A Low Ablow

Bravely hurtling forward into the nineteenth century, Dr Keith Ablow, psychiatrist, Fox News Contributor, chicly bald, has lambasted Jenna Lyons, a J. Crew designer, for a photograph in the latest J. Crew catalogue in which she "paints her son Beckett's toe nails a hot pink." Ablow is not concerned about the boy's colouring (he's clearly an Autumn; a dusk orange would be more appropriate), he's concerned about the boy's psychological well-being.

Yeah, well, it may be fun and games now, Jenna, but at least put some money aside for psychotherapy for the kid—and maybe a little for others who’ll be affected by your “innocent” pleasure.

First: all parents should put some money aside for psychotherapy for their kids. Even if you’re not painting their toe nails hot pink, you’re going to be doing something else disastrous to them with your “fun” and your “games”. Setting aside some money is wise. Preferably quite a lot. And if more people did, I wouldn’t have to supplement my career by blogging! (Wait, I’m not getting paid for this? Oh hell.) Second: everybody in the public eye should put some money aside for psychotherapy for other people’s kids. In fact, every family in the country should expect financial assistance from the Jim Henson Estate for children affected by the muppets’ “innocent” pleasures, like the mass destruction of crockery.

This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity—homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such “psychological sterilization” [my word choice] is not known.

This is a dramatic example of the way that every single culture in the world is being encouraged to shed any trappings of tempered, nuanced argument—homogenizing thinking when the outcome of such “brain-shredding thought-castration” [my word choice] is not known.

If you have no problem with the J. Crew ad, how about one in which a little boy models a sundress? What could possibly be the problem with that?

I bet we’re about to find out.

Well, how about the fact that encouraging the choosing of gender identity, rather than suggesting our children become comfortable with the ones that they got at birth

Pause. Most children get genders at birth based on their external genitalia; children typically don’t develop a basic “gender identity” until around three years of age. Ablow the psychiatrist obviously spent his time doodling in the margins of his copy of The National Review during the lecture series on development during his training. Hey, this reminds me of a story I heard, a true one, a non-fictional one, about a two-and-a-half year old boy and a three-and-a-half year old girl playing at a lunch table; the boy was playing with the girl’s miniature dolls, and she told him to stop, explaining that they were toys for girls, and she was a girl but he was a boy. She demonstrated an evolving, and quite appropriately rigid, sense of gender identities and gender roles; the extent to which the boy was confused by this was manifested not only by continuing to enjoy playing with the dolls, but by subsequently thinking that the girl’s name was “boy”, and calling her this for the rest of the day, much to her chagrin. Okay, go on.

can throw our species into real psychological turmoil

Pause. Yes, I see . . . Nope. I don’t even know where to begin. Just go on.

—not to mention crowding operating rooms with procedures to grotesquely amputate body parts? Why not make race the next frontier? What would be so wrong with people deciding to tattoo themselves dark brown and claim African-American heritage? Why not bleach the skin of others so they can playact as Caucasians?

From gay panic to race panic! This psychiatrist is having an identity panic attack!

Why should we hold dear anything with which we were born?

I personally hold dear a jar of the vernix with which I was born.

What’s the benefit of non-fiction over fiction?

It’s far cheaper to produce?

Well, the benefit is that non-fiction always wins, in the end.

Oh. Well, given that this is not true, is Ablow’s fiction winning, while masquerading as a non-fiction?

And to the extent that you take flights of fancy into masquerading through life, life will exact a psychological penalty.

What exactly is the psychological penalty for masquerading as a developmentally-oriented, psychologically-astute commentator on the human condition during reactionary flights of fancy?

The fallout is already being seen. Increasingly, girls show none of the reticence they once did to engage in early sexual relationships with boys.

Not with me they’re not.

That may be a good thing from the standpoint of gender equality, but it could be a bad thing since there is no longer the same typically “feminine” brake on such behavior.

Here and there I’ve inserted pauses into Ablow’s general bumrush of phony naturalism, the glib and shady notion that Ablow’s own concepts of development, gender, race, psychological health, and so forth, are inherently ingrained into and generated from nature (represented here also by “non-fiction”), which are being perverted by influence of nefarious cultural actors like a mother painting her son’s toenails in a J. Crew catalogue; but at this point, surely the “pause” must become “Stop!” Let’s put a typically “non-sexist” brake on Ablow’s behavior in order to say: the idea that women and girls are naturally responsible for putting a “brake” on male sexual aggression is very, very dangerous, with very real consequences.

Anyway, the “fallout” continues:

Girls beat up other girls on YouTube.

A bit of techno-panic inserted here. There are now some readers of Fox News who think that YouTube is filled with Girly Fight Club videos. If only.

Young men primp and preen until their abdomens are washboards and their hair is perfect.

Now, sociologists have pointed out . . . Hold on. Hold on one minute. “Young men primp and preen until their abdomens are washboards and their hair is perfect”? This is fallout from modern gender identity woes? I’m sure these young men beg to differ.

And while that may seem like no big deal, it will be a very big deal if it turns out that neither gender is very comfortable anymore nurturing children above all else, and neither gender is motivated to rank creating a family above having great sex forever and neither gender is motivated to protect the nation by marching into combat against other men and risking their lives.

Methinks the “neither gender” is somewhat loaded here.

Maybe we’ll all have shiny, colored lips, though, and pierced ears and perfect eyebrows and mommies who get applause from their J. Crew friends at the park for parading their sons through the streets in costume.

Pause. Would this be such a bad thing? I can think of worse things.

Jenna Lyons and J. Crew seem to know exactly what they’re up to.

Pause. What exactly does this sentence mean? Is he insinuating a plot? Or is this another psychiatric, psychological assessment of their insight?

That’s why the photograph of Jenna’s son so prominently displays his hot pink, neon toe nails. These folks are hostile to the gender distinctions that actually are part of the magnificent synergy that creates and sustains the human race. They respect their own creative notions a whole lot more than any creative Force in the universe.

