Are You Not Entertained?

Last Friday night, some friends and I went to an improv comedy show based on Grimm's fairy tales. Unfortunately, the show itself was a mixed bag. In all fairness, we had been warned. The group's website recommended an audience age of 18+. The warning was all too apt.

The actors were a group of amazingly talented, funny people, who had me shaking with barely controlled laughter for at least half the night. The other half? Spent cringing at raunchy and/or profane humor. Why oh why? These people were genuinely hilarious without falling back on the tired standbys of sex and swearing. The crudity came about equally from audience participation and cast members, and, to be honest, maybe one or two of the off-color jokes were actually funny. But everything else was just the same ol', same ol' -- people trying to shock and giggling at their daring in making naughty jokes. ::eyeroll:: Please. Every sophomore guy in the history of high school has made these kinds of jokes before. You're not actually being that clever by tossing around the f-bomb like confetti. 

There is no imagination in this kind of humor. It has neither the hilarious absurdity of screwball comedies and Jeeves & Wooster nor the sophisticated wit of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde. It doesn't even aspire to the cleverness of innuendo, which only suggests at something not quite kosher and allows the intellect its own enjoyment at unraveling the veiled hints. 

Ultimately, raunch and swearing are deeply boring and mind-numbing. Let's face it, after the shock of the first few cracks has worn off, there are a very limited number of places you can go before you're merely repeating yourself. I noticed this in the improv performance, and it was only an hour-long show. Compared with the richness of the rest of the English language, curse-words make up an infinitesimal percentage. The same thing goes for sex or potty humor.

Listen to this trash long enough, however, and it has a corrosive effect on your brain. When you only listen to jokes about poop, well, pretty soon that's the only kind of humor you'll find amusing. Like any other attempt to raise your standards above the mediocre (or in this case, the down-right rancid and soul-smothering), it takes an effort to learn to appreciate the higher things, whether they be humor, cooking, painting, literature, science, architecture etc., etc. But do you honestly want to settle for the bare minimum? Even if it takes a heck of a lot more work to improve yourself, physically, mentally and spiritually? This kind of humor is only one of the many ways in which we fail to push ourselves toward something higher and better, looking beyond the comfortable to the truly noble and worthy.

Come on, people, we've all heard these things before. Can't we start acting like adults and stop laughing at fart jokes? Seriously. Why does humor so often descend to the level of the lowest common denominator? Is it because this is the easy humor, the old reliable jokes that have gotten laughs since preschool, or in the case of sex-related humor, junior high? Supposedly, humans ripen mentally as well as physically, reportedly reaching a half-mythic stage of existence called "maturity" where we can have "real" conversations about literature, politics, science, fashion, life after death, and any number of other serious topics that involve some sort of intelligence. Be a lady (or a gentleman) and get your mind out of the gutter and into something worthwhile.

Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

After reading an excerpt from Kay Hymowitz' "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys" in the Wall Street Journal, I was intrigued, placed it on hold at the library and added it to my ever-growing summer reading list. It sounded like an interesting premise, and judging from the excerpt, a pretty even-handed treatment of the topic. Did it live up to its promise? Weeeellllllll.... It's certainly one of the most interesting books I've read in a while. 

Hymowitz starts out with her definition of the "preadult", the 20-something who's half child, half adult, stranded between school and a solid career. How did we get to the preadult? Hymowitz lays out two primary factors, the Industrial and Sexual Revolutions. One changed the culture's idea of work and its purpose, creating the free-time necessary for a college degree and its resultant "knowledge economy jobs"; the other completely changed the script when it came to marriage, family and children. From this basis, Hymowitz examines how women have flourished in this new career playing field. Not surprising, since the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution freed women from much of the domestic drudgery and the Sexual Revolution "liberated" women from children and a husband. Men on the other hand? They've retreated to their man-caves with a beer in one hand and a remote in the other. Think Knocked Up, beer pong, frat parties and Adam Sandler movies, among other things. Why?

