How to Say "Bill Hicks is Overrated" (or Any Other Comedian) Without Mentioning Social Justice

I

Bill Hicks is one of stand-up comedy’s annointed saints, spoken of in the same reverence as Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Lenny Bruce. He is, in fact, hugely overrated.

That’s not say he’s not funny. I remember seeing him in one of his few broadcast appearances, on “Comic Strip Live,” and cracking me up with a story about pulling pranks in high school that ended in permanent injuries for the prankees. Of course, stand-ups probably consider that material to be put together in order to pander to the masses.

He’s got more than a little whiff of all the elements that come boilerplate in a pop culture icon. He started stand-up as a teen, combining classes and late-night sets. He had a confrontational personality. He had a period of “spiritual” awakening brought on by a post-adolescent exploration of drugs and alcohol (cf. Joe Rogan). He was “censored.” He had his bits (allegedly) stolen by Denis Leary, who went on to great success with them. And, just as he was starting to see success--in Britain, which only adds to his “too XXXX for Americans” appeal--he dies of cancer. Instant saint.

The entertainment world is built on telling stories and, just as a charming man is easily charmed (h/t James Ellroy), they are easily suckered in by a good story. [This is why performers are so consistently Leftists. There are no variables or stressors in the Leftist worldview, only arcs, progressions and moments of transformation.] Hicks can more or less fit into the Lenny Bruce narrative of a performer who was “too real” for his audience and his society, mixed in with a little “child prodigy” and “spiritual seeker,” as well as “iconoclast.”

I’m more interested in the development of stand-up as a form. Bruce expanded what was acceptable to talk about in mainstream nightclubs but he was using the style that Mort Sahl pioneered, that of a guy simply talking to the audience. (Before that, Bob Hope developed the style of a recognizable--if comic--human with a distinct personality telling jokes, which rendered obsolete the funny-looking guy shouting gags style of vaudeville.) Bruce is primarily remembered as a martyr for free speech, especially because so few of his performances were recorded and those that exist are from the end of his career, when he would bring a stack of legal documents onstage and comment on them.

[Another note: Someday I might feel like writing about my love for Albert Goldman’s books. He wrote blistering unauthorized biographies of Elvis and John Lennon but started with one about Bruce. He started as a critic and his most notable tic is that he is the original “I liked his early stuff better” guy. He liked only Presley’s Sun recordings, thought Lennon betrayed his talent the moment Beatles left Germany and pursued a recording contract and thought Bruce was best before he turned “dirty” and told discrete bits like “Religion, Inc.”]

Early in the canonization of Hicks, the desire to turn him into the next Lenny Bruce was so fierce that they tried to turn a David Letterman appearance (or two) into a case of censorship. It’s not worth researching to remind myself whether his jokes were “political” (Hicks was political the way saying, “George Bush is a fascist fuck” is political) or crossed the nebulous language line, but it’s enough to say that not having some jokes broadcast on NBC is not the same as “censorship.” I mean, Bruce had to go jail for what he said; Hicks had to go to cable.

After Sahl established the format and Bruce opened the playing field, there wasn’t much more growth available to stand-up outside of the strength of talent and material. Richard Pryor, for example, is an icon because of his incredible talent, not because of his innovations, although an argument could be made that his work opened the form towards confessional, personal work. Why George Carlin is so esteemed, well, I think that it’s a combination of being in the game so consistently for so long, as well as embodying the attitudes that dominate the underemployed, overeducated bourgeoisie from which most modern comedians spring forth.

[I’d love to put a couple of drinks into Robert Klein and ask him about Carlin. Klein’s been active as long as Carlin and was hot stuff in the Seventies as well, but your average comedy nerd today hasn’t heard of him. David Brenner, too.]

As far as I can tell, the only real innovation in stand-up after Bruce was Sam Kinison’s scream. It’s hard to tell all these years later, but to hear comedians tell it, that scream, in an intimate club with the performer inches off the ground and mere feet from the audience, broke the decorum in a way that performance artists dream.

Hick’s innovation, as far as I can tell, is, instead of screaming in the face of the audience, he screamed at individual audience members. Seriously, take a look at this.

Now, consider that, to modern comedians, this is some sort of glorious moment. Hicks is too smart, too funny, too good for this “drunk bitch” and he gives it her with both barrels. Now, I understand that jabbering rummies are a regular hazard and headache for comedians but imagine you didn’t know that and walked into a room where this was going on. Hicks seems unbalanced, more so when you consider the content of what he’s saying to her. “Go see fucking Madonna, you idiot piece of shit,” he says. It’s a weird thing for him to say, I think, indicative of the media-intensive generation of performers that follow him. He’s saying that she’s a bad person because she doesn’t like his performance; in fact, she so bad that she probably like Madonna or something. [Anonymous Conservative would probably have interesting things to say about Hicks’ behavior here; it looks like amygdala overload to me.]

It’s this attitude that leads me to what I think is the most revealing bit he has, Goatboy. In it, Hicks takes on the persona of a demon (sometimes called a “pagan spirit”) and violates, in graphic detail, none other than Debbie Gibson for her crimes against “rock ‘n’ roll.” [“Rock ‘n’ roll” is one of those terms that always leads me to think, “Thanks for stopping by, Grandpa.”]

For those that don’t know, Debbie Gibson is perhaps the most innocuous teen pop star of the Eighties. I can’t stress enough the fact that there was nothing sexual or enticing about her persona at all. She wore acid washed jeans torn only at the knees, brimmed hats on the back of her head and sang about heartthrobs she kissed only in her dreams and anthems about “Electric Youth.” Oh, and she never expressed any affiliation with rock.

I won’t go all Illuminati agenda here but it seems that Gibson’s only crime was being goody-goody and Hicks put himself and his audience firmly on the side of that which debases her. In this way, I guess Hicks was a defining comic of our age, the age that finds innocence, or the presentation of innocence, and has to humiliate it. His attitude struck me as odd back then and disgusting today.

Beyond that, he takes all the attitudes that one expects of an icon of the American Left. He mocks Christians and Southerners as one ignorant, drawling caricature even as he outsmarts them with his own religious knowledge. He ascribes simple, malignant motives to those in power (as always, a monolithic, all-powerful conservative Right, more conceivable during the Reagan-Bush years than today), greed, racism and blood-lust. Organized religion is for idiots and middle America is full of proudly stupid sheep.

For all his reputation, it’s hard to find anything more concrete than a series of poses and attitudes rather than the hard-edged satire we’re supposed to believe he produced. Usually it’s a matter of reductio ad absurdum delivered as, “Hey, idiot, if you think this, why don’t you do this?” Funny enough as strict jokes but never--never--the speaking-truth-to-power prophet we’re told he was.

