“The Comedy of Man Begins Like This”: On and with Terry Zwigoff
The aspiring artist seeking an inspiring avatar in the corpus of Terry Zwigoff has set themselves up, to put it mildly, for a fair bit of consternation. It’s not that, to invoke his Daniel Clowes adaptation Art School Confidential (2006), the “narcotic moment of creative bliss” is totally impossible—Crumb (1994), his documentary about the eponymous underground cartoonist, is littered with such moments rendered with the commonplace flick of a pen, even if bliss is comparatively rare—only Zwigoff’s cadre of enfants terribles, male pathetics, and fringe art-makers wryly observe how a collapsing capitalism and an ever-accelerating corporatism have come to define […]
by Frank Falisi on Apr 17, 2026
