Post by Admin on Oct 5, 2016 9:26:21 GMT -6
Here's my theory - comedy - has often been kind of about poking stuff. It's kind of evolved with the times, partly reactively and partly drug by a handful of extremely inventive individuals.
But my thought here is - comedy was pretty tame through the 50s, and then comedians began to - sort of chomp at that bit if you will. And then it swung much further left in the 60s and became much edgier. Not that there wasn't edgy stuff going on before that. It just became more mainstream.
And then the 70s was sort of balls out. The 80s things got more conservative and walked that back a bit. The 90s felt like a time of experimentation in both directions.
But - here's the thing, that reactive part of the comedy beast, I feel like is turning on the left now. Edgy underground comedy seems to be, on that super subterranean level where the lava brews, happening to spite the political correctness and community standards and "safe spaces" that have grown from the left.
Rather than the recently more traditional deal where it seemed more to react to the stodginess of the right.
The left has sort of usurped that role within the social power structure, and - to me it seems like the truly ripe ground for comedy right now, because of that, is - like the subterranean eruptions from the right, like alt-right.
And in a sense, the left leaning comedians that are turning their edge toward defending that against those other sort of "status-quo" defying voices may not be - sort of actually participating in these roles quite the way they see themselves.
It's not a super defined chain of thought, but it's something I've been wanting to post about before it flees my head.
There are a lot of social ideas tied up in it. But it's basically about the direction of comedy and the social roles that comedians play (both knowingly and unknowingly) and if rebellion is as big a part of comedy as I think it may be, is comedy, as a beast, going to be lurching more to the right as the left gradually becomes the more mainstream?
But my thought here is - comedy was pretty tame through the 50s, and then comedians began to - sort of chomp at that bit if you will. And then it swung much further left in the 60s and became much edgier. Not that there wasn't edgy stuff going on before that. It just became more mainstream.
And then the 70s was sort of balls out. The 80s things got more conservative and walked that back a bit. The 90s felt like a time of experimentation in both directions.
But - here's the thing, that reactive part of the comedy beast, I feel like is turning on the left now. Edgy underground comedy seems to be, on that super subterranean level where the lava brews, happening to spite the political correctness and community standards and "safe spaces" that have grown from the left.
Rather than the recently more traditional deal where it seemed more to react to the stodginess of the right.
The left has sort of usurped that role within the social power structure, and - to me it seems like the truly ripe ground for comedy right now, because of that, is - like the subterranean eruptions from the right, like alt-right.
And in a sense, the left leaning comedians that are turning their edge toward defending that against those other sort of "status-quo" defying voices may not be - sort of actually participating in these roles quite the way they see themselves.
It's not a super defined chain of thought, but it's something I've been wanting to post about before it flees my head.
There are a lot of social ideas tied up in it. But it's basically about the direction of comedy and the social roles that comedians play (both knowingly and unknowingly) and if rebellion is as big a part of comedy as I think it may be, is comedy, as a beast, going to be lurching more to the right as the left gradually becomes the more mainstream?