Transfer Phenomena

R

rubysay

Member
Been thinking about this topic quite a bit in relation to comedy. Lots has been written and said about ingroups laughing at outgroups, racist/otherwise bigoted comedy being possible due to (and reinforcing) shared worldviews and the likes, but i rarely see people talking about comedy as like... a tool or technology for transfer of cultural knowledge or something (cultural reproduction? am i using that right???), used to maybe convince someone of something, or to help assimilate and indoctrinate a target audience into a wider societal context or alternate worldview. to me it at least has felt like one can gleam all sorts of cultural information from another culture's comedy.

The bent of a whole lot of contemporary american alt comedy,(tim and eric, conner o'malley, million dollar extreme, leftist twitter podcast humor, memes and other internet comedy styles) for example, left right or "centre" seems to be to want to push it's audience in some ideological direction through either repetition of, deconstruction of, or wholecloth creation of, american culture war issues, both internet style/homegrown or astroturfed. Certainly in me, consumption of all the shit i named from a relatively early age has pushed me towards doing shit like quoting memes out loud and saying shit like "i'm obama, and im sucking dick at the dick sucking factory that i'm also about to suicide bomb because it's run by the globohomo nwo" at alarming frequency, and through being on the internet, i can see people's private languages and humor either taking the style of the website they're on, (as far as i can tell, at least 4chan, twitch, reddit, facebook, twitter, tumblr, something awful, youtube, all have both sitewide tropes and specific ingroups that generate their own behaviours) or straight up repeating the jokes/formats of specific people that influence them endlessly until the people they took it from say to stop (guilty!).

I know that at least million dollar extreme (sam hyde more specifically)'s explicit goal is to (in a mercenary sort of way) push people towards neoreactionary/libertarian/conspira-boomer/racist/mysogynist/fash-lite sentiment through a brainwash combination of dark, nasty, "post-ironic" comedy, futurist (fascist) art, and maybe it's most interesting (if most genuinely crook and fucked) innovation, the targeted and intentional psychological abuse of its audience.


Does this work? Who knows.

Unlike a lot of art, seems like because there's the pretense of comedy being (at least on some level) non fiction, that it winds up kind of hitting a sweet spot between the pourous part of your brain that wants to absorb new information and the lazy emperor part that just wants to lie on a couch and be fed grapes all the time
In online western spaces, it seems like the comedy of what you consume ends up shaping how you talk. Everyone on this forum seems (no offence) like either male (sorry lol) gen x brits who grew up reading books, consuming chris morris and the like or nonbinary zoomers who are internet raised, and are basically, literally, "actually me lol" me.


Am i wrong? Does comedy, like most art, only serve to reinforce your own beliefs and views?
Does it (also like most art) only shift your aesthetic sensibilities for the period of time in and around which you consume it?
Do you feel like the comedy you consume has influenced your dreams/hypnogogia like proper on-rails fiction and game mechanics have the capacity to do???
Did i use too many commas and bracketed sentences in writing this? (yes, and yes)
Does this relate at all to the thread topic?
Has this been posted in the thread already? (upon re-reading, it has and i probably should've just replied to wektor and started a conversation)
Is this post too long?
In all counts: Who cares!
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Wish I was more familiar with some of the cultural sources you mentioned, but yeah I'd say a culture/subculture's comedy reveals what values they live by, if perhaps not those they would claim to live by. Think it has something to do with incongruence, that something registers as funny because it shouldn't be there or something.

But how many of us are really gonna go out of our own way to make ourselves more uncomfortable than we need to be? It seems one needs to have experienced enough of a reason to, to be convinced that doing so will have a net positive impact. A bit bleak, sure, but I also see that as an opportunity for art, specifically popular/consumer art: to provide insight into the stories one hasn't been clued into.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
You can see this as either optimistic or pessimistic - I see it as agnostic - but a lot of this really seems to be determined by one's experience: are you the one that doesn't fit in, thus being the basis for a sort of neurotic sense of humor? Or is it always someone else you are laughing at, someone else that everyone else is laughing at?

And in these situations it really seems like the only cure would have been a preventative one, with exceptions.
 
V

version

Well-known member
rubysay said:
Been thinking about this topic quite a bit in relation to comedy. Lots has been written and said about ingroups laughing at outgroups, racist/otherwise bigoted comedy being possible due to (and reinforcing) shared worldviews and the likes, but i rarely see people talking about comedy as like... a tool or technology for transfer of cultural knowledge or something (cultural reproduction? am i using that right???), used to maybe convince someone of something, or to help assimilate and indoctrinate a target audience into a wider societal context or alternate worldview. to me it at least has felt like one can gleam all sorts of cultural information from another culture's comedy.
Click to expand...
People like Bill Hicks and George Carlin come to mind. You see a lot of their fans referring to them as "more than just a comic," and talking about how they "opened their eyes" and shaped their worldview.
 
wektor

wektor

Well-known member
rubysay said:
Been thinking about this topic quite a bit in relation to comedy. Lots has been written and said about ingroups laughing at outgroups, racist/otherwise bigoted comedy being possible due to (and reinforcing) shared worldviews and the likes, but i rarely see people talking about comedy as like... a tool or technology for transfer of cultural knowledge or something (cultural reproduction? am i using that right???), used to maybe convince someone of something, or to help assimilate and indoctrinate a target audience into a wider societal context or alternate worldview. to me it at least has felt like one can gleam all sorts of cultural information from another culture's comedy.

