uncomfortable, watching that surrender scene in a kitchen. We know it did not do justice either to the woman's cause or the man's principles. But that is easily forgivable. After all, the whole episode is one cut-rate lark, a cross between The Andros Targets and The Goodbye Girl, with none of the sociological and emotional bite of either.

But the humor! We have not laughed as heartily in the past week as we did over that restaurant sequence, when Asner tried to finally meet the woman editor. Nor as loudly as when he scathingly remarked that perhaps the Sports Section had already been retitled "Tomorrow," or "Yesterday." We found ourselves giggling before the punchline and laughing after it.

So that stuff is all lightweight. But it is neither dull nor stupid. And Asner is an infectiously beamish performer. Which should make Lou Grant a show we can get accustomed to in the future, perhaps even anticipate with real fondness.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Welcome the new comedians!

When I wrote this welcoming piece more than two decades ago, the older comedians of Philippine cinema and television were getting just a mite too tired. Today, those "new" comedians who were the stars of Iskul Bukol are showing every sign of being just as tired.

Is there a new generation that has bravely taken up the flag of Philippine comedy? One mentions, unavoidably, Michael V., Ogie Alcasid, Janno Gibbs. These three, however, have already had a noticeably long exposure to television and their brand of comedy, while sometimes still managing to cough up laughs, has become too repetitive: Bumenta na, as they say in the local dialect.

It's time to look out for newer comedy and even newer comedians.


"Impressions," TV Times, 26 November-2 December 1978

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It is nice to watch Iskul Bukol because, for once, I see younger, newer faces doing comedy on Philippine television. And doing it very naturally.

Not that the curtain has gone down on the older comedians (Who doesn't speak in capital letters of PUGO, the dean of them all?), but that the younger comedians offer a promise and a hope that the older ones are now short of. Besides, the younger ones have verve enough for the performer and the viewer, plus a greater feel for the contemporary.

So, I discount Iskul Bukol's predictable storyline and tawdry script. I even close my eyes to the miscasting of the guest stars, who often cannot groove with the regular cast. I disregard the queasy feeling I get whenever Bibeth Orteza talks too much because, well, knowing Bibeth, that is what she has always done.

I forgive the loose hand that lets the dialogue go too much without direction, too often without zap. I keep my peace and wait for the flak to settle, even if sometimes it seems it never will, until I can see where all of it is leading me to.

May I remind scriptwriters and directors that, while they may have natural comedians in their hands and on their shows, they still need well-written scripts and well-planned plots. And that, for comedy to be more than funny and just a little memorable, it must have bite, send-ups and put-downs, parody and reverberation?

But I let all that go, because just to watch natural comedians making it after a great long time in television, and just to hope that they would bring to the medium a fine new madness, is enough reason to be forgiving.

All the rest can come--but only with care, faith, perseverance, and hard work.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Filipino masters of comedy

As I was posting this column, it occurred to me that the leading actors of this short-lived comedy series have all departed from the scene: Pugo, Patsy, Jay Ilagan, and I believe, also Tange. They are four of the better Filipino actors, with acting portfolios very few of today's comedians/actors can approximate.

Students of Philippine cinema and television should attempt to find archived copies of this series, as well as of the earlier My Son, My Son. They will learn a lot about the golden age of Filipino comedy and will see why many critics mourn the deterioration of the genre.


"Impressions," TV Times, 2-8 July 1978

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Some people have the unusual gift of translating the life around them into such universal terms that their audience is often moved, through either laughter or tears, into a recognition that here--in microcosm--is the basic stuff of humanity. In the reality of their performances, these people stain the memory with the sheer weight of their sharp and sympathetic portrayals of the various ways in which ordinary, well-meaning people stumble into one sad mess after another.

Son of My Son falls short of such affecting universality, but it is an amusingly kinetic show, nevertheless. The subject here has grown from the original My Son, My Son family to embrace another and future family--still Pugo's, through his now-married son, portrayed by Jay Ilagan.

The family is, of course, a favorite formula in traditional situation comedies. And every week, Pugo and his screen family wiggle through some generally amusing, though not individually hilarious, scenes.

