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I'm 20 and I know who Andrew Dice Clay is, and I don't study or really have any particular interest in standup; before reading this thread I had a vague impression of him as 'the dude whose entire act was saying really offensive shit but way less focused and topical than, say, George Carlin.' But anyway. To the topic at hand; glad this thread got bumped because I meant to bring this up earlier but didn't have the chance and then forgot about it.
Agree with everyone else, he's a racist/homophobic/misogynistic cock etc, but he pisses me off for reasons other than that too. He perpetuates a regional stereotype ("regional" probably isn't the right word, but I'm not sure what to use... hopefully people understand what I mean) which I think is very divisive, especially politically. (I should preface this by saying that this is, at the moment, a fairly nebulous idea, and I'm trying to hash it out here but if I do a poor job of that then apologies.) By taking on such a hyper-exagerrated rural American persona, he makes it easy for us big city liberal intellectuals to dismiss his audience.
I'm not trying to single anybody out- frankly, I had the same initial reaction- but comments like
The morons don't understand how much they're being mocked, how much they seem to adore the very joke that's on them.
and
Millions of morons think he's hilarious.
are, I think, part of the problem. Beyond specific comments I'm getting (in places) a general vibe of 'how could his audience be soooo stupid'; if other people aren't feeling that then feel free to call me out on it. David Cross also explicitely called his audience stupid; I'll cut him some slack because he was making a joke, but it's part of the same thing, I think.
I'm from Maine, which is about as rural a state as you can get (someone once asked me if we had telephone poles there, and people are frequently astonished that my family cuts its own Christmas trees). The southern part is relatively densely populated but as you get further north you get fewer people and a lot more trees. My hometown has about 40,000 people but it's located in the center of the state so it's basically at the border of urban and rural; there are a bunch of small, sparsely populated outlier towns which send people to my high school so I knew a good combination of city kids and rural kids growing up. I had a friend in high school who is one of the nicest, most thoughtful, and most conscientious people I know, who also happens to be very smart. He grew up basically in the middle of nowhere and has a pretty thick Maine accent (for reference, imagine something similar to a Boston accent but softer and involving the word 'ayuh' a lot). He finds Larry the Cable Guy hilarious. I don't hold it against him and I don't think it makes him stupid. If the subject were to come up now- I haven't seen him in a couple years- I might mention that I dislike Larry because of the racism/homophobia/etc. I would hope it might make him reconsider, but, again, I don't think it makes him stupid. I know plenty of other people who like him, too, or at least who toss around 'git 'er done' every so often, and by and large I like them or I wouldn't hang around with them.
What's the point to all this, you ask, beyond a fond reminiscence of my high school days and possible release of more personal information than I am comfortable with? Basically, I think that Larry's persona encourages people like us ('people like us' meaning something along the lines of 'educated liberals') to... well, to judge an entire group of people based on limited or no direct experience. In this case, to dismiss an entire population of people as stupid solely by virtue of the fact that they enjoy Larry the Cable Guy.
Hieronymus called Larry's act an
attempt to cash in on the Red State/Blue State polarization myth
which encompasses my problem with him nicely, I think; he's a symptom of, and helps perpetuate, urban-rural polarization. I remember, in reading some of the coverage leading up to the last election, a comment that Bush's team would try to paint John Kerry as a 'slick East-coast big-city liberal' or something along those lines. Why in the fuck does it matter where John Kerry's from? I don't give a fuck where a candidate is from, I give a fuck about what he thinks. I would have voted for Bill Clinton if I'd been old enough, and he's from fucking Arkansas.
And that's the exact problem that David Cross has with Larry: his audience has a perserve pride in being simpletons, being racist, being stupid, willfully ignorant, and anti-intellectual. I mean, how many different ways can I say the word "stupid"?
I suspect because of elitism, or perceived elitism, on the part of urban liberals- themselves a stereotype- in the sense of "okay, you think we're all stupid? Well then FUCK YOU, I'm going to be ignorant and PROUD OF IT!" I do wonder how much of that liberal elitism/dismissal is real and how much manufactured for political purposes. (Random thought: how were the titular family of the original 'Beverly Hillbillies' presented?) |
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