Celebritarded II: Telling funny jokes.
This past week was a bad one for the media. First the whole Fourth Estate gets shanghaied by a reality-television aspirant who pretended to send his child aloft in a homemade balloon. (There’s already a video game, t-shirt and lots of Halloween potential, apparently.) Then there was the little story about the autistic boy who saved his teacher from choking, a story apparently only I have to watch through my fingers, so awful and insipid was the media’s coverage. Sometimes it seems like Big Media is either being run by idiots or conned by them. But either way, it’s clear from the amount of public interest these kinds of stories generate that Things on Screens (television, movie theater, computer) have profound effects on people’s opinions of the world.
This isn’t new, but it got me thinking about one particular group out there whose members are supposed to circumvent the standing order, to short-circuit all our wrong-headed beliefs by forcing us to look at ourselves and, ultimately, laugh. Comedians I’m talking about. Many have done fine work, fine work. But some push the old thoughts forward, they reinforce the beliefs of the standing order, they make a joke or a career by getting us to laugh by exciting the small and stupid parts of us. They don’t short any circuits or crack any heads; they just maintain the status quo, which for those who weren’t paying attention is a quo of fathers pretending to send their children aloft for the sake of the teee-veee.
I think of Ben Stiller, who used to be such a nice boy, and who has made the “hilarious retard” trope into a multi million-$$$ proposition. He is one of the great high lords of the easy joke. Consider the character of Warren in “There’s Something About Mary” — whom Stiller learns to love or whatever. Ah how they all laugh. It made a career or two. Then there’s the complicated scene in “Tropic Thunder” in which Robert Downey, Jr. in blackface scolds Stiller for going “full retard” —
Which objecting to makes for strange bedfellows —
— but also leads to Peter Coffin, who might generously be called a “comedian,” responding to the controversy around “Tropic Thunder” (I can’t see a need to watch the whole thing; a few seconds and you get the idea, but I want to point out something here) —
The middling Q-list comedians who YouTube their iterations of “full retard” and whatever represent a kind of trickle-down effect — getting a few questionable jokes in under the protective aegis of a larger, more mainstream work that first stepped into that taboo country. My feelings about this whole thing are complex, as I like the inappropriate humor more than is my share. But these jokes never really work; I mean watch Robert Downey Jr. go full-black and talk about full-retard — even with this pretty involved satire, the humor doesn’t seem that funny. Because I think at its heart, mean-spirited humor can’t be executed by people who want to return from that place and claim a basic decency. It’s a lack of commitment, really.
Unlike Sarah Silverman, who has gone all the way. Hers is not, and never will be, a kind of comedy that wants to hope to be even remotely close to knowing the telephone number to call a cab to drive her around the neighborhood of “appropriate.” She’s not coming back. She says the wrong things almost exclusively, and like say South Park, it sometimes feels like she’s keeping the First Amendment alive by exercising it. Total social insult without malice is a hard, and isolating, condition to maintain. And yet, way out there, she is pretty funny.
Thankfully there was a Bill Hicks. He made everybody feel small, but in a good way. He placed us in the universe, showed us how big it is and how we could all fit together in it. He made a lot of fun, but it was never petty or mean or easy. He shorted every circuit he could, and it was probably the amount of existential electricity he ran through himself that shorted his own life. Even now, he makes a world that gets stranger by the day seem accessible, acceptable, accountable.
Oct 18th, 2009 6:11pm
