Avuncular Nation

avuncular (adj.); of or relating to an uncle.

That’s right. There’s a word for that.

That means there’s a behavior paradigm necessitating a descriptive adjective. A better term than “uncle-like”, which is hard to say.

Avuncular.

Long ago, when I discovered “avuncular”, I created the elder god Avunculus; a cross-dimensional villain who still, somehow, evoked an uncle. He appears as the deus ex machina in my movie, John’s Arm: Armageddon, to confront The Nadir, who had temporarily appropriated his avuncular powers. I’d place a “spoiler warning” here, but to be honest, even the few that have actually seen the movie couldn’t tell what was going on.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but from a small pool of people. Coincidentally, they’re all guys known for polemics and honest opinion. Having lost a dad, an uncle, and two close guy friends in the past handful of years, I wondered if I was subconsciously trying to fill a void. I mentioned previously that I disdain the practice of using comedians as prejudice barometers, and I wanted to ensure I wasn’t doing that unintentionally, either.

Then it dawned on me that I was trying to recreate an avuncular atmosphere from my youth. Good times, when you were allowed to sit in with dad and the uncles. Maybe even fetch beers. But one thing was certain; you got to observe a den of family guys being themselves. 

Maybe an uncle would say something and “go too far”. His place in this group is not based on connection to the child, but to his own brother, whom he more than likely still seeks approval from. This is unique and as precious as the bond between father and son. It’s crucial to the socialization of a young man, disagreements and all.

So an uncle will balance what he wants to say with how much he wants to stay in the good graces of the home. Uncles apologize without resentment. They know it doesn’t threaten their opinions or status. Uncles move on. Uncles bide their time. They glance at a wristwatch, mutter “I gotta thing,” and with a gust of cologne and pomade they are exeunt. Leaving you all the poorer, and longing for the next time you’ll be lucky enough to “hang with the guys”.

When you’re a boy, uncles are like characters in a classic sitcom, because in general, part of how they earn their spiritual keep is entertaining you. The show starts as soon as they arrive. A guy could be the most gigantic bag of shit to the rest of the world, and be a superstar uncle to a kid. This is the inherent power of avuncularity.

One of the best examples from modern comedy is Jim Florentine. Jim struck gold making prank calls, which later became the TV puppet show Crank Yankers. If you think I’m a hateful cynic, you’ve never heard Florentine go off on Facebook posts, or hashtags. In one of the lowest bassos I’ve ever heard, Jim goes apoplectic on “man buns”, righteously acknowledging that guys are saying the words “man buns”. MAN BUNS! That’s the sort of real talk that only an uncle can deliver. They typically hail from the same generation as the father, but can view the current world without the rose-colored glasses of parenthood. Even if they themselves become fathers.

Uncles can be cool in ways that dads and grand-dads cannot. Grandfathers are generally too “racist” to hang out, because oftentimes they had to fight in a war against a people we later reconciled with. If the military trains you to hate specific people, then very little in civilian society is going to rewire that. It’s just forgotten about, like an unexploded bomb. We simply call them “racist”, and make fun of them on TV.

Uncles were a much more welcome presence on the tube. Entire shows and movies are based around them. Time was, a gay actor could play an uncle, and work without personal scrutiny, becoming an accepted part of a nuclear family. One needn’t be straight to be an uncle, merely a brother. Hell, back in my day, we called close male friends of the family “Uncle”. I had two Uncle Bobs. I have an Uncle Sam!

Another comedian, Nick DiPaolo, is practically avuncular incarnate. He’s exactly like the Italian uncles of my youth. The wheezing laugh, the terse, no-nonsense ethics, that special form of surrendering a point without really surrendering; it’s all there. Nick used to spar with the equally-brilliant Boston comic Patrice O’Neal, and the beauty of it was how they agreed on literally nothing. Their mutual respect, and unwillingness to back down, made for spectacular viewing/listening.

Nick and Patrice were unmistakably avuncular, longtime blood brothers playfully bickering across a picket fence. Unfortunately uncles don’t always take care of themselves, so we lose guys like Patrice O’Neal to diabetes. Patrice’s honesty and approachability are wholly absent in comedy today. Can you imagine Patrice O’Neal being content to say “go fuck yourself” to Milo Yiannopolous?

Nick DiPaolo is so much like an uncle, he was annoyed by neighbor Mitch Hedberg’s folk guitar-playing, and pounded his fist on the adjoining wall. Hedberg spun this into a classic joke he told on The Tonight Show, where he replied coolly to Nick’s beatings with “go around. I cannot answer a wall.”

https://youtu.be/v4jegSUjevU

Nick is one of the only comedians I’ve heard who can do a humorous whistle. Maybe it’s a Northern maritime thing, but it kills me every time. Once he did it to imitate John Delorean with a rock of coke trapped in his sinus, like a marble in a spray paint can. When I first heard him do it, I was in high school, and he was talking about sleeping in a hotel room with the air conditioner blasting (you can’t turn it off), and you wake up with “a box of Triscuits in your nose.”

Recently, Nick DiPaolo was interviewed by radio host Ron Bennington. In case you don’t know his name, Ron is the demiurge. 

Anything anyone has ever done in talk radio: Ron Bennington has done it better, and with more style. He knows everything, and everybody. I thought it was hype before I heard him. You can get an hour of radio just by asking him a question. A recording does not exist wherein someone makes Ron look bad, or gets one over on him. He has powers of cunning and diplomacy that a Russian tsar would envy. He has outlasted all comers.

He and Nick DiPaolo are as avuncular as it gets.

https://youtu.be/c-LuSq4q2Yg

Whether our world wants to admit it or not, that’s something we need to hang around.