Comic Conner O’Malley caught the MAGA moment on the wing a few years ago in a series of Vines (collected here). In these six-second shots: “O’Malley — playing a deranged car-and-wealth-obsessed man — would pull up to befuddled Manhattan businessmen in sports cars, scream guttural praise for their public display of opulence, and then bike away before they knew what hit them.” I’m quoting from Pablo Goldstein’s 2018 guide to O’Malley’s comedy, which takes in his videos, television appearances, pod-casts etc. It maps the opening stages of this weird pilgrim’s progress.
Once the Don came down the escalator, O’Malley made the connection between his id-y vids of NYC street-meets—“God is a pimp, you’re an angel-job-creator. You’re BETTER than me….”—and Trumpism. He began uploading YouTube videos centered on a character named Mark Seevers—the, ah, seeker behind an Infowars-type site called TruthHunters, who often did on location shoots at Trump events. He aims to be a player at an Orlando campaign rally, the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and Trump’s inaugural. He tries to stay Up but he’s a figure of pathos, of permanent exclusion. He can’t get into the Convention and in one early video he’s kicked out of an Atlantic City police confab. Alone in a parking lot, he melts down, yearning for “a gun, to fucking feel a tit, and to go to sleep and not feel so fucking sad anymore.” Other videos introduced other Midwestern lost boys at the mercy of trumpery, such as Benghazi-obsessed Scott Andrews who’s on a long mission to protect his local Wisconsin outlet mall from ISIS. (If Scott turns up in a new video, I assume he’ll be hunting Antifa.) O’Malley also had himself filmed hitting NYC streets again where he ran into MAGA avatar Geraldo Rivera, rolling in a Bentley down Noblesse Oblige Avenue.
O’Malley’s characters tend to bump into Trump fans, and his raps with them might usefully be contrasted with Daily Show “correspondent” Jordan Klepper’s Q&A’s with MAGA mugs in the crowd. Klepper is snarky but his goofs are defensible. While teasing won’t stop a fasc on the march, over time, revelations of Trumpists acting like morons may shake the base’s faith they’re the true illuminati. And even if Klepper’s talk-back doesn’t plant seeds of doubt, his interviews speak to a genuine human phenomenon: the mystery of stupidity. Still, his sojourns among the benighted skate on America’s surfaces. O’Malley’s comedy goes deeper. He’s not a smooth operator. He brings an ax to this country’s culture wars. He’s out to break down received ideas wherever he roams. O’Malley never smugs from above. He grew up in an Irish working class family and hung tight with other American ethnics in blue-collar Chicago neighborhoods.[1] His background hasn’t made him more liable to make excuses for bigots but, unlike the more obviously “culturally competent” Klepper, O’Malley’s comedy rages up from the great American race/class morass. What’s more, he’s fully aware mixed emotions he acts out are products of late capitalist structures of feeling. His characters tend to be branded men whose souls have been gamified and pornified. His comedy links Trumpery to hegemony and ways have-nots get twisted into ID-ing with have-mores. (You’re an angel-job-creator…BETTER than me.)
Take his Tony Camarabi – “NYC’s Number #1 Masturbator.” He wears a t-shirt that announces he’s “Future Rich Guy.” Tony reports from a real “exxxotica expo” in Edison, New Jersey, where his quick and dirty back and forths with attendees keep underscoring lost norms. (Pace Ben Kessler.) Tony is, in his own mind, a hyper-regular guy. And new normies are everywhere at the porn show. One expresses his yearning to “make love to a beautiful girl” even as Tony C. talks up jerking off in a tupperwear container. Tony’s day at the expo peaks with a short political convo with a sex toy saleswoman who allows she was not a “fan” of Obama. Their citizenly discourse about health insurance gets interrupted when she revs up an electric succubus attached to Tony’s prick—“you can feel that all the way down to your balls, right?”
Tony C., like most of O’Malley’s characters, is plenty ballsy. O’Malley’s comedy is extremely physical. He’s chunky, with muscles though his body isn’t exactly toned. (He’s a lot thicker than that ectomorph Klepper.) His physicality is sort of old school. It carries a message he’s prole-ier than most contemporary comics, though his fun-boys are at the mercy of the attention economy (and pornhub), not assembly lines or factory farms. Clothes his characters wear call to mind John Berger’s account of how peasants’ bodies tended to look deformed in suits designed to make desk-men without muscles seem shapely. (I’m just now reminded Mark Seevers puts on a red suit in one vid and looks like a post-modern peasant.) Not that O’Malley’s characters do hard physical labor now. His comedy actually hints they might miss the sensation—and sense of validation?—that came with such work almost as much as the lost memory of skin.
