The biggest casualty of this terrible conflict has been coherent thought. The simplest sentence is a challenge to construct. A spoken phrase as mundane as "I'm going downstairs to the mail room" seems to blurt out as "Potato-spatula Malamute!" Logic has leaked out of my head. All that's left is absurdism.
At least I can deal with that; absurdism is one of my favorite forms of humor.
I don't mean Absurdism in the Kierkgaard/Existentialist manner; that level of academic psychobabble is a bit more than I can muster in my pseudoephedrine haze. Instead I'm referring to the punchline that revels in the preposterous; one that tosses all logic aside for the sake of a good laugh. Something you'd find in a Monty Python skit...or a Young Ones episode...or The Mighty Boosh...something British.
The British are masters of absurdist humor. Any culture that could introduce "bubble and squeak" and "spotted dick" to the culinary lexicon and keep a straight face has got to be a pro!
Of course America has done pretty well in serving up its fair share of ridiculous brilliance. Take a glance at several decades of Warner Brothers cartoons and you'll find absurdism dancing a merry pirouette with its sister genre slapstick before pulling an improbable anvil from its pocket and dropping it on her head. Dr. Seuss even managed to meld the form with some sort of message to create mutated morality plays. Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot Comics refrained from such aspirations and simply reveled in its own nonsense. And then, of course, there was the Far Side. Two words: Cow Tools.
But sometime after the 1990s America's humor landscape changed. Nobody seemed to have much appetite for brazenly illogical humor anymore. Why? Who knows?
Maybe it's because reality became more absurd; The real world suddenly had Sarah Palin, Balloon Boy and the Tea Party Movement. It's hard to compete with that. It had to change. But was that change good?
It seems the entire genre rebooted itself to its default setting, that most reptilian part of the comic brain: the scatalogical. Cartman gets an anal probe; cue laughtrack. Stewie poops in his diaper; everyone guffaws. Shrek and Donkey pass gas; millions of dollars pour in. I'm not getting it.
Oh, I tried. I wanted to be all liberal and open-minded about embracing this paradigm shift of jocularity. I even attempted to incorporate a fart joke into a performance art piece I was doing on a crowded elevator. All I got were looks of disgust and anger from the crowd. I guess my delivery was off.
So now I sit off the radar scope with my cheap pharmaceuticals and my Zippy the Pinhead books, scratching my snotty head and trying to figure out how to tap the current humor zeitgeist.
But I'll think of something. And when I do I'll potato-spatula Malamute!
Awww, screw it! Here's a cartoon:
