Sunday, July 15, 2007
To laugh, or not to laugh?
There's a commercial running for an espn cell phone sports updater at the moment that poses to me a tough question. If you aren't familiar with the commercial the gist is: a man is being interviewed as if he had just finished some sort of professional sport, when in actuality he was at his daughters ballet recital watching sports updates on his cell phone - when asked if experience played a part in his performance he responds "Yea, we've been to two dance recitals this year; you really learn from that kind of boredom". The question it poses - which I may myself have an answer for, but nonetheless think it's a topic worth discussing - is whether this commercial is cementing bad ideas in the minds of the people who see it, or if the the commedy should be appreciated - it is pretty well done, i just don't know if I should laugh. On the one hand, I don't care much for ballet, so it does bore me and I wouldn't much want my daughter participating in such an activity unless she had a full appreciation of the process and evolution of the art of dancing and how ballet came to be and still wanted to do it, but she would be six and not have nearly the brain capacity for that. On the other hand at face value, which is what the subconscious of the morons of the world will absorb, it is teaching people not to appreciate the actions of our fellow human beings, the creations and the doings of our children; teaching us to write them off as boring unless it fits into our own slim and dogmatic perspective. Is it good, or bad?
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6 comments:
Obviously the commercial is written for what the network considers its audience, ultra sport fans that are by and large male. I have not seen the commercial, however it does not sound too different from almost every beer commercial I am hit with when watching football (or tv in general). Think about the Coors commercial with the color changing wrapper. (it turns blue when its cold enough to enjoy). Remember how the dude in the commercial’s wife it doing a pregnancy test in the other room and they both yell "its blue" at the same time, pissing off the wife and ending with her locking herself in the bathroom.
This like your espn alert commercial can only be seen as funny because of its mook like quality. Of course you shouldn't laugh. It's hard, but really there’s nothing funny about the degeneration of American culture (as well as a respect for humanity and everything else that is not, by it’s nature, a commodity) for profit. What makes one want to laugh is the social acceptability of such advertisements that portrait a world that reflects the "typical" espn viewer’s most selfish of inner thoughts (id), which (as sold to you by espn and its sponsors) consists of beer and sports on the least intellectual of levels. These ads are designed by those who destroy culture to draw your attention (and hopefully buy their product), thus it might be hard to resist their pull (as the advertisers have spent much more time carefully scripting their focused filth on their model average espn viewer than the average espn viewer has spent thinking about the advertiser’s real message).
Bottom Line: Don't laugh, unless its Halloween and your a pawn.
I couldn't agree more with why I shouldn't laugh, but it may not be giving it a fair say. I'm no one to assume anything, including the intentions and thoughts of this person in a commercial; if I want people to think for themselves it would be out of line for me to assume that they do not. Given that this man is thinking for himself and knows full well and has his own educated opinions on the usefullness of his daughters ballet and decides that it bores him, I cannot deny the well played nature of the commercial; the comic timing is excellent. But for me I can't argue, the effects that it has in further cementing the assumptions it does in the minds of the ignorant Americans who don't bother to think for themselves is inexcusable.
Don't confuse fiction from reality. The man in the commercial is only real as an actor. As a character in a commercial, he is undeveloped and therefore less-than-human. He is a shadow upon a shadow. Don't flatter the industry of falsities with being capable of re-creating man in his full capacity. Even the most delveloped characters are only characters, not men.
The commercial, though we are fully aware of a characters inability to represent reality, is meant to represent a 'real life' situation, I looked at this as theoretical - if this were a real situation, would it be funny. I wouldn't care if I laughed or not at a less-than-real situation because it wouldn't pertain to my very real morality. I meant the thought to be in consideration of if a real man being observed by the populus of America were to be that disrespectful of the achievements of his own offspring, would it be funny because I agree that ballet is useless to a child, or would it be dispicable because he is disrespecting a persons effort towards something in life - in both situations, respecting that the man is educated in the sense that he is a self-thinking person and has decided for himself that he does not ballet for his daughter. Now, obviously it is unhealthy for the community in many ways to support such behavior when people are as ignorant to what they are exposed to as they are, but in an ideal situation where people are able and willing to think for themsleves - which I am not in the position to say that they don't, even though it's fairly apparent that they don't - it would be fine, in fact it's a place that I'd love to see us at. But until people wake up I, unfortunatly, cannot laugh.
*note: Jasper was logged in as me on that last post...
Haha that's my bad I forgot you were on my computer before...
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