Remember how yesterday I posted a link to that thing about gender flipping?

Turns out it works great with race, too.

That link goes to a great bit of biting satire on Gawker which ruthlessly mocks the way the media handles stories about black people in general, and more specifically the recent outbreak of blatant racism in the pundit-sphere of the American Right.

I love this kind of thing, as I made clear in last night’s post. I am a natural born satirist, with a satirist’s sensitivity to hypocrisy, irony, and inconsistency, and I enjoy few things more than using language to make said hypocrisy abundantly evident by putting it under the microscope and letting everyone see what nasty little bug it is.

I mean, I’m the guy who did this :

That’s me laying it on thick and hard, Jonathan Swift style. Sure, it is not exactly subtle, but I never meant it to be.

Sure, us liberal intellectual types appreciate nuance and subtlety but we’re already in the choir. Everyone else needs a blunt instrument to crack open their misconceptions and overwhelm their defenses by rubbing their faces with their own cognitive dissonance.

This is not a nice thing to do. Odds are, even if it works, nobody will thank you for it. Truly important satire is not even designed to make anyone laugh.

It’s designed to make them think, and when it is done right, that is exactly what it makes people do, because whether or not they agree with you, the satire forces them to think about why they believe what they do, either to defend their minds against your horrible conclusions, or to find their way through the forest of irony and figure out what you really mean.

Of course, someone has to see the damned thing first. Sigh.

Speaking of satire, sometimes it can be done most elegantly and effectively by an act of compilation.

Of course, the place I got it from somehow thought it was about how male-oriented American cinema is, and I suppose you could get that from it too.

After all, it’s almost never “only one woman… “, is it?

But mostly, it’s about just how over-used that “only one man can stop this bad thing from happening!” trope has become.

It’s a trope that makes sense in our highly individualistic culture. Our heroes have to not just be individuals but hyper-individuals, absolutely and utterly unique people who are the only ones in all of existence that can do what the plot calls upon them to do.

Even if, objectively, what they do is not all that unique. A lot of American action heroes benefit greatly from the fact that because they are the hero, they get away with shit that should get them killed.

Like the fact that bad guys can’t shoot worth shit, for example. I call it the Bullet Exclusion Field. No matter how many bad guys are shooting at the hero, miraculously, none of the bullets will hit him.

That’s because the hero is protected by the plot. He gets shot at a lot because hey, bullets flying is cool. Getting shot at is cool. Squibs popping everywhere is cool.

But if logic prevailed and the hero actually got shot, the movie would be over. So the hero has to be magic, which makes his heroism a lot less impressive to my mind.

Next, we have a rare thing : a Cracked.com skit that is actually fairly decent.

And it’s not even an After Hours.

Usually, the people at Cracked take an OK premise and their obviously impressive production capabilities and make a total hash of it. Terrible gags, poor structure, coldheartedness, not having even the slightest idea where the “funny” is in a concept… the best I can say is that the acting is usually good.

The performers have the chops. But the writing tends to suck.

But I liked this skit. The premise is fairly obvious but the execution was good. Who hasn’t wanted a Shakespeare character to say “I literally have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. ”

Of course, they gave it their usual inaccurate title. It’s not a “Worst Performance” because it is clearly happening within the world of the play itself.

Get it together, you knobs.

Shakespearean language is pretty opaque. Not because Shakespeare was a lousy writer, far from it in fact. It’s just that his plays are full of what were, basically, topical references of his time.

Add to that the natural shift in the English language since Shakespearean days and it’s no wonder we need annotations up the yingyang to make sense of it all.

Imagine someone four hundred years from now trying to make sense of a hip, topical comedy based on current events, or an intense drama based on real world issues.

At least they will have the Internet to use!

And now, of course, today’s vid.

Not much to say about it. Picture of cute animals with my goofy assed jokes. Another day when I just did not feel very inspired when it came time to make a video.

I feel like I am really losing momentum on the video front. Somehow the project and me aren’t always on the same wavelength any more. I went into it with great enthusiasm and a thirst for experimentation, but now I am just not feeling it.

Well, worst case scenario, I only have eight more to do before the project is over. Of course, then I will have to come up with some other way to keep myself busy.

I am pondering a video project that is not tied to a one a day schedule. A lot of my vids could have been a lot better if I had simply had more time to refine them.

But the daily thing really works for me. I would be very afraid that without that structure, there would be nothing to keep me focused and it would be just another project abandoned when it had barely begun.

At least the crazy daily projects keep me going.

Maybe I should do things in multiple parts, one part a day?

Who knows. But I will find something to keep me occupied.