Medieval manuscript artists frequently indulged in irreverent, bawdy, shocking humor...
Posted on 07/24/2009 4:53:18 AM PDT by Kaslin
When it comes to awful movies, Pat Buchanan once quipped he didn't have to look underneath a manhole cover to know there's a sewer down below. The smutty new movie "Bruno" can be read by its cover. In the midst of a barrage of crude sexual humor, master satirist Sacha Baron Cohen is once again exposing Americans for what Time magazine calls their "ignorance and prejudice, hypocrisy and primitive rage."
Yes, I'm sure it has its funny moments, and some are laugh-out-loud hilarious. I say I'm sure because I really don't know. I was on my way to the theater when I reversed course. I'm not going to give these slimy people $9.50, or $1.50. Besides, it's all there on the Internet.
In his last film, "Borat," Cohen played an idiotic journalist from Kazakhstan who attempted to expose unsuspecting people as misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic. The new title character of "Bruno" is a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter who is going to expose the raging "homophobia" in America, especially the South (also targeted in the last film).
But this character is so unbelievably stupid and self-absorbed that the film seems to set the cause of sexual "liberation" backward by a decade or two.
The shock and disgust arrives early, when Bruno has a tiny Asian lover who helps him pour champagne. It's not hard to imagine where Cohen places the champagne bottle as he pours the little man like a teapot.
Bruno decides to come to America and make a pilot of a new celebrity-interview show. But since Bruno is an idiot and can't land a celebrity interview, we're left with a scene where a focus group watches as Cohen's pilot displays a long, drawn-out shot of a penis twirling around like a pinwheel, which then points at the camera and "speaks."
The focus group speaks for almost everyone when they suggest they'd rather pluck their eyes out than watch any more of this garbage.
"Bruno" originally drew an NC-17 rating, but the viewer is left wondering if putting a tiny black box over sex acts, real or simulated (like group sex at a swingers club) is all Cohen needed to get an R rating. This film's full-frontal nudity and gross-out clips are more than a permissive parent bringing a teenager will expect.
It's not a huge hit with audiences -- it "flamed out in its second weekend," the website Box Office Mojo reported, without a wink. But it will make enough profit in theatres and on DVD to offer Cohen another opportunity to abuse unsuspecting Americans with his film droppings.
And maybe that's what's more upsetting than the smuttiness. It is the systematic dishonesty. Cohen's filmmaking strategy is to lie relentlessly to the real people he interacts with on film.
Take Alabama pastor Jody Trautwein, who earnestly tries in the film to convert Bruno to leave his homosexual lifestyle in favor of Christianity. As the pastor talks of following Jesus, Cohen has his idiot character talk dirty, asking if the pastor had ever put woodwind instruments "up your Auschwitz"? (Cohen, who is Jewish, uses the name of the concentration camp as a synonym for anus in the film.)
Now, here's how Trautwein explains how he was approached about the scene. On Jan. 30, 2009, he received a phone call from a Todd Lewis of Amesbury Chase productions in Los Angeles (a fake firm, complete with phony website). He told him that German One Television (also fake) had hired them to produce a documentary. He said that with the recent rise in Europe of liberalism and increasing immorality in America, German One really wanted to show strong, pure American traditional moral values.
"One of the ways they wanted to do this was they had a young man who was desiring to come out of homosexuality and wanted to give his heart to Christ," Trautwein explained. "He asked me if I would be interested in having them produce this documentary [meant to] alert parents and leaders of young people, and expose the deception and perversion that some in the entertainment industry want to perpetrate against our children, our families and our homes."
Trautwein sat with Cohen's character for two entire hours, absorbing Cohen's abuse. The pastor said director Larry Charles (who only used his first name) praised him when the abuse was over. "He said he didn't think he could have been that patient with Bruno."
So a good pastor is set up and ridiculed because, well, because he's a good man, and nothing else. That's humor?
You bet wrong BTW.
Do you mean “archaic”?
I’m not debasising this site. I stated a fact. You disagree.
In NYC, Cohen - in Borat character - was in the process of receiving an honestly earned butt whipping when he was rescued by his buddy Hugh Laurie (”House”). So much for us ignorant bigots down South.
You ably described this type of “humor,” which has never been funny to me. There are plenty people in the world who deserve ridicule with their often publicly outrageous lifestyles. These people are known as politicians and celebrities. What could be humorous about deceiving your average Joe Blow, preoccupied as he is with earning his day’s wages to provide for his family and grabbing his amusements where he can, is beyond me. It’s just mean-spirited. I couldn’t even enjoy Howie Mandel’s idiotic “hidden camera” exploits on Leno because of his toying with regular folks.
There’s always been high comedy, but there’s also always been fart jokes. According to the wiki article the first Greek comedy known was bawdy songs during fertility festivals. That’s shock comedy.
Medieval manuscript artists frequently indulged in irreverent, bawdy, shocking humor...
No, it wasn’t.
As I said, it was part of the mores of the culture, so it was not shock. It was simply low humor. There are “fart jokes” in the Canterbury Tales. Howard Stern talks about farting. No big deal. But when Howard Stern encourages a couple to have intercourse in the entryway to St. Paul’s cathedral, that is a type of “shock” that we do not find in ancient literature.
Setting up a fake website. Claiming t be from a phony company. Asking an earnest preacher to help someone who is in trouble...all to ridicule that preacher, is not a part of our mores. Well, it is to leftists.
But to conservatives, we need to condemn it for being the anti-Christian, leftist attack that it is.
Couldn’t agree more.
He is exploiting decent people for two reasons: 1. His own fame and fortune, 2. To ridicule conservatives and especially Americans.
