A few years ago, Barbra Streisand remembered the day she went to sing at the show of Judy Garland with her. As an introduction, some funny taunts were thrown on stage: “We have all your records at home and you are so good that I hate you,” the hostess began. “Oh, Judy, you’re so sweet, you’re so cool that I’ve been hating you for years. In fact, my ambition is to be cool enough to be hated by as many singers as you are.” Despite her youth at the time—she was 21 years old—or rather thanks to her, Streisand had an overwhelming self-confidence that prevented her from understanding Garland’s fears. “She was drinking white wine and her hands were shaking, and she was clinging to me. And I thought: What is this about? When you get older, what is this fear? I understand it now.” Judy would die six years later.
I bring this detail up because in —and from here there will be substantial revelations of the plot—the version of Happy Days that the two legends performed that day in 1963. He does it just after Deborah Vance, sick with cancer, reluctant to treatment and about to take a train to Zurich to receive euthanasia, changes her mind. He does it because a joke occurs to him. The best of a series of gags that she and Ava improvise about death. “The worst thing about death is that I can’t even enjoy being in the bones.”
The vocation as a lifeguard, so demystified and reviled now, has several peculiarities when one dedicates himself to comedy. The first, that it is a risky resource, given, as mentioned in the episode itself, the number of comedians who have taken their lives, perhaps by not being able to sustain, as they would say, the contradiction between person and character. The second is that it is not only something that one is good at or that one feels called to, it is above all a way of looking. A language, the one that turned Deborah and Ava into close friends. from the HBO Max series: “When you share a sense of humor with someone it’s like finding someone who speaks your same little language.” For five years, our devoted viewers have shared that language with them. Let the tears of emotion for the plot and sadness for its end in this last episode do not deceive us: we will continue speaking the language of Hacks.
