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The art of embarrassment and the embarrassment of art

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The art of embarrassment and the embarrassment of art

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Content THE ART OF EMBARRASSMENT AND THE EMBARRASSMENT OF ART

By

JAMIE CARRAGHER
________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)

May 2017

Copyright 2017 Jamie Carragher

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my chair KC Cole for taking me on at a late hour and for doing such a great job.
Her commitment to this project really spurred me on. Thanks to Tim Page for recommending KC
in his stead and for encouraging my ideas during the Fall semester—a great teacher from whom
I've learned a great deal. Without Sasha Anawalt this thesis would not exist. She's the reason I
came to USC, and I count her as one of my closest mentors. In relation to this thesis, Sasha has
probed my thinking at every turn and has strengthened my ideas. Also, I'm grateful for Tom
Lutz's contribution, both as an interviewee and editor. His thoughts on emotion were revelatory,
his editing suggestions invaluable. Thanks to David Cannadine for the Christopher Ricks
recommendation and for supporting my academic career since 2011. A shout out to my Arts
Journalism classmates, especially Hannah Deitch for help on this piece. And thanks to Mike
Ploszek who has answered all my questions with consideration, patience and enthusiasm.

I owe a lot to my extended friends and family, and I hope to repay them whenever I can. (I'm
speaking metaphorically, please do not expect financial reparation.) Special mention for Sarah
Carragher, my L.A. guardian, and John Carragher for the final proofread. My love to the closest
who mean the mostest: Mum, Dad, Adam and Laura. Your love and support are everything! And
my love and thanks to Sinéad, who's been with me every step of the way this year—you make
me happy (and your notes are great, too).

Finally, thanks to the artists and experts who inspired this piece, particularly those who sat down
to talk with me.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 2
Abstract 4
The Art of Embarrassment and the Embarrassment of Art 5
Bibliography 32
Discography 35

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Abstract
This article explores the intersection between the emotion of embarrassment and the creation of
art. Because art usually depends on the presence of an audience, writers and performers regularly
expose themselves to the possibility of negative evaluation, which is the basis of embarrassment.
By looking at art through the lens of embarrassment, there are lessons to be gleaned about how
and why artists produce their art.

Embarrassment intersects with the creation of art in four different ways: in the making of art, as
material, in the delivery of art to the audience, and in the artist's judgement of his or her work.
Although it is considered a negative emotion, this article examines how embarrassment can play
a positive role in the life of an artist. For one, embarrassment encountered in life can be
converted into jokes and anecdotes— there is a whole swathe of comedy nights dedicated to this
trend, including Mortified and My Diary. It can also be a source of plot and character for fiction
writers, being an emotion so interconnected with private and social values. Embarrassment can
also lead to an artistic epiphany, as the example of Steve Martin proves.

However, the corrective and even oppressive elements of embarrassment should also be
acknowledged, even if it is hard to measure creative expression that has been discarded out of
fear of humiliation. Yet as the example of Paul McCartney illustrates, fear of embarrassment is
not the recourse of an amateur or the error prone. At its root, embarrassment shows emotional
investment, and demonstrates the artist's desire to affect the audience.

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The Art of Embarrassment and the Embarrassment of Art

There's a blush for want, a blush for shan't
And a blush for having done it,
There's a blush for thought, and a blush for naught
And a blush for just begun it.

John Keats
(Keats, 1958, pp. 219-220)

Here comes that shrinking feeling. You've smashed the glass, slipped on the peel, badmouthed a
colleague in earshot. You've put your foot in it, literally, metaphorically, possibly both. There's a
brief suspension of time, a vacuum so empty that perhaps the dreaded act—the mishap that'll
make you audibly groan whenever you think of it—never even happened. But look around you.
At the aftermath, at everybody else looking at you. It happened.

We have all felt embarrassed and witnessed the embarrassment of others. It is a universal
emotion. Yet there is one human pursuit entangled in the possibility of embarrassment like no
other: the creation of art.

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To produce art that moves people to reaction is central to the artist's purpose, at least for most
artists. As pioneering theatre director Peter Brook once wrote: "I can take any empty space and
call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him,
and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre" (Brook, 1968, p.7). If a monologue is
performed in the woods and nobody watches, it's not art, it's a rural rehearsal. The presence of an
audience, people ready to be engaged, is key.

Given the necessity of an audience, the very act of creating art incurs the potential of negative
evaluation, which is the foundation of embarrassment. There's no reason to believe artists are
more prone to embarrassment than anyone else. Nevertheless, to step into the limelight as a
writer or performer is to embrace the possibility of mortification. Other public professions—
teachers, politicians—run the risk of humiliation, yet such a risk is an occupational hazard
distinct from their primary purpose, which is to educate and to govern. The purpose of art is to
affect people, and an artist's embarrassment acknowledges this purpose, principally as a fear of
failure.

Paul McCartney once presented a freshly written ballad to John Lennon with nervous apologies
and bated breath. John Keats penned poems borne of his acute sensitivity to social faux-pas.
Satirical writer Dawn Powell was so perturbed by her debut novel, Whither, published in 1925,
that she bought and destroyed every copy she could, promoting her second effort, She Walks in
Beauty, as her first (Page, 1998, p.69). Embarrassment looms over all stages of the artistic
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process: in the making of art, in the material, in the delivery to the audience, and in the artist's
reflection on his or her work. It does not always rear its head, but is never far away, lying in wait.

Its subtle but detectable presence is not simply an unwanted by-product of creativity, but a sign
of the symbiotic relationship that exists between the artist and the audience. The artist affects and
then is affected. Taken positively, embarrassment strikes at both how and why humans are
inclined to make art: as a form of connection with other people.

Embarrassment is a very physical emotion. You avert your gaze as if a bright light has been
shone in your direction, you bear a repressed smile. You hang your head a little, downplay the
situation. You touch your face to find hot cheeks, the confirmation of your conspicuous state.
The flush is the flourish in this ungainly yet recognizable dance, an involuntary, physical signal
that a transgression has taken place. So visible and patent that it can spark others to blush.

On seeing the four symptoms of gaze aversion, smile controls, head movement, and face touches,
participants in a psychological experiment were able to accurately identify the embarrassment of
others 92% of the time (Keltner, 1995). This high rate of identification should not surprise. In
Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life, psychologist Dr. Rowland S. Miller notes the
social function of embarrassment's visibility. Not only is embarrassment "a painful personal
response to untoward public events" but it is also "a vivid interpersonal communication that
informs others of our dismay and chagrin" (Miller, 1996, p.134). Its physical signals are
supposed to be recognized.
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Like many other human traits, embarrassment likely evolved through a process of natural
selection. To publicly acknowledge error is an historically attractive attribute, as Miller points
out: "People who are incapable of feeling embarrassment seem untrustworthy or ruthless. They're
less likely to be picked for teams, less likely to be picked as mates." In the evolution of man,
recognizing wrongdoing through embarrassment was advantageous for a species dependent upon
cooperation for survival.

"A human is extremely weak in nature: not very fast, poor sense of smell, pretty easy to eat.
We're a social species—we have to get along," says Dr. Glenn Fox, a neuroscientist specializing
in social emotions. Embarrassment is corrective. It acts as a sudden reproach for a mistake, a
communicative recognition of wrongdoing with the implicit intention of inhibiting repetition of
the act. "It's aversive enough to inspire better behavior," Fox says—a social safety net designed
to prevent a person from becoming a pariah.

What qualifies as grounds for embarrassment is culturally variable. Tom Lutz, who wrote
Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears, says that, "Emotions have a history: emotional
expression changes over time, and what counts as a reasonable amount to express changes over
time, too." The tripwires of transgression are in constant cultural flux, the goalposts always
moving. "Embarrassment is completely related to what the culture values and what the culture
disvalues."

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How someone relates to cultural values and expectations is highly individual, an idiosyncratic
tug-of-war partially illuminated by embarrassment. What brings about strong abashment for one
person may cause a little for another, or perhaps no emotional response at all.

Emotions are interconnected with our privately held values and thereby affect day-to-day
decision-making, providing "gut feelings" or hunches which can steer us one way rather than
another. According to Martha Nussbaum's book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of
Emotions, everybody has goals, and our emotions "represent the world from the point of view of
those goals and projects, rather than from a strictly impartial viewpoint" (Nussbaum, 2001, p.12)
How someone reacts to a potentially embarrassing event is akin to an individual lens on life: it is
revelatory of a certain point of view, at a certain point in time, while being dependent on what
exactly falls within the frame.

Unlike other emotions, such as anger or happiness, humans do not gain the capacity for
embarrassment until the development of self-consciousness, a process which around the age of
two or three years old (Miller, 1996, pp. 70-85). Perceiving oneself as a target of external
evaluation is a key element of self-consciousness, and therefore embarrassment. In his book The
Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin refers to self-consciousness as
"self-attention," which involves "not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance," but
also, "thinking what others think of us" (Darwin, 1872, pp. 326-7) To be embarrassed involves
the instantaneous placement of yourself in another's judgemental shoes, which is often a leap of
imagination since the disapproval of others is usually not expressed visibly or verbally.
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Just as audience is essential to art, it is often essential to embarrassment, which is much more
likely to occur when other people are around. Audience is a potent force whether real or
imagined. Someone may feel embarrassed even if nobody else is present simply by imagining
what others would think had they been there.

