So you equate infantile “potty” humor with Howard Stern encouraging a couple to have intercourse in the entry to St. Paul’s Cathedral?
That, my FRiend, is the very nature of decadence, a decay of societal values, the inability to draw a line between what is acceptable and what is not, which is what I have been defining from the beginning of this thread.
Cohen is a leftist agitator who is seeking fame and fortune for himself and, while doing so, to ridicule American values. And like all cowardly liberals, he attacks Christian pastors, not the Imam.
Yes and no. Both push the bounds of sensibility and good taste in their respective societies, and in many cases, do so with the simple intent of shock. The main difference is in where the societies in question draw their boundaries...not the artist's efforts to push them.
I was really responding to your original post at #6, where you wrote, "But the difference there is that the bawdiness itself did not shock the crowd because it was not beyond the mores of society the humor was being presented to. As far as I can tell, “shock humor” is a fairly recent phenomenon..."
I was making the point that that's simply not true, unless you consider the medieval era, "fairly recent."
Right about 1000 years ago St. Bernard of Clairvaux (from whom my tag line emenates) decried visual imagery not because it was "obscene" by our standards, but merely because it would distract from one's focus on the Divine. What he found in contemporary art was by his standards, shocking, obscene and outside the conventions of good taste for his day...
"How, in the cloister where the monks do their reading, can that ridiculous monstrosity be justified, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What place have obscene monkeys, savage lions, unnatural centaurs, creatures part man and part beast, striped tigers, fighting knights, or hunters sounding their horns ... ? With such an abundant and bewildering array of contradictory forms on show, one would rather read in the sculptured stones than in the books, and spend the whole day wondering at them than meditating on the law of God. Good Lord!"
Believe me, I'm not in any way, shape or form trying to defend Cohen...I have no use for him. I'm merely saying that every time a society draws a line there will be those who push it...it's essentially the Durkheim's constant of humour.