Circular Humor

On one episode of Family Guy, Peter finds his handicapped friend Joe Swanson severely depressed. While thinking of a way to boost his friend’s self-confidence, a news bulletin appears, reporting on the upcoming “Special People’s Games”. Peter is elated and suggests that Joe enters in the games. The reporter then goes onto the next headline.

Coming up, our expose on conveniently placed TV headlines on sitcoms. But first, Peter, watch out for that skateboard.

Peter promptly slips on the skateboard.

I find this specific flavor of humor effective, and while seven years old, still reasonably fresh. The unrealistic cliche that sitcoms use as segues, the TV headline, is routinely accepted despite its unreasonably coincidentiality. The Family Guy writers took the audience’s acceptance of poor storytelling, and before anyone can really catch on, turns it on its head and satirizes it.

This duplicity in meaning is hardly complex. While some to whom Family Guy’s humor has become obnoxious or those too old to ever really care for it in the first place may not find it laugh out loud funny, but they intuitively “get it”. The humor is classically ironic, where that is defined as saying one thing and meaning another. More specifically, this brand of irony is,

(esp. in contemporary writing) a manner of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., esp. as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion.

A consistent theme in Family Guy is its invokation of cliches from the 80s and early 90s while satirizing them. These cliches were insipid and silly, but there’s nothing wrong with a sudden nostalgic reference to them. Only through simultaneously -and ironically- using and making fun of them does the show give “full expression” to the way many young adults view anything from sitcoms to Star Trek.

As stated, this humor isn’t really hard to understand. Still, if this form of irony is taken one step further, the effect is completely lost on anyone not paying perfect attention. The comedy Undercover Brother is hardly an satirical masterpiece, but its cornerstone achievement is in making fun of stereotypical stereotypes. It is effectively a reaction to a reaction to blaxploitation films, while appearing only to be a reaction to blaxploitation films. If that made your head spin, you now understand most audiences’ confusion. Too many people took it as retreading the work of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy when Undercover Brother was really making fun of them. If you sit here after watching the film and seeing David Chappelle quip, “Babe Ruth… [was a] black man”, what else could the filmmakers be possibly be doing?

This is not only lost on the uncouth masses, but professional reviewers as well. In Ebert and Roeper’s review of the movie, Roeper spends the length of the segment detailing how dated the film’s humor is. When Ebert steps in and points out exactly what I pointed out, Roeper immediately dismisses such complexity. After about five seconds, he becomes viscerally upset since he didn’t “get” the essential cornerstone of a mediocre comedy starring Eddie Griffin and begins angrily nitpicking.

If one of the most important cinematic critics cannot “get” circular humor in a scarcely complex application, how can we assume the “informed” moviegoer, let alone the philistine, understand it themselves?

If an elite reviewer of film cannot understand the subtleties of a mediocre comedy, how can the masses understand the endlessly complex A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?

The book, a decade old without showing a day of its age, explores the pains of its introspective author, Dave Eggers, after both of his parents died within a month of one another. The work, ostensible a memoir, frequently elictits the previously established form of irony in comfounded, compounding forms which demonstrate the author’s anguish of using his parents’ death in a satirical work of fiction. Several times throughout the book, real life friends and family “break out of character” and the fourth wall, and criticize the author’s choices in life or justification in writing the book itself. Eggers prepares his readers for these jarring “conversations” in the “acknowledgments” section, describing the themes as,

