The Gayfish episode (Fishsticks) of South Park with Kanye West making love to a fish....
“There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at.”
This to me is one of those quotes that is infinitely interesting. I have long held the view that comedy is one of the most secretly dangerous influencers in modern America today. And it is made much worse by the type of extremely crude, mean, blasphemous and empathy-less comedy entertainment that saturates the world of today. Whether it is TV shows like South Park, The Simpsons or Family Guy, or comedians like Bill Maher, John Stewart, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert or George Lopez.
But it’s not just entertainment (I didn’t even mention movies), one area where damage has been done in a major way in my opinion is in the area of “fail” videos and the like. These are videos that pervade the Internet (and on TV via certain shows) where people laugh at others who have “failed” at something… However often this involves the person getting hurt in some manner, whether it’s falling, bailing on a skateboard or running into a pole, falling into a hole, etc.
I know people who absolutely love to watch these videos and will spend hours on the Internet laughing at the expense of others. While I agree that the above isn’t the same or direct cause (necessarily) in creating a person who is completely absent of compassion, it IS still a step in that direction when you get used to laughing at what should offend or cause one pause. And the sad reality is that our society’s love of fail videos has lead to many of these situations happening in real life, and people doing absolutely nothing about it… except laughing. We’ve all seen news coverage of bad things happening, and people simply minding their own business and walking by, not lifting a figure to help. Or even worse, laughing about it or at the person involved (such as during school fights….). Then again, “The Good Samaritan” is a Biblical story that’s as old as time itself, and even back in those days people were walking on by when someone was seriously injured…
While the violence in our media and the like may have some impact as well, I think the real damage is not in the media itself, but in the tendency to see the world without empathy and compassion at the expense of the person on the other end; all for a short laugh on your end.
And I don’t know what the solution is other than to try and influence your friends and family to avoid that type of “entertainment” or to avoid saturating themselves in it. And constantly reminding yourself that it isn’t cool to laugh at someone else’s expense. Period.
Having said that I can enjoy an episode of South Park as much as the next guy, so I’m not trying to say that one has to halt all viewing of said entertainment, but I do think you need to be careful to keep your empathy and compassion intact and be careful that those around you are not growing a tolerance to seeing others in pain and finding it funny. Because it isn’t. And that worldview is a dangerous one indeed. One only has to look at Nazi Germany to understand what happens when a society grows to lack compassion for all individuals.