I imagine that, had he lived, he would have settled into the kind of anti-authoritarian libertarianism that old Leftists come into when they like to drink, smoke and have sex but still believe everything the Left says as long as they haven’t had a conflicting experience. On the other hand, he might have followed his messianic leanings into the kind of bone-headed, formless universalism that Russel Brand likes to dribble.

II

When I write now, it’s only for two reasons. One is that I’ve got something in my head that won’t leave until I get it out in words. The second is that it’s something I think that I haven’t heard anywhere else. The above is the latter.

When looking at Bill Hicks’ work from the whole of stand-up comedy, it’s hard to see what, exactly, is the big deal. He was, above all, a nightclub comic, meaning that he stood in front of crowds and said the things that got a reaction from the crowd. The difference was in his content and pose, inherently polarizing, not in his joke construction or delivery. Hicks talking about inbred Southerners in a black duster was just a flip of your standard Eighties comic in shirtsleeves and a square-bottomed tie talking about the fags. Even the stereotypical comic might end his set with a bit of maudlin talk, maybe about the unhappiness in the world and his chance to brighten everyone’s day, just as Hicks would pepper his act with syncretic references to a cosmic consciousness.

There’s a lot to criticize Hicks for in terms of material. His confrontational attitude seems more self-destructive narcissism than the passion of an artist. His persona was a simple black-is-white reversal of the dominant stand-up persona. His jokes, while often funny, didn’t break any ground in terms of structure. One can even make the argument that he isn’t that funny, if one’s tastes run contrary to his. There are many non-ideological avenues to take if one wants to take him down off the pedestal.

But look up “Bill Hicks overrated” and you’ll find a number of individual forum posts from bewildered individuals asking, “Isn’t the Emperor naked? He looks naked to me.” Anything done by a professional who dares to question St. Bill says the same thing:  He wasn’t Leftist enough.

Primarily, the from-the-left argument is what you’d expect leveled against a straight white man, a category that now can only be considered as an “ally” rather than a leader in the march of Progress. He’s misogynistic and prone to simplistic sloganeering over deep dialectic. His attitude toward smoking is in conflict with the program for a Happier, Healthier Life for All. He probably slipped in the word “tranny” a time or two.

This is the only avenue of criticism available in the media today. The worst of it is not that it’s outrageous, it’s tiresome.

I’ve written before that I’m a bad-movie fan from way back. I don’t watch them as often anymore [the more you’ve seen, the harder it is to find one that really impresses you, just like anything else], but I do have subscriptions to a few bad movie podcasts. [I recommend, just as everyone does, The Flop House, which is hilarious without entering the territory I’m about to describe.] I’ve got a love-hate relationship with How Did This Get Made? because they tend to work themselves up way beyond what’s necessary. I mean, I went to the last Twilight movie because they made it sound crazy when it was just as boring as any of the others. But, more germane to the conversation, there’s always a danger of the hosts, particularly June Diane Raphael, of venturing into cut-rate progressive deconstruction of the films. One episode in particular I had to shut off, for one reason that the conversation had been entirely hijacked toward discussing the gender attitude problems of a film made in the early Nineties. For another, they talked about that time as if feminism were invented in 2002 and all the years before that were like living in Afghanistan for women. Having lived through that time, I can tell you that we heard plenty about the way women and minorities were portrayed.

I unsubscribed from We Hate Movies for just that reason. While the hosts had a good run for a while riffing on the films, in the past year they’ve settled into a default position of mocking the filmmakers’ outmoded racial and gender attitudes. Finally, I got tired of thinking, “That’s not true at all,” instead of laughing.

A big part of my tortuous path to a bachelor’s degree was this attitude, that the only criticism available is from the Left (the New Left, all identity politics). Worse is the attitude that the critic is not only enlightened--that goes without saying--but that he’s operating at a high level of intellectual sophistication. It’s obvious that the schools have gotten only worse, as nearly everyone in the media is a miniature Cornell West.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that that the opinion industry, social, political and entertainment, is done mostly by recent college graduates. They may not write the large feature pieces; those are still for the more accomplished. But the lower levels, the ones writing the short, anonymous pieces at the beginnings of magazines and, now, the quickie blog posts, are staffed entirely by juniors. For them, it’s just a stepping stone, leading to more powerful, less visible positions in their respective industries.

This is a problem because they create the contextual frame for our social dialogue. It’s increasingly true that they’re coming from the Ivy League or its West coast counterpart and have been well-trained in the social justice perspective. Their educations are exactly the same, no matter where they went, and they come out believing the same set of principles and get to work broadcasting it.

Youth and the perpetually-adolescent culture we’ve created is vital to the progressive movement because ignorance of history is the lubricant necessary to achieve their ever-distant goals. Young people not only don’t know history, they don’t have history, no experiences against which they can judge their hand-me-down opinions. We’ve had almost half a century since the Civil Rights Act, 60 years from the beginnings of desegregation, almost as much time in the era of women’s liberation, not to mention the Great Society, etc, etc, and the only response to that progress is, “There’s so much more left to be done,” and “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Bill Hicks is the model of our modern social justice warrior, even if his progressive attitudes in the early Nineties are considered backwards today:  To be “right” one merely has to find some position to the left, measure the world against that theoretical standard and preen righteously.

Hicks had talent, presence and charisma; today’s blogger working for, say, The Atlantic or The New Yorker, has only an esteemed degree and the Correct Perspective. We get pieces like Flavorwire criticizing the New York Times for not using the neologistic pronouns its transsexual subject preferred or various outlets categorizing as “problematic” Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, one of the most Rainbow Coalition, Grrl Power shows in existence.

However, I do look forward to the day that NYT is so filled with “ze”s and “xir”s that it looks like a report written in newspeak.

III

This weekend I watched Colin Quinn’s Long Story Short on Netflix. It’s his one-man show detailing the history of the world. It’s not bad but it highlights exactly what’s wrong with the Carlin/Bruce model of stand-up comedy and the larger problems with the political attitudes of performers.

I’ve always liked Colin Quinn, though he’s never been one of those whose career I’ve followed. He’s got the tough-guy New York attitude that doesn’t resonate much with me, but, in the era of I’ve-got-too-many-feelings comedians Quinn’s style (like Nick DiPaolo’s, for example) is at least a refreshing throwback. I’m more likely to watch this kind of performer these days because I’m more likely to agree with a performer who has the attitude that everything is bullshit; at least I won’t have to hear them carry water for the Left and parrot talking points that lost me years ago.

