I was firing up to write a post-modern theater explication of Clint Eastwood & Chair’s double-act at the Republican National Convention, but find that it’s been done very well already by lawsyl at Daily Kos, here.
Lawsyl took a cue from those who dubbed Eastwood’s antics “Theater of the Absurd.” But many viewers went in another theatrical direction, describing the bit as a “rambling, ad libbed vaudeville routine” (Celebuzz) or “vaudevillian like shtick” (CNN), “surreal vaudevillian routine” (Fiscal Times), “embarrassing vaudeville act” (Motherboard) and rambling monologue/forauy into vaudeville” (Gothamist).
“Reformed and Conservative” blogger Michael Bauman wrote:
Eastwood was just employing an old vaudeville tactic with his empty chair. It’s been done exactly this way for many decades. The tactic is vaudevillian, not leftist.
These protestations to the contrary, the vaudeville history books I most admire are not bursting with examples of empty-chair routines. There was indeed a popular routine in vaudeville called “The Vacant Chair,” but it was a sad song about a departed war veteran, not a comedy number.
There were many vaudeville routines with chairs, but they were done by jugglers and dancers. Burlesque striptease artists sure knew how to use chairs. The double-act Clark & McCullough had a bit where they moved furniture about and balanced a chair on a table. But to say that debating an empty chair is something we should obviously recognize as a classic comedy bit would be an overstatement. As Eastwood proved, the routine is simply too slow for vaudeville, too unstable, too ripe for heckling if the audience doesn’t share your views and tastes and timing.
Debating empty chairs, it is noted by Smithsonian Magazine and NPR and elsewhere, has a strong legacy in political debates. It appears that these convention-hall routines, some of which are very recent, are more common than comedy ones.
Comparing Clint Eastwood’s speech to a Bob Newhart or Shelly Berman bit, as the online comedy mag Shecky has done, is another forced comparison (though Shecky gets much credit for not buying into the concept that this is classic vaudeville). Berman’s prop was a phone, not a chair, and the antagonists answered—we just couldn’t hear them. In Newhart’s routines, the comedy was in what Newhart’s character was doing—his reactions, not the prompts from the unseen co-star.
Eastwood tried to imbue his chair with too much life and personality for it to be an effective comic act. You felt sorry for the chair. The chair’s response’s weren’t realistic. The chair deserved better.
Basically, Eastwood blew the only surefire punchline of empty-chair routines of any persuasion—that the invisible target has nothing to say, no response, just awkward silence. Eastwood had his chair responding with rancor to the snide accusations, essentially telling the actor and Mitt Romney to go fuck themselves.
What Eastwood did was create a character who was verbally assaulted, to the delight of onlookers, yet could only answer back with words put into his mouth. The effect was “You must be very angry that I’m so right, and so much in control”—not the surest comic premise, and not a great method of governance either.
Which returns us to Theater of the Absurd and post-modern performance techniques. Eastwood’s chair is the theater of Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe, in which a torture victim stands silently in his chair while being harangued by his business-like tormentors. It’s the theater of radical monologists Eric Bogosian and Danny Hoch who encapsulated the fears and frustrations of the Reagan years, where well-meaning individuals are beat down by faceless bureaucracies and bigoted cultures.
I don’t think that, even if he tightened the act, Eastwood would play well in vaudeville. The jokes are too much like getting hit in the head with a chair.