Considering that embarrassment is rooted in actual or imagined public disapproval, art about
embarrassment is paradoxically popular in mainstream culture. In fact, embarrassment provides a
rich seam of material for those artists looking to win over the crowd and gain their collective
approval.

Lindsay Ames is a Canadian comedian who runs My Diary, a monthly event at the Upright
Citizens Brigade in L.A. where comedians, writers and actors read aloud from their old diaries.
As the founder and host of My Diary, Ames is a Pied Piper figure, setting the standard for
unguarded sharing, leading her fellow performers down the path of self-humiliation. She reads
out titbits and poems from her childhood diaries, including a poem she wrote when she was eight
years old.
Cream
soft and smooth
wet and glossy
dry skin banished from my body
a loved one rubs it on my shoulders
this is a massage.
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"I thought it would be so fun to have a show where your favorite comedians read from the dark
pages of their diary. Because you never get to see the real, true intimate side of these performers.
You're seeing their act," Ames says. The My Diary readings aim to reveal a "true side" of the
teller, an aspect of personality hitherto unseen.

The bare-all confessional is in vogue. In 2016, Richard Gadd won the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy
Award with a personally revealing show called Monkey See, Monkey Do. Live storytelling events
Mortified and The Moth, which are later produced as podcasts, showcase comedy mined from
real life.

Although Ames is flexible when it comes to what the performers choose to read at My Diary—
"A diary is anything that has been recorded, it could be a text message, it could be a letter, an
online entry,"—she recognizes that diaries are not exact or accurate representations. "A lot of
performers point out to the audience how they wrote in a certain way, as if they were talking to
somebody else who was also reading the diary," an imaginary reader of sorts, conjured up during
the writing process. "Even though people are being very real, it's still a curated real." To put it
another way, the performers are only as honest as their diaries allow.

Established in 2002, storytelling event Mortified is the longest running showcase in the honest
comedy landscape. Since the beginning of Mortified, founder Dave Nadelberg has been eager to
root out any retrospective manipulation of the childhood diaries from which the performers read.
"I like memoirs, David Sedaris, Woody Allen's Radio Days, Freaks and Geeks. But it's always
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from the point of view of an adult who's been through adult experiences and might be jaded or
sardonic. We take those same experiences from the point of view of the kid who's still in it. The
voice of this kid is frozen in time."

Since the Mortified participants don't alter what they wrote all those years ago, the performers
achieve what Nadelberg describes as a "fly in the amber" effect. The diaries are nostalgia-free
preservations of the performers' previous self-presentations, and often it is in the obviously
artificial elements of these presentations that an authentic side of the teller may be gleaned. For
instance, a performer's old preoccupation with appearing tough, even in a private diary, is
revelatory of character (as well as funny). As Nadelberg says, "Our posturing is very
transparent," especially with the passage of time.

It is no coincidence that many of the performers at My Diary and Mortified look to their teenage
diaries for the most cringeworthy anecdotes. Heightened sensitivity to embarrassment commonly
occurs with adolescence, as, according to Arnold Buss' Self-Consciousness and Social Anxiety, it
is a time when social status counts more than ever, when physical changes are rife, and sexuality
is a burgeoning novelty (Buss, 1980). Thus, the feeling of being conspicuous becomes more
frequent and intense, while, at the same time, the criteria for social misjudgement is ever-
increasing.

Occasionally the embarrassment of adolescence and art converge. The Beatles' George Harrison
recalled when he and Paul McCartney used to play music together in his family home in
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Liverpool, "I remember him being a little embarrassed to really sing out, seeing we were stuck
right in the middle of my parents' place with the whole family walking about. He said he felt
funny singing about love and such around my Dad" (Giulano, 1990, p.17).

Embarrassment doesn't always engender creative hesitancy, however. In his memoir, The
Discomfort Zone, novelist Jonathan Franzen draws a connection between his awkward high
school days, his contemporaneous examination of himself in his journal, and his adolescent
desire to become a writer:

I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn't need school in order to
experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment
in the privacy of my bedroom, simply by reading what I'd written in the journal the day
before. Its pages faithfully mirrored my fraudulence and pomposity and immaturity.
Reading it made me desperate to change myself, to sound less idiotic... And so I declared
private war on stagnation and committed myself privately to personal growth, The
Authentic Relationship I wanted now was with the written page (Franzen, 2006, p.108).