The show is pretty funny; I especially liked the finale in which Quinn portrayed the invasion of Iraq as a bar fight at 3:30 in the morning. Still, it was frustrating to watch because, while Quinn’s grasp of history is miles above the average comedian’s, it would probably get him a C on a 300-level college test. He made a few significant errors and his technique was to turn every country into a character type, making his descriptions of conflicts unbearably glib.

I imagine that history buffs would feel the same as I did. It’s not that he wasn’t funny, because he was. It’s that, in order to get to the jokes, he has to simplify the situations; in doing so, it’s easy to oversimplify and miss what’s interesting entirely. Then the audience walks away with an incorrect vision of the world.

I’m not interested a raging at Quinn for portraying England as a beta male pining for a louche France. Its example points towards why performers are usually so unsuited for “speaking truth to power.”

If you’re in the mood for an angry read, try Paul Provenza’s Satiristas, a collection of interviews valorizing comedians who dare to say that some people are racist and that rich guys are jerks. You know, the stuff that The Man won’t let you say.

The book, after a while, becomes a bit pathetic, listening to Provenza and the subjects congratulating each other for having the guts to say what everyone else is saying, all while exaggerating their opposition. But it’s clear that they really believe that their opinions, as righteous as they are, are in danger of being defeated by those whose motivations are downright evil.

I wonder, though, if they’re not feeling a bit of what Hicks did when he was screaming at the woman who didn’t care for his act. What’s most insidious about Progressivism is that it is a narrative, a story that ties up all loose ends. I imagine that some of that opposition is merely the blank stare of audiences who came into the club to have fun, not be subject to a diatribe about the evils of society. The Progressive narrative is not, “I failed at giving my audience what they want,” but, “Obviously, these people are either racists or sheep and uncomfortable with facing the truth.”

We’re seeing this more and more, the overarching social issue explaining away that which could be interpersonal problems. Someone gives you a dirty look in a store? Must be because they are “fat haters” and not because you’re making a scene about the sizes. There’s little anyone can do to dissuade these people because it’s all based on supernatural knowledge of others’ secret thoughts and it all makes perfect sense in their heads.

But what I find most fascinating about liberal performers, outspoken would-be social prophets like Patton Oswalt, David Cross and Louis CK (all of whom have been very funny), is how limited their experiences have been. Almost without fail, comedians start performing in their late teens and do nothing outside of show business their entire careers. They may travel all over the country but their interactions are only with other show business people, outside of cashiers and servers. Regular people are just audience members.

I’m sure that even comedians spend time talking to regular folks but they are missing those experiences that come from being forced to interact with others different from oneself. They don’t have deal, day in and day out, with the snotty receptionist that eats fast-food every day for lunch and sighs loudly every time she has to do some work. They don’t have to deal with the guy that comes in ten minutes late every day, red-eyed and smelling of stale beer. It’s experiences like those that make people say, “Maybe these people don’t need a hand-out; they need a kick in the ass.”

Combine this with the fact that the modern performer is downright obsessed with entertainment media, and they are just as full of Progressive dogma as your newswire blogger at The Atlantic. And since stand-up comedy has become another branch of Geek Culture, the audience is as schooled as they are.

Hicks got the audience he wanted. Isn’t everything perfect now?

The Nazification of Bowling Leagues

An old one, via Steve Sailer:

Could Bowling Leagues and the PTA Breed Nazis?

... In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Germany had an exceptionally vibrant civil society that included clubs involved in hiking, animal breeding, shooting, gymnastics, bowling, firefighting and singing. The authors’ principal finding is that in cities with dense networks of clubs and associations, Germans were far more likely to join the Nazi Party.

I understand the average person not wanting to figure out Nazi Germany for himself but it's unconscionable for a pundit to throw around the other N-word without some kind of understanding beyond "Nazis are bad." If they're such a bugaboo, wouldn't we benefit from a richer understanding of the movement and its consequences?

I recommend Richard Evans' Third Reich series, which is probably the most thorough history we'll see in our lifetime. We're at a strange time in Nazi history because the last of those alive in that era, even as children, are few and far between. With so few left to defend themselves, progressive historians have begun to paint pre-Nazi German culture as irretrievably evil, making the horrors of Nazi genocide the product of the sinister German Volk rather than the corruptible nature of humanity. Evans' work does much to combat the notion.

This article is especially interesting because it's both a repeat of the Nazi's original intention and a very bad understanding of history. In short, the Nazis took over the bowling leagues. That is, if you were a member of the North Munich Strike Squad, you would have walked in one day to find that your league had been disbanded and you were now invited to join the Strength Through Joy Nazi Bowling League. Membership in the Party was probably something less than optional.

Take the much-referenced Hitler Youth. We are instructed to understand that this was a youth group made up of rabid young Nazis. In fact, it was the Nazi replacement for the Boy Scouts. The boy, like our former Pope, who wanted to go camping and tie knots had no other social outlet than the one with the Fuehrer's name.

It was in this way that the Nazis consolidated power. There was no assembly that didn't have the swastika attached. Nothing was outside of the Party's purview and everything had to be turned towards the Party's goals.

Understanding this, it's both frightening and hilarious that the progressives have come to a similar solution as their arch-rivals the fascists. The bowling league, when directed only towards bowling and camaraderie, is a potential petrie dish for ideas contrary to the Powers That Be. Thus, they should be monitored.

The only saving grace is that a progressive-controlled bowling league, with its quota-mandated teams and handicapped scoring, would be so little fun for anyone that it would die on the vine.

A Word on Pope Francis

I figured that the conversation about Pope Francis' long interview would have faded by the time I adjusted to fatherhood and returned to the blog. That was apparently too optimistic.

So, my two cents:

So far, I haven't been thrilled about Francis the way I was with Benedict. Then again, Benedict was my "return to the flock" pope, so my warm fuzzies may be colored by sentimentality. My interest and path back to the Church has been moral philosophy, so Benedict often seemed to be addressing what I wanted to know.

Not so with Francis, who often seems to be speaking to the liberal worldview. He's from Latin America and a Jesuit, the main sources of the discredited liberation theology. The danger, traditionalists fear, is that his Jesuit background and life surrounded by Marxist politics (though Argentina is hardly the worst of the region) will allow Leftist thinking to infect the pontificate. This will cause, in typical Leftist fashion, the moral authority of the Church to hollow.

