Can you really do this on tv?

WHAT!? :O

 

"Dumb" people laugh at the fart jokes.
"Smart" people laugh at the englightenment brought about by the discovery and mockery of societal faux pas. ;-)

 

Oh, I guess I kinda see. I can relate to this type of thing from Speddy_20. We were watching the Simpsons, and this crazy guy was pretending to be Michael Jackson, and he was white and all fat. BTW, this episode was made before michael was whiter than white people themselves. The crazed man explained he was crazy and was imitating Michael, and Speddy_20 knows what Michael Jackson looks like and said, "They made him look gay." I was like OMG! And he called me a smartass. He only laughs at "low denominator" jokes, and calls funny yet smart jokes dumb since he doesnt get them.

I did laugh though when Peter from FG laughed at the word "Swallow". :smt082

 

Mairsil -

While it can be interpreted like that, you cannot typecast audiences as "dumb" or "smart". Both components are assimilated by all audiences - but they are assimilated in different measures.
The implicit message is not intended to be obvious. That's what makes it become a legitimation instrument - being taken for granted.

 

I don't like South Park... at all really, but the 'punchline' of that (the Aristocrats bit) was pretty funny.

 

So how do the people fit in who don't laugh at the show at all because they find no humor in it - even if it's pretentiously passed off as 'deep social commentary'? I'd like to assume they fall into a "smarter" category, but with the South Park still enjoying the popularity it does, it's painfully obvious that society in general might not think along such straightforward lines of reasoning anymore.

 

I was only trying to give a short (not necessarily the best or most accurate) interpretation of it. Certainly both "groups" can receive and digest the message.

If people do not like the show or cannot find humor in it, that is their loss. It is, afterall, only a television show and not everyone likes every television show. Personally, I think that if you want a show that demonstrates the rapid decay of society, you should not be looking at South Park, you should be looking at American Idol...

 

Eghh, My mom and dad love to watch American Idol.

 

GSL

To avoid any sort of conflict, I would like to emphasize the fact that I did not establish a division between "dumb" or "smart" audiences, as it is impossible to do so.
There are no dumb or smart tastes in entertainment.
There are two narrative layers that form the layered structure that impulses implicit messages. The same could be said of more "intelligent" media, and not just comedy. I think it was Marcuse who discussed this. I'm sure it's some theorist from the 60s, but I just can't pin the name.

You complain about the lack of critical thought in South Park the same way I would complain about the lack of critical thought in Fox News or the USA network. American Idol I have not seen, but if it's anything like the mexican equivalent, I'd rather poke my eyes out with a spoon.

Whichever shows we prefer, or our taste in humour, does not make me dumber/smarter than you are, or you dumber/smarter than I am. We simply respond in different manners, according to our indoctrination in the ideological "apparatus" of the system. Different layers with different messages react with different layers of our own structure of values and ideology, resonate with some, reject some. The implicit component in whichever show we watch legitimises different worldviews according to each audience - but still, things are being taken for granted.


I hope you do not find this analysis pretentious.

 

Well said.

It sounds the same.

 

You're not being pretentious at all, I was just a little bothered by the allusion that there were only the "dumb" people watching the show for the dick and fart jokes, and the "smart" people watching it for an underlying social commentary that I believe to be more projected and accidental than intentional, but that's just me. Though to be honest, I find television in it's entireity to be ridiculous - Marx has been wrong for years, and religion is in no way the opiate of the masses. The endless sitcoms, reality shows, and horribly unobjective news broadcasts are reason enough for me to stay away from it, but what passes for comedy has, for the most part, struck me as horribly dull, and attempts to 'push the envelope' are usually done at the expense of often juvenile humor that overshadows the possibility that any relevant social commentary MAY underlie the potty jokes. I've often had people tell me the same thing about South Park - that it truely masks a detailed analysis of our society and blah blah blah, and to be honest, I never got it and always found it to be a way of rationalizing the viewing of such drivel. But then again, who am I to make value judgements on the entertainment others derive from TV or anything else? I don't profess to tell anyone how to think, but I do take offense to the oft-heard pretension about the show containing a deeper meaning that some people just don't get because they can't see past the crude humor, which to me frankly is bullshit.

But who knows, there could be something deeper behind the show, but I find it a bit counter-productive to have my intelligence lowered by several orders of magnitude just to find some hidden punchline about the cultural zeitgeist.

 

Damn Xerdo, never thought I'd see Southpark as deep intellectual social commentary. But I suppose that's true, there is an implicit message in every episode (and now that you mention it, every other TV show as well.)

GSL, I think you're reading too much into it. I don't think the Southpark guys really give much of a shit about thier show as a vehicle for social change. It just happens that the funniest stuff just happens to be true.

Totally true. I also notice the shows that don't have the underlying social commentary (like say, Drawn together) suck.

I hate reality shows with a passion. At least Southpark invovles some imagination.

 

Oh, I'm pretty sure that the South Park guys really didn't intend anything deeper than poop jokes and such - that's why I used such tentive phrases as "an underlying social commentary that I believe to be more projected and accidental than intentional" or "the possibility that any relevant social commentary MAY underlie the potty jokes" - I wasn't the one arguing for any underlying value.

Looking back, I was being a little redundant, it seems. Note to self: consult thesaurus about "social commentary" and "potty humor".

 

The thing is, every "text" contains a subtextual layer that's where its true meaning lies. Authors do not do this on purpose all the time, but even when we communicate, we create "text" and "subtext" structures that are contained in our messages and their context. Analyse your next conversation, and you'll see layers of text and subtext significance, if you read it carefully.

As for there being something beyond the dick and fart jokes, I know, for sure, there is. I myself used to find most of the humour in South Park extremely crude (and because of it, I was never a fan of the series, in fact, until I saw the movie). I guess after clinically analysing mexican soap operas, talk shows, and american or mexican news broadcasts of all flavours, one becomes numb to the textual layer of stupidity that constitutes pretty much everything on TV. Suddenly, South Park didn't seem so bad and I started watching it. I'm not ashamed to say I enjoy it. A lot.

To me, South Park is a violent criticism of the system - that, in order to "soften" itself, places the very thing the system fears the most in the frontmost layer. It's not precisely elegant, but, for sure, it's very efficient in communicating these messages.
This and many other cultural products are a representation of the violent rejection of the established system of values and social codes, that's disseminated through the institutions and traditional media.

About Marx being wrong, though... Most media analysis currents are derivates of the german critical theory, which is itself a derivate of marxist ideas and media analysis.
The thing is, today's "religion" equivalent opiate is Consumerism. In the end, even religion itself has become a way to ideologically defend the capitalist system and the establishment - supported, precisely, by the forced consumerism of the masses.

I too hate reality shows, because they show the laziness in the manufacture of content. Now they don't even use creativity to come up with fiction that backs their implicit legitimation of consumer culture and empty capitalist values. Hell, they create a "consumer" model character, and implicitly use the values he/she reflects to legitimise components of the system's value structure, while making him/her legitimate in the audience's mind because "everybody else" voted for him to stay. (That's how mexican reality shows work, anyway.)
They don't even disguise it anymore - and they do the same show over and over again.

 

never liked south park, and i probably won't ever understand why and how someone can love this kind of thing.