The Lively Art of Conversation

Sometimes the best way to employ a medium is not to particularly exploit its qualities, counter-intuitive as that seem. Television can thrive on pure talk, what Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet called "the lively art of conversation," without any visual flourishes. Consider two Chicago classics, The Sportswriters on TV and Kup's Show itself (both of which were nationally syndicated). The former, which ran on cable from 1985 to 2000, consisted of nothing more than a bunch of Chicago-area sportswriters (including the great Rick Telander) sitting around a table jawing about sports. That was it. It was positively anti-visual, but it was also mesmerizing.

Kup's Show, hosted by Kupcinet from 1959 to 1986, was in a classic talk show format that, unless I am missing someone, only Bill Maher has cultivated recently: You invite interesting people on and encourage them to talk about all kinds of subjects, not just to you the host, but to each other. Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin also used to do this very well. But, unfortunately, it was the Johnny Carson Tonight Show model that "stuck" -- host-centric, and relentlessly promotional on the part of the guests. I admire Carson as a comedian and a skillful "driver" of his program, but he did the genre no favors by eliminating the free conversational aspect.

Matt Zoller Seitz just wrote a positive and insightful piece on Maher, but did not especially highlight this aspect of his hosting practice, which I think is important to notice:

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/01/13/bill_maher_1_13/index.html

My friend Robert Kennedy and I agree that the endlessly amusing and original John Waters could host a "lively art of conversation"-type show brilliantly if he wanted to take that project on; naturally, Maher has had Waters as a panelist on Politically Incorrect and Real Time a number of times. If anyone wanted to try emulating Kup, Cavett, and Griffin, I would truly be up for it. (Charlie Rose has great people on, but not in an open group format, and although a smart, well-informed guy, he is a bit of a starry-eyed suck-up, really not all that different from the lowbrow Larry King.)

I find it interesting that one of the philosophical beliefs that Maher and John Waters share is that it is incumbent upon us all to become smarter people. Thus Maher's "Do you read?" comment quoted by MZS, and Waters' insistence, repeated again in his latest book, that we should all read the hardest books we can lay our hands on. Dick Cavett is an incredible reader, and although one may not think of Merv Griffin as an intellect, in fact he was a very smart guy, one of the best businessmen in Hollywood, and, worth noting, the creator of the game show Jeopardy!, one of the rare post-50s television shows that really celebrates intellect. Griffin actually brought philosopher Bertrand Russell on his show to discuss the Vietnam War, which is a Maher-like move even though Griffin's and Maher's hosting personalities couldn't be more different.

So it seems that a high level of self-education and the cultivation of the lively art of conversation go hand-in-hand.