John & Marsha, the late celebrated family sitcom, used the same nucleus of the family. The difference is that the family as conceived in Son of My Son has adapted through the weeks, constricting or expanding as the episodes demand. The family in John & Marsha did not allow enough flexibility and space for growth. John & Marsha, if it had wanted to stay on the tube forever, would have had to discover new themes, new plots, new adventures, to balm the occasional boredom of its viewers. In the end, John & Marsha died because of its failure to balm such boredom. Son of My Son can escape this fate by simply extending its reach and growing in size, number, and, consequently, experience.

The staying power of Son of My Son duplicates the staying power of its lead actor--the durable, admirable, lovable Pugo. Here is that touchingly vulnerable bumpkin who perhaps epitomizes the Filipino comedian. Of course, the comic can be scurrilous, too, but I know of no other local comedian onscreen today who so consistently commands respect from the audience even when his comedy is sometimes tipped with coarseness. His is a mocking, at times graceless, wit that is both casual and lethal. But who faults him for that? Certainly not us, who can only bow before the experience and expertise that made him the dean of all local comedians. Besides, there is, in Pugo, that essential kinship with all other men who have marked many miles of their long life journeys with grouchily funny jabs at the rest of mankind, but who, at the end of each mile, are always humble enough to confess and apologize for their misdemeanors, however grouchily they may do so.

Ably playing the accompaniment to Pugo's melody are Patsy and Tange. Both are fast on the verbal draw and bracing in their characterizations. Jay Ilagan has been showing a little more feel for comedy after a little more time with the masters. The three, together with Pugo, lend Son of My Son a charmingly improvisational air that breathes freshness into what are often boringly familiar plots.

The rest of the cast may be adequate, but they appear to suffer from a very basic seriousness in their approach to their little roles. Too much seriousness can rob performers of that amused, detached eye, that spontaneity and lightness, that feel for comedy. Come to think of it, though, they do provide a contrast to the zany company of Pugo, Patsy, and Tange, making the three stand out even more in a genre where they are the acknowledged and unquestioned masters.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

Fresh comedy, absurd frugality

"Impressions," TV Times, 12-18 February 1978

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If you think every television sitcom to come after John & Marsha must necessarily be a cliché, you can think again. Here comes Pete Matipid, which is really two keys above the ill-starred Asiong Aksaya. Part of the reason is because Pete comes closest to all our departed ancestors' penny-pinching hearts. The other part? Because Pete seems so much more considerate of our tube-anesthetized nerves.

Both romantic and pragmatic, a disarming comic who lives more frugally than the most Ilocano of us all, the character of Pete offers both comedy and sock. You can hear the canned laughter all the way from the sound booth, but you can also feel the sharp point of the mockery all the way to the tips of your manicured nails. You can almost hear Pete warning you that they shall surely up the cost of a hand-and-foot job even at the crummiest beauty parlor, and that's not even counting the tip.

In this buoyant comedy, Pete comes out a true absurdity, his obsession excessive, stupid, laughable. I can do a whole paper on the contrast between content and form here, but that is another story. What I feel is a gurgle of amusement rising up in my snobbish soul when I see the parade of bottles filled with the odds and ends of existence stacked above and inside Pete's cabinets. That is, until it strikes me, a few minutes after, that indeed, here is an original, a character, if you wish, but a brave one. Holding on to his convictions, however absurd, he makes a statement with his every move. He knocks your windpipes off, then socks you right where you can feel it--your wallet and its dwindling contents.

Sometime or other, you would surely wish you can gather up the excesses and luxuries of your lifetyle like a carpet sweeper and recycle them as Pete Matipid does. Indeed, some of the fascination of the show comes from the fact that it does not dislocate you but situates you instead against your backdrop and adds a new depth--a possibility--to that backdrop. Within the givens of your existence, depending on your lifestyle, it is surely possible to find a million and one ways to adopt Pete Matipid's philosophy.

It is a challenge, anyway, whether you accept it or not. Give me 20 specific ways by which you can save a little tonight: electricity, food, water, time, energy, yourself. And don't dismiss it all as part hype, part junk, part propaganda. You might be losing out on a signature lifestyle. Besides, were not some fortunes built on junk and is not every fashionable hang-up once the subject of conscious and sustained propaganda? Brown sugar, anyone?

