Funny thing

It seems coverage of the recent VP debate got rickrolled.



It's not the first time somebody's held up a funny sign for the camera during an ostensibly serious news event. Perhaps, then, it's not an historic moment, but it does seem potentially to be an historically memorable expression of the Zeitgeist. It seems to say something important about what Generation Y thinks is funny, which is a funny thing, or what they think is serious, which is a serious matter.

I recently read an interview with Woody Allen in which he noted that today's smart kids appear to have the same taste as today's dumb kids, preferring the lowest forms of humor to anything approaching art, bored by Bergman and in raptures over one idiot kicking another idiot in the nards on Jackass. I say he "noted" it, rather than "complained," because the man's smart enough to know that what's past is past - no vehemence of nostalgia can recapture a dead era. One commenter on the interview, while misunderstanding this latter distinction, had an interesting reply: You, Mr. Allen, don't understand our humor today - everything is ironic, so part of the fun of watching someone getting kicked in the nards is the fact that we know that's a stupid thing to find funny. Well okay, but isn't that rather miserably fin de siecle? If we have nothing genuinely funny or engaging or interesting today, the distinction between funny or engaging or interesting and ironically funny or engaging or interesting is bound to be lost on the next generation. This is exactly what decadence, in its proper historical sense, looks like. It is irony so universal as to become cynicism.

That said, I don't mean to imply that the sign-holders behind Chris Matthews were missing the real importance of the moment. It is impossible to disentangle the serious from the entertaining in our contemporary media politics. Certainly the VP debate was, in some genuine and important ways, fake and unimportant. It was a joke, and America was the butt. In short, I can't argue that we aren't in fact at the end of the Enlightenment Era. It is the end of an era, the decadence of something grand, and perhaps that's funny, in a way.