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.
The look on his face reminds me of someone who can't quite figure out that the stench he is smelling is coming from his own rear.
LOL. I'll bring my hunting bow.
That is South Park's saving grace, it's not PC. I wouldn't even watch the show if it's pure junk or liberal/socialist junk.
Brent maeks a good point but screwed up. The trashing on this thread has been unfair and only hinges on the fact that SP is on our side (roughly).
"...it would be a whole lot better than a lot of the courses we have now."
That is true, but ti's like asking whether you prefer beer in a cracked, leaky gaudy mug or one made out of baked bat guano. You'd opt for the gaudy one but wish you have a proper beer mug.
It would be nice to entertainingly destroy PC without going to the gutter or resorting to mindless violence. As much as I like SP, it is not in anyway shape or form the pinnacle of American entertainment. We've had better and hope we will again.
I'll take the cracked one, assuming the latter means PC. I can't see any way we're getting rid of the guano any time soon, so might as well tell the kids "No, bat guano does not make for a good coffee cup."
Sigh, the choices we have.
That's what I think every election. :)
We make do with what we can. But it's going to be tough. Too many conservatives have fallen for at least one tenet of liberalism.
Well if he wasn't, he was obviously never a little fat kid.
But, you do seem to understand that they were trying to make a point. There are way too many who don't understand that there was a reason they did what they did. Many critics saw it as ridiculing Jesus, and that was it.
Kinda like the Uncle F'er song in their movie of a movie that had the movie-movie audiance leaving the theater ( w/ accompanied minors) about the same time actual parents were leaving with their accompanied minors. The Irony is not lost on the rest of us.
In a similar vain, the great "Three Kinds of People" speach. Expressing the profound in the disgustingly profaine...the ideas expressed would actually make a rather insightful position paper.
Humor is a weapon.
Closer to Socrates than all the hordes of the Tenured.
I must say, that's one thing I like about FReeper women...always a good retort (that, and they can take a joke)! :)
They weren't making a joke, they were making a point -- the point that the "powers that be" had no problem showing the offensive images, even to the point of the blasphemy depicted on the portrayal of Jesus, but that the same powers were too craven to allow ANY depiction of Mohammad, let alone an offensive or obscene one.
It was an amazing depiction of the media's double-standard, where offensive language and imagery against Christian beliefs is deemed acceptable, but the Islamic nutjobs must be appeased at any cost.
Or Mr. Hankey!
Or the towel that is always high on marijuana?
That in itself is a deep, philosophical observation, and oh-so-true.
It is reminiscent of Shakespeares' "Methinks thou dost protest too much", kinda, but more akin to "I think you are trying too hard to convince me that this visual tripe is indeed funny".
I'll go one further: You are a sentient, bioengineered towel who escaped from his military handlers and constantly smokes marijuana.
I thought the sex scene was over the top grossness too. Especially the copraphilia.
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