9 April 2009: "Who is the most authentic South Park celebrity interpretation?"

This post is about the carnivalesque. Can humor be deployed as a weapon against the forces of reaction and petit bourgeois conventionalism? Or are the mediums used to disseminate humor themselves antagonistic to radicalism, denaturing the would-be subversive messages and making them safe for middlebrow consumption? Carles uses the popular comedic show South Park to explore the question of how to disrupt hegemonic structures. "Not sure who I should like the most/find the funniest. Feel ‘jealous’ of South Park for being ’so mainstream’ but also ‘being cutting edge.’ Not sure if I should ‘respect it’, ‘go out of my way 2 h8 it’, or ‘pretend I don’t watch it.’" The show exists on the boundary between irony and collaboration; it seems to collude with the forces it mocks, so it mirrors the positionality of a "cool" audience that relies on that which it spurns for its identity.

As Carles makes clear, using cartoons to parody famous personages is a strategy that has exhausted its subversive potential. The examples he images in this post reveal their spent force in their bland inability to shock; their impotent lampoons play to a decadent culture of celebrity, and are little more than more bread and circuses for a jaded and otherwise indifferent public -- as Carles notes, "the kind of people who just ‘make fun of shit’ but ‘don’t make the world better’".

Carles argues that shows like South Park work by enhancing the bourgeois sense of individualistic entitlement: "Sometimes I feel like South Park is ‘funnie’ and that I am the only bro who ‘gets it’ like it is supposed 2 be ‘gotten.’" This illusion masks the shows disciplinary function, to condition our sense of humor and denude it, strip it of its subversive capabilities. Instead of aligning with longstanding carnivalesque tropes of upending hierarchies and undermining authority, we learn to laugh at what the bosses want us to, at one another so that collective action becomes impossible. When this humiliating state of subjection is achieved, any act of resistance can be mocked as trivial self-expression: "Just wanna go ‘adult swimming’, and laugh at progressive comedy, dreaming about how ‘I am random and smart…maybe 1 day I can write this stuff… Might start a pop culture blog instead with political opinions.’" Carles stops short of drawing the inevitable conclusion, perhaps because it's so obvious. The only revolutionary position is to call for the complete abolishing of laughter.