Gonzo’s acts frequently attempted to combine bizarre performance art with high culture: "I shall now eat a rubber tire to the music of ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’…music, maestro!" Another famous performance is best summed up by his quote, "I shall now defuse this highly explosive bomb while simultaneously, and at the same time, reciting from the works of Percy Byshee Shelley." Other acts include dancing "Top Hat" in a vat of oatmeal, hypnotizing chickens, and being hammered feet first into a railway tie by two American Gladiators on Muppets Tonight.

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Gonzo walks the high trapeze line between high art and absurdist entertainment. His offstage antics (love affairs with Madeleine Kahn, a cow and several chickens) and troubled past (his mother died before he was born) add a touch of pathos to his character which Fozzie the Bear lacks.

I am strolling down Memory Lane without a single thing to remember.
I am strolling down Memory Lane without even a dying ember.
Some folks remember their mothers and others their girlfriends behind.
But I am strolling down Memory Lane without a ding-dong thing on my mind.

See one of my favorites here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE3KNaxijaQ

This song was written by Abe Burrows with more vulgar lyrics. You can read a 1946 article about Abe in Time here.

I am a recovering English Lit major. For four years I was subjected to deconstructions, symbolism, and social criticism in which every book was a Da Vinci Code to be deciphered but not read for enjoyment. English Lit classes asked all the wrong questions and studied all the wrong books. No one ever stopped to wonder why As I Lay Dying is such a boring book and Grapes Of Wrath is such a good one. I’m sure it’s different now. But when I was at the University of Oregon, books were not entertainment but encrypted tracts of feminism, Marxism and whatever. We had to dig behind the obscure and arcane language of Shakespeare and Alice Walker and convince ourselves how amazing they were.

Which brings me to Barbara Kingsolver. I have read Kingsolver in reverse. My first taste was The Poisonwood Bible, which is almost universally loved by missionaries because of, not despite, its unflattering picture of a Fundamentalist Baptist family self-destructing under the hot sun of Africa. If Poisonwood errs it is because it drags in the latter half of the book trying to live up to its literary ambitions (switching perspectives and first-person narration also hamper the author). Two weeks ago at the beach I read Pigs In Heaven not realizing it was the sequel to The Bean Trees which I had also brought with me. It was a happy accident because Pigs is the sweet spot between the freshman effort of The Bean Trees and the more pretentious Poisonwood. I laughed all weekend long sometimes because of the humor but more often with joy over Kingsolver’s sublime metaphors. I felt like the fly who had switched from a diet of vinegar to honey. Kingsolver seduces her readers with her prose, her characterization and her firm hand on the dramatic arc of the novel form. The Bean Trees, a small book, is planted firmly on Aristotle’s Incline (see here for a brief description). She is thoroughly preoccupied with topics of social justice but she never brow-beats you and never forgets that the first responsibility of the artist is to entertain. If Kingsolver is decidedly feminist, her masculine contemporary might be Ivan Doig, a firmly masculine voice that is likewise saturated with location and dialect.