This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. His newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It

Social recession is my term for the social and cultural consequences of a permanently recessionary economy such as that of Japan—and now, Europe and the U.S.

Forget Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of expansion (“growth”) or recession—what really matters is the social recession, which continues to deepen in America.

The term social recession has two distinct meanings: around 2000, the term was used to describe the erosion of social cohesion via the decline of institutions such as marriage and the rise of social problems such as teen pregnancy.

Many commentators pinned the responsibility for this erosion of social constraints and bonds on rampant individualism and overstimulated consumerism, while others pointed to urbanization, the commodification of child care, women entering the workforce en masse and similar trends. Poverty was explicitly rejected as a causal factor, hence the term “social recession.”

This notion of social recession was aptly described by Robert E. Lane, author of the 2001 book The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies:

There is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solidary family life… For people lacking in social support of this kind, unemployment has more serious effects, illnesses are more deadly, disappointment with one’s children is harder to bear, bouts of depression last longer, and frustration and failed expectations of all kinds are more traumatic.

(For more on the subject, please see “The Social Recession” (The American Prospect.)

I use the term social recession to describe a very different phenomenon, the social and cultural consequences of permanently recessionary economies such as Japan, and now Europe and the U.S.

I have defined and used social recession in this way since 2010:

The Non-Financial Cost of Stagnation: “Social Recession” and Japan’s “Lost Generations” (August 9, 2010)

Here are the conditions that characterize social recession:

1. High expectations of endless rising prosperity have been instilled in generations of citizens as a birthright.

2. Part-time and unemployed people are marginalized, not just financially but socially.

3. Widening income/wealth disparity as those in the top 10% pull away from the shrinking middle class.

4. A systemic decline in social/economic mobility as it becomes increasingly difficult to move from dependence on the state (welfare) or parents to the middle class.

5. A widening disconnect between higher education and employment: a college/university degree no longer guarantees a stable, good-paying job.

6. A failure in the status quo institutions and mainstream media to recognize social recession as a reality.

7. A systemic failure of imagination within state and private-sector institutions on how to address social recession issues.

8. The abandonment of middle class aspirations by the generations ensnared by the social recession: young people no longer aspire to (or cannot afford) consumerist status symbols such as autos.

9. A generational abandonment of marriage, families and independent households as these are no longer affordable to those with part-time or unstable employment, i.e. the “end of work”.

10. A loss of hope in the young generations as a result of the above conditions.

I have described the “end to (paying) work” many times:

End of Work, End of Affluence   (December 5, 2008)

End of Work, End of Affluence II: Cascading Job Losses (December 8, 2008)

End of Work, End of Affluence III: The Rise of Informal Businesses (December 10, 2008

Endgame 3: The End of (Paying) Work   (January 21, 2009)

Demographics and the End of the Savior State   (May 17, 2010)

What happens to the social fabric of an advanced-economy nation after a decade or more of economic stagnation?

For an answer, we can turn to Japan. The second-largest economy in the world has stagnated in just this fashion for almost twenty years, and the consequences for the “lost generations” which have come of age in the “lost decades” have been dire. In many ways, the social conventions of Japan are fraying or unraveling under the relentless pressure of an economy in seemingly permanent decline.

While the world sees Japan as the home of consumer technology juggernauts such as Sony and Toshiba and high-tech “bullet trains” (shinkansen), beneath the bright lights of Tokyo and the evident wealth generated by decades of hard work and the massive global export machine of “Japan, Inc,” lies a different reality: increasing poverty and decreasing opportunity for the nation’s youth.

The gap between extremes of income at the top and bottom of society—measured by the Gini coefficient—has been growing in Japan for years; to the surprise of many
outsiders, once-egalitarian Japan is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.

The media in Japan have popularized the phrase “kakusa shakai,” literally meaning “gap society.” As the elite slice of society prospers and younger workers are increasingly marginalized, the media has focused on the shrinking middle class. For example, a bestselling book offers tips on how to get by on an annual income of less than three million yen ($30,770). Two million yen ($20,500) has become the de-facto poverty line for millions of Japanese, especially outside high-cost Tokyo.

