You seem to have missed the point of the article, which was that our culture is now dominated by fakery. The opposition isn’t between seriousness and comedy, but between seriousness and fakery. Comedy, good comedy, is real and therefore serious in the wider sense of the word - as anyone who’s read Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Evelyn W…
You seem to have missed the point of the article, which was that our culture is now dominated by fakery. The opposition isn’t between seriousness and comedy, but between seriousness and fakery. Comedy, good comedy, is real and therefore serious in the wider sense of the word - as anyone who’s read Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark could tell you.
But nothing fake can be comic, unless it’s deliberately comic because it’s fake (a real fake? A comedy of fakery?) Otherwise it’s a brain tickle, without comic spark and the cleverness, cognitive dissonance and touch of compassion that makes the best comedy.
Much of our culture is just a great big fake balloon just waiting to be pierced. And what better to do it than comedy ?
You seem to have missed the point of the article, which was that our culture is now dominated by fakery. The opposition isn’t between seriousness and comedy, but between seriousness and fakery. Comedy, good comedy, is real and therefore serious in the wider sense of the word - as anyone who’s read Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark could tell you.
But nothing fake can be comic, unless it’s deliberately comic because it’s fake (a real fake? A comedy of fakery?) Otherwise it’s a brain tickle, without comic spark and the cleverness, cognitive dissonance and touch of compassion that makes the best comedy.
Much of our culture is just a great big fake balloon just waiting to be pierced. And what better to do it than comedy ?