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| Fall of the house of Simpson |
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10 January 06.
George Meyer is generally regarded as one of the driving forces behind the Simpsons. Here are three data points on the guy:
That first interview really is a great interview. If you have limited time, stop reading this and go read it. I've done so about fifteen times, and keep referring to it in conversation. One of the first people to link to my little blog, Mr. PH of Seattle, WA, did so partly because I had linked to the interview in an early post and thus "rescued a great ... interview from the cyber-depths." He said so in this post, but that's just about me so don't bother clicking through on it; instead you should be reading his comments on waterboarding. The poster in the second of the three links above says she cuddles up with that interview at night, and to a great extent I don't think she's exaggerating. So when I saw the link to third interview, all I could think was `darn, I'd better send this away to Mr. PH of Seattle, WA, as quick as I can!!' But then I got to reading it, and it wasn't the same. It was, well, bitter. The jokes in Army Man go back and forth among just surreal, commentaries on pop culture, and just cruel. As many people fall out of windows as complain about coffee. All the cultural commentary and surreality and just a dab of the cruelty transferred over to the Simpsons. And, y'know, in the right context, cultural commentary is easy, because everything we do is a little funny, just by pointing out the minutiæ of life and their futile motivations. `Look at the cover of this religious pamphlet,' a character would observe, `It has a sunrise on it. I feel more serene already.' Our world is filled with such clichès, to the point that we don't even think about them. Much of George Meyer's sense of humor was built around that, and you can see it in interview #1, where he talks about advertising and buying tabs of LSD for five bucks. I think some would call that sort of thing 'observational humor', and that label usually has a derogatory slant because of all those people who have quipped `you ever notice how many Starbuck'ses there are these days?' and expected us to laugh. As a matter of fact, no, I live in Baltimore, a city that has 640,000 people in city limits and _seven_ SBUXes. Compare with DC: 550,000 and 59 SBUXim (which is indeed enough for two on every corner). But observational humor is funny when it's done by somebody who really does observe the weird stuff that lurks in our institutions and our social structures. The later interview was different, as the balance between that wide-eyed sense of screwing around with day-to-day pabulum and the cruelty shifted toward the cruel: the model for comedy he cites in this interview is Candide. And ya know, watching people fall down is funny, and will always be funny forever more, but it doesn't say what Meyer's earlier observations on culture, religion, government, and all that other weird stuff we fill 24 hours of every day with did say.
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