Notwithstanding the capital letter for “Force”, a common nudge-and-wink to the theological crowd, can we just admire how felicitously and pervasively Ablow is demanding a humility and a subservience to what he thinks of as a natural order? And yet there’s not a moment of humility on his own part, wondering if his concept of a natural order is in any way fictitious, imaginary, partial, or socially- and culturally-constructed; there’s nary a moment of subservience to the facts about how gender identity and gender roles have changed and continue to change, deviating far, far from what he seems to think is right. Speaking of which, what is the right way to have a little boy be a little boy?

I wonder what Jenna would think if her son wanted to celebrate his masculinity with a little playacting as a cowboy, with a gun? Would that bring the same smile of joy and pure love that we see on her face in the J. Crew advertisement? Or would that be where she might draw the line?

Or maybe she would draw the line here?

In any case, if there is one psychiatrist out there who has the scoop on comedy and joking, who really understands the purpose of comedy, it’s the good Dr Ablow (who, in this segment, proves himself every part the expert):

The There There

When there is a there there

Last Friday night, Noah Baumbach introduced Brian De Palma's Sisters at BAM. Standing with a microphone in front of the screen, Baumbach, who looked like he'd been hit by a truck and then changed his clothes and washed and styled his beautiful long floppy hair, mumbled in Fantastic Mr Fox-fashion about how he is friends with De Palma and about how he first approached him twenty years ago and drunkenly tried to insist that a scene in one of his films was indebted to some French New Wave film. Apparently, De Palma was really unimpressed. We've all been there. Well, not quite there; we weren't a young Noah Baumbach trying to impress Brian De Palma. But you know the feeling: young, over-eager, drink-disinhibited accolyte trying to strut his stuff with old master who is far wiser and far less excitable (and probably far more drunk).

The thing is, with De Palma's movies, we're always still there: watching his films is like being in a drunken argument with the screen about how scenes are references to other films, they're obviously references to other films, and yet the entire film treats those observations with a sort of disdain, and just goes on about its business. In other words, just because you get it, just because you get the reference, you aren't in a better position to understand the movie or speak about the movie, and, even worse, you feel like you're left in the position of stating the obvious while missing the point. It's a peculiar, disorienting feeling. And, what's worst of all, getting a sneaky reference and being able to lean over to your date to whisper, "Remind me, I'll explain it after the movie", is one of those things that makes being a man worth it. But with de Palma's films, the references are so obvious; there's nothing subtle about it. If your date had seen the movie being referred to, then your date would get it; if not, not. Saying "That's scene was right out of Psycho or Vertigo or Rear Window" is then answered with, "Okay, and?" and you're left saying, "Yes, but, it's right out of that film!"

I am not a De Palma critic; I suspect that I've been flailing towards something that smart people have thought a lot about and handled much more elegantly: how de Palma is and is not an original film-maker; how he watches other films and other oeuvres very closely, and makes use of what he knows, loves, is impressed or moved by, in order to tell a story of his own.

But what excited me about this particular perspective is that it undermines the expectation that reference is richness, that intertextuality enlivens your understanding; I wonder if de Palma is not using reference in a much more clinical, if you will, way, not to make the film more "profound" but to manipulate the audience ("So, you think you know what will come next . . . do you?") Reference is no longer a gift to the audience, a gesture of indebtedness, a desire to make your work deeper: it's a way of telling a story. There is no there there, it's all here.

When there's no there there

This has been coming up in an extraordinary way with the quasi-Presidential run being announced by Donald Trump. So far, he has gained the most traction in the press by insinuating that he is a birther.

Like so many businessmen and corporatists when it comes to politics, he's a concern-troll:

Trump insisted he didn't introduce the citizenship issue, but he isn't letting go of it either. Since he was asked about it during an interview several weeks ago, the real estate executive said, he's looked into it and now believes "there is a big possibility" Obama may have violated the Constitution.

"I'd like to have him show his birth certificate," Trump said. "And to be honest with you, I hope he can."

He's not just a concern troll about Obama:

Asked in the interview how genuine his presidential ambition is, Trump said, "I always take things seriously, but I've never taken it seriously like this. I wish I didn't have to do it."

"I wish this was the greatest place in the world," Trump said. But he said the United States is losing respect in the world at a time when jobs at home are vanishing. He accused Obama of giving the country "a terrible presidency."

And he's very serious about running:

Of Obama, he said, "I want him to do well. ... I love this country, but this country is going to hell. ... The world laughs at us. They won't be laughing if I'm elected president."

Okay, so that last line really made me laugh. Trump comes off like a hand-wringing villain threatening to rain down the fires of hell across the people of the world. "They won't be laughing then! You're all fired!" (Plus, it reminded me of Bob Monkhouse's great line: "People used to laugh at me when I said I was going to be a comedian. Well they're not laughing now." Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.)

Trump really isn't really wishing for or hoping for the things he's saying he wishes and hopes for; it's a perfect example of the concern-troll language of corporatists who have to pretend they're playing by the game, but want to make it clear that they're barely making any effort. They'll do it for as long as they're bothered.

When it comes to the entire phony birther narrative that has Trump so perplexed, about which he is so deeply concerned, there is no there there. It is, instead, an obliquely-deflected racism posing as constitutionality; a way of engendering and maintaining a background thrum of pervasive distrust for everything Obama; and a fuck-you to everybody for whom the last President of the United States was dubiously promoted to the office by Republican members of the Supreme Court and then, by way of Swift Boats and Diebold, dubiously maintained there. Just because there's no there there doesn't mean there's not a there here.

There there

One of the problems with seeing a De Palma film like Sisters in a large audience is that the audience is going to laugh at some of the grotequeries, the B-movie touches, the big thrilling references; one of the problems Trump is facing is that nobody is really taking his run seriously - something he addresses in a very non-serious way about him being a man who takes "everything seriously", which has no credibility, then adding he's never "taken it seriously like this" (I don't actually know what that means).

The "serious" is a guarantor, an anchor in reality, an insistence that there is a there there: my words out there mean something, speech acts affect the world; the comedic is exceptional not because it is the opposite (the comedic means something, pace Channel 4's implication about "absurdist satire") but because the guarantee is not quite made, it can thrive on the implication that there is no there there - and it doesn't matter. When faced with something that might be serious or it might not, like a gaudy scene in Sisters (which, Baumbach observed, can seem so campy . . . and yet he's sure that De Palma was not intending anything camp) or Trump's run for the Presidency, you've reached a crisis: the serious denounces its twin; the comedic does not: so is Gertrude Stein right that there is no there there, or is there a there there? Choose an answer at your own peril.

