hey old folks answer me was there a time where unironically wholesome or vaguely sexualizable shit didnt get "that just sounds WRONG!" treatment

seriously, in - i dunno - 1970, would normal adults working in an office together look at a magazine ad with a kid on grandpa's lap and be like "that's just not RIGHT lol" or is this a modern invention?

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongye taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

lol copied and pasted from a blog so no typo

I think it would have been pretty normal in 1970, kinda o_O by 1980. Not sure what it was about the 70s...let's blame C.J. Laing and John Holmes. But what do I know, I was 6 years old during most of 1970.

How was life on the lap?

I think the answer here is "no," depending on precisely how you mean it -- I mean, making sexual innuendo out of innocent statements is like ... there's plenty in Shakespeare, and I'm not sure there's anything else is Restoration comedy, and I'm sure drunk dudes kept it up strong all through the 20th century

Looking back I think you might mean something different here, though?

Those were days you could spank the hell out of a naked kid and nobody wanted to put it on the internet.

Drunk dudes NOTM.

i remember reading once, cant remember where, that david letterman really mainstreamed the whole lol-the-50s/lol-the-midwest school of cheap irony, like before letterman guys in an elevator would just talk normally but post-letterman guys in an elevator were likelier to be all riffing on the banality of elevator conversation and how keenly away they all were of participating in this... t/f??

yeah nabisco i know folks have been turning innocent shit into dirty shit (and pompous shit into ridiculous shit) since babylon, i guess i mean more as an all-encompassing communication mode... like, it isn't subversive or novel, it just flows unconsciously now

I think the increasing acceptance of homosexuality and the heightened awareness of things like incest/pedophilia/etc. combined with the popularity of shock humor and gross out jokes has just kind of opened up a can of worms for people both mentally and verbally in the past few decades, so that people are much quicker to jump to the dirtiest possible connotation of a phrase or action and/or to say something about it.

i guess this and the ironic guys in the elevator are two diff things but it feels like theyre all coming from this same shift in how people interact day to day

like before two guys could hug, or a kid could sit on their grandfather's lap etc. and everyone in the room wouldn't immediately take a mental inventory of all the boner jokes they know

xpost

i guess im kinda thinking of this too http://www.geocities.com/arlen_texas/shesaid.htm

another flavor of this is that any children's character or mascot or whatever thats in any way manacing or unusual gets the whole "that's gonna give me NIGHTMARES!"/"clowns are the scariest thing in the world!" treatment

i'm trying to get at exactly what i'm talking about here, still... there's this constant desire to show how far ahead in the game you are, that you're capable of interpreting junk culture in a way that the creators didn't intend?

If anything I'd think that SNL more than Letterman is responsible for what you're talking about here.

and what is david denby????

Oh, I see, you mean actively ironizing everyday stuff -- kind of attached to what somedude said, I think ... with an adult person in 1970, his/her experience of the world would still be mostly firsthand, whereas today, people's experience of the world is way more mediated, which is what allows you to be ironic and self-conscious about this stuff, having sort of external/mediated experiences of things that you can constantly compare to what's actually happening

That ties in with what somedude is saying because we're kind of constantly immersed in mediated information about certain things that lots of people really have no firsthand experience of and feel loads of discomfort about in exactly those terms

"keenly away"

btw i meant "keenly aware" obv

Hahaha maybe I don't see, and you mean something else -- if it's just about taking this kind of critical/ironic stance toward interpreting all the mediated info around you, I think most people would agree that took a huge upswing over the second half of the 20th century just because people were more immersed in such stuff and lots of us pretty naturally tried to become better / more powerful / more perceptive about dealing with it!

i used to be able to watch sports events, see a team mascot on the sidelines, and never think about furries.

thanks a lot, ilx.

I'm wondering how it's connected to the increased knowledge/acceptance of gay folks and a wider variety of people able to actually detect a gay subtext. I'm not expressing this very well, but it works like Rob Halford talking all this black leather fetish wear and setting the tone and style as a macho guy in heavy metal in 1978, only it took everybody else a decade or more to twig to the fact that the costume had different connotations.

and I get the sense that an increasing use of camp and, if nothing else, more people seeing John Waters movies(or insert whatever relevant pop artifact you'd like).

