Notes for 2/22/07
- Due to some, ah, internal problems at the clapclap household, the above has not been edited as well as it should, so if you're one of the early birds, you're likely to see a different version later tomorrow. I'm sure there are any number of errors both factual and grammatical in there right now, but they'll be gone soon enough. If this bothers you, click your heels together three times and say, "It's only a blog..."- Today's post was partially a reaction to a review of The Sarah Silverman Program by Tad Friend, in The New Yorker. You can read it here. As a whole, it's good, but some of the the things he says along the way are absolutely baffling. For instance, he writes:
Sarah’s crowd punishes sexual indeterminacy: when she suddenly decides that she’s a lesbian, everyone scoffs. 'As a lesbian, I resent your laughter,' Sarah says. 'And all laughter.' Is the joke about identity politics? Lesbians? Or is it on us: So you think lesbians are humorless? At times, you wonder whether you’re laughing with Silverman or at her, and then you realize that she’s laughing at you.The last point is good, but as for what comes before: dude, it's a joke about lesbians. Trust me on this, I went to Oberlin. I've heard that joke before.
- I have two reviews in Flagpole this week, of local Athens bands King of Prussia and The 63 Crayons. The latter will hopefully be interesting even if you haven't heard the band, but the former is actually about music, and it's very positive. I reference the New Pornographers, and that's quite intentional; it's baffling to me why bands are imitating other indie bands but not that one. Well, King of Prussia, intentionally or not, sound like the New Pornographers, and I couldn't be happier about it. Their CD, only seven songs ong, is absolutely wonderful, and I really hope they get some wider attention.
Here is their Myspace page, where you can hear two of their best songs: "Terrarium" and "Misadventures of the Campaign Kids." If you like the New Pornographers, or good guitar-pop in general, you should really check them out. (Ha, and I see they have now changed their motto. Thanks guys!)
Labels: critics, flagpole, king of prussia, notes, reviews, The New Yorker
posted by Mike B. @ 12:01 AM
23 Comments:
Dude, you nailed the 63 Crayons thing.
Wshew, good to know. I felt like I was missing something, but I didn't know what...
Nope. They're sooo post-9/11.
Carl here again. I can't seem to stop defending Sarah Silverman. On the lesbian joke, Friend is closer to the mark than you are, because the joke takes place in the context of Silverman pretending to decide to be a lesbian, while we know that she's not, so when she - while supposedly emulating and admiring lesbians - tells a cliched joke about lesbians, it's not about the joke, it's about the contradiction. Part of the trick, of course, is that the contradiction doesn't work if she doesn't also make the joke funny - that "being offensive" in quotation marks is boring unless you make the quotation marks really blurry, so the viewer will wonder if you are just being offensive. But the laugh she's interested in, I'm convinced, is not the laugh at the offensive joke, but the second laugh that follows, which is the mysterious one: Are you laughing at the skill she's used to make you laugh at something you don't feel you should laugh at? Are you laughing at yourself in contempt because you realize you believe in the prejudice that makes the offensive joke funny? Are you laughing because you realize you just suppressed your laughter at the offensive joke? Are you laughing at the way that she's concealing her disbelief in what she's saying? Are you just laughing out of discomfort?
So yeah, the first laugh is laughing at the lesbian joke. The second laugh is some other kind of laugh - as Friend says, it's as if she's laughing at you with your own mouth.
See, I would just laugh at the lesbian joke just because I think it's funny and not feel particularly reflective about it afterwards; it's the kind of joke I sit around and tell with my lesbian friends on Friday nights, and I don't think I'm particularly strange in that respect. For me and the people I know, those jokes aren't things that conjure self-reflection, they're just funny. I think both Friend and you are misjudging her audience. All the stuff you're talking about is less a laugh and more something that's funny, if that makes sense.
(For instance, I think she's also very much making fun of people who worry about a joke being offensive, so I guess she's laughing at you in that case, but she's not really laughing at me, apparently.)
I don't think we're coming from very different places with this, actually, Mike - but I do think SS relies on the category of "offensive joke" existing for her jokes to work. The lesbian joke is so mild that it's not a great example, but I don't think she's ever without that double-jointedness in her jokes, which is what the whole 'clueless affluent pretty girl' character exists to allow. But she's definitely also questioning how offensive an offensive joke is, in comparison to the offences of reality - treating the vast storehouse of bigoted humour *as* a vast storehouse of kind of imaginative wonders. So I left out one category in my list of second-laugh factors, which is memory. The kind of joyful thing that she celebrates with her humour, in some ways, is that these jokes are unthreatening enough at this point that you can goof on them, that we may all be racist but not *that* racist (or otherwise bigoted) compared to the places these jokes come from. That's where sometimes I think it's almost too easy a laugh, a nostalgic laugh - I can't think of that many cases where she plays this way with, say, Muslim and Arab jokes, because they don't fall into that sweet spot so easily. Anyway, I'll stop quibbling - she's just one of the few comedians I find interesting enough to get excited about talking about her.
oy...
if you have to explain a joke, it probably isn't that funny. there's alot of explaining going on here.
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