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Tag Archives: My Favourite Year

Trump, Fake News, Gonzo Society & a series of Unfortunate Satirical Events.

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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"You Brits", 2016 Election, Alinsky, America Today, British Airways, Comedy, Democrat, Doors of Perception, Fake News, Gonzo, Harvard Lampoon, Hogarth, Hunter S Thomson, Intersectionality, Jewish Global Conspiracy, Lakota Sioux, LSD, Matt Monroe, Moliere, Moore's Law, My Favourite Year, National Lampoon, New World, Nixon, Old World, Pentagon Papers, Pizza Paedophile Ring, PJ O Rourke, Radicalism, Relativism, Republican, Ridicule, Rowlandson, Rules For Radicals, Satire, Saturday Night Live, Social Media, Sy Benson, Trump, Watergate, You never cut funny!

AKA Trump, The Gonzo President.

An hour in the company of PJ O Rourke – iconoclast, much lauded author of the seminal Republican Party Reptile, contemporary of Hunter S Thomson, man of letters, polemicist, contrarian – and of course the near mythical voice of some legendary BA adverts that wrote themselves into our cultural mythology with that laconic opening statement: “You Brits!”

The Theme for the gathering – a TortoiseMedia-eye look at America Today in the space between Presidential conceding and inauguration. Rich pickings indeed.

What’s not to like.

PJ O Rourke is a hero, the meeting of which can be a precarious thing at the best of times, as James Harding, Tortoise co-founder and our host rightly pointed out. But we were in safe hands. Mr Harding’s effortless steerage allowed us to hang out in our PJs if you will, consuming PJs warm yet remorseless observations without said meeting popping the heroic balloon.

The hour was spent walking the tightrope between PJ’s ability to infuse Zoom with the smoky,  peaty warmth of an antique Chesterfield chair and the frothy opinion and polemic bubbling up in the chat stream at the expense of the departing POTUS . 

What does the lampooning and highly satirical Republican-ish writer PJ O Rourke think of The Yellow Hair?  [my imagined Lakota Sioux name for said POTUS].

A proponent of Gonzo Journalism, this was the man who famously wrote on “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.” He also notably served as Editor-in-Chief of National Lampoon for many years with his imprint on many National Lampoon classics. His room for satirical manoeuvre was vast.  

And then it hit me – the fact that a master of Yan-kee satire and lampooning would be discussing a political culture of shifting-sand sensibilities underwritten by fatuous and sometimes almost wilfully funny untruths struck me as ironic at best, or at worse, a conflict of interest. 

This tension felt like it deserved a little more poking.  

To most people outside the U.S., and a rather large number inside, American Politics feels like it has been hijacked by the writers of National Lampoon and The Onion – with a smattering of H R Puff N Stuff and The King Of Kings screenplay bringing in the wings. At the heart of it all? Fake News – a master class in obfuscation. Everything is Fake, unless the Real President says otherwise, with @realDonaldTrump playing a pungent role in the Real Fake divide. Madonna or Maradonna? You decide.

Fake News – ridiculous flights of factual fictions, fantasies and potential conspiracies –  all liberally doused with the petrol of incensed ‘values-based’ hurt and ‘spiritual’ mortification. As the American master Mark Twain proclaimed:  ‘Why let the truth get in the way of a real story.’ Amen! Each new ‘real’ news story is  another tongue placed firmly in 330 Million or so American cheeks – and all the while POTUS gleefully flicking off the critical flies with pronouncements of ‘Fake News.’

Fake News feels so, well, American.  The right to shape any truth, fact, system, person, group, taste, belief, or data point in your own inimitable and highly subjective image feels more than just human. It feels like a goddam’ amendment in the constitution of all that is American.

Hunter S Thomson summed it up thus in his seminal Gonzo tome, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

‘But what was the story?

Nobody had bothered to say.

So we would have to drum it up on our own.

Free enterprise. The American Dream.’

Damn right. The Right to live out a Truman-show life under God & Fake News feels pretty damn good. Throw in a Rifle and I’ll pay the damn sub RIGHT NOW – in dark web crypto-currency of course, so those long-haired, bean-shoot-smokin, pinko sons-of-bitches can’t trace me. Hell yeah. I’m a Boy and Proud of it. Get me?

When the fact that the greatest political satire is real life – when everything is Fake, up is down, black is white, left is right, sex isn’t gender, fixed is fluid, everything’s a meme and the question of ‘how did we get here?’ gets begged – my tuppence-worth of an observation is this.

In the old courtly world, high satire was exactly that: the rarified and vaunted art of the rapier strike – of barbed projectiles of intelligent drollery fired against the pustular buffooning of royals, aristocrats and their petite bourgeoisie henchmen, with a liberal dose of mockery reserved for the sprawling, brawling plebiscite. 

But in the New World – the land of opportunity –  where every man was equal under God [though not the women – and…uhm…oh, yes, those dark skinned folks and any Native Indians we haven’t killed or filed under D for Destitution – just saying] – everyone should be allowed to play. Why just let the nobs of Nob Hill have all of the fun. 

Cue the heady days of the 60s and 70s. American polemicists took the spirit of free speech and the people’s right to voice their disdains, loathings, suspicions and truths to a whole new level. In the social splintering of the politicised Beat Generation and with the late Sixties agitprop movements came a new wave of satirists and lampooners with a much more audacious and ambitious sense of their audience. Hell, if a washing powder can change the behaviours [and underwear colour] of millions of Americans through television – just think what we might achieve. 

Mid West college kids, East Coast ingenues and West Coast dilettantes, growing up on the mass-market all you-can-eat-buffet of the American Dream, got busy. And they got tooled up. They armed themselves with Satire. What’s more, they got populist. [For the people by the people. How could they not. The whole point of propaganda, whether to stop a war, a politician, or a bunch of racists, is to inflame a reaction in the hearts and minds of as many people as possible as often as possible for as long as possible. Ridicule became the power tool of their populist propaganda.. 

Serious political discourse and posturing was already in full flight across most US college campuses. Over arch and deeply myopic, radicalism, was the order of the day and it had ‘rules’ as Saul Alinsky so clearly set out. This modern radical agenda and its propagandas cut deeply into the fresh-faced self-serving idealism of the existing New World elites. But it would always be a throw-back from the old world that would cut deepest. And that throw back was Ridicule. 

Ridicule, an art practised slavishly and to a higher order in the Old World of the 17th and 18th Centuries was, once again, to threaten the power elites of the New World. The using of formal and informal fallacies and fakeries to undermine someone or their argument – to make a mockery of their position or beliefs and in that way disavow them of any credibility, credulity or integrity – was to have a U.S. make-over.

As a weapon, Ridcule, designed to wither and erode the very foundations upon which someone stood, was remorseless and relentless. Ridicule is engineered to destroy the essence of the thing it targets. Forensic. Calculated. Cruel. 

The new satirical U.S. version was simply the old Ridicule dressed up in a goofy Matt Monroe jumper.

In playground terms, National Lampoon magazine could be said to have ‘started it’. Originally the Harvard Lampoon, NL parodied, mocked and ridiculed everything and everyone. In that way it was VERY egalitarian.

In it we can find perhaps a ground zero – a crucible moment – in a Gonzo to Fake News trajectory theory.

True Facts, one of the magazine’s cornerstone pieces and in fact the only factual part of the whole rag, used such bizarre obtuse and ridiculous pieces of real news from around the world that reality, even when it was in evidence, was barely distinguishable from ridiculous madness and satirical surreality.

It is at this point that the connection between Gonzo Journalism and Fake News becomes clearer for me. In that moment, where reality and the ridiculous were purposefully blurred beyond comprehension, the possibility of a Gonzo society became an unsettling reality.

In that effect, I believe that for all the good they did, and for all the rotten edifices they collapsed, the arch lampooners and satirists have at least a little to answer for in regard to to the polluting and toxic nature of what we now call Fake News.

The multiplier in all of this? The steroid of mass media – the exponential reach and influence of Television and the Movies.

Hot on its heels of National Lampoon came the fire-starter of Saturday Night Live. From its inauguration in 1975, SNL packed and wrapped ridicule for mass American consumption. By the mid-to-late seventies it was a seed-bed of cultish satirical showmanship. 

Between National Lampoon, SNL and all the subsequent mischief makers they spawned [The Onion being a notable example], the intelligent populist, comedic contrarian and anarcho-satirist had the opportunity to fire their ire into millions of homes via both printed piece and the cathode ray. What’s not to like?  

The small flaw in the blessed trajectory?

If everything is ridiculous, then nothing is serious – and more importantly, nothing is sacrosanct. There are no safe places or secure vaults of immutable truths and irreversible facts. Relativistic trick-cycling allowed anyone to present even the most rigorously tested or peer reviewed truth or fact as open to disdainful disregard or suspicion. Nothing can be fixed. Everything is fluid. Everything suffers a Borderline Personality Disorder. 

In a culture still mostly raised on the biblical trope of Let him that is without sin cast the first stone, the idea that any flaw whatsoever disavows you of being able to stand in serious and sometimes punitive judgement of a belief, moral code or political position, satire is more than just an intellectual foil, it is an instrument of faith. When that happens, you’re effectively fucked.

Everything is flawed – ergo – it does not have the untainted status, permission or the credibility to ever take higher ground or present an unassailable position, framing fact or truth.  In that instance, everything is relative and nothing is what it seems, to the person or persons ‘seeming’ it at least. So any and every thing can be ridiculed, undermined and summarily dismissed with no right to reply. Sound familiar?

The satirist and the lampooners power to pull down edifices of bullshit, self interest, political filibustering, outright deception and lying changed the face of massed political debate and its accompanying sophistry, in some cases irrevocably, removing its cloak or invisibility and invincibility completely. 

More recently, Social Media has simply accelerated the whole kit and caboodle – leaving us with Radical Pamphleteering to the power of Moore’s Law.

People under the cosh of power elites have always seen potential witchery and devilry in those above and beyond them. Unknown darkness and debauch in the big houses and the strange ways of those who Have have always been with us. And elites have always attracted suspicion, with wild stories of their excesses and self interest [often true] used as propaganda to bring them down. Put that sensibility into the New World and the land of Salem Witch Trials and the Pilgrim suspicions of the excesses of Mammon and, well – light blue touch paper and stand well back.  Conspiracy theories have always existed. But as with any fact or ‘truth’ generally, pop a conspiracy theory into the super-fly, deep-fat-frier of investigative gonzo journalism to the power of social media and shazaam, Bob’s your slightly unnerving and sexually ambivalent Pizza Delivering Paeodophile Uncle of the Jewish Global Conspiracy variety. 

Suddenly, It feels like a very short walk 

from 

everything is underwritten

to 

everything is undermined

How does one sustain a shift of that scale and nature? 

Comedy of course. Great comedy. Crazy comedy. Off-beat comedy. Free-form rough-edged comedy shit. Funny shit. People love to laugh, especially at things that would otherwise make them cry – like the state of their wallet, their world or the nature and idiosyncrasies of the people tasked with running it – elected or otherwise.

Funny is what we do when all else fails. Humour is how we navigate the madness. Funny is sacrosanct; a human right. We don’t like people telling us what to laugh and not laugh at. If you need proof, look no further than the belief that the the inauguration of Donald J Trump was in part powered by people reacting against being told what not to laugh at. Don’t mess with funny. Even it if is offensive or potentially dangerous. 

‘Sy Benson’ discusses comedy and Coffee with ‘Benjy Stone’ [AKA Benjamin Steinberg].

As Sy Benson, head-writer on King Kaiser’s Comedy Cavalcade in the movie My Favourite Year proclaims when challenged to remove his ‘Boss Hijack’ sketch, a bitingly satirical yet potentially libellous piece on a Mobster thug:

“You never cut funny.”   

The relationship been truth, satire, journalism and dangerous living are ancient. Telling powerful people, or massed tribes and types of people exactly what you think of them and their shibboleths has been getting satirists into trouble since Aristophenes in Ancient Greece first thought to poke fun at both Socrates and the Athenian Court System. The golden age of Satire was no different – Moliere, Voltaire and Boileau-Desperaux in France and Swift, Pope, Dryden and Hogarth in the U.K. walked a perilous line with the potential for censure, prison and death threats as the reward for their caustic, parodical exclamations.

This whiff of danger has lurked in the wings of Gonzo since its inception. The counter culture and its harrying of state instruments and bodies in the era of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon and Watergate bought investigative journalists, cultural commentators and bold satirists closer to the flame again. To be seen to be distributing a truth that did not align with the ‘confected’ truth of the governing elites was a very dangerous pastime. 

Furthermore, it wasn’t always political truths that were being smashed or subverted. This was also the era of brutal self enquiry, identity myth busting and raw revelation – where people mined the underlying flows, fractures and flaws of the human psyche through explorations that sought to break down multiple doors of perception in search of some greater cosmic truth via LSD. A search for absolute truths in whichever shape they came could be cause for concern

Again Thomson, this time in a Rolling Stone Article in 1973 states:

“Absolute truth is a rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” 

If you set out to design, engineer and seed a social movement custom-built to suffocate serious debate and enquiry, undermine universal ethical and moral constructs, and effectively neuter any intellectually-rigorous and profound discourse or enquiry, you couldn’t do better than Gonzo Journalism and National Lampoon’s anything. A stroke of genius. In these two pillars the foundations of a Gonzo Society are born.

To that point, one could posit that Gonzo culture and Gonzo Society both deserve and create Gonzo Politicians. 

Followed to its logical end, one could say that Donald J Trump was the only choice in 2016.

Trump is the ultimate Gonzo Politician. The perfect POTUS to sit in power at the heart of a nation of states suckled on gonzo lampooning and relentless irreverence. In 2016 Hilary was the epitome of a satirical target. Rooted and raised in the self serving circles of political power elites and Washington well-doers, Hilary was never going to have an easy race against Trump in a predominantly Gonzo Society. Gonzo was the pixie dust in Trump’s armoury, the accelerator of his ambition. The 2016 election was far more a realisation of gonzo politics than an assertion of real inalienable political will. 

Is P.J partially responsible for the political mood in 2016? Kinda but not really. No more than for any election since 1969. Should Hunter S Thomson take a bow? Again, it’s a No.

But their legacy does certainly taint the world we now live in, for both good and bad.

If showbiz rules and we’re all Gonzo now, Trump Rules – or at least did for 4 years longer than most of us would have liked. But, careful what you wish for. And perhaps more importantly careful what you laugh it. Because someone might take you seriously.

Inspired by the very real events and conversations [recorded] in an An Evening with PJ O Rourke hosted by Tortoise Media. The topic? America Today.

‘Funny’, Political Correctness & Modern Family humour.

14 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Amazing World of Gumball, Blur, Brian Griffen, Cam&Mitch, Charlie Hebdo, Daddy Pig, Diogenes, Family Guy, Hamas, Homer Simpson, Human Suffrage, ISIS, Israel, Jay&Gloria, Joe Lycett, LBGT, Lectins, Modern Family, My Favourite Year, Palatine Hills, Peppa Pig, Phil&Claire, PLO, Rowlandson, South Park, The Jedi, Veganism

modern-family.jpg

 

So shoot the dinosaur if I am not understanding this correctly BUT I am wholly confused about how humour and the topics of gender fluidity [in which I include LGBT as a ‘topic’], ethnicity, disability and beliefs collide. There’s a rule book somewhere that is, from what I can fathom, as fluid as the Gender identity it sometimes defends.

So, I understand the opening premise. That we are all human inside; the universal organism truth of us in which lie the seeds of Equality for All. Clear. And agreed.

And in the immutable words of a 90s Blur anthem, regardless of whether I am a boy who likes girls like their girls like their boys; or a girl whom wishes to be a boy; or a boy who wishes to dress like a girl; whether I have a Koran or a bible or a Torah or a light sabre (jedi numbers in the UK stood at 176,632 in the 201census, the 7thlargest religion in the UK after Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism); whether I have black, brown, olive, bluey white, or any other skin colour or patina you can name; regardless of how I speak – by accent, idiom, dialect or impediment; whether I have all of my limbs or just some of them, flaws, glitches, disease, chromosomal or neural disorders or again, any other condition or illness that renders me ‘imperfect’ in the eyes of the zealots, we are still all the same sentient human creature and should be treated as such.

This is where normailsation or universality should apply, calibrate and enforce itself. At a regulatory, political and constitutional level.  This is the nature of Human Suffrage. And these are societal and cultural truths that need to be enforced if needs be, especially if someone in flouting these human truths chooses to act maliciously against any one party to the detriment of that party and the benefits of themselves.

But the tension point on all of this for me is around humour.

Humour is a kicking post. A buffer to what sometimes feels like an imbalanced world or our own individual tribal and societal failings or myopia. Yes, it is turned cruelly against some people and beliefs – as is every technology humanity has ever created [ and yes I am referring to humour as a technology]. But broadly, humour is as much a tool of the oppressed, the marginalised, the down trodden, the forgotten and the set against as it is a tool of the bully and the racist.

Satire has been used as apolitical weapon for millennia, especially amongst those who felt they were incapable of confronting on equal terms a politic, leader, party, belief or philosophy that they found diminished their equal right to inclusion,  peaceful living in equality with their neighbours.

Is satire a moral instrument? Yes. Whether it is being wielded by some homophobic, racist, right-wing, liberal-hating cyclops, or by some bullying, socially psychopathic vegan eco-fetishist, it is being used to promote a particular moral/immoral/amoral world view or perspective that truly believes in its righteous self. [We must remember that morality, like sexuality, is fluid.]

But it seems that one of satire and humour’s redeeming traits is that it is mostly fired up in favour of the underdog or the insurgent spirit in any given situation.

From the walls of the palatine Hills or the Senate baths; Diogenes in his barrel in the square, the rapier wit of Rowlandson and the satirists of western Georgian society all the way through to the agitating propagandists of ‘pick a world war any world war’, the revolutionary guard of 1968 and the journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo; humour is a leveller and a balloon popper; a stick with which to hit the stuffiness and humourless, po-pious self-righteous pomposity of those people seeking to rule through some self-ordained permission and assertion.

I love humour. And the more edgy and raw and punk it gets – the more hackles it raises – the more I like it.

Perhaps I just don’t like the smug controlling satisfaction written over the faces of what seem quite joyless people in any given situation.

Agreed. The catch all of the foot-in-mouth ‘truth as bullets’ insensitive twat ‘humour’ of ‘I was just saying what everyone else was thinking’ …displays a crass insensitivity and lack of even a shred of the kind of diplomacy that is a primary facet of any socialised human being. But my greatest issue is that it is frankly usually just lazy. And it is rarely funny. [The greater sin.]

But back to the upside.

A lot of humour for me is predicated on challenging every norm, status quo and given wisdom around identity truth, practice, posture, habit, behaviour, viewpoint, politic, assumption and directive. Anything that seemed to adopt a tyrannical, humourless, bullying self-referential righteousness.

It is there as a relentless counter balance to what is presented as ‘right’ or ‘normal.’

It is at its least a projection on to a higher plane of ‘taking the piss’ – a pastime created to keep people from getting ‘ideas above their station’, ‘too big for their boots’ or ‘too clever by half.’

In recent times once we’d cut out way through the smoky bullying humour of the working men’s clubs of the 1970s, aimed at ‘er indoors, the mother-in-law, women drivers, people of colour, homosexuals, ginger haired kids and the ‘t’ick’ Irish (or the Polish in North American Society) we got to the stand-up revolution of the 1980s.

Barbs and parodies and small humorous cruelties where now aimed at Maggie Thatcher, racist coppers, bent politicians, pig-ignorant gin & jag Middle-Englanders, Kebab Shop Men, gobby builders, Gap Yar students, Hoorays, PR queens, and every other shade of the establishment (who could forget Alan Beresford  B’stard).

Then the Noughties switcheroo mix-up of geo-gender-livestock-foodstuff-education-politics had us all getting more and more confused. Suddenly Left was Right. Up was down. In was out.

One example of this lies in the roots of the recent Anti Semitism row in the Labour Party.  And there ain’t nothing funny about that.

Was a time when supporting Palestine against state-funded [The American state to be precise] Zionist incursions and hegemony in the Middle East was particularly a stand against Israel’s state-terrorism [as it was perceived], not against the Jewish people. That support became an alignment with the PLO, who tripped and passed the baton to Hamas, who buddy up to the Hezbollah, who’re in bed with nascent IS militancy and suddenly a lot of people in the Labour Party are all confused. Pro PLO was not meant to be anti-semitic. But then again was it? If Israel is a secular state, then everyones fine. If it’s the homeland of the jewish people then that gets complicated. Back then Pro Palestine was definitely anti America and Anti Global Money. But it certainly wasn’t meant to be pro Hezbollah; and as for IS, well… Anyway. pick the comedy bones out of that if you can.

