It hasn’t grown older instead it’s been renewed.
I think of Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace: “To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger.” When Emo tells us jokes, we are really cheering him up.Įmo’s audience has always been mixed-age. Though it might seem narcissistic, there is generosity in this self-love, a celebration of Emo as archetype, incarnate in others and in us. About halfway through, he was joined on stage by an Emo impersonator - actor and comedian, Erin Maguire - who performed five minutes of old material, ending with “Die, heretic!” Emo watched her joyfully and watched us watching her, as we watched him watch his doppelgänger being watched by us.
In the Rockwell show, Emo’s doubling was made tangible. When we look at him, we can see growth and change or continuity and kinship: the common vulnerability of childhood and old age. The boyish Emo needed us as we all needed him old Emo needs us, too. God knows we need his sympathy, confronting a global pandemic, climate change, and the revival of fascism. Old Emo is a sage, a man who has aged into compassion. “Science can only give us part of the glorious picture of the cosmos,” Emo now concedes. It begins with Emo meeting a man on a bridge who is about to jump it ends with the line: “I said ‘Die, heretic!’ and pushed him over.” There are jokes about religion in the recent shows, but the best are extravagantly mild. In 2005, an extended bit from his first album E=Mo 2 was voted the funniest joke about religion ever. When he lands a joke, his hands float by his face in astonished celebration.Įmo’s satire has become gentler over the years. Emo sheds his waistcoat, drapes it on the mic stand, thanks us for being his friends. Young Emo was childlike old Emo is avuncular, wise - he is Mister Rogers in Bizarro World. Emo emits the same uncanny aura of identity and change. My whitening stubble, smudged eyes, and double chin are superimposed on the unblemished features of a boy - like an Instagram filter for middle age. On the rare occasions that I do, I can still make out the 11-year-old me. Watching Emo on stage now is a bit like looking at my own face in the mirror at 44. Since writing it, they have become more vivid to me, as my health declines and my mother struggles with early-onset Alzheimer’s. It said much less about the medical indignities of aging. It was a book not just for the middle-aged but for anyone coping with the irreversibility of time. Three years ago, I published a philosophical guide to the struggles of midlife: the inevitability of regret, the sense of futility in striving for success, and the looming proximity of death. I have been thinking a lot about getting old these days. Emo speaks more slowly and takes longer pauses than he once did. “You are really cheering me up,” he says to the audience, repeating an old refrain, but now he seems genuinely sad. The shabby coat and vest suggest not beatnik eccentricity but homelessness.
Emo philips skin#
His skin no longer smooth, Emo has the careworn face and tired eyes of an older man. He is still reflecting on his parents at 63: “My father,” he reminisces, “…a loving man… a generous man… a kind man… all walk into a bar.”Īnd yet he is transfigured. His themes are constant: absurdity, religion, childhood trauma. He wears the same clothes and has the same voice the wobbling falsetto, legato delivery, and physical fidgeting are unchanged. On stage at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, 2018, and at the Rockwell in Somerville this fall, he looks at first the same. I was 11 years old in 1987 I am middle-aged now. I fell in love with Emo Phillips in the 1980s, watching him on British TV, lost track of his career for 30 years, then saw him live at the last two iterations of the Boston Comedy Festival. “Wait a second,” Emo muses, “if that’s Jimmy Peterson, he’d have grown up, too.” “Walking down the street, I say to myself, ‘That’s Jimmy Peterson I haven’t seen him since the third grade.’” Emo swoops over and slaps his friend on the back - “How’s it going, you old moron?” - knocking him to the ground, where he screams, “Mommy! Mommy!” “The weirdest thing happened today,” Emo whines. The first joke in Emo Philips’s 1987 special, Live at the Hasty Pudding - after the physical joke of his appearance, lithe and spindly, hair cut in a long black bob, almond face, wide eyes and waistcoat - is the joke about Jimmy Peterson. Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women.