What is, of course, plain and obvious now even to those who have yet to feel the tug of a pervasive sensibility (and a necessary one these days, considering how expensive living can be) is that Chiquito is the born comedian.

As Pete Matipid, he is every inch a natural. Shorn of the song-and-dance routine and the oiled smoothness that make many of his movie performances absolute no-nos, Chiquito comes out as a refreshingly nutty TV character, an improvement over some of the medium's still embarrassingly self-conscious performers. Of course, the possibility is always there that, given the regimen of a weekly show, Chiquito's performance may fall into a tiresome pattern, sacrificing competence for expediency. We feel that he will not, however, until and unless everybody else in the production staff does--the script and story people especially and first. Did not John & Marsha reek of a similar disease before its timely, even delayed, demise?

This is perhaps where Pete Matipid also proves itself a mite more respectful of its audience. Please, NO scriptwriter with seemingly absolute rights to the series. Instead, why don't you--the viewer--contribute your own storyline? It may come out more expensive for the production's bottom line, but it's certainly more democratic. And more diverse and varied. Which may mean a more interesting series, less chance of falling back on the same tired storylines and the same tiring gags week after week. Let us hope so, anyway.

A series like Pete Matipid should not be allowed to die from sheer boredom. It should at least live to a ripe, full season.

-- NBT

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No title in original published column

What do we expect from a comedy?

"Impressions," TV Times, 21-27 August 1977

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Naturally, one does not expect the hard and bitter stuff of life from comedy. Not the critical dilemmas, the profound human miseries, the apocalyptic visions, the tragic tales of love and despair. Certainly not soul-searching journeys through the severe landscapes of the heart and the mind.

But we do expect some things from comedy. A certain verve, a fullness of flavor, a flamboyance, a vitality, a robustness. Laughter welling from the deep innards of our beings like a gas strike--spontaneous, iridescent, sparkling. Humor tweaking us behind the ears and socking it to us where it hurts: in this case, our overgrown middle-class bellies.

Unlike tearjerkers, which can excusably plead that all is part of the human angst, comedies cannot allow too many disturbing notes of self-evident weariness to escape from their tight craftsmanship. Jokes must crackle with the crispness of new bank notes. Humor must strike the viewer like lightning before an unexpected storm. Irony--ah, but irony must always be present in comedy, or the comedy loses its sting--must be as skillfully dressed as the perfect bait.

Of performers in a comedy, we expect much. Overacting or deadpan, combative or reactive, a performer in a comedy show must be precise in his timing, fastidious in his intonation, and assured in his delivery.

While a performer in a serious dramatic play may confidently place the total value of his whole performance on the general emotional aura that he can cultivate around his role, the performer in a comedy show must ensure the impact of almost every scene in which he moves and almost every dialogue in which he participates. Otherwise, he loses his hold on the magic of memory and he becomes only one faceless player in a forgettable band.

After playing their roles week in and week out over television, the performers in the local comedy show Baltic & Co. cannot remain faceless, of course. Yet, why do most of them seem so forgettable? And why do most of their characterizations seem as stale as yesterday's pan de sal? We often get the distinct feeling, watching the show, that many of the performers have been pipelined by the talent machine straight into the TV screen, without logic or reason.

When a television performer fails, it is because his preparation is inadequate. Minimal talent, or complete lack of it. Asinine script, or again, the lack of a script. Most television comedy shows start with only a thin storyline and nothing else to leaven it. The result, inevitably, is a lumpy plot that drags along painfully like a bum leg.

The more experienced performers, to their credit, sometimes attempt to boost the sagging plot with a generous sprinkling of the day's accepted street-corner jokes and cliches. Unfortunately, such jokes and cliches--long-drawn-out and essentially humorless at times--only result in dull and boring sequences that lack teeth. Lacking teeth, comedy degenerates into tragedy--for the viewer, for the performer, for the show.

Or shall we excuse it all as comedy, Pinoy-style?

-- NBT

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No title in original published column