The Methodology of Mr. Bill
Maybe it was the trembling in his frail voice.
There’s something ghoulish about watching an audience howl with laughter at the pain of a defenseless thing. A kind of primal power starts to stir. I generally don’t believe in policing the content of entertainment and I certainly don’t believe Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill Show sketches could have encouraged bullying in children (Mr. Bill was never intended for kids anyway). But there’s something about the Mr. Bill universe that makes it hard to smile.
Mr. Bill - you’ll remember - is the affable little clay man in the blue pants, red shirt and blond bowl haircut. He's the excitable host of a supposed kids show bearing his name. Smiling, sweet and cheerful. Each show finds Mr. Bill gleefully high-pitched as he sets out with his dog Spot, on an activity for the day (“so kids, I hope you're ready to have a great time today because we’re all going to have our own circus! Yaaaayyyy!”).
By the end, Mr. Bill and poor Spot have been twisted, lacerated, flattened, dirtied, stretched, poked, scalded and broken so badly — sometimes beyond recognition — you wind up feeling a little sad. Every sketch follows this formula. And since Mr. Bill is not animated with stop motion or any such thing, he cannot fight back against Mr. Hands or the clay bully, Sluggo. Acting as both the narrator and the engine of the narrative, Mr. Hands — literally just a voice and pair of real hands (those of Vance DeGeneres) — is virtually free to do whatever gruesome thing he can dream up, since Mr. Bill has to be placed everywhere he intends to do something.
the earliest pasteboard Mr. Bill segment submitted for Saturday Night Live in 1977 - more high-pitched and manic than what was to come, but a good introduction
The VHS tape I still have consists of about fifty minutes of Mr. Bill shorts which began as a regular series. It was submitted by Walter Williams to Saturday Night Live after the show advertised it would air funny home movie material sent in from the audience. I watched the tape again and considered what would be the best way to evaluate it. How does it play in 2021? And what makes this a question worth asking? I can’t say I laughed a whole lot but then again I never did laugh very much at Mr. Bill. There’s too much devastation and persecution on display to get into the spirit. The more I watched it, the more I noticed it had a flow. The sketches selected were arranged in such a way that they told a story. It was a heartbreaking one.
It’s best to think of Mr. Bill as a Theatre of Cruelty.
the Mr. Bill VHS compilation tape which I still have and which is the saddest movie ever made
Never at any point does Mr. Bill triumph over the people who keep killing him. And although it was just a side project created by a do-it-yourselfer in his basement and clearly intended as a parody of kids shows, seeing it this way has the incidental effect of creating an attachment in the viewer to the plight of its clay hero. It's a silly concept that becomes more serious with your emotional investment. Its characters are far removed from the dynamic world of heart-tugging Pixar animation, and yet one’s sympathies and resentments become bound up in them because of this raw power.
The sketches perhaps weren’t meant to be watched in succession. The novelty eventually wears off and all that’s left is the pain. A kind of heavy-cat punkdom begins to take form: that intangible thing which pricks our emotions. It’s the unplanned emotional effect that rises from the material. The ineffable power emanating from the sum of the parts. At first, the reason given for Mr. Bill's suffering was simply that he was the unluckiest person in the world. But this of course, is part of the cruel joke - Mr. Bill’s problems are his external oppressors. He's trapped within a toxic cycle from which he can’t free himself.
The first third of the tape consisted of the earliest sketches in which the concept is introduced. The formula is rolled out and variations on the theme are played in sequence, with Mr. Hands being the real villain. He pretended to be a friend of the show and a sidekick to Mr. Bill while committing the worst crimes himself, as opposed to the more transparently nefarious Sluggo. A blue clay man with a dour frown, Sluggo is the devil you know. But Mr. Hands stabs you in the back, not the chest. Even a seemingly naive pollyanna like Mr. Bill will suspect something is not quite right with his five-fingered co-host. In sketches like Mr. Bill Goes to New York, Mr. Bill Moves In and Mr. Bill Goes Fishing, the groundwork and formula are established. For a while, it’s sort of cute. The sketches mostly take place on a miniature replica of a proscenium stage with its Styrofoam floor. But all the while, something about Mr. Bill’s suffering begins to gnaw at me.
It’s the suffering of a good soul at the hands of something he cannot control that feels difficult to take as humor in 2021. At this moment in our history, the least of us seem to bear the heaviest burden. Those on the losing end of the genetic lottery face a gap in opportunities and will find the American Dream much more likely to remain a dream than become a reality. Bad things happen to good people at the behest of the Mr. Hands’ and Sluggos of the world, people who are less and less accountable and seem to have no other motivation than to deny others their happiness and freedom. The awareness of these kinds of hard lessons, for those with the capacity for such awareness, informs how we reassess cultural materials.
