March 1, 2013

• What Did You Pay For?

  Okay. Seth McFarlane hosted the Oscars 5 days ago. He sang a song (with somebody’s gay male chorus) entitled, “We Saw Your Boobs.” He insulted George Clooney with a joke about a nine year-old probably very few people had heard of before the awards cycle started. He pronounced her name correctly. He expressed a generally dismal attitude toward women.

  Apparently this came as a horrible surprise.

  From that I will assume no one else has ever seen Ted. Or The Family Guy. Or any comment Seth McFarlane made about the upcoming Oscar event, or…Seth McFarlane. Anywhere. I would mention Bill What’s-his-name* and his show what’s-it-called**, but I can’t spell ‘mar’ and I can’t remember the name of the show, which I watch fairly regularly. Seth McFarlane shows up there. He is often very funny, but that’s different show and a different audience.

  He pokes things with sticks for a living.

  George Clooney dating younger women, for instance.

  Or Hollywood’s persistent ability to reduce women to mobile body parts.

  The Oscars are long and boring and mostly about people we don’t know getting awards for things we don’t care about or understand while keeping us from learning who won Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture. After about two hours of watching, one might get the impression that making movies is the hardest, most important work anyone could possibly do and the only way to truly change the course of civilization.  In the past decade coverage of the Oscars has become mostly about who wore what, who designed the what, and whether or not who wore it well or should have worn it at all. The overall presentation sends a steady, inevitable message: pretty people are more fun to look at, and the most fun an ugly person can have is pointing out all of the mistakes the pretty people make. On that note of elevated awareness, watching beautiful boobs in expensive dresses is somehow different from singing about seeing them naked. 

  Seth McFarlane’s job was to keep me watching this parade of dresses and strangers for three hours just to learn who won the above three categories in the end. He did.

  There are no two people in the world who have exactly the same sense of humor. Humor is all about challenging limits: what is funny to you is anything that is just a half-step beyond your comfort zone. To be funny, the joke has to make you think. You have to think WAIT: oh, okay–I can handle that. And you laugh. There is even a certain sense of superiority you can acquire from being able to see the humor in, oh, for example, Larry the Cable Guy.  George Lopez. If a comedian doesn’t make you just a little bit uncomfortable s/he’s not doing the job.

  I saw Ted about a week before the Oscars. I didn’t particularly like it, but then, I was never the target audience.  It’s a guy thing, where meeting a woman and committing to marriage is roughly synonymous with signing up for a new Mom, only this one trades sexual favors for proof you are ready to stop having fun and Assume Responsibility. The movie is pretty much a series of fart jokes which are funny because the characters live in Boston and pronounce the word ’faht’. Deep, penetrating humor. Sort of like, “We Saw Your Boobs”. 

  I’m a little tired of reading endless harangues about what a misogynist Seth McFarlane is. I’m not convinced he is–he may just be poking his little sword at the absurdity that made Honey Boo Boo a TV star. But let’s say he is. Let’s say Seth McFarlane suffered some debilitating brain damage when he was twelve and he still really believes things like, oh, sex scenes, rape scenes, and women just jumping to the shower all have one simple common denominator–you got to see her boobs.

  It’s not like any of us didn’t know that man could be a snake when we picked him up.

  *Bill Maher

  **Overtime

   

  • 11:19 am
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