August 05, 2015
Colin Quinn
It’s informative to compare two current memoirs focused upon race: the rapturously welcomed Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I reviewed a week ago, and The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America by the veteran Irish-American comic Colin Quinn, last seen stealing the movie Trainwreck as Amy Schumer’s father.
Americans all claim to be fascinated by diversity, but the popularity of Coates” old-fashioned black-white tunnel vision demonstrates once again that the conventional wisdom hasn”t become more sophisticated in the past half century. It’s always that Selma bridge in 1965.
In contrast, around 1966 the 7-year-old Quinn’s family moved to Brooklyn’s deteriorating Park Slope, then one of the most ethnically mixed (and junkie-infested) spots in America.
He loved it.
Through Aug. 16, Quinn is doing a one-man show Off Broadway about what he learned growing up there, The New York Story, directed by his old pal Jerry Seinfeld. (As you may recall, Seinfeld complained in June about how political correctness is increasingly constricting comedy; if you are interested in guessing what the usually diplomatic Seinfeld thinks in private, you might want to listen to what the outspoken Quinn says in public.)
Park Slope is a particularly educational place to be from because much of New York’s social history has happened there in overdrive. In 1890, following the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge to Wall Street, Park Slope, with its famous brownstone townhomes, was the richest neighborhood in America. But by 1966 it had fallen a long way.
This is not to say that Quinn is from the working class. Instead, he comes from a long line of “smart broke people.”
His father, whose death in 2012 at age 80 was likely the impetus for Quinn finally writing a book, was a professor of English at City College who had big, if unconventional, dreams for his son. Both of them were inspired by J.P. Donleavy’s peculiarly influential 1955 comic novel, The Ginger Man. If the first Velvet Underground album sold only 10,000 copies but every purchaser started a band, it sometimes seems as if every reader of The Ginger Man, such as Hunter S. Thompson, set out to become an alcoholic bard. Quinn recalls:
My father, who also loved these writers, enabled my delusions…. He loved the idea of me being a wild Irish poet-writer. I loved the idea, too. Both of us wanted me to be this guy. My father never said, “Hey, wait a minute, you”re just a drunk!”
Eventually, after a series of macroaggressions that often found Quinn waking up, bruised, in places like the median of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he figured that out for himself. He stopped drinking and finally started working on his stand-up. In the meantime, a long series of lousy jobs had given him plenty of material about just how different the various ethnic groups can be.
Unfortunately, bartending at mobbed-up Italian restaurants and delivering Chinese food didn”t enable Quinn to buy property in Park Slope, which in the 21st century has been America’s ground zero of gentrification by thirtysomething married “white people who don”t scan as Italian, Jewish, or Irish.” As a native Brooklynite, Quinn is a little weirded out by all the deracinated Nice-Americans newly arrived from suburbs across the land:
But looking at them, you see why this country was built successfully”WASPs are chore-oriented. When they came to New York, there were ten times as many hardware stores…. That’s the one weapon that not even the toughest community in New York City was prepared to combat: affability. Guns, knives, bats, but the one thing they never thought you”d get hit with is a can-do attitude. How can you argue with the energy that built the West?…
These new white people hate the white man, too. They”ve been to liberal arts colleges where they learned about oppression and condemn it. And so there they are, these people who look like they stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, on the sidewalks of Bed-Stuy, singing along with Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments,” sanding chairs.
Still, Quinn can”t see these New Conformists as genuine New Yorkers:
Supposedly nonjudgmental judgmentalism used to be what Southern California was for, but now it’s encroaching even here in New York”where people are supposed to come to judge things.
Growing up in Park Slope at the bottom of New York’s decline, Quinn couldn”t help noticing differences among the multitudinous ethnic groups. As one of the few true believers in diversity, he finds that everybody has something to contribute. For example:
We can learn about dating confidence from black guys. True story: I once saw a black guy handcuffed against a police car and when a girl walked by, he said, before being driven away, “What’s up, sweetheart?”
Whites, in Quinn’s opinion, could stand to work on their charisma:
White people do exciting shit boring, and black people do boring shit exciting. We will skateboard volcanoes and base-jump off a canyon but cause someone to fall asleep when we explain it to them.
Black guys can do nothing all day, but when you hear them explain their day, it sounds like they”ve been skateboarding volcanoes.
