Gad, Series, Huge in France, Comedy, Tragedy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology

Huge in France: Is He Gad, or Is He a Latter Day de Tocqueville?

 

Having just finished watching the first season of Huge in France, Gad Elmaleh’s comic take on living life in America as a French Comedy Star whose celebrity status counts for naught here, I was not surprised to hear that Netflix is not renewing it for a second season.  It, like Hacks, another current series about comedians, has not a likeable character in it.  Even The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, starring a likeable comedian, is turning her into someone we don’t like in it’s fifth and final season.  Is there something about being funny that makes people unlikeable?  Certainly the characters on Seinfeld, while likeable, had few other redeeming qualities, as they themselves were quick to point out.

Gad, however, may only be a comedy by accident.  Sure, Gad is the Seinfeld of France.  His decision to leave fame behind; fame which has turned bitter in his mouth, and move to America, propels the series towards its black humor where Gad plays straight man to the antics of a series of shallow, self-obsessed Americans like his son, Luke (Jordan Ver Hoeve), his ex and his son’s mother Vivian (Erinn Hayes), and her current lover, Jason Alan Ross (Matthew Del Negro).  He is guided through this tour of vapidness in the capitol of vapidity, Los Angeles, by a Korean American, Brian Kurihara (Scott Keiji Takeda).  Brian, in his role as Sancho Panza, sits firmly astride an early 1970s vintage Toyota(?) station wagon.  

But this series does not primarily evoke Don Quixote for me, even though Gad is on a Quixotic quest to win back the love of his Dulcinea – in the form of the son he has neglected for the 14 years of the kid’s life – but instead it appears to be the commentary of a Frenchmen on the culture, as it were, that he finds in America.  And this, in turn, is reminiscent of the observations of another Frenchman, who published, in 1835, his two-volume book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville .  Many consider this work to be a near prescient assessment of our country not as it was conceived, but as it was realized.

Central to de Tocqueville’s assessment of America was the idea that we, instead of inheriting our wealth, worked for it.  He admired this, as it created an industriousness that he did not see in his own country where men either inherited wealth and looked down on those who needed to labor – or they were laborers with no hope of becoming wealthy, so were consigned to the drudgery of life.  Hence the current concerns in France with quality of life, including being unshackled from labor to retire at a relatively young age.

Gad’s wealth has been supporting the lifestyles of his ex, her boyfriend and their son.  But they have not been living the life of Ryan, luxuriating in that wealth (though they live in a fine home and drive nice cars).  Instead they are each working towards wealth and fame in their own ways.  Luke is working to become a model, Vivian has an Instagram based company, Exhale, to which she is uploading episodes filmed by her assistant on their iPhone and for which she is entertaining groups and instructing them how to be calm by, you guessed it, exhaling, and Jason Alan Ross is trying out for TV parts while mentoring Luke based on his earlier experience as a model.

Gad observes their antics with an air of mild disdain.  Why are they engaged in such silly pursuits?  He is most concerned with Luke, who is trying to find the money to buy surgically supplied pecs to enhance his chest without causing his arms to become bloated.  Why would he want to distort himself in this way?  Why are these people obsessed with appearance? 

Luke, for his part, does not understand why his biological father is so clueless about what is important to him and sticks like glue to his preferred father figure, Jason Alan Ross, who keeps promising to come up with money for his half of the cost of the surgery.

I think Gad’s feelings towards Luke (and Vivian and Jason Alan Ross) are intended as commentary on our country in part because of his reaction to American humor.  Gad repeatedly engages with a comic who tells dick jokes, as in, “I have a California dick so it looks blond and curly and like it is ready to go surfing.”  After commenting on what the dicks of various members of the audience must look like based on where they are from, he calls out Gad and asks where he is from.  When Gad acknowledges that he is French, the comedian calls out rhetorically, “What does a French dick look like?  If looks like you!”  (With drum roll and inane laughter to follow). 

Crestfallen, Gad, who has been questioning himself while being bewildered by those around him, turns to his sidekick, the loser Brian, who defends the comic, saying that his jokes are not just dick jokes, but meta-dick jokes: they offer commentary on the weakness of the genre.  Perplexed and angry, Gad enlists his friend Jerry Seinfeld to put the upstart comic in his place, twisting Jerry’s arm to tell the punk that the joke is not funny, but Jerry, in the moment when he should support Gad, pulls the rug out from under him, acknowledging that the joke is, in fact, funny.  And humor, in Jerry’s world, trumps the dignity of his friend.

Facing the ignominy of  having lost his son, his ex, and playing second fiddle to a man who is inept in so many ways that it is hard to imagine a less worthy opponent, Gad excuses himself from a bowling match in which he is supposed to be his son’s wing man to try his hand at an open mic night in the bowling alley’s lounge – perhaps the lowest place a comic can sink to.