• “The unspoken magic of parental disappearance [...]
• The brotherly love / weird symbiosis factor [...]
• The painfully, endlessly self-conscious book aspect [...]
• The Knowingness about the book’s self-consciousness aspect [...]
• The telling the world of suffering as a means or flushing or at least diluting of pain aspect[...]
• The putting this all down as tool for stopping time given the overlap with fear of death aspect[...]
• In addition to putting this down as tool for stopping time, the sexual rendezrous with old friends or grade school crushes as tool for collapsing of time and vindication of self worth[...]
• The part where the author either exploits or exalts his parents, depending on your point of view[...]
• The memoir as act of self-destruction aspect[...]
• The easy and unconvincing nihilistic poseurism RE: full disclosure of one’s secrets and pain, passing it off under a semi-high-minded guise when in fact the author is himself very private about many or more matters, though he sees the use in making certain facts and happenings public[...]
• The fact that, below, or maybe next to, the self-righteousness, and the self-hatred, is a certain hope, instilled far before any of this happened[...]
• The flouting of sublimation as evidence of enforced solipsism aspect[...]
• The solipsism as a likely result of economic, historical, and geopolitical privilege aspect[...]
• The Toph Dialactic: His serving both the inspiration for and impediment to writing of memoir[...]
• The parental loss dialectic: in terms of that factor lending itself well to situations necessitating the garnering of sympathy and also to those requiring a quick exit[...]
• The self-aggrandizement as art form aspect[...]
• The self-flagellation as art form aspect[...]
• The self-aggrandizement disguized as self-flaggleglation as even higher art form aspect[...]
• The self-cannonization disguised as self-desctruction masquerading as self-aggrandizement disguised as self flagellation as highest form of all aspect[...]“

Notice further how Eggers further distances himself from these “themes” by phrasing them awkwardly and unnecessarily scholastically. This distance, or irony, signals us to understand the multidimensionality the work takes. The reader comprehends that Eggers wants to “aggrandize” his loss all the while informing the reader he is fully aware of how distastful publishing the book is.

Ironic, circular humor is not a trifle or inginificant literary device. It is a cornerstone of modern film and prose. I would even argue its place in contemporary music. Such satire can even effectively be traced to those of such stature as Vonnegut, especially in Breakfast of Champions.  Ciruclar humor allows for a whole other dimension of artistic communication, portraying contradictory understandings of truth far more honest and inclusatory than earlier binary models. Confoundingly circular and ironic messages are not just a meaningless fad of postmodernism, but a permanent step in our ability to communicate comprehensively in a world of uncertainty.

Impostor Art

Popularly, when nonintellectuals wish to praise their most cherished books, movies, music, or any other media, they characterize it as “art”. If questioned as to why The Royal Tenanbaums or OK Computer is art, they frequently cite how stimulating it is to experience or the virtuosity of its creators. If further pressed, they may retreat into one of two implicit arguments:

1. Art is a synonym for “really good media”
2. Art is subjective

The first can be dismissed out of hand. “Art” is a very loaded word and it invokes pretenses of intellectualism and meaning. If one wants to communicate that a piece of media is merely very good, there are a few thousand other more accurate adjectives to say so, lest “art”, much like “awesome”, “fantastic”, and “terrific”, loses any connotation beyond an undefined, but extreme degree, of goodness.

The second position has far more merit and is the shared opinion of many academics. It asserts what I assert, that art’s unique ability to communicate defines it. For example, Picasso’s Guernica and Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov present a view of the world that the audience could never understand equally as well through prose alone. However, the subjective view takes it one step further, fracturing into many possible standpoints. It may contend that,

1. The artist’s intentions and abilities are irrelevant and its message is whatever interpreters agree is the best interpretation.
2. All interpretations of the meaning of a work are equally valid so long as the specific interpretation can sufficiently cite the work.
3. The experience of any emotional “meaning” through any media turns the media into art, regardless of one’s ability to cite reasoning within the text (literal or metaphorical) or even to put specific words to what that meaning is.

(1) is what most academics mean by referring to art as subjective and is not a viewpoint with which I totally disagree. Other academics may mean (2) if they have an affinity towards relativism. (3) is in another ballpark all its own, the equivalent of showing up in Wembly Stadium with an intention to watch hockey. This definition is completely uncritical and self-affirming, neutering the word of any meaning it may have had. To paraphrase The Incredibles and others, if everything is art, nothing is art.

If art communicates something only you personally can understand, it really isn’t communicating anything at all. A beautiful waterfall, rock formation, or ocean view has its merits, but it doesn’t “communicate” in any true sense beyond pleasantries like “nature is trying to tell me something”. Your ability to take a look at a mountain and realize you need to change careers or marry the girl is a function of you talking to yourself, not the mountain telling you something you didn’t already know. True art is not a mountain, existing out of chance and the dalliances of nature, but a communication of truth above and beyond your preexisting knowledge base. Whether or not the author intended that specific message is immaterial.

