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Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Desperate Humor
Joel. Isn't he cute?
EXPLAINING THE JOKE.
Everyone's getting all hot under
the collar about Joel
"I Don't Support Our Troops" Stein, including Michelle Malkin,
Instapundit,
and a whole array of folks listed here.
Exhibit A from Joel's offending column in the L.A. Times:
I read it before the other bloggers started noting it, and I have to admit, something about it struck me as "off." So I clicked on his bio right there at the L.A. Times site. Here's what's there.
I've got no problem with other people —
the ones who were for the Iraq war — supporting the troops. If you
think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away.
Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the
Chinese are making money off of.
But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.
But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.
I read it before the other bloggers started noting it, and I have to admit, something about it struck me as "off." So I clicked on his bio right there at the L.A. Times site. Here's what's there.
Joel Stein is desperate for attention.
He grew up in Edison, N.J., went to Stanford and then worked for Martha
Stewart for a year. After two years of fact-checking at various
publications, he got hired as a sports editor at Time Out New York. Two
years later he lucked into a job as a staff writer for Time magazine,
where over seven and a half years he wrote a dozen cover stories on
subjects such as Michael Jordan, Las Vegas, the Internet bubble and —
it being Time and he being a warm body in the office — low-carb diets.
Being desperate for attention, he has appeared on any TV show that asks him: VH1's "I Love the Decade You Tell Me I Love," HBO's "Phoning It In," Comedy Central's "Reel Comedy" and E! Entertainment's "101 Hottest Hot Hotties' Hotness."
After teaching a class in humor writing at Princeton, he moved to L.A. at the beginning of 2005 to write a column for the Los Angeles Times. He still contributes to Time and whatever magazines allow him to. But his heart belongs to you, L.A. Times reader. Only to you.
Being desperate for attention, he has appeared on any TV show that asks him: VH1's "I Love the Decade You Tell Me I Love," HBO's "Phoning It In," Comedy Central's "Reel Comedy" and E! Entertainment's "101 Hottest Hot Hotties' Hotness."
After teaching a class in humor writing at Princeton, he moved to L.A. at the beginning of 2005 to write a column for the Los Angeles Times. He still contributes to Time and whatever magazines allow him to. But his heart belongs to you, L.A. Times reader. Only to you.
He's pulling your chain, guys. He wrote the column specifically to provoke the reaction he's getting. That's what he thinks of as humor.
That's not the end of the discussion, though. He taught "a class in humor writing at Princeton." Wow. That's the funniest sentence in either piece. The whole idea of teaching people to write humor is funny. When you add Princeton as the venue it becomes hilarious. Let me explain.
Writing things that are funny begins with having a sense of humor. That's not something which can be acquired through the ministrations of a devoted instructor. All the technique in the world fails if an underlying comic spirit is absent. Joel's bio is a great example of this principle. The real purpose of the bio is to let us know how cool Joel is by citing all his glossy resume entries couched in what seem to be self-deprecatory terms. But they're not really self-deprecatory. The punchlines are buried under the thunder of the big names Joel drops one after another like so many lead weights: Stanford, Martha Stewart, Time Magazine, Michael Jordan, HBO, Comedy Central, Princeton, and the Los Angeles Times. Someone who really knows funny would either forego lame jokes to present an arid list of credits or dispense with the name-dropping to communicate a persona rather than a Who's Who entry.
That's my real problem with Joel's column. It's a sly and superior attempt at humor that just isn't funny.
So what is, or would be, funny?
Well, there's no point in over-intellectualizing it the way we might if we were teaching Princeton undergraduates about the subject. Funny is always a change-up. Revealing the unexpected at precisely the moment the audience thinks it knows where you're heading. For example, just showing the banana peel and then the dowager slipping on the banana peel isn't funny. If you want laughs, after you show the banana peel, you have to make the audience forget that it's there before she unexpectedly slips on it.
Joel doesn't know this. He thinks it's somehow unexpected that a good liberal would eschew the idea of supporting the troops. That's his banana peel. He shows it to us immediately. Then, without even a hint of misdirection or original insight, WE are supposed to play the part of the stupid dowager who obediently slips on his neon banana peel so that the real audience -- i.e., Joel -- can laugh his ass off.
That's what we call a private joke. It's someting that invariably falls flat when undisciplined and untalented comedians sneak them into movies, shows, and other media.
Of course, it's not at all unexpected that a liberal might realize at some level that he really doesn't support the troops. That's why various conservatives took the piece too seriously. It's also why the real joke is really on Joel. The fact that he thinks he is making a joke -- at a time when American troops are exposed to real danger, maiming, and death, -- demonstrates that whatever he thinks he thinks, Joel truly doesn't give a rat's ass about the troops.
The joke's on him. And I'm laughing my ass off. Because despite his name-dropping and other pretensions, he really is a moral idiot. And much more important, he doesn't know sh*t about funny. No wonder he's "desperate."
And for the conservatives out there, rest assured that Joel Stein is no big villain. He's just a teeny-tiny little villain. A fly swatter is all that's required to deal with him.
UPDATE.Welcome to Michelle Malkin's readers. If you think Stein's column is a damning symptom of Liberal Disease, the New York Times editorial of January 26 is an even worse symptom, and we can prove it. Take a look. You won't be sorry.
