How Joking About Life Turned Life Into A Joke
/Athena Diaz was born in 1988 to a Mexican father and a mother whose roots go back to Church of Christ ministers in Louisiana. She was one of three children living in a household where the father was an alcoholic who was physically (but not sexually) abusive to her at an early age. Her mother checked out of family life when Athena was three or four, by enrolling in a graduate program in mathematics. Athena remembers that one of the ways to be close to her mother was to be in math class with her and so she became, as a result, a model student, eventually graduating as valedictorian from her high school.
Athena’s father did not sexually assault her, but he did beat her up frequently, something she ascribes to Mexican culture, Mexicans being known for their penchant to violence. Athena assumes that her father was baptized a Catholic because he grew up on a farm in Mexico. Her mother was extremely cold and strict, something she attributes to the fact that her preacher step-father molested her as a child. During her childhood, Athena remembers attending the Church of Christ in Lake Charles, Louisiana on a regular basis.
By the time Athena reached the age of 10, her father was gone, her mom was at work, and she was home alone going through puberty and wishing “someone would come for me” because she felt “super-isolated, mega-isolated.” Mom was not around to explain the changes that were taking place in her body. They never talked about sexual issues. When Athena asked her mother what a condom was, her mother was horrified.
Sex education in school filled the vacuum at home. In order to take part in the sex-ed class, Athena had to get permission from her parents. Athena passed the permission slip on to her mother, who passed it on to her father, who attended the class, decided that the film that was being shown was pornographic and then refused to sign the permission slip. Undeterred, Athena forged his signature and attended the class anyway.
She eventually got to watch the sex-ed film, but doesn’t remember it as being pornographic, something she understood because she had already been exposed to pornography at the age of seven when she popped a VHS cassette that was lying on their kitchen table into their VCR and began what would become a life-long habit of watching pornography.
She still remembers the XXX on the tapes that were in a grocery bag on the table and suspects that her father left them there on purpose as a trap that was supposed to ensnare someone, even though she’s not sure who. Her father was a cruel person who would take pleasure in pointing his finger at someone who had fallen into the trap he himself was in, so that he could lord it over his victim.
Athena remembers feeling super-scared, but gradually the “mega fear” she felt subsided and was replaced by the sense that she was now dealing with something that was “almost a drug, like a joint, something that would arouse her, give pleasure, and at the same time give her some sense that she had power over her life and, she would discover, over the lives of others as well.
The power which that habit had over her behavior increased exponentially when the family bought its first computer around the year 2002 when she was 14 years old. Athena already knew about porn; she learned about masturbation from other girls her age; now those habits coalesced because of access to porn on the Internet, which she would access when she was home alone, which was not infrequent since her father was gone and her mother was away at work. Athena developed the habit of pulling the plug on the computer whenever anyone showed up unexpectedly in the living room. Porn then led Athena to the chat rooms where she would log on by giving her age, sex, and location to predominantly older men in her area, who then risked jail time by contacting her in person. Athena remembers meeting a man in his twenties who met her at the local public library. This led to sessions of making out in his car but nothing more than that. At this point, Athena discovered that she had become popular with the middle-aged men in her area who succeeded in persuading her to have sex with them after the twenty-year-old failed.
By the time she got to high school the middle-aged men in the chat rooms got displaced by her interest in the “cool teachers” in school, and that eventually led to sexual relations with a number of faculty members at her predominantly black high school. She developed her most serious relationship with a Hispanic teacher who was in his fifties when Athena was 16. The relationship was, of course, fraught with danger and the teacher in question didn’t emerge unscathed from it. After looking into the e-mail account which Athena inadvertently left open, her mother discovered Athena’s correspondence with the teacher in question. She then printed up the e-mails and showed them to the local police, who showed up at the school and arrested Athena’s 50-year-old boyfriend, who was found guilty of child abuse after pleading guilty, and ended up being sentenced to six months in prison, which eventually got commuted to house arrest because he developed throat cancer.
When I asked Athena if her affair had caused scandal at her high school, she replied “Not really because a lot of the teachers in the same school in Maryland were involved in sexual relations with their students. One teacher was sexually involved with 10 different under-aged girls. The school was basically a glorified day care center, so there was tons of this sort of stuff going on there,” which she attributes to the loose sexual morality which is pandemic in black culture.
Because Athena’s father was Mexican, Athena qualified for affirmative action scholarships. Because her mother had a Ph.D. in mathematics, she ended up not only being the smartest girl in the school, she was also able to capitalize on her situation by “playing the female Hispanic card” to get out of St. George’s county Maryland. Athena eventually succeeded in getting an affirmative action scholarship to MIT, where the shortcomings of being the smartest student in a substandard school became immediately apparent to her.
The owl of minerva flies at Twilight
Pornography is the unacknowledged subtext of Todd Phillips’ film Joker, which is a mash up of two films by Martin Scorcese, Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. The scene of revolutionary violence which brings Joker to a close is a remake of Times Square during the era of Taxi Driver, which is to say, the 1970s, in which all of the cinema marquees advertise pornographic films. Director Todd Phillips’ recycling of Scorces’s material in Joker, however, makes the nihilism of Taxi Driver look benign by comparison. Similarly, The King of Comedy, which Roger Ebert described as “one of the most arid, painful, wounded movies I’ve ever seen,”[1] comes across as warm and light-hearted compared to Philips’ appropriation of Scorcese’s material.
When Hegel insisted that “the owl of Minerva always flies at twilight,” he indicated that cultures produce philosophy only in the terminal stages of decline. What is true of philosophy is a fortiori true of stand-up comedy, which became conscious of itself when Martin Scorcese directed The King of Comedy, which premiered in January of 1983. Robert De Niro got the idea for The King of Comedy by hanging out at open mike night at Catch a Falling Star, the comedy venue opened by Budd Friedman, the man David Brenner referred to as “Shylock,” because “He never stopped being a bastard.”[2] Catch a Falling Star promoted the new, nihilistic comedy which turned life into a joke. Catch a Falling Star in 1979, according to Bill Maher, who wrote a roman a clef about his days there:
was not the Village Gate in 1963; in the audience there were no poetic types hoping to be challenged by Lenny Bruce. It had a lot of tourists and bachelor parties from Brooklyn and New Jersey hoping to hear dick jokes. The more the non-cognoscenti took over the club scene, the more the comedians tailored their acts along crowd pleasing lines to survive. And the more the comedians did that, the more the people in berets stayed away.[3]
Needless to say, it didn’t take a genius to tell dick jokes to the bridge and tunnel crowd. In fact, the main joke at Catch a Falling Star was “how bad the jokes were,”[4] something De Niro eventually worked into the script of The King of Comedy. Tonight Show host Johnny Carson had become the broker for comedic talent, or the lack thereof, and because of that fact he became the model for Jerry in The King of Comedy. Stars appeared overnight like mushrooms after the rain. Freddie Prinze became famous at the age of 19 after his Tonight Show debut in 1973.[5]
By the time The King of Comedy made it onto the screen, it seemed that everyone was famous, but that no one had talent. The best example of this phenomenon was Andy Kaufmann, who was performing in New York when Robert De Niro was frequenting comedy clubs and could have been one of the models for the Joker's Arthur Fleck, because “when no one laughed at his jokes, Andy started blubbering about how badly he needed the work, then suddenly pulled out a gun to shoot himself.”[6] In Joker, Arthur shot the host, played by Robert De Niro, but in real life, the host grabbed the gun and, after the show returned from a commercial break, continued with the interview. Kaufmann could also have been the source for the refrigerator scene in Joker because “one time he had a refrigerator delivered onstage; when audience members came up to open the door, Kaufman was inside balancing a checkbook.”[7]
The King of Comedy premiered in 1983 at the height of the national comedy glut which followed the New York comedy strike of 1979, but the idea for it began in the early ’70s, when a writer for Newsweek by the name of Paul D. Zimmerman became fascinated by Johnny Carson’s ability to confer instant stardom on anyone who could tell a joke, no matter how badly, and how one man became obsessed with cashing in on the fame Carson conferred so effortlessly.[8] Zimmerman worked initially with Milos Forman, who had developed similar material when he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When Forman dropped out of the project, Zimmerman was able to attract the interest of Robert De Niro, who then persuaded his friend Martin Scorcese to direct it in spite of his initial reluctance based on “the deliberately cringe-worthy material in the script,” which Scorcese found “unpleasant even from behind the camera.”[9] Scorcese’s attitude didn’t improve as the project developed. The material was “so unpleasant and disturbing” that Scorcese had to struggle through the filming. He found the film so unsettling once it was completed that he avoided seeing it in the theater after its release. The fact that the film only earned a little more that $2.5 million by the end of its box office run only confirmed Scorcese’s negative opinion of the film.
Ebert went on to say that The King of Comedy lacked all of the “big city life,” “violence and sexuality” which Scorcese put on the screen in movies like Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. Ebert described The King of Comedy as an exercise in “cinema interruptus,” in which the director “doesn’t direct a single scene for a payoff.” The cringe worthy characters spend their time in front of the camera “waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can start.” No on listens to anyone else, “and everybody’s so emotionally isolated in this movie that they don’t even seem able to guess what they’re missing. . . . The whole movie is about the inability of the characters to get any kind of a positive response to their bids for recognition.”[10]
That was then. Now, as some indication of the moral and cultural decline I just mentioned, reviewers are claiming that Todd Phillips’ appropriation of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy material makes Scorcese look warm and “empathetic” by comparison:
Whereas Scorsese always reveals himself to be an empathetic filmmaker first and foremost, Phillips has shown in his first foray into dark, character-centric storytelling that his disposition as a filmmaker is much more cynical and cold than the famous Italian-American screen giant. By presenting us with a narrative bereft of comedy, without a clear voice of reason, in a world that is as un-ironic as it is disturbing, Joker functions as a Scorsese movie devoid of Scorsese’s most important quality: humanity.[11]
Even after he abandoned the Catholic faith, Scorcese never stopped espousing the values he abandoned. This made him incapable of directing horror movies, a fact he made clear in a conversation with the Jewish Canadian horror-meister David Cronenberg, because, unlike Cronenberg, Scorcese never lost his sense of moral causality. Scorcese, according to Cronenberg, was an ex-Catholic who “does deal with good and evil in very proto-Catholic terms, and I’m sure that what he meant was that when he saw my films.” Scorcese, on the other hand, told Cronenberg that he didn’t understand his own films. Scorcese, according to Cronenberg, “saw the struggle” between good and evil “being played out. I don’t see it quite that way because I really don’t see the lines drawn in those terms.” Scorcese spends his time rebelling against a moral order he cannot ignore. Cronenberg, on the other hand, does horror because he has lost his grasp on moral causality. “I have difficulty thinking in terms of good and evil,” Cronenberg continued, “I’m sure if I had been raised a Catholic I would have no trouble because those issues are raised at a very early age.”[12]
Joker’s Jewish director Todd Phillips has a similar problem when it comes to Scorcese’s material, something that the reviewers found puzzling. Writing for Esquire, Dom Nero found that Phillips drained all of the characters Phillips had appropriated from “the already thoroughly upsetting world of Taxi Driver” of their humanity. As a result, “all the shooting, stabbing, killing, carnage, crying, and laughing presented without morals in Phillips’s film,” deprives the viewer of any sense of redemption he might have derived from a Scorcese film and leaves him feeling that “all the references in Phillips’s film don’t feel like they’re homages–they feel like blasphemy.”[13]
Those who grew up in the nihilistic world of Taxi Driver and Mean Streets found themselves incapable of comprehending the immensity of its depravity because they lacked any cultural referents outside of the world it portrayed. As a result, what might be termed a generation gap emerged in the reviews of Joker, with the younger generation applauding what the older generation deplored.
