A nation of standups: starring in our own scripts.

Geffery Paine, who's an editor of the Wilson Quarter&, is one of those fellows, whenever you talk with him, comes up with Something Really Smart.

"I was watching reruns of the old 'You Bet Your Life' show," Jeff was saying. "Remember, when Groucho would spend five or ten minutes interviewing and ad-libbing with the contestants before asking them the silly questions? And it struck me that people like that just don't exist anymore." "Wha," I said.

"They were so spontaneous," he said. "They-I don't know-- they didn't think of themselves as 'being on TV'; at least, not the way everyone does now."

See what I mean? The Paine Theorem becomes obvious if you compare the--call it the "aura" of the original "You Bet Your Life" with that of the current reincarnation featuring Bill Cosby. Never mind that, as a spontaneous wit, the only thing Cosby has in common with Groucho is that he likes cigars, too. It's the contestants who are fascinating. Not only do they know they're on TV, but in Paine formulation--they think of themselves as being on TV; that is, they adopt, quite naturally, the pose and the poise of professional TV "personalities"--the body language, the right facial cast, even the right crispness of speech. And they do it, of course, because unlike their ancestors in the age of Groucho, they have grown up with the Tube, and have come to assimilate these gestures and articulations as paradigms of sellhood. Same-o same-o on any other game show, any other talk show, even with the folks interviewed on the local news: we have become among other things, a nation of standups and sound-byters.

Not to get faux-profound on you, but one of the things I keep fumbling for in these columns is an understanding of what exactly the Tube is, as a version and model of human meaning, and how the meanings it imposes determine or deflect the meanings we make. (A Wittgenstein of the couch-potatoes: now theft's a helluva ambition.)

This, of course, is what obsessed Saint Marshall McLuhan, whose work seems fresher with each passing year. But what fascinates me is not so much the differences among, say, print, film, and electromagnetic media as forms of transmission, but the differences among them as ways of saying what a "story" is.

Because if "media" are important at all, they' re important as ways of telling stories. And stories are important because, as grand folks from Virginia WooIf to Northrop Frye to the Rev. John S. Dunne tell us, they're the very stuff of our existence: your first theology and our quintessential humanity. Tell me what story you think you're in, and I'll tell you who you really think you are.

This is not exactly a Manhattan-Project big secret. The nineteenth-century novel, and the nineteenth century itself, are replete with characters, fictional and historical, who behave the way they do because the form of the novel itself, with its complicated interfaces of public role-playing and contemplative privacy, has taught them that this is "the way people act." The impact of film on behavior is, if anything, even more apparent and well-documented. A heartbreaking scene early in Malcolm X exemplifies this. The young Malcolm and his ghetto pal, both in zoot suits (the zoot suit itself being a baroque elaboration of film noir gangster-duds) traipse through a Detroit park playing at being--Bogart and Cagney ! David Toolan's brilliant overview of the work of Walter Ong (Commonweal, November 20, 1992) suggests, among much else, that TV is establishing (has established?) a kind of "secondary morality" :returning us to the state of turbulently unorganized inner life and ferociously adversarial public performance that distinguishes oral from print cultures. Well, okay: this certainly explains why Sam Donaldson holds down a job. And probably people in oral cultures are more "scripted"--bound by strict codes of behavior and deportment--than folks in print cultures, where the act of reading itself allows an escape into "interiority." The catch, I think, is that "secondary orality" isn't secondary and isn't really oral at all. Put it this way. Oral cultures privilege performance; print cultures (including film) privilege behavior. A crucial break-of-noon figure here is Hamlet, whose tragedy is largely that he can't decide, until it's too late, which paradigm he's operating under: which kind of story he's really in.

But TV culture, I'd suggest, imposes an even harder psychic story on its members (victims?). It demands that performance and behavior be equally privileged: that, in fact, they be the same. The Tube is excruciatingly intimate and immediate, a kind of apotheosis of novelistic interiority. It is also scaldingly public, numbering its simultaneous, instantaneous communicants in numbers of, minimally, seven digits. Step outside the borders of that tense, magic pentangle--as when George Bush innocently checks his watch, before the bloody nation, in the middle of the second presidential debate--at peril of falling outside the "story" (read: "reality") altogether.

Catholic, oral culture uses the model of the confessional. Protestant, print culture uses the model of the private journal and the examen de conscience. And in that sense the Tube is a triumph of ecumenism: two varieties of tsuris for the price of one.

Nowhere is this more striking than in the growth-industry of over-the-air counseling. It's been around on the radio for years, and was beautifully sent up in the Dolly Parton/James Woods movie, Straight Talk. But now it's taking root in the prepared soil of the Tube. Out here on the Second Coast the latest entry, on ninety minutes each day from Monday to Friday from L.A., is Dr. David Viscott.

Now Dr. Viscott has an impressive list of credentials and, besides being exceptionally vetted, seems an exceptionally good fellow: a benevolent Rod Steiger, say, with a soupcon of Paul Sorvino's hooded alertness and just the right tincture of a newyawk accent to guarantee that this guy don't dance. Byte for byte, he's the best around to get you through the languors of nine to ten-thirty A.M., unless--and this is universal--you' ve got a previously-unread Dickens around the house.

But after a while you get edgy. The anonymous callers all coalesce into one monotone, public/private voice. "Jane: Her Husband Won't Change His Underwear." "Steve: Married, But Thinks He's Bisexual." "Ted: Can't Talk To His Father." Und so weiter. And Dr. Viscott's instant, add-hot-crisis-and-serve, analyses of these disembodied selves take on a--what?--a bemusing intemal harmony, too. "You see, Jane, it's yourself you're angry at, not your husband." "Steve, I think you just have to face your Fear of being different, and then you'll see that fear go away. Will you trust me on this?" Und so weiter. And then-- applying the Jeff Paine Theorem--you get it. These good people imagine their agonies, and Dr. V. instantly pigeonholes their agonies, as if they were all living in a sitcom, where of course the human condition can be dealt with in the same snappy dialogue that solves every installment of "Mary Tyler Moore" or "Newhart" or "Roseanne." The game takes two players, analyst as top banana and analysand as straight man. And it may be not better or worse than the same sorts of games of identity we've been playing since we first became human--that is, first became storytellers. But the rules have subtly altered. And they've altered because all of us now are the protagonists, not of our own journals or novels or movies--but, God help us, of our own miniseries.