Is it because women were the primary beneficiaries of the two Revolutions? Did second-wave feminists raise daughters to aggressively pursue degrees and careers that were once the sole province of men? Or are women just better at the knowledge-based career world that bloomed in the last half of the 20th century? Hymowitz explores all of these possibilities, as well as what the preadult phenomenon has meant for men and women in the boardroom and the bedroom. She ends her book by acknowledging that, while most women seem to still desire marriage and children, the growing bloc of "choice mothers" (those who employ sperm banks instead of the crude child-man) will probably become the norm. She ends by stating that

"men may have lost the clarity of previous eras' script for growing up, but that does not mean that the only alternative is to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and underachieving. They can still choose to keep their eyes on the things that will lead to a meaningful life." 

In other words, it's the guys' fault for not adapting and evolving to fit this new model of society where women don't really need them as husband, father or breadwinner. And yet puzzlingly enough, in the next paragraph, Hymowitz acknowledges that "with nobody expecting anything of them, men get worse." That's right, man, I don't really need you because I am woman, hear me roar. I have a satisfying career, a chic apartment, friends, everything I need. Well, actually I kinda need your sperm cause I want kids. But I don't want you cause you're gross and crude and immature. Somehow, Hymowitz fails to see the connection between the evaporation of the expectations placed on men by the previous societal life-script and the resultant slob who appeared after women decided that they didn't really need men performing in their traditional roles.

One other thing that bothered me: besides Hymowitz' obviously irritating stance that contraception did women a favor by "liberating" them from children, I also threw my hands heavenward over her dichotomy of the guys women date (or don't date, as the case were). She gives the reader two types: the sensitive, so-called-nice guy*, who's thoughtful and in touch with his feminine side, supposedly the ideal man in a post-feminist-revolt world; the other is the man's man (as Hymowitz defines him), the kind of guy who notches his bedpost and uses something called "Game" to score women without a shred of feeling. She sees no middle ground between these two kinds of men, and finds it somewhat puzzling that women don't seem to be attracted to the sensitive man, but are rather drawn to the so-called macho man. I found it most irritating that she defined the manly man, the man's man, as the slimeball in the second example. That is not a manly man; that is a cad (<== lovely, descriptive word, that). Ascribing such things as "respect" and "care" to her "nice guy", Hymowitz paints a picture of the manly man as an arrogant, neanderthal jerk. And that's just not true. Neither of her two options sound at all appealing, and I've had just enough experience with guys to know that there's a third type, the gentleman, and with all due respect to Ms. Hymowitz and her well-placed indignation over the Gamers, that's the kind of man I want.

So while I found "Manning Up" to be a fairly informative if somewhat frenetic attempt to cover all the bases, Hymowitz' failure to offer any satisfying conclusion to the question she poses disappointed me. I did enjoy reading the book. It's not your typical summer read, but it has offered me quite a bit to think about.

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*Nice?! *snorts of indignation* One such "nice" guy that she quotes is miffed because "you [the average preadult woman] ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy." Yeah. Cause I call a guy nice when he gives me emotional satisfaction only with the ultimate expectation that I'll sleep with him. Good call on that definition of nice, Ms. Hymowitz

In Which I Pontificate Upon Two Disparate Topics

Firstly, a slight reflection on the word memoir:

Memoir is a much more enticing word than biography. A memoir is memories, personal impressions, what a person sees as important about one, particular episode or period of life. A biography must grapple with facts, reciting the events of one person's life from birth to death, inclusive. Plus, memoir is taken from a French word; biography from the Greek. Which language strikes you as more elegant and intriguing?

Secondly, a brief rant about Ironman 2:

During the climactic encounter with the Bad Guys, Scarlett Johansson's character strips down to her undergarments and dons a skintight...something. Honestly, I couldn't tell what it was supposed to be. Sure, it might be a little inconvenient to fight the villain's minions in the secretary's de rigueur pencil skirt, but really? Is it that much more realistic that she would take five minutes to change into a shrink-wrap bodysuit before taking out the security guards? Blurgh (that is a disgusted noise, FYI). Would they make a male sidekick change from suit to speedo? Hazarding a guess here, I'd say no.