Now de Tocqueville did not face similar personal challenges (as far as I know) on his trip to America.  Quite the contrary, he was greeted as an esteemed visitor from a country, in the midst of its second try at a Republic, that was imagined by both countries to be comrades in arms – working, on two sides of the ocean, to figure out how to engage in this complicated mess called self-government.  De Tocqueville had a whiggish view of history – that the Republic was built on the accomplishments of Louis the IV – the Sun King, who had brought France out of the middle ages and into an enlightened era that would lead, inexorably toward the ennoblement of the common man. 

The reality of America, for de Tocqueville, was that the white man in America was so focused on his own promotion that he was largely unaware of others, except in so far as they could help him towards a goal – whether in working together towards something that would benefit all working on that project or working alone.  In the process of being so focused on themselves, they were blind to, among other things, the terrors they were wreaking on African Slaves and Native Americans.  He predicted that we would assimilate the Native Americans and isolate the African Americans, and that this would be a dilemma that would prevent us from achieving the lofty goals of equality that we set for ourselves.

De Tocqueville, though, saw that the industry of the Americans would outstrip the French in productivity. He saw the French collectivism as breeding a certain kind of apathy.  The French may have a greater sense of country and of belonging and they may enjoy a certain kind of freedom that comes from not being afraid of being left by the side of the road by a citizenry that doesn’t care (OK, I may be presentizing de Tocqueville here), but their material accomplishments were likely to be eclipsed by the exploits of the Americans.

Gad, the character, is the most popular comic in France (I don’t know whether the actor – a French/Morocan comic – is actually that popular).  As the most popular comic, he is known in France as the French Jerry Seinfeld.  Even in France, where he speaks the language and where he is huge, he is eclipsed by the exploits of the self-centered and aggrandizing Americans.

Curious about what we do across the pond, and also wanting to connect with his son, Gad travels here.  As a comic, he observes.  This is what comics do.  They observe – and they comment.  They notice what is going on around them, and they (at least according to Hannah Gadsby) bring the most egregious and anxiety provoking aspects of our experience to our attention, but then, rather than energizing us to do something to change those things, they release the tension that they have brought into the room by making light of the situation.

Aristotle wrote the book on tragedy.  Nietzsche used that work to write a modern version of the tragic.  What was lost in antiquity were Aristotle’s thoughts on comedy.  Could it be that Gad, now in the guise of Aristotle, would point out that comedy is based on horror?

Freud maintained that dreams are, at their base, means of granting wishes to our unconscious drives.  What he didn’t say, but maybe left implicit, is that the source of the wish is a lack and behind that lack is a fear that the lack will not be addressed.  Freud's first example of a dream is of the child who is hungry and dreams of eating so that he or she doesn’t wake up.  What he doesn’t point out here is that the child is lacking something – food – and feeling something – hunger – that would motivate him to address the lack except that, at the moment, the need for sleep is going to trump the need for food, so we are going to produce some imaginary food - and the purpose of the dream is to keep us asleep. 

Of course, when we are hungry enough, we are desperate for food because we are horrified that we will die if we don’t eat.  Similarly, while we may want to cavort naked, to meet our desire to exhibit ourselves, we are also horrified when we dream that we have gone to school or to work without wearing any clothes.  Gad points out to us, in this film, the he is horrified of the state of affairs in America.  We are bloated narcissists who focus on the surface of our lives – and put that out on the internet for others to emulate, parading nude, as it were, on the internet.

From a classical perspective, this is, indeed a comedy.  It has a happy ending, of sorts.  Our hero – whether as Quixote, de Tocqueville, or Aristotle, managed to accomplish the relational goals that he set for himself.  His Sancho Panza helped him to these goals.  There was some ambiguity about how well the other characters made out – and without another season, we will not know how the story might have continued.

I think that the essential unlikeability of most of the cast was necessary to clarify to the reader that what Gad was seeing was really there – he wanted to hold up a mirror to them and to us that would highlight the flaws that his de Tocquevillian self was observing.  Perhaps, though, the horror that is at the heart of the series – and one that the happy ending could not quite mask – is that, for all his disdain, Gad still wants to be an American – and he despises himself for doing that.

In his stand-up routine – taped and available to stream – he talks about being at the beach in Morocco when he was a child and his father pointing across the ocean and saying that America lies on the other side of that and, if he is lucky, he will be able to go there some day.  He ends the show by telling of going out to Long Island and pointing across the Atlantic to tell his child that Morocco lies there, and, if he is lucky, some day he will be able to go there – but it is a joke.  America is the shining destination.  As horrible as it is, it is desirable in a way that Morocco simply is not.

What if, then, what is most monstrous and horrifying about us is that we desire to be Americans – to be striving to make our dreams come true not just at night, but when we are awake.  That we are in love with the idea of being able to “live the dream” and blind to the fact that the effort to achieve it will spoil us.

It is a truism in psychotherapeutic work that we don’t want to strip away all of the defenses.  Some delusion is an important element of living a happy life.  As observer, Gad (and his fellow comedians) relentlessly desire to show us who we are ultimately has a tragic quality – he strips away his and our delusions and connects us to our ugly, unhidden selves, and we find him, and ourselves, unlikeable.   

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.