Again, I'm articulating all this none too well, but hopefully somebody gets the idea.

If anything I'd think that SNL more than Letterman is responsible for what you're talking about here.

I think I agree with this. Also: National Lampoon. (That shit was rude. I got in big trouble when my dad found a copy of that in my room, circa 1977.)

Mainly for the cartoon where a little St. Nick is crawling up a naked woman's leg and saying "Yes, Vagina, there is a Santa Claus."

yeah i mean i guess a lot of this goes back to notes on camp but at the time this was this gay minority response to mega-popular mainstream culture, whereas now the only unintentional camp left seems to be at the fringes of society (christian music videos, weird local ads put up on youtube) and foisted into the mainstream by internet camp appreciation - unlike the days of, i dunno, ben hur, there's a larger audience for laughing at camp than there is for shit that isnt trying to be appreciated as camp

Funny how Culture Club, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Duran Duran were almost post-gay top 40 bands in the early 80s, where now it would be hard to imagine them being accepted as more than a niche.

gargantua and pantagruel

does that make any sense? even in 1970, it feels like the majority of entertainment and advertising and whatever was unintentionally ridiculous shit, and there was a minority of folks who took pleasure in appreciating it on a different level, but now in 2009 theres only a few corners of unironic camp left, and usually i only hear about it from best week ever or some internet meme

not to say a lot of folks working on campy 60s/70s stuff didnt obviously know what they were doing, but i mean did the majority of viewing audiences for bewitched or even batman appreciate them the same way we would now?

i think youd have to argue that this kind of response is different than any other sort of socially-conditioned responses--i cant think of any other examples right now but im sure clowns (or whatever) provoked a certain kind of conditioned response in the 1950s; that they provoke a different reaction in a (certain) segment of the population now doesnt necessarily mean anything other than we live in a different time period with a different set of cultural lenses.

i mean when i hear a guy go "oh man clowns give me nightmares" or "hey thats just WRONG" i dont really imagine that hes thinking it all the way through in a "whats the most ahead-of-the-game/ironic/not-chumpy way to react," i think its more of a "thats just what people say" reaction...

i mean i get that the distinction im making is a fine one, but its the difference between dave letterman and the cast of snl operating in that ironic insecure mode vs. the whole country

or to put it another way--just because everyone loves camp now doesnt mean theyre operating at a sontag level of irony--just that they understand that theyre SUPPOSED to love camp, because letterman or dimitri martin or whoever does

yeah i guess this is sorta like every ilm thread 'oh man i cant believe modest mouse is popular now!!@ even tho it sounds like everything else on the soft rock station - just becase something has its origins in minority/opposition culture doesnt mean it could become part of the majority smoothly and painlessly? so distanced cultural one-upmanship became the default mode

(Just to clarify: at least as an eighth-grader, I looked at Culture Club and Frankie as gay the way we look at Obama now as black: it's there, but it's not distracting. Whereas now a top-40 Frankie or Queen, etc., would be easier to ridicule.)

I dunno, E, that seems like a case of not noticing the water you swim in -- this country's still full of a billion kinds of earnestness either way, isn't it? (We might also just have a more complex decentralized patchwork of one person's earnestness being ridiculous to someone else)

(I also worry about giving ourselves too much credit for being so much more penetrating about these things than people were in the past; surely we will get old and some hollowness will appear in our stuff that seems amusingly camp to our successors -- maybe it'll even be exactly what you're talking about, maybe that quality itself will begin to look quaint and laughable)

or to put it another way--just because everyone loves camp now doesnt mean theyre operating at a sontag level of irony--just that they understand that theyre SUPPOSED to love camp

yah but isnt the o.p. asking when this shift in perception occured and i guess implicity why/how?

uh, vietnam, and because we all read derrida

jk i dunno

well yeah n i know that but i think there's also maybe just MORE views in the mainstream now? like, in 1960 how many penetrating critiques of ike or jfk hero worship were floating around, vs endless unignorable obamessiah jokes now

um there is a terrific umberto eco quote about irony/innocence from his postscript to name of the rose that i think would offer some interesting insights to this conversation but i cannt find it

xp i know youre kidding with vietnam but in the prez analogy i just made, maybe nixon? is that just boomer mediapoly that makes me think this was a shift in how folks viewed "the president" as a thing

i dont know how to connect the whole kevin from the wonder years "we lost our innocence in the late 60s" b.s. to guys being self-conscious about an elevator conversation but some old fuck on ile must be able to

What if its just an acceleration of the cycle of production/consumption/time passes/fashion changes/rediscovery/mockery?

