The Grateful Dead as improv comedy

One of the Grateful Dead’s most endearing qualities is their self-deprecating sense of humor.

They are easy to make fun of, too.

The music is a fair target for mockery, as Conan O’Brien did in a monologue: “The Grateful Dead are planning to release an 85-disc anthology of their musical career. The project has been delayed because The Dead haven’t decided which song to release.” The Onion took a similar tack in Our Dumb Century.

Here’s a darker joke:

What’s the one thing that can kill Chuck Norris?
Playing keys for the Grateful Dead.

The fandom is the subject of plenty of jokes too:

How many Deadheads does it take to change a lightbulb?
One to fix the new one and 50,000 to follow around the burned-out one.

And, of course, the Deadheads love a good inside joke.

Sean Zwagerman thinks that these kinds of jokes aren’t just amusing; they are the key to understanding the entire Grateful Dead phenomenon. That’s the argument in his paper, “Comedy Is What We’re Really About”: The Grateful Dead in a Comic Frame. Zwagerman begins by complaining about how the Deadheads (including most Dead scholars) have misapplied tragic and Romantic frames to the band. If you describe Jerry as a divinely inspired genius whose spiritual quest was thwarted by his succumbing to the forces of darkness, that simultaneously gives him too much credit and not enough. The comic frame is more appropriate to a man whose main aim in life was to provide himself and his audience a good time.

The comic frame accounts for Garcia’s embrace of spontaneity, but – unlike the Romantic frame – in the pursuit of pleasure rather than the sacred. Against the tragic frame’s emphasis on fallen greatness and the Romantic frame’s focus on artistic genius, the comic frame accommodates Garcia’s insistent self-deprecation and rejection of genius, and his ready acknowledgment of imperfection and failure.

It isn’t only Deadheads who speak in Romantic terms. Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart frequently use the language of mystical transcendence and higher consciousness when talking about music. I don’t doubt their sincerity, but it can be hard to take them seriously when you compare their high-flown language with their wildly inconsistent music. The most devout Deadheads’ rhapsodic descriptions of their favorite shows similarly make me roll my eyes, and I’m a fellow believer. I can only imagine how annoying they (we) are to everyone else.

Jerry sometimes spoke about his playing in Romantic terms in his earliest interviews. In 1971, he said that “music is like the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn’t even talk about.” However, as time went on, his description of himself and the band got more prosaic, especially (as Zwagerman points out) when the fans started worshipping him.

Zwagerman is uncomfortable with hagiographic reverence toward the band, but he also doesn’t like when people dismiss them as untalented hacks. He prefers the comic frame because it’s a healthier balance

between Blair Jackson’s mystification of Dead shows as “transcendent musical moments that moved the body and enriched the soul” (Jackson, Garcia 219), and an unknown iconoclast’s assessment that the Grateful Dead had the aspiration of the John Coltrane Quartet with the ability of the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

Zwagerman likes Bill Graham’s assessment: “They’re not the best at what they do, but they’re the only ones who do what they do.” I am solidly with Zwagerman and Bill Graham. Mystical language was appealing to me as a kid, but the down-to-earth comic frame fits the facts better.

Why were the Dead so hot in 1977? Is it because they were attuned to a higher consciousness, or is it because Keith Olsen forced them to rehearse more than usual to prepare for the Terrapin Station sessions? It doesn’t take anything away from 5/8/77 to know that it was more the result of perspiration than inspiration. Conversely, you could see Jerry’s dreadful playing in his last years as his tragic defeat at the hands of his insatiable addictions, or you could subscribe to Bruce Hornsby’s theory that Jerry was too bored and depressed to bother practicing the guitar.

I feel sad about Jerry’s self-destructive tendencies, but he didn’t ultimately die from anything so romantic as a drug overdose; it was a distinctly less rock-and-roll combination of poor cardiac health and sleep apnea. Maybe it seems disrespectful to think of Jerry in comic rather than tragic terms, but I think it’s actually more respectful, because it’s more in line with how he saw himself. Bob Weir recalls in an interview that the last words Jerry spoke to him after their last performance together were: “Always a hoot, always a hoot.” That level of flippancy can be cold, but it can also feel frank, like you trust each other. Mickey Hart gets colder in the Long Strange Trip documentary, when he says of Jerry, “He was a coooool guy, until he killed himself.” It’s a line that Jerry might just as easily have self-applied.

In a Relix interview conducted shortly before his death, Jerry said, “I don’t feel like I’m guiding anybody. I feel like I’m sort of stumbling along and a lot of people are watching me or stumbling with me or allowing me to stumble for them.” In Blair Jackson’s biography, he says of his worshippers, “I know better, you know? I mean, no matter who you are, you know yourself for the asshole that you are. You know yourself for the person who makes mistakes and is capable of being really stupid, and doing stupid things” (p. 363). In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, he described the Dead’s group consciousness as “like one dumb guy, instead of five, you know…dumb guys”. This is a relatable attitude.

