April 8, 2024: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: Vaughn Joy on No Way Out

[This coming weekend marks the 60^th anniversary of Sidney Poitier becoming the first Black actor to win a Best Actor Oscar. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Poitier performances, leading up to a special post on a handful of 21C actors carrying his legacy forward!]

Back in January, at the end of my series on Columbia Pictures’ 100^th anniversary, I paid tribute to a current FilmStudier I really love: Vaughn Joy. I ended that list of (some of) Vaughn’s many impressive pieces and projects by highlighting one of her newest, her Review Roulette newsletter. Not too long after that, Vaughn focused on a Black History Month edition of her newsletter on Sidney Poitier’s film debut, No Way Out (1950). It’s one of my favorite entries in a newsletter that I’m always excited to see in my inbox, so in lieu of today’s post I’ll ask you to check out that hyperlinked piece of Vaughn’s, subscribe to Review Roulette, and come on back here tomorrow for the next PoitierStudying!

Next Poitier post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Poitier films you’d highlight?

April 6-7, 2024: Emily Lauer on Comics Analysis & Editing as Public-Facing Scholarship

[This is Emily Lauer’s fourth Guest Post, making her the current leader in sharing her great ideas and writing here. Everybody else, time to step up your Guest Posting game!]

It’s always lovely to guest post for Ben’s American Studies community, and this time around, instead of reviewing some interesting American Culture Thing, I’m writing about one of my own activities in public-facing scholarship. 

 

I’ve been involved with the website WWAC for almost eight years now, and I currently hold the position of Comics Academe Editor - that is, I edit the posts that go up in the section of the site dedicated to academic writing about comics. This includes scholarly reviews of comics, reviews of comics scholarship, and academic analysis of comics for a general audience. All the editors are volunteers; this role is a labor of love, not a paying gig. 

 

The website WomenWriteAboutComics.com was started by Megan Purdy in 2012 in response to a specific claim by some ill-informed pundit who said, when asked why his site didn’t publish criticism written by women, that, “women don’t write about comics.” In the many years since then, the site has grown to encompass coverage of television and film and non-comics books in our Bookmarked section as well.

 

We won the Eisner Award for Best Comics Journalism three times in a row, in 2020, 2021, and 2022. 

 

We are archived by the US Library of Congress, where we are featured as an online source for research about women and comic books. 

 

After Megan stepped back from her roles as Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, those roles have been filled by a number of dedicated people, currently Nola Pfau as Editor-in-Chief and Kate Tanski as Publisher. Under their leadership WWAC has “become an educational partner of the Oregon State University Creative Writing Internship program,” and they are pursuing “potential future partnerships with comics-related non-profit organizations” according to Kate. I am especially looking forward to their plan to change the site name to WeWriteAboutComics.com, to better reflect the range of marginalized genders among our varied contributors. In the meantime, we are going by our initials, WWAC, as much as possible. 

 

Personally, I got involved with WWAC in the summer of 2016 when I saw a call for people to join their copyediting team. I had a sabbatical coming up with a project writing about comics adaptations, and some experience in journalism and proofreading. It seemed like a good fit. After a time as a copyeditor, I also became a contributor; after a time as a contributor I was asked to take on editing duties for a section of the site called Pubwatches which offers roundups of comics publishers’ new releases and news on a monthly basis. 

 

After years as the Pubwatches Editor, we started winning Eisners. Was it largely due to my own personal efforts that the site became so celebrated? Reader, it was not. But it was definitely an exciting time to be involved. Due to some personal stuff with the pandemic and moving into a new apartment, I took a break from editing, but I missed it, and started my current role in the Comics Academe section of the site about a year ago. 

 

The Comics Academe section is a venue for scholarly writing with journalistic publishing practices. If you are a scholar who has something to say about a comic (or about Comics) but you don’t feel it needs to be in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, it is probably right for Comics Academe. Kate Tanski points out that, “essays published in Comics Academe are frequently used on syllabi, and have won the Gilbert Seldes Prize from the Comics Studies Society’s annual awards in 2021 and 2023 . Several current or past members of the Comics Studies Society have also served on the CSS board.” 

 

In my short time working on this section of the site, we’ve published a three-part series about archeology in comics, written by academic archeologists who happen to be interested in comics; we’ve published reviews of comics that take a scholarly approach to their analysis, and we’ve published a pedagogical discussion of using comics in the classroom—among other things. In the queue now we have a review of a scholarly collection of essays about comics, and a biographical look at an influential comics creator in India. 

 

It’s a vibrant and varied section, is what I’m saying. And we welcome pitches!

 

It’s really fun for me to receive these pitches and then get to read all these cool things scholars are doing with comics, often in a more casual tone than would be required for a scholarly journal, and a more casual timeline than would be required for most journalism. The best of both. 

 

Being a part of an organization like WWAC is rewarding for other reasons, too. Not only because the submissions are so interesting, but also partly because my involvement with WWAC is so different from my day-to-day experience of being a college professor. WWAC includes people all over the world, not all academics, with different career goals and strengths in writing. It enriches my scholarly practice, as all public-facing scholarship does, by broadening my perspective on what scholarship can be, and where it can go. 

[Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Ideas for Guest Posts of your own? Share ‘em, please!]

April 5, 2024: Satire Studying: The Big Short and Vice

[If ever a year both needed and yet resisted a heavy dose of satire, it would be 2024. So for this year’s April Fool’s series I’ll share a humorous handful of SatireStudying posts—please add your thoughts on these and any other satirical texts you’d highlight for a knee-slapping yet pointed crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the value and the limits of satire when it comes to contemporary, contested events.

One of the more interesting artistic transformations of the 21^st century has been that of writer and director Adam McKay. McKay rose to prominence through his collaborations with comedian Will Ferrell (and others) on a series of extremely silly comedies: Anchorman (2004) and its sequel, Talladega Nights (2006), Step Brothers (2008), and The Other Guys (2010). