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It's not high art or anything but I got what I was expecting going into it: mindless humor. Just because a movie is stupid doesn't mean that someone who enjoys it has to be. I'm a big proponent of the theory that sometimes you just need some mindless entertainment (mindless action films are usually preferable to comedies, but I've been known to watch both).

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I dunno.

As FacilityPro sort of alluded to, there are different degrees of "mindlessness". Airplane, for instance, might not be a "smart" movie -- there's no meaning behind the jokes; it's all just for laughs -- but I wouldn't really say it's "stupid", either.

Incidentally, I'm not really sure what FacilityPro meant when he said that he was glad that most humor isn't Shakespearean. Humor is humor, and Shakespeare's wasn't necessarily more highbrow than anything else: It was bawdy and silly. The only thing is, as with all of his writing, humor or not, the language difference makes it difficult to really understand nowadays.

In Romeo and Juliet, in this passage

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SAMPSON
Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and
'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.

GREGORY
'Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou
hadst been poor John.

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he's just making a penis joke. It's hardly highbrow. It might not actually be funny, any more, but part of the problem with that is that the slang he's using -- "poor John" -- is 400 years out of date. But in its time, it might have been accessible and funny to its audience.


But, aside from degrees of mindlessness, there are at least two other issues, too.

Sure, an intelligent person might be able to love a movie like Die Hard, which isn't exactly brain food. (Though, to continue with the degrees of mindlessness issue, you could argue that it's not really stupid, either, and it shows elements of good craftsmanship, if not high art)

But I think an intelligent person would also enjoy a wide variety of other things, many of which are NOT mindless.




The other issue is that, even if an intelligent person might enjoy some "mindless" entertainment, that person should at least know it for what it is.


As usual, this post is being submitted not really when it was finished, but when I lost interest with the subject.

I was looking for the "doormat" thing online, but not only is it (seemingly) not on Youtube, IMDB doesn't even have any memorable quotes from the show!

It must be because fans of the show are too old to have a computer or be internet savvy.

Really, though, SNL has become little more than a dumping ground for poorly written political pieces targeted at the most avid NPR listeners.

Wait a minute, what?

Are there politics to water bottles falling out of a closet that I'm unaware of? Or multilayer tacos? Or dick-in-a-box? Or shows about mustaches? Or two a-holes trying to adopt baby gonzo?

I know those are just a few sketches from the last couple of years, but I don't think they're unrepresentative.

One of the few things I can possibly think of that you're talking about would be the president impersonations. Or the Weekend Update. But they've been doing those since the very beginning of SNL.

There's also the Barry Gibb Talk Show, where they talk about politics and chest hair, but it seems like the jokes about more about the mannerisms of the hosts than the politics.

Fair enough. I hadn't really been watching the show a couple of years ago. For that matter, I don't watch it much now, but when I do, the jokes seem based on silliness, not satire. I've heard plenty of complaints that the show isn't funny, but I don't know if I had ever heard it implied that it was "too intelligent".