Kontextmaschine

5th July 2015

Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 123 notes

I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU

This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.

Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.

When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.

So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.

The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.

Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, '60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.

And it’s not like oooo, this was acceptable once upon a time, it’s that when I was growing up, this was the official line of media social liberalism. Who was that anon asking about the '90s? In the '90s, liberal Hollywood was putting out “message movies” the messages of which were America Is Finally Free, Thanks To Brave Heroes Like Larry Flynt Depicting Women As Violently Degraded Sex Objects, And Thank God For His Heirs Like Howard Stern, Still Fighting The Good Fight.

If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.

Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.

I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.

If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy” was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.

Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.

If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.

Tagged: culture war it's media PCU Benny Hill amhist