I’m against going back and retroactively “canceling” dated cultural materials for their political crimes because I think it’s censorious, counterproductive and a waste of anger. But just as so many dated romantic comedies upon closer inspection actually contain some alarmingly rapey elements, it may not be out of place in this comedic enterprise to ask oneself, “Should I be laughing at this?” We’re alerted to the effects of bully culture in this day and age but even though Mr. Bill is a parody, substituting inanimate materials for real people, it becomes very difficult not to suspend that alertness. The implications of Mr. Bill are so fundamentally corrosive, the intended effect gets lost. Punching down looks like punching down no matter what materials are substituted. This is what makes the compilation so difficult to watch. There's a need in entertainment to uphold dignity on the part of those who lack the means to articulate their oppression in their own way. If there is no dignity, no defender, there is nothing to uphold.
”Stop hurting him,” I used to say to the TV whenever I watched Mr Bill as a kid. “Just stop.....Leave him alone!.....Can’t you just leave him ALONE?”
The second section of sketches on the tape complicates matters further. There is now an emotional threadline from sketch to sketch. A larger theme comes into focus as Mr. Bill begins to have doubts about his good friend. In a series of sketches titled, Mr. Bill is Late, Mr. Bill is Hiding, and Mr. Bill Runs Away, Mr. Bill is unable to avoid or best his enemies no matter what he does. We see him changing. His confidence is shaken, his good demeanor dampered. His voice begins to sound paranoid and withdrawn. He tells us he can no longer stand all the torture and humiliation.
It’s right here that the Mr. Bill saga starts to draw its emotional power. Williams had realized the pain of Mr. Bill’s existence. A frail, idealistic being is bullied relentlessly, with no hope of justice. Turns out, Mr. Bill actually feels this pain and he’s telling us he doesn’t like it. The more Mr. Bill tries to detach himself from his sadistic puppeteer, the more punishment he takes. I don’t know much about Walter Williams as a man but his worldview registers as relentlessly bleak and defeatist. His project looks at times like something a mean-spirited schoolkid with no friends would make in his attic before going outside and burning ants with a magnifying glass.
Hitchhiker Sluggo
The bargain basement production design of these shorts is what underlines their grave implications in the first place. Again, I can’t say I laughed a whole lot with repeat viewings. My own hatred of bullies runs a little too deep. I had the same problem with Napoleon Dynamite, in which I would submit the filmmakers, rather than any specific characters, as the bullies, with the audience invited to join them in the act of punching down. I suppose it must paint me as something of a wet blanket. But the message here is that one shouldn’t be surprised by such a bare depiction of a bleak existence — it’s hard to accept it being expressed in the rawest possible state, without even such a fictional world worthy of the name to fester in, or the possibility of implied emotions that might give it some wider context.
In fact, Mr. Bill’s existential meta-nightmare seems none too far removed from that of Daffy Duck in the classic Looney Tunes short, Duck Amuck. Set against a white background, where reality and the laws of nature keep abruptly mutating, Daffy is undercut, disfigured, mocked and tormented by his cruel, unseen animator. What begins as a false start to entertaining becomes a battle to the finish against his medium with a wicked God’s cruel sense of humor. Whenever Daffy changes costumes to fit the scenery, the animator changes the scenery or changes Daffy. He’s mocked with all the tricks of animation - perspective, distance, continuity, sound. It’s one of my most favorite works of fiction ever because it sums up with perfect economy and invention how I often feel about Existence: We are never in control. We suffer alone. We observe our surroundings and try to assimilate into them but they never stay the same very long. We have ourselves cast as the star of our own show, with niceties we self-select, but we’re always playing catch up with life’s vagaries as we gradually become marginalized by age and ailment. We fight harder for meaning and dignity. Then it’s over. And for the final insult, God turns out to be just another ghost in the machine, shutting the door on us in amusement with his own game.
”Who is responsible for this? I DEMAND that you show yourself! WHO ARE YOU?!” - words that can be shouted either by a beloved cartoon character in a one-joke battle against his medium or by the systematically ravaged and downtrodden as they look up and stare into the indifferent eyes of an absent God.
Mr. Bill plays deep in that space. Not to mention, some Mr. Bill sketches were really quite dark. Beginning with Mr. Bill Goes to Court, one gets the sense Williams was realizing he needed to go somewhere with the material by fashioning a greater story. He’s too much of a storyteller to make every sketch exactly the same, with Mr. Bill never wising up to the source of his repeated disfigurement. Mr. Bill Goes to Court depicts a farcical trial in which Prosecutor Sluggo takes Mr. Bill’s Mom into the back room and works her over in order to get the testimony he needs. And insult is added to injury in Mr. Bill Goes to the Movies, which uses an effectively realized silent comedy interlude to imply torment going back in Mr. Bill’s ancestry by the same oppressors, and perhaps throughout history indefinitely.
