When the World is On Fire, Who Can Laugh About Anything?
I got up from my super comfortable reclining theater chair to run to the bathroom and I suddenly realized I was physically exhausted.
What? I had one beer during the movie. I sat for an hour and a half. Why am I so beat?
Then it hit me. The movie was Jackass Forever and I had just spent 90 minutes laughing my ass completely off.
When had I laughed that hard last? I couldn't recall the last time I laughed so much that my legs were gone for thirty minutes after.
"Your sense of humor seems to be trending towards stupid." My wife was right. I'm not a fan of farce and, in general, I have a fairly dark sense of what's funny but it takes complete idiocy to actually evoke a laugh out of me.
I can appreciate the humor behind Ted Lasso and truly enjoy it but it doesn't make me laugh. For that, I need to watch an episode of Peacemaker, a James Gunn creation that has moments of such inanity it surprises me out of myself, my awareness that the hyperbole is that our democracy is ending, that COVID will never smooth out, that every instance of inequity is boiled down to skin color and culture, is all forgotten for a second and I belly laugh at something stupid coming out of John Cena's exquisitely chiseled face.
With Jackass it isn't just the sight of Steve-O standing naked on a pedestal with a full swarm of bees attached to his dick and balls that's funny. It's the gang of morons surrounding him as he does this stunt, cheering him on and laughing their asses off while he's doing it that brings on the Who Gives a Fuck About the January 6th Riot Right Now? giggles that expand into a physical convulsion of pure laughter.
Recently, my wife and I went to see some live theater. No small feat given the fact that live theater has been neutered for the past two years but there are a few small blackbox-type venues in Vegas and the Majestic Theater on Main Street in the Arts District is producing a musical parody of the 90's film The Craft.
Yes, we had to provide proof of vaccination (we did). Sure, it was $30.00 a pop plus a $12.00 beer (the company has to make some money and having produced blackbox theater in Chicago for fifteen years, I get it). The show was fun. Sometimes funny. I may have laughed out loud a few times and smiled throughout.
Except for the end of the first act. One of the actors broke the fourth wall to provide the audience with a late-stage trigger warning or apology for the non-PC attitude of the 90's on display. A virtue signal post-offense, I suppose. "We're going all in on our irreverence but want to apologize for it, too. Is that OK?" he seemed to be asking.
I didn't laugh the entire second act.
On the binge-watch front, I started watching The Good Fight based on my mother's enthusiastic recommendation. In Season Five, the third episode (I think) a stand up comedienne with a propensity to challenge racial and sexual norms for laughs hires the law firm to do a 'sensitivity read' of her upcoming televised special.
Turns out, at least in the minds of the series writers, lawyers aren't especially funny. One storyline has the lawyers changing the script to be more sensitive to current cultural mores and another has the mail room guy print up joke cards requiring people to relax and tell jokes about forbidden topics. The staff loves these cards; HR does not.
I hate to talk in terms of our side, this side, that side. But our side, the liberal progressives, the open-minded people – I don’t want us to be the scolds and the shushers. That was always the role of neoconservatives and the religious fundamentalists, to restrict and remove words. I don’t want our side to be the one that’s parsing language.
It just really, really bothers me, if the liberal progressives have now become the scolds. We were the Grouchos! We’re not the Margaret Dumonts — and we’re turning into the Margaret Dumonts on a lot of levels. That lets the misogynists and homophobes and racists seem like the rebels: “Well, we’re saying what people can’t say anymore.” We should be having way more fun with language and jokes and going too far. If our side starts doing that, then I think we’re fucked in terms of moving forward as a society. — Patton Oswalt
I love Patton. This is the same comedian who then later fell on his sword apologizing to the Margaret Dumonts of the Left for a decades-long friendship with Dave Chapelle.
Further illustrating his point is the recent trend of conservatives desperately trying to convince us how it is they who are, as Oswalt claims, "the rebels." White men starting exclusive groups because they aren't allowed to spout their advantaged masculinity without scrutiny. CEOs claiming victim status using the same language as actual victimized citizens. White Nationalists/Supremicists banding together online and bearing tiki torches purchased at Home Depot. PJ O'Rourke once in 2017 claiming that The Breakfast Clubis, in fact, a conservative film on its 30th Anniversary.
Like all of John’s movies, The Breakfast Club is conservative. Note that the first thing the disgruntled kids in detention do is not organize a protest, not express “class (of 1985) solidarity,” not chant “Students of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your locker combinations” and not claim it takes a Shermer to raise them.
They present themselves, like good conservatives do, as individuals and place the highest value, like this conservative does, on goofing off. Otherwise known as individual liberty.
O'Rourke makes an interesting case (you should read it)—I suspect he is correct in surmising that "a 2015 remake of The Breakfast Club [would need] Latino-American, African-American, Islamic-American, Born-Again Christian, Undocumented Alien, Feminist, Post-Feminist, Occupy Activist, Tea Party Member, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender… To cover all the bases of Identity Politics, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall would have had to double- and triple-up. And wear some strange cosmetics."
That doesn't mean that the film is conservative (even if Hughes was a Reaganite). O'Rourke makes the mistake in stating that individualism and the belief in individual liberty is a conservative value. It is not.
Studies have shown that conservatives are far more in tune with ideologies that support conformity and the ability to enforce that homogenous view of how a citizen should respond to authority than progressives. Just because conservatives believe they should get to own assault rifles and protect their Christian values with the threat of violence doesn't indicate a love of individual freedom. It indicates a love of self interest over the interests of all others.
The Breakfast Club is, yes, a homogenous group racially but tracks five different types, filled with that conservative love of self above all others as they slowly learn empathy and common interests in the face of authoritarian requirements of fealty to the rules. And they do it by sharing stories with one another. So, rather than a conservative comedy, it is a comedy about abandoning the selfish, narcissistic ideology of the Right and learning to become more empathetic and progressive through common interest and community.
In recent years, the cultural left has come to be in tune with ideologies that support conformity and the ability to enforce that homogenous view of how a citizen should respond to authority as well as embracing this love of self above all others. That leaves us with no laughter except for when Johnny Knoxville electrocutes a piano player.
We on the Left mock those in power. That's our job. When we spend our energies knee-jerking after every perceived slight and tearing each other down, we open up the playing field for idiot savants like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Greene to own the 'disenfranchised revolutionary" cloak. Does this mean we swallow everything everyone says with a grain of salt? YES. If we can't laugh at ourselves, we can't effectively mock anything else. THAT'S the lesson we learn from the Right. Laugh at ourselves or lose all credibility to play the Fool.
COVID (and our botched reactions to it) have taken a host of things we used to take for granted away. I miss relaxing in a restaurant without either fearing that the bartender fixing my drink is infected or noticing how stupid it is to wear a mask upon entering only to take it off to drink. I miss live theater. What I miss most is the opportunity to just throw down and fucking laugh like an idiot about, well, anything.
Thank god for Jackass. I appreciate the not-so-gentle reminder.