Adolescent sensitivity to embarrassment has been acknowledged artistically long before Franzen
or Mortified. In the early 1800s, poet John Keats tapped into the pains of adolescent limbo with
aplomb, prefacing one of his collections thus:

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The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is
healthy; but there is a space of, life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the
character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence
proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must
necessarily taste in going over the following pages (Keats, 1818, ix)

In his book Keats and Embarrassment, Dr. Christopher Ricks holds that "a particular strength of
Keats is the implication that the youthful, the luxuriant, the immature, can be, not just excusable
errors, but vantage-points" (Ricks, 1974, p.12)

As a word little used before the 1700s, embarrassment entered common lexicon during the
Romantic era, and became a hot topic of scientific inquiry and social analysis. "In Romanticism,
the young person and the blush both embody paradoxes about innocence and guilt" (Ricks, 1974,
p.4) These were intertwining dichotomies to which Keats returned repeatedly, as Ricks lays out
in his compelling thesis that "Keats as a man and a poet was especially sensitive to, and morally
intelligent about, embarrassment" (Ricks, 1974, p.1) (Not that Keats' emotive and emotional
style was always appreciated by his contemporaries—Lord Byron, renowned for his detached
style and sang froid, referred to his work as "Johnny Keats' P*ss a bed poetry."[ Byron, 1821])

By raking over the "thousand bitters" of the past, the performers at My Diary and Mortified are
revelatory about the present. They skewer the person they were trying to be in their diaries, poke
holes in the external act they used to put on. In doing so, the performers reveal something of their
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current self-image, too: that they've changed and wouldn't willingly repeat the social sins and
accidental mishaps of yesteryear.

The potential for strong and refreshed embarrassment at My Diary is tempered because, instead
of fearing judgement, the performers judge and mock themselves in a kind of "self-
Schadenfreude", as snakes reviewing some scraggy skin they shed long ago. "I was a different
person back then," is a familiar refrain. Indeed, performers occasionally mock aspects of their
past that were previously points of pride.

"I like it," Ames tells me, "I can look at pages now, because I've looked at those journals so
much and it's just these nostalgic feelings. I'm constantly horrified with things that I find; it feels
like it's a different person but you also know that it's not."

Retrospective disparagement is a phenomenon that occurs with artists and their work more
generally. Artists frequently belittle their previous output, and further, refer to it in terms that
personally dissociate them from having authored the work in the first place. For instance, rock
band Arctic Monkeys refused, for a time, to play songs from their 2005 breakout album
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, telling Spin they "cringed" at the thought. Lead
singer Alex Turner commented that whenever the band did resurrect their old hits, "It’s almost
like you’re doing a cover version of it" (Turner, 2013). Similarly, when author Zadie Smith was
asked by Interview if she ever revisited her debut novel, White Teeth, she said, "Never ever. To
me it's a book by a different person, and it's not to my taste."
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Shifting artistic judgements demonstrate how emotional reactions evolve in accordance with our
changeable values. Regarding White Teeth, Smith continues, "Now that I've grown, I can look
back and think, Okay, it's okay for a 22-year-old. It is what it is. It's full of flaws but I think
fondly of that 22-year-old who wrote it. Whereas before she filled me with total horror" (Smith,
2012). The book hasn't changed but the lens through which Smith judges it (and its author) has.
Arctic Monkeys now whip out their golden oldies with glee. What causes embarrassment is as
changeable and individual as taste in music.

As well as the dissociation of self-ridicule, there is another reason why My Diary, Mortified, and
other art borne of embarrassment don't necessarily seem to embarrass the artist bearing all. It's
the same reason why rouge was traditionally applied to actors' faces: it's a hard emotion to
summon on command.

Embarrassment is spontaneous and inextricably linked with the occasion that caused it— it's
difficult to stimulate through recounting as an anecdote. A sudden recollection of an old mishap
can certainly provoke a bout of the blushes, but storytelling events are (usually) voluntary, pre-
planned and rehearsed. Embarrassment is a hot shock felt in the moment, whereas the performers
at My Diary and Mortified know what's on the menu. In fact, they've written it.

Then there is the matter of social expectations. If the My Diary audience anticipates the
shocking, then it belies the unexpected origin of the emotion. What's a transgression in a share-
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all-space? The chances of the performer provoking the disapproval of others is reduced by the
context.

That's not to say they're no-fail zones. At the My Diary I attended in October 2016, there was one
moment of genuine and collective embarrassment. One performer, who is an actor and writer,
spent the vast majority of his allotted time prefacing his diary. His set was almost entirely
preamble. He kept providing context to fully illustrate the nature of his unhappy childhood in
what was more like a heartfelt monologue than a whimsical nostalgia trip. His inability to move
on led to a collective discomfort, exacerbated by time pressure. The audience was enraptured, if
not necessarily laughing. And then, out of nowhere, he dropped his drink over himself on stage.
The air crumpled with empathy for the man who'd spilled his guts and then spilled his beer. The
whole room inhaled in empathy and winced as one.

