![]() ![]() For the next three minutes, the members of Weezer perform their song with an exuberant level of what I call “sinceirony:” a balance of sincerity and irony. Once Weezer drummer Patrick Wilson counts off a-one and a-two and a-three and a-four, and the band begins to play, “Buddy Holly” fully transitions from sitcom to music video. It’s just like Schopenhauer said: “As long as humans are terrified of solitude, religions and sitcom laugh tracks will survive.”ĪhahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, haHAHAHA, HAHAha, ha ha ha ha ha… Of course now in the 2010s many popular sitcoms that love 1970s sitcoms are embracing audible laughter again. If you’re too young (or too old) to remember, back in the 1990s most popular sitcoms still featured audible audience laughter, both earnest and staged, but the practice was becoming so unfashionable that by the middle of the next decade, most popular sitcoms shunned such laughter altogether. “Buddy Holly” knows that this joke in itself is not funny enough to deserve that much laughter however, the fact that “Buddy Holly” knows that the joke isn’t that funny, yet uses a laugh track to pretend that it is funny, is what’s supposed to be funny. Just before the band starts to play, Al asks everyone to “try the fish,” a request that elicits the obviously-artificial response of a canned TV laugh-track. Al claims Weezer is “Kenosha, Wisconsin’s own,” though in reality-our reality, at least-Weezer formed in Los Angeles, California. Actor Al Molinaro, reprising his role as Arnold’s cook/owner Al Delvecchio, introduces Weezer, the band everyone’s here to see, and the kids cheer enthusiastically. We’re at Arnold’s Drive-In, a 1950s Middle-American diner, where dozens of young Wisconsonites are gathered excitedly for a highly-anticipated rock n’ roll show. Cunningham” Bosley tells us that this was filmed before a live studio audience, which it wasn’t. The fatherly, gruff-yet-warm voice of Tom “Mr. The names of Gary Marshall (creator of Happy Days, though not “Buddy Holly”) and Spike Jonze (director of “Buddy Holly,” but never an episode of Happy Days) fill the screen. “Buddy Holly” is a music video that starts as if it’s a sitcom episode, with echoes of the doo-woppy Happy Days theme song fading out. This should probably be titled “Matryoshka Nostalgia,” but “Buddy Holly” is way less of a mouthful. ![]() Nostalgia kinda like those Russian Nesting Dolls, or matryoshka. This is about 2010s nostalgia for 1990s nostalgia for 1970s nostalgia for the 1950s. Directed by eventual Oscar-winner Spike Jonze, the video features Weezer, a pop-rock band formed in the 1990s, playing their song “Buddy Holly” as if they were characters on Happy Days, a fondly-remembered sitcom from the 1970s that looked back warmly on American life in the 1950s. ![]() This is something I’m writing in the year 2018, looking back affectionately and obsessively upon a music video I fell in love with when it first aired in 1994. It’s about a music video for a fuzzy-yet-sleek new wavy power-pop song called "Buddy Holly," which isn’t really about the musician Buddy Holly either, it’s about how the song’s singer, Rivers Cuomo, resembles Buddy Holly. This is something I've been writing called “Buddy Holly,” but it’s not really about the late preppy-nerdy rockabilly musician with the thick-framed glasses. ![]()
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