The clown thing has a lot more baggage behind it than "oh I want to be ahead of the game" and doesn't seem to fit in with the sexualization jokes; there's an entire set of iconography/art predicated on the idea that clowns are sinister and evil, the most obvious example being The Joker (who first appeared in 1940). The whole "clowns are scary" thing seems to be driven from two angles:

- standard horror-cliche subversion of a positive childhood memory to elicit a fright reaction
- a real-life childhood experience with a clown that was supposed to be fun but, for whatever reason, involved some level of trauma

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_clown where they link this as a manifestation of the Trickster archetype

sort of a tangent but i've always wondered how many cues 'our' behavior has taken from mass popular art since say 1900, like when any given two lovers are in an argument, how many of the poses and rhythms and sighs and pauses and speech is coming out of what people *think* a lover's quarrel should look like(and if this matters etc.). Sure all those cues presumably come from 'life' in the first place but i get the sense that certain modes of expressing oneself have gotten all but filtered out with each passing generation as mass cultural formulas have slowly taken hold and metastasized (sometimes into novel new/authentic directions sure but again i'm curious as to what's been lost)

i think this basically some zeitgeist-y superobv b_s but there has a been a concrete structural change in what most first world ppl do and it seems obv that having a job that involves thinking mostly symbolically or in abstracts lends itself to thinking about everything else as signs, signs, everywhere signs

I got to read some old (1967) issues of Justice League of America, and the letter columns had a running argument about how camp the fans wanted the comic to be.

I would imagine some of the ridiculous "sexual" situations would have been commented on if things like that could have been discussed in a letters column.

I also get the feeling that these were aging college students attempting to be a step ahead of the material they still loved.

xposts to lots of things

dan this is more about the shift from clowns-are-evil as serious mythology to insecure wahey!!@ joke

xp it was the late 60s when stan lee declared marvel comics would now be referred to as "marvel POP ART! productions" on the cover in response to lichtenstein

lol suggest book. but, yeah, srlsy lost if the funhouse is great

the "condition" identified in "lost in the funhouse" is a specific kind of awareness of self-awareness. it is the awareness that the self cannot perceive things without perceiving, in turn, all of the associations those things trigger, and being aware at the same time that one IS perceiving and evaluating all those triggered associations, and also evaluating one's position relative to them as perceived by others, real or imaginary, and at the same time perceiving this whole tangled mess, and running it through the same changes, etc. i'm arguing that this multiplex, infinitely telescoping awareness of awareness of awareness (etc.) is fundamental to the conscious condition of the intelligent, media-saturated human being in the late-20th/early-21st century.

I vehemently disagree w/ this

cf. rilke

xpost - Yeah, I might be misremembering the circumstances -- but it was a sort of decision-making paralysis, which is just amusing me, given the post before. (Haha he also lives for a while in the building across the street from my old place.)

xpost - I think I disagree with that, too, but I also think contenderizer was sent by god to teach me why people give me tl;dr reactions. (that's not a dis, contenderizer, that's totally an "I know where you're coming from, bro")

or some german older than rilke maybe

xp

Is that really mind-blowing, though? I mean, I agree with you that this is way more of a mode of communication for a lot more people than it appeared to be over the last century -- my point with the old lit stuff, though, is just that I get the feeling it's existed as an understood thing for a long, long time, so ... well, it's not a recent invention (I know, nobody's claimed that), and it strikes me as possible that there may have been other historical periods where certain classes of people did a lot of it.

Another good lit example that surely ties in with what Clover was saying upthread about "aimless middle classes" -- London's jazz-age rich kids would seem to have been every bit as ironic, facetious, distanced, sarcastic, deliberately and comically frivolous, etc. as anyone today. (Haha they even had the equivalent of flashmobs!)

