Humor

[Charles Brown]

>>Louis Pr wrote:
Getting back to some points that my friends Gary McClennan and Carrol Cox
made yesterday, which have a bearing on the question of "irony" and
working-class representation. One of the great socialist artists of the
20th century was Bertold Brecht, who nobody could ever accuse of
romanticizing the workers. Mother Courage is the portrait of a woman who
goes around the battlefields after the combat has died down in order to
pick through the corpses for valuables to salvage. Is this more
unflattering than the portrait Michael Moore draws of the woman who sells
rabbits for meat? Tch-tch. >>

Charles  comments :

 Workers have enough self-esteem to laugh at themselves if something is really funny, and to take it in the spirit of criticism /self-criticism. It seems to me Moore is self-deprecating enough (though I don't watch television much; I did see Roger and Me, and used to march in protest at the GM building a lot) that he fulfills his self-criticism obligation. He is working class too, so he has some license to supply the self-criticism/deprecation of workers more generally.

But the theory I am throwing out here requires a balance of also portraying the "nobility" of the masses of Flint residents and others in their lives of quiet desparation. I would even propose seeking out and using poetic license to exaggerate those events where workers do presage revolutionary actions, mixing utopian romance with comedy.

Flint just had another plantclosing and suffers from GM' s recent decision to concentrate its headquarters in Detroit. No doubt GM wants Detroit to replace Flint as its companytown. Flint is our rugged little brother city.


>Louis Pr. also said:
The real discussion that underlies all the chitchat about Michael Moore,
Mark Twain, et al is how we can reach the working-class in advanced
capitalist countries. This is one of  the most important topics we can
discuss. It is not just humor that is a factor, although we have been
stressing this. Another factor is language. >>

Charles comments:

I agree and the working class has really lost its mind (not its fault) so the common sense therapy of common humor is critical for reaching them. The mass insanity or irrationality especially in inability to significantly sustain consciousness and activity in its own class self-interest is an understandable symptom of living in late, late, rotten , decadent capitalism (the phenomenon of child murders being a latest spectacular symptom). But somehow more conscious elements must "talk our people" out of this delirium as they are the only  possible agent of social revolution.

Charles Brown