Share the wealth of what David Brooks called Sturm und Drang this past week. Brooks on NPR referred to the week past since the Congressional assassination attempt and shooting massacre in Tucson AZ.
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending it to others?
More below the fold if you dare to play nice. WYFP? I've got 99 problems (which you won't hear) and...Sarah Palin ain't one
MFP: contemporary television, as inherently anti-historical, does not adequately recognize the roles of its precursors. A precursor to SNL Weekend Update and The Daily Show was
That Was The Week That Was, also known as TW3, is a satirical television comedy programme shown on BBC Television in 1962 and 1963, devised, produced and directed by Ned Sherrin and presented by David Frost. An American version by the same name aired on NBC from 1964–65, also featuring Frost.
Recalling that David Frost is the one who gave us the Frost/Nixon interviews interpreted as the Frost/Nixon (2008) movie, television news and the dialogic disclosure always seems a powerful way to project the subjectivity of Presidential power. In this case it was meant to distract the American people from making critical judgments about the legacy message of the Nixon Presidency. This attempt at framing and revisionism may have been doomed from the start because an America used to TW3 following on the JFK assassination and the roiling civil rights struggle would make Frost be perceived as a different kind of interviewer. Frost, having formerly appeared on a satire show that functioned as parody seemed not to have that context recognized by Nixon. This mistake may have created its contradictory message and empowering what some literary critics have called metacriticism (Margaret Rose. Linda Hutcheon). Parody means that like the classical Greeks, the political context is evident in all artistic media and often voiced by a chorus. It remains to be seen whether the blogosphere and its meta discourse serves that function of political communication in a public sphere.
In the broader sense of Greek parodia, parody can occur when whole elements of one work are lifted out of their context and reused, not necessarily to be ridiculed. Hutcheon argues that this sense of parody has again become prevalent in the Twentieth Century, as artists have sought to connect with the past while registering differences brought by modernity. Major modernist examples of this recontextualizing parody include James Joyce's Ulysses, which incorporates elements of Homer's Odyssey in a Twentieth-Century Irish context, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which incorporates and recontextualizes elements of a vast range of prior texts.
In the postmodern sensibility, blank parody, in which an artist takes the skeletal form of another art work and places it in a new context without ridiculing it, is common. Pastiche is a closely related genre, and parody can also occur when characters or settings belonging to one work are used in a humorous or ironic way in another, such as the transformation of minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Shakespeare's drama Hamlet into the principal characters in a comedic perspective on the same events in the play (and film) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Similarly, one can compare The Daily Show and The Colbert Report: both produce satire and parody with differences in context since Colbert tries to maintain his character in the continuing context of Bill Loofah O'Reilly as the frame for projecting his critique. Can it be claimed that all comedy is now blank parody that now separates the audience into lizard people of the American Taliban from those who can appreciate the diversity and complexity of US society? Can this help explain the FP the media had with cheering during the McKale Center memorial service?
This last week was a week of heroism, folly, cowardice, and reflection; that week was the week of Loughner the sick man who wasn't seen as such by those who should have intervened, and that week wasn't without consequences. So WYFP?
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Hutcheon, Linda.(1985) A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms' .
Rose, Margaret. (1993) Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern.