Your General Humor Buildup: Constructing Albert Brooks

This chapter places Albert Brooks in conversation with movements both in comedy, as well as contemporary US art, especially conceptual art. Brooks constructed a New Comedy practice of unparalleled breadth that could bring together mediacritical practices directed at magazine publishing, live performance, radio, and television, that could unite the subversive educational scenarios of the Famous School and the joke-mandala with the formal subversions of the animal “film” and the pseudo blooper. It had room for questions about the propositionality of the joke alongside name-naming criticism of key players in the U.S. media ecology. Its social commentary did not lie in a haughty assumption that “real” social problems could be reduced to the discourses of their appearance. Instead, Brooks took the real problems that confronted him, medium by medium, and found ways of opening up critical habitations that might simultaneously speak to their cultural typicality—contemporary television and radio—and their historical specificity. The chapter shows that those habitations have specific occasions and conceptual consequences and that the passage between those scales is managed via a relentless reflexivity. That reflexivity has been seen as a limitation of Brooks’ TV-bit-based approach. But as the reflexive embodiment of a medium already at a fever pitch of reflection, Albert Brooks stood as a singular figure against the ground of U.S. television.