More than one-third of the workforce is part-time as companies have shed the famed Japanese lifetime employment system, nudged along by government legislation which abolished restrictions on flexible hiring a few years ago. Temp agencies have expanded to fill the need for contract jobs, as permanent job opportunities have dwindled.

Many fear that as the generation of salaried Baby Boomers dies out, the country’s economic slide might accelerate. Japan’s share of the global economy has fallen below 10 percent from a peak of 18 percent in 1994. Were this decline to continue, income disparities would widen and threaten to pull this once-stable society apart.

Young Japanese, their expectations permanently downsized, are increasingly opting out of the rigid social systems on which Japan, Inc. was built.

The term “Freeter” is a hybrid word that originated in the late 1980s, just as the Japanese property and stock market bubbles reached their zenith.  It combines the English “free” and the German “arbeiter,” or worker, and describes a lifestyle which is radically different from the buttoned-down rigidity of the permanent-employment economy: freedom to move between jobs.

This absence of loyalty to a company is totally alien to previous generations of driven Japanese “salarymen” who were expected to uncomplainingly turn in 70-hour work weeks at the same company for decades, all in exchange for lifetime employment.

Many young people have come to mistrust big corporations, having seen their fathers or uncles eased out of “lifetime” jobs in the relentless downsizing of the past twenty years. From the point of view of the younger generations, the loyalty their parents unstintingly offered to companies was wasted.

They have also come to see diminishing value in the grueling study and tortuous examinations required to compete for the elite jobs in academia, industry and government; with opportunities fading, long years of study are perceived as pointless.

In contrast, the “freeter” lifestyle is one of hopping between short-term jobs and devoting energy and time to foreign travel, hobbies or other interests.

As long ago as 2001, The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare estimates that 50 percent of high school graduates and 30 percent of college graduates now quit their jobs within three years of leaving school.

The downside is permanently downsized income and prospects. Many of the four million “freeters” survive on part-time work and either live at home or in a tiny flat with no bath.  A typical “freeter” wage is 1,000 yen ($10.25) an hour.

Japan’s slump has lasted so long, that a “New Lost Generation” is coming of age, joining Japan’s first “Lost Generation” which graduated into the bleak job market of the 1990s.

These trends have led to an ironic moniker for the Freeter lifestyle: 
Dame-Ren (No Good People). The Dame-Ren get by on odd jobs, low-cost living and drastically diminished expectations.

The decline of permanent employment has led to the unraveling of social mores and conventions.  Many young men now reject the macho work ethic and related values of their fathers. These “herbivores” also reject the traditional Samurai ideal of masculinity.

Derisively called “herbivores” or “grass-eaters,” these young men are uncompetitive and uncommitted to work, evidence of their deep disillusionment with Japan’s troubled economy.

A bestselling book titled The Herbivorous Ladylike Men Who Are Changing Japan by Megumi Ushikubo, president of Tokyo marketing firm Infinity, claims that about two-thirds of all Japanese men aged 20-34 are now partial or total grass-eaters. “People who grew up in the bubble era (of the 1980s) really feel like they were let down. They worked so hard and it all came to nothing,” says Ms Ushikubo. “So the men who came after them have changed.”

This has spawned a disconnect between genders so pervasive that
Japan is experiencing a “social recession” in marriage, births, and even sex, all of which are declining.

With a wealth and income divide widening along generational lines, many young Japanese are attaching themselves to their parents, the generation that accumulated home and savings during the boom years of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Surveys indicate that roughly two-thirds of freeters live at home.

Freeters “who have no children, no dreams, hope or job skills could become a major burden on society, as they contribute to the decline in the birthrate and in social insurance contributions,” Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor wrote in a magazine essay titled, Parasite Singles Feed on Family System.