And the idea of sustainable lives and living within our means was a good thing. Cheap meat and its industrial production was killing the planet and our health and well-being. A more balanced diet was called for. More vegetables. A more vegetarian diet became suitable and vegetable-led diets are becoming far more normal. But the Vegans got super militant and a lot more aggressive. And suddenly they are the tyrants encroaching on free will. WTF?

And then as the Gay Agenda is usurped by the Gender Agenda, who’s rights come first? LGBT thankfully stepped in as the umbrella collective to champion all rights equally but the Gender Agenda could not be denied. And its confusing out there. [As Joe Lycett, the currently Bi-sexual comedian pointed out on Radio 4 recently, the Gays are controlling the Bi agenda, so Bis have to speak up for themselves.]

Although statistics reveal that 1 in 16 people are either gay or lesbian, we are yet to see what the true number of the transgender population might be.

We also need to allow for what I like to think of as  ‘settlement’ – where the very universal nature of youth’s fierce pursuit of identity might predispose more than are actually truly transgender to pursue it as an option of identity while ‘churning’ through their individual activism years.

Yes. That idea of transgender possibly being a phase– shoot me now for suggesting that just maybe, transgender, like many other things, sometimes politics, sometimes philosophy, sometimes religious, sometimes physical, can be put in the tumble dryer of puberty and the fierce crucible of early identity and come up looking like an absolute, an emphatic truth; and feel that way for some years.

Do I believe that people can fundamentally find themselves in the wrong body? Yes. But equally, do I also believe that transgender has popped itself on the shelf of turbulent identities that youth might reach for? Yes. And that needs to be remembered before we steamroll anything in any direction without letting it ‘settle’. Less haste to the scalpel and more power to the emotional support systems while going through this stuff seems sensible to me.

Veganism and Vegetarianism unsurprisingly also feature heavily in the individual activism years, as they are also most likely to set young people ‘against’ their parents and the existing Order’s politics, beliefs and behaviours.

So what is activism linked to identity and being? And what is activism linked to humanity and existence?

The lazy answer would be ‘its all shades of the same.’ They’re not.

Regardless, that the new tropes of gender, veganism et al are being rendered through the social smack down of the social channels and the twitter model of ‘no right to reply’ leads us to the role of humour and satire.

Tyrannies of social inclusion and exclusion are being undertaken. And revolutions are being foisted on communities and societies.

Small problem is that the gathering norm is coming from the kind of people the humour of the 80s and 90s once set out to liberate.

And the rule book is currently either being used as loo paper in the gender neutral khazi or hung on a hanging tree next to the most recent #metoo protagonist.

Humour is now as likely to target gay rights activists, gender neutral toilets, tech entrepreneurs, hipsters, uber-feminists and fragile millennials as it will the old favourites of Proscribed Religion, philandering and (criminally) bent politicians, oil moguls, bankers, war mongers, child abusers, and Doctor’s Surgery Receptionists.

So does that mean teasing and taking the piss out of transgender is a return to the old days of right wing homophobias; or is it simply humour doing what it always does?

Which brings me to the catalyst for this blog.

Modern Family.

Or should I say my family’s interpretation of Modern Family and particularly the humour involved.

After a particular binge-watching weekend [Bad parenting] we realised that my daughter is sensitive to how women are portrayed in Modern Family. Neurotic Claire. With her over-controlling mania’s and aggression issues. Over-inflated Gloria with her ‘goose honk’ Columbian tone, towering heels and malapropisms. The two Dumfy daughters – one stupid and loose, the other geeky and up tight. So a wholly reasonable perspective and opinion on my daughter’s part.