A fantasy phone call with Robert DeNiro in a recent O’Malley bit made me think of the famous final scene in Raging Bull which may belong in the comic’s back story (along with turns by Andy Kaufman, Chris Eliot, John Candy, et al.). DeNiro as Jake LaMotta preps for an appearance on the dinner speaker circuit by memorizing poems and Brando’s famous “could’ve been a contender” monologue from On the Waterfront. LaMotta is way past his physical prime (and way overweight), but he’s anything but lazy. He’s concentrates on a kind of work that doesn’t come easy to him but that he doesn’t disdain. Then, prep-work done, he stands up and throws all of himself into a furious series of combinations. His punches come at warp speed. We’re witnessing another feat of human expression—an act of physical creativity that fuses mind and body.
O’Malley, as I’ve underscored, gets physical repeatedly. And he has his own way of embodying his inalienable right to be fully human. It’s in his dances. When he gets his groove on, as he often does without warm-up, he dances without pride just like a white guy should. Still, his jokey moves hint the direction of American culture isn’t axiomatically ass-backward, notwithstanding our fucked anthropology. O’Malley’s white wannabe normies may be out of time and mind, but they’re more at home in their bodies than ye olde WASP stiffs. They clown themselves but they can clock a beat.
O’Malley’s most memorable body-move may be his interpretative dance to The Charlie Rose Show theme. Before #MeToo exposed Rose as a sexual predator, that 47 second tease blew away the notion he was ever anything but a blight on our culture. O’Malley’s dance evoked the CD101 cum doofus essence of Rose’s signature song, which, no doubt, sound-tracked PBS grandees’ sense the show would be a vector for what was “smart” and “hip” in American life. Even if they didn’t know their host was a little Weinstein, it’s appalling to think of how many culture-mongers went on that show and pretended Rose didn’t stink at what he did. (Bless Harold Pinter who found himself in a dull conversation about international politics with Rose and made a point of lingering over the phrase “spheres of influence” as he looked straight at his host’s dead eyes.)
O’Malley may focus on hegemaniacs who live beneath the contempt of urban haute bourgeoisie, but his dis of The Charlie Rose Show hinted he was born to resist moeurs of the meritocracy. Which brings us to the vogue for Hamilton. I don’t hate that show on principle. (I’m down with upholding the example of any Founding Father who was against slavery.) But I’m guessing even Hamilton’s auteur Lin-Manuel Miranda might grasp how his stuff risks being grist for goodies who are clueless about classic hip hop. O’Malley spoofed Miranda’s Broadway rap in a recent video of a Covid-19 night ride in Manhattan. His over-the-top versions of Miranda’s hybrids implicitly called out the cultural incompetence of Hamilton heads who assume the show’s rap songs are more worthy than, say, “My Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me.”
O’Malley’s recent Covid-19 bike rides through New York City’s “neo-liberal hell-scape”—forgive me for using the NL-word!—flashed me back to signs of the times in those Vines he made when he first came to the city. Along with pricey cars and Maxim suits, piles of chicken bones and wet bagels on the street, he was struck by…New York University. O’Malley himself is a drop-out from a Chicago community college, but I didn’t get a sense he was wowed by what NYU signified. It may have been too soon for him to take in that institution’s bad meld of urbanity and money, but I bet he sensed his own sketch artistry was at odds with “higher learning.” On that score he may be in the tradition of an earlier set of Impressionists. The following graphs from Mallarmé’s case for those painters of modern life seem on point when it comes to O’Malley’s creative imperatives:
At that critical hour for the human race when nature desires to work for herself, she requires certain lovers of hers—new and impersonal men placed directly in communion with the sentiment of their time—to loose the restraint of education, to let hand and eye do what they will, and thus through them reveal herself.
For the mere pleasure of doing so? Certainly not, but to express herself, calm, naked, habitual, to those newcomers of tomorrow, of which each one will consent to be an unknown unit in the mighty numbers of a universal suffrage, and to place in their power a newer and more succinct means of observing her.[2]
While O’Malley comedy isn’t a calmative, “naked” applies to his impressionism. It’s surely more daring than that cultivated in the Academy’s various Arts programs. O’Malley, even when he’s playing NYC’s Number #1 Masturbator, is more fecund than most young “creatives” with degrees.
Note
1 O’Malley talks about his Chicago working class upbringing in this podcast.
2 Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet” 1876, quoted by T.J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life.