This trend of never leaving home has sparked an almost tragicomic counter-trend of Japanese parents who actively seek mates to marry off their “parasite single” offspring as the only way to get them out of the house.

An even more extreme social disorder is Hikikomori, or “acute social withdrawal,” a condition in which the young live-at-home person will virtually wall themselves off from the world by never leaving their room.

What we’re seeing in Japan is the confluence of three dynamics: definancialization, the demise of growth-positive demographics and the devolution of the consumerist model of endless “demand” and “growth.”

Japan is the leading-edge of the crumbling model of advanced neoliberal capitalism: that consumerist excess creates wealth, prosperity and happiness.

What consumerist excess actually creates is alienation, social atomization, narcissism,and a profound contradiction at the heart of the consumerist-dependent model of “growth”: the narcissism that powers consumerist lust and identity is at odds with the demands of the workplace that generates the income needed to consume.

Japan and the Exhaustion of Consumerism

The Hidden Cost of the “New Economy”: New-Type Depression

The Future of America Is Japan:  Stagnation

The Future of America Is Japan: Runaway Deficits, Runaway Debts

The younger generation of workers raised in a consumerist “paradise” are facing an economic stagnation that reduces opportunities to earn the high income needed to fulfill the consumerist demands for status symbols. Given the hopelessness of earning enough to afford the consumerist lifestyle, they have abandoned traditional status symbols such as luxury autos and taken up fashion and media as expressions of consumerism.

But the narcissism bred by consumerism has nurtured a kind of emotional isolation and immaturity, what might be called permanent adolescence, which leaves many young people without the tools needed to handle criticism, collaboration and the pressures of the workplace.

Narcissism is the result of the consumerist society’s relentless focus on the essential project of consumerism, which is “the only self that is real is the self that is purchased and projected.”

Narcissism, Consumerism and the End of Growth  (October 19, 2012)

In my analysis, this is the direct consequence of the supremacy of a consumerism that is dependent on financialization: an economy dependent on debt-fueled consumption to power its “endless growth” is one that will necessarily implode from its internal contradictions: debt and leverage eventually exceed the carrying capacity of the collateral and the national income, and the narcissism of consumerism leads to social recession, a crippling state of “suspended animation” adolescence and great personal frustration and unhappiness.

The ultimate contradiction in this debt-consumption version of capitalism is this: how can an economy have “endless expansion and growth” when pay and opportunities for secure, high-paying jobs are both relentlessly declining? It cannot. Financialization, consumerist narcissism and the end of growth are inextricably linked.

This leads to a dispiriting no exit:It’s as if there is a split in the road and no third way: some young people make it onto the traditional corporate or government career path, and everyone else is left in part-time suspended animation with few options for adult expression or development.

We need a third way that offers people work, resilience and authentic meaning. In my view, that cannot come from the Central State or the global corporate workplace: it can only come from a relocalized economy in revitalized communities.

For more on this topic:

Generational Wealth and Upward Mobility (October 24, 2012)

Priced Out of the Middle Class (June 28, 2012)

Do We Have What It Takes To Get From Here To There? Part 1: Japan (November 8, 2012)

Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism and Peak Consumption (May 9, 2013)

Tune In, Turn On, Opt Out (May 17, 2013)

Will Crushing Student Loans and Worthless College Degrees
Politicize the Millennial Generation? (May 31, 2013)

The Recession That Never Ended: 2008 -2013 (and Counting) (August 26, 2013)

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. His newest book is Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It

 
It was Gloria the cat that first brought Gemma Kirby Davies the “gift” that started her photographing dead animals.

“It started about 18 months ago when Gloria (the cat) brought me a gift,” Gemma tells Dangerous MInds. “A perfectly intact, but totally lifeless mouse–which as it fell from her mouth to the floor, seemed to sink into the earth with a complete sense of purpose and ultimate timeliness. It was his time to go, and the earth swallowed him back up. It made me feel a huge sense of peace toward death.

