I'm probably being a bit too too too generous giving "Metropolitan Life" 4 stars. I'm doing it more for the lovability of Frannie Lebowitz, than necessarily her laugh-out-loud funniness. And yet, I remember Fran's endless appearances on talk shows in the 1970s-early 1980s, looking very errudite and Andy Warhol-ish, with sophisticated cigarette in hand, as she spouted off her pontifications and rumination of life. We all thought she was the height of eccentric sophistication and witty urbane intelligence back then in 1980.
Does it translate as well in 2006?
Fran Lebowitz is still clever enough. It's a slice of life that we'll never see again: that Andy Warhol-Halston-Studio 54 crowd that mixed with New York City's power elite: Fran was able to bridge those two worlds. I guess I'm feeling nostalgic for that period of time, when everybody rubbed shoulders with everyone else, and people weren't so isolated and cloistered in their own little groups reaffirming their own little world view.
Fran Lebowitz represented, back then, a kind of being able to expand your comfort zone. You didn't have to live in New York City to "get" her. You didn't have to be an edgy urbane sophisticate to appreciate the cleverness of her witticism.
You still don't. Here's what Fran has to say about....sleep:
"Sleep is death without the responsibility."
Fran on ...poetry:
"Generally speaking, it is inhumane to detain a fleeting insight."
Fran on convenience foods:
"The servant problem being what it is, one would think it apparent that a society that provides a Helper for tuna but compels a writer to pack her own suitcases desperately needs to reorder its priorities".
Fran on the self-help movement:
"If you want to get ahead in this world, get a lawyer--not a book.
There are all sorts of these Fran-isms in "Metropolitan Life".
Fran wakes up at 12:35 pm to start her day:
"---The phone rings. I am not amused. This is not my favorite way to wake up. My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish."--Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life
In 1978, when Metropolitan Life was published, New York City was all the rage, and we thought these urbane witticisms were the funniest thing ever.
I still think she's very clever and represents a certain urban social strata that's, today, lost forever. The Studio 54 crowd of the late 1970s, that Andy Warhol/Fran Lebowitz came out of, were some of the most dynamic, artistic, edgy, intellectuals ever. Obviously today's club kids, and what passes for today's urban "Hip Hop" youth are completely different. Today, it's an anti-intellectualism that pervades urban club culture.
So, in that sense......Fran Lebowitz's world looks very appealing, today, when you contrast it with what passes for empty, dumbed-down humor in contemporary 2006.
No, of course "Metropolitan Life" isn't laugh-out-loud hysterical/hilarious by today's standards of jaded humor. But it does represent a universal-clever urban sophistication that we are missing from society today. We have become very polarized and, today, you'd never see a Fran Lebowitz, or Andy Warhol, mixing with New York establishment types, or appealing to the general masses the way she/they did back then. You also have to remember that this was ten years before Seinfeld, and she paved the way for that kind of Seinfeld-ian dry-humor and comedic observations.
In that sense the humor book, Metropolitan Life, if short on belly-laughs, does indeed work as a historical/culture chronicle. And Fran is far more clever than anything that passes for generic/homogenized humor today.
