Not again! (Flippancy aint Humour, folks)

I don't know how many times I have to stress this.

Many times, I guess.

The principle is simple: Flippancy and Humour stand at opposite ends of a spectrum. They are not the same thing. The only way in which they are related is that some real people happen to laugh at flippancy and mockery and slander. At one time, them were fightin words. Now, them's deseperate attempts to get a giggle out of someone. It's not surprising. As soon as people had nothing else they believed in, there was nothing to laugh at anymore. Effective humour requires contrast. The contrast of mockery is reverence. Without reverence in society, in the viewers themselves, the mockery can't be tweaked so as to be funny, because there's no normative point with which to contrast. So people had to invent impossible scenes in which they mocked and slandered stereotypes which were no longer believed in or even held to be true anymore.

Without the dim possibility of a real Big Foot stomping about at large, and real believers stomping about after him, there's no 'humour' in making mock Big Foot stories or media.

But flippancy has moved far past masquerading as humour. It's moved far past its lack of contrast for any deep effect. It's begun to take sadistic, gloating delight in putting down others with whom the comedy makers may harshly disagree (or imagine their viewers will), or in denigrating people whom one may disrespect (usually from a considerable distance, since little real worldview dialogue is current and popular in the world). So this new 'laughter' is actually the same thing as dismissive cruelty, since the cosmetic smiles are cracked in ignorance - in ignorance of the one or the thing which is mocked. Good humour requires audience knowledge and does not rely on ignorance nor disrespect!

Mockery is reactionary. It has no fixed and founded ground of its own making - it relies on the Other in order to make a point. But it's ceased to understand, love, or even vaguely respect the Other. Mockery is meant to whip people into a sort of frenzy. It just so happens that people post 1970s in particular associate such frenzy with fun and laughter! People became so depressed that they couldn't laugh unless they entered into a sort of mindless, unanalytical frenzy. So now anyone and anything possible is a prey of flippancy: the Holocaust, Slavery, people being tortured in Guantanamo Bay, live pets and animals who have accidents (self-injurious) on film, marching protesters believing in a cause, racial and religious stereotypes (by far the most innocent among the kinds of predation going on).

You see, for those who don't believe in anything, it causes them fear, loss, insecurity, irritability. They need to assuage their paralysis and cowardice by mocking and deriding others.

And they don't do so with RESPECT. True humour always contains an element of dignity and respect (cf. Fawlty Towers). False humour relies heavily on DISRESPECT. The creators of such comedy use disrespect because they're people with disrespectful, angry, insecure insides. They can't get through their day without cracking up laughing at something - and now they have to root around for things to laugh at, so miserable, dry and empty and black have their lives become!

It's no wonder they seek out 'comedy'. They find it so hard to laugh at *anything* anymore - and that's because they've become people of desensitivity and disbelief. For those who don't believe in the wonder of the world, there's very very little left to smile or laugh at. True humour always contains a very tiny element of joy - a joy which creeps up on you, stings you under your funnybone, and helps you see that Absurdity is Beautiful because Absurdity is Normative and Innocent and Wonderful! False humour is a cover-up for depression, tunnel-vision, myopia, misery.

So laughs are people's dope now - they no longer are deep laughs. For deep laughter requires contrast with something that is innocent, pure, solemn, true. And the contrast is done with dignity, not with a desire to torture, mock or destroy.

The present laughs are not gotten by virtue of the contents of the comedy, but by the aura, the presentation by means of which the comedy strains to exist and please: i.e., the commentator's tone of voice, his (often flippant, flabbergasted, teasing) facial expressions, his timing, his environment, the use of clever sounds and shapes to startle the viewer. But when the raw substance and contents of the slander and mockery (of other human beings) are examined, there's very little found to be 'funny' in such contents. A dry transcription of most comedy movies out today would lend even more credence to that.

But credence from whom?

That's the real connivance, why distinctions from viewers can't be made. Comedy is a perception, and perception (not contents) is the quickest and easiest thing to manipulate and corrupt. For those who have no beliefs, all their perceptions are skewed as well.

NpH