“Gloria rarely eats her prey, and so the mouse’s corpse was given back to nature. In one of my favourite books, Jim Crace’s Being Dead, there are beautiful descriptions of nature reclaiming nature and how through the death and decomposition of living things, nature is renewed and the dead (once living matter), prevail in the earth, the soil and the plants.”

Gloria’s gift inspired Gemma to begin photographing dead animals, when and wherever she discovered their bodies, and curating these beautiful and moving pictures on her website Peace at Last. It should be made clear that Gemma has nothing to do with the demise of any of the animals photographed, and her work aims to preserve something of each creature’s final beauty. The site is introduced by the poem “Death Be Not Proud” by John Donne:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost over throw
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure - then, from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery.
Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more. Death thou shalt die.

Gemma Kirby Davies: We, like all animals will one day die. It’s something I find sad, but reassuringly certain. I hope my photographs evoke a sense of how I perceive death; wholly still, eternally quiet and completely calm.

I see death as stillness and as sleep. Not all of my images are cute and fluffy; some animals may have come to a brutal end and their visceral wounds reflect that. But death for me is always an end to chaos: an end to suffering, peace at last.

Dangerous Minds: What attracted you to this subject matter?

Gemma Kirby Davies: Growing up I was always interested in dark themes in art; Francis Bacon’s paintings and macabre literature. I love Taxidermy, and have been extremely inspired by this art trend, especially the exquisite work of modern artists like Polly Morgan and Nancy Foutts.

Yes, there is a deeper meaning behind what I am doing, but I think the colours and composition of my pictures work on a superficial level too – dead animals can be visually stunning… and much easier to photograph when still.

DM: What has the response to your work been?

Gemma Kirby Davies: It’s not for everyone. My aunt’s response to the invite to my recent exhibition was, “Of course I’ll come and support you dear—as long as you don’t expect me to ever put any of it up on my walls!” and on applying for a stall at Spitalfields Art Market, I was advised that my work wasn’t family friendly and cautioned that my photographs could be “interpreted as disturbing”… I didn’t have the heart tell them that that was sort of the point!

I think art should always incite feeling, and if we all got excited about the same things then life would be rather boring. Reactions like that - especially from an art market in London’s seemingly edgy East End - prove that there is a real stigma around portraying death in art. If I have hit a nerve with this subject matter then I am glad of positive and negative responses as it opens up a debate.

Gemma is now developing a Peace At Last book, which will include pictures sent to her by other artists. If you are genuinely interested in submitting a picture, “your personal interpretations of this theme (photos of ‘peaceful’ dead animals),” then please send your images to peaceatlastphotography@yahoo.co.uk Alas, Gemma can’t offer a fee, but if published in the book each artist will be credited and “of course get free champagne at the book launch!”

Discover more of Gemma Kirby Davies’ incredible photographs at her site Peace at Last.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 

The name Steve Ditko probably means very little to you if you aren’t a comics fan, but if you are, then the name is well known to you: Steve Ditko is the co-creator of Spider-Man, the original artist who envisioned the character along with Stan Lee. The worldwide smash of the Spiderman film franchise saw many Ditko-drawn Spider-Man classics republished and a concurrent growing fascination with the reclusive artist, who is still working in New York, at age 85.

Aside from Spider-Man, Ditko was also the co-creator, again with Lee, of the cosmic Dr. Strange, who was my favorite comic book hero as a child. The comic panels of Dr. Strange were some of the most vividly psychedelic ever seen in comics, and they contrasted sharply with his rendering of Peter Parker’s drab world, which was almost Soviet in comparison.
 

 
In the mid-60s, Ditko began to chafe at Stan Lee’s dictatorial editorship of Spider-Man and eventually got Lee to agree to let him plot Spider-Man—unheard of at Marvel—while control freak Lee would write the actual dialogue suggested from Ditko’s stories. The arrangement did not last long. Spider-Man as originally written was very much a conflicted character as we all know, but the character also had a lot of anti-establishment appeal—he was a smartass—and this is one of the many reasons the character took off in the heady era of the ‘60s. At the time that Ditko’s grasp on Spider-Man tightened, so did his interest grow in the Objectivist philosophy of Russian-born novelist, Ayn Rand. When Rand’s humorless black and white moralizing started creeping into the Spider-Man stories, Lee balked and soon the two men were not speaking to each other. Eventually Ditko left, leaving behind a character that would go on to become a billion dollar enterprise. He would never draw Spider-Man again and has essentially erased himself as much as possible from the character’s history.

 
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Ditko sees himself as a real-life “Howard Roark,” Rand’s fictional architect in The Fountainhead, a man who refuses to compromise his vision. Rand’s influence was even more obvious in his right wing vigilante character Mr A, who would throw someone off a building for disagreeing with him. His work became didactic, shrill, hectoring and rightwing his influence waned. Mr. A was like Bill O’Reilly as a superhero. What teenager wants to be yelled at by a moralistic superhero? In the opinion of many, his work degenerated into fascistic rhetoric and lunacy from the late 1960s onwards.

There have been almost no interviews, ever, with Steve Ditko. While really not a hermit or a recluse, he’s an intensely private person and refuses all interviews, although there are stories of him speaking to a fan ballsy enough to ring his doorbell, but always standing in the doorway, never inviting them into his studio. In his BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko, otaku British talkshow host Jonathan Ross tracked Ditko down in New York City and called the artist on the telephone. Ditko politely refused his request for an on camera interview. But when Ross (and Neil Gaiman) showed up on his doorstep, he did in fact entertain them, although not on camera.

 
Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a coffeetable book published by Fantagraphics, is a wonderful and fascinating look at Ditko’s life and work. Kudos to Bell for putting together such a volume which was clearly a labor of love and unique erudition. I can’t imagine how much shit he had to go through to be able to put together such a book. I’m sure Steve Ditko was no help!

Below, Jonathan Ross’s wonderful BBC documentary Searching for Steve Ditko:
 

 
This is a guest editorial by Allan Sheahen, the author of the new book Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security (Palgrave/MacMillan, NYC). A previous essay from Mr. Sheahen, “Jobs are not the answer: The BIG idea that libertarians and socialists alike can agree on?” was published at Dangerous Minds last week and proved to be very popular.

America is awash with money.

Yet poverty continues to grow.

Does anybody care?

The latest government figures show that 46 million Americans live in poverty, more than at any other time in our nation’s history. That’s 15.1 percent of our population. One in five children live below the poverty line of $22,314 for a family of four, compared to one in twelve in France and one in 38 in Sweden.

Yet whenever elected officials ask their constituents what issues are most important to them, poverty isn’t even on the list. The economy, jobs, Afghanistan, the environment, health care, and education always show up. But not poverty.

Accordingly, Congress is now debating not whether to cut food stamps for the poorest Americans, but by how much.  The Senate is proposing $4 billion in cuts. The House wants to cut $20 billion. Many Democrats are supporting the Senate version.

More than a half-million people are homeless in America. Food banks and homeless shelters are serving more people now than a year ago.  Unemployment is at 7.6 percent.

The problem is that all the private charities in America can’t end hunger and poverty. Ending poverty demands government programs, such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, Medicare, welfare, food stamps, child care, and more.

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act was sold to us as a way to get people off welfare, and it did.  Welfare rolls in the United States are down more than 50 percent.  But it didn’t reduce poverty. That’s because welfare reform dumped many recipients into low-paying jobs—with no benefits or ability to move up.

Does anybody care?

Maybe we care, but we don’t know what to do about it. So we shrug, say the poor will always be with us, and forget about it.

In 1969, a Presidential Commission recommended we establish a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) at the poverty level for all Americans.