I will allow that Francis' statements have been alarming to me and I won't strike the possibility that he may weaken the Church in some manner. However, I believe, as we are called to believe, that the Church is holy and the Bride of Christ. If the Holy Spirit has placed Francis where he is, and we are called to believe that, too, then there is no cause for worry, even if the immediate results look dire.

The Church will always be under siege, even from within. But the highest Power of all is guiding it; there is no need to despair.

Quick Review: Mike Doughty's "Circles..."

I've watched Mike Doughty's discussions of his new album with a sick fascination. He decided to re-record several of his old band's most popular songs, despite the outcry from Soul Coughing fans.

Soul Coughing has a lot of props in the alt-world and one hit, "Circles," is a good example of what they did, stripped-down and slowed-up for the mass market. My opinion is that the band was probably the best amalgamation of the alternative rock movement and hip-hop. Doughty didn't try to rap, which was the most common mistake artists made in the 90s, but instead used the forceful delivery of MC punchlines with a hint of melody. The rest of the band took the influence of sampling and break-beats and delivered something similar to a Bomb Squad (of Public Enemy) sound, aired out for live instrumentation. The old saw is that great artists steal, and Soul Coughing stole the thinking behind hip-hop's sound to create their own.

Doughty is a recovering drug addict and most of his reasons for re-recording these tracks are about band acrimony and general bad memories about his time with them. I can understand trying to reclaim them; I saw him maybe eight years ago and everyone requested SC songs (which he mostly refused)--it must be difficult to be reminded of the worst time in your life every time you step on stage. But I suspect that this is a "Fuck you" to his old band-mates; Doughty can claim a larger amount of the royalties for the same songs.

How's the album? Terrible, mostly. Useless, certainly. None of the songs seem to be re-imagined. They are arranged very similarly to the originals, only wimpier and with a few extra light samples thrown in here and there. The vocals are pushed forward, which is probably gratifying for Doughty but take away from the texture that made SC so good. Without the tension and input of the rest of SC, Doughty's songs lose a lot of their urgency.

Years ago, I read a book about The Beatles' Get Back sessions, the aborted album that was later shaped into Let It Be. The author took each tape and more or less gave a synopsis, ie, the songs they played and the discussions in between. The primary lesson I took was that it's difficult to determine who actually wrote a rock song. Paul would come in with a melody, a chord progression and a couple of lyrics and the rest of the band would flesh it out, making suggestions all the while. Someone might come in with just a riff. The final product is often much different than the original idea. So, who gets the credit?

The real pop revolution of the rock era is that the recorded performance is as important or even more important than the song. "White Christmas" may have been popularized by Bing Crosby but any performer can sing it with impunity. Rock doesn't allow that--witness the popular decline of Pat Boone, who covered R&B tunes as if they were "Three Coins in the Fountain." In the modern pop era, instrumentation and production matter as much as the quality of the song itself.

Doughty's problem with his band-mates ultimately circled around writing credits, just like so many other bands. Doughty was the frontman and originally a solo folk artist and poet. SC's albums are credited to the band, and so they get publishing rights as much as performance royalties. The new album is credited to Doughty alone, but that doesn't mean you should buy it. A good band is a chemical reaction while Doughty's newest is inert.

Ideal of Freedom: Sex Like a Gay Man

What I've found most productive when looking at the world is to be flexible in my philosophies. Not to swear allegiance (though I've had those moments) but to try on a lens and see how the world looks through it.

This is my thinking when I'm exploring conspiracy theories, most importantly the satanic, Illuminati theories. Not only do they apply a level of meaning to otherwise shallow pop culture, they create a new image of the world I know and through which I can compare the map with the territory.

So it is with a layer of credulity and another of skepticism that I read HenryMakow.com. Makow is a (I believe) former professor in Canada who started as an anti-feminist blogger. His interest widened into the global satanic conspiracy, with a bit of Jewish conspiracy thrown in. The Jewish stuff is as non-anti-Semitic as is possible for such a site, emphasizing again and again that the average Jewish person is as much a victim of the conspiracy as the gentiles. A fine line, I know.

The site's quite a hodge-podge of topics, with angry Canadian Muslims criticizing their universities to disgruntled recovering feminists to gloating satanic conspirators contributing. What I've found most enlightening is his repeated assertion that we are being driven to a sexual morality that mimics that of male homosexuals. Lust ranking high above love, casual encounters, group sex, habitual breaking of taboos, emphasis on appearance over everything else.

Reading Vice this weekend, I had that familiar shock of reading something that fits one of my filters. Try "Learning How to Have Sex Like a Gay Man" by Fiona Duncan.

For years, my best women friends and I have bemoaned our inability to bang like our gay male peers, who seemed to practice an ideal of free love we longed for, full of equal opportunity objectification, elective nonmonogamy, unashamed sluttiness, and a communal acceptance of all of the above. Gay sex land was, to us, a magical place where traditional monogamy was possible, maybe, but usually questioned; where jealousy wasn’t nonexistent but it could either be ignored or made hot.

It's the mark of our academic Left that they insist their instincts are wrong and that their theories are right. I can see where Makow is going with this, because going against one's instincts in order to find transcendent bliss is the core of occult esoterica. Duncan reaches the promised land on mushrooms while getting fingered in the midst of a crowd of gay men at a music festival:

I was at the center of a queer Dionysian cabal, and in my post-orgasm rush, I saw God. High in the sky, she rose up: a hologram above the rainbow stage lasers and the sea of bodies.

We could all argue with Duncan and those like her about the dangers of this behavior both to herself and to society but it would make no difference. They have been trained, and trained themselves, to view all resistance as oppression, even if that resistance comes from within.

In the past, I hadn't approached men not because I didn’t want to or men didn’t want me to, but because of the power dynamics of traditional heterosexual relations. The scripts of courtship are well rehearsed: singledom as a path to coupledom and coupledom as defined by a property-oriented monogamy. The woman is the beloved, the man is the lover, pursuer and pursued, blah blah blah. None of this ever fit me. I envied my gay male peers, because they got to start fresh and write dynamics to suit their desires, rather than forcing their desires to fit some predetermined model.

You see, her reluctance to "jump" men wasn't the natural order of the complementary relationship of the sexes, it was a product of "power dynamics" and "scripts." She had to overcome these instincts and to do so she had to make them alien, a role-play injected into her brain before she could make her own decisions.

That, in a nutshell, is why I'm pessimistic about the American experiment. As we've driven further into waters only charted a priori, we've also cut off all paths of retreat. Any phenomenon that disproves the theory is already discounted as fear or ignorance or as a tool of control. The only way back, it seems, is for each individual to wake up, one by one. Most will not until they realize they live in a ruin.

