Rita Koganzon, “All Camped Out: How ‘Glee’ Became a Preachy After School Special” (326) and Jame J. Weinman, “Fox News Attempts to Get Funny”
“All Camped Out” by Rita Koganzon
One. How is Glee an exercise in hypocrisy?
On one hand Glee paints women as liars and manipulators working “under the strictures of monogamous relationships” (326); on the other hand, Glee wants to preach a “sincere message for its younger viewers.”
Two. How does Glee skewer “troglodyte culture”?
The show is set in a small town where the people are close-minded, provincial, ignorant troglodytes whose prejudices create conflict with the artistic, blooming adolescents who populate the high school.
Troglodyte culture is a culture where there is no thinking, just mindless acceptance of traditions and rituals in order to conform to the status quo. Troglodyte culture is about the perpetuation of ignorance.
A troglodyte is a “cave dweller.” We refer to the cave metaphorically, which is to say a troglodyte shelters himself in a cave of ignorance and darkness. He only associates himself with members of his own tribe. Another term for troglodyte, in fact, is a tribalist. The tribalist or troglodyte loathes change, innovations, new ideas, creativity, the arts. He remains in long, protracted age of ignorance called the jahiliyyah.
The opposite of a troglodyte is a cosmopolitan, a student of the world, a person who soaks up the diversity of culture and experience and as such is open to new ideas. The cosmopolitan is curious about new things and constantly uses self-criticism to make constant improvements; the troglodyte, on the other hand, feels threatened by change and fresh experience, and he despises anything that might make him look critically at himself. The troglodyte is content with his smug mediocrity.
Unfortunately, critics point out that in Glee’s attempt to pit cosmopolitans against the small-town troglodytes, that the show has become annoying and arrogant: a “cloying combination of underdog elitism and progressive cynicism” that condescends to people who are different than them. In an ironic turn of events, the Glee writers, who fancy themselves as cosmopolitans, are acting like troglodytes or tribalists.
Elitism, the idea that we are more educated and generally more superior to the “Ignorant Other,” is in itself a form of ignorant tribalism.
The hero is Glee is the loner, the misfit, the loser, the outcast, and the pariah who cannot conform to the troglodyte culture. Instead, he blossoms by finding his particular niche and escapes the small-town hell and can now gloat that he has “made it” by escaping the ignorance of his troglodyte neighbors. But his gloating shows a lack of spirituality and instead renders a type of ignorance and arrogance that, ironically, are attributes of the troglodyte.
The portrayal of the small town isn’t even convincingly troglodyte. The high school’s arts program, for example, is wealthy and can “afford a full band and multiple costume changes for each of the club’s performances.”
Buffy the Vampire Slayer also takes place in a small town and the show derides its small town characters in the same way Glee does. In fact, this condescension is a common motif for a lot of TV shows, so common in fact that the motif is a cliché.
The clichés are further dolloped in Glee with the soap opera of characters who have made “Bad Life Decisions”; even more clichés are larded on the viewer with “didactic after school” preaching of various messages the writers wish to disseminate for our benefit. To make sure these sermons are inculcated into our heads, the “self-important Glee Club diva” Rachel delivers sermonettes about pregnancy, alcoholism, and other issues of the day.
Jaime J. Weinman, “Fox News Attempts to Get Funny” (347)
One. What is Fox News so desperate to be funny?
They’re desperate for “street cred” because it’s well known their viewership is the most ill informed and misinformed of all cable news TV audiences.
Secondly, they are desperate to fight back against all the mockery, scorn, and ridicule they suffer (rightly so in my opinion) from satirical news shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
Thirdly, Doug Giles, a conservative columnist, warned Fox News that they would lose the cultural wars unless they learned how to make viewers laugh.
Fourth, by trying to use comedy, Fox News is showing they want to get a younger audience. Their need for youth is desperate when we consider that the average age of a Fox News viewer is 68.8 year old.
The future belongs to the young and the young like humor.
Two. What is the dilemma of conservatives who wish to be funny?
According to Gavin McNett, conservatives are not hard-wired to be funny. They are hard-wired to be serious and stuck in a “hermetic, self-referential world view” that doesn’t allow for the kind of creativity and surprise rendered by comedy (348).
The evidence is that indeed the conservatives on Fox are not funny if we look at their program The ½ Hour News Hour. They’re segments with a laugh track, a very bad sign.
Anti-liberals Parker and Stone of South Park may indeed have episodes that “hate on” liberals, but unlike Fox News conservatives, Parker and Stone are not conservative Kool-Aid drinkers or fanboys. They have episodes that lambaste conservatives as well (a point the author curiously leaves out).
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