On that Commission, the chairmen of IBM, Westinghouse, and Rand, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown and 17 others unanimously agreed with economist Milton Friedman that: “We should replace the ragbag of welfare programs with a single, comprehensive program of income suplements in cash—a negative income tax.  It would provide an assured minimum to all persons in need, regardless of the reasons for their need.”

Fast-forward 44 years, and we find that welfare has failed because it has destroyed people’s ability to take control of their own lives and make their own decisions. We assume the poor are incapable of making sound decisions; that they can’t be trusted with cash and have to be protected from themselves. It’s as if your employer thought you so irresponsible that he sent part of your paycheck to your landlord, another part to your grocer, another to the bank that provided your car loan, another to your doctor.

There are more than 300 income-tested social programs costing more than $400 billion a year. Much of that money goes for administrative expenses, not to the needy.

Charles Murray, whose 1984 book Losing Ground claimed that welfare was doing more harm than good, now agrees with the BIG approach.

“America’s population is wealthier than any in history,” Murray writes in his new book, In Our Hands.  “Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for retirements, health care, and the alleviation of poverty. We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate health care, and living in poverty. Only a government can spend so much money so ineffectually. The solution is to give the money to the people.”

Murray calls for giving an annual cash grant of $10,000—with no work requirements—to every adult over age 21.

Indeed, the U.S. is a wealthy nation. Our 2011 Gross Domestic Product was $14.4 trillion. That’s an average of $46,000 for each man, woman and child in the country. It’s an average of $61,000 per adult. It’s more than enough to end poverty.

Poverty is wrong. A Basic Income Guarantee would establish economic security as a universal right. It gives each of us the assurance that, no matter what happens, we won’t go hungry.

Allan Sheahen is the author of the new book: Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security (Palgrave/MacMillan, NYC).  For more information, go to www.basicincomeguarantee.com

Below, footage of FDR’s so-called “Second Bill of Rights” speech which was filmed right after he had finished his State of the Union Address on radio on January 11, 1944.
 

 
To get a handle on who Dan Harmon is, the following facts are relevant. He grew up in Wisconsin, which gave him access to, simultaneously, a healthy dose of anti-elitism, a taste for brusque humor, and an enduring respect for hard work. As a child growing up, he had the early verbal gifts and a doting mother and a psychologically absent father; the household was an untidy one. In his teen years (to place him generationally, Harmon turned 40 recently) he feasted on the dork’s trinity of comics, sci-fi, and D&D. He’s probably on “the Spectrum” but had the wit and/or the guts to try improv at his early adulthood (before it was trendy, too); the improv seems to have taught him to be fearless—for what is there to fear in experimentation and self-revelation?—and gave his writerly, Spectrum-y brain an extrovert’s outlet. He may have had that performative spark all along, but the improv instilled habits that would prove very, very useful and make him, almost incidentally, rather wealthy. In any case he’s a writer’s writer with just enough sketch chops to pass as a real performer, and this sets him apart. He’s imbibed the performative instinct; onstage, he inhabits “bits.” The improv probably saved him from becoming an inveterate crafter of dreary and well-written novels, and thank god for that.

Even though he has a formal education he qualifies as an autodidact, the telltale sign of which is his wholesale adoption of Joseph Campbell as his hero. He has the necessary verbal gifts and fearlessness to be a writer (which he is)—one wonders if he ever really reads books; books never enter into his stories, and this is a guy who shares everything. But then again, his job is TV, and what he “reads” is pop culture most of all—for pop culture tropes are what an improv artist most requires, and the same is true for the creator and showrunner of Community.

Everyone who writes about him mentions his intelligence, and I’m no exception. He’s given to frenzied, flustered, and eloquent rants, he sometimes bullies his interlocutors in argument (he admits as much), and the scalpel of his highly intuitive intellect occasionally runs ashore on the shoals of insufficient command of fact and, very occasionally, of common sense. But that’s fine, I like messy and bold thinkers, and Harmon is nothing if not that.
 

