The Banality of Evil

Lussorioso. Tell me, what has made thee so melancholy?

Vindice. Why, going to law. Tourner, The Revenger's Tragedy

THE JOB OF THE theater critic involves more art than artifice, and thus beggars any sort of laundry-list, classified-ad description. The experience of the critic is the very substance of drama--the interaction of the art with its audiences. As such, what he writes about will always remain in the crepuscular realm of the Moment. The reviewer's job, on the other hand, is relatively simple: he tells his readers whether they should go see a show or not.

Don't go see Supraman.

Supraman opened last week at the Law School. It calls itself a parody, and, in a way, it is. The singing is often off-key and almost always bad. The acting is below the level of most House shows, an aesthetic limbo-dance of no mean difficulty. The lyrics and music were written by a dozen people in their various permutations; they are predictably uneven. Consider this snippet from Why Can't I?:

Supraman

Supraman

Name famed across the land

People holding hands in the park

Lovers sharing wine in the dark

Why can't I

Learn to laugh?

Learn to cry?

Now that might be called, in the argot of the Law School, tortious.

The script hits as often as it misses when it relies on humor that is generally accessible, as it does in the second scene in the Somerville apartment. But the little lawyers continually rely on in-jokes, strings of innuendos and associations totally in-comprehensible to anyone alien to their peculiar colony. Prof. Peter Murray plays a Professor Perinifield in a scene in an HLS classroom: I think he is modeled on someone and I am sure he is very funny. There is another sketch at something called the Daily Gannett, which I think parodies the Law School newspaper, except I'm not sure there is a Law School newspaper. After that they parody the BSA. I thought the BSA was the Black Students Association. But the sketch was a barrel of ho-hos, I'm sure.

THE PROBLEM, OF COURSE, is not merely that these in-jokes are only funny to law students, even though the advertisements yelped, "You don't have to be a law student to enjoy it!" (which the little lawyers call misrepresentation). The problem is that this is not humor at all. It might be called the humor of recognition, a humor that plays upon collective anxieties of a tribe like the Law School by depending on the mere mention of names associated with the collective experience. There is nothing intrinsically funny about "LSAT scores," "Langdell receptionist," or "Roberto Unger." These things make law students laugh the way an itch makes you scratch; it is closer in its workings to irritation than humor.

Worse, many of these jokes aimed at the biggest problems with the Law School: the inhuman competition, the grade-lust, the Brooks Brothers suit and the job on Wall Street after graduation. These are fit objects for satire, but not when the satirists are the villains themselves--then the humor is only a device to distance these people from their own guilt. It is offensive to hear somebody yuk it up about working for Cravath, Swaine and then go interview with them the next day. Yukking it up about corporate fascism makes it a lot easier to live with yourself when you become a part of it.

And that's no laughing matter. It might seem, in the end, that I have squandered my indignation on what amounts to a fraternity talent show. But I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by law school. Go up there, you'll find any number of wrong-way Faustuses who have given up magic and art for a strange thing called security. And what's security, anyway? They never heard of it in Kabul.