Laughter and sadness often go hand in hand. If you are reminded of a happy memory, one that makes you laugh, chances are your brain is also wrestling with the sadness of knowing that you could never experience this memory again. The desire to feel sadness in tandem with pure joy is why we crave nostalgia or why we love to bask in the miseries of others. This Thursday, FX premiered a show that explores this dichotomy through the story of one struggling artist, Chip Baskets, an aspiring clown who moves back to his hometown of Bakersfield, California after dropping out of Parisian clown college. Co-created by Louis C.K., Zach Galifinakis and Jonathan Krisel, Baskets is thoughtful, strange and a little depressing, but well worth the watch, even if just to see how far they can take this.
Clowning is the most important in Chip’s world, although he lacks the grace, cunning and ability to speak french that he needs to excel at the Académie de Clown Françias. Chip has an avant-garde style of clowning as Renoir (his clown name) that is understood by few and appreciated by even less.
To get back on his feet in the U.S. he gets a job as a rodeo clown. This line of work doesn’t quite fulfill the artistic void within him and only pays $4.00 an hour. He attempts to perform his routine as Renoir at the rodeo, but is met with an audience of boos and heckles. Only after he is knocked over by an angry bull does he earn the audience’s applause.
Since being back in California, Chip married a Parisian woman he went out with briefly in France. She is uninterested in him and his aspirations and has frankly let him know that she only agreed to their marriage so she could obtain a green card. Her only contact with him is to ask for forty dollars for an HBO subscription at her new, nicer apartment.
Chip gets into an accident while riding his scooter on the freeway, summoning the help of Martha, his insurance agent. Martha is dowdy in her appearance, wears an unexplained green cast on her right arm and speaks with slow uncertainty in her voice. Despite Chip treating her like a piece of trash, she takes a liking to him and offers to drive him around while he is without transportation.
Chip sets off with Martha to borrow forty dollars from his Mother. Chip’s childhood home feels comforting but, also a bit uncanny and strange, like a side show designed in a HomeGoods. The walls are covered with pictures of Ms. Baskets’ two sets of twins, there are Lladro clown figurines on display and all products in the house are visibly purchased from Costco. Chip’s mother is played by Louie Anderson, the male stand up comedian and former host of Family Feud. The gender flip is subdued and not once mentioned or made to be the punchline of the joke, but rather suggests Chip’s skewed reality.
She is caring and nurturing, but has some motherly complaints and comparisons to her other sons that hurts Chip. My personal favorite being her complaints about the money lost on clown college, “do you know how much I paid for that college? I paid in Euros, so I don’t exactly know how much it cost, but there were a lot of zeros on that check.”
Chip takes the hint and doesn’t ask her for the forty dollars, so Martha takes him to see his twin brother, Dale. The successful owner of Baskets Career College, who is also played by Galifinakis, Dale condescends Chip and Martha, but gives him 2 crisp twenty dollar bills and sends them on their way. Dale is chipper, narcissistic and insincere, the virtual opposite of his angry, self-loathing and passionate twin.
Chip begins to distance himself from his former clown persona, Renoir and embrace his new self as Baskets the Rodeo Clown. With him getting head clown at the rodeo by default, he sees a chance to have control over something in his life at last.
Baskets showcases Galifinakis’ weirdness in it’s rawest form. It has some of his classic go-to moves, which include but are not limited to:
- Generally being clueless
- Interrupting himself to take care of some mundane business going on around him during a heated exchange
- Mispronouncing things
- Having a beard
- Leaving mistakes in that would have normally been edited out
- Misleading dialogue
- Wearing ill-fitting pants
His comedic style combined with the subject matter creates an unusual blend of absurdism, slapstick gags, melodramatic tantrums and reflective melancholy. Episodes are paced rather slowly and large laugh out loud moments are few and far between, although this doesn’t quite diminish the show’s comedic quality. There is no rule that states just how many setups and punchlines must be crammed in a half-hour of television to make it qualify as a comedy. To me, comedy has always been any work that elicits a range of emotions that ultimately leads to joy. On the way there, comedies are allowed to feel sad, strange and subtle, especially in a television landscape where traditional sitcoms compete with the likes of Louie, Transparent and The Last Man on Earth.
Repeatedly, Chip declares, “I am a clown!” whenever someone questions abilities, which is not something most people are proud to exclaim. Clowns bring joy to some, terror to other, but to most are simply something they would not like to be seen as. Chip’s journey as a clown has some parallels to the early careers of many alternative comedians, such as Galifinakis and C.K.. Those who believed in their weird brand of comedy, broke traditional rules for jokes and threw themselves on stage in front of an audience that would much rather watch them get rammed by a bull, maybe they were no different than a clown.
binge watch this. 