Pure Comedy [Essay] Father John Misty

“What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,
‘See, this is new?’
It has been already
in the ages before us.

There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
among those who come after.”
- Ecclesiastes

Pure Comedy is the story of a species born with a half-formed brain. The species’ only hope for survival, finding itself on a cruel, unpredictable rock surrounded by other species who seem far more adept at this whole thing (and to whom they are delicious), is the reliance on other, slightly older, half-formed brains. This reliance takes on a few different names as their story unfolds, like “love,” “culture,” “family,” etc. Over time, and as their brains prove to be remarkably good at inventing meaning where there is none, the species becomes the purveyor of increasingly bizarre and sophisticated ironies. These ironies are designed to help cope with the species’ loathsome vulnerability and to try and reconcile how disproportionate their imagination is to the monotony of their existence.

Now all of a sudden they expect light in the dark, warmth in the cold, and to make something out of nothing. Cooperation among the species to achieve these goals eventually yields a worldview wherein some among the species believe that there are individuals for whom this type of work is maybe ill-suited. The contribution of the ill-suited is of a more abstract, inspirational nature. The ill-suited begin to make subtle distinctions among themselves that extend beyond “eaten by a bear/not eaten by a bear”. These distinctions involve do-it-ness, cool-face-and-body-ness, craftiness, etc. – an arrangement emerges where these traits can be traded in for better-than-ness. This better-than-ness really starts to run rampant, and the species begins to wonder if there isn’t a Sky-Man in the sky who is perhaps the source of all better-than-ness. It seems like a pretty good explanation for why the species is so important.

Sky-Man pretty much runs the show for a really, really long time, and his inner-circle of better-thans gets increasingly smaller and smaller, even though by the end of his reign everyone in the species considers themselves one. Unfortunately there are some better-thans who get together and decide that one way of better-than-ness is better than other betters-thans’ better-than-ness and teach their little half-formed-brain babies as much (most who interpret this distinction as “me’s” vs. “not-me’s”). “Not-me’s” eventually come to encapsulate everyone that is not a single “me” at any given time, and this paves the way for incredibly distasteful behavior until the species arrives at a place of such alienation and fear there is really nothing so horrible that one of them wouldn’t do to the other. To deal with this less than ideal state of affairs, which seems suspiciously incompatible with how progressive and evolved they are by this point, they set about to entertain themselves into an oblivion with politics, sex, finance, philosophy, and other games of war. This they do until they are so numb, and the idea of any “not-me” so untenable, that they are blissfully incapable of noticing they’re all dead. This happens more or less on an infinite loop until the end of time.

Something like that.

Imagine if you will, as the album starts, that you’re way out in space looking at the earth and, though it’s impossible to “fall” through space, you start a free fall anyway in the direction of the bright blue marble. For the next 75 minutes you plummet toward the earth, losing more and more perspective on what an abstract and impermanent place our planet is, how predictably we step on the same rakes, slip on the same banana peels over and over again through the ages, quickly becoming more and more immersed in the very messy business of being a human – the dubious privilege of being here, the elusiveness of meaning, true love and its habitual absence, random euphoria and the inexplicable misery of others, truth and its more alluring counterfeits, the sophistication of answers that don’t make any sense, the barbarism of our appetites, lucky breaks and injustice, faith and ignorance, crippling, mind-numbing boredom, and the terror of it all ending too soon. Before you know it, you’ve delicately crash-landed and find yourself lying on your back looking up at the stars. If you’re lucky, with someone you love; even if just for a day, a year, a lifetime. Though just an hour has passed you have no recollection of what the earth looked like from the far-flung reaches of space, nor how simple it all seemed a matter of minutes ago.

I know everyone doesn’t feel the same about what’s going on right now. What for some is clearly garden-variety violent white nationalism serving as a catch-all for any number of paranoia-induced anti-fantasies foisted upon the poor and uneducated precisely by the ideologues bent on manufacturing voters who can be manipulated into voting against their own interests by making good and sure they remain poor and uneducated before cravenly blaming their problems largely on people bearing distinctions like race, gender, and sexuality so people forget everything that’s good about the American experiment, is to others an opportunity to wrench the country back from the influence of hypocritical corporate tyrants bent on enslaving our minds with spineless liberal rhetoric in order to justify wiping out the jobs of decent people so they can fulfill their fey utopian dream of an impossible global community designed to profit only its architects (probably Banking Consortiums, pedophile rings, and definitely The Illuminati).