Sunday Recommendations

A baker's dozen of things that are so much better than they should be:

- Children's books by Oliver Jeffers
- Dylan's Mono Recordings

- The Other Guys
- Kasparov's review of books on Bobby Fischer
- Krispy Kreme Doughnuts
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Jacques Derrida
- Molecular Gastronomy
- Early Andrew Lloyd Weber Musicals
- Donald Judd
- Hugs
- Sidney Lumet and Elton John

About a Boy

A few days ago, we discussed a Frankie Boyle joke and, under closer scrutiny, a BBC news report about this joke. I want to thank those who commented on the post for pushing a few points, and I want to return to the joke and what was said in the BBC news report. Underlying this return is the same question that I asked in the post: how do we . . . make sense of offensive jokes?

If you don't have the patience to scroll way past the enormous photograph and down a few posts, I'll provide a brief synopsis. Katie Price, also known as Jordan, has a son with septo-optic dysplasia and autism. In a routine on his television show, Frankie Boyle said:

I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cagefighter. She needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from fucking her.

Let's leave aside the joke for a moment and recall the responses, as reported in the BBC article.

Ofcom. In the article's opening paragraph, we learn that Ofcom censured Channel 4 for the joke because it was "offensive"; the article concludes by noting that Ofcom refused to censure another television show for jokes deemed offensive because "to restrict humour only to material which does not cause offence would be an unnecessary restriction of freedom of expression." We could spend hours on the wild inconsistency between the moral obligation of the body to censure what is offensive and the social obligation to prevent restriction of freedom of expression; we could spend hours on the concept of "unnecessary" in their statement; we could spend hours on whether any comedic material would be left if humour were restricted to jokes that could never cause offence; we could spend minutes on whether their statement should have used "that" instead of "which".

What Ofcom fails to realise is that Sick jokes are, fundamentally, jokes at the expense of (moral, aesthetic) judgement. That is what they do. That is how they work their magic. They root their way into the nooks and crannies of offence and expose the act of judgement at its hinge: either you laugh, rejecting the disapproving judgement of silence, or you remain silent, rejecting the approving judgement of laughter. But, crucially, that is not all. There remains ambiguity: in laughing, are you rejecting the disapproval of silence or are you rejecting the disapproval of the joke; that is, are you rejecting judgement or suspending judgement? We can rephrase it for silence: are you not laughing because you disapprove or are you not laughing because you think it is not funny? I would argue that these are not all wholly the same thing, although another layer of ambiguity spreads an opacity over the proceedings: if you disapprove of the joke, you are unlikely to find it funny; if you find it funny, you are unlikely to disapprove of the joke--at least at first. We could go on like this, so let me make this point about Ofcom's contradictory stance: if you are only going to address an offensive/sick joke as a moral matter of censure or a social matter of freedom of expression, you are going to get caught in the wild inconsistency we see on display; if you fail to see how one essential function in offensive jokes is to create an ambiguity out of the twin contradictory certainties, you will end up looking like fools. That is what happened to Ofcom. They literally don't know what they are talking about.

Channel 4. I am reminded of Senator Inhofe: when speaking about "Iraqi prisoner abuse"/torture, he was famously more outraged by the outrage. I find myself more outraged by Channel 4's official response than by the joke. As I pointed out in the previous post, Channel 4's bullshit slides by because neither the journalist nor Ofcom (nor, I would assume, the reader) is making any sense of the joke. Channel 4 says the joke is "wholly justified in the context", and they get away with it because nobody is interrogating what they mean by "context" (much less how any context can wholly justify anything). They say it was "not intended as a slur on any particular community" and that "everyone is fair game in Frankie's eyes", and they get away with it, even though they're having their cake and eating it too: a revocation of intent to slur and a justification of slurring anybody Frankie chooses to slur on the basis of some phony egalitarianism. To make sense of offensive jokes, we need to think about their multiple contexts, particularly the overarching "comic context" and how offensive jokes are secure in the heart of the "comic context" but also always testing the boundaries of that context; to make sense of offensive jokes, we need to reckon with how they target vulnerability, not leak platitudes about valuing "communities" or egalitarianism.

But then Channel 4 really begins to insult our intelligence. They call it "simply absurdist satire" and then say that the joke was a socially-complex, targeted, and significant critique of celebrity, maternity, and attachment: i.e., making fun of Price's "exploitation of her children for publicity purposes...her behavior as a mother and her cavalier attitude towards relationships." I was initially pissed off that they would think we are so stupid about comedy that they could throw this rotted contradiction out and we'd lap it up like it was fresh cream. But then, thanks to the comments made to the original post, I thought about it some more and became outraged. After a comedian cracks a joke about a woman's son, Channel 4 comes out and insults this woman in horrible ways, humourlessly and viciously maligning her as a mother and as a person. Now, I'm as tempted as the next person to despise and deride trashy celebrities, but to let myself get caught up in Channel 4's assumptions about this woman on account of her "celebrity" has really made me quite ashamed. I know vanishingly little about Katie Price, but if some anonymous spokesperson tells me that a celebrity is a slut and a shitty mother, I basically believe them? That's feeble on my part, and insidious on theirs. Katie Price knows this: she asks if Ofcom would have come to the same decision not to demand an apology from Channel 4 "if Harvey was the child of a well-known politician?" And, as pointed out in the comments section to the original post, saying that the joke is about her and not about the boy is as disingenuous, as consciously misleading, as a pickpocket saying "look up there" and pointing to the sky with one hand while his other hand is in your pocket, stealing your integrity.

Channel 4 takes us for fools; they talk gibberish about comedy and we nod and rub our chins.

