Thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video
What is the great American joke?
According to literary scholar Louis Rubin jr
It's the constant gap between American ideals and American realities.
And it pervades all of American satire from Mark Twain, to Kurt Vonnegut ,to Richard Pryor, to our contemporary times.
As he writes, 'There's an incongruity between American rhetoric and American practices. Between mundane circumstance and heroic ideal.
Material fact and spiritual hunger, theory of equality and fact of social and economic inequality.
Between what people would be and must be.
Satire at its best has always revealed these incongruity. It cuts through the noise,
explodes the hypocrisy of our institutions and offers nuanced perspectives into heated social and political debates.
So why do animated cartoons excel in satire? Ever since the Simpsons premiered in
1989 any long-held belief that animated cartoons were solely for children were shattered and now in
2017 animated satires are some of the most critically acclaimed
television we have. A lot of it has to do with the medium itself. One of the satirist central tools has always been
exaggeration, and visual exaggeration is a staple of animation. A show could have models appear paper-thin to satirize
American standards of beauty or maybe someone could come out as gay to their family in front of an entire football
stadium to satirize the absurd process of revealing your sexuality in America. If your dad can't accept you for who you are,
then you don't need him in your life.
'Yeah get him out of your life!'
Indeed the sheer scale of animation allows it to satirize anything.
Live-action is typically limited to a home or a bar or a studio
But animation can go anywhere it wants. In the recent hit Rick and Morty a giant all-powerful head comes to earth and forces Earth's
residents to compete in a universe scale music competition.
"Show me what you got!"
While the episode satirizes all kinds of societal issues, it especially
satirizes our discussions around God. "The old gods' are dead. F### all
previous existing religions. All hail the one true God, the giant head in the sky."
The Simpsons in South Park similarly play with these large-scale capabilities.
It is not uncommon to see an episode jump from a family home, to a government office, to a bar to downtown
businesses and back home again. As writer Kurt Koenigsburger notes of The Simpsons, "The plastic limits of Springfield's
circumscribe American social relations in their entirety. "We're lucky enough that we've created a show where it's not about a family or a kid,
it's about a town. And so it really does lend itself very well to say you know we can sit down in the writers
room and go, what's going on in the world, you know, how do we have that happen in South Park. Few live-action shows are
capable of pulling off commentary on this scale the only one that comes to mind is not even a satire.
Shhhiiiiitttt...... But perhaps the most nuanced advantage of the medium is its ability to disarm us. We've been conditioned to accept cartoons as a
non-threatening form of communication. Many people grew up on cartoons and associate them with innocence.
Their bright colors and silliness as Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg
points out encourage us to lower our guard. For one reason or another we give them permission to hit us with the harsh realities.
A spoonful of sugar that helps the satire go down. "Well, that's horrible.
Why would you tell me that now?"
But there's one particular element of animation that really sets it apart from live-action television. Its ability to use kids as
vehicles for satire. Trey Parker and Matt Stone the creators of South Park have long said that if their main characters weren't
children the content of their show would be impossible. "We used to talk about all in the family
and we were big fans of all in the family. And in the time of the early 90s
we were kind of sitting there going, you know a show
like that couldn't be on the air right now.
You couldn't do it, because things are so PC you couldn't have an Archie Bunker.
And we used to talk about how,
you know if that Archie Bunker was eight years old I bet you could do it.
It makes sense, kids seemed to get a pass for being ignorant and politically incorrect.
Which allows them to comment on the status quo more freely, and they're also automatically anti-authority.
As founder of the onion Scott Dicker's writes "The best targets of satire are usually the comfortable, the status quo, an entrenched power or any
authority no matter how low level. Children's innocence and powerlessness can always be juxtaposed against the
ideologies of their parents, their schools, their country and anything in between.
In the boondocks, Huey points out all kinds of flaws in the ideals of the black community.
But no one will listen to him. In the Simpsons Bart uses his catchphrase to subvert
authority and unsettle notions of social order. "Eat my shorts.
Alright, I'll ...eat your shorts!
Yeah, eat my shorts!"
And in Shouthpark, the children almost always have an episode ending "I've learnt something!" monologue
that directs criticism at the adults for creating and sustaining a crazy world full of
dysfunction and hypocrisy.
"But at least we showed him that sometimes joking about un-PC things can actually be important, because it starts a dialogue.
Indeed by funneling their critiques through children, these shows can explore a middle ground on issues
without coming off as too preachy.
South Park practically functions on this idea. The kids are placed in the middle of two extremes and watch as both revealed their hypocrisies.
"Hey all you un-American bastards. If you don't like America why don't you get out!"
The founding fathers would agree with our right to protest.
The founding Fathers would kick all your asses!
Boys what do you think the founding fathers would say?
The, the fatty who?
Over the years many critics have argued that these shows
inevitably lead to nihilism in the public sphere. That making fun of everything results in a total
disillusionment toward our institutions. "It's not my fault. It's society. Everything is because of society!" But I'm not convinced
That's true in a study on the interactions between fans of the show Daria a show whose titular character is pretty cynical
researchers found a surprisingly optimistic fan culture
Who firmly believed in the possibility for change in the case of Bojack horseman?
Many fans say the show's borderline nihilism toward the system presents the tools to nihilism
Itself whether these shows lead to apathy in the public sphere or whether they simply reflect a distrust in the public sphere and it's idealistic
Discourse is ultimately a tough question to answer
I don't think any 23 minutes show presumes to teach us about any subject in full but it can begin to suggest just how
Complex some of these issues really are I don't think these shows say all mainstream positions are meaningless
They just attempt to give them a hard look and either try to refine them or provide nuanced
Perspectives on them with a world now almost completely devoid of nuance
Locked in a battle of extremes at all times
You might just want to turn on an animated satire because underneath all their snark parody and biting criticism
There's a hope for something better some new kind of truth that exists in the middle of the great American joke
Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching, I just want to talk about designing my new website with Squarespace
They have this really intuitive easy-to-use platform that made the process
Painless for someone like me who hasn't written a line of code ever
They have award-winning designer templates they do domains they have 24/7 customer service
It really is an all-in-one platform where you can build a good-looking website? I'm really happy with it
You can start your free trial today. Go to squarespace.com slash wills coder to get 10% off your first purchase
Thanks everyone. I'll see you again soon