6.29.26 - The Melancholy of Mr. Bean
Boredom and relaxation is incredibly important. I've been chilling a lot this summer (will resume bar prep) and my brain is healing in some ways.
You remember things, reflect, and all that good stuff.
So here's a memory that's burned in to my brain I wanted to share.
I was sitting in a living room with some kids and a lot of adults during some a house party of some sort (I'm a second gen of a culture that does a lot of those). Mr. Bean was on and some of the kids were watching. Mr. Bean was a staple amongst us. I've learned from other second-gen friends and the internet that it's a staple for kids TV in a lot of different markets. I think that because Mr. Bean doesn't have a lot of dialogue it does well with an international audience. I actually watched Mr. Bean more as a kid when I went abroad then in the U.S.
But anyways, it was playing in a home in a U.S. suburb in this memory.
It was some gag where Mr. Bean sends himself letters, I think, and opens them, amongst other gags. I believe it was a birthday episode and he was celebrating his birthday by himself.
As a child, it was very funny, haha, we all laughed. I distinctly remember one of the adults chuckling, turning to another and saying "it's a little sad, right?"
Looking back at the T.V., I realized, jeez this is pretty sad. And for some reason, this stuck with me.
Mr. Bean is always alone. He clearly does not have a lot friends, has trouble relating to others, and a lot of the humor throughout the show comes from his extremely maladjusted efforts to *connect* with other people.
Like the sandwich episode. He sees someone eating a sandwich, and I guess part of him just wants to be like, "hey, I'm having a sandwich too"---but fused with this pathological need for one-upmanship that makes the whole interaction comically strange and offputting. This is a recurring gag. He wants to do what other people are doing but generally wants to one up them in some way. He goes to the highest dicing board on the pool episode, is too proud to just turn around and climb back down in front of the children. He eats the oysters that make him sick trying to copy and outdo another restaurant guest.
The end result is always humiliation. Haha, very funny.
The crazy thing is I've come to recognize this pattern (obviously in less comical forms) in a few socially maladjusted people I know IRL. But most acutely, this one guy. Let's call him Ricky.
Ricky was a guy I met at college orientation. He became friends with the people I'm currently friends with, lived with all of us, and is really the only one who is not friends with any of us anymore. The reason being he was exceedingly unpleasant and awkward. There's a lot of reason for this. But I can boil it down to an extremely irritating combination that he was clearly lonely, wanted to connect and make friends, but also simultaneously wanted to show off to those friends. He had very little humility.
One of my close friends compares ME to Ricky because both of us can come off a bit cocky in social interactions. This is fair enough. But the difference is I have a lot of friends and Ricky does not. Because Ricky crops up from time to time--at a birthday, at a ballgame, or what have you--he has been the subject of an ongoing psychological analysis by all of us over the past ten years (for the psychologically anxious reader, yes, everyone does talk about YOU as soon as you're not in the room, and everyone notices everything about you).
My take is I think Ricky's efforts end in humiliation for the same reason as Mr. Bean. Except, in real life, the resulting loneliness is not funny but quite sad.
I wasn't planning on writing about Ricky when i started writing this. But it's as good as a digression as any.
I think the real reason anyone is alone--whether its Mr. Bean or Ricky (although Mr. Bean, strangely enough, has a girlfriend, and Ricky does not) is because of ego. There are very few people who reallly like people and being around people and don't have enough of it in my opinion. People say we're in a loneliness epidemic. I think we're in a pride epidemic.
Some people are too proud to pick up the phone and just say HEY i wanna see you. And some people are too prideful to listen when they do. And many of these people try "self-improvement" in order to gain social status and improve their social lives ("maybe if I was fitter, more charismatic, more of a chad, I'd have more friends"). I'd put Ricky and a lot of young men I've encountered in this category. It's the whole, let me work on MYSELF, and then I'll put myself out there mentality.
But this is just intensifying the pathology that is the root cause of their loneliness. They want to be SEEN more than they want to SEE others. They want to IMPRESS more than they want to make themselves open to BEING impressed.
Ricky, in my opinion, never felt like he was genuinely curious about others, never felt like he just wanted to BE there and have a good time. He could never make anyone laugh. He was unfailingly KIND and generous given the opportunity. And he has clear LOYALTY and in many respects good character. But that doesn't make you the kind of guy someone wants to hang out with. It's like those guys who are confused about why girls don't like them when they have all the necessary checkboxes (I'm fit! I have money! I'm purpose driven and family oriented! Why don't they like me???). Ricky has the pieces of a "good guy" but still comes off fundamentally unlikeable.
I read How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie in college and it made a large impression on me. I have struggled with social relations in some episodes in my past (I still do, but for very different reasons that have to do more with the KIND of people I can get along with). Dale basically starts with the assumption that most people are interested in themselves, and that's fine, and you connect with someone by playing into that. The way he writes this is feels as if this is some kind of trick, playing into other's vanity in order to curry favor. I can't really recall whether he clarified that this isn't what it's all about--but I'll defend Dale for him. To me, the whole trick is, you start by pretending, but over time it becomes a habit, and if you do it right, it's a genuine change in how your brain works. You stop thinking about YOURSELF and start thinking about other people. And in my experience, it happens pretty quickly.
Once you make the change of being someone who thinks about how other people are perceiving YOU to thinking about other people's feelings on how YOU perceive THEM things fundamentally change.
See Mr. Bean doesn't get this, and that's the core of the humor. He sees someone making a sandwich, clearly thinks its cool, probably wants to connect with the person in some way, and instead of saying, hey, that's a really cool sandwich, where did you buy it? He tries to make a bigger sandwich, in order to ELICIT the other person to say "wow, that's such a cool sandwich you're making."
Ricky is kind of the same. Although, I must say, he's gotten better in recent interactions. But fundamentally, I never felt like Ricky could "connect" with another person quite properly. Like, I've seen him talk to girls, and even when he asks questions, expresses curiosity, it doesn't read right.
I can't tell you precisely why, even when he does ask questions, it doesn't feel right. For one thing, my own sincere curiosity in other people has been misread as other things. I do think that "socially awkward" people are just perceived unfairly. I don't believe its always their "fault" and I think normies can be cruel.
But Ricky is so reliably and universally deemed to be unlikeable (but somewhat sympathetic) that understanding WHY even when he follows Dale's advice he fails seems essential to unlocking a great deal of social wisdom,
Is it because we can detect some inauthenticity? I think girls are good at this in very limited ways. Girls don't seem to like him asking questions (even though, he is, in my eyes, conventionally handsome, or at least average).
Is it because he's just not funny? Ricky has never made me laugh. I've never seen him make other people laugh. I wonder what makes someone funny?
Humor is probably a proxy for a lot of different positive traits working together in harmony--intelligence, easy going temparament, creativity, a finger on the social pulse. What does it mean if he has parts of these, but can't synthesize them to produce a chuckle?
I really don't know. But very much like that small memory of watching Mr. Bean, it's something I think about a lot.
I think I find Ricky fascinating because we were so similar in a lot of ways--similar interests, we made the same kinds of friends at the start of college. People said we were alike. But the trajectories were extremely divergent socially. We started in the exact same spot at orientation and around identical groups of nearly identical groups of people the first couple years of college. But now we are...not.
All I know is he's tried to hang out a good deal with my general circle. But it never really lands. It's been years and years and he still can't get it. A lot of incidents with him and his social awkwardness have become the butt of long-running jokes. But really, "it's a little sad, right?"
kindly,
knxnts