The prize for the most tone deaf review goes to Black Zoomer Lawrence Ware, who explained in a review which appeared in The New York Times, that Joker, which is a movie about the quintessential white loser, “is essentially a depiction of what happens when White Supremacy is left unchecked.”[14] If there is one thing Arthur Fleck doesn’t have, it is white privilege. Philips had a very specific audience in mind: white incels (involuntary celibates) in their twenties or thirties who live with their mothers. In fact, the point of Phillips’ remake of Scorcese’s material is to appeal to and simultaneously ridicule the very audience of white losers which Lawrence Ware demonizes as bearers of white privilege.
Phillips accomplishes this by introducing the only element which diverges from his otherwise slavish replication of Scorcese’s material, namely, the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. Rupert Pupkin, the loser who is the main character in The King of Comedy succeeds when he becomes a successful stand-up comic after serving time in prison for kidnapping his idol Jerry Langford. On the other hand, Arthur Fleck, the “hero” of Joker, succeeds by becoming a revolutionary after following a trajectory of random acts of violence. The message which The King of Comedy conveyed to loser Boomers in 1983 was kidnap Johnny Carson and you will become famous. The message which Joker conveyed to the loser Zoomers who live in their mothers’ basements is clear: if you want to be a success, go out and kill someone, and some Jewish director will valorize your nihilism as revolutionary behavior.
[…]
This is just an excerpt from Culture Wars Magazine, not the full article. To continue reading, purchase the February 2020 edition of Culture Wars Magazine.
Read More:
Culture of Death Watch
Identity Crisis for the Indigenous Irish
- Geraldine Comiskey
Features
How Joking About Life Turned Life Into A Joke
- E. Michael Jones
Reviews
Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Blunder
- Jonas Alexis
Footnotes:
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 89
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 104
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 114
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 144
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 171
Zoglin, p. 176.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/599688/the-king-of-comedy-martin-scorsese-movie-fact
http://mentalfloss.com/article/599688/the-king-of-comedy-martin-scorsese-movie-fact
E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id, p. 275.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/movies/joker-movie-controversy.html
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 205.
Jennalee Donia, Taking Comedy Seriously: Stand-up Dissident Potential in Mass Culture (New York: Lexington Books, 2019), p. ix.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 17.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 17.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 9.
William Karl Thomas. Lenny Bruce: The Making of a Prophet (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1989), p. 28.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 49.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 49.
Thomas, p. 28.
Thomas, p. 29.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 8-9
Thomas, Lenny Bruce, p. 15
Thomas, p. 15.
Zoglin, p. 10.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 8
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 8
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 19
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 55.
Zoglin, p. 20.
Zoglin, p. 20.
Zoglin, p. 20.
Zoglin, p. 21.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 33
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 44
Zoglin, p. 49.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 21.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 21.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 21.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 22.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 22.
Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously, p. 23.
Zoglin, p. 37.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 37
Zoglin, p. 33.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 34
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 34
Zoglin, p. 93.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 223.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9 translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1925.
Masahiro Kitano, Aristotle's Theory of Comedy: Muthos and Catharsis” https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1f8f/18187a8f993451b38165aab239acd498c1f8.pdf
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 182.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 188
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 64.
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 64.
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 68.
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 71.
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 115.
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 116.
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 128.
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 129.
Krefting, All Joking Aside, p. 11.
Kreffting, p. 133.
Jennalee Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously: Stand-Up’s Dissident Potential in a Mass Culture (New York: Lexington Books, 2019), p. xiii.
Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge, p. 5