The Stalinst farce of a criminal trial in the world of Mr. Bill: The moment after Mr. Bill’s Mom is forcefully “cross examined” so she gives the right testimony but before Mr. Bill has the books - as in literal books - thrown at him
The universe of Mr. Bill begins to expand. Fewer and fewer sketches take place in the “studio”. As the setting of Mr. Bill extrapolates to show Mr. Bill in real New York settings, so too do Mr. Bill and Spot’s efforts to free themselves from persecution become more pronounced. It’s a little shocking when Mr. Hands’ car finds a disguised Mr. Bill hitchhiking to get away from him in Mr. Bill Runs Away — right up until the moment when after having run over Spot, he and hitchhiker Sluggo jump out the moving car and leave Mr. Bill to fly off a cliff and burst into flames.
By the time we get to the third set of shorts on the tape, we notice a laugh track has been added. Mr. Bill sketches now aired in front of a live audience because they’d become a popular, highly anticipated SNL segment at that point. Not all of these are included, nor are the many special Mr. Bill TV spots and added materials Williams made over the years. The ones featured on the tape seem to pick up where the earlier, more humble Williams sketches left off. They have a running story. But these shorts, still produced by Williams, are even crueler and more despairing than the others.
A destitute Mr. Bill, still ever so hopeful, is fed up with his tormentors and decides to stand up and fight back. Only now, the events transpire to the raucous laughter of a live TV audience, which has the effect of making the whole thing play like a nightmare. In the first of the new sketches featuring a home movie screening of Mr. Bill at Coney Island, a new character is introduced in the form of a little clay lady named Ms. Sally. She appears as a love interest to offer Mr. Bill some emotional respite but eventually she too is mangled and befouled. Keeping with the new addition of insult piled onto injury, she is pictured cheating on Mr. Bill with Sluggo after promising to wait for him to finish his prison sentence in Mr. Bill Goes to Jail.
But again Mr. Bill finds no salvation, respite, or justice. And now the antagonism has been extrapolated from Mr. Hands and Sluggo to include whole institutions Mr. Bill encounters in his struggle. Each sketch sees that Mr. Bill’s problems are compounded by a different and more complex enemy: The System which enables Sluggo and Mr. Hands to get away with their dirty work in a time of fascist ascendance and cultural impoverishment. The bullying of institutions and authority mimics that of individuals. It’s a revelatory insight.
Alfred Hitchcock’s most agonizing film, The Wrong Man (1957), depicts the painful process by which an Innocent Man Wrongly Accused has his identity stripped from him in the way he’s treated by authority figures. Mr. Bill Strikes Back puts a hint of that experience inside a riotous comedy sketch.
Within this morose context, broad comic generalizations in these scenes do little to take the edge off in the succession of sketches wherein social institutions (staffed exclusively by different incarnations of either Mr. Hands, Sluggo or both) deny Mr. Bill justice because of the corruption and fundamental flaws that Williams sees as being inseparable from American life. Sketch after sketch, Mr. Bill meets the larger sources of his creator’s beef with The System, one by one. No aspect of the American experience is safe from Williams in a succession of wallowings inside America’s dreary, post-Vietnam status quo — Psychiatry (Mr. Bill Gets Help), Law Enforcement (Mr. Bill Strikes Back), The Prison System (Mr. Bill Goes to Jail) — each institutional misadventure playing like a grim, Stalinist farce.
The saga becomes a spookhouse ride through a broken America with a different facet of The System getting the curtain pulled back on it each time. And we notice the wear it has on Mr. Bill. He’s depressed and nothing changes. His situation gets worse. Any pretense about him being the host of a TV show is gone. The authoritarian nightmare that is Mr. Bill Strikes Back opens with Mr. Bill drunk on skid row, having given up hope before the heart-tugging scene where Ms. Sally finds him and convinces him to turn his life around. Now this simple little one-joke string of do-it-yourself hobby projects shot on 8mm has become a grand and shattering modern tragedy. Our hero is not only being bludgeoned and severed to death. He’s being demoralized. He’s being hurt on the inside. Seen individually every week on TV during an SNL broadcast, Mr Bill is a cute interlude. Seen successively in chronological order on a video compilation, it plays like a how-to manual for breaking a life.
