comedy Archive

What the fuck happened at the Republican Presidential debate last night?

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I stopped live-blogging these things a while ago, because they just made me want to cut myself. Or self-immolate on the floor of Congress. In the above, we go from a discussion about birth control to a discussion about… I don’t even know. How denying access to birth control to women is the definition of freedom, or some such. I honestly can’t understand how half the country thinks that giving these people the reins of government would be a good idea. And it’s been depressing the hell out of me (in case you haven’t noticed that I’ve been shying away from this sort of stuff lately). We’re all going to die, and that’s sad (if slightly liberating) enough. But the fact that we’re going to be bossed around by madmen until we finally do perish is, for me, not particularly funny right now.

Umberto Eco wrote, in The Name of the Rose, about Aristotle’s lost works, and particularly a treatise on comedy, whose supposed existence in an obscure monastery’s library in the Middle Ages led to several mysterious deaths, around which the main plot revolves. The professor who taught it to me in my 20th Century Italian Literature class (senior slide, baby), suggested that it was the fear of comedy and the absurd — and their capacity to undermine authority by replacing our fear of the iron fist with laughter at its very existence — that made the antagonist resort to murdering anyone who dared try to find it. And it’s certainly true that satire is an extremely effective method of political protest. Two of the most trusted news sources in American politics today work for Comedy Central, after all. There’s certainly something to be said for that.

The people in the video above? They are pure comedy and absolute absurdism. The shit they’re throwing out is so staggeringly incoherent that the “jokes,” so to speak, write themselves. But to me, that signals something like the end of parody. When all you have to do is quote a politician to get a laugh, a la Tina Fey on SNL, you’ve taken all the fun out of it. It’s not hilarious that people are arguing that easy access to birth control leads to single welfare moms and/or drug addicts. It’s not funny that they’re getting applause for it. And it’s not rotfl that these people are serious contenders for the leadership of the free world.

Or maybe it still is for some people, and maybe I’m just doing a bad job of coping with the deep depravity of human existence right now. At any rate, I’m certainly not laughing about it.