Haneke and the Hollow Audience

Linking to this AV Club article about Michael Haneke's Funny Games (the German and American versions), is really just an excuse to say something that I've been talking about for years.

I'm surprised that writer Mike D'Angelo doesn't mention what every other article mentions about the film(s). In short, the film is about two upper-middle-class young men that torture a similarly affluent family, sometimes physically, sometimes mentally. The most noteworthy scene, at least according to serious critics, is the one in which, in the midst of a moment of toying with a victim, one of the malefactors turns directly to the camera and gives a knowing look.

The idea is that Haneke is acknowledging the audience in order to relate the characters' sadism with those of the viewing public. By watching this, you are in league with the sadists. This is horseshit. It's Haneke's film, not ours, and we participate because we're led to believe that his work is important. It's this reason that I won't watch his films--I don't want to participate.

To compare, imagine a man waving at you from a corner. "Hey, you seem pretty hip. I've got something to show you. It's really cool." You think, "Okay," and come over. He shows you a picture of a woman having sex with a horse. "Ha, ha. Now you're a pervert, too." No, you're not. You've been tricked into seeing something you didn't ask for.

It's disheartening and a dark sign of our times that our most important films are those considered to be "challenging" in the manner of "how much can you take?" Haneke's films are consistently about man's inhumanity to man--is this new ground? Does it need to be addressed by heightening the cruelty and rubbing our faces in it, disconnected from any judgment or resolution?

An artist has to go where the muse takes him but is this the best use of one of the world's best directors? More importantly, what does it say about the elite audience that these type of films are considered must-see?

Part of it, of course, is that the "elite" audience is no longer what it once was. Whereas the audience for "art films" at one time had a grounding in the Western canon and a capacity to understand film language--classic liberal arts training in the humanities. Today's audience is more likely to affect high-culture cinephilia as a status-indicator. Their training is in spotting fictional white men being evil.

The issues in The Seventh Seal or Viridiana, questions of faith and morality, are no longer part of the elite's mindset. A generation ago, the cultured allowed the challenges presented in those films to be taken as conclusions and we're left with a Nietzschean world; the only subjects considered worthwhile are sex, madness and extreme violence.

I played my part, too. When one pursues alternative media--artistic, cult and "bad"--the rabbit hole to extremity is too large to miss. Herschell Gordon Lewis leads to Cannibal Holocaust, leads to the Guinea Pig series. Eventually one looks to discover whether one has a breaking point.

One comes to realize that these extremes have an effect. Not necessarily a long-term, warp-your-mind effect--though that's possible. One gets through a movie showing the detailed torture of someone, or a painting of children being molested or a musical track of pained screams and one is forced to take stock of exactly how he feels. And that feeling is terrible:  disturbed, uncomfortable, dirty.

The films of Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier (truly a waste, considering his earlier work) and works like A Serbian Film are for people who don't know how they want to feel. These are our cultural arbiters, hollow zombies who have no higher calling than their lifestyles, who fill their spiritual voids--a place normally for joy, wonder and love--with depravity, cruelty and disgust and call it high entertainment.

METH LAB! More Semantics...

Quick, what do you think of when someone says "meth lab?" Walter White in a sterilized warehouse? The image one gets from television, Intervention and Law & Order, is of a filthy kitchen with pots cooking, putting out corrosive vapors.

How about a 20 ounce soda bottle?

That's a "mobile methamphetamine lab" according to police and the news media. Couple faces meth charges weeks after release from jail, via WLKY, Louisville.

Naturally, upon finding a coke bottle in the car, the entire building was evacuated.

The locals got all het up, too:

"I just kept getting worked up. My heart is still racing over the whole thing," said William Smith, who lives in the apartment complex.

Is meth made from nitroglycerin? How is it that this "lab," small enough to fit into the pocket of a pair of cargo pants, can endanger an apartment building from the parking lot?

Police later found two more "labs" in the couple's hotel room.

Remember:  "Meth Lab"="Poison" and "Explosion." "Meth Lab" also equals "Walter White's industrial chemical warehouse" and "Coke bottle with 20 Sudafeds and brake fluid."

Where We're Headed

In general, what we're seeing is the dysfunctioning of our society.

We've lived so long with a functioning government, a functioning economy and a functioning society that it appeared indestructible. What does it matter that a political appointee is incompetent, that another entitlement is added to the tax roll, that another individual violates the social order?

The effect is like that of drilling holes in a foundation. One doesn't hurt--even twenty might not hurt. There will be a point, however, when the holes have begun weakening the foundation. Eventually it will collapse.

We see the evidence every day. NSA agents, "qualified" but poorly vetted, tracking their ex's communications. Misappropriation of funding everywhere. Schools playing the testing system. Single motherhood and the attendant problems everywhere. The US is slipping into the Third World, except with electronic gadgets.

When it collapses, it will be like a machine that's never been maintained, lurching and struggling to keep moving, slowing and grinding until it finally comes to a stop.

At least, I hope so. As this happens, the resourceful people whose ancestors built the machine will begin to work around the broken system. Once a critical mass of people start mistrusting the government--not generally but to accomplish whatever specific tasks they want done--then we'll start to see a real change.

What's unfortunate is that, following the principles of anarcho-tyranny, the government will attempt to use its power on those that were always obedient (while ignoring those that won't submit). Luckily for us, the force will be wielded by an incompetent.

The Girl Guides Believe that We All have Saintly Hearts

Dalrock points out the recent change in the Girl Guides' vow. The organization, the UK's Girl Scouts counterpart, now asks girls to pledge to “be true to myself and develop my beliefs” in place of “love my God,” which itself replaces “do my duty to God.”

More than the devolution of the sentiment, it shows a destructive assumption our betters hold.

They seem to believe that there is a lowest common denominator to morality. If we simply remove the strictures of organized religion and other small-mindedness, we could all live happily by following our hearts.

If there is a universal bottom to human behavior, rules which come entirely from one's gut, then it's close to that which we see in the wilds of Afghanistan and the darkest regions of Darfur.

The lowest common denominator is very, very low. It's best that we never approach it.

A Few Semantic Association Games

Reading an article about "sex trafficking:"  Are they talking about trafficking as we've been taught it is, the kidnapping, through force or trickery, of individuals for transport into another country followed by coercion into prostitution? Or are they talking about run-of-the-mill prostitution, with the sad-but-common indignities of pimps and brutality?