Katie Price. You live by the media, you die by the media. Because I know nothing about Katie Price, I can't really make much sense of Ofcom's warbling Solomonic justice in giving censure but not demanding an apology, a decision possibly arrived at in part because Katie Price and her ex-husbands "consciously exposed their and their children's lives to the media" and (now citing the BBC article) "must expect to be the targets of humour and criticism." Though, typically, Ofcom goes on to say that there is not "unlimited licence to broadcast comedy that targets humour at such a child's expense" and, weirdly, that the child "had not himself chosen to be in the public eye": so there is licence but it's not unlimited; and, children in the public eye should be expected to be targets of humour and criticism but not if they haven't chosen to be in the public eye? Why can't they make up their minds? (Answer: because they haven't thought about what they're doing; they're using cut-and-paste ethical fragments and putting them together in the hopes that we won't notice). But back to Katie Price. Wait. This actually isn't about Katie Price. It's about a boy.

About a Boy. The boy has septo-optic dysplasia and autism. I argued, in the comments, that Boyle's joke plays on notions of physical strength and sexual incontinence in the mentally retarded - cf Of Mice and Men (I won't repeat my John Terry joke here). I should have made clear then, and will make clear now, neither septo-optic dysplasia nor autism are synonymous with mental retardation: however specific and detailed Frankie Boyle's joke is - the new step-dad's profession ("a cage-fighter"), the boy's name, his mother's celebrity - my interpretation of the joke is just that: an interpretation. An interpretation means an assumption of shared meaning (I will defend this statement to the death). I think I'm getting the joke because I think I know what Boyle is referring to, what the joke means. A joke is always interpreted (now that's a controversial statement, but I will stick to it even though I happen to believe it is controversial because, as I hew to my party-line, I insist that comedy is always ambiguous, even cognitively: is it interpreted, an active process, or do we get it, a passive one? Both.) Why is any of this relevant? First of all, if the joke must be interpreted, then there must be a declaration of shared meaning. Channel 4 lied about the shared meaning ("it's about the boy's mum"); Ofcom deferred (that's the whole point! In cutting-and-pasting ethical boilerplate, they're deferring interpretation, and that is why they are contradicting themselves); Katie Price says it's about her son. In the comments, another interpretation is given: apparently Harvey is large. I don't think that is sufficient to explain the joke: there is, I think, some broader implication about disability and physical strength, sexual rapacity, and lack of cognitive and psychological orientation in the joke. But the comment is spot on to point out that it only makes it that much more obvious the joke is about the boy.

What is the relationship of the boy to septo-optic dysplasia and autism? What is the relationship of the boy to his mother? What is the relationship of people with neurodevelopmental disorders to aggression, sexual expression? The sick joke relays between "communities" and individuals, between deep assumptions about people in general and specific characters, between assumed characteristics and stereotypes; the act of interpretation, of assuming (the mantle of) a shared meaning, is incriminating (if you laugh, you've agreed in some way with the material) or judging (if you do not laugh, you stand outside in judgement). If you want to make sense of a sick joke, you need to linger with it, to state your assumptions, to expose yourself to judgement; the boy (the one being accused of blindly raping his mother) is innocent, but he is used to incriminate us all - Ofcom, Channel 4, me, even his own mother.

Frankie Boyle. How cruel is his joke? How mean-spirited? You don't need me to answer that for you. But Frankie Boyle stood up there and made the joke; in my eyes, however cruel and however mean-spirited the joke was, Boyle takes responsibility for it, which is more than I can say for either Ofcom or Channel 4.

*****

As a coda, I want to mention Nick Hornby. I assume at some point during this post you got the "About a Boy" reference? Nick Hornby has a son with autism. About a decade ago, he edited a book of short stories called Speaking with the Angel, whose contributors included a round-up of the usual suspects (Smith, Welsh, Eggers, Doyle, Fielding, Marber) and a ringer or two (Colin Fi-Fi-Fi-Firth); the proceeds of which went to TreeHouse, a school for autistic children. Now, I have very little patience for short stories that aren't written by masters of the craft; bad theatre, bad films, bad paintings and bad sculpture are usually at least interesting and/or amusing; bad novels can be put down; but bad short stories steal something from me. I don't remember if any of the stories were really good or really bad or how much of my soul was taken from me by Patrick Marber or Zadie Smith; maybe not much? But I do remember the introduction: it's one of the best written pieces about raising a child with autism I've ever read. It's really Hornby at his best.

So if you feel a bit dirty about this whole sordid sick joke Frankie Boyle affair, get a copy of Speaking with the Angel.

Plus, face it, you now really want to read a sh-short story wr-wr-written by C-C-C-Colin I-uh-I-uh-I-uh . . . HAVE! . . . a-a-a-A. . . Osc-Osc-Osc-OSCAR!!! Fi-Fi-Fi-FUCK!-Firth.

(And yes, dear readers, unlike Colin Firth, I actually am a stutterer, I don't just play one in the muh-muh-muh-movies).

Trojan Horses

I want to thank an alert reader thrice: once for notifying me of a superb topic for today's post; second, for doing so via a web-site I will now closely follow; and third for prefacing the heads-up by saying that this issue is "complex": when I first read the article in question, I did not think it was complex at all, but after thinking about it for a moment, I agree completely with the reader.

The web-site is http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com. The authors of the web-site dutifully post all the published retractions in the scientific literature. How can I describe what they do? Maybe it's like watching an episode of COPS where all the scenes of police officers in sunglasses driving their squad cars and mumbling about how much they love their job are cut out and you're just left with the scenes of perps getting flung across the hood of the squad car or plucked from a chicken wire fence they're trying to scale, while semi-clad neighbours either hurl abuse at the shamed perp or at the police? I've never seen COPS, so maybe I'm wrong; maybe it's like a short video montage consisting only of the fight scenes in the Rocky films? Or really, it's like this.

In any case, they reported today on a retraction of an editorial in Surgery News, written by Lazar Greenfield, the editor-in-chief of Surgery News, the President-Elect of the American College of Surgeons, and the inventor of the Greenfield Filter. I implore you to read at the very least the editorial by Dr Greenfield, quoted in full in the retractionwatch post - and to read the article as well.

One of the legends of St. Valentine says that he was a priest arrested by Roman Emperor Claudius II for secretly performing marriages. Claudius wanted to enlarge his army and believed that married men did not make good soldiers, rather like Halsted’s feelings about surgical residents. But Valentine’s Day is about love, and if you remember a romantic gut feeling when you met your significant other, it might have a physiological basis.

