Where’s that funny bone?
July 25, 2004 | 12:00am
The gourmands of crude humor cry foul. Comedies are now sap fests of best friends/ex-spouses/co-workers hugging each other through every crisis. Is the choke collar on funny being snapped too tight? As they say, it’s always funniest to laugh at someone else’s expense. But while the heckle and jeckle is ensuing some guards of the thin-skinned have stuck their cow prodders to the Lenny Bruce’s of today.
So as a backlash, many of today’s hottest actors poke fun at themselves. Ethan Hawke proclaims he’s a loser, and many comediennes call themselves boring. You can see that they are trying to take themselves less seriously. But it just comes out being annoyingly ironic. And condescending. So now more about making fun the right way.
Details recently got into a lot of trouble. In their newly-installed monthly column by Whitney McNalley called "Anthropology" where they pit a stereotype against a gay man and do a stat test (past subjects were prep, dandy and cowboy) they did the fatal mistake of classifying Asians as a "look"‚ rather than a race. Wow. An issue later, Daniel Peres wrote a cocky letter of apology and gave three pages of ranting from the Asian community. Guess it will be the last time the bitchy world of Details will be using the word chink again, even if it’s just referring to porcelain.
Another would be that of schaddenfreude (laughing at others’ expense). Now even the poor socialite who lost all her chandeliers and Baccarat to taxes does not deserve to be the high tea joke. Pretty small of people really despite its wholly entertaining nature.
Even if you rationalize it in the Buddhist way and call it karma, it still makes for bad taste. It’s the lint of navel gazing.
Yes some people go too far. When comedians use sensitive issues such as starving kids and marital rape as material it certainly exudes some sort of vapid ignorance that pretends to be intelligent satire. There, like mercury, sulphuric acid and shit, are just some things that you just don’t touch for the sake of a good laugh. However, when entertainment seems to move to a slow tango since eggshells are littered all over the dance floor, yawns and cringes outdo the guffaws.
Let’s admit it people are just way too sensitive these days. Now some simple banter can end up in a lawsuit thanks to today’s litigious frenzy. And with meds going around like Altoids, people of today are simply not equipped with the natural mental and emotional pillars to laugh at themselves anymore. It becomes yet another issue (and yet another reason to issue a prescription). Even SMS becomes an issue. More often than not if you text without a smiley face or in all caps something must be wrong.
That’s what made Seinfeld so rich he could afford someone else’s wife and a hangar full of Porsches. Seinfeld laughed at masturbation, repeated outfits, unemployment, parents, bad pictures, ugly babies and every taboo thing in ordinary life. Seinfeld made us realize that we can laugh at the mundane realities of our world and not have to look for an anorexic teen queen as the voodoo doll of our laugh box. Of course, it got ugly when Kramer (Jerry Seinfeld’s neighbor in the show) burnt the Cuban flag with his cigar. Savants sometimes get a sense of infallibility from their maverick ways, it’s easy to lose sight of the line.
The question that looms is that why is it so funny on the tube and hard to swallow in real life? What’s happening to everyone? Is it the death of the concept of satire?
One way to look at it is that we have grown up and have become responsible for our reactions. Throughout the years the dark realities of domestic life are surfacing everywhere from the UN to supermarket tabloids. Things that used to be funny in vaudeville-like-bitch slapping ain’t that amusing anymore.
However, part of this maturity with our developed grasp of reality is that yes we should lighten up. And no, not with a martini and a Xanax. Yes, there are many sensitive issues and irritating details such as knock off Jordi Labanda prints littering everything from Filofaxes to yeast infection creams. Is it too much coffee? Too much credit? Or too little carbs? I don’t know but wouldn’t life just be so much simpler if we learned to laugh and be silly again?
So as a backlash, many of today’s hottest actors poke fun at themselves. Ethan Hawke proclaims he’s a loser, and many comediennes call themselves boring. You can see that they are trying to take themselves less seriously. But it just comes out being annoyingly ironic. And condescending. So now more about making fun the right way.
Details recently got into a lot of trouble. In their newly-installed monthly column by Whitney McNalley called "Anthropology" where they pit a stereotype against a gay man and do a stat test (past subjects were prep, dandy and cowboy) they did the fatal mistake of classifying Asians as a "look"‚ rather than a race. Wow. An issue later, Daniel Peres wrote a cocky letter of apology and gave three pages of ranting from the Asian community. Guess it will be the last time the bitchy world of Details will be using the word chink again, even if it’s just referring to porcelain.
Another would be that of schaddenfreude (laughing at others’ expense). Now even the poor socialite who lost all her chandeliers and Baccarat to taxes does not deserve to be the high tea joke. Pretty small of people really despite its wholly entertaining nature.
Even if you rationalize it in the Buddhist way and call it karma, it still makes for bad taste. It’s the lint of navel gazing.
Yes some people go too far. When comedians use sensitive issues such as starving kids and marital rape as material it certainly exudes some sort of vapid ignorance that pretends to be intelligent satire. There, like mercury, sulphuric acid and shit, are just some things that you just don’t touch for the sake of a good laugh. However, when entertainment seems to move to a slow tango since eggshells are littered all over the dance floor, yawns and cringes outdo the guffaws.
Let’s admit it people are just way too sensitive these days. Now some simple banter can end up in a lawsuit thanks to today’s litigious frenzy. And with meds going around like Altoids, people of today are simply not equipped with the natural mental and emotional pillars to laugh at themselves anymore. It becomes yet another issue (and yet another reason to issue a prescription). Even SMS becomes an issue. More often than not if you text without a smiley face or in all caps something must be wrong.
That’s what made Seinfeld so rich he could afford someone else’s wife and a hangar full of Porsches. Seinfeld laughed at masturbation, repeated outfits, unemployment, parents, bad pictures, ugly babies and every taboo thing in ordinary life. Seinfeld made us realize that we can laugh at the mundane realities of our world and not have to look for an anorexic teen queen as the voodoo doll of our laugh box. Of course, it got ugly when Kramer (Jerry Seinfeld’s neighbor in the show) burnt the Cuban flag with his cigar. Savants sometimes get a sense of infallibility from their maverick ways, it’s easy to lose sight of the line.
The question that looms is that why is it so funny on the tube and hard to swallow in real life? What’s happening to everyone? Is it the death of the concept of satire?
One way to look at it is that we have grown up and have become responsible for our reactions. Throughout the years the dark realities of domestic life are surfacing everywhere from the UN to supermarket tabloids. Things that used to be funny in vaudeville-like-bitch slapping ain’t that amusing anymore.
However, part of this maturity with our developed grasp of reality is that yes we should lighten up. And no, not with a martini and a Xanax. Yes, there are many sensitive issues and irritating details such as knock off Jordi Labanda prints littering everything from Filofaxes to yeast infection creams. Is it too much coffee? Too much credit? Or too little carbs? I don’t know but wouldn’t life just be so much simpler if we learned to laugh and be silly again?
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