Let The Good Times Roll

2004, 15:43 min, color, sound

Based on a live performance by Stanya Kahn, Let the Good Times Roll shuffles time and location as two loners meet in the desert on their way to a rock show. Stories of seasonal depression and finding unexpected exuberance emerge in suspended, Waiting for Godot-like circumstances.

Writes Rachel Kushner in Artforum, "In Let The Good Times Roll, a depressive, effusive woman named Lois [Kahn] sits in a motel room telling an unseen cameraman about a party she once attended...If comedy in contemporary art seldom appears without qualifiers like deadpan, concrete or conceptual, Dodge and Kahn's shared comic sensibility belongs to its own idiosyncratic genre, closer in tone and caliber to the artists' cited influences (Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin and Lenny Bruce) than to the art world's site gag or idea-based sorts of humor." On the other hand, writes Kushner, "art audiences uniquely and all too painfully relate to Lois' various episodes of alienation, her hyperanalytic attempts to decipher cultural absurdities, and her brave, pathetic optimism in the face of failure."

Music: Melvins.

 
 

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