The Deconstructionist: It’s Not Funny Because It’s True
Where Funny ‘Ha Ha’ and Funny ‘My God That’s Depressing’ Meet.
Hello and welcome to Blood, Blade and Thruster dot come, the on-line compliment to the print version of Blood, Blade and Thruster: the Magazine of Speculative Fiction! Who are you, and why are you here? Wait, don’t answer, because we already know something about you, thanks to the statistics-capturing software that lurks just below the shiny surface of our site. We know what links might have led you here, how many of you are *unique*visitors, how long your visit will last, and what pages you might have looked at. Well, not you specifically, but we can form a general understanding of who is here and why. For example: so far this month, 46 of you have come here chasing a lead on the words ‘ball busting’ which Lucien used to describe winters here in the northeast. But you are not here to read about the winters, are you? You are here searching for another kind of ball busting, the kind often discussed on Savage Love over at the Onion.
Others have come searching for Harry Potter’s cock. That one is my fault- a few weeks ago I wrote about the efforts to ‘sexx up’ the Harry Potter posters, and my essay coincided with Daniel Radcliff’s nude stint in Equs, so where I was talking about the photshopping of a fictional character’s package, you have come looking for the real deal, but are using the fictional character’s name when what you are really after is the actor’s wedding tackle, but maybe that’s not what you want. Perhaps you really do want an image of the fictional character’s junk, and Radcliff is as close as you are going to get. And that has led you here, where this is the best we can do.
Some of you have been led here by less sexual desires - maybe a review of Spider-Man 3 (we can do that), or news on the return of Futurama (sorry- we just quote them frequently), while most of you here for the first time have come to check our submission guidelines. Some folks are even regular readers, and we appreciate that, we truly do, but there’s still that strange fascination with the idea that more than one hundred of the folks here for the first time last month were surfing with one hand on the mouse and the other down their pants.
My first idea was to make jikes about the unlikely circumstances that lead people searching for hardcore (or HarryPottercore) pornography to our sci-fi satire site, but too many of the folks who get here via search engine are looking for porn and there’s almost nothing we can use as a tag or category that doesn’t mean porn to someone. I mean, humor is often exaggeration, but how can I exaggerate the concept that everyone on the internet is looking for porn when everyone on the internet is looking for porn? Sure it’s funny at first, but when an over-enthusiastic description of a harsh winter leads scores of people searching for specific sexual acts to your sci-fi site, well, you can feel the fun slowing down.
I felt a similar slow down watching ‘Lil’ Bush’ on Comedy Central. I saw the episode where Bush goes to Baghdad to do some shopping for his father on father’s day, and the jokes were about how it’s becoming a quagmire, and ends up in the ‘Green Zone’ which is the wealthiest place on earth! with giant dollar-sign mascots and gangs of white guys in suits swimming in piles on tax dollars and so on. I might actual laugh at some of that if I wasn’t halfway to believing most of it. Hey! The Vice President’s former company is making billions on a war that the Vice President was a chief proponent of starting! Isn’t that hilarious? It’s funny like a kick in the gut, and that’s before you start piling the dead soldiers on top.
After 9/11, there was some speculation that irony and satire was if not dead then at least going away for a while. No one knew what it was okay to laugh at anymore, so much so that, according to legend, the 2001 Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner was a solemn occasion until Gilbert Godfrey busted out ‘The Aristocrats’, thereby pushing the line so far that the only possible response as laughter.
The direction Godfrey pushed the line is important. He’d opened with a 9/11 joke and had gotten booed. In comedy, they say, timing is everything, and Godfrey’s first joke was too soon. No one was ready for 9/11 jokes, just as no one was making Katrina jokes while the wind was still blowing and you’re not hearing too many Dafur jokes these days. After all, would even Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal have been so effective if the were actually their ?
So who thought it was a good idea to make a show that’s all about the humor to be found in the Iraq war, and to make that show right now? I mean, I know that my taxes are being given to horrible people who are doing awful things with the money, I know that the U.S. is hard at working repeating all the mistakes from Vietnam while adding some new ones and doing all this the middle of an source of energy that our way of life depends upon, so the stakes are incredibly high, and I know that we are being led through this by a former Texas governor who ducked his own chance to serve in a war and who thinks that the constitution needs more bible. Maybe one day I’ll look back on all this and laugh, but now? Right now? Right now I just want to comfort Jon Stewart as he chokes back the tears of anger every night.
And there’s nothing funny about that.
The Deconstructionist with Gordon Weir appears every Wednesday.