To my amusement, I noticed that my take on the Oscars turned out to be somewhat accurate. It was indeed a rather male-oriented production as far as contemporary show business goes. Thanks to Seth MacFarlane, it turned out to have some ribald male humor, and was not exactly deferential to women. But how could it be otherwise? Without inserting some irreverent masculine playfulness into the mix, it would have been nothing but a sappy sequin fest that would guarantee nearly zero male viewership next year.
However, the jokes – MacFarlane’s boob song in particular – have inspired some rage on the part of humorless women across our nation. I suppose that’s to be expected, but this time there were a number of really, seriously offended men!
Spencer Kornhaber, who writes for The Atlantic, remarked upon the “banality” of MacFarlane’s “sexism and racism at the Oscars.” He was referring to the line about “the banality of evil” in the title of Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial for WWII war crimes. Get it? He’s comparing making jokes about female actresses to the Final Solution, and Seth MacFarlane to Adolf Eichmann. That’s Kornhaber humor. Really funny, isn’t it?
From his article:
But then William Shatner was beamed in for a Family Guy-esque experiment in the meta. Captain Kirk had come from the future to reveal that the headlines the next day would proclaim MacFarlane the worst Oscar host ever, unless he changed his routine. Cut to a clip—from the future, see—of MacFarlane performing “We Saw Your Boobs,” during which he essentially read off a Mr. Skin database of shirtless-actress appearances over time. The bit could have been a hilarious acknowledgement of MacFarlane’s past idiocies—if it had been, like, five seconds long. But no: We got a full minute-plus of breast chronicling, followed by MacFarlane’s definition-of-homophobic insistence to Shatner that he wasn’t a member of the gay men’s chorus he’d just sang with.
From there, the jokes just got more and more… well, what’s the word? Calling them offensive gives them too much power, which isn’t to say that black people shouldn’t have felt uncomfortable about MacFarlane pretending to mix up Denzel Washington and Eddie Murphy, or that half the population needn’t have squirmed when MacFarlane called Zero Dark Thirty’s plotline an example of “a woman’s innate ability to never ever let anything go.” What the jokes were, really, was stupid, boring, and empty: humor that relied less on its own patently sexist, racist, homophobic, etc. content than on admiration for or disgust with the host’s willingness to deliver it. So much of comedy is about the shock of recognition, of seeing some previously unacknowledged truth suddenly acknowledged, but the only recognition MacFarlane offered was that some people say dumb things about other peoples’ gender/racial/sexual identities. Which, of course, should not be shocking at all.
What hole are these guys pulling their indignation out of? Jokes are routinely made at men’s expense, men are ridiculed constantly in media, and yet we must draw the line where women are concerned.
Whether or not MacFarlane’s jokes were politically correct is not necessarily relevant to whether they were funny or not, but that’s exactly what Kornhaber is saying.
I look at the men of my generation and younger who supposedly speak for us, and it’s embarrassing. They are like so many tattletales and teachers’ pets who do nothing but take the fun out of life. Instead of speaking for their peers, they might as well be speaking for old ladies.
Spencer Kornhaber, like so many of our young, male journalists, is a little twat. If anything was inappropriate and humorless, it was his Nazi reference in the title of his article, but let’s be honest: it wasn’t his intention to be funny.
No, if anything, Kornhaber was doing his best to kill humor dead. For that, at least, he has a talent.
