Eric Bogosian: Pounding Nails In The Floor With My Forehead

Eric Bogosian isn't easily classified. His performances have elements of theater, performance art, stand-up comedy, and autobiographical monologues. He changes characters from piece to piece, sometimes to socio-political ends, sometimes for personal observations, and sometimes just for the sake of the laugh. Pounding Nails In the Floor With My Forehead is a piece initially written and performed at New York's Minetta Lane Theater in 1994, apparently during 16 snowstorms; there is a certain confessional bent to the material that could easily come from the claustrophobic feel of being stranded by adverse conditions. His characters, himself included, are all narcissistic, pouring their guts out and looking for some sort of answer, whether through new-age pop psychology, drugs, or nihilistic rejection of everything they perceive as problematic. Some of Bogosian's observations are easy and self-important: In his introduction, for example, he mocks the audience for eating at Third World restaurants because the residents of those countries could not afford to eat there. In another, he uses Hanson and The Spice Girls as barn-sized targets for his venom. Most of his material, however, is loaded with dead-on humor. In the persona of a self-help guru, Bogosian urges audience members to get in touch with their inner babies, emphatically screaming, "Babies are in the now… They are rude. They are crude. They are selfish, and they are happy!" In another, he attends a support group for male guilt: "I feel like a human being trapped in a man's body." In a less insightful but more rewarding piece, "Blow Me," Bogosian spews forth a list of people and archetypes who can, you know, blow him, outdoing Sam Kinison, Denis Leary, and all other would-be bitter comedians, past and present. Perhaps the simplest way to regard Nails is as a comedy album, because there are no tracks without some sort of effective joke. But Bogosian also has the ability to make the listener squirm with discomfort, and that helps it resonate.