Of course you're right, and I think that's what the first friend and I were kind of getting at. The Family Guy can be fun to watch, it might make you laugh more than the Simpsons, but I tend to completely forget it after I watch it. Which isn't really fair to say, most TV is utterly forgettable, but they both have different things they do, so evaluating them as if they do the same thing is a little strange.
I think the assumption about whether or not something is good is usually whether or not you enjoy it. That's also not entirely true though because there would be no such thing as a "guilty pleasure": that is, something that you know isn't good, but you enjoy it nevertheless.
The whole problem of talking about things in this way is that it is entirely based upon your tastes and opinions, but the language you use is not - something is just "better", and this gets people offended and argumentative.
I think there are a lot of people out there who take this sort of thing very seriously, like the second friend in the story above. He acts this way about a great many things - this and this is the best, etc. and Person A is stupid for not liking it. You know he knows that everyone doesn't agree with him, but he acts as if they should, and if he just talked to them he could get them to see his great wisdom.
Now I feel like I'm talking about myself. But I'm not as bad as some people, I know that.
I take comedy fairly seriously myself. There are things that simply aren't funny, and I think people are morons for laughing. Fart jokes = stupid, for instance. People that make photo albums and put little bubble stickers next to the people in the photograph as if the person is saying them - not funny. It's sad, and pathetic, and lame, and anyone who thinks it's funny is a moron. Photoshopping one person's head onto another's body is, by and large, completely unfunny, and the people that like it are stupid.
But all along I realize that there is no accounting for taste, and my humor is not objectively better than theirs, and so on. Maybe we can have it both ways. Maybe it's true that all humor is created equal, but certain humor is the type that dumb people like, and other humor is the type that smart people like. If someone laughs at "dumb person humor", there's nothing wrong with thinking they probably fit in the Dumb Person category. There is, in other words, still dumb and smart humor, that just doesn't make one better than the other.
Why is photoshopping someone's head on to someone's body not funny? I mean, at some point it was funny, like when the first person did it. Granted now its older than dirt, but still, at some point it was probably hilarious.
True enough, there are obviously temporal elements involved. Whether the photoshop thing used to be actually funny, I'm not sure, but certainly some things were funny at some point and have since ceased to be (or are funny in a different way).
OH MY GOD. What a crime to talk about yourself. *laugh* my stumbling process of defintion follows: Guilty Pleasure - something that you don't enjoy that you do anyway to get away from your own thoughts and as a rebellion against all the people who are telling you what's "good" and "bad" instead of what JUST IS OR Guilty Pleasure - something that you enjoy but have been repeatedly told is "bad".
Good and Bad as concepts really fuck us human beings up, I think.
Of course, it's all more complicated than I can articulate. Language, man. It's slippery.
Another thing that popped into my head: Maybe there are no bad people? [insert laughter at myself here, because that's something I strongly believe but because I haven't talked to you in so long and because I've quotechangedunquote a lot in the interim I feel as though asserting myself would be a bad idea. Ha. Ha Ha. Hi, Kev. I'm going to stop being stupid about talking to you now.]
I think the assumption about whether or not something is good is usually whether or not you enjoy it. That's also not entirely true though because there would be no such thing as a "guilty pleasure": that is, something that you know isn't good, but you enjoy it nevertheless.
The whole problem of talking about things in this way is that it is entirely based upon your tastes and opinions, but the language you use is not - something is just "better", and this gets people offended and argumentative.
I think there are a lot of people out there who take this sort of thing very seriously, like the second friend in the story above. He acts this way about a great many things - this and this is the best, etc. and Person A is stupid for not liking it. You know he knows that everyone doesn't agree with him, but he acts as if they should, and if he just talked to them he could get them to see his great wisdom.
Now I feel like I'm talking about myself. But I'm not as bad as some people, I know that.
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But all along I realize that there is no accounting for taste, and my humor is not objectively better than theirs, and so on. Maybe we can have it both ways. Maybe it's true that all humor is created equal, but certain humor is the type that dumb people like, and other humor is the type that smart people like. If someone laughs at "dumb person humor", there's nothing wrong with thinking they probably fit in the Dumb Person category. There is, in other words, still dumb and smart humor, that just doesn't make one better than the other.
What do you think of my solution?
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my stumbling process of defintion follows:
Guilty Pleasure - something that you don't enjoy that you do anyway to get away from your own thoughts and as a rebellion against all the people who are telling you what's "good" and "bad" instead of what JUST IS
OR
Guilty Pleasure - something that you enjoy but have been repeatedly told is "bad".
Good and Bad as concepts really fuck us human beings up, I think.
Of course, it's all more complicated than I can articulate. Language, man. It's slippery.
Another thing that popped into my head: Maybe there are no bad people? [insert laughter at myself here, because that's something I strongly believe but because I haven't talked to you in so long and because I've quotechangedunquote a lot in the interim I feel as though asserting myself would be a bad idea. Ha. Ha Ha. Hi, Kev. I'm going to stop being stupid about talking to you now.]
And I don't think there are any bad people.
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