Perfect humor. Witty and sharp. Right to the point. If I would like to use it as satire, the only thing I would need to do is add a comment:
This is the perfect description of the Obama administration.
Castrated Humor
These two examples illustrate perfectly, I think, how good humor can be turned into satire. The litmus test for any real humor is that it can be distinguished from fake, surrogate entertainment in the same way a lead pencil helps us distinguish real diamond from the fake diamond made from boron glass.
Good humor is rare in the US, where surrogates rule supreme. When I first started watching TV shows in this country, I was surprised by the sounds of laughter. They were used as a way to tell people when it was time to laugh, eliciting a response much like the conditioned reflex of a dog. The TV producers didn't go so far as to elicit responses of crying or mourning from the audience, but it surely looked as if they were on the way to doing that. Those situations were awkward, embarrassing, and moronic. But they were not funny. On the contrary, they were often hilariously stupid, as when, for instance, one politician declared that "Ronnie Reagan" was our wisest President. I laughed out loud at what seemed an obvious absurdity, but noticed that nobody around me shared my reaction and some people seemed genuinely appalled. That's how I discovered that in the US humor is treated like a neutered dog. It should be there for tricks but should not bite or even bark.
I could list many examples of such castrated humor, but two come to mind most readily. The first one involves Jon
Stewart.
The interesting, intrinsically funny thing about Jon Stewart is that missing "h' in his first name. (His real name has been gone since the time he was a background actor on the Nanny show). That missing "h" is very much like missing balls: the name is castrated and has lost its meaning. It sounds like a dog's name, and if we follow the canine simile here, we can be sure the dog is a perfectly trained one.
Jon Stuart's purpose is to scratch your back when you
feel an itch. The scratching must relieve the itch and feel good, but it must never be painful. He comes out all smiles and jokes about
something meaningless, like how a senator misspelled a sentence, or how a
congressman embarrassed himself, or
how the people in power screw things up. All of that is accompanied by funny
snapshots and/or by grimaces and
shrugs.
Jon simulates you--the average Joe. He never goes over your
head or
challenges your intelligence, no matter how meager. He might codify my quote above from Moby Dick, the one about laughing being the easiest answer to all that is queer, and make you laugh at the "queer." However, he craftily chooses what he presents to you as being queer, so the real targets of the term stay out of the picture.
Jon is considered a liberal, but he never criticizes war, either scathingly or otherwise. Neither does he show up the powerful people on his show for the dangerous morons they are: he paints them as, maybe, not terribly bright, but definitely as honest. He welcomes everyone on his show except real people. That forces him to balance on the surrogate thread from day to day, and gives him the right to frequently become vulgar when he gets tired of the crap he sells. If you watch him for a while, you can notice a malicious flicker in his eye. It comes from a man who understands the role he plays for money and is disgusted with himself. That flicker makes an attentive person even feel sad for him, but, when that happens, even the pseudo-funny parts of his charade disappear entirely.
My second clinical case of castrated humor involves Tina Fey.
I placed the picture of Audrey Hepburn at the top of this piece, and here's Tina Fey impersonating Audrey in Breakfast
at Tiffani's:
[http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=tina+Fey+++as+Audrey+hepburn&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2-ytff-sunm]
The irony starts here: I can download the photo of an acting genius, magnificent Audrey in the full charm of her youth, but I cannot download the grotesque representation of her by Tina Fey on the cover of Entertainment
Weekly. (I have to use a link instead.)
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