Despite having seen the shorts before and knowing their predictable trajectories, I still find myself rooting against Mr. Bill’s tormentors as if I’m viewing it for the first time. Something about outright violence against defenseless, well-meaning Mr. Bill resonates more deeply than maybe it would have or should have in the late seventies. Perhaps the way was paved for the arrival of Mr. Bill by the culture which spawned it. Historically, it was at this point in time that America’s grief over the lies and deceit surrounding the slaughter of the Vietnamese had begun to process. The resulting damaged self-image that could be seen in the callowness in film criticism and the public taste, which would greet the bloodless genocide of Star
Wars and the macho self-pity of The Deer Hunter as welcome arrivals in American popular culture. What smarts isn’t just the pervasive feeling that our lives and destinies are controlled by bullies - whether they’re the kind wearing jackboots or getting shown to the best tables at posh restaurants. It’s that many Americans seem to be rooting for them.
I must confess I’m somewhat bewildered by some of what Williams filmed. Clay figures are a mutable stand-in for what can feel like helplessness at the hands of sinister forces that manipulate a powerless proletariat. But this is where it gets dubious. The ironies at play here are numerous. But how to determine exactly what they are? And how do we sift through them when we’re too busy miring in Mr. Bill’s seemingly endless run of bad luck?
By the final sketch, The Mr. Bill Christmas Special, the attentive viewer is emotionally wrung out. Mr. Bill, Ms. Sally and Spot have not only been murdered several times over. They’ve been abused, humiliated and discarded by a faceless, unfeeling machine of franchised brutalization. The sadistic orchestrator of this fatuously cruel mayhem spares us a laugh track for the Christmas special, which functions as a downbeat epilogue. And why not?
Look what’s led up to this point in the laugh track sketches: Mr. Bill walks out on the first episode of his all new SNL primetime slot distraught with his inability to rid himself of Mr. Hands. Mr. Bill pulls himself out of a drunken gutter on skid row only to be lobotomized by his therapist after opening up about his darkest fears (I find the bathtub vortex nightmare sequence in Mr. Bill Gets Help terrifying). He tries to turn in his two conspirators but is arrested by the police and framed for the very crimes committed against him by Sluggo and Mr. Hands. He’s stranded in prison by Ms. Sally and shot by prison guards during a botched jailbreak perpetrated by Mr. Hands. Are we expecting some It’s a Wonderful Life-type miracle at the end?
You won’t find it here:
Mr. Hands and Sluggo are nowhere to be found in the snowy park where we open with Mr. Bill, Ms. Sally and Spot on Christmas Eve. Huddled around a trash can fire with his loved ones, Mr. Bill apologizes for not having a set from which to do the show: “We’ve had some hard times and we haven’t had much to eat and it’s been real cold but don’t worry because we’re still going to have a really Merry Christmas! Yaaaay!” He looks back on past Christmases in his life in search of a good one. We see them in flashback. They contain the usual torture and catastrophes still difficult to take after nearly an hour of Mr. Bill sketches. Of course, there are no happy memories and each one depicts a cruel yule that is unmistakably Mr. Bill-ian. Then Ms. Sally says, “Gee, Mr. Bill — this isn’t such a bad Christmas.” Mr. Bill agrees and it’s easy to see why. It’s the only ending that doesn’t see him vivisected, mangled, melted, flattened, lacerated or twisted beyond recognition. He rejoices: “At least we all have each other. Yaayy! Merry Christmas everybody!” The End. The faintest glimmer of hope. Mr. Bill still refuses to give up.
If that’s not harrowing, I don’t know what is.
If this material was ever put to live action film, it would play like an Italian Neo-Realist tearjerker to rival the most devastating works of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. The gradual and irreversible depletion of any and all possible justice is palpable by the end. It washes over the viewer like a creeping tide. The denouement is of little consolation. You won’t be moved to boo or jeer, but you certainly won’t be applauding. It’s supposed to be funny and it is - in the abstract. But its social implications keep everything too painfully accurate to really laugh at.
A movie made from this kind of material is not what a studio would deem “bankable” in any sense. Imagine pitching a project about an innocent and meek but well-meaning entity who sets out to entertain in the purest sense but gets relentlessly crushed to a pulp over and over again, with no chance for restitution. The Mr. Bill Show was a break in a sketch comedy show for some broad slap-schtick. But it throbs with defeatism at its core, rife with the flavor of pointless, almost cosmic suffering. It’s a cute little concept, but stop to think about it with the slightest bit of depth for just a millisecond, and it makes you want to weep. It’s as if the Book of Job were rendered in clay. A Jobian, three-act, clay calamity.
I can’t say whether this relentless compilation of doom benefits or suffers from its unwavering defeatism. Either way, I’ve more than once been overcome with emotion while watching it. Williams’ use of an unfortunate little clay man to revenge himself upon the world may or may not ring in meaning as loudly as the tragic sweep of the story of Mr. Bill itself. But as much as the analytical adult in me is touched by Williams’ evocation of social angst in the late seventies, the wide-eyed little boy in me is moved even further by his lucid anger at plain and simple bullies, large and small. And his hero’s dogged refusal to succumb to permanent and total despair.
better days
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