A Quick Shoutout to Christina Applegate
On Vomit
A while ago, I got a bee in my bonnet about vomit. I was obsessively watching this Eric Andre clip with Lauren Conrad, because I was working on a new introduction for my book project and wanted a fun contemporary-ish anecdote that instantiated and elaborated upon the book’s thesis: stand-up comedy is a sonic medium that, in particular cases, makes audible the resonances of the (historical) avant-garde in the post-45 culture industry. I think. I hope! Ah, but aren’t those words just the same thing!
So I logged into Northwestern Libraries (I’m an adjunct at NU now and getting library access again is incredible) and did The Scroll. The Scroll is the most important part of the research and writing process, I think. And you absolutely need institutional access to do it. I was always grateful when I was un/underemployed (I still am, by the way, but it’s better now) and my friends who had academic jobs or were still in school offered to download anything I needed, but the thing is you don’t know what you need until you do The Scroll first. You have to scroll past or even read some of a bunch of articles about communication disorders and JAMA reports about tongues and shit to get what you need. And that’s how I found this Eugenie Brinkema article about Laura Dern. (You can also read it here.)
It was so good I tweeted about it. And I learned that a bunch of you people know a lot of stuff about vomit! It was helpful, but I ended up not really using any of it except the Brinkema. Sorry.
Anyway, to cut to the chase, I wrote the anecdote about vomit and Eric Andre, but unfortunately I can’t use it in my chapter. So I’m posting it here. I’d love to know what you think! It’s very short. I hope you like it. Thanks for reading.
“I can take a pinkie, but not a whole dick.” So opens the second part of the “Lauren Conrad; Reese Witherspoon” episode of The Eric Andre Show, after a brief jazz intro. “Yeah, that’d be rough. Slight pause. And we’re back with Lauren Conrad.” What happens next, for a few moments, is a sequence of sounds. Following some canned applause, co-host Hannibal Burress takes out a white paper fortune teller and starts coughing and sneezing. The camera cuts to a reaction shot of Conrad, looking scared. After a quick shoutout to Christina Applegate from Burress, Conrad comments, “It’s like ninety degrees.” Andre vomits, yellow chunky liquid, thinner toward the end. “Ohuf,” he exhales, a little guttural.
Whereas mimesis is about representation—a reproduction of source, being–emesis (or the process of vomiting) is about expulsion, redirection, liquid decay. Whereas the typical psychoanalytic understanding of vomiting relies upon the premise that the vomiting act is necessarily a last resort, or functionally an involuntary production by the vomiter, Andre, here, is vomiting on purpose, with the mimesis of emesis as the goal. A beat later he slurps some of the yellow chyme (semi-liquid bodily fluid) back up. An oral, de-romantic solo Julian (as in Miranda July) “poop back and forth forever” but only for a little while. Conrad revolts in response, hand to mouth, abrupt exit.
Per Kristeva, abjection (i.e. vomit) is the response to a breakdown in signification—representation, logos, order, mimesis. But Andre, here, is the one doing the breaking, as well as one of the ones being broken down. This break is rhythmic, landing over and over again with each beat: through the syncopated notes of vomit, slurp, and sucking inhale, “are you alright?”, along with the Foley-esque capacities of Andre’s object work at his desk, verbal admonishments from Andre, and Lauren “Helene Weigel” Conrad’s silent scream. Andre is a semi-retired jazz musician (he played the double-bass at Berklee, and in 2019 released an album under his band name Blarf), and the sonic impulse across his work as an actor, stand-up comic, and talk show performer lingers. The vomit bit only plays as comedy because of this jazz formalism, with jokes and oddities peppered gloopily and solidly throughout. In other words, if there weren’t also more solid abstractions—jokes—peppered in throughout the sketch, the segment would only be gross-out quasi-surrealism. Instead it’s (also) something else. This is a segment about disgust, about its production. As Eugenie Brinkema writes, “the form of disgust is a designation of the something worse than the worst - a structure organized around the opening of exclusion and not a content that fills it in, or gives it shape, coherence or substance.” The “opening of exclusion” as opposed to a structuring impulse formalizes this noisy music—Eric Andre’s sonic comedy, his comic avant-garde.