[SNIP]

As far as humans are concerned, you may think you know all about sexual signals, but you’d be surprised by new findings. It’s been known since the 1990s that heterosexual women living together synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones, but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize, the researchers suspected that semen played a role. In fact, they found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient. Female college students having unprotected sex were significantly less depressed than were those whose partners used condoms (Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93). Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity, because women using condoms were just as depressed as those practicing total abstinence. The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts and better performance on cognition tests.

So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

Dr Greenfield muses about biological bases for romance, the physiology of attraction, desire, romantic attachment, and an odd psychosocial finding related to unprotected sex. He ended it with something that might be a joke.

I say "might be", because the alert reader notifying me about this topic pointed out that Greenfield's final line cuts both ways: were it not for the slightly flamboyant prose, it could simply be a conclusion to what has been argued; but the slightly flamboyant prose uses some of the hallmarks of wit and joking (connection of the incongruous, the creative imagery that condenses an argument into a scene played out for amusing effect). The alert reader keenly points out that if the line is read as a "serious point", retraction and resignation are hardly in order; but making a sick or offensive joke - if it is read as a joke - can justify retraction and resignation.

There's something wonderfully odd about this observation. If we are to treat the line as a "serious" conclusion written lightly, then it is, in scientific terms, a premature ejaculation, or, in less scientific terms, a misleading conclusion drawn from what is clearly very limited, preliminary and problematic study; therefore, remembering what we just said about when retraction and resignation would be in order: in a scientific journal, making a (serious) point that is fundamentally bad science would not be a sackable offence; making a facetious point that gives the reader a wink about the quality of the science and treats it as a subject for comedy is a sackable offence. How about that for some weird ambiguity stemming from the questionable use of comedy?

Now, let's think about the line for a minute. Chocolate, semen, Valetine's Day, husbands and wives. Surely these are the keywords for the next Will Ferrell movie. The good members of retractionwatch do a fine job of putting the line into editorial context. The editorial comes from an organisation's newspaper: these newspapers are big money-makers for the publisher, full of advertisements and job offers; most of the articles are updates on medical issues written by science journalists, interviews with and profiles of prominent people in the field, ethics columns, reports from advocacy groups and policy updates, letters about the poor quality of today's trainees because they've lost the art of medicine and don't live their lives in hospitals: in short, it's guild journalism. Greenfield could expect a little authorial leeway: he wasn't writing an editorial in a peer-reviewed, medline-indexed journal; he was writing for colleagues, in a newspaper that, if it's lucky, will quickly get recycled and, if not, will end up lining some rich surgeon's cat's litterbox. Should there be more editorial oversight? Who is ultimately responsible? Well, read retractionwatch's views and decide for yourself; but I would really highlight that the overall stakes for this newspaper's credibility are pretty low and Greenfield could expect in general to have an audience more forgiving of flights of fancy than when they open their copies of Circulation or The Journal of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery.

But there are some other issues.

Is the furore about such a line a signal of American discomfort with sex? Yes. No question about it. When it comes to sex, the United States is a country that has its head up its ass - and not in a good way. Last year, Bristol Palin made about as much money as a surgeon by working for a group that tries to dissuade teen pregnancy - I hope the inconsistencies and ironies, of which there are multiple, speak for themselves.

Now, let's get to the good stuff.

Is the line sexist? On one level, I am deeply unimpressed by the claims of misogyny made in the comments, and which presumably (?) underlie the decision to retract. Somewhat primed when I read the article, I expected to find myself uncomfortable with the last line for some slippage of overt sexism.

Those of us who have sat through beaming old fogeys giving speeches reminiscing about the past, making what they think are kind statements about gender relations and about how far women have come, cracking a few jokes that would have been out-of-date if they came out in black-and-white, know the wince. It's no fun. You want to be on their side, you know they're trying, but they just . . . don't . . . quite . . . get it. And when they make that sexist statement, you wince.

This didn't make me wince. In fact, the overt claim that there might be something physiologically beneficial in sperm and suggesting that women might get something positive from men for a change seems more than just harmless: it suggests reparation, repair, a real gift. And joking about this overt claim seems to be a way of taking the claim with a grain of salt while playing with it as something pleasant, something to enjoy. Insisting that male-female relations are always antagonistic, that the suggestion of beneficience or benefit is just another act of violence, that male sexuality is wholly selfish strikes me as prudish and malevolent.

On the other hand, let's think about this another way. It's terribly unfair on men to play a game of gender politics where if a man says something risqué about women he is necessarily being misogynistic, and the past 30 years have seen countless examples of men being chastised or otherwise marginalised for this; it's also terribly unfair on women that the past 30,000 years of gender politics have seen women treated as chattel, sexual objects, stripped of rights and dignity, and - you get the picture, right?

Let's be more specific. A man makes something that resembles a "wife joke"; the actual joke may not be horribly pejorative, but he's working in a genre that is burdened by a history of consistent, constant, mean-spirited vitriol directed against emancipation and dignity.

Dr Greenfield learned that it isn't only arsonists who get burned when they play with fire; and, by the way, if you're caught playing with fire, you've got to expect some people to think you're an arsonist.

Is the joke anti-gay? As I read the editorial, I wondered if anybody would get queasy about the issue of queerness, and someone in the comments did:

I agree that it’s the science more than the sex that is problematic, but the science does seem heterosexist. If this hypothesis were true, we’d expect to see very low rates of depression among gay men who have regular unprotected sex. Yet this does not appear to be the case.

Okay, so if you study men having intercourse with women, you're heterosexist? Heteronormativity is not just a misguided assumption that heterosexuality is normative; it's a practice of exclusion, of rendering people invisible, of ignoring them, or refusing to hear them. But I see no evidence that the decision to pick a population (men and women having sex with one another) is necessarily heterosexist, any more than a decision to pick a population that is mostly white is necessarily racist. It might be, but let's be careful about our assumptions, right? And I rather think a citation would be warranted for "this does not appear to be the case".