Part of the appeal of live art is the chance it could go wrong, the challenges of live performance
adds electricity. There is also a perverse pleasure in observing the authenticity of a mistake in a
contrived setting, for instance, actors "corpsing" can prove exhilarating in small doses. In David
Foster Wallace's essay on the porn industry, "Big Red Son", a lengthy footnote tells the story of a
well-to-do, middle aged police officer who loves hard-core pornography— an appreciation
which stems from those occasions when the highly-artificial genre is perforated by the actress'
authentic facial expressions; "the rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the
starlets dropped their fuck-me-I'm-a-nasty-girl-sneer and became real people" (Foster Wallace,
2005, p. 16)
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The trend of confessional art (and one may extend the point to reality television) offers similar
authenticity within an artificial environment, if not to the same extent as an onstage mistake. As
playwright and actor Tim Crouch puts it, "To see someone fail and to be embarrassed is a very
real thing, and we like it real and unmediated I suppose."

Crouch is a theatre-maker whose work often flirts with deliberate loss of control in a live
setting—in his two-hander An Oak Tree, only one actor, Crouch, knows the script before the
show takes place; his counterpart, who has been played by over 250 different actors, is fed scraps
of the script and must improvise around the situation. Another of Crouch's plays, I, Malvolio is
all about humiliation, based as it is on Malvolio, the Puritan steward in William Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night, or What You Will, the punch line of the play:

If it's going to be embarrassing, it's something that you haven't planned. In my solo
Malvolio piece, it's just me and an audience. At one point I am stripped down to a leopard
print thong and nothing else, and I look fucking ridiculous. I consciously put myself into
an absurdly ridiculous position, but don't for a moment feel embarrassed. Because I know
why I'm doing it: that play is all about an audience laughing at me and then me attacking
them for laughing at me. I put myself at my most vulnerable, at the character's most
vulnerable, I get the audience to laugh and then the catchphrase of that show is, "Do you
find that funny? Is that the kind of thing you find funny?"

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As Crouch suggests, control over humiliation is antithetical to the occurrence of embarrassment,
and art is a possible means of gaining control. Barring any onstage mishap, performers at
Mortified can transform a previous negative experience into a potentially positive one. Dr. Glenn
Fox spoke of the possible upsides of dealing with negative experiences as similar to the pain
induced during exercise: "The pleasure comes from the relief of pain and the relief of pain is
sometimes as pleasurable as it is rewarding." Confessional comedy can be cathartic.

However, more than simply re-writing history, or, taking ownership over a previous mistake,
revelling in personal embarrassment in a public forum offers certain social rewards. Self-
deprecatory performance can translate into attention, praise, and even financial gain.

The approval of the audience is not an accidental by-product of processing old embarrassment in
public. It's the intended result of deliberate conspicuousness while recalling a previous moment
of conspicuousness of a less pleasurable nature. Therefore, what once caused acute, if brief,
social isolation becomes a source of positive evaluation, and even community.

"There's a good chunk of the audience that likes discomfort. The same way that we like Larry
David on Curb Your Enthusiasm," Nadelberg says. But it's not just the comedic value of cringe
that's a crowd pleaser, "There's pathos. Most comedy does not care or make you want to care. At
Mortified you can get a little choked up."

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Audiences respond to stories about embarrassment, not only because the stories can be riveting
and peppered with funny situations, but also because tales of embarrassment often bring about an
empathetic bond between performer and viewer. The "Me too!" feeling.

Jessie Kahnweiler, a screenwriter and actor who has performed at My Diary, is the showrunner
for web series The Skinny, the first web series to premiere at "Sundance Film Festival" in 2016.
Kahnweiler plays main character, Jess, as she faces up to the tragic-comic struggles of her
bulimia. In one sequence, she retrieves an entire cake from the trash, scoffs it and vomits it back
up.

"I think the embarrassing really resonates with people. The more vulnerable scenes are what
people specifically tell me about."

The main character's struggles are based closely on the writer's real life, and are advertised as
such. "The more personal and embarrassing that I am, the more positive attention that I get. The
more people are like, 'Oh yeah me too, I've had that experience.'"

Kahnweiler presents herself as an artist who is willing to portray and discuss uncomfortable,
deeply personal issues. In this way, she follows in the vein of other accomplished writers like
David Sedaris and Lena Dunham.

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Dunham, in particular, has made 'over-sharing' her calling card, both as her fictional character
Hannah Hovarth in HBO TV series Girls and as her actual self in the capacity of writer and
broadcaster, a blurred distinction that has occasionally led to controversy. Girls gained so much
attention in 2012 due to its portrayal of life warts-and-all, the warts being genital warts and the
all including abortion clinics. What attracts many of Girls' viewers is the same thing that repels
many of its detractors: the discomfort the show induces. As the show's executive producer Judd
Apatow told NPR, "If everyone is mature, there is no comedy" (Apatow, 2017).

