‘Fishing with John’: John Lurie’s eccentric and absurd angling show
An unrivalled bastion of creative intellect, there isn’t an artistic facet that John Lurie hasn’t seemingly tried his hand at. Known for his jazz group The Lounge Lizards, his early acting roles in the Jim Jarmusch films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, his Grammy-winning score for Get Shorty and a commendable painting career that spawned the Bear Surprise piece, Lurie is a genuine master of the imaginative.
In fact, Lurie has even extended his talent into the realm of television and in 1991, he released one of the most curious shows to grace the small screen. Serving as something of an American independent version of the UK’s Mortimer and Whitehouse’s Gone Fishing and playing out like the outtakes of one of Jim Jarmusch’s early works, Fishing With John is a cult classic of the 1990s.
The project manifests the sheer eccentricity of Lurie, who wrote, directed, starred in and composed the music. On the surface, Fishing with John is indeed a travelogue-type show in which Lurie sets out on a fishing trip with his famous friends, director Jim Jarmusch, actors Matt Dillion, Dennis Hopper and Willem Dafoe, and musician Tom Waits.
However, seeing as Lurie and the show’s guests know little about fishing itself, what proceeds are hour episodes of deadpan humour that teeter on the borders of the bizarre and mundane. Lurie sets up a peculiar narrative in which he and his friends find themselves in the strangest of situations. He and Dafoe are stranded in wintry Maine and must use their survival skills to get by, while Dillon and Lurie fish in Costa Rica with supernatural consequences.
So what begins as a pretty standard fishing series eventually becomes a surreal vehicle for absurdity and reflections on human nature and existence, though always delivered with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour. Lurie and his guests discuss morality, friendship and a wide variety of topics that poke fun at the seriousness of life while simultaneously getting at their deep meanings.
It’s that melancholic tone, married perfectly to Lurie’s dark sense of humour, that makes the show so brilliant. One of its best features is the voice-over narration by 60 Minutes’ Robb Webb, who runs completely off-topic in increasingly banal and absurd non-sequiturs, a testament to the many layers that Lurie managed to write in.
The episode with Tom Waits in Jamaica did not seem to go down too well, and he ended up refusing to speak to Lurie for the next two years. Meanwhile, Dennis Hopper was said to be high on sugar for his two-part episode that he could not concentrate on the fishing, though perhaps this supposed sugar might have been something else, knowing Hopper’s propensity.
Fishing with John is a brilliant reflection on the absurdity of human life, with some of the 20th century’s most significant cultural names coming along for the ride with the ever-eccentric Lurie. Simultaneously providing the calmness of angling and the chaos of comedy, Lurie’s show has gone down in history as a very special and unique piece of television.
Check out an episode of Fishing with John below.