That having been said, the final line about a "deeper bond" forming when men innoculate women with a jet of anti-depressant love-juice does seem to forget, if only for a moment, in an article that started off with the non-heteronormative, inclusive term "significant others", that surely the exact same "deeper bond" can form between men. But what about the mention of the vagina as "richly vascularized" (which just happens to be my go-to description of vaginas)? You can take this two ways ("that's what she said"): you can see it as an explanation for how these psychotropic chemicals will escape the vagina and make their way to the brain (which is not a heterosexist assumption), or as a pre-emptive strike against the mouth and rump as equivalent receptacles - but then either is a very, very hazy claim. Remember, if you want somebody to absorb a drug like a benzodiazepene quickly, you can smear it in their mouth or insert per rectum. Perhaps a follow-up study should be a comparison between gargling ejaculate and come-enemas (or as I like to call them, cumemas)?

If you review the comments on retractionwatch, there are plenty of opinions about whether the line is funny or not, sexist or not, whether somebody should resign over it; there are some really excellent comments, and more than a few that just deserve eye-rolls, particularly when it comes to the question of how to read scientific articles (skilled readers of the scientific literature often spot weaknesses in the research; foolish readers of the scientific literature also often spot weaknesses in the research, but they don't understand how that research is being used and read and interpreted - they tend to think that everything is being treated as pure gospel truth, instead of being considered, contemplated, and contextualised: a musing editorial can refer to various findings without constantly tugging at the reader's elbow to explain how weak those findings are, because the editorialist trusts the readers to understand that this is musing, about weak findings).

Over the past few posts, we've dealt with the question of apologies and the issue of sick jokes. Should Greenfield have resigned and/or apologised; should the article be retracted; is it a joke at all, and how does it being comic effect how we make sense of what he's saying? I leave it to you to decide.

And now, if you'll excuse me, my cats are looking a bit down . . .

Double Acts and Gender

I wanted to talk more about the role of details in jokes, but was derailed and driven to distraction by Frankie Boyle's sick joke and now Brian Logan's piece in The Guardian, in which he asks why there are so few male-female comedy acts?

The double act is, after all, one of the most durable comic formats. But a quick range across its greatest exponents reveals – unsurprisingly – few receding to zero male-female duos. Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise . . . – the all-male acts obviously predominate. French and Saunders, most notably . . . show that woman-plus-woman is a formula that's gaining traction.
But you'll run out pretty soon if you look for great – or indeed any – male-female duos.

Tempting though it is to nitpick through the piece, I won't, except to note that this last line is just a bit embarrassing; one is at least obliged to mention George Burns and Gracie Allen and Elaine May and Mike Nichols. (If he were only talking about current duos, then why do his examples run back to the earlier parts of the twentieth century?)

You might surmise that the male-female dynamic militates against comedy – but for the many examples throughout the history of sitcom and rom-com that disprove the idea. So is it something to do with the specific exigencies of the live double-act?

A good question! Logan has spotted something that is all too easy to miss: many of the best comic male-female relationships take place in sit-coms (Spaced, for example, or Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock) and rom-coms (Beatrice and Benedick).

Unfortunately, despite his own protests, he goes on to staunch this line of questioning with:

Or maybe it's just that – depressing generalisation alert – men and women really do have divergent senses of humour, and that the intensity of a double-act collaboration necessarily exposes that.

Yes, it is a depressing generalisation, and there's nothing substantive in it: double-act collaborations get their frisson from differences and divergent senses of humour (see, for example, The Mighty Boosh); in addition, the same rationale would also pose problems for sit-com and rom-com male-female comedy partnerships. There may well be sociological, sociopolitical rationales for the disproportionate lack of male-female comedy duos, but let's leave aside armchair Venus-Mars observations to the sexperts, or, much better, to Tina Fey (*failed link to brilliant New Yorker article, Lessons from Late Night*), and go back to his question. Does it have something to do with the exigencies of the live double-act?

Maybe not; maybe it has to do with comedy itself? So let's ask, first, why double-acts are such a mainstay in comedy? I would argue that it is another manifestation of the underlying presence of doubling in comedy. Whether doubling is understood as structural (in the formation of ambiguity through, say, the precious detail and the unspoken), as part of comedy's form (impersonation, caricature, parody), as comedy's social role in providing commentary (see, for example, the doubled-voice of Stephen Colbert's The Word), as a way of conceiving what I previously called the symbiotic relationship with the Other, doubling necessitates relationship and difference. In the double act, doubling is played out in characterisation and dialogue, where the relationship is typically enacted in characterisation and the difference in dialogue.

The problem is that male-female relationships are massively overdetermined (as we see in Logan's claim about different senses of humour: whether or not it is true or meaningful, he is nevertheless demonstrating the overdetermination of the male-female relationship, the surplus of meaning freighting the relationship); this overdetermination affects both characterisation and dialogic possibilities. This is not to say that double-acts cannot be sexually charged (obviously, male-male double acts simmer with homoerotics), just that there is a specific challenge for a male-female double acts to surpass overdetermination.

Regarding two brilliant male-female double acts on television - Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, and Jessica Stevenson and Simon Pegg on Spaced - think of the extent to which Fey and Stevenson are desexualised on the show to neutralise sexual overdetermination and to give the relationships and dialogue room to do the type of work we associate with comedy double acts. One example, common to both shows: both women fart. Of course, you would be right to say that both pairs of relationships are not without sexual sparks or sexual tensions, but the charm and endurance of their double-act permits these sparks and these tensions as ambiguous, uncertain, tentative (and, if they were acted on, unfulfilling) largely because of the massive desexualisation that Daisy Steiner and Liz Lemon endure. The point here is not to settle for received opinion about what constitutes male or female characteristics, such as a gendered sense of humour, and I do not intend to distill Daisy and Liz to desexualisation; rather, I want to point out that overdetermination of the male-female relationship is a barrier that needs to be overcome, just as overdetermination of race is a barrier that needs to be overcome in mixed-race double acts (of which there are also surprisingly few). One way to overcome this overdetermination is to desexualise the woman. (Another way around it is to desexualise the man by making him gay - but that would never happen!)