Embarrassment is a natural bedfellow for a writer; it's a generator of both story and character.
Tom Lutz, who writes fiction as well as non-fiction, references the work of 20th century Russian
narrative theorist, Yuri Lotman. "For him, the event in the narrative is always when you cross
some sort of social boundary." The way people, real or fictional, respond to embarrassing events
is revelatory about their characters, their inner-lives. "If I burp really loudly, what does the event
mean? If I'm not embarrassed that's a character point about me, if you're not embarrassed, that's a
character point about you. If you are embarrassed, that's an empathetic thing, if I'm embarrassed,
that's normal."

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom, is particularly adept at creating
characters with complex value systems, only to force them into situations that threaten these
values, usually via their internal contradictions. Humiliation ensues and Franzen's examination of
inner-psychology makes for compelling comedy of manners.

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Embarrassment can form significant plot points not only in fiction but also in real life.
Comedian, actor and writer, Steve Martin, recalls an epiphanic moment when he was a college
student in his accomplished autobiography, Born Standing Up:

On campus, I experienced a life-changing moment of illumination appropriately
occurring in the bright sun. I was walking across the quad when a startling thought
came to me: to implement the new concept called originality that was presenting itself
in my classes in literature, poetry, and philosophy, I would have to write everything in
my comedy act myself. Any line or idea with even a vague feeling of familiarity or
provenance had to be expunged. There could be nothing that made the audience feel
that they weren’t seeing something utterly new.

Due to his new found knowledge about originality, Martin's value system shifted. His "way of
seeing", or (in Martha Nussbaum's term) his "aboutness" towards comedy, changed (Nussbaum,
2001, p.28). He imagined how others may consider his then current act unoriginal and
hackneyed.
This realization mortified me. I did not know how to write comedy—at all. But I did
know that I would have to drop some of my best one-liners, pilfered from gag books
or other people’s routines, and consequently lose a major portion of my already
strained act. The thought of losing all this material was depressing. After several years of
working up my weak twenty minutes, I was now starting from almost zero.
(Martin, 2007, pp. 72-73)
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Since the unoriginal nature of his act threatened his newly formed goal—to be original—Martin
became embarrassed and then downhearted. He also resolved to embark on a new path, to ensure
he did the right thing by his self-image and goals. An internal yet significant moment in Martin's
artistic career ("life-changing"), an embarrassment without visible mishap or witness.

Inda Craig-Galván, playwright and screenwriter who was awarded Best New Screenplay at the
2016 "Urbanworld Festival," told a similar story of career-changing embarrassment.

Before committing to writing, Craig-Galván had seriously considered becoming a full-time
comedian. In 2013, just days before embarking on her MFA at USC, Craig-Galván auditioned as
an improv performer for a Second City boat tour. Having already performed with the likes of
Keegan-Michael Key, she was unsure about graduate school and reluctant to abandon the inroads
she'd made in the Chicago comedy scene. Then came a disastrous audition.

"I had quite possibly the worst audition I've ever had," Craig-Galván says. "The one thing they
[the Second City instructors] said was 'Do not cry.' If you're a woman, do not go there, don't do
that as a character. And I got up there and I started crying. I left and was like, 'What was that?'
and I think that it was me subconsciously knowing that was the wrong path—I sabotaged
myself."

Though she cringes when recalling that audition, Craig-Galván looks back on that mortifying
experience as a decisive moment in her career, a moment of realization: "I shouldn't have been
running from the thing I should have been doing my whole life. I'd been putting off writing and
24

chasing other dreams, or just working a regular job, or raising kids, and finally realized I want to
be a writer, and I want to be a professional writer, and I want a degree, and I want to go out into
this career really prepared for it."

In the cases of Martin and Craig-Galván, it's reasonable to be a little skeptical at the importance
both have placed in their respective embarrassments. Could these events really have led them to
where they are now? How far are they using embarrassing events to form a narrative out of their
past, present and future?

It may be the case that neither had, from an outsider's view, reason to be embarrassed, nor, cause
to act upon it. Yet they both identified their respective embarrassment as significant to them and
conceived it as part of their respective stories—a Nietzschean redemption where a setback
becomes part of the life story, and furthermore, the setback is rendered essential to the overall
success of that story. I wouldn't be the person I am today had it not been for failure X (Anderson,
2005).

It's said that failure is the key to success, that a quantifiable amount of struggle can produce a
great artist. Certainly the acquisition of competence is important, but not all failure is equal.
Failure tinged with embarrassment is failure with stakes. It shows investment.

