Not to defend all the idiots we see, but I have to say; the people who do any sort of creative work tend to want to explore a deeper meaning. Not that the aesthetic or technical skill isn’t valuable, its probably harder to have great technical skill.
I write, both poetry and short stories (just for myself not as a career or anything) and I don’t want to do the shallow stuff either. But that doesn’t mean your rupi kaur like ‘poets’ are ‘bad’. Clearly strike some form of emotion for the readers.
A lot of comedians do have some deep material, both philosophical and emotional. Not talking about your clap comedians, Trevor Noah etc whose ‘jokes’ are meant to make them seem righteous and nget claps and cheers instead of laughs. (Not saying Trevor Noah doesn’t have the capacity to pull laughs, he can be funny too).
But look at someone like Steven Wright, a postmodernist sense of humour that builds upon that kind of art.
“I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, ‘Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.’ I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”
Here’s an example, I love this joke, it builds upon the Borges story On Exactitude in Science and elaborates on a concept in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: a fictional map that had “the scale of a mile to the mile.” One of Carroll’s characters notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
Italian writer Umberto Eco expanded upon the theme, quoting the story as the epigraph for his short story “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1”, collected in his How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard cited “On Exactitude in Science” as a predecessor to his concept of hyperreality in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation.
(I copied the last bit from Wikipedia)
So we can explore massive themes and ideas as comedians. And quite a few do.
Not to defend all the idiots we see, but I have to say; the people who do any sort of creative work tend to want to explore a deeper meaning. Not that the aesthetic or technical skill isn’t valuable, its probably harder to have great technical skill.
I write, both poetry and short stories (just for myself not as a career or anything) and I don’t want to do the shallow stuff either. But that doesn’t mean your rupi kaur like ‘poets’ are ‘bad’. Clearly strike some form of emotion for the readers.
A lot of comedians do have some deep material, both philosophical and emotional. Not talking about your clap comedians, Trevor Noah etc whose ‘jokes’ are meant to make them seem righteous and nget claps and cheers instead of laughs. (Not saying Trevor Noah doesn’t have the capacity to pull laughs, he can be funny too).
But look at someone like Steven Wright, a postmodernist sense of humour that builds upon that kind of art.
“I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, ‘Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.’ I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”
Here’s an example, I love this joke, it builds upon the Borges story On Exactitude in Science and elaborates on a concept in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: a fictional map that had “the scale of a mile to the mile.” One of Carroll’s characters notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
Italian writer Umberto Eco expanded upon the theme, quoting the story as the epigraph for his short story “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1”, collected in his How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard cited “On Exactitude in Science” as a predecessor to his concept of hyperreality in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation.
(I copied the last bit from Wikipedia)
So we can explore massive themes and ideas as comedians. And quite a few do.
PS. You can read both SUPER short stories on !shortstories@literature.cafe and I post my poetry on !originalpoetry@literature.cafe