Ofcom

I was alerted by a kind reader to this BBC report about comedian Frankie Boyle getting his wrist slapped with a limp piece of soggy toast (one resembling Frankie Boyle's face). Apparently Boyle told a joke that involved Katie Price's son. The kind reader, ever alert, pointed out that the BBC article did not contain the actual joke that provoked this crazy outburst of ass-censuring.

Before I impress you with my skills as a web-researcher (I think I found the joke!), I wanted to discuss - briefly - the article. In part, it is completely crap journalistic writing, a mish-mash of provocative quotes of the He-said, She-said variety. In part, it is completely crap journalistic writing because nobody has really bothered to think through the topic at hand: How do we describe and make sense of offensive jokes?

Channel 4 said it was "wholly justified in the context". Price said it was "a further insult" that Ofcom had not forced the station to apologise.

Right, there's some nice examples: "in context." In what context? How does the context justify this particular joke? Which context are we talking about? And when does a context wholly justify something?

The model was among those who complained about the comments in Boyle's comedy series Tramadol Nights, saying they were "discriminatory, offensive, demeaning and humiliating".

In response Channel 4 said Boyle's comedy was not "intended as a slur on any particular community", but that "everyone is fair game in Frankie's eyes".

Having your cake and eating it too: we don't intend to insult anybody, we just insult everybody. Phony egalitarianism, the cowardice of comedians who pretend they're honest-to-god, "equal opportunity" truth-tellers and not vampires sucking the lifejuices out of the vulnerable. (Just to be clear, I mean "vampires sucking the lifejuices out of the vulernable" as a compliment)

One of the jokes that attracted complaints was not about Harvey's disability or about rape or incest, it said, but was "simply absurdist satire".

Okay, really? Really? Leaving aside the "simply", do we really suspect the joke is going to be "absurdist satire"? We can judge at the end whether it is "absurdist satire", but I'd have been willing to bet it was going to approximate "absurdist satire" about as much as Chinese Democracy approximates Glenn Gould. Discuss.

The broadcaster also said Boyle's remarks were meant to make fun of Price's alleged "exploitation of her children for publicity purposes... her behaviour as a mother and her cavalier attitude towards relationships".

So wait, is it "absurdist satire" or is it "meant to make fun of . . ." According to this article, Channel 4, which apparently can speak, speaks completely contradictory, righteous, arse-covering nonsense.

The ruling also said: "Ofcom was of the view that the material in question appeared to directly target and mock the mental and physical disabilities of a known eight year-old child who had not himself chosen to be in the public eye.

"As such, Ofcom found that the comments had considerable potential to be highly offensive to the audience."

Yes, and how do you bet this article is going to end?

Meanwhile, Ofcom also cleared BBC Two's Top Gear after the hosts made fun of Mexican people for being "lazy". The regulator said viewers would have been familiar with the show's "mocking, playground-style humour". "To restrict humour only to material which does not cause offence would be an unnecessary restriction of freedom of expression," it added.

I'd sigh if I weren't choking on a piece of toast.

So what was the joke?

I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cage-fighter. She needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from f***ing her.

Or, as it is fully reported:

Katie Price – aka Jordan - has complained to Ofcom about Frankie Boyle, after the comedian made a joke about her disabled son, Harvey, who suffers from septo-optic dysplasia and autism.

Boyle said on his Tramadol Nights show: "I have a theory about the reason Jordan married a cage-fighter. She needed a man strong enough to stop Harvey from f***ing her."

So what do you think of the joke?

The Post-Empire Strikes Back

The Warlock, on his Torpedo of Truth/Defeat is not an Option tour, had a bad opening night in Detroit. Apparently, he recovered for Chicago, revamping his show, which suggests that this tour is very much the calibrated work of an entertainer and not simply the cultural facilitation and financial exploitation of one man's madness.

In reviewing the Detroit show, Ryhs Blakely of The Australian, writes appreciatively of a pair of Sheen's lines (not from the show):

Yes, his recent interviews have shown that he possesses a genius for diatribe, a gift for frenzied verbal invention that touches the sublime when he hits attack mode. And no, he doesn't seem to give a damn.

His claim that his adventures with drink, drugs and porn actresses would have made "(Errol) Flynn, (Mick) Jagger and (Keith) Richards look like droopy-eyed armless children", will live with us forever. I, for one, sniggered out loud when I read how he had called a radio station to tell listeners not dabble with crack "unless you can manage it socially".

I love the crack joke. I kind of think it's the type of thing either Robin Williams or Bret Easton Ellis might have wished they had said. But it's the other joke I want to think about for a moment.

"Droopy-eyed armless children" is exquisitely lurid, wildly imaginative, and, one might add, rather upsetting if you stop to think about the image sans the benefit of imagining Flynn, Jagger, and Richards as cartoonishly dopey lovelorn toddlers. "Droopy-eyed" is no particularly barrier to love, as any real lothario can attest. "Armless" seems inept and weird, perhaps vindictive towards the swashbucklers he's evoked? (I've occasioned the thought that he was channeling Johnny Depp's tribute to Richards and originally said "'armless"?) And "children" has a somewhat sweet air about it, with Sheen taking on a paternal role towards these naive juvenile offenders.

What intrigues me, though, is the quality of the detail. There's a pleasure to be had in the exuberance and the excess of the image; the mind races to make sense of the image, and yet, at the very same time, its brilliance is that one does not have to make sense of it in any logical, cognitively consistent way to be bowled over by the power. The detail is at once utterly crucial and utterly pointless; it's poetry, but only in the most aesthetic sense of language doing something evocative and sensual. You can dig through to work at it, to try to pin it down, but . . . why?

But the other end of the line, the front end of the line, is also impressively detailed, going with the now-distant Hollywood glamour of a mid-century studio Star along with two gawky, filthy, scrawny Rock geniuses. I'm not sure that any of them deserves to namechecked for their use of drink, drugs, and porn stars, but a libel lawsuit would probably be ill-advised.

So, how and why does detail matter in comedy?

