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May 09, 2004
Tortured Humor
As usual this weekend, I tried to get some yucks in from Garrison Keillor, the Car Talk Guys and Michael Feldman of NPR's "What D'You Know?". Feldman, however had the nerve to try a succession of jokes about Abu Ghraib. It went over like a lead balloon. Worse, his rambling interview with the author of Tom Tomorrow continued the pitiful attempt at light banter with the occasional gratuitous swipe at Republicans. Republicans are such idiots because they say Democrats are not patriots.
I can't say that I've ever heard a worse episode.
There's only a certain kind of humor that works about Abu Ghraib and Feldman is incapable of delivering it. One has to have the kind of personna and schtick that allows you to tell somebody in the audience his mother's panties stink. Unless and until you can attain such a level of communication, jokes about torture cannot work. This is something I believe I am capable doing but it's unclear if the audience of Cobb or the blogosphere itself is ready, willing and able to deal with it.
It takes me back once again to Hitchens and Amis, because there is something I perceive about the contemporary Brit that allows him a certain resigned and callous yet intelligently skeptical regard for the absurd. When you can write a story like 'The Little Puppy That Could' as Amis did about nuclear armageddon, you're onto something. Although many will disagree with me, I happen to think that both Will Self and the American T.C. Boyle share this kind of eye. Ultimately Abu Ghraib represents the absurdity of taking weekend warriors and turning them into weekend torturers.
Once upon a time I dreamed of being a New York playwrite, imagine the play about the men and women who listen to talk radio, who take their powerlessness as ordinary Americans seriously and grow as cynical and vulgar as any average taxpayer. In fact, wouldn't that be the best name for it, 'The Taxpayer'. They volunteer as a group for the National Guard in patriotic substitution for midlife crisis after a corporate RIF package sends them to paintball camp. Soon they find themselves on a C-130 landing in Baghdad. Their typical Puritan regard for crime and punishment finds expression as they find themselves in their own prison experiment, etc.
The point of such an excursion is to put American audiences into the context of empowering their own best political and cultural sensibilities in an arena in which there is no possible proper context. Where lawlessness prevails, nobody's law is right. The creation of order requires force, and this is something talked about but never experienced by Americans since in America they have no power. Their experience of it destroys them and recreates them. They can't go home again.
There's the outline of a powerful drama, but very much like I wrote about with the wankers, I would infuse such a drama with stuff like references to 'Fear Factor' worm confections and the ordinary television gross-outs that under the color of authority suddenly become international crimes.
There is no way around this. This means me, this means you. So why is nobody laughing?
UPDATE: Finally, Ayn Clouter finds some humor.
Posted by mbowen at May 9, 2004 08:11 AM
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