“Progressive intellectuals from privileged classes who are themselves obsessed with gaining material wealth are uncomfortable with the insistence that one can be poor, yet lead a rich and meaningful life.”
This sentence taken from the text Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor from Bell Hooks novel really spoke to me, but it wasn’t until the class on cynicism that I found the angle of approach to write my post. I will establish why I choose this sentence and answer, from there, a question indirectly asked during the class: “What is comedy’s role in entertainment?”.
First, let’s develop on what I understand and take from this quote. Intellectuals from privileged class are generally partly (if not fully) aware of their situation in our societal system. They know where they stand in the financial hierarchy and in what boxes they (or at least their image) fit in society. While they might not be truly happy in this situation, they do have a greater capacity to pay themselves temporary entertainment and materialistic pleasure. If they encounter a happier person with less money (less money meaning here a “lesser capacity” to obtain entertainment and material wealth), they will be directly confronted with the absurdity of their situation.
These pleasures are temporary, shallow and highly superficial. Especially for higher financial class, they are a way of ignoring the dysfunctional aspects of the very system they stand on top of. This behavior is also found in middle class. A large portion of middle class is aware of the atrocities and problems of our system, yet materialistic pleasure and entertainment is a way to forget about it.
Breaking out of these practices is difficult, especially when everybody around you do it, therefore defining what is “normal” and “accepted”. That’s where I made links in my head. If everybody sticks to the mold of the accepted and rely on materialistic wealth and entertainment to distract themselves, entertainment itself is then the way to pass a message to the mass. There’s one specific branch of entertainment that can attack and pick on sensitive, unaccepted and taboo topics: comedy.
One of the best example to me is a stand up comedian from Québec named Guillaume Wagner. Building his entire humour on spitting to the public their own harsh reality, Wagner’s crude style is loved by many but also hated a lot. I will include at the end a link to one of his presentation. The video is in french but here’s the big lines of what he’s saying:
Intro: “Thanks Montreal for existing, you are the best public. I absolutely love that you guys spend so much time in a big city, working a job you hate and getting stuck in traffic. It’s cool because after that you need to come here and pay someone to make you laugh and make you think you’re happy. That’s basically my job so thanks!”
He then proceeds to develop on how people reaches “happiness” in our society: by thinking about nothing (or by not thinking). He then explain what are the top 5 ways of not thinking (basically forgetting about the system’s dysfunctions). Of course he’s pushing the crude humour a lot, basically hitting the crowd in the face with an exaggerated version of their own reality:
- Sex: “Sex is a great way of not thinking about anything. I’m not talking about love or relationship, because you need to think and talk for that, just raw primitive sex.”
- Religion: “Religion is great, it comes with a set of predefined values and ways of acting. All you have to do is plant the whole package into your head and sing songs without thinking about why you do it.”
- Buying: “When you don’t feel well, buy stuff to forget you don’t feel well. It’s basically the same logic as stupidly dancing in the middle of the woods to forget that you’re lost, but yeah keep doing it.”
- A job: “To buy you need a job. Ideally find a job that is repetitive, boring and that slowly erases your personality. That way you become stupider and stupider and reach the perfect state where you don’t really stimulate your brain anymore. At that point you are happy because you’re not thinking about anything. If you’re asked if you like your job, just say yes because you make a good salary. It’s the same logic as saying you like your girlfriend only for her big tits, but yeah, get a high salary job.”
- Television: “Television is a machine created to places ideas in your brain so that you don’t have to think by yourself. Sometimes it’ll remind you that you’re not happy, but it’ll give you clear ways or being happy, such as getting obsessed with your image and buying stuff!”
In my opinion, Guillaume Wagner does it’s job perfectly and crosses some lines only humour can cross. Unlike other comedians, his humour isn’t well hidden behind disguised double meanings: it’s crude, it’s in your face and it directly makes you think. Of course, some people don’t appreciate his humour, because just like building your life around material wealth to find a poorer individual happier than you, paying an entertainer that ends up reminding you of your own reality can be quite “unpleasing”.
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