Modern “art” that is only art in that meaningless third sense abounds in the popular culture of the young, educated adults who should really know better. Even worse, it often seems like the “art” is designed specifically so that it sounds meaningful, without possessing any meaning in particular, making it especially malleable for those inclined to such vagueness. Although I won’t go into detail on any of these, here is a list of such titular impostor art popular today.

• The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Anything by Radiohead
• Any song by Coldplay that isn’t related to love
• Anything by David Lynch
• Anything by Wes Anderson
• Juno
• Anything by Quinten Tarantino
• Garden State

There are several common threads running through these. Their underlying dishonesty is the presentation of a vague emotional detachment from modernity and artful dodging or jousting when it comes time to ask why the emotional detachment is so vague. The “artists” or their fans may pretend that the vagueness is an analogue for profundity, which it is as much as the emperor’s clothing was gold.

For example, Reckoner by Radiohead.

Reckoner
You can’t take it with you
Disavow the pleasure

You were not to blame for
Bittersweet distractos
Dare not speak his name
Dedicated to all you, all your needs

Because we separate
It ripples our reflections
Because we separate
It ripples our reflections

Reckoner
Dedicated to all you, all your needs

I’ve listened to this song far more times than I would prefer to admit. The sullenness of Yorke’s voice just sucks you in. The important question is, what the hell does it mean? That the modern world is sad and impersonal and we just need to find a true love to get us through our ridiculous lives, like the “meaning” of the majority of “art” I listed?

I don’t consider myself some literary savant, but can ANYONE tell me what the song is supposed to mean without being flippant about it?

To cite another specific example, here are the lyrics from Politik by Coldplay

Look at the earth from outer space
Everyone must find a place
Give me time and give me space
Give me real don’t give me fake
Give me strength, reserve control
Give me heart and give me soul
Give me time, give us a kiss
Tell me your own politik

And open up your eyes, open up your eyes, open up your eyes, open up your eyes

Give me one ’cause one is best
In confusion, confidence
Give me peace of mind and trust
Don’t forget the rest us
Give me strength, reserve control
Give me heart and give me soul
Wounds that heal and cracks that fix
Tell me your own politik

And open up your eyes, open up your eyes, open up your eyes, open up your eyes
Just open up your eyes

But give me love over, love over, love over this

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse, but there is something fundamentally different than pretty sounding words and something that actually has meaning behind it. Look at the ingenious foresight and subtlety that went into something like Prufrock or Lyrical Ballads and tell me that Garden State belongs in the same category as either.  There is a sharp distinction between the former two, which explain fundamental aspects of the human condition, and the latter, which tells us, that dude, you just gotta live life. That distinction, the place where you draw the line, is where art begins.

I’ll reveal a couple clues that often suggest you might be enjoying impostor art.

If the “artist” refuses to discuss the meaning of his work or gives intentionally vague responses, acting as if the discussion is beneath him, you might be enjoying impostor art.

If ostentatious wordplay or similar virtuosity is the focal point of the “artist’s” oeuvre, you might be enjoying impostor art.

If you’re reading/listening to lyrics that smell oddly familiar to a poem you were forced to read in 11th grade, but you cannot make out any real meaning to the lyrics despite years more wisdom, you might be enjoying impostor art.

If the protagonist in the movie you’re watching comes from a rich background and acts unnaturally stilted in speech or mannerism, you might be enjoying impostor art.

If the “art’s” focus is to set up the “artist” so she can deliver clever, snide comments about mainstream values, which upon consideration, have absolutely no factual basis at all, you might be enjoying imposter art.

Art either implies profundity or has no rhetorical meaning at all. By uncritically accepting whatever band, artist, novelist, or filmmaker is presented to us as artistic, we corrupt the accuracy of any definition of art we may have had. Anointing any media we happen to identify with as “art” is ridiculously elitist, if you think about it. If you don’t enjoy thoughtful, cerebral art – true art – that’s fine. Just please don’t insist that The Brothers Karamazov isn’t art any more art than Juno is.

The Danger of Messianic Figures in Fiction

An archetype found in narratives of all medium is the cosmic, anointed protagonist sent to make the world a better place. This set of protagonists includes “Christ figures” but is not limited to them, as technically “Christ figure” implies that this character must die to meet his goal. This anointed character possesses a specific brand of superhuman ability, whether that manifests itself in intelligence, physical prowess, or magic.

