Hey Wisecrack, Jared here, and today we’re unpacking the truly singular persona of Bill
Murray. Since replacing Chevy Chase on SNL in 1977 Bill Murray has embodied a very particular
kind of comedy that can best be described as “ironic and cooly distant.”
"I don't worry about anything."
Over the years, Murray has curiously transcended the label of “that goofy dude in movies” to
essentially that of a comedy legend.
"Who's Bill Murray?"
"I mean that's like asking who Ghandi is."
Last year the New York Times ran a piece exploring
Murray’s “Peculiar Ascent” from the status of comedian to the level of a “secular saint.”
"I'm a god."
Apparently, the amount of pop culture paraphernalia dedicated to Murray rivals that
of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Albert Einstein.
There’s a truly particular irony to Murray’s existence. He has a cameo in Parks and Rec
where he plays a corpse, which is ONLY funny BECAUSE it’s Bill Murray. The entire plot
of Osmosis Jones takes place inside Bill Murray’s body, which seems like the producers telling us:
Hey, isn't this funny how they're inside Bill Murray?
And for some reason, he has a cameo in Space Jam where he plays… himself.
"Producer's a friend of mine. Just had a teamster come and drop me off."
So… what’s the deal with this guy? Is this just cult of personality run amok? Or
is there something more going on here? Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the philosophy
of Bill Murray. Have you ever noticed how, in many Bill Murray movies, he doesn’t seem
to be taking the plot seriously?
"Real wrath of God type stuff: fire and brimstone coming down from the skies."
"Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!"
He stands slightly at a distance from everything, enabling
him to maintain a dryly humorous commentary about what’s going on around him.
"What the hell kinda clown are you?"
"The crying-on-the-inside kind I guess."
"Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back."
Murray is perpetually sarcastic, even during otherwise dramatic moments, so much so that he often
verges on or outright breaks the reality of the scene. Murray just doesn’t give a fuck.
It’s kinda his thing.
It’s as if his very presence is license to deflate the stakes of an otherwise dramatic moment.
"Congratulations, you're a father."
When his ship is boarded by bloodthirsty pirates in The Life Aquatic, Murray inexplicably
goes Rambo and takes back the boat despite the fact his character is not a badass. At
all. The entire premise of The Man Who Knew Too Little is essentially Murray playing a
man who has no personal stake in the plot surrounding him, because he literally believes
it is the world's most convincing game of improv.
"Relax, we're actors."
This kind of detatched comedic irony isn’t new nor is it unique to Murray. For one thing,
it’s a staple of American comedy dating back at least to vaudeville days. In Marx
Brothers movies, for instance, the stories were merely there to provide some sort of
skeletal structure for the jokes, and Groucho would frequently break the fourth wall.
"Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. This would be a better world for children if the parents had to eat the spinach."
In fact, this ironic, detatched kind of comedy goes back to 500 years before the Marx Brothers.
Japanese playwright and philosopher Zeami Motokiyo
trained actors to conceal their intentions as they acted, even from themselves. Much
later German poet/playwrite Bertolt Brecht, having been influenced by Japanese theater, trained his
actors to develop a style where everything on stage was acted out in quotation marks,
so that every line is divorced from it’s intended dramatic weight. He wanted to make
sure that neither his actors nor the audience fully identified with the characters on stage.
The purpose of this was to inspire the audience to break free of conventional thinking and
bring them a new experience- to make them think again.
Over the last few years Bill Murray has been making headlines for crashing parties, photobombing,
and randomly popping up in people's lives. In June of 2014 he turned up at the pre-wedding
photoshoot for a couple he’d never even met, In 2011 he turned up at Karaoke One 7
in NYC and joined the party of some rando. He served as a Bartender at SXSW 2010 for
no apparent reason. And, perhaps best of all, in 2009 he turned up at the construction site
for New York City’s new Poets House to read a poem and dole out some advice.
For a big celebrity, he's also notoriously hard to get a hold of.
He doesn't have an agent and forces producers to contact him through a 1-800 hotline
he checks only a few times a year.
Just what is Murray up to?
"What the hell are you doing?"
"I have no idea."
Why does he spend his time doing stunts like this instead of
filling yachts with models and absconding to Eurpoean villas like other celebrities?
One explanation might be Murray’s relationship to Sufi mystic GI Gurdjieff. According to
the late Harold Ramis, Murray was a student of Gurdjieff, a kind of guru who “used to
act really irrationally to his students almost as if trying to teach them object lessons.”
Gurdjieff, like most mystics, aimed at freeing the minds of men from illusion, or waking
people up to the reality of their own freedom. He was a teacher of something he called the
fourth way to enlightenment or, alternatively, the way of the sly man. The sly man doesn’t
have to hide himself away in a monastery or practice abstinence or asceticism, but can
find the truth in everyday life.
The first step in Gurdjieff’s method is to divide your attention. You have to become
aware of both the external world and your own inner state and then you have to refuse
to get caught up in either world. The purpose of this separation is to take control over
your own behavior and reactions. The sly man creates distance between the world, the self,
and the self that is observing everything.
"It doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter!"
What makes Murray unique is that he turns the usual American style of comedic irony
against itself, or against himself. The result is a bit mystifying.
Irony traditionally means that the character’s words or actions are clear to the audience
but unknown to the character. Murray takes this a step further. He gives us ironic performances
wherein his characters are unaware of the meaning of their own activity, but we know
that Bill Murray knows. In Ghostbusters, for instance, when the woman he loves transforms
in to a demon, his reaction is not what one would expect.
"Okay, so, she's a dog."
The fact that it seems outlandish
for his character to react with such nonchalance is exactly the point. The audience identifies
not with Bill Murray’s character, but with Bill Murray, who distances himself from the
stakes of the narrative.
In 1993’s Groundhog Day this ironic distance and self-awareness becomes his whole character
arc. Through each repetition Murray’s character becomes more aware. First of his
surroundings, then of other people until he's finally able to achieve some distance from himself and his
selfishness and can accept love and find some peace in the small town of Punxsutawney.
"Anything different is good."
So what do you think: Is a sarcastic approach to daily life the way to go?
"So do you have any regrets?"
"Garfield, maybe."
Is Bill Murray's whole career an intervention, an attempt to wake people up to some kind of enlightenment?
"I like to be more consistently here, you know, really in it, really alive."
Or is it all a joke? Let us know what you think in the comments.