It was surprising to me that I've never written about McSweeney's
before. It has undergone massive massive changes in the last few years,
I've been following the website for almost a decade now on and off,
mostly off now.
It used to be a great humor site, many of the
current generation of American comedians started out as contributors to
it. Funny, edgy but in a good way, so different from New Yorker's staid
and generally straight-on shouts or shouts & murmurs columns.
Something
happened during Trump years. They branched off to non-funny section of
the site too, which was fine because people can branch, companies can
expand, websites can open new sections. Then they decided their existing
humor section was not woke enough and uhhh. Something happened. If I
didn't tell someone it was supposed to be a humor site and sent them a
link to it, it'd be hard to tell they were trying to be funny.
The
point of woke humor is to disarm. It's to show the absurdity of
everyday existence, the absurdity of evil and all things that are bad,
and if done well, to show an alternative. It is the most effective when
someone's pissing their pants laughing but also thinking ohhh wow if I
didn't know this was a joke I'd have thought it was making such deep
social commentary wait I totally get it now.
Terry Pratchett
did an amazing job with that kind of humor. His books were funnies, and
if you really wanted to ignore it you could pretend the social subtext
didn't exist and the text was the subtext. In Monstrous Regiment
(spoilers) when a contingent of 'male' soldiers is exclusively women
pretending to be men to others because they think everyone else is a
male fighting their way through enemy lines trying to take back their
brothers husbands lovers, loved male members of their families. You
could try really really hard and pretend this was just a case of
mistaken identity and the humor of cross-dressing but you'd have to be a
specially-designed machinery to ignore the obvious.
McSweeney's
went the other way as far as it could go. There is not a hint it's
funny. It's 'woke' but it's not a humor site anymore. It's opened up a
space for fun online humor.
@pinboard (on twitter) talks
about this a bit in his twitter. The Onion went the way of the Bernie
brotherhood, making fun of everyone and everything besides St. Bernard
the unimpeachable. McSweeney's decided the concept of humor itself is
offensive and needs to be cancelled.
Put things in
perspective people. Activism is great in challenging times, but not at a
cost of abandoning entirely what you're really good at doing.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Tell me what you think. I'll read, promise.