Monday, January 14, 2013

Irreverence in comedy- MAKE IT STOP


I've grown rather tired of irreverence. There was once a time- a time when absurd social rules reigned- when you could mock nearly everything, because it deserved to be mocked. (i.e. Monty Python)

But now I see comedy that has no respect for anything (i.e. most Comedy Central shows), and will assault your eyes and ears with real-life injury, gore, profane sexual acts, various bodily fluids, blasphemy, indiscriminate parodies of all public figures and popular fiction, and relentless deconstruction of every storytelling tactic you can think of. Everybody and everything you love or wish not to see is made into a joke.

You could argue that Monty Python did all this, but a lot of it was done with affection for the subject they satirized, such as when they parodied Icelandic epic poetry. The times when they mocked something that was clearly unlikeable, such as false religious doctrine, it was to expose a stupid thing for what it was.

Now it seems to me that adult comedy, and even some family comedy, wants to just urinate all over everything in popular culture, whether it deserves it or not, and break social taboos just because they want to shock you. It doesn't strike me as an attempt to have fun with something they love, or awake your moral awareness and ideals... this is comedy's higher purpose, and what I see in today's adult humor is hatred, indifference, and lust for anything disgusting.
It's a cold, systematic, and merciless way of creating "humor".

They don't seem to care if somebody holds their object of mockery dear to their hearts.

1 comment:

  1. Hey tymime -

    Thanks for the heads up on the Exploding Plastic Inev. comp being blocked by Mediafire. That's to knowledge the first time this has happened to one of my posts. I'm going to do a re-up, likely this weekend when I'll have the time.

    Thanks again.

    ReplyDelete