― nabisco, Friday, February 27, 2009 12:09 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark

There's a lot of it in Evelyn Waugh novels about that period, and it crops up in Fitzgerald as well. But Nabisco's right, it's definitely there in Jane Austen novels, esp. Northanger Abbey, which makes me think about all the Austen film adaptations in the past decade or so. That's the earliest example that I can think of (late 18th century) where you could easily substitute "horror movie" for "gothic novel" and it would feel pretty contemporary.

I think a key part of this is the sources we're looking towards (and can look at) for historical verification -- literature, music, plays, art -- and these things, of course, are somewhat determined by the culture, customs and markets of their times. So we don't really answer the question, "were people always as self-aware and self-conscious as they are now," instead we're answering, "was media always as self-aware and self-conscious as it is now."

we're also asking "can we find evidence of what we're looking for in the past?" and of course we can.

but i don't think we can find convincing analogs for 30 rock, the family guy, LITF, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, warhol's persona/art, kaufman/letterman-style non-comedy (metacomedy), hipster runoff, etc. all of these things express a critique of the world and of the self in the world, and of the self as a member of "the audience", and of the self as a being that is VERY uncomfortably aware of all of the above. moreover, as time goes on, popular art runs this awareness-kaleidoscope in an increasingly efficient, subtle and assumptive manner, as though less and less of the groundwork of first-level observation has to take place before second-level observation of that first-level observation can kick in to subvert it, before being itself subverted. the technology of 360-degree meta-awareness is improving by leaps and bounds, and i think we see it reflected in the culture and people around us -- ILX, again, being an excellent petri dish.

that said, by "fundamental to the conscious condition of the intelligent, media-saturated human being" i don't mean "existing fully-formed in everyone". people vary, but i do think it's become integral part of the general, shared human experience - at least in a passive, second-hand sense.

TL to tha motherfuckin DR

but i don't think we can find convincing analogs for 30 rock, the family guy, LITF, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, warhol's persona/art, kaufman/letterman-style non-comedy (metacomedy), hipster runoff, etc. all of these things express a critique of the world and of the self in the world, and of the self as a member of "the audience", and of the self as a being that is VERY uncomfortably aware of all of the above.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_c1yVlEiBDNM/SJUwhHCAQUI/AAAAAAAAAEY/Mqb_gk6KllY/s400/velazquez-meninas.jpg

but i don't think we can find convincing analogs for 30 rock, the family guy, LITF, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, warhol's persona/art, kaufman/letterman-style non-comedy (metacomedy), hipster runoff, etc.

Some of these examples make zero sense to me, but I'll just pick on one: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is like ridiculously earnest and a BILLION times less self-conscious about being a text than, say, Tristam Shandy

but that's, again, just a very documentation of the most superficial sort of "self-awareness" -- something that we all agree has been part of human consciousness for a long, long time. looking at that painting and finding in it something akin to andy kaufmann's stance relative to his audience requires a MASSIVE assumptive stretch. i mean, more than anything else, it seems like a wry, simple joke about the relationship of the artist to his subjects.

i don't get your point

tristram shandy is a precursor of the kind of think i'm talking about. and "earnestness" is in no way at odds with this kind of awareness. in fact, i think the successful integration of earnestness and irony in works like AHWOSG is evidence of how completely ironic recursiveness has been absorbed into human consciousness.

but that's, again, just a very documentation of the most superficial sort of "self-awareness"

this goes back tho to my point about how we're conditioned to read for self-awareness rather than the actual perspective of the painter

also if irony is reflexive rather than critical how self-aware can it be?

