Stupid is as stupid does
Here I sit, watching (several years after the fact) the film Jackass, after the MTV show of the same name. Currently on the screen, Steve-O is attempting to cross a tightrope over an alligator pit wearing nothing but a helmet, shoes, and a jock strap with several pounds of meat stuffed in the waistband.
Recently, I watched the new Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, which I highly recommend to all. Some of you know Mike Judge from Beavis and Butthead. Others from King of the Hill. Still others may have seen Office Space a dozen times. The common thread through all these movies is an abiding contempt of the deeply stupid and pointless things and people that make life a little poorer for having encountered them. People mistook Beavis and Butthead for a mere celebration of dimwitted hijinks - I swear to you there's some anger in there also. How else do you explain the Halloween special where Butthead meets a farmer who dismembers people and helps the farmer, in a sequence what actually manages to be a little chilling despite the lo-rent animation, capture and dismember Beavis? King of the Hill features an endless parade of do-gooding dipshits who wreak havoc in the name of 'helping.' Office Space goes after the pettiness of managerial power and the deadening, soul-sapping routines that office life can draw one into.
Anyway, what was I saying before I disappeared up my own anus... O yeah. Idiocracy. Good movie. Not as good as Office Space but pretty great nonetheless, about an average man of today who wakes up 500 years in the future to find he's the smartest man on the planet. The President is a professional wrestler. Garbage is piled up everywhere. La-Z-Boys come with plumbing and a nice comfy toilet seat. The #1 show in the USA is called "Ow! My Balls!" and the biggest Oscar winner is titled Ass. Our hero, because he speaks in complete sentences, is told he "talks like a fag."
So.
Thesis A: Steve-O hanging from a rope as crocodiles lunge at him from below, attracted to the chicken carcass stuffed into his jockstrap, is comic genius of the first water.
Thesis B: Steve-O hanging from that rope not that different from "Ow! My Balls!," the type of comedy which Mike Judge holds in total contempt as the lowest common denominator of culture, a baseless, graceless, debasing parade of farting ass cheeks and nut-shots that not only lacks in any intellectual content, but which actually is hostile to the very idea of intellect, and which as a consequence impoverishes the culture that enjoys it.
So I ask you: as I sit here laughing my ass off, how can both A and B possibly be simultaneously true? They sure as hell seem to be.
on
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Easy - if you accept that
Easy - if you accept that comic genius has no necessary basis in intellect, there's no logical conflict between A and B.
Note that I said "necessary basis". There's a bunch of comic genius that wouldn't exist, if shorn of its intellectual underpinnings. However, the Three Stooges were hilarious, and the characters' collective IQ wouldn't have made it to freezing, Fahrenheit.
People can become jaded and
People can become jaded and accustomed to any vile amusement. Look at Roman gladiatorial combat.
You have only one life. You can make it look like a stinky unwashed sock, or you can stop squandering it.
Check this out: http://www.amazon.com/Leonard-Bernstein-Peoples-Concerts-Philharmonic/d…
I don't know. Judge seems to
I don't know. Judge seems to treat his characters with something less than contempt, but I'll be damned if I could explain it. It's an interesting line he walks, and I don't know that I can think of anyone else who walks that line as well. You see, I think Judge thinks that "Ow, My Balls" is hilarious. That's why he put it in his movie. But he also kinda sneers at it to, even while laughing at it. So he's doing both, somehow.
One of my film snob friends recently commented that he loved the Jackass movie. This shocked the hell out of me. This guy's pretty pretentious, so I wanted to know why he liked it so much. He obviously thinks it's hysterical, which is part of the reason, but being the snob that he is, he came up with some intellectual explanation as well. He said he started thinking about why we, as a society, tend to avoid pain, and what we're missing. He doesn't think the jackass guys are masochists, but rather people who like to experience things that no one else has (or would even think of experiencing). He can explain it better than I, but there you have it: an intellectual defense of jackass.
Mark - that's great! I love
Mark - that's great! I love it. I also happen to think your friend is sort right about Jackass, although I dont think that I'd put it in those hifalutin terms.
And on the case of Mike Judge, I think the thing that burns his bacon is when "Ow! My Balls!" is the ONLY thing that's even conceivable of as funny, rather than just one TYPE of funny.
Maybe I should meet Mike Judge and whack him in the huevos. That would be goddamn funny.