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I laughed more during Charles Fairbanks’s four-and-a-half-minute video Wrestling With My Father (screening this Saturday at the Nightingale as part of a program of Fairbanks’s work) than I did during the entire 110 minutes of We’re the Millers—and I cared a lot more about its characters too, even though all they do is watch high school wrestling matches. I make this comparison not as a slight at mainstream comedy on the whole (I don’t find Wrestling funnier than The World’s End, for instance), but to highlight the crucial role that humor plays in Fairbanks’s videos. Many spectators reject experimental film and video out of the false impression that it’s all theoretical and humorless, though a wide range of U.S. experimental filmmakers have employed humor as part of their cinematic experiments—Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, Owen Land, Robert Nelson, and Lewis Klahr being the first five names that come to mind.
The next shot emphasizes the connection even more. Another match, another audience, and Mr. Fairbanks is still wearing the same damn outfit and fidgeting like a kid. Mrs. Fairbanks is there too, putting on the same outsize expressions of worry. Yet the overall effect is different than that of the previous shots. With these repetitions, Fairbanks junior has subtly created a sense of constancy. We sense the bond that’s kept this married couple together. Like Buster Keaton and the neurotic women he’d wind up with in his films, the Fairbankses accept each other’s quirks and get along swimmingly. If you’ve watched Fairbanks’s 33-minute short Pioneers, made the previous year and also screening this Saturday, you know just how quirky these folks can be. If you haven’t seen Pioneers, the joke’s still funny, which says a lot about Fairbanks’s comedic chops and knack for composition.
