"Some modern travellers still pretend to find Acephalous people in America."
Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, 1753
- Satire should be funny.
- Rechristening something a part of the female anatomy isn't funny unless you're Dane Cook. ("The Vulva"? What is so quintessentially feminine about it that nothing but external female genitalia will suffice? Is it all the words? Are you frightened by their feminine wiles?)
- Satire should not require the satirist to tell the reader what is and isn't funny. ("This part of the gag wasn't funny"? Do tell.)
- The object of satire should be discernible without having to use a person's real name. ("How can we be sure people will know who satirizing?" "Don't know dude, maybe we should use his real name?" "Excellent idea! Then everyone will know who we're talking about.")
- Satire should be legible. (Font sizes below 2 are strongly discouraged.)
- The satirist should have a passing familiarity with the object of satire. ("Cuteness Cat Friday is four days off"? Do you want to be the Dane Cook of the English department? Because I have some material on airports, cheese, and those crazy things women do to annoy men that's been killing in the Poconos since 1934.)
- Satire should be funny.
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Heath Ledger & Hollywood Clout I wouldn't normally post something like this—I'm none too keen on celebrity culture—but I wanted to note that I find the passing of Heath Ledger unaccountably saddening. Many an underreported (and likely undeserved) panegyric will echo through the media in the days to come, but few (if any) will address much more than the personal nature of this tragedy for those who knew him well or our hypothetical loss as consumers of contemporary cinema. But how hypothetical is our loss? Depends on how powerful the lost actor or actress is. Consider other selective stars who, like Ledger, leveraged their clout such that they only appeared in films they believed in: Had Johnny Depp died at 28 (in 1992), he would be remembered as Private Gator Lerner, Wade Walker, Officer Tom Hanson and Edward Scissorhands. In 1986, the 28-year-old Daniel Day-Lewis would have starred in My Beautiful Laundrette and A Room with a View. A 28-year-old Ralph Fiennes would be remembered as the "star" of a made-for-television movie about Lawrence After Arabia (1991). Now consider all the movies that would not have been produced had these three not thrown their weight behind the pet projects of talented directors. Where would Tim Burton be without Depp? Would Scorsese have been able to reestablish himself after Casino and Kundun had Day-Lewis not unretired to star in Gangs of New York? Would Harry Potter ever hit the screen had Fiennes not committed to play Voldemort? (Maybe.) Point being, the loss of talent with little clout (River Phoenix) has no real impact on what movies get made, whereas losing talent of Ledger's clout alters the Hollywood landscape. There will be no more gay cowboys. (There would have been none had not Ledger signed on. Studios were not feeling favorable to Ang Lee after the smashing success of Hulk.) The fate of the film Ledger was currently shooting, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, directed by the infamously hounded Terry Gilliam (who never would have brought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to screen had it not been for Depp) is darker today than yesterday. Movies already being as bad as they are, I can't help but wonder whether much of my inexplicable sadness is explicably selfish: I would love to've seen what Ledger could've forced the studios to release. Now I never will.PREVIOUS POST
Alan Moore's Watchmen: The Rhetoric of Heroism in a MAD World (The following is a collection of rough notes for a class I'm guest-speaking in on The Rhetoric of Heroism. The intended audience is a group of freshmen composition students. Just something to keep in mind.) During WWII, superheroes fought Nazis. Superman and Captain America took time off from fighting masked novelties to put a whipping on an evil all the more disturbing because all the more mundane: people obsessed with the desire to remake the world in their image and according to their ideology. To your left is Captain America smashing Hitler. To your right is Superman punching a tank. (Because the most effective way for the American government to deploy someone with the ability to melt cities with his eyes and wilt fields with his breath is to send him out with the grunts and have him punch tanks. But I digress.) That moment in our cultural history has passed. As proof, I offer the sad decline of Frank Miller, who not but two decades back put the darkness back into "The Dark Knight." In 2006, Miller decided to revive the tradition of American heroes fighting alongside the American military by sending Batman off to fight Osama bin Laden. His idea was widely reviled. What could one man dressed as a bat accomplish against a worldwide jihad movement? How could Bruce Wayne single-handedly forestall the coming of the Caliphate? The answer was obvious to everyone but Miller, who by this point had become a caricature of himself. All the bold strokes of cinematic excess on exhibit in the two recent films of his work—Sin City and 300—seem to have dulled his critical faculties. (To this day, the publication status of Holy Terror, Batman! remains unclear.) A contemporary audience, composed of people like of you, would mock the absurdity of Miller's nostalgic vision. As gratifying as it might be to see Batman deck bin Laden—there is no small joy in seeing Captain America land a solid hook to Hitler's jaw—as a statement it would be nothing short of perplexing. Why would Batman, the perpetual outsider, act in league with the United States government? As is obvious from the panel on the right, that role is better served by someone without an adversarial relationship to authority; by someone who believes it is his duty (and pleasure) to serve the land that adopted him, however pragmatically, as one of their own; by someone, that is, like Superman. In 1986, at the height of the Cold War, that is precisely what Miller did. To your left are panels from The Dark Knight Returns in which the American flag morphs into the "s" on Superman's chest. Miller could hardly be less subtle. However, the threat facing the nation in 1986 is far different than the one facing America today, as I will discuss in more detail shortly. For now, it is enough to say that the role of the hero in modern society has changed, and the book we'll be discussing this next week,...
