Drunk for your Amusement Doug Stanhope

By James Curcio
(First run on Alterati.)

No Refunds.

Doug Stanhope Deadbeat Hero from a decade ago.

For years now, I’ve wondered who the next Bill Hicks was going to be. As things grew more and more grim I wondered if maybe we would have no more fool messiahs (Eulogy is the track I’m referring to…) because the meter was just fucking broke and we’ve all become too whitebread and insecure to recognize the rallying call if it comes. “COMEDY IS DEAD, GO HOME, GAME OVER.”

Comedy is a dicey topic these days. In fact, you can't go within a hundred yards of many topics without engaging a twitter boat load of hate your way--sometimes with good reason, and sometimes not. Consider this. The point is that comedy makes people engage with ideas, sometimes incredibly subtle or complex ones, without realizing that they are doing so. Comedy is, in other words, a means of making the public engage in philosophy. I realize that may seem absurd. Just as absurd as it is to suggest that Doug Stanhope is a philosopher? But even if the comedians themselves don't recognize it--and I think Doug does, actually--this is the real task of the comedian. To get people engaged with uncomfortable topics. Laughter is a defense mechanism. But it isn't just a method of diffusion.

But that's the joke!

I'd be remiss in not following up yesterdays post with a point.

muriel clayton

"But it just wasn't that funny." No?

Humor, for what it is worth, is almost impossible to fully explain (though the confusion of expectation seems a regular part of the humor - cognitive dissonance, in other words.) And so often it manages to strike a nerve. If the joke "works," it strikes the nerve and calls the object to mind without causing true offense, we may act offended for the sake of social pretense, but we aren't actually hurt.

But equally possible, it could hurt. It could bring to mind something, possibly something it didn't even aim at, and cause little more than trauma. The fact is, we don't fully know the contents, or more to the point, the history of most other people's minds, and it is almost inevitable that any joke that hits close to home will in fact not so much hit too close to home, as hit a bunker somewhere in the back, full of munitions.

There's nothing to be done, really, in such cases but state ones actual intent, and for the person to realize that you may have still paid an unintentional favor: pain, when it serves its evolutionary purpose, is there to alert us to a problem. It can say, "hey! Look, something else for you to work with your damn analyist on!"

But seriously folks, the point ultimately is not that we should stop joking. It is that we should have compassion for one another at the same time. When joking makes us lose our compassion, when it becomes a front for coldness and allows us to distance from others, then it really is just a prelude for rape, even if it is just rape of an emotional kind.

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Pornocalypse Now (adbusters)

Hopefully I'll have time to comment on this later, but for the time being, I direct your eyes to a surprisingly to the point & thoughtful article about porn in Adbusters:

Second, unlike women, men have largely failed to re-evaluate their sense of purpose in the 21st century. Feminism as a social revolution resulted in the emancipation of the female and the displacement of traditional male roles. Rather than making a conscious effort to resituate “the masculine” in the context of rising gender equality, heterosexual men have in many ways fallen into a subconscious, anti-feminine counterrevolution.

And this takes us back to our imaginary Orwell. Picture him sitting on a couch, in his underwear, at 2:00 a.m. His naked profile lit by the warm glow of a laptop screen. He’s surfing the net, reading about how Hitler invented the first sex doll, which prompts him to play a quick round of Call of Duty. He’s tossing grenades and sniping Nazis, but then he gets bored so he pops in a bukkake DVD and tosses off to the image of a female performer being submerged in seminal fluid. He’s satiated and disconnected but in the virtual world he’s still a dominant, violent, virulent alpha male.

The porn industry, now bigger than Hollywood and pro sports combined, has facilitated the transformation of sex into a liquid consumer good. There is nothing left to separate the individual from the market and the industry’s success has also produced a feedback loop that results in its own intensification. In order to compete with porn, the mainstream media appropriates the pornographic, which in turn forces porn producers and websites to create more vicious and chaotic content. The mainstream becomes porn and porn gradually edges closer to snuff.

Of course very little of this sexual media reflects reality in any way. When watching hard-core porn, one is struck by the message it so desperately attempts to communicate: sex is boring. And the more violent the porn, it seems, the more anti-sex its message. But could anything be further from the truth? Isn’t having sex with another living, human being the one thing that provides the most intense connection with the present moment?

(Read article)