The Steubenville rape case:  After all this time, I still don't have a good idea whether the crime was an actual, multiple partner, PIV full penetration gang rape, or what I originally heard, a group of kids that stripped a drunk girl and took pictures with one young man digitally penetrating her. According to the foot soldiers of the feminist ranks, the difference doesn't matter.

"Sexual predator:"  The term conjures a criminal who hunts and exploits the innocent. The label may be applied to those charged with nearly any sex-related offense, no matter how solitary or consensual.

Semantic association has the same problem as diagnosis drift, that the description becomes larger and larger until its original meaning has lost its usefulness. Thus, the "racism" of the lynch mob becomes equal to the "racism" of the little old lady who locks her car door upon seeing a black man. Even the difference in degree is lost.

Thus no victory is ever won, and the enemy never shrinks in ferocity and ubiquity. Thus there is always a need to escalate the war.

A Word on the Sophisticated Defense of Miss Manning

Vice published a pro-trans response to Bradley/Chelsea Manning's announcement that he is seeking a sex change and wishes to be referred to as "she." (I, on the other hand, believe that it's a perfectly good rule to wait until the surgery has been performed and all the legal hoops have been jumped through; if I'm called to refer to Manning, it will be as "him" until something has changed.)

The piece is a middle-of-the road anti-cis rant, notable only for being a typical example of how they are pushing their agenda. A few thoughts.

• The alliance between the homosexual community and the trans community doesn't seem to be an easy fit. In fact, the whole alphabet soup of the alliance (LGBTQ and whatever else has been added in the last two years) is shaky. In a large way, tolerance encompasses the group but gays want tolerance for alternate forms of sexual expression and transsexuals want tolerance for a conception of the human form and substance that really is unlike what we've seen before.
• Feminists have a shaky alliance with transsexuals because of their shared belief in the division between sex and gender. However, it's doomed to fail before the gay union falls apart. Transsexuals change their sex to fit what they perceive to be their gender--in their minds, gender is fixed while biology is not (think about that for a second) while feminists believe that gender is a social construct. This, and it doesn't look good to have men becoming women when the feminist message is that women are victims of our culture.
• As the trans-rights issues become more prominent, it's important to realize that, even in this article, the count in America is 700,000 trans-identifying people. That's 1 in 500. Gay marriage laws only affected the privileges of, at most, 4% of the population; this community is on .2%. Take that with you as the media rants and raves.
• Equally important is to take the propaganda's historical and cross-cultural citations with a big grain of salt. Same-sex attraction has been threaded throughout history. Sex-identity-confusion is very rare.
• Attaching this movement to history is useful because a simple run through our living memory makes a strong case that, put bluntly, gender identity disorders seem to be made up. I see a parallel with the rise in Mulitple Identity Disorders from the 70s to the mid-90s. People didn't seem to have it until they've heard of it. Both conditions being entirely self-reported, its easy to parrot the accepted narrative and receive validation.
• My prediction is that the coming years will see a rise in those that identify as trans and even more so as homo- or bisexual. (Particularly the latter. I imagine we'll see a lot of "retired" bisexuals who've settled into heterosexuality as they've gotten older.) My ugly reason for this? It gives alienated kids a reason to be special. This will be hard to prove, of course, but it's my instinct--how many adolescents flirt with communism, anarchism, goth culture, hippie culture and the like because it creates a more concrete identity as being different from those around them. By increasing acceptance of the fringe, we're increasing the options for the disaffected.
• The focus of the article is that wanting to change one's sex is not a sign of mental illness. I like the sputtering disbelief that Kevin D. Williamson brought up Body Identity Integrity Disorder. For one, the only difference I can see between wanting to cut off one's leg and wanting to cut off one's penis--in order to feel that one's body matches one's internal perception of it--is that the latter has a lot of gender theory behind it. For another, it's a great example of a leftist using the "I can't believe you said that" shaming tactic. How dare you compare two like things! And in the next paragraph, we get sex-change operations compared to body modification--only a square would discriminate against that.
• This is the work in the semantic world we've been seeing a lot of. In the largest frame, so much chatter from the Left is about human and civil "rights" as if these are tangible objects. Americans believe in rights--they're written right into our most seminal documents--so we have a hard time arguing against more and more "rights" being discovered and inscribed into law. In this formulation, a "sex change" is nothing more than a "body modification" like a nose piercing. We have a "right" to modify our body, so why stop at complete removal and change of our genitalia?
• But the argument is betrayed in this line:  

I imagine he opposes less radical body mods like corset piercings as well—or maybe he doesn’t, since he finds them less icky, which seems to be his criteria for who deserves to be labeled “sick” or “normal.”

I used the example of nose piercings, a common alteration. Writer Harry Cheadle just had to use corset piercings, in which several dozen rings are put through the skin on one's back. Those rings are then looped through with ribbon or something similar and pulled, mimicking the tie to a corset. Please note how boring and conventional Cheadle finds this modification, nothing nearly as cool as splitting one's tongue in half. The goal, it shouldn't surprise you to learn, is not to advance the transsexual but to push back at the normal people. It's more r/ selected, passive-aggressive warfare--find your enemy's enemy and help him. Cheadle can't help but identify himself as one of the sophisticated people, who finds a corset piercing an everyday occurrence and has the most up-to-date attitudes toward transsexuals.

• Finally, note this:

Why do so many trans people try to commit suicide? Could it have something to do with the widespread prejudice they face—i.e., people like Williamson calling them mentally ill?

Traditionalists and others on the Right need to find an answer to this kind of question right away. This is the same motor that's behind anti-racism, feminism, communism and anything that's out to destroy society--the slightest whiff of intolerance for the cause du jour is enough to wreck everything. The rate of suicide among post-op transsexuals couldn't be that they are profoundly disturbed individuals who have made irreversible changes--no, it's that someone, somewhere, doesn't like what they've done and they can't live with the intolerance. 

India's Pornographic Invasion

Geez, there sure are a lot rapes in India making international news, huh?

It makes one wonder what's going on over there. Is it that there are actually more rapes in India than before or that the rapes have gotten more horrifying? Or is it that the police are taking it more seriously than before? Or is it that they are getting reported more often? Or is it that their news media is more expansive than before, meaning local crimes get national coverage?

I was lucky enough to travel in India in 1998. I can say that the attitude toward women there is similar to what I've always heard about Italy, namely, that the men there are always on the prowl and free with their hands.

I wonder--and there's no way of knowing this from the outside--if the rapid Westernization of the country has something to do with the upswing in rape. That is, maybe India wasn't culturally prepared for the sexual liberty their American friends have been importing.