Contenderizer, I don't want this to go the way of the acting thread, but I don't understand how you can say "I don't think we can find convincing analogs for XYZ" and then, when someone names the most convincing analog in the universe, you go "well that's more of a precursor"

again, i'm not talking about whether or not this mode of thinking was "invented" in the late 20th century (it wasn't) but rather the way it was packaged and popularized, and the extent to which it has, as a result, become part of the "ordinary" default state of human awareness.

granted, nabisco: i overstated my case. analogs do exist. but, again, i'm more concerned with cultural saturation than with existence/nonexistence.

contenderizer if you dont think theres more going on in las meninas than velazquez saying "hey! look! im in the painting!" may i refer you to http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=las+meninas&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

Although to be fair I guess the best modern-day analog for Tristam Shandy would be "How I Met Your Mother," since it is essentially the same thing -- "let me tell you a story," and then the joke is that the story goes on forever before getting to anything remotely resembling what it's supposed to be about

xpost - ok, Cont., but then I don't really get what you are arguing -- I think everyone pretty firmly agrees that this is a more mainstream habit in the modern-day US than in the past

Although to be fair I guess the best modern-day analog for Tristam Shandy would be "How I Met Your Mother,"

i just sb'd you for this

if irony is reflexive rather than critical how self-aware can it be?

― Lamp

this is part of the LITF effect -- understanding this paradox and yet being no less trapped by it

haha it's true, man! TS gets through like three volumes before getting to the part where he's born

I think everyone pretty firmly agrees that this is a more mainstream habit in the modern-day US than in the past

― nabisco

dude, all i've been doing from word one is defending that very simple point, and talking about what i see as the cultural/psychological consequences. if the point weren't controversial, there wouldn't have been so much controversy.

i dunno, maybe my mode of argument encourages it. and maybe i've been unclear. hard to say from over here...

if that had been "all you've been doing" then no one would be arguing with you you've def been more far reaching than that simple point

xpost - ok, Cont., but then I don't really get what you are arguing -- I think everyone pretty firmly agrees that this is a more mainstream habit in the modern-day US than in the past

Someone upthread mentioned being part of "the audience" - and I think that's definitely something that has changed, in the sense, that the performer/audience dynamic has grown to encompass more and more of our lives, and the lives of a larger segment of the population. Going back to Velasquez and classical painting: it used to be that we only saw pictures or read stories of the rich and powerful and religious, it really wasn't until Capitalism took hold that there were portrayals of regular middle class people, but it wasn't like everyone was painting self-portraits 24-7, which we can do with facebook, live journal, flicker et al. Add to that all the passiveaggressivenotes, vice, hipsterrunoff type sites that chronicle the banality of the lives of nobodies, and not only is the average person presented with the opportunity of performing their whole life for an audience, but that they are not in control of that audience, who can criticize and recontextualize their "performance" for cheap lols.

i just went back and read all my posts in this thread - not to prove you wrong, just to verify my own sense of the argument(s) i've been making.

from time to time i've overstepped the bounds of that box, or seeemed to, but for the most part, that really is the gist of what i've argued. that in the late 20th century, due to the collision of a number of factors*, the seeming self-awareness popular culture changed radically, reflecting and also instigating changes in deep culture & individual psychology. basically that "we think differently now", especially WR2 our awareness of our own thinking.

* those "factors" identified in my first post here in the following manner: "...a response to the omnipresence and sophistication of commercial media (as nabisco suggested), and also to the mainstreaming of camp sensibilities (kingfish). there's also our social internalization of early 20th century psychology/psychiatry: freud, etc. plus the breakdown of old taboos & social conventions that kept certain "unpleasant" ideas & realities out of the public view..."

** plus sarahel OTM. i was talking about "the audience" upthread: the way performer/audience dynamics have invaded "ordinary" life and consciousness. particularly interesting is the way we now have to balance both states (performer AND audience) at the same time, while also maintaining ironic distance from each

opening of that last addressed to lamp

haha contendo, I think you've been perceiving "controversy" where no one is necessarily arguing -- i.e., I don't think your point has been "controversial," I think people have generally left it be and maybe added some other, umm, perspectives

I mean, you might find me upthread pointing out that we don't really know a lot of the things you've claiming, which for the record I still think -- you guys are sort of making this assumption that this stuff has only recently crossed over to "the audience," but part of the point of my mentioning a lot of older things is that this isn't necessarily the firmest assumption. There are pockets of cultural history -- yes, mostly involving an educated upper class -- where I don't think anyone on this thread has much certain evidence that people didn't communicate in a way that maybe resembled or anticipated the way we do today. A surprising number of examples have cropped up here, which I really find interesting! (The jazz age is a fascinating one, especially w/r/t this "audience" idea)

