Blurring the lines between comedy and tragedy at Hot Docs

Canadian singerโ€™s funny and touching life story a festival sensation

HOT DOCS, THE annual documentary film festival held each spring here in Toronto, might seem an unlikely place to find laughs. Most of the films revolve around tragedies, but if you look carefully, there are a few comedic gems in the mix.

This year was no exception. I found movies with laughter as the subject, and at least two of them were wonderful and enlightening.

The one that didn’t quite work was And Everything Is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s tribute to the late Spalding Gray. For those unfamiliar with the name, Gray was one of the finest monologists in the U.S. until his untimely suicide in 2004.

Gray’s iconic shows, in which he would sit at a desk and read serio-comic tales of his own life from a loose-leaf binder, were masterpieces of dry wit and wisdom. A kind of WASPy, patrician Woody Allen, Gray’s New Yorker navel-gazing made him a hero to intellectual theatre patrons. Many of his shows were filmed, some by Soderbergh himself, and were hits on the festival circuit.

Unfortunately, his fascinating life did not make for much of a documentary, at least in the hands of the filmmakers.

I had the opposite reaction to American: The Bill Hicks Story. Hicks was a cult stand-up comic in the Lenny Bruce mold who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32 in 1994. Although mass success eluded him, he regularly sold out clubs, appeared on talk shows and had a huge following.

The documentary uses visual tricks I’ve never seen before. Stills of Hicks are digitized, animated and manipulated, so it looks like the comedian is wandering through the photo.When the film deals with Hicks’s use of psychedelics, the movie explodes with trippy colours to mimic his drug-altered state.

I booked Hicks at Yuk Yuk’s back in 1992. He was very funny and pointed, but he seemed unhappy and very distracted. He was not a conventional showbiz personality, and that’s one reason the film works so well.

Finally, there’s John Zaritsky’s Leave Them Laughing, about a fortyish Canadian singer living in L.A who has contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease, a fatal disease of the nervous system, which slowly and horribly strangles the life out of its victims. But the woman, Carla Zilbersmith, refuses to be a victim.

She confronts her disease with ribald humour, both in her blog and in her life. She will not go gentle into that good night, and fills her day slinging zingers to her coterie of friends. Zaritsky’s camera is there to preserve it all.

I defy anyone to watch this movie and not fall in love with the woman’s grace and charm. The film was shot over a period of years, and the filmmaker flashes back and forth over various periods of Carla’s sickness and wellness. The contrast between footage taken before she contracted the disease and afterwards is heartbreaking.

The movie sounds bleak, but it isn’t. I laughed a lot, and Zilbersmith’s withering barbs are quotable and profound. We always talk about how close comedy and tragedy can be; here’s a woman who lives it.

 

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