When I was there, just as India was becoming a technology center, the internet was hard to find (and I wasn't looking for it; communication was still through land lines). They had cable television, which everybody seemed to love, and Western programming was rare. The culture, despite the grabby proles, was very chaste.

My ex-wife said, "It's like the fifties here." As a long-time student of the other entertainment (I'm nothing if not diverse in my interests), I figured it was more like the mid to late sixties.

I mentioned Bollywood films the other day and it's fairly well known that Mumbai produces films at a rate comparable and sometimes greater than Hollywood. And just like the West in the sixties, India had exploitation films and grindhouse theaters.

I only got to see one, though I would have seen all that crossed my path if I didn't have to take a woman with me. Because these theaters were no place for a woman. My ex-wife definitely got sized up as we walked in. We were able to avoid any untoward activity by buying the most expensive seats, which were probably 8 cents or something.

And even though the aura of the place was seedy and forbidden, the film was, again, surprisingly chaste. There were two female leads. In traditional sexploitation fashion, one was attractive and remained clothed and the other was a bit pudgy and had a nude sex scene.

The story, briefly, was about a couple who go out to the country for their honeymoon and discover that their seems to be haunted. In fact, the elderly owners are pretending to haunt the hotel in revenge for the gang rape and murder of their daughter years before. How this all worked was lost in the Hindi dialogue, if it was addressed logically at all. (Most Indians, and the media, speak in a mix of Hindi and often archaic English. I knew it was their honeymoon, for example, because the husband kept sing-songing "Honeymoon!" in excitement.)

I was charmed by the framing of the sex scene within the context of a honeymoon, as if seeing a couple have extra-marital sex would offend the audience. I was disgusted by the sex scene itself. For one, it went out of focus, like the cameraman covered his eyes out of shame while they were filming it. For another, there was a strange fixation on tongue kissing, with a good 90 seconds devoted to the couple rubbing their fully-extended tongues together. The nudity, too, was strange, like a camera shoved into a dressing room, barely pointed in the right direction, one shot showing a hairless pubis (without the attendant organ) that looked like a rippling plain of flesh.

Bollywood films are long and are usually structured like two feature-length films. It's as if Jaws II played for forty-five minutes, then Sheriff Brody had a flashback in which the entirety of Jaws was played. After the flashback is finished, we watch the second half of the film. This film wasn't quite that accomplished, so we had a little more than an hour of the newlyweds' experience in the hotel and then the same amount of time devoted to the flashback, ending in the aforementioned gang rape which was the second "sex" scene of the film.

At the same time, I found a copy of India's answer to Playboy, which was just as explicit as Hefner's brainchild was in 1967--that is, not very. I did find the advice column particularly interesting, though:  one question was whether the above-the-clothing fondling the writer was engaging with his sister (both early 20s) was normal or not. The magazine, ostensibly for the sexually sophisticated, struck me as sexually naive, if not ignorant.

The mid to late sixties is known as the beginning of the "roughie" era in sexploitation history. The time of "nudie cuties" was over because naked volleyball and window-peeping no longer did the trick. The average pop culture enthusiast has heard the name Ilsa:  She-Wolf of the SS--this is a late entry to the roughie genre. I got the impression that Indian exploitation culture was more or less at that point in pornographic development.

I'll thumbnail the progression from here. The roughies gave way to penetrative sex, through art films like I am Curious--Yellow and "scientific documentaries" along with 8mm loops. That led to Deep Throat and a national conversation about pornography, mainstreaming it to a great degree and eventually losing the violence that marked the late sixties era. Pornography was a legitimate business long before I got to India.

What I'm getting at is that India probably got a full-bore dose of our modern-era pornography in the last ten years. I'm not saying that porn leads to rape but I do say that it alters our perceptions of sex. I also say that the introduction of porn into India wasn't gradual. Their sexual attitudes were changing--Bollywood movies didn't even allow kissing between married couples when I was there--but they probably weren't ready for what the West found common-place. I think it made India a worse place to be a woman than before.

More on the Semantic World

Describing the semantic world is difficult without going into deconstruction-speak, where words start taking quotations and "meaning" becomes ""meaning"" until nothing means anything. But it's a lot more simple than that.

The semantic world is about the associations we bring to abstractions. The pictures we create when we hear a word.

"I like drugs."

If I were to follow that with, "Penicillin is my favorite," you'd be surprised but not confused. I simply took a word with multiple meanings and used it in its less-popular form.

"He lost his toes to frostbite in Africa." Africa, in the understanding we share, is not a place to get frostbite. At the mention of Africa, you might get a picture of the sweltering Congo or the sun-baked Sahara but probably not the frosty peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro. It's possible to get frostbite in Africa but we don't think of it.

The semantic world is the foundation of culture. Culture is having the same associations to the same subjects.

This is obvious but understanding the semantic world is vital at those places where we meet the unknown. "Undefined" is a better term. Are the lights in the woods spirits or the eyes of Vulpes vulpes? Is this investment risky or a sure thing?

The semantic world is a map of our entire environment, physical, mental and beyond. Mississippi is full of rednecks. The Ivy League is full of idiots. Heaven is full of souls.

The semantic world is where we argue. Are people that sleep in the street homeless or bums? Are some of them addicts or debauchees?

Generally, over a long time, the semantic map approaches reality. There are no arguments over what constitutes cheese, for example. The heart is a four-chambered organ. Jerry is a homeless addict--he keeps going to treatment but can't keep a job or pay his rent. Jim is a debauched bum--he tried to smuggle wine into the shelter.

A false understanding of the abstract can only be maintained by studied avoidance of the concrete. That which makes the most sense wins, even if it's later rather than sooner.

The Semantic World and the Narrative

If there's a better name for the semantic world, I'd like to hear it.

Steve Sailer and others talk about the Narrative. In small form, the Narrative is about whatever PC elements apply to a particular news story. Trayvon Martin was a victim of stereotyping in the Narrative, for example. In this way, the Narrative is the way we are supposed to think about hot-button topics when they appear.

In a larger sense, the Narrative is about the West's unerring march of progress. Ideas of the past are conquered unconditionally and today is better than all the days before it. We are smarter and more free than we ever have been but we still must do battle with ignorance and oppression. Tomorrow, more false ideas will be defeated and we will be better people than even today.

More people every day are seeing that the Narrative is fiction as what we see in the media becomes more of an alternate universe than a picture of reality. In this separation we can see what I mean by the semantic world.