 
Harmon’s the only guy I can think of who can feature as an authoritarian and a Trotskyite in the same breath. In a recent episode of Harmontown, he argued with his co-presenters for many minutes about the agrarian worker’s paradise of perhaps a hundred people he would set up on the moon, given the opportunity. In effect he was bellowing, “No no no, I’m decreeing that there won’t be any hierarchy here!!”—and he was scarcely aware of the contradiction. What was truly transmitted in the whole debate was his honest and devout desire for such a world.

His penchant for abject self-revelation functions like an onion onstage, there are always more layers. His very sharp and ostentatiously “needy” (note the quotation marks) girlfriend Erin McGathy, who has a podcast about relationships of her own called This Feels Terrible is also a weekly presence on Harmontown, and on several occasions the two of them have engaged in ostensibly gut-wrenching arguments onstage that left audience members gaping (the Pittsburgh episode of their tour last winter was a standout in this regard). But when the metaphorical curtain drops, they all take their metaphorical bows, and it emerges that in some sense these battles function as still more “bits.” But underneath those “bits” are, it seems, real pain at times, and so on indefinitely. The improv performer’s ethic allows them to pass off their actual emotional tumult as entertainment, but one is left wondering just how protected they really are. Apparently they’re all “strong” enough in the right ways to deal with it, or else simply crave that which an audience alone can supply them. It wouldn’t be unfair in this context to observe that Harmon, with his messianic fervor, does hanker after the Christlike. In some indefinable way he crucifies himself every week (some weeks) in order to confer beneficent lessons onto his Asberger’s-y flock.

Unmentioned so far is a key part of the dynamic—Dan Harmon is the mayor of Harmontown, but the always nattily dressed Jeff Davis, an authentic improv actor often seen on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, serves as its comptroller. Harmon and Davis, who are dear friends in real life (it would have to be so in order to work), are something like the Ernie and Bert of grown-up verbal horseplay, but that metaphor misses the dapperness and bon esprit and general air of specialness Davis involuntarily imparts, and the analogy of Cameron and Ferris misses it on the other side; Harmon’s too self-actualized for Cameron (even if he has the angst).
 

 
I “discovered” Harmon as an object of interest of his own (as distinct from Community) last year, and I’ve been calling him “the thinking person’s Bill Murray” ever since. The trouble is, I’m not sure what that gets him. There’s a real chance he could emerge as something like this generation’s—what? Andy Kaufman? No. George Plimpton? Also no. (John Hodgman is that.) Hunter S. Thompson may be the closest we can get, the intellectual’s daredevil icon. The fact is that we haven’t seen a gregarious intellect-but-not-intellectual like this in the public sphere in living memory. It just isn’t usual for people as smart and greedily cerebral as Harmon to have enough common touch to become even remotely famous. All the good comps are literary writers (David Foster Wallace? Truman Capote?), and Harmon isn’t that.

While showrunning Harmontown, Harmon first took serious notice of the Spectrum, and he has become something like the Spectrum-inhabitant’s especial hero par excellence. The tribe that has coalesced around Harmontown meets in the back of a comic book store in Hollywood, and Harmon frequently references the likelihood of a Harmontown fan to be, variously, male, bearded, shy, obsessively honest, able to cite Star Wars: A New Hope chapter and verse, and so on. We all know the type (hell, I’m one too, albeit not so strong on the Lucas interest). I attended his triumphant return from “HarmonCountry” at the Egyptian Theater last February, and the line awaiting the passes at the entry table certainly confirmed any stereotypes one might have harbored about his audience.

All of this is to say that Harmontown is the best comedy podcast currently being distributed, period. Harmon has a talent for spawning projects, and Harmontown appears to be #2 on his docket at the moment (he is running Community again, after all). The number of tweets and photos and videos and paintings he and his audience have generated is positively daunting; Harmontown is a cult of sorts. Harmon is reflexively technophilic, and both he and his audience are entirely comfortable in what used to be called cyberspace.