Sort of agree with 2-5 - they could have done better than "the Vulva" and I can understand why you'd be upset about 4, but seriously, 1 & 7? The Mom2233 comment had me in stitches. And I thought maybe you had written the last comment yourself...since you're usually the first to try to found humor in your tremendously bad luck. It certainly didn't seem like a dig.
Posted by: surlacarte | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 04:58 PM
Parts of it were funny, but that's statistically inevitable given the 9,000 words they crammed on that page. Most of it read like lame blog clichés. I was waiting for the pajamas, but alas! they never came. (Wait, did I write "alas"? Because I meant "surprise!") I mean, I could go through line-by-line and identify the funny bits -- credit being due where it's due -- but the funny bits are satirical outliers, less about blogs or academia than clever turns of phrase.
(And anyway, were a meteor to crash into my apartment, there's no way I'd ended up "partially blinded." Surely I'd be stricken with infuriating LASIK-halos, such that I would almost always just about to be able to resolve those smudges into words then fail.)
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 05:12 PM
Thank you for the writing tips, Mr. Kaufman. As for point #2, I suggest you take that up with whomever made the decision to subtitle the referenced blog 'a literary organ'.
Posted by: Augustus Ant IV | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 07:06 PM
The low-hanging fruit always tastes the sweetest, I know, I know.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 08:31 PM
I'm afraid I'm a bit confused about the context of this. What failed satire are you referring to?
Posted by: Tom | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 08:46 PM
At first I thought it was that Office riff "The Apartment" about all those academics and their oh-so-funny lives.
I think it is that satire of all the academic blogs.
"The Vulva" = The Valve. I remember, but not strongly, some sort of thing like that being concocted. Satire should indeed be funny, but I wouldn't gauge it with Dane Cook's brand of humor. That man is one step above Michael Winslow (Police Academy fame). I prefer comedians not normally discussed around high school lunch tables.
Posted by: JAKE | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 09:09 PM
I should've been more clear on this one: the English department at UCI has a satirical publication by the same folks who did the MLAde thing last month. On the whole it's funny, but the latest edition shoved in my departmental mailbox consisted of an unfunny satire of Kugelmass's posts on The Valve. Not entirely unfunny, mind you, but mean-spirited. I tried to include enough information for the post to be understandable to a general audience, but see now I failed.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 09:17 PM
http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/parodying-academic-blogging/
The main parody of Kugelmass's Valve posts is BY Kugelmass...hence not mean spirited...(ok, I know the Ant Farm's annonymous, be he outed himself with the post, so I assume this is fair to mention)
Otherwise, I'd totally understand your reaction...but in trying to defend Joe you're actually insulting him. Anyway, it's much funnier as self-parody...all in good fun...
Posted by: surlacarte | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 10:29 PM
And you know, I'm such an idiot that I forgot 1) having read that and 2) having commented on it. I think that has more to do with where I was at the beginning of January than anything else. (At least I hope it does, what with the alternative being grave memory lapses of the sort I don't expect all the drinking to cause for another four or five months, tops.)
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 11:04 PM
Wait, you commented on that post, SEK...seemingly approvingly...so now I'm confused
Posted by: surlacarte | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 11:06 PM
(beat me to it by 2 minutes...)
Posted by: surlacarte | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 11:10 PM
No reason to be confused, two minutes later or what-not. Take my stupidity at face-value, my friend. We'll all be better served in the end.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 11:13 PM
I should point out that "The Vulva" wasn't a coinage, and, as a coinage on par with various outbursts from Dejan et al., is lame.
Posted by: Joseph Kugelmass | Thursday, 24 January 2008 at 01:25 AM
Er, "wasn't a coinage of mine."
Posted by: Joseph Kugelmass | Thursday, 24 January 2008 at 01:25 AM
Now I feel bad for going on record as not finding "the Vulva" funny. Whatever, it was a funny article and a funny edition of the Ant Farm. No need to quibble over individual jokes.
Posted by: surlacarte | Thursday, 24 January 2008 at 04:12 AM