Oh man, beware this thread. In the past few days I read Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, Post Office by Charles Bukowski, half of Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murphy, started re-reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, saw the new Spielberg version of War of the Worlds, and listened to a lot of Beatles albums while stuck on a plane flying back from Hawaii with this book in my lap (care of my brother who had taken a Beatles class in school for fun last quarter), and as a result I am caught in the thrall of a massive goddamn hippie/armchair-psychology/pop-culture mental feedback loop concerning the human condition and the nature of comedy. I had nowhere to dump this information except here on the Forums. Apparently I am a sad sad person, and this is a goddamn blog.
As usual when I start reading Dirk Gently, I get extremely depressed that Douglas Adams is still dead. More specifically, the irrational but earnest voice in the back of my head keeps asking 1) why he died so soon, and more ridiculously, 2) if he really died, why hasn't he risen from the grave yet, and revealed the true meaning of life to mankind? Surely he knew it.
Okay, maybe not, but that man had a pretty good idea of what was going on. I am of the mind that of all his books, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is the one that hits the closest to "the mark," whatever it is that "the mark" is. The Hitchhiker's Guide books are all about characters who fly around the galaxy sort of half-assedly searching for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, but never find it (and maybe never really intend to) whereas Dirk Gently is in a way about characters who manage to successfully stumble across it completely by accident, or maybe on purpose if Dirk is to be believed.
I wondered tonight (in a non-serious way) if Douglas Adams actually did discover the true meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and managed to successfully write it into Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, but unbeknownst to him was dissuaded from fully including it in the final edition by a time traveler who fed him some nonsense about a vengeful space alien to throw him off the scent. The third Dirk Gently book, which Adams didn't finish because he died, focused in at least one of the plot threads on Dirk mounting an official full investigation of himself. That sentence thoroughly depresses me.
In reading that Beatles book, I discovered that in his youth and much of the early days of the Beatles, John Lennon was a fan of a few sort of ridiculous comedy radio programs, and that sort of thing, and also of course wrote songs like "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite," and more humorous and ridiculous things that I can't remember now. Later in life he seemed to decide that all those comedy shows were stupid and bullshit, and that "Mr. Kite" was a piece of garbage. I'm sad that he got shot before he was able to get over himself if that was possible, and go back and re-comprehend the underlying seriousness present in quality comedy, including the stuff he created and later dismissed as tripe.
Comedy and it's relation to the human condition/the meaning of life/the progress of society/yadda yadda is something that has interested me for a long time, and it always makes me sad when people who successfully tap into crucial parts of that relation die or fuck it up or throw it away before they're truly done. I know using Lennon in that discussion is a little bit stupid and hilarious in itself, but whatever. That's surely not "what he was about" if you want to have a "real" discussion about him or his music, but it was there. I guess if the world at large fully understood the fact that real comedy is utterly serious, and comprehended its power to manipulate thought and emotion, to cut to the core of "the truth" only slightly more easily than it can mislead you to believe something is true that really doesn't make sense if you go back and retrace it logically, it wouldn't be as effective which I guess would be a bit of a bummer, but it sucks when people dismiss it. Things that exist in our society as effective tools for cutting through all the bullshit, or boiling thoughts down to their bare essentials are important, but people often don't get it.
It frustrates me when people say "that actor should shut up about his political beliefs, and stick to acting," or "that writer needs to go back home and write" or "that comedian should stop his goddamn preaching and start telling jokes." These are people whose jobs, in my opinion, if done well and done properly, are to distill things down to as close to "the truth" as they can get. An actor's job is to find the center/heart/truth of their character and make it believable, make it something the viewer can relate to. A fiction writer has almost the same job as an actor, while historical writers and journalists strive to boil down facts to "the truth" through their own personal filters and selective editing (surely journalists and historical writers don't write about everything that happened when recounting an event - they just tell you "the important parts"). I don't think I need to continue this repetition to comedians - their entire job consists of pointing out what really happens in real life. "It's funny because it's true!"
This sort of thing is why I love pop culture and entertainment. Mainstream entertainment, when done well, can act as a major cultural trojan horse, slipping past peoples defenses (starting with the initial defense of "oh that doesn't look like something I'll like," and, if it's done well enough, slipping all the way past many other weird mental blocks and psychological constructs people keep in their heads) and get them to feel something different, see something they haven't seen before, or at it's most extreme, maybe get them to ask themselves a question they haven't asked themselves before. I know that's asking a lot, but it's what excites me about mainstream culture. I love it when things like Coen Brothers films get picked up by the mainstream. I love that for some reason Steven Spielberg has been given the ability by people to tell whatever story he wants, and everyone will go and see it. War of the Worlds isn't the best movie he's ever made by any means - the story is sort of weak even for an adaptation of a tale of aliens who walk around blowing everything up and then randomly die yielding a happy ending. War of the Worlds' story is stupid, Tom Cruise plays a cardboard character of "the bad dad," the kids are basically cliché "Spielberg Kids," but the movie does a great job of showing human fear. It just has a bunch of little iconic blips throughout it that mysteriously ring true to me. For instance, the aliens shoot these hilariously retro green and purple flashing lightning lasers - oh man, it's impossible to describe. To me they were one of the most funny things in that film because they were the 100% standard classic "invading alien" laser, but Spielberg made them genuinely scary. There is a shot early in the film where the characters are hiding in a basement, and outside the windows and through the cracks in the wall you see nothing but black with intermixed huge gigantic flashes of strobing purple and green that would cause a light-bloom programmer to shit his pants 8,000 times out of extremeness and it's actually freaky. They are terrifying. I don't know at all why this is relevant. I was just grinning ear to ear during those moments (while sitting slightly crunched up into my seat with my hand in a fist on my forehead). I think pop culture at its absolute best (see: good comedy, good Spielberg, etc etc other stuff that I've talked about and stuff you can come up with yourself) is awesome in its ability to actually better society, if only a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny bit.
Pop culture at its worst, or at anything other than its best, is another story I guess. Actually one sec, I'll get back to that.
