Our BetterMost Community > Chez Tremblay
You know you're a Brokaholic when...
Meryl:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on January 25, 2007, 11:01:58 pm ---Only to a limit. The friend from India had to break away from her reminiscences to answer a Tech Services call. ;D
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:laugh: :laugh:
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on January 25, 2007, 11:01:58 pm ---It doesn't bother me, because those gay characters are scene through the eyes of a character, Earl, who is obviously a Neanderthal. (Oh, dear, I've just stereotyped cave men. ;D )
But don't forget, in the debut episode, even the Neanderthal Earl actually took Kenny the Gay Guy to a gay bar--after he got over his initial panic reaction, of course. And Earl was quite comfortable in that bar once Kenny told him how much he, Earl, had done for him, Kenny.
--- End quote ---
I guess ... It made me cringe a little. But (to paraphrase my favorite line by Gene Hackman in "The Royal Tennenbaums") what doesn't these days? ;D
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: latjoreme on January 26, 2007, 12:55:52 am ---I guess ... It made me cringe a little. But (to paraphrase my favorite line by Gene Hackman in "The Royal Tennenbaums") what doesn't these days? ;D
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Well, nice that it made you cringe, I guess. Maybe a lot is owed to Jason Lee's wide-eyed delivery of his lines. The creators of the show send up so many stereotypes (e.g., in the funeral episode, the woman in India is working at a computer "Help desk"/tech services position) that I find I can't take any of it seriously.
Real case in point: The show is set in some fictitious "Camden County," but I can't help but believe that's a joky reference to the city and county in New Jersey just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia!
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on January 26, 2007, 10:18:06 am ---Well, nice that it made you cringe, I guess. Maybe a lot is owed to Jason Lee's wide-eyed delivery of his lines. The creators of the show send up so many stereotypes (e.g., in the funeral episode, the woman in India is working at a computer "Help desk"/tech services position) that I find I can't take any of it seriously.
--- End quote ---
Yes, it's hard to get offended by Earl himself. He's supposed to be a redneck, so it's realistic to show him as homophobic, and then nice when he can set his prejudices aside. Plus, Jason Lee makes him so cute and funny and goofy and naive and well-meaning that you can't really be offended by him.
I was thinking more of the way the characters are portrayed: Kenny, who is dorky and feeble, and then that guy on the bus-stop bench a couple of weeks ago who, due to a misunderstanding, goes off for a quick tryst in the park with Randy. Compare those to the way Darnell is portrayed. He's funny and has his own quirks, but they don't evoke creaky stereotypes about black people. I can't remember where you stood on the "SNL gay cowboys in the audience" debate, Jeff, but this is sort of the same situation.
Here's something I read recently in Slate that made me think of that SNL debate and that I thought expressed the issue really well. Laura Kipnis is writing about stereotypes in a particular book -- in this case, stereotypes about behavior of straight women and men. But the principle she describes is exactly what we SNL-segment opponents were talking about.
--- Quote ---If there's humor to be milked from the (tragically, all too common) situation of loving someone who doesn't love you back, or from the variety of self-abnegating female behavior on display here, let's call it the humor of painful recognition. The comedy hinges on a willingness to recognize the element of truth in the parody. But the humor of painful recognition is also an inherently conservative social form, especially when it comes to conventional gender behaviors, because it just further hardens such behaviors into "the way things are." The laughter depends not only on our recognizing the world as it supposedly is, but on our leaving it that way; it questions nothing. Consider, by contrast, someone like Sarah Silverman, whose scabrous humor, delivered in that faux-naive girly voice, leaves exactly nothing the same. When Silverman takes on female abjection—most famously, "I was raped by my doctor. Which is such a poignant experience for a Jewish girl"—the clichés are demolished, not upheld; the world as it was is turned on its ear. The laughter isn't from painful recognition, it's the shock and pleasure of smashing conventions instead of toadying to them.
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I didn't find the rest of the piece all that interesting, frankly (though I usually like Laura Kipnis). But for the record, you can read the whole article here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2158215/
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: latjoreme on January 26, 2007, 11:11:02 am ---I can't remember where you stood on the "SNL gay cowboys in the audience" debate, Jeff, but this is sort of the same situation.
Here's something I read recently in Slate that made me think of that SNL debate and that I thought expressed the issue really well. Laura Kipnis is writing about stereotypes in a particular book -- in this case, stereotypes about behavior of straight women and men. But the principle she describes is exactly what we SNL-segment opponents were talking about.
I didn't find the rest of the piece all that interesting, frankly (though I usually like Laura Kipnis). But for the record, you can read the whole article here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2158215/
--- End quote ---
Well, I don't watch SNL--never have, and didn't even for Jake (I think it's healthier emotionally for me to go out on a Saturday night and hang out with my buddies than to sit at home--alone--watching late night television)--so I know nothing about this "SNL gay cowboys in the audience debate" of which you speak, and therefore have no position. Sorry!
That excerpt from Laura Kipnis is interesting. I like that phrase, "the humor of painful recognition." However, I barely know who Sarah Silverman is--I think I read something about her somewhere, so I assume she's a raunchy female comic--but I don't get Kipnis's take that Silverman's joke about being raped by her doctor is a poignant experience for a Jewish girl "demolishes" rather than "upholds" cliches. I would think the joke is funny precisely because of the stereotype or cliche that "all Jewish mothers want their daughters to marry doctors." I can see that the joke turns the cliche on its head, but I don't see that it demolishes (that is, destroys) it--unless by "demolishes" Kipnis means what I'm calling "turning it on its head."
(Edit: Just to note that I'm leaving work early this afternoon, 3:30 EST, to go visit my father for the weekend, and I'll be out of computer touch till I return home Sunday evening, so if I drop out of the conversation, that's why. ~J.W.)
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