Here's an update on the Gretchen piece, featured above, Called "I shoulda Had a G-8!"
In the writers room today, the meeting ground to a halt in a full-fledged brouhaha, a hullabaloo if you would, over this piece. It started from one person suggesting that the piece was not appropriate because our listeners have never heard of the G-8 Summit. Appeals were made on both sides of the argument, and everyone speaking on behalf of this body known as "our listeners."
From the time of Cicero and the Roman Republic's Publius to the time of Alexander Hamilton and the American Republic's "Publius", this elusive body, this public, is used again and again as the podium from which to speak. In creative pitch meetings as in politics as in philosophy, often times people's personal aesthetics and personal tastes manifest themselves as platitudes spoken about "the public." It's the secret rhetorical tool of turning first person into third person in order to give your point more weight.
I hear a lot of this: "Hey man, I'm not saying you can't talk about the G-8. I just care if the thing is funny." Now, that point relies on the fact that there is something called Funny that you could compare to something like "Red", and there are things that are more red and less red that at all points are struggling toward perfect Redness. There is, of course, no single Red. I know some Greeks who drove themselves crazy trying to draw a triangle. Saying "I just care if the thing is funny" makes about as much sense as saying, "hey man, I just care if the thing tastes good."
Laughter is not unlike a boner. It is a biological reaction that is wordlessly enjoyed in the moment and scientifically explained only retrospectively. Someone buying porno simply wants to get off. But what if the producer of porno said, "hey man, there is one type of porno that gets people off, and that type is 'White Chicks Black Dicks.'" You'd obviously think this person to be misled, because there are plenty of types of porno, including splooshing and prisoner fantasies and adult diaper play, all of which are enjoyed by wide segments of the population.
The same thing with comedy. When you produce it -- excuse me -- when you produce it for a wide audience, an audience that is larger than your core group, you have to understand that some people want their toes sucked, but also some people want to dress up in corsets and knickers and some want you to shave them. That is, some people want to hear the "Tuesday Morning Fart Song," but for every person who loves that song, there is someone else just dying to hear "Proust-ical the Musical."
That's comedy.
But, like in the political sphere, every room has one or two people who are screaming hysterically on behalf of their representative demographic. The Silent Majority. The Moral Majority. Whatever. This unseen mass of people is as old as the hills. In 1375 it was called The Major Pars, and was used as a political theory tool to describe the organizational principle that, hey, if "weightiest part" of society wants it, let's go with that.
The problem is, the weightiest part of society, like Red or the perfect Triangle, doesn't exist in society. What exists are a collection of personal perspectives that sometiems coagulate into factions, and sometimes dissociate. The point of a pluralistic society is not believing that we are all the same, but we are all different, and that everyone, from the toe-sucker to the Catullus reader, should get off.
~ae