What else do you have to know about the show? True to its democratic intentions, audience participation is a usual thing; Harmon and Davis are as likely to haul up an audience member onstage as anything else, and a fair number of the audience members are known as semi-regulars. I attended three episodes when I was visiting LA last February, and what do you know, Harmon ended one of the episodes by pulling me into the action; he actually sang me a little song in which he professed to love me as a symbol of his love for all humanity (go to the 98:00 mark).

Harmontown started out as an hour-long show but rapidly ratcheted up to roughly two hours a week. A D&D game has been in effect since the early weeks; Harmon recruited a marvelous fellow named Spencer Crittenden from the audience one night to serve as dungeonmaster, a decision that has reaped rewards wildly beyond anyone’s expectations (Crittenden now works as Harmon’s assistant on the set of Community). The D&D game takes up about a third of every episode, and the in-game characters are by now as familiar to the audience as Harmon, Davis, et al. themselves. Harmon’s character is Sharpie Buttsalot for amusing reasons revealed in episode 6; Davis is for arbitrary reasons known as Quark Pffffffffft; and so on.
 

 
After a few months of the podcast, Harmon took the whole clan on the road for several weeks in order to meet his audience outside of LA; these segments are collectively known as “HarmonCountry.” The road episodes are wildly entertaining (each one is also obscurely sui generis), and they also served to cement his relationship (hitherto a presumptive one) to his audience in interesting ways. Harmon being Harmon, there was no lack of grandiosity in it all, but his essential good nature and good intentions keep shining through. A documentary about the tour is currently in the process of being edited.

In a landscape in which even very sharp podcasts have a thudding air of dude-ness about them, Harmontown is an oasis for that rarest of things—wit, even Wildean wit in the purest sense. Harmontown is an arena in which what is prized above all is verbal play, and that isn’t something that is actually true of any other comedy podcast I can think of; in other podcasts, all of the comedians ultimately hew very closely to a comparatively restricted set of tropes that (let’s face it) substitutes for wit. Paul F. Tompkins might be the guy one would use to counter the above statement about Harmontown‘s wit, but Tompkins and Harmon are completely different types. Tompkins is a trained professional who is as fussy about his wardrobe as Davis himself; Harmon is a wild man by comparison, perfectly willing to play a gorilla in the wild for an hour a week, wading into inchoate territory that would leave Tompkins feeling more than a little exposed. What makes Harmontown special is that they nail the wit thing again and again even under such unpromising, i.e. primal conditions.

The truly revolutionary aspect of the show is that it is truly, truly unscripted. Many episodes start with a (completely sincere) avowal from Harmon that he hasn’t any idea if there’s anything to talk about this week, and damned if every week they don’t come up with a fruitful tangent to follow. The shared history of Harmon and Davis (and satellite characters like his sometime writing and business partner, Rob Schrab) enables this, because there’s no shortage of crazy anecdotes to dredge up, for Harmon and his friends live to be casually, playfully brutal to one another as only good friends can, a stance one finds oneself envying—we return to Harmontown’s missionary aspect. The show derives its energy from the sheer confidence Harmon has in himself to be interesting, and you can feel the other participants’ confidence in the exact same thing. As long as Harmon has a burr up his butt about something, the show will be dazzlingly entertaining, period.

It’s smart and fun and evinces a real sense of community. You never know what to expect from an episode of Harmontown, and there’s a subreddit dedicated to sifting through the ashes every week. Harmon and his buddies really know pop culture, and they have a perspective (more than one perspective), and a lot of shared in-references, and, I don’t know, if you’re a verbal type, it generates an oxytocin hit in the brain that no other podcast can touch.

Here’s some video! Harmontown is a podcast, hence there isn’t video of it. Instead, here’s Harmon in an extended interview with Kevin Pollak from the summer of 2012 and a weird training video Harmon performed in for Cousins Subs chain in 1995.