Okay, so Jerry didn’t think of himself as a holy man, but what about the music? Surely that was spiritual, right? Jerry did sometimes talk about improvisation in mystical terms, but he mostly presented it as a practical solution to the particular problem of boredom. He was a workaholic who spent his breaks from the Dead gigging with his side bands. Due to some combination of pathological anti-authoritarianism and undiagnosed ADHD, he and the rest of the Dead were constitutionally incapable of playing the same thing in the same way twice. Even if they had wanted to nail down arrangements and play them the same way every night, they would not have been able to. How often did they ever play the through-composed sections of their songs correctly?

Zwagerman compares the Dead to a specific kind of comedy, the long-form improv championed by Del Close at the Second City. Del was a Merry Prankster who had helped create some of the Dead’s early light shows, and Zwagerman thinks this connection is not a coincidence. I have been to a lot of improv shows and have performed in a few. Nothing will make you laugh harder or upend your expectations more than a good improv show. On the other hand, nothing is more boring or uncomfortable than an improv show that isn’t clicking. This will sound very familiar to anyone who has been to a Dead show.

There’s ample reason to see the Dead in their last decade as tragic figures, but they are also undeniably funny. Here’s this band playing to packed stadiums with complex light shows and giant projector screens, and they look and behave like a bunch of my parents’ friends at a bagel brunch. Now that it’s so common for rock bands to be comprised of unfashionable and socially awkward middle-aged guys, it’s hard to remember how culturally out of step the Dead were in the 1980s. The bass player was a bespectacled nerd with a tie-dyed t-shirt tucked into his belted khaki pants. One singer/guitarist wore a pink tank top and very short cutoff jean shorts. The other one, this band’s supposedly most charismatic figure, was a disheveled wreck in a stretched-out black t-shirt and black sweatpants who would spend the whole show looking at the floor. It’s pretty funny that when I was in high school, my friends and I were obsessed with this guy who looked and sounded older at age 40 than Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney do at age 80.

The comic frame explains Deadheads’ unusual tolerance for (and even affection for) the band’s constant failure: to remember their own songs, to exercise quality control, to have even one conventionally “good” singer in the band at any point. Nick Paumgarten lists everything we have had to be tolerant of:

Even the fanatic can admit to a few things. The Dead were musically self-indulgent, and yet, to some ears, harmonically shallow… Pop-craft buffs, punkers, and anyone steeped in the orthodoxy of concision tend to plug their ears to the noodling, while jazz buffs often find it unsophisticated and aimless. The Dead’s sense of time was not always crisp. It’s been said that the two drummers, in the eighties, sounded like sneakers in a dryer… Even the high-tech light shows of later years and the spaceship twinkle of their amplifiers could not compensate for a lumpy stage presence… They forgot lyrics, sang out of key, delivered rank harmonies, missed notes, blew takeoffs and landings, and laid down clams by the dozen. Their lyrics were often fruity—hippie poetry about roses and bells and dew. They resisted irony. They were apolitical. They bombed at the big gigs. They unleashed those multicolored dancing bears.

Paumgarten also shares my discomfort with the parking lot scene, whose denizens “bought into the idea, which grew flimsier each year, that following a rock band from football stadium to football stadium, fairground to fairground, constituted adventure of the Kerouac kind.” You could be as disgusted by all this as the Deadheads are reverent toward it, but as Zwagerman argues, the comic frame offers a third way.

Failure in the comic frame is not something one must attribute to a fatal flaw or to malign external forces, or reluctantly acknowledge and then quickly counter with a reaffirmation of genius or inspiration; “Yes,” the Romantic will admit, “the Grateful Dead sometimes played poorly, but…” Because the Romantic frame must deflect or rationalize failure, it fails to give failure its due. The comic frame, on the other hand, renders coherent the necessary relation between improvisation and failure and casts failure not as a potential risk in a Grateful Dead performance, but a feature. It is through failure that the tragic and comic frames have a complementary relationship: it is unforeseeable when the inevitable pratfall will occur.

This was a community not of spiritual communion but of socialized and good-humored commiseration. The Romantically inclined fan dances ecstatically when the magic happens (and also when it does not); the comedically inclined fan smiles knowingly when disaster strikes. Both come back the next night.

Zwagerman believes that the comic frame is compatible with the hippies’ quest for higher consciousness, without falling prey to self-delusion. Comedians scrutinize and criticize everything, including themselves. Negative experiences, like being tricked or cheated, still have value as experiences to learn from. The comic frame allows you to attain broader consciousness by remaining aware of your own failures.

A dark sense of humor can be useful in the face of situations that are otherwise plain depressing. In an outtake from the Blair Jackson Jerry biography, Bruce Hornsby recalled a show from the summer of 1994 where he was trying to reconcile Jerry’s numb and dissociated performance with the rapturous faces of the Deadheads in the crowd, and described the whole thing as “a surreal, dark joke.” That is not as much fun as a light joke, but it holds away despair.