^^ this is stipulating that today is different from yesterday -- don't disagree -- and then saying "well, it's interesting to ponder whether yesterday was that different"

I think we're, yes, agreeing with the main point, and arguing over semantics and levels of degree and popularity (in terms of applying to a larger portion of the population vs. Waugh's "smart set").

think y'all are understating the degree of controversy/contention about the crux point over the past week, but i'll readily admit that i often get kinda defensive in these debates. like whenever someone takes up a point i've made, even if indirectly, i feel obliged to man the ramparts at full battle strength. which sometimes impedes more than clarifies...

ike whenever someone takes up a point i've made, even if indirectly, i feel obliged to man the ramparts at full battle strength. which sometimes impedes more than clarifies...

http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/130/009_575-010~Norman-Rockwell-Triple-Self-Portrait-Posters.jpg

So I don't have the text with me, but there is a bit in John O'Hara's BUtterfield 8 (1935) where a woman is going through a paper and reads a recap of a baseball game in which there was a "squeeze play" and someone "lays down a perfect bunt," and she says something along the lines of "I guess that shouldn't sound funny but you know I have a dirty mind."

But to be honest there is so much about that book that feels so amazingly modern that I keep flipping back to the copyright page to make absolutely completely sure that it was seriously written in the 30s and I'm not just tripping

http://books.google.com/books?id=2SEBBT6MWG8C&pg=RA1-PA309&img=1&pgis=1&dq=%22squeeze+play%22&sig=ACfU3U3yubgf1L47NNcniQ4crDTAmj2P5w&edge=1

omg why thank you

really <3 that book and its whole atmosphere of tawdry boozy sex

was thinking about this thread the other week cuz my grandmother & i were having a conversation about sports that involved liberal discussion about handling balls

the "condition" identified in "lost in the funhouse" is a specific kind of awareness of self-awareness. it is the awareness that the self cannot perceive things without perceiving, in turn, all of the associations those things trigger, and being aware at the same time that one IS perceiving and evaluating all those triggered associations, and also evaluating one's position relative to them as perceived by others, real or imaginary, and at the same time perceiving this whole tangled mess, and running it through the same changes, etc. i'm arguing that this multiplex, infinitely telescoping awareness of awareness of awareness (etc.) is fundamental to the conscious condition of the intelligent, media-saturated human being in the late-20th/early-21st century.

This sensation is the reason I quit smoking weed.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rebeccae/first-recorded-thats-what-she-said-joke/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6SMOSXa7A

will someone please school me on the history of "I'd ____ her ____ statements?"

I imagine there's a long history of innuendos like "I'd stick my plug into her socket," where the action is clearly suggestive of sex. but how long have people been making innuendos like "I'd higgs her boson" or "I'd school her seven bells", where the action is deliberately nonsensical and not suggestive of sex in any concrete way? the latter is obviously an absurdist spin on an existing trope, but is it (fairly) new?

"I'd like to fuck her on the tennis court, if you get my meaning."

"I'd serve her balls..."

"I'd balance her bank statements! Um, wait..."

"I'd like to fuck her on the tennis court, if you get my meaning."

yeah but the kind of thing I'm thinking about is more like, "heh, I'd restring her racquet with synthetic multi-filament catgut for improved tension and better durability." the whole point is that it's clinical and unsexy as fuck.

the whole point is that it's clinical and unsexy as fuck.

exactly!

there's another "thing" (which is what jaymc just did) where someone will say something that's unambiguously sexual but act as if it's a really subtle double entendre that will probably fly over most people's heads (but really doesn't). "I'd fuck her in the ass, if you catch my drift *wink wink*" and stuff like that. this might be a recent development too, I dunno.

http://www.escuchar-musica-espagnola.com/musica.internacional/Alanis-Morissette/images/alanis-morissette-ironic.jpg

"I'd balance her bank statements! Um, wait..."

― WHEY AHR MAH DREGUNS? (DJP), Tuesday, 5 June 2012 10:04 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agh i was going to make this joke