Ironic cluelessness
Bookworm on Dec 03 2008 at 12:28 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
As part of a very enjoyable neighborhood social event, I went out to a comedy club tonight. The old guy who made old people jokes was very funny. The other “observational” humorists occasionally hit the mark, but mostly didn’t. Many were clearly struggling with new post-election material now that they don’t have Bush and Cheney as their targets, especially since their manifest Obama worship makes it clear that he’ll never be the butt of one of their jokes. Overall, the intentional humor was weak.
The funniest moment was unintentional, and only because it was an exquisite demonstration of irony. It came about when the gay, morbidly obese, foul-mouthed guy, sporting multiple earings, and making jokes about drugs, child abuse and other unsavory stuff, announced that, after a hellish “comedy” tour of Montana, he just had to tell one last time the Sarah Palin jokes he couldn’t tell those sour Montanans. His first joke: “Sarah Palin is the epitomy of white trash.”
Huh? On the facts as we know them, she’s a college graduate, small business owner, married, with a dramatically successful career in national and local politics, while you’re a rather gross looking fellow who seems to live in a perpetual sordid wallow. Who are you calling white trash, dude?
As it was, the comic (a term I use very advisedly) eventually did get around to explaining why Palin’s white trash: “She taught her daughter abstinence while the girl was pregnant.” Again — Huh? Do only white trash girls get pregnant out of wedlock? And because unwed mothers are one of the fastest rising demographics in America, I guess that makes a lot of mommies white trash. Or perhaps white trash women are simply those who don’t believe in abortion. As an ambivalent pro-choicer, I can certainly envision making a variety of arguments against ardent pro-Lifers, but calling people who value innocent life over all other things “white trash” isn’t one of those arguments.
I won’t offend you by repeating here the nasty remarks about Trig’s handicap, but I will tell you that there are few “white trash” people who would stoop so low.
In other words, the comics were funny if you find it amusing, as I do, to watch absolutely clueless and classless people smugly exposing their ignorance and ugliness in public.
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13 Responses to “Ironic cluelessness”
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Bravo, Book, bravo!
The palin hatred is irrational. But then all hatred are.
It both astonishes me –and doesn’t– that the phrase “white trash” continues in public use without the opprobrium reserved for such racist horrors as, oh, “negro” or “oriental.” In the self-hating world of white liberals and the white-hating world of many blacks, any attack on Caucasians is ok. I see it on TV all the time. And we whites are supposed to go along with it to show our good humor. Burns me.
And Huan, some hatreds make perfect sense, even though they are non-rational, coming from feeling and emotion rather than intellect. Sometimes feeling has the truth. And is required for survival.
I’m curious as to the reaction of the crowd. Book, did the audience find this rude lout hilarious?
I’ve often wondered how many “white elites” have taught their daughters about birth control only to have them get pregnant. We will never know that number if the girls had abortions. I doubt that guys like the comedian have spent much time thinking about raising kids. Frankly, I’m sick of this narcissistic, hey-look-at-me-I’m-cool attitude. Putting a condom on a banana doesn’t begin to deal with the challenges of child rearing.
Strike me that a very high % of Palin-hate comes from people who have advanced degrees of one kind or another….I suspect some of the most virulent hate comes from people who spent a lot of time & money getting their degrees in some squishy subject and are now disappointed in their levels of career success. The fact that someone can achieve Palin’s level of success and recognition *without* the advanced degree is like a red flag to a bull.
Greetings:
Your keystroking about “the old guy who made old people jokes,” reminds me of the times, in the Bronx of my youth, when we would cut school and catch the “D” train down to Rockefellar Center. Down there, free tickets could be had for the game shows that, back then, were being filmed for television. Before the filming, there was usually a vaudeville-graduate comedian who would come out to get the audience’s pleasure juices flowing with his jokes and routine.
After a couple of sessions, our group was familiar with some of the material and one of our guys called out with a response to one of the jokes. Hearing where it came from and looking up and seeing our non-adult-supervised group, the comedian paused and then said, “What’s a matter boys, the pool hall’s not open yet.”
The more I listen to other comics, the more I value Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard Seinfeld make an offensive joke, yet I find him incredibly funny. One of his best bits ever was about the way in which all men secretly, in a small part of their mind, see themselves as kind of a super hero. We all joke about our little boys doing that, but Seinfeld claims the big guys do it too, only more subtly. His example? The way in which men will strap a mattress onto the roof of their car and then drive with the window down and one arm out, holding onto that mattress. Seinfeld remarked upon the fact that they seem actually to believe that, if the mattress gets unstrapped, they, with that lone arm, can hang onto a large flat object going 65 miles an hour! Gentle, pointed observational humor, brilliantly rendered, with no meanness.
By the way, I do believe in political humor and think it’s a healthy part of a true democratic system. Personally insulting a candidate, especially when the insult bears no relationship to reality and falls well within “pot calling kettle black” territory simply isn’t funny. For that reason, I never found the “Bush is stupid” jokes funny, since he obviously isn’t stupid. “Bush is inarticulate” jokes were amusing, because (a) they were true and (b) they were more gentle in tone.
Given comics’ fear of jokes about Obama (either because they worship him or because they’re afraid of being perceived as racist), a slow learning curve about his genuine foibles (and he will have them), might eventually yield some very good jokes. That is, the fact that people aren’t just grabbing on to one concept, no matter how little rooted in truth about the man, may create a window of time in which to find genuine handholds for true, thoughtful humor.
David Foster:
Spot-on observation! You put your finger on something that’s been bugging me for a long time, namely, why affluent, upper middle-class people spend so much time hating Bush and going ballistic over Palin.
But then all hatred are.
That is false.
Hatred contains both objects that are the good, the neutral, and the evil. There is no one size fits all template for hatred.
Seinfeld remarked upon the fact that they seem actually to believe that, if the mattress gets unstrapped, they, with that lone arm, can hang onto a large flat object going 65 miles an hour! Gentle, pointed observational humor, brilliantly rendered, with no meanness.
Of course, the alternative explanation is that they would like to know if the mattress started flying off so they could stop to retrieve it.
Dear Bookworm, (“As an ambivalent pro-choicer, ……………”)
There is nothing ambivalent about an unborn woman’s natural desire to keep on living. To accept legally that any innocent life can be judged inconvenient and can be exterminated, will not stop with our unborn. We have established a precedent from which the rest of us can not be defended. Why do you think a major political party wish to enshrine this insanity? There is no love for women in abortion, born or unborn.
An ardent pro-lifer, Frank in Billerica
http://www.toofewwitnesses.com
I hadn’t even read USMSF’s comment to Huan when I posted my comment.
This just goes to show you, Book, that some people have one way of thinking and other people have different ways of thinking. Which is the standard response for why you reacted the way you did to the “comedian’s” thinking.