But she equally seemed somewhat oblivious to the rest of the comedy cavalcade of swipes – the gay stereotypes of Cam and Mitchell and their fatuous statements – “the only gay men to leave LA  on pride weekend because we don’t like crowds” “Oh no, Lesbians” – and hybrid Gay-Asian jokes – “the only two gay men in America to have raised an underperforming Asian child”– the old school, rich white myopia of Jay (he’s a brash crass self-made man with intimacy issues and he did marry pneumatic Gloria after all) and of course, Phil Dumfy’s deeply flawed world view on subjects such as the menstrual cycle and its effect on women – “monstruation” –  his staggering stupidities, fawning salesmanship and general foolishness.

At which point my son chimes in and says perhaps there are gender stereotypes but everyone’s being targeted. And while we are at it, no-one seems up in arms about the prevailing wind in tv drama and comedy of stupid, self-interested, unhygienic, venal, childish male stereotype with a one track mind [whether that be shabby cheap sex, donuts, skipping work, or playing golf.]

We have Brian Griffen in Family Guy; the less said about Homer Simpson the idiot child abuser the better; Richard Watterson, the dad in Amazing world of Gumball demonstrates a staggering level of parental irresponsibility and idiocy; and even Peppa Pig’s father, Daddy Pig, could do with a bath and a fresh injection of brain cells.

The female riposte to this is often ‘well, you guys identify and laugh at those male truisms – and anyway, it’s about time you got skewered after hundreds of years of beating down women’s self-worth and identity – emotionally, intellectually and physically if needs be.’

Fair cop. But if we’re all equal. Surely we’re all up for the rules to be applied equally?

Anyway, where we netted out on Modern families humour imperative was, in my opinion, the right place.

In turns each of the stereotypes is hammered but it is done with a redemptive and cautionary tale ending in mind. Ultimately it says, reach beyond the short-sightedness and human frailty and flaws and we are all equally and without exception allowed and capable of a shot of redemption if we choose to take it.

It is the equanimity of deft cruel parodies, stereotypes and clichés and the purpose to which these comedic cruelties are played that allows all things.

As long as humour is applied equally, and no one stereotype is singled out, then anything goes, the only filter then being to what tonal extremity do you like your humour to play.

South Park far outreaches Gumball in extremity and crass stereotyping. But the premise of using stereotypes is much the same.

But this is a liberal choice. Some would say that as in literature, what constitutes funny it is a question of quality not morality or ethics.

It is the quality of the writing and framing and characterisations in the comedy that should be judged. Not the morality. As Oscar Wilde was said to point out when discussing the morality of a particular book:

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

The source code of humour is the human condition, in all of its flawed, raw truth and sometime often-time ugliness and inappropriateness.

Lazy humour tends to just be cruel for cruelty’s sake. Humour that tends to just seek to make people feel less shit by demeaning someone else to make them feel shitter – that’s not only lazy but spiteful and negative. That’s not OK. There is no counterpoint or greater purpose to it.

Even if the purpose is just to put a pressure valve on something that would otherwise explode into something far more destructive, at least it has a role in society.

Humour with purpose is a beautiful thing. Because it reminds us that power in all its forms, shiboleths, hysterical and aggressive assertions, trumpeting identity and righteous untouchables are all fodder for the excoriating blade of wit and humour.

Humour is the raw blunt edge of humanity. And like all evolved practices behaviours and traits, it exists for a reason. As I have said. Humour is a Human Technology.

As Sy Benson, the erstwhile Head Comedy Writer character in the film My Favourite Year promounced:

“You don’t cut ‘funny.’”

He also pronounced on the morality of a philandering Actor’s right to appear on a family show:

“We’re discussing morals. We’re talking generations to come here.”

To which Alice, another writer, responds:

“you’re not qualified to discuss morals, Sy”

to which Sy intelligently replies

“Up yours with a Mello Roll, Alice!”

Now what are we to do with this? Accuse him of misogynistic and aggressive use of language and making threats with a pastry, and have him arrested? Undertake a thorough investigation to define which ‘hole’ he is referring to, to define whether this is indeed gender specific abuse or a more universal aggressive attack? Shame him on twitter in the absence of context? Send him home with a pat on the head saying time to hang up your comedy typewriter? Or accept that humour like humanity has rough and imperfect edges, points of discomfort and areas of uncertainty, and having accepted that just apply a little wit and wisdom in the judging of it.

Anyone one for a Non Vegan, Camp Comedy Night Out?

 

 

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