I always thought, after years of performing it, and attempting to write it, and laughing at it, that humor was too personal to get empirical about. My friend Guy Smith recently posted on his blog that "Doonesbury is doomed." Guy went on to praise one of his favorite cartoonists as exhibiting more finesse. Well, doom is a big concept, and stretches out a long way into the future. Both of these cartoonists will have their audience until they tire of the work. Happened for Watterston, (Calvin and Hobbes) for Larson (Far Side), for Breathed (Opus). They quit, not got dumped by readers or marginalized.
Question: What is the common thread between Jackass, Married With Children, 30 Rock and The Critic? To somebody, each of them is funny. Comics strive to make us laugh, and think, too. They take a lot of different points of view.
Guy also had gripes with the Mainstream Media, or as some denigrate it, MSM. In an era where election coverage is dominated by the Internet, I agree that mainstream doesn't mean much anymore. So why rail against it? 30 Rock wins the Emmy for Best Comedy. Mad Men wins the Emmy for Best Drama. Few viewers watch either program. One airs on a broadcast network, the other on basic cable. Not even mainstream awards like Emmys make a difference. Any afternoon of Oprah probably outdrew both shows put together. Oprah's MSM, political, too. People poke fun at her, but she draws attention. And not a comic at all. Instead, she advises couples to start each day with a 10-second kiss. Effective for remembering love.
Media had a chance to be mainstream before the Internet. Now everybody pretty much believes what they want to believe, until personal experience teaches them something new. How broken is healthcare? Have your spouse's hip replaced. How worthless is Wall Street? See 100 grand of your retirement vanish in a week. I saw them both this month, from my family to a good friend from the 3000 world. These things are broken, from my experience. I don't need to read a comic anyplace to learn different.
Finesse is French for "smoothness." Doesn't mean subtlety, or something clever. Burrs under the saddle don't include just "elite." They run to "liberal" and "left" too. This name-calling has us looking pretty immature. The us vs. them sing-songs are what's got our country at a standstill, bleeding its potential from millions of little cuts at one another, falling out when we could be walking tall.
I wish Joe the Plumber luck. I started a business in flush times, the early 1990s, during the brief era of one-party rule. I've persevered through a more lengthy era of one-party rule, but the business trend has been downward since 2001. The fault? It lies not in the star cartoonists, but in ourselves. And so we can rally ourselves and laugh at ourselves. And work together with people who after all, are just like us in some way.
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