>
>No, it's not a joke...or rather the joke's on us, because if "humor"
>promotes the idea that it's funny to send an old lady into a fatal dive
>on account of some potato chips....we can extrapolate about what that
>means in general for what we do to eachother and for what motives.
>
>Joanna
Joanna--
I do understand your point and it is not completely without validity. The creators have tried to be absurd in their portrayal of two seniors fighting to the death over something as inconsequential as a half-eaten bag of potato chips. By showing the senior who has taken the nose dive as the victor, they have at least attempted to mitigate the domestic violence aspect. IN fact, since neither senior obtains the bag in the end, the futility of violence is the moral tale.
If you want to study bad taste then I can't think of any genre as fertile as television commercials. if you want to protest overt violence in ads, then call Anheuser-Bush. One Budwiser commercial shows a man using his pet mongrel to attack another man in order to get his bottle of beer. Another depicts a woman as a screaming bully. The first commercial at least has a point, the beer is good enough to be worth the trouble and the attacked man is a pretentious bastard who deserves his comeuppance. The second is just gratuitous stereotyping.
The point is that we have limited resources. If we spend those resources railing against commercials that the vast majority do not think are bothersome, we must use up much of these resources explaining why we are upset. If we don't, the ideas and their authors become nationalized as humourless, or worse. The probability of success is diminished. Whereas if we fight against more obvious choices we might actually win one and move the standards.