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That's not funny!
Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: That's not funny!
Okay, now that I have that out of my system (again)...
Welcome to year six of sev's ruminations on humor. Today's subject: parody.
I have, it's important to note, a stunted sense of humor. I must, for the number of times I'm told to stop being so sensitive because they're just kidding. (That, by the way, was sarcasm.) I also just don't understand Monty Python. (That part is simply unfortunate truth.)
Humor can be anything from a coping mechanism to a tool for social change. It can also be a weapon wielded by the status quo to keep the disenfranchised from getting too full of [them/our]selves. The difference isn't always clear-cut.
That's why parody is hard.
(this is where I get vague. I think what follows may be an outline for a much longer piece.)
I wonder if I should distinguish between "parody" and garden-variety cruelty via mockery? The former has a message, or a point, beyond simply "look at that, isn't it silly?"
Parody has includes a value judgment -- this particular trait being caricatured is *bad*.
The simplest parody relies on the audience bringing a context with them to flesh out the value judgment. A parody is generally a specific instance of a person, situation, or behavior. The context informs which specifics are relevant to the parody. The parodied person may have an identifiable gender, race or class; how does the audience tell which of those are relevant to the parody, and which are orthogonal?
As there are myriad negative stereotypes surrounding most marginalized cultures, it's common to associate the value-judgment involved in parody with one side or another of any power-gradients present in the portrayal, regardless of whether that association was intended by the author. When that's *not* the association intended by the author, the parody falls flat and/or misses its target.
Furthermore, the intent of parody is to disempower its target. This is what makes it an effective tool for political change; in extreme cases, it's one of the only redresses available to an oppressed community. This is also, unfortunately, what makes it so offensive when it backfires. It's not in good taste for people to stomp on those who are already less fortunate than they are. Because parody suggests a value judgment, the behaviors or traits most commonly chosen for parody are those which can be easily established as "bad", either due to context explicitly provided by the author or implicitly brought along by the audience. And in the latter case, when the value judgment is implicitly supplied by the audience, that's going to be a judgment already extant in common culture.
Thus, the crux of the problem. Not all value judgments that are part of our common culture are healthy ones.
When a parody (or any kind of humor?) intersects a pathological cultural value judgment, the target of the parody can be unclear. Is it lampooning a behavior? Is it lampooning the marginalization of that behavior?
Effective parody should, therefore, include a scathing portrayal of the forces that create or reinforce the exact situation or problem being parodied. Otherwise, it's no better than mocking a marginalized behavior (and that's just crass).
A: That's not funny!
Okay, now that I have that out of my system (again)...
Welcome to year six of sev's ruminations on humor. Today's subject: parody.
I have, it's important to note, a stunted sense of humor. I must, for the number of times I'm told to stop being so sensitive because they're just kidding. (That, by the way, was sarcasm.) I also just don't understand Monty Python. (That part is simply unfortunate truth.)
Humor can be anything from a coping mechanism to a tool for social change. It can also be a weapon wielded by the status quo to keep the disenfranchised from getting too full of [them/our]selves. The difference isn't always clear-cut.
That's why parody is hard.
(this is where I get vague. I think what follows may be an outline for a much longer piece.)
I wonder if I should distinguish between "parody" and garden-variety cruelty via mockery? The former has a message, or a point, beyond simply "look at that, isn't it silly?"
Parody has includes a value judgment -- this particular trait being caricatured is *bad*.
The simplest parody relies on the audience bringing a context with them to flesh out the value judgment. A parody is generally a specific instance of a person, situation, or behavior. The context informs which specifics are relevant to the parody. The parodied person may have an identifiable gender, race or class; how does the audience tell which of those are relevant to the parody, and which are orthogonal?
As there are myriad negative stereotypes surrounding most marginalized cultures, it's common to associate the value-judgment involved in parody with one side or another of any power-gradients present in the portrayal, regardless of whether that association was intended by the author. When that's *not* the association intended by the author, the parody falls flat and/or misses its target.
Furthermore, the intent of parody is to disempower its target. This is what makes it an effective tool for political change; in extreme cases, it's one of the only redresses available to an oppressed community. This is also, unfortunately, what makes it so offensive when it backfires. It's not in good taste for people to stomp on those who are already less fortunate than they are. Because parody suggests a value judgment, the behaviors or traits most commonly chosen for parody are those which can be easily established as "bad", either due to context explicitly provided by the author or implicitly brought along by the audience. And in the latter case, when the value judgment is implicitly supplied by the audience, that's going to be a judgment already extant in common culture.
Thus, the crux of the problem. Not all value judgments that are part of our common culture are healthy ones.
When a parody (or any kind of humor?) intersects a pathological cultural value judgment, the target of the parody can be unclear. Is it lampooning a behavior? Is it lampooning the marginalization of that behavior?
Effective parody should, therefore, include a scathing portrayal of the forces that create or reinforce the exact situation or problem being parodied. Otherwise, it's no better than mocking a marginalized behavior (and that's just crass).
no subject
Like you, I also hate sarcasm. I've had way too many situations where someone would clearly be insulting me or making a racist double entendre, but when I would object, they would say, "That's not what I meant!" And they'd act all indignant, like I had no right to take the remark the way I did. *sigh*
I also hate irony, which is why I don't normally care for The Onion. I have to keep teling myself they're just kidding, but it's usually hard. I guess I take things too literally.
But unlike you, I love parody. I enjoy changing song lyrics, a la Weird Al. It never fails to crack me up. I also love Monty Python, even though they usually make no sense, which is part of their charm for me. I also love puns and word play.
So I guess I'm not totally without hope. :)
no subject
I do get accused of failing to have a sense of humor because I point out to people when their "jokes" are mean instead of funny (or constructed in such a way that it's unclear, either intentionally or not, whether they're complicit in or objecting to the -ism they're joking about).
I'm an advocate of *responsible* humor. :)
no subject
no subject
I think that when people hear or see humor and don't fit its intended audience and they speak up about it, instead of being silently invisible, it can be a powerful act. Powerful acts cause discomfort and one way of dealing with discomfort is by mocking. Hence the backlash humor such as the one you cited.
I don't think I have a stunted sense of humor, by the way. I think I have a very picky, intelligent, and sometimes obscure sense of humor.
no subject
I think that finely crafted humor doesn't necessarily have this issue. That's the basis for my contention that "effective parody should ... include a scathing portrayal of the forces that create or reinforce the exact situation or problem being parodied" (um, assuming that the humorist is actually sympathetic to the victims of those forces. I'm pretty sure I skipped a number of logical steps in there.) If the proclivities of the audience is known, the extra context to identify where the humorists sympathies lie is unneccessary. Or something like that.
Much in agreement with the rest of it.