Calling a character the most “x” human ever, where that x can be pretty much anything most Westerners would like to have, is a quick way to create an interesting, “unique” character without having to do much actual thinking. By concentrating all aspects of this character’s greatness into that one x, the protagonist remains “human” and easy to identify with. The character-development portions of the narrative quickly write themselves against the backdrop of showing off all the neat tricks the protagonist can perform with x. The writing and dialogue can be crap, but the audience may remain entranced as it watches what it would be like to be the most x ever.

Unconvinced that this archetype is especially prominent in fiction? Here is a list of films that exhibit this attribute and are either culturally essential franchises, critically acclaimed, or both.

1. The Matrix
2. Harry Potter
3. Good Will Hunting
4. Star Wars
5. A Beautiful Mind
6. Any superhero movie. Ever. Including Iron Man.

That list is not comprehensive and amounts to what I can remember without any research. Of the top 100 grossing movies of all time, I conservatively count 27 to fall unambiguously into this criteria. That does not include situations like The Lord of the Rings series where a secondary figure arguably fulfills the role or when the characters are simply ridiculously skilled at what they do rather than THE greatest at it (Mr. and Mrs. Smith, 300, and several others). I’m not even considering the two instances where a character’s divinity is more than implied, those being The Passion of the Christ and Bruce Almighty. This “archetype” is not just an archetype or a cliché, but a defining aspect of popular modern cinema.

There isn’t anything particularly “dangerous” about popular narratives portraying the same hackneyed storytelling device over and over again. Narratives relying on messianic figures have in a certain sense become a genre of their own, trading in the lust scenes of erotica or the explosions of action movies for a human character with a single, unrealistically strong characteristic. Critics seem completely unaware of their universal effect of turning any movie into a meaningless experiment into a showcase of how neat it would be to be the most “x” person ever. Any meaning found in the acclaimed Rain Man or the universally panned The Wizard flows directly from the genius of either protagonist, as both are character-driven dramas. However, critics seem fixated upon performances, technical virtuosity, or whether or not the movie in question was a ninety minute commercial for the Super Nintendo, rather than the underlying quality and content of either story, which are seemingly identical. To selectively praise equally cliched narratives with messianic figures as a focal point is roughly analogous to giving a Pulitzer to a book of random words simply because the words were spelled correctly and the formatting was pristine. For any popular narrative, the literary application of superhuman abilities is the equivalent of valueless shiny rocks, not a device of meaningful brilliance.

There are yet situations where portraying a character as great is effective and consequential. This is when the narrative only ostensibly tells a story while really making a (allegedly) demonstratively true argument. The writer places importance on developing the argument and the character possesses desirable traits embodying the writer’s philosophy. The best example is Neitzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Zarathustra is not great out of virtue of being really smart or really strong, but by personifying the philosophy Neitzche argues. The reader sees Zarathustra’s reaction to an array of situations. If the reader disagrees with Zarathustra, he rejects Neitzche. If she agrees, this is out of reasonable persuasion, not because Neitzche embroidered his protagonist with irrelevant implications of cosmic greatness.

The titular “danger” in messianic figures is when the author does the opposite. If the writer latches onto one of the aforementioned “x” and applies it to his character, it’s harmless. When that character is then used as a spokesperson for a philosophy, with no argument proffered beyond the fact that this character is the best person ever, it’s ridiculous. In the Ender’s Saga, a series of books succeeding the sci-fi classic, Ender’s Game, the protagonist, a military genius who saved the world with his unquestionable logic and rationality as a child, takes a jarring, unsubstantiated turn towards a condescending form of smarmy relativism later in the series. This turn is scarcely justified by anything but the events in the narrative which uncomfortably fit in with such relativism, and which the protagonist can magically foresee with his massive intelligence.

These books, starting with Speaker for the Dead, do not really ever argue anything. Instead, they promote a value set by stating it self-evidentially within the narrative, and use the endorsement of the messianic figure to provide justification. Such argument is no more than a startlingly clear example of Appeal to Authority, but one that takes it a step further. The “authority” is no more than the author himself. In effect, works such as this, which use irrelevant characterizations of a protagonist as “the best”, argue nothing but that the author’s political and philosophical opinions are true because he said so.

