Posted on 03/27/2007 10:59:35 PM PDT by chasio649
From time to time, we hear about zany professors of popular culture using their academic credentials to elevate the most aggressively offensive and potty-mouthed TV shows into the Great Works of Western Civilization. What causes these bookworms in academe to slither around trying to intellectualize our cultural rubbish? It's like getting a master's degree in restroom graffiti. Can you really compare "South Park" to Socrates?
That's exactly what happens in a new book titled "South Park and Philosophy." I have no idea who would read all the way through this laughable exercise in excuse-making. The first essay is a riot all by itself. William W. Young III, listed as an associate professor of humanities at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., has titled his essay "Flatulence and Philosophy." The title fits.
Maybe this fellow also delivers lectures on the subject. That's some bang for the buck for parents forking over $31,628 annually to send their child to this sorry excuse for a college.
Young mocks those who find "danger" in "South Park." The only danger, he asserts, is its "depiction of dialogue and free thinking." He believes the perpetually profane Comedy Central cartoon, like Socrates, "harms no one," but provides an education, to "instruct people and provide them with the intellectual tools they need to become wise, free and good."
Citing Socrates, Young says those uptight people who find harm in this television show are inherently opposed to questioning, and questioning things is the source of all wisdom. Many powerful people in Athens found Socrates dangerous because his questioning would "undermine their bases for power."
Young praises the "nonconformist, reflective virtue" of the questioning children of "South Park," and then conflates the chronically clueless parent characters with parents in real life: "The parents of 'South Park' corrupt the children far more than a television show ever could. Like the Athenians, the adults don't know as much as they think they know." In the show, when adults address the children, "the adult usually sounds like a bumbling idiot."
The good professor seems to have no concept that it's the writers of "South Park" who make a living from putting bumbling idiocy on television.
How do professors like this stoop to the bizarre idea that children can be enlightened by a show that labors to fit 160 uses of the S-bomb into a half-hour? A show that delights in having Jesus Christ defecate on President Bush with his "yummy, yummy crap"? How can you elevate that into the idea that watching "South Park" should really be seen as a correspondence course, like Newt Gingrich's "Renewing American Civilization" series?
Young insists we're supposed to be wiser than what's obvious, what's staring at us and screaming at us from the TV set. We're supposed to be swept along by the siren song of Sigmund Freud, who argued that the use of vulgarity is merely verbalizing the drives and desires that we often repress, and that laughter at crude jokes allows us to release our harmful inhibitions.
"This is what makes the show's crudeness so essential," Young argues. It creates a "space" for discussion that keeps us from transforming our repression into violence or social exclusion. "South Park" is, in his estimation, as one of his headings declares, the "Talking Cure for Our Culture." It's much more like a communicable disease.
Young then attempts to argue that "Terrance and Philip," an infantile cartoon within the infantile cartoon, is really one of the better offerings in television: "Is 'Terrance and Philip' really more vapid, crude and pointless than 'Jerry Springer' or 'Wife Swap'? Is it more mindless than Fox News, 'The 700 Club' or 'Law and Order'? The answer is no." He then claims what offends South Park critics is "not that the show is vulgar and pointless, but that it highlights the mindlessness that is television in general."
This is where Young really makes a joke out of himself. Everything on television is mindless in general, and he can make no fine distinctions? To be charitable, comparing "Law and Order" to "South Park" is roughly equivalent to comparing Einstein to your garden-variety grade-school class clown. Or your favorite professor to this walking insult to academe.
There is an ocean of difference between the entertaining and enlightening excellence that the discriminating viewer can find occasionally on television and the mindless drivel that often airs on Comedy Central. But some philosophy professors are too lost in an academic hall of mirrors to notice.
ping! for your list
Either he has never seen the show himself, or is incapable of getting the (anti liberal, anti-pc) messages that they convey
"A show that delights in having Jesus Christ defecate on President Bush with his "yummy, yummy crap"?"
Talk about missing the clue train. That was to make fun of the PC restriction on even showing mohommad in a cartoon, while the network had no problem with Jesus defecating on president bush and everyone else on the screen.
Yep....saw an interview with them...that is exactly why they did it...I like Brent at times...but i figure SP is too low brow for him and in actuality, it goes right over his pea pickin' head...bless his heart.
'stoop to the bizarre idea that children can be enlightened by a show'
Hate to state the obvious, but this show isn't for children. What's his point in pushing the idea that the show is targeted for kids?
I wonder if Brent waxed indignant over The Gospel According to Peanuts. Somehow, I doubt it.
'the mindless drivel that often airs on Comedy Central'
That mindless drivel is exactly what I need after work and reading the news. Geez.
That mindless drivel is exactly what I need after work and reading the news. Geez.
I hope that the very last episode of SP has Butters getting revenge on every single character...especially Cartman.
This article should be in the dictionary under "whooshed."
I can't imagine a more alienating character for our party's image than Brent.
Yep. People at work look at me like that. On the brighter side, I got copies of about 30 episodes for my wife and she watched them on a long roadtrip, laughing all along. Now I have her hooked. At least I got that.
Then again, Our Movie is Napoleon Dynamite, so go figure.
Flatulence and Philosophy
Beans beans, the musical fruit.
The more you eat, the more you toot.
The more you toot, the better you feel.
So let's have beans for every meal.
Lordy Lordy...i have the same story...my wife is hooked also...she gets so mad at Cartman..but you still gotta love the guy...he's at least honest about what he wants ;)
"How can anyone criticize that which gave us Butters?"
Or Mr. Hankey!
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