Sunday Recommendations

What is the point of having a blog if you're not going to make recommendations? There is none. The enterprise is pointless if you're not selling something. So today I am commencing what I hope will be a regular feature: Sunday Recommendations. Future installments will include comic clips, poetry, film, music, videos, web-sites, hygiene tips, general household instructions, and other daily bric-a-brac, probably of a disturbingly erotic nature - I won't include "NSFW" warnings because none of my extensive readership worries about what their bosses or co-workers think about them.

Today's first Sunday Recommendation is for a book. Having been instructed last year to acquaint myself with Evelyn Waugh, I dashed through Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, Put Out More Flags and Black Mischief. A funnier, more deftly-written collection of books is hard to imagine. I managed to intersperse a few non-Waugh novels in between to keep my attention from flagging, finally getting to Auster's New York Trilogy, amongst others. But really, however good the other novels have been, this has been Waugh's year.

Based on a very welcome fluff piece in the Guardian about great books nobody has read, I decided to purchase a few non-Waugh titles, limiting myself to ones from the New York Review of Books Classic imprint (because a few years ago I had such luck with the lovely, charming, hilarious The Tenants of Moonbloom).

After finishing Black Mischief, which I hope I will come to at some point in this blog, I turned to something that I thought would be entirely different: Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other.

I recommend you read it.

It's like J.D. Salinger meets Philip Roth, written by a man who was like Norman Mailer meets Your-everyday-Irish-Literature-scholar-teaching-at-Tulsa-whose-parents-happened-to-be-Stars-of-Early-Hollywood-whose-luck-turned. What struck me was that here was a twentieth-century prose-stylist and a humourist whose work was in no way lessened by coming after five of the most stylish, funniest books in twentieth century literature.

If you are interested in early Hollywood stars, if you are interested in mid-twentieth century American adolescence (which is the heritage I'm certain all of my readership shares and so has some interest in), if you love a book that feels like it needed to be written but the need in no way overshadowed the elegance and charm with which it was written, if you love very funny and very sad books, I recommend you read it.

You're welcome.

Carr Stereo

As I was saying . . . Here’s Carr’s statement again:

I’ve got nothing but respect for the young men and women who put their lives on the line for this country. I’ve visited the military hospital in Selly Oak, Birmingham, and the rehabilitation centre in Headley Court on many occasions to meet seriously injured young men. I will continue to support them in any way I can. My thoughts are with the servicemen and their families, especially on Remembrance Sunday. I’m sorry if anyone was offended but that’s the kind of comedy I do. If a silly joke draws attention to the plight of these servicemen then so much the better. My intention was only to make people laugh.

Carr begins his self-negating apology with an explanation of who he is: a man who has actually gone out of his way to meet with wounded soldiers and to entertain them and cheer them, a man whose support for them has been to offer a different type of lip service: he probably made them laugh (and I suspect few would think that those laughs were trivial, unimportant or inconsequential). The language he uses is respectful, it is sincere and earnest, and he makes uses a common, somber political platitude about one’s thoughts being with the suffering (even if one’s fingers are twitching across an X-box console and one’s eyes are glazed); the argument is rational, conventional, gilded with good intent. And then he moves to comedy, and his arguments skew into divisions, contradicting one another. Reverence and pieties for victimhood followed by split arguments and contradictions. It is an interesting pattern, and a familiar one.

The overall impression one might have is that he’s saying, Look, I’m really a good bloke; when I’m doing my stint as a comedian, then I might say things that aren’t okay. The person is not the same as the comedian, and they are responsible to different moral authorities. Bill Hicks put it rather differently: “I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out.”

In an interview with the Guardian after the kerfluffle, we read the following:

Is there any subject he wouldn't touch? "No is the short answer," he says after a moment's hesitation, "if it was funny enough. If you come up with a joke about something that's uncomfortable to talk about – abortion, there's a good example – it's not a difficult moral decision not to do the joke if it isn't that funny. But if you come up with a joke about abortion and you tell it to your friend, and your friend goes, 'Oh my God, you can't say that on stage – but that is fucking wicked,' then suddenly morals go out of the window and you go, 'We're definitely doing that.'"

It’s quite quaint applying a moral threshold argument to comedy, weighing funniness against morality as though they can be understood separately. Part of what makes so many jokes funny is precisely that they are so wicked; vaulting moral thresholds is well within the nature of comedy, of course, but it’s not as though moral thresholds are there only as a barrier: vaulting them is the athletic accomplishment, the acrobatic choreography of comedy.

The disavowal of responsibility can take a number of forms. There’s the Comedian’s Two Bodies (the bloke in the pub vs the person on stage; the man who entertains the troops vs the stand-up under the spotlight); comedy’s two moralities (we can shed light on serious subjects in a way that nobody else can vs it’s just a bloody joke for a laugh; morality as something that gives comedic is transgressive frisson vs morality as something that can be tossed out the window if the joke is good enough). Then there's comedic form.

"I do a lot of jokes about rape," he admits, "but it's not a discourse on rape. I do jokes to get laughs. I happen to think the construct of '99% of women kiss with their eyes closed, which is why it's so difficult to identify a rapist' is funny. It's not really about the act of a serious sexual assault. You have to go out of your way to take offence over, 'I bought a rape alarm because I kept on forgetting when to rape people.'"

Yes, it’s the construct that is funny. No, it’s not really about about the act of a serious sexual assault, it’s about . . . clever constructs that get laughs? Comedy is splayed away from its content as a clever form, a style that can be admired, appreciation of logical twists and maneouvres.

I don't really object to any of this. Comedy is already a duet with itself, it's stereo with Kanye West and Katy Perry coming in one ear, and T.S. Eliot reading a poem in the other; comedy is not so much parasitic on the serious (which is why in the comments to the previous post, I was not so concerned about withdrawing some of my over-egged claims which dealt with the relationship of the comedic comment and the expression of the serious) as symbiotic with its Other, whatever that Other might be at the moment. When the Other is "rape" or "these servicemen amputees", we can't pretend that the comic symbiote can survive without it, but then disavowal is perforce inscribed into comedy, which is constituted already by its Other, for which it bears no responsibility; and you can't formally apologise for something if you are disavowing responsibility for it.

("I'm sorry it was an accident" - the chorus of toddlerhood.)

Does that answer any questions?