The phenomenal popularity of messianic narratives ensures us a steady supply well into the future. Our enjoyment of watching really smart or really strong or really magical people is fine. We take pleasure in watching seemingly human characters use superhuman powers. However, the audience and critics should not confuse this pleasure with meaning, as the effective differences in plot amongst diverse messianic stories are metaphorically little more than the differences in setting for explosions in an action movie. If the author uses these analogous explosions as a way to vindicate her personal opinions, the work can without further consideration be tossed aside as dishonest and crass. The only exception is an argument wherein a character is great because he embodies the argued philosophy, as in the case of Zarathustra, rather than stating argument is true because the character asserting it is great, as in Ender. It is rare when a messianic narrative holds meaning; I leave it to the critics to begin seeing when they do.

Political Art

One legitimate purpose of art is to demonstrate emotionally and narratively truth that one could not effectively communicate through essays and arguments. Personally, I feel like I learned more about myself while reading The Fall than through any other experience in my life. Camus’s elucidation of guilt and duplicity is one that I could never give justice to; any summary invariably sells the meaning of the book short. That is what makes it art and great art. It is the unique utilization of the medium and the psychological and emotional evidence of indefinable truths of human existence that could only ever be know in the realm of intuition.

That is the key to art that communicates, or to be flippant about it, any art that is more meaningful than pretty doodles. It communicates ideas that can only be known intuitively. It’s hard to prove, through science and unassuming scholasticism, the notion that everyone has the right not to be attacked with a kitchen knife, but most people feel perfectly justified in believing it. That point of view is not wrong, just reliant on art or similarly intuition-based forms of persuasion to make its point (setting aside the idea that we should only protect life because no one else wants to be attacked, which in turn makes other intuition-based, consequentialist assumptions). When we are realistically unable to make normative statements on an issue, we can only make positive ones or none at all.

Art runs into problems when it stops trying to answer questions of what values we should hold and instead answers how we should get there. Art can tell us it’s a bad thing people are poor; it cannot tell us whether the government can fix it. Art can tell us to consider divinity; it cannot tell us to support churches with the state. Believing art can have any impact on whether we should end a specific war or support free market capitalism misses this point entirely. We can test, if not scientifically and especially effectively, whether such actions will have the desired effect. The failure of politicized art is a corollary to the narrative fallacy. Just as trying to shoehorn the events of history into a neat story fails to look at evidence, using art to force one’s conjectural view of life into an idealized vehicle is entirely meaningless.

Rand said,

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man’s nature.

This is absolutely true and as good of a definition of communicative art as any. Ironically, in her own books, Rand misses out the importance of this, the “value-judgments”. All too often, her villains do not somehow oppose the proposed values, but evilly want to subvert them. She later writes a normative argument in favor of capitalism, but her works of fiction suggest an inevitable failure of planning, which in turn is a positive conjecture we may test. Neither flaw belongs in a true work of communicative art.

Rand has been either vilified or beloved, and very much so by what amount to party lines. The academic community is clear in its distaste for either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, which is understandable if not for everything else but its gratuitously awkward “romance scenes.” However, her choice of values, an unholy union of Ludwig von Mises and RIchard Dawkins, is intuitionally based and non-falsifiable, and thus impossible to rationally dismiss. What throws off the analyses of the press and academics is the flaws above, which while are prevalent in art favored by left-liberals, is difficult to honestly assess until you are the target yourself. Only then does it become morally repugnant.

The flaws of The Cider House Rules and the works of Green Day are completely analogous, but far more acceptable to the left-liberal perspective. Each tell a story that matches an argument. By themselves and their nature, they cannot make such arguments.

Art cannot reasonably answer political questions. It can sway political questions as to the values one should fight for, such as the what and the why. Through more effective means can we answer the questions of the whether, the how, and the how much. Attempting to answer questions that cannot intrinsically be scientifically answered should not be categorically scorned, but the methods we use in applying those values one may quantitatively scrutinize. The communicative role of art is essential and important in the way we may form values, but it should never grasp pretensions of being better than empirics and logic in defining the feasibility of the means that may emerge from the values.