The thought first came to me in one of my universities. We were studying early colonial writings about the Americas, particularly Amerigo Vespucci's. Vespucci's accounts were salacious, portraying the natives as being lax in apparel and loose in morals. It was advertising, really, to get royal subjects to become colonists but it was also creating an understanding of the Americas in the European mind. It was an expansion of the semantic world.

Operation in the semantic world is most obvious in talk show monologues. Shallow and obvious, the jokes are precisely about what we all are expected to understand. Lindsay Lohan likes drugs. Donald Trump has weird hair.

And, of course, Paula Deen. The old connection was "Paula Deen=butter." "Butter" is "butter=unhealthy food." "Unheathy food±white trash." Paula Deen also equals "Southern," which also plus-or-minus equals "white trash."

Clearly, there weren't too many steps to "racist," so the revelations of her using the Forbidden Word easily attached that association to her. "Racist" is our cultural trump word, the association that blots out all other qualities. Turn on Letterman tonight and see that "Paula Deen=racist."

I don't mean to start talking in formulas; they don't effectively communicate what I mean, anyway. The semantic world is more of a cloud than clear connections.

Semantic connections are both malleable and stubborn. We're reaching the end of the age in which they have been the most manipulated and moving to a time, I think, of battling understandings.

Let me unpack that statement. In our post-Christ era, understanding of the things in the world was dominated by Catholic meaning. The printing press was an opportunity for that understanding to be both spread and challenged by alternative viewpoints. The marketplace of ideas was open to the public.

The marketplace remained free, if limited by means and geography, until the early 20th century as the media industries became centralized profit generators, the era of Hearst and Pulitzer, the movie studios and the broadcast companies. (Europe and Britain were a little further along and a little different but we've ended up in the same place.)

Around the time of WWII--and I heard about this a lot in J-school--the news industry made it a goal to become objective reporters of the day's events, abandoning the proselytizing that was the reason most newspapers were founded.

Looking back, this aspiration to objectivity was more about sales than nobility, no matter what Edward R. Murrow might tell you. Being a Republican paper in a Democratic city limits the number of possible readers. Still, the ensuing generations of reporters were taught with objectivity as an ideal.

An illustrative thumbnail aside:  Take the different semantic representations of the reporters in The Front Page and those in All the President's Men. In the former, the reporters are eager to find facts that make a hot story; in the latter, the reporters are out to expose corruption.

The main problem with centralization is that the temptation to abuse one's power is irresistible. As the news and entertainment media became more monolithic, it became too easy to editorialize in subtle ways. Show Dan Quayle staring off into space, maybe. Show footage of the president throwing up into someone's lap. What was someone going to do, turn on ABC instead? They're all showing the same stuff.

The internet is a return to the free marketplace of ideas, where anyone can write a book or make a video and have it available around the world, which is more than any content producer in history ever had. The media conglomerates are scrambling as profits fall and their producers cling to their prestige.

As Big Media declines, we're entering an age in which ideas are battling on a more level field. The cognitive dissonance one feels when watching the news is no longer confined to the individual and his immediate circle--now he can go online and find out just how many people think the Narrative is fictional.

All of this happens in the semantic world, the world of our understandings. The monolithic media understands Paula Deen to be a racist; we understand her to be a victim of a PC witch hunt. The monolithic media understands itself to be a noble force of progress; we understand it to be an alienated echo chamber of elites.

The Narrative will fail because it doesn't fit the world as we already understand it, through our own experiences. It will fail because we bring the realities it ignores to the forefront again and again. It will fail because it's about understanding first, reality second.

The colonists eventually discovered that the natives weren't as licentious as they were led to believe.

Current Obsessions: Tyler Perry Part 3

Various thoughts:

Last night I watched the film that started my recent interest in Tyler Perry, Temptation:  Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.

Not surprisingly, I enjoyed that one, too. I was most excited by the element that none of the liberal critics wanted to mention:  the villain is clearly Satan. Yes, the HIV that the female lead gets is none other than the wages of sin.

The film is more a parable than a morality play, a fine distinction but Temptation is allegorical where a morality play isn't. There's even a scene in which the husband descends into Hell, in this case a nightclub, moving past sexy women who stroke his chest to find his wife drunk and probably high as one of several women lounging on the satanic figure. Not to mention that her mother calls him "The Devil" several times.

I've made a couple of theoretical defenses of Perry's films but I don't understand the general distaste for him. His films are fun even when they're completely serious like this one. Sure, there's a message, and it's not a subtle message, but so does every other film, in one way or another.

I guess I've answered my own question. The establishment media thinks they're giving the ultimate damnation when they call Perry's movies "corny." They are corny and neither Perry nor I think that's a bad thing.

If anything, he's rescuing corny movies from oblivion. Watching Leave it to Beaver or The Waltons today, we've got no point of relation. Those worlds are not only not connected to our world, they aren't even part of our semantic world--that is, the Great Depression is more alien to us than Alien. The suburban world of Beaver is now Desperate Housewives. Perry makes sentimental, moral movies that take place in a world with strip clubs, rape and HIV--our world and the world as we understand it. No wonder the "enlightened" hate him.

Temptation is the first non-Madea film I've watched and I had some trepidation about seeing it. I love the character of Madea; she hits me in a way that bypasses my brain and just makes me laugh.

From the outside, it appeared that Madea was just the old stereotype:  a take-no-guff, sassy, moralistic old black lady. She's that but she's also a semi-reformed bad girl. The Madea sub-plot in Madea's Big Happy Family is that she doesn't know (or care) who the father of her adult daughter is. She creates criminal chaos and even goes to jail in, well, Madea Goes to Jail.

Big Happy Family is not the best film, even by the standards of the soap opera style Perry has, but it's a great example of what his movies are all about and a great example of what Madea can do. My favorite scene is a big, big throwback. Madea's single-time lover, Brown, the supposed father of her daughter Cora, has come from the hospital with the news that he's diabetic. Madea and her brother, Joe (also Perry), sling insult after insult at him. This scene is old vaudeville, like watching W.C. Fields throw barbs at a child.

But Big Happy Family's structure is a good example of the mechanical style that the critics don't like. As a mother tries to tell her family that she's got terminal cancer, her children are too wrapped up in their personal problems to hear the news. Madea is called in as an expert and, in the end, deus ex machina.

It's the least deft denouement in a series that isn't know for its deftness. After allowing the animosities between the family members to rise to the surface, Madea sits them down at the mother's funeral and proceeds to tell the secrets and home truths that make them understand and forgive one another. This allows for a comic--and too long--final scene in which Madea goes on Maury to find out Brown is not Cora's father and make the typical Maury scene.