Rant

[thehefner]

Gahh... after the pretty cool Smallville ep (Oooh, Rutger Hauer goodness), I am currently enduring my first-ever episode of Angel. Spike hasn't shown up yet. He's the only bleedin' reason I'm watching this, just as he was the only reason I watched Buffy. This is it. The last straw.

I can't stand Whedon humor. I hate this cutesy self-refferential crap. I hate every stupid lazy I'm-so-clever bit of dialogue. I don't care if the rest of the world disagrees with me, I'm the last angry fan. I wouldn't be so pissed off if these shows weren't hailed as works of utter genius by the vast majority of geekdom, of my people. I mean, the humor was great when Willow did it... five years ago. Now EVERYBODY frickin' sounds like her. Am I the only other bothered by all this?

I know no one gives a shit about this but me. But this needs to be said, once and for all: Joss Whedon is NOT the 21st Century Oscar Wilde.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But as I am in such a tiny minority apparently solely populated by my mother and I, I feel I'm allowed to be particularly vocal.

"And how do you take your blood, Mr. Angel?"

God in Heaven...

Comments

[2sick2pray.livejournal.com]

yeah, i'm not a huge whedon fan.

but then again cutesy humor of any sort pisses me off. mark twain pisses me off. so i suppose i have weird taste.

i'm gonna hold off on validating your taste because none of this forgives that you didn't like PIRATES! arrrghh!!!

What?

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Wait, hey, didn't you hear? I went to go see Pirates a second time and I really liked it. Once I got over the supreme disappointment of it not living up to the immense hype all of YOU heaped upon me, I realized it was a pretty cool film. I mean, yeah, w/o Johnny Depp it would've been lessened, but still it was an above-average summer flick.

NOW will you validate my taste? Hmmm?

Re: What?

[2sick2pray.livejournal.com]

hmmm.... tempting but i think not. i mean the fact that you had to see it twice i do believe renders you an inferior being. and its fun to tease. hehehehe.

OOooooh and ya didn't like Moulin Rouge, so booyah, obviously skewed standards are at work here.

LOL, ya know i luv ya.

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

Self-reference is the end of all humor. It's the last joke, the joke to be told when all the other jokes have been used up.

It's easy; for any work of fiction, you can always tell the joke in which the characters of the story discover that they are in fact characters in a story. Every artist eventually decides to paint his own brushes. The sheer number of Broadway musicals about the production of Broadway musicals suggests that the Broadway musical was an art form that leapt directly to self parody.

Because it's so easy, it feels cheap. But because for thousands of years it was considered a no-no, it still feels daring, bold, and insightful to many people. Which makes it feel doubly cheap to people who are already bored by the joke.

I wish I could find out who said, "The end of everything is self-parody." It certainly seems that way.

Joss Whedon is not always about self-parody. His trademark gag to me is the clever turn of phrase, which is hard to define but often fun to hear. Writers on Buffy sometimes complain that they get the most praise for lines which were actually Joss Whedon's. Watching Angel, it's fairly clear when writers get sweetening from Whedon, and when they're trying to evoke his style.

He is not the epigrammist that Oscar Wilde was. Whedon can, at most, influence the way people talk for a while, but they won't be quoting him a hundred years from now. I think he must know that. The reason his turns of phrase work is because they are fresh, unusual, and rhythmically interesting. That binds them in time; they will peak and fall.

I don't know if that's properly called genuis or not, and I don't particularly care. I think it's nifty that he can come up wth something reasonably novel and have that thing entertain a lot of people; I respect rap music and Titanic for the same reasons.

[frumple.livejournal.com]

Chill. It is the first episode of the season, and it is part one of a two parter acording to TIVO. I shamlessly admit I love the show and have been watching it since season one. I am interested in seeing where they are going this season. It is, after all, a big departure from where the show was been.