>I think it is more general than that. I have been in situations, some
>dating back 20 years, some a lot more recent, where members of priveleged
>groups (rich whites, male physicians, etc.) Told crude anti-black,
>anti-semetic, anti-women jokes and if you didn't "go along" by laughing, the
>response was "you have no sense of humor."
Actually, the character who inspired this thread--one Joe Queenan--is a
frequent guest on the Don Imus show, which along with the Howard Stern
show, encapsulates what's wrong with mainstream humor. Unlike the Marx
Brothers, Mark Twain or Jonathan Swift, humor on these shows targets the
weak, the underprivileged and the discriminated against. I once heard
Queenan riffing on the Imus show about the tackiness and bad food at Red
Lobster restaurants, which was in line with a book he was promoting titled
"Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America."
It's really a snobbish dig at ordinary working people and how they live.
The irony is that Don Imus started out as a blue collar worker and ended up
as a multimillionaire playing off his blue collar mystique. It is all
bullshit, of course. Imus has the reputation of being a "bad boy" who
insults his ruling class guests, but in actuality he is a modern day court
jester. The social role of a court jester was to mock the King without
getting to close to the social relations that give him his real power. You
can also see contempt for working people in shows like SNL or Mad TV, which
offer up skits about feckless messengers, waiters, or truck drivers when
they are not mocking black people or the retarded. The funny thing, of
course, is that these shows are uniformly unfunny. If I was a writer for
one of these shows, I'd be developing material about rich lawyers,
investment bankers or pretentious show business figures, not the wretched
of the earth.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