Neuroscientist Antonio Demasio writes in his book Looking For Spinoza that, "in individuals
who have an autobiographical self—the sense of personal past and anticipated future also known
25

as extended consciousness," the brain is able to approach emotionally charged situations,
"saliently" (Demasio, 2003, p.177) Where a humiliation or failure fits into an individual's
personal story is easier to discern, or, arguably, manufacture, with the projected goal in mind, a
goal like Steve Martin's to become a professional comedian. (Spoiler alert: it happened).

An experience may be so exciting emotionally as to almost leave a scar on the cerebral tissue.
William James (James, 1890, p.670)

Though embarrassment paved the way for Martin and Craig-Galván, the most significant
ramification of embarrassment is perhaps realized in what we don't do. Fear of embarrassment
prevents us from acting certain ways and leads to active avoidance. In the 17th century, the word
embarrassment was used as a synonym for obstacle. For the artist, fear of embarrassment can
wield an editorial, even self-censoring, power amounting to an obstacle.

In the personal essay entitled "Dead Man Laughing", Zadie Smith recalls the occasion her
younger brother, Ben, invited her to watch him perform stand-up comedy for the first time.

Thinking of him standing up there alone with a microphone, trying to be funny, I felt
a renewed, Siamese-twin closeness: fearing for him was like fearing for me. I’ve never
been able to bear watching anyone die onstage, never mind a blood relative. If he’d told
26

me that it was major heart surgery he was about to have, on this makeshift stage in the
tiny, dark basement of a London pub, I couldn’t have been more sick about it.

Smith's fear of Ben's possible, though hardly guaranteed, embarrassment is palpable. An
empathetic fear, heightened by her familial bond. An imaginary projection of failure, yet clearly
visceral. One may reasonably speculate that Smith wouldn't have relished swapping places with
her brother. That her fear of "dying" on stage would prevent her from personally attempting
stand-up comedy (unlike Ben who is nowadays a professional stand-up comedian under stage-
name Doc Brown).

While waiting for her brother's set, Smith recalls a mortifying memory as she watches a comedy
sketch act flounder on stage:

As I watched the unspooling horror of it, a repressed, traumatic memory resurfaced,
of an audition.... This audition took the form of a breakfast meeting, a “chat about
comedy” with two young men, then members of the Cambridge Footlights, now a
popular British TV double act. I don’t remember what it was that I said. I remember
only strained smiles, the silent consumption of scrambled eggs, a feeling of human
free fall. And the conclusion, which was obvious to us all. Despite having spent years
at the grindstone of comedy appreciation, I wasn’t funny. Not even slightly (Smith,
2008).
27

Smith captures how previous failures, seemingly forgotten, can invade the present and affect our
mindset, in a biting, bitterly felt way. She also relates the neurological causality of emotional
thought. First, the sensation of "human free fall," followed by the consequential, rational
conclusion: "I wasn't funny."

Smith had no personal experience of messing up on stage as a comedian and yet still felt fearful
of it. It is common to have a subjunctive fear of something, a process of projection that Damasio
has dubbed the "as-if body loop," which essentially amounts to physical empathy:

The brain can simulate certain emotional body states internally. Think for example of
being told about a horrible accident in which someone was badly injured. For a
moment you may feel a twinge of pain that mirrors in your mind the pain of the person in
question. You feel as if you were the victim...(Demasio, 2003, p. 115)

Just the thought of something happening can be enough to engender embarrassment. Though
Tom Lutz has written across several forms, he says there are certain texts he's unwilling to share
with the world:

I've always written some poetry as a form of courtship and continued courtship of my
wife. And I'm very moved by my own poetry. If I read it, I weep. I just pray that I have
28

the courage to never publish it. Because I think it would be deeply embarrassing. To
think of it as a thing out in the world is a source of embarrassment.

On one hand, it could be argued that fear of embarrassment is a good thing for those attempting
to make art: it prevents unnecessary hurt and rejection, leading artists to think twice about
embarking on compromising situations (e.g. performing a play without learning the lines.) It also
encourages consideration of the audience, a founding motivation for creating art in the first
place.

On the other hand, it's impossible to quantify the number of artistic masterpieces never executed
for fear of embarrassment, and the rank failures never made or staged, and everything in
between. Embarrassment is a self-emergent block to creativity, or at least, sharing the fruits of
creativity in the form of art.

Yet there is reason to believe people are overly cautious in its avoidance: the Spotlight Effect,
the inaccurate measurement of the disapproval of others (Gilovich et al, 2001). Because
embarrassment is so rooted in self-consciousness, and requires leaps of imagination, people are
prone to overestimating the reputational damage caused by their mistakes, and consequently how
embarrassed they should feel when they make these mistakes. This should be a boon for any one
seemingly prone to gaffes, or, aspiring artists, bound to "make mistakes" as they improve their
craft. More often than not, other people aren't as detrimentally judgmental as worst fears may
suggest.
29

Since failure occurs anyway, regardless of fear and experience, and artistic success and failure is
subjective and a matter of changeable taste, it's surely a small tragedy to think of all the stuff
never made, or abandoned, for fear of embarrassment. To think of those people who subjugated
their creative expression due to the weight of social expectation, who kept their candle under the
bushel due to the imagined disapproval of others. Blushes may have been spared, but what has
been lost?

