Way, way over the top (10/29/96)
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— It’s always foolish to attempt to explain a joke. — But: I think my intention was not to appeal directly to the [firstorder] fans of Beavis and Butthead, i.e., those who think they’re laughing at them because they suppose they’ve finally found a couple of adolescents even dumber than they are themselves [though actually they haven’t], but, rather, to appeal by indirection to those [secondorder] cultural observers who are fascinated by this phenomenon of people who don’t realize they’re laughing at themselves; and, of course, the apologists who don’t realize the people laughing don’t realize they’re laughing at themselves. — I recall, e.g., having heard some GenX analyst expounding not long ago on the ironic dimensions of the Beavis-and-Butthead boomlet: “Just think of it!” he exclaimed. “MTV making fun of adolescent boys! its own core constituency! — You simply can’t imagine the
New Yorker, say, doing anything so daring!” — indicating that [first] he’d never looked at the
New Yorker and noticed, for instance, the cartoons, and [second] he hadn’t noticed that most of the people watching Beavis and Butthead on MTV, having little or no capacity for the kind of ironic distancing he was projecting, have in effect adopted them as rolemodels. — Because this imagined, this hypothetical, this fondly supposed ironic distancing, so essential to the GenX pose, is completely phony. Isn’t it. — It’s all very well to pretend that those eighty hours a week spent watching reruns of
Gilligan’s Island are mere exercise for your sneer. But meanwhile your brain really has turned to oatmeal. And you’ve started to talk like Bob Denver. — So the point isn’t the [real] absence of irony, but the ironic dimensions of imagined [virtual] irony. — It’s hardly accidental that the plot of
Reality Bites turns on Winona Ryder’s inability to define the word, for instance. — At any rate, when I make fun of the tendency to overintellectualize, I know perfectly well I’m making fun of myself. — I think too much. And I do suck.
____________Ed Wood returns; and other misadventures (7/20/96)
