Meanwhile, Monty Python’s Life of Brian literally had a male character who identifies as female and everybody in the movie is cool with it
And John Cleese is now a transphobe. Go figure. (Other members are cool from what I’ve heard)
You can make the argument the joke there isn’t so much that being trans is weird or wrong, it’s in the juxtaposition between where it starts and where it ends up. The singer starts with a very masculine stereotype and shifts drastically into a feminine one to the point it confuses other masc stereotypes who reject him. The singer didn’t read the room and went way off the rails.
Not the best justification, I know, but it doesn’t feel especially hostile towards trans, just using it as an irresponsible punchline in a joke about traditional masculinity vs feminity, which was typical of the time.
Its not so indiscriminate. Its just that theyre edgy libertarians and radical centrists. Its less about blanket making fun of everyone including themselves and that theyre smugly declaring “both sides bad” on most things.
The viewer must be able to laugh at themselves, or at least be able to tolerate writers who are deliberately pushing people’s buttons. Sometimes there’s a good point hiding in the bullshit.
Or, just skip the show entirely. It’s great that their turnaround time is only six days(!), so they can address surprisingly current issues, but the show is past its prime anyway.
I love South Park, but damn, the Mr Garrison trans episodes are just, ahhhhhhhhhggggggggggg.
I’m neurodivergent, and I laugh in many instances South Park made fun of neudivergent and mentally disabled people. I’m Latin American, South Park made fun of latin americans so many times. I’m progressive, South Park made fun of progressives so many times. I’m atheist, same thing. I’m bisexual, same thing, I could go on.
The problem with the Mr Garrison episodes is that, they are so viscerally transphobic, it is very obviously made in such bad faith.
Of course they are not the worse thing depicted in South Park, but yeah, a show with the objective to be as offensive as possible gotta hit somewhere in a very personal point eventually.
Ultimately the South Park moral comes down to change is bad. Let’s keep the status quo.
And that’s what I find offensive. To be fair, The Simpsons does the same thing, as does Family Guy
As does most society critical content that makes it to television.
I think those “both sides” shows have to go out of their way to find things to make fun of in certain circumstances. So they feel forced to charicature or misrepresent those groups in order to make any proper humor. On the audience side people who buck the status quo are held under the same scrutiny as people who are rapidly climbing the discrimination pipeline.
Matt and Trey are the sort of shitpost wizards who’d be the coolest guys on some dead forum if they didn’t happen to work for Paramount. They were doing the same transgressive edgelord nonsense fueling the best worst Flash animations on Newgrounds. They just did it on television.
It’s important to recognize how things catch on when people are told “no.” Busybodies insist video games are for children, so you get shocking excessive gore like Mortal Kombat. American distributors insist cartoons are for children, so you get a Christmas musical about a turd. Parents hound their kids about dial-up porn, so you get Rule 34. Suppress something widely-desired, and hey guess what, it doesn’t just go away. Those kids grow up and do whatever they want.
They were in the industry the whole time. They didn’t just show up with a 16mm test print and leave with Isaac Hayes’ phone number. Orgazmo came out nearly the same day as South Park’s premiere.
It bothers me less depending on how old the episode is, and the overall tone of the joke. Older “let’s put this guy in a dress for cheap laughs” type stuff is lame, but not as bad as more recent attempts to make hatred more palatable by disguising it with a thin veneer of “humor”.
One of the most egregious examples I can think of from recent media was from Kimmy Schmidt where the people that take issue with trans/enbyphobia were turned into the butt of a joke because… they’re annoying I guess?
Came out of left field in a show I thought was queer friendly but I realized later on that it tracks with the brand of feminism that Tina Fey follows. (I never watched 30 Rock and don’t intend to so I had no idea she was already problematic)
Oh no, what has Tina Fey done? I’m trying to think back on 30 Rock and I can imagine how some of it hasn’t aged well.
No, that old stuff is just as bad. Go watch the end of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It was just simpler then because the writers considered that type of hate to be ubiquitous instead of needing nuance or explanation.
It’s like saying older racism wasn’t as bad as the more recent attempts to galvanize people into nazis. But I contend it was for the same reason above. You’re seeing recent attempts at both towards being more palatable specifically because it’s not as accepted now.
Huh. I just deleted an entire paragraph replying to you, but then I did some introspection. Where are you consuming media? I haven’t experienced much transgenderism or similar thing recently, but my experience seems to be very curated. I don’t watch TV, but I listen to radio and watch a lot of YouTube and some Netflix. I’m also following social media sites, most recently lemme, for decent conversations.
I’m curious where you’re seeing “hatred more palatable by disguising it with a thin veneer”?
It’s a bit of a lengthy read, but here is an article that gets into the messiness of Zoolander 2 and Deadpool. Long story short, they both attempt to be more performatively progressive with their depictions but end up perpetuating many of the same harmful stereotypes of queer individuals. They become the same low brow entertainment as before with a few tweaks to make them more acceptable. That being said, I still liked Deadpool. I think the industry is still evolving and we need to continue to let it evolve in a positive direction.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/meredithtalusan/25-years-of-transphobia-in-comedies
Meanwhile Denise Bryson is on Twin Peaks being totally cool and never the butt of a joke
Agent Dale Cooper is just that cool. Also Kyle MacLachlan is a super chill guy.
I wanna say King of the Hill is safe.
There’s one episode with a drag queen, not trans. It’s pretty positive! She thinks Peggy is also a drag queen and they become best friends. It ends that way too.
Thoughts on the episode where Bill pretended to be flamboyantly gay so he could work at a hip salon?
It’s been a while, but I felt like the episode poked fun at the stereotype of the clownishly flamboyant gay man and the belief that gay = fashionable. I think Queer Eye was big around that time and sort of pushed that idea, too. So yeah, not really making fun of gay people as much as making fun of popular culture and the sort of “gay chasers”, I guess.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but i hope not.
I think both of your views are pretty on point. I just wanted to point out that they did use (feigned?) queerness as a plot point.
I, unfortunately, remember when all of my peers called things they thought were stupid g**. And everyone they didn’t like were f*gs.
We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve made progress.
