mikegerber.com

Running around today, so I’ll keep it short, but here’s a tight little spoof of the BP situation courtesy of the UCB. Very enjoyable, although it just sorta ends, which is understandable given that it’s lampooning a situation which hasn’t ended yet. But on the other hand their take seems a bit, well, passive, and certainly reductive in the way I mentioned in the Blackwater parody song post. The vid does a beautiful job of sketching the folks at BP as incompetent, misguided, overmanaging retards, and while that delivers good laughs, it’s all surface—as if the problem was just that BP is run by morons. They’re not morons, they’re very smart, and they’ve been acting with complete intentionality throughout this entire situation. Comedy that assigns BP the identity of idiots is not only incorrect—it’s a kid’s vision of the world, and how corporations work—it also lets them off the hook.

It’s that Onion motto again: “You are stupid,” as if the world’s problems are caused by a simple lack of intelligence. When of course any adult knows that the problem isn’t lack of intelligence, but intelligence misapplied. Big problem or small, an oil spill in the gulf or a mistimed traffic light, our difficulties don’t arise because people are morons; it’s because they’re other things as well as smart: greedy, distracted, short-sighted, in love with technology, you name it.

Of course, I could be particularly sensitive to this because I watched “The Great Dictator” last night. That speech at the end, though it isn’t comic, and makes modern audiences squirm with its sentimentality, is nevertheless essential to the film. Without it, Dictator would be an Abbott and Costello movie, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s Chaplin’s willingness to engage with evil—to confront it head on, say exactly what he thinks about it, and what we need to do in response—that raises him from a comedian to a great artist. Improv training makes one exquisitely sensitive to the mechanisms of comedy (how to time a joke, how to find a comic characteristic and heighten it, et cetera), but it also builds in a deep aversion to ever taking oneself too seriously, lest the audience “not want to go there.” But of course the improv one remembers (watching and especially doing) is the stuff that taps into something much greater and deeper than a laugh. Do I know exactly how this BP video could’ve pulled this off? Not immediately, but I’m sure there was a solution, and precisely because they did the comic part so wonderfully, I would’ve liked to have seen them try. Because they are NOT stupid, and neither are we, and neither is BP. Comedy that says, “People in authority are morons” and leaves it at that is comedy for children, and since we’re already drowning in such stuff, I’d like more of the other kind please.

Here’s the video, and then after that, the heartfelt speech by Chaplin, coming after 90 minutes of primo slapstick.