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him,
always.
Arthur Miller

Though embarrassment is naturally associated with making mistakes, it is not the recourse of a
rookie: artists of the highest calibre are subject to it as well. The potential for it occurring does
not disappear with success—perhaps it only disappears with the disappearance of ambition. For
instance, although The Beatles was the biggest band in the world in 1968, Paul McCartney was
particularly sheepish when presenting the song "Hey Jude" to his co-writer John Lennon. From
Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head:

He took the tape to Lennon, apologising for the lyric as the first words that had come into
his head. His partner would have none of this, dismissing McCartney's embarrassment
over the line "the movement you need is on your shoulder" and declaring "Hey Jude" all
30

but finished as it stood. (He later described the song as the best his partner wrote.)
(MacDonald, 1996, p.242)

There are a number of reasons why McCartney may have been embarrassed and apologized as a
form of remediation. He may have not liked his own lyric. Also, he may have feared an acerbic
reaction from Lennon, who was known for criticizing his song writing tropes—he later slammed
McCartney's 'silly love songs' (which is no piss-a-bed poetry). Additionally, McCartney wrote
the song for Lennon's son, Julian Lennon, (originally singing "Hey Jules,") so the personal nature
of the song may have also induced a certain vulnerability in McCartney. Regardless, it shows
that even at the peak of his abilities and success, McCartney was susceptible to abashment, cared
about the opinion of others—especially his writing partner Lennon, whom he so admired—and
was capable of misjudging when he ought to be embarrassed. That "funny feeling" he
experienced at George Harrison's house never went away.

Steve Martin also offered up a similar sentiment—that the fear of failure never goes away, that
the potential for artistic embarrassment is ever-present if the artist is committed to his or her
work:

Charlie Rose: You've got no fear. I mean, you're not—no fear of embarrassment. No
fear. I mean you're willing to take chances because you somehow have a huge amount of
self-confidence because—
31

Steve Martin: No. It's not that you have no fear. It's that you're willing to put it aside, to
overcome it, that you're gonna take that chance. But the fear is very real. If you had no
fear, it'd be easy (Martin, 2014, p.159)

The creation of art actively courts embarrassment, and fear of it is natural. But only by risking
the pain of disapproval can an artist possibly experience the riches embarrassment can offer.
After all, chances are the critics won't be nearly as damning as worst fears predict. There's the
solace, too, that if it really goes very wrong, the failure can be turned it into an anecdote to
entertain an embarrassment-hungry audience, or, coalesced into the story of overall success. Or,
perhaps, like McCartney, the artist teetering on the edge of embarrassment may have just
produced a masterpiece.

32

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mature-there-is-no-comedy/.
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This article explores the intersection between the emotion of embarrassment and the creation of art. Because art usually depends on the presence of an audience, writers and performers regularly expose themselves to the possibility of negative evaluation, which is the basis of embarrassment. By looking at art through the lens of embarrassment, there are lessons to be gleaned about how and why artists produce their art. ❧ Embarrassment intersects with the creation of art in four different ways: in the making of art, as material, in the delivery of art to the audience, and in the artist's judgement of his or her work. Although it is considered a negative emotion, this article examines how embarrassment can play a positive role in the life of an artist. For one, embarrassment encountered in life can be converted into jokes and anecdotes—there is a whole swathe of comedy nights dedicated to this trend, including Mortified and My Diary. It can also be a source of plot and character for fiction writers, being an emotion so interconnected with private and social values. Embarrassment can also lead to an artistic epiphany, as the example of Steve Martin proves. ❧ However, the corrective and even oppressive elements of embarrassment should also be acknowledged, even if it is hard to measure creative expression that has been discarded out of fear of humiliation. Yet as the example of Paul McCartney illustrates, fear of embarrassment is not the recourse of an amateur or the error prone. At its root, embarrassment shows emotional investment, and demonstrates the artist's desire to affect the audience.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Carragher, Jamie (author)

Core Title The art of embarrassment and the embarrassment of art

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 04/19/2017

Defense Date 04/18/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,embarrassment,Jamie Carragher,Jonathan Franzen,mortification,OAI-PMH Harvest,Paul McCartney,performance,Steve Martin,Zadie Smith

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Cole, K. C. (committee chair), Anawalt, Sasha (committee member), Lutz, Tom (committee member)

Creator Email carra1000@hotmail.com,carraghe@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-360123

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Rights Carragher, Jamie

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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