I CAN'T LAUGH WITHOUT YOU

By BRUCE HANDY

Popular culture is pretty much the only culture we have left. like kudzu, it grows over everything in its path. One of the few things that can confound it, if only for a while, is genuine tragedy. Consider the following exchange:

"Did you hear Kennedy got shot?"

"No, but how's it go?"

Former comedian Vaughn Meader said that was his response when told of John F. Kennedy's assassination. He thought he was being set up for a punch line. At the time, Meader was one of the country's most popular performers, thanks to his ability to impersonate the 35th President with gently mocking good humor. His 1962 album, The First Family, was the nation's fastest-selling LP ever. No wonder Lenny Bruce is said to have walked onstage the evening of the assassination and, after a respectful pause, to have broken the silence with "Man, poor Vaughn Meader."

Meader wasn't totally washed out of show business: today he sings and plays honky-tonk piano in small nightclubs in Maine. But it is with Meader and more recent news events in mind that we offer similar sympathy to the producers of Diana & Me, a romantic film comedy about a woman who is obsessed with the Princess of Wales. In her effort to meet Diana, the heroine hooks up with and eventually falls for a paparazzo who is stalking Diana. This lighthearted Australian production finished shooting only recently, not long before the paparazzi-related automobile accident that has riveted the world. The producers of Diana & Me have announced that they still plan to release the film at some future date. Boy, is it hard to imagine how. No doubt there are already Diana one-liners circulating among stockbrokers or whoever it is that originates the jokes that instantly crop up in the wake of celebrity deaths and big plane crashes; but it will be a while before the general public, rubbed raw by the funeral, is ready to have a laugh anywhere near the late Princess of Wales.

Comedy, at least as it is currently practiced, thrives on building consensus. Comedians will tell you that one of the best ways to kill a performance is to move ahead of the audience's prejudices. Thus Jay Leno and David Letterman can get away with portraying Bill Clinton as a pig and a lech only because viewers have already come to the same conclusion. It is our comic shorthand for Clinton. Of course, all public figures exist in shorthand versions, comic or not--that's what being a public figure is all about. For someone like Princess Diana who suffers a dramatic and untimely death, the tragedy becomes our Rorshach response: Diana, the tragically slain princess. Like J.F.K., the tragically slain President. Or John Lennon, the tragically slain Beatle. Or Tupac Shakur, the tragically slain rapper. Their endings, in a sense, become their beginnings, jumping-off points in the popular imagination. This is unfair and terribly reductive, but death is one of the few things even more reductive than pop culture. Together they're a doozy.

Right now, aside from bathetic song tributes and the mastications of the self-loathing news media, no one knows what to do about Diana's death; the public, for its part, is mesmerized by its operatic grief. But that will surely change, if not soon enough for the cheeky-sounding Diana & Me, then at least to the benefit of some solemnly phony TV movie. As the old joke goes, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" Show business ultimately trumps all.