Fraud vs. Freud

>> David Rakoff skewers psychotherapy and comedy

by JULIET WATERS

"The central drama of my life," claims essayist David Rakoff, "is about being a fraud, alas. That's a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play." Alas, I smell another lie in Rakoff's book, Fraud. The central drama of his life, I suspect, is being the child of psychiatrists.

I'm guessing this because of how little Rakoff actually talks about his family, at least compared to his contemporaries from NPR's This American Life, David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell. Something of a vicious triangle of American essayists (except that Rakoff's Canadian), Sedaris and Vowell satirize their families with gleeful abandon.

If Rakoff bears any hostility toward his parents--and it would be difficult to believe someone who claims to have spent most of his life in therapy doesn't--they should be grateful he only mentions them once. This is in an essay about a Christmas he spends posing as Sigmund Freud and listening to "patients" as part of a bizarre New York "Neurotic Yule" window display for Barney's. He's asked by a journalist whether this is a dream come true. "Well it is a dream. It's logical... One of my parents is a psychiatrist and the other is a department store window." In fact, the other is an M.D. who practices psychotherapy.

Herein lies the irony of Rakoff's life. His vocation as acidic social satirist is to be the anti-therapist. It drives him to go forth, find weird people, distort their flaws and publicly skewer them. He does this extremely well, but so obviously hates himself for it afterwards that reading a Rakoff essay is like watching the writer's version of Hari Kiri over and over again. Though he's inevitably more successful at the attack than the suicide.

Take Robin Williams, please. Rakoff goes to the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival with the objective of proving that Williams is the personification of everything "wrong and normative and middlebrow in our culture." And he does a great job.

"Watching his live act over almost two decades--the endless reel of cocaine jokes and spoofs of Valley-speak--drives home two little-acknowledged facts: first, Robin Williams is a really good, competent actor when he shuts up, which is never. And this is too bad because, second, Robin Williams isn't actually all that funny. He is the Billy Joel of comedy, accessibly catchy in the initial moment, but with the shelf life of yogurt." That said, Rakoff retreats into a very quick shower of self-deprecation. "To his credit--and to the detriment of my evil purposes--Williams comes off fairly well and keeps his dewy Angel of Laughter in check."

Rakoff pulls this trick over and over again. Whether he's digging into nature lovers, survivalists, Icelanders, Stephen Segal leading a weekend workshop, or himself as a survivor of Hodgkin's disease (which he likens to being "a cancer tourist"). His essays show the signs of a struggle between two impulses.

"If being funny is not a moral virtue... then neither is being unfunny a moral failing. This brings up yet another, far more important misconception: that being comically generative and having a sense of humour are one and the same thing. The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is among the most. One is a handy social tool, the other an integral component of human survival. It bears repeating a third time: not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humour does."

Fraud is the struggle between being a survivor and a tool. Generally, this means he is less relentlessly funny than Sedaris or Vowell. But in the final analysis he proves himself a more insightful, intelligent and thought-provoking writer than either of them.

Fraud by David Rakoff, Doubleday, hc, 225pp, $29.95