Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Saturday Night Live After 9/11

http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2001/09/30/snl.htm

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=474002147830401061&q=will+ferrell+osama+bin+laden&total=9&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=5


The Terror and Gallows Humor piece from before spring break got me thinking about humor after September 11th. Mentally going back to the days and weeks following September 11th has become slightly more difficult as more time goes by. That being said, the overall sentiment of that time still resonates in me. And one of the starkest memories I have of the days following the event was a sense that humor would never be the same. That it wouldn’t be ok to really laugh for a long, long time. And that certainly the events of September 11th themselves were off-limits.

So when I go back to that time and think about the first obvious attempts at humor following 9/11, there are a few things that immediately come to mind. First of all, I wasn’t much of an Onion reader back then so I missed out on that really interesting post-9/11 Onion installment. For me, humor in 2001 centered much more on the late night TV shows and especially Saturday Night Live. At fourteen years old, the comedy of Saturday Night Live was still fresh and hilarious. Thinking about Saturday Night Live in 2001 brings back memories of Will Ferrell still in the cast which now feels like a lifetime ago. While digging around the internet for 9/11 related pieces I came across this article from USA Today critiquing the first SNL following 9/11. I remember watching all the SNLs in the weeks following 9/11 because I had grown to miss “regular TV” during the insane 24-hour news network frenzy directly following 9/11 itself. This article highlighted some of the things I remember about the show during this time.

Overall, the event of just a couple weeks before was hardly brought up during the episode aside from the large-scale serious tribute to start the show. I distinctly remember Rudy Giuliani’s “why start now?” line, which I thought was pretty hilarious. The joke mentioned in the article from the Weekend Update segment applies pretty closely to the Doniger piece. Following a tragic event such as 9/11, the first acceptable targets were the enemies. In this case: Osama Bin Laden and Mariah Carey. Overall, the first episode back played it safe; there were no sketches featuring George W. Bush and the event itself was mentioned only a few times. As the weeks progressed, I distinctly remember this gradually changing. Osama Bin Laden and the hijackers became a central focus of the comedy on the show. Will Ferrell played both Osama Bin Laden and President Bush, demonstrating his earlier range and talent.

One sketch I remember in particular was aired following the release of a tape of Bin Laden taking responsibility for the 9/11 attack. I couldn’t find the clip online, but the sketch aimed to recreate the tape closely. It was presented in the same hazy and amateurish style of the tape and featured Will Ferrell as Osama Bin Laden describing the events of 9/11 to some friends. The sketch began to diverge from the dialogue of the actual tape when Will Ferrell started to describe the attitudes of the hijackers. He claimed that they wanted to attack America, but they developed cold-feet after learning that they would be involved in a suicide mission. They asked Bin Laden if they could instead just hijack a plane and threaten the people onboard, asking for the release of prisoners and landing safely in Egypt or something. Humor such as this and the Onion articles we looked at highlight a specific kind of comedy that was deemed acceptable following the tragedy. It was ok to mock the hijackers, painting them as cowards or imagining what kind of torture they were receiving in hell. Humor beyond that was much more controversial.

I also managed to track down a video of Will Ferrell as George W. Bush entitled “George W. Bush Calls Out Bin Laden.” Again, Bush himself is not really a target here, although this is slightly beginning to change. Bush is presented in the typical Ferrell fashion: dim-witted, child-like, and kind of a cowboy. Yet as you can tell by the crowd reaction, the audience is entirely supportive of everything Ferrell is saying. Looking back on this clip six years later, the comedy is still humorous while the subject-matter still stings a bit. We haven’t been attacked again, yet I’m sure many of us would like to see a return to this level of gusto from President Bush about tracking down Bin Laden. Almost any impression of George W. Bush today is presented in a much different tone than this one. The humor is aimed at the President instead of who we’re fighting and the message is more cynical and disparaging. This only stresses the importance of the passage of time. Since 2001 our foreign policy has changed, the country’s attitudes have changed, and comedy has changed right along with it.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Media, Gatekeeping, and the War in Iraq















This is a political cartoon by R.J. Matson from the New York Observer that I thought tied in pretty closely to our discussion on the impact of humor in politics. I thought this Matson cartoon was closely related to the readings we did from Mulkay and McKain. The direct commentary of the media in this cartoon is a long-running style of political humor that these articles focused on specifically. We may think that political cartoons or other forms of political satire are being subversive or are directly challenging political norms, but a cartoon like this emphasizes that much of political humor is entirely beholden to the status quo.

This political cartoon in particular is being critical of the gatekeeping quality of the News. An image of a radar screen is covered with contemporary stories and media interests, none of which happen to be the War in Iraq. Matson points out rather directly that the media has chosen to ignore what should be one of its major stories. While some of the issues encompassed in the radar screen are also serious such as the economy and the presidential candidates, some of the issues focused on are entirely trivial in comparison to the war such as March Madness and, most notably, Eliot Spitzer. It can be shocking to actually consider that a current story like the Eliot Spitzer call-girl debacle can actually dominate headlines more than the continued violence and relative chaos in Iraq. In this cartoon, Matson is expressing his frustration, similar in many ways to the manner in which Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert express their frustration on TV every night.

Matson is being critical of the gatekeeping practices of the media recently, or what kind of news the media chooses to focus on. While this political cartoon appears to be poignant and extremely critical of the status quo, it does become clear after reading McKain or Mulkay that political cartoons such as this rely heavily on the status quo in order to function. As McKain states in a totally clear and not-confusing manner, “As a parody of News, TDS constructs itself out of news transmitted by the News, just as the News uses news content as its bricks and mortar” (pg. 416). Indeed, this political cartoon and many others wouldn’t exist if the traditional media didn’t continue its ways. Like Mulkay said, “Institutionalized political humor is derived from, and dependent for its meaning upon, the established pattern of serious political discourse” (pg. 210). The status quo in both media and politics is the number one target for political cartoonists and satirists.

Mulkay also points out that, “repetitive political humor contributes to a sense of political apathy which actually makes it easier for our rulers to continue to exercise political domination in the customary manner” (pg. 210). If this is indeed the case, then I feel that it speaks more poorly of us as the public as opposed to the political humorists who choose to take on these issues. That being said, a political cartoon such as this one can’t help but remind the public of an important issue when the mainstream media has so far failed to do so. While political humor may not succeed in destroying the entrenched style of media we’ve grown accustomed to, it can succeed on a smaller level. Even if these forms of humor only reaffirm existing views, the fact that these opinions have an outlet through this channel of expression is valuable.