The bent of a whole lot of contemporary american alt comedy,(tim and eric, conner o'malley, million dollar extreme, leftist twitter podcast humor, memes and other internet comedy styles) for example, left right or "centre" seems to be to want to push it's audience in some ideological direction through either repetition of, deconstruction of, or wholecloth creation of, american culture war issues, both internet style/homegrown or astroturfed. Certainly in me, consumption of all the shit i named from a relatively early age has pushed me towards doing shit like quoting memes out loud and saying shit like "i'm obama, and im sucking dick at the dick sucking factory that i'm also about to suicide bomb because it's run by the globohomo nwo" at alarming frequency, and through being on the internet, i can see people's private languages and humor either taking the style of the website they're on, (as far as i can tell, at least 4chan, twitch, reddit, facebook, twitter, tumblr, something awful, youtube, all have both sitewide tropes and specific ingroups that generate their own behaviours) or straight up repeating the jokes/formats of specific people that influence them endlessly until the people they took it from say to stop (guilty!).

I know that at least million dollar extreme (sam hyde more specifically)'s explicit goal is to (in a mercenary sort of way) push people towards neoreactionary/libertarian/conspira-boomer/racist/mysogynist/fash-lite sentiment through a brainwash combination of dark, nasty, "post-ironic" comedy, futurist (fascist) art, and maybe it's most interesting (if most genuinely crook and fucked) innovation, the targeted and intentional psychological abuse of its audience.


Does this work? Who knows.

Unlike a lot of art, seems like because there's the pretense of comedy being (at least on some level) non fiction, that it winds up kind of hitting a sweet spot between the pourous part of your brain that wants to absorb new information and the lazy emperor part that just wants to lie on a couch and be fed grapes all the time
In online western spaces, it seems like the comedy of what you consume ends up shaping how you talk. Everyone on this forum seems (no offence) like either male (sorry lol) gen x brits who grew up reading books, consuming chris morris and the like or nonbinary zoomers who are internet raised, and are basically, literally, "actually me lol" me.


Am i wrong? Does comedy, like most art, only serve to reinforce your own beliefs and views?
Does it (also like most art) only shift your aesthetic sensibilities for the period of time in and around which you consume it?
Do you feel like the comedy you consume has influenced your dreams/hypnogogia like proper on-rails fiction and game mechanics have the capacity to do???
Did i use too many commas and bracketed sentences in writing this? (yes, and yes)
Does this relate at all to the thread topic?
Has this been posted in the thread already? (upon re-reading, it has and i probably should've just replied to wektor and started a conversation)
Is this post too long?
In all counts: Who cares!
Click to expand...
I think one of the tricky and potentially betraying us is the part of the brain that tends to memorise and value positively things that are "funny".
Your uncle enjoys jokes about refugees because "they are hilarious" in the first place, not because he's racist.
It's the prolonged exposure to those that transfers all the assumptions and the correlated worldview.

Anyways, even megacorps have figured that out - when it comes to adverts, humour works as well as intensity of colour, light or sound. Perhaps better.
Hence the ridiculousness of attempting to encapsulate what the most of population will find funny.
Regardless to whether you agree or not, YOU WILL remember if it amused you. With an extra topping of cringe, cute or sexy.
Maxi King commercial, Michelin mascot, fucking Delma margarine man, this fucking creature that looks like it came back from a trip of festivals in the british countryside and that advertises polish fromage frais. Henry the hoover. You name it.

We want funny, amusing content. It is gratifying. We want more of it, obviously.
Problem is, with repetition, we assimilate not only the humourous content, but everything else as well.

Another important factor in this, is how what is funny seems to be socially defined, even within the smallest circle you don't exactly decide about it yourself.
You're forcing it, otherwise. Interestingly, a lot of very alive memes were forced in their early stage, ie. certain wojak and pepe variants, some developed organically, Spurdo Spärde for example.
Many times I've been shown something that's actually grim and uneasy material, when I would ask about why it's been shown to me, I would get "look at it, it's so hilarious" in response.
Worth whole another topic on how reddit users can perceive CCTV footage of people throwing themselves under the train as amusing, how 4chan implanted casual jokes about pedophilia and genocide in the heads of a whole generation. I mean take a step back and think fucking Pedobear, seriously? From a perspective, how psychopathic some of these people were?

Bottom line is: be careful what you laugh at, as you might start hating on house music ironically, but eventually you will start thinking that this man @luka is talking sense.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
version said:
It seems to have a numbing effect on politics and political satire as everything becomes a joke and nothing's really taken seriously, e.g. the way the public respond to the numerous gaffes of Boris Johnson.
Click to expand...

Trump
 
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