The Upside to Tim Allen's Manly-Man Brand of Comedy

[TMC]

http://splitsider.com/2013/06/the-upside-to-tim-allens-manly-man-brand-of-comedy/

by Justin Gray | June 5th, 2013

When I have a tool in my hand, like a screwdriver, let’s say, or a
power drill, I become riddled with anxiety and begin to sweat
profusely. A tool offers less in the way of helping me fix things than
it does a brand new opportunity to fail at something. My brothers
built trucks when they were teenagers, and my Dad used to hang around
with them, offering instruction and insight into the inner working of
the combustible engine. Where was I? Probably in my room, nose firmly
planted in a book. Or masturbating. Yeah, probably masturbating. So, a
trip to a hardware store for me generally tends to go a bit like this:

Like Marc Maron in this terrific episode from his new show Maron, I
carry around a certain amount of shame for my total ineptitude when it
comes to doing anything even remotely manly. However, I do believe I
have it in me to still walk into a hardware store and gaze at the
endless rows of tools and think, “Yeah, with these, I could solve
everything.” It is a particular delusion that men seem to live with,
and no man captures that delusion quite as well as Tim Allen.

The clip above is from an early standup appearance from the time Allen
was just surfacing in the public consciousness. One of Allen’s
brilliant conceits in his standup act is his ability to both lampoon
man’s fascination with tools and also celebrate it. (“I got a gear
puller…I have no idea what it does…looks good on the peg board,
though!”) Those inclined to dismiss Allen’s standup as simple gender
stereotyping are ignoring the subtle groundwork that he has laid. For
anyone who has performed standup comedy and received any kind of notes
from someone in power, whether it be a talent management or a club
booker, one of the most baffling pieces of advice to receive is that
you should “have a point of view.”

This is the kind of advice that tends to be so generic that it’s
worthless; however, it's not always — an act like Tim Allen’s is what
they’re talking about. We know exactly who Tim Allen is one minute
into his set. Even his throwaway opener about avocadoes reveals that
he is the type of guy who isn’t impressed by your newfangled produce.
He is the type of guy who thinks of himself as a macho man, but
reveals himself to be quite inept with these expensive tools he buys
for himself. His character is in some ways a Midwestern, red-blooded
American riff on Woody Allen’s standup character, who often positioned
himself as ladies man during the setup of a joke, only to deflate that
character during the punchline. And say what you will about the Tim
Allen grunts, but it is a terrific hook for his character and allows
him to be both boorish onstage while also admitting that his behavior
is not the most enlightened.

It was the duality of his standup persona that would allow Allen to
make one of the easiest transitions to sitcom stardom ever. During the
hey-day of standup comedy during the late 1980s and early 1990s, it
seemed like just about every standup comedic worth his salt received a
sitcom. Most of these shows turned out to be duds — generally comics
would be thrown into roles as a teacher or something if they got a
show, then have their acts watered down by executives; making the
choice to center the show around a well known comic superfluous.
However, when the sitcoms were centered on comedians who had a
definite point of view, like Tim Allen with Home Improvement or
Roseanne Barr on Roseanne, the shows tended to snap into place pretty
quickly (of course outliers like Seinfeld simply rewrote the rule book
on what a sitcom could be).

On Home Improvement, much of Allen’s act served as the basis for the
early episodes (which is par for the course for most of these sitcoms)
and unlike Larry David’s rule on Seinfeld of “no learning, no
hugging,” Home Improvement was all learning and hugging. A general
episode of Home Improvement would center around Tim Taylor doing
something insensitive to his wife or kids and then growing confused as
to why people were mad at him. After a heart to heart with faceless
next-door neighbor, Wilson, Tim would realize what he had done to
upset someone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-VM6Y_PzDE

It's no accident that Home Improvement surrounded Tim Taylor with
characters who were generally smarter and more open to change than
him. Granted while his wife, Jill Taylor, served as a catalyst for
many of Tim’s epiphanies, he generally found guidance from the super-
intelligent Wilson. Even Tim’s sidekick, Al, on the show within a
show, Tool Time, was often portrayed as an overly sensitive new-age
type of man but the jokes made on the show at his expense were often
undercut by the fact that Al was always shown to be the more competent
craftsman at the tool bench. An inversion of the expected stereotypes
and a sly comment on the fact that much of the macho chest pounding of
Tim Taylor was nothing more than a facade put on to live up to the
gender expectations of modern man.

The show also served as great training ground for Tim Allen as an
actor, a career he would ultimately end up pursuing rather than
sticking to standup. And really, Tim Allen has had a breathtaking
career as an actor. The transition from TV to the big screen is one
that few comedians and actors are able to navigate successfully;
however Tim Allen hit the ball out of the park in his first starring
role in The Santa Clause. While his role in the film was not exactly a
stretch for the Allen, his cynical wisecracking take on the man who
would become Santa helped cut through the treacle mush that often
mires this type of fare down. However, the other two installments
would never quite get the formula right again.

While The Santa Clause may have shown Hollywood that he was able to
carry a film, it would be voicing Buzz Lightyear in the classic Toy
Story that would secure his place at the top of the A list. Tim
Allen’s characterization of Buzz Lightyear as an earnest yet misguided
new toy in competition with Tom Hanks’ Woody for the affections of
their child owner proved that Allen had considerably more acting chops
to play characters other than thinly veiled versions of himself on TV
shows. Two films later as well a series of shorts and the character
still remains super popular among youngsters.

However, while the Toy Story films are indisputably great and Allen’s
voice characterization certainly contributed to that, I would argue
that Tim Allen’s best work in a movie was and continues to be in the
fantastic Galaxy Quest. Allen stars as the leader of a rag-tag cast
from the fictional sci-fi show Galaxy Quest who are unwittingly
brought into actions by an alien race who have mistaken the TV show as
a historical accounting of life on Earth. The film works as a pitch-
perfect spoof of Star Trek, as well as being a solid movie on its own
terms. Tim Allen shines as Jason Nesmith, a stand-in for the
egomaniacal yet effusively charming William Shatner. Allen does a
great job in the role, leading a cast of top-notch character actors
(notably Sigourney Weaver, Sam Rockwell, and Alan Rickman) and gives
the character a depth and feeling that transcends the goofy premise.
Surprisingly, out of such a pedigreed cast, Allen does most of the
emotional heavy lifting, while the rest of the cast get the funniest
lines. However, in this clip, Allen gets his Kirk on while tussling
with a rock monster.

Since the end of his sitcom and his run of hit films during the 1990s,
Tim Allen has appeared in several different movies, of varying degrees
of quality. In 2002, he starred in Barry Sonnefeld’s Big Trouble,
which was unceremoniously dropped into theaters a year after it was
supposed to be, due to a plot point that involves getting a bomb onto
an airplane — studio executives didn’t feel that would play well
post-9/11. While few of the movies he has appeared in have lit up the
box office quite the way Toy Story or even Galaxy Quest did, Allen has
deftly switched back and forth between indie fare and big-budget
comedies like Christmas with the Kranks. In 2011, Tim Allen made his
return to network television on Last Man Standing. The premise of the
show is that Allen’s character, Mike Baxter, is a macho man (heck, he
even owns an outdoor sporting goods store!) who finds himself
surrounded by a wife and three daughters. In its initial season, the
show hit all of the notes you thought it would with that premise.
However, when the show returned for the second season, after quite a
bit of re-tooling, the program took a more political bent, positioning
Baxter as a kind of modern day Archie Bunker. It was a big risk, but
numbers for the show have slowly increased throughout the season (take
some time to read AV Club writer Todd VanDerWerff’s write up of the
show for some great insight).

http://www.avclub.com/articles/last-man-standings-second-season-was-the-weirdest,95857/

Tim Allen has had a surprisingly varied career. He's been a standup
sensation, had a hit sitcom, been the voice of one of the most iconic
animated characters of the past twenty years, and has proven himself a
reliable leading man in several different kinds of films. He continues
to explore and expand his voice on television and for this he gets our
begrudging respect.