San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Comedian asks what to do about toxic masculinity.
When Michael Ian Black was in fifth grade, he wanted to learn the flute. He liked “the weird, sideways way they were held.” But his mother said the flute was too expensive. They could afford the clarinet, though. And the saxophone Black’s brother played, come to think of it. It’s only now, decades later, that Black sees what was up: The flute wasn’t too expensive — it was too gay.
In “A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son,” the 49yearold comedian and actor wanders the cretinous thicket of American masculinity, keen on charting a better course for his collegebound boy. Black has written other books — children’s books, essays — but mostly he’s made his mark as a funny person, from the sketch comedy shows “The State” and “Stella” to movies like “Wet Hot American Summer.” “A Better Man” is not funny, except in a halfthepopulationismonstrous way, but the wit and sensitivity at the core of his comedy are present.
And we need this book. Men have, of course, taken to acting with fascinating poorness lately (dawn of civilization through late 2020). This has included a few interesting new moves (maskrejecting machismo, unsolicited dick pics, doxxing exes, increasingly insane mass shootings), but mostly the old classics suffice: mansplaining, manspreading, harassing, stalking, assaulting, raping, murdering, sputtering in outrage at accusations, starting wars, perpetuating white supremacy, attaining ever more power amid all of the above, plus casually touching lower backs whenever humanly possible.
Black asks two questions: why, and what to do about it?
Part letter and part bespoke history text, “A Better Man” threads Black’s own upbringing through the broader culture — here an assessment of his dad’s manliness, there the screwy schism between the stoicism expected of men and the wild abandon celebrated in boys. We get fun behindthemusic dirt on the mythologies undergirding American masculinity: how the “selfmade man” notion, for instance, originated with a Kentucky senator praising industrialists whose success depended on slave labor. And there are straightup pleas to kick it all to the curb.
Guys with half a brain will have reflected on some of this stuff before — the realization, say, that the performance of masculinity constitutes a kind of drag show. But Black began this book in the wake of the 2018 Parkland shootings, and his reflections are often nextlevel. I loved his proposal that men learn to think of strength differently, “as a kind of common trust, something we hold for a time and then pass around like a library book.”
I don’t believe letters to sons change sons, not much. Anyway, I assume Black’s son is already good, because his father is good, and that’s how it works. So what is this book? It’s a guy trying to make sense of things, at a transitional moment. It’s a complicated moment, too. To read “A Better Man” now, when the world often seems beyond repair, so many generations of men having steered us into calamity with their brittleness and hubris and idiocy — one could wonder whether even a good book can make a difference. But then you’re snapped back to Black’s simple decency, and intelligence and love for his son, and you think oh man, maybe.