There is a difference between “bawdy” humor, which Shakespeare engaged in when he talked about two people as “making the beast with two backs” and what we have degraded to with shock-jocks and the jackass Borat.
Also, those you mentioned who were engaging in bawdy humor during the Medieval period were not communicating to millions of people at a single airing. They were trying to entertain themselves.
And if you care to 1. cite where you copied that picture of the “manuscript” from so that I can authenticate it as being “medieval” and 2. link to a better image so that I can read the text, it may serve as better evidence of your argument. As it is, it is merely a grainy black and white picture of what looks like a type of satyr with words that are too blurry for me to make out. Don't take the "history" of Eco's Name of the Rose too seriously.
Bruno was/is obscene and could only appeal to those whose senses were so dulled that they no longer can see right and wrong. There are absolutes.
you’re redefining shock comedy. Shock comedy is NOT something from outside our mores, shock comedy is something from outside our normal interactions. It’s not necessarily something we don’t do, it’s something we don’t do IN PUBLIC. That’s where the nervous laughter of shock comedy comes from. The fart jokes in Canterbury Tales were shock humor, not because people didn’t fart, but because people didn’t acknowledge it happening.
No I’m not “redefining” it. I’m clarifying.
Part of the lie of leftist academe is that before the 1960’s people in western civ were very uptight, straight-laced, non-laughing purists. This was a lie. Fart jokes and other bodily-humor jokes were in fact very common. That is why it was not shock.
I illustrated the difference between low humor and shock as it is currently undertaken.
Go and see the movie. Pump some money into a leftist’s anti-American pockets, and laugh while our culture is knocked down again. I’m done with this discussion. There is a communist in the White House that I need to expose, whose goal I need to block. He is there in large part because of the same anti-establishment mentality that presents Cohen as some sort of “satirical” funny guy.
Such imagery was also employed after the invention of the printing press. The "limited" appeal was not the intent of the artist, but the limitation ofthe media.
"And if you care to 1. cite where you copied that picture of the “manuscript” from so that I can authenticate it as being “medieval”"
Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
So you equate infantile “potty” humor with Howard Stern encouraging a couple to have intercourse in the entry to St. Paul’s Cathedral?
That, my FRiend, is the very nature of decadence, a decay of societal values, the inability to draw a line between what is acceptable and what is not, which is what I have been defining from the beginning of this thread.
Cohen is a leftist agitator who is seeking fame and fortune for himself and, while doing so, to ridicule American values. And like all cowardly liberals, he attacks Christian pastors, not the Imam.
Yes and no. Both push the bounds of sensibility and good taste in their respective societies, and in many cases, do so with the simple intent of shock. The main difference is in where the societies in question draw their boundaries...not the artist's efforts to push them.
I was really responding to your original post at #6, where you wrote, "But the difference there is that the bawdiness itself did not shock the crowd because it was not beyond the mores of society the humor was being presented to. As far as I can tell, “shock humor” is a fairly recent phenomenon..."
I was making the point that that's simply not true, unless you consider the medieval era, "fairly recent."
Right about 1000 years ago St. Bernard of Clairvaux (from whom my tag line emenates) decried visual imagery not because it was "obscene" by our standards, but merely because it would distract from one's focus on the Divine. What he found in contemporary art was by his standards, shocking, obscene and outside the conventions of good taste for his day...
"How, in the cloister where the monks do their reading, can that ridiculous monstrosity be justified, an amazing kind of deformed beauty and yet a beautiful deformity? What place have obscene monkeys, savage lions, unnatural centaurs, creatures part man and part beast, striped tigers, fighting knights, or hunters sounding their horns ... ? With such an abundant and bewildering array of contradictory forms on show, one would rather read in the sculptured stones than in the books, and spend the whole day wondering at them than meditating on the law of God. Good Lord!"
Believe me, I'm not in any way, shape or form trying to defend Cohen...I have no use for him. I'm merely saying that every time a society draws a line there will be those who push it...it's essentially the Durkheim's constant of humour.
Sorry you’re redefining. You’ve basically created a definition of shock comedy that is circular, that could only have existed in the last 50 years, to prove that it only exists in the last 50 years.
Nobody is saying they were uptight, straight-laced non-laughing purists. We’re saying they knew farts and fart jokes were not part of polite society, and therefore when someone told a fart joke it was a certain brand of humor, a brand of humor that goes against the rules of polite society, shock comedy.
All you “illustrated” was that you had your own definition of shock comedy which is quite simply false. Low humor and shock comedy have major overlap, you throw out the slapstick from low humor and what you’re left with is the lewd humor which is shock comedy. Now has shock comedy “advanced” to higher levels of shock today? Absolutely, but that doesn’t make it a new invention, it’s just how things change.
And there you go making assumptions. I’m not interested in Bruno. Gay jokes bore me. Whether or not I’m going to see the movie has nothing to do with the fact that your definition of shock comedy is false and creates a false history.
I am reminded of Act two, scene five of "As You Like I". The character Malvolio is completely set up when his detractors plant a forged letter for him to read. Malvolio is the victim. He believes it is the lovely Olivia who loves him. He struts and preens himself. He is completely gulled by Sir Toby Belch and the wench Maria.
What may be ignored in using another era as a defence of the likes of Cohen, is that the participants were all actors. None were deceived, none absolutely devastated. Then away to the tavern all together afterward no doubt.
Those who support this man (Cohen) and laugh would of course fail to see the bottom line. If THEY had a relative, who was a vulnerable person and was gulled by Cohen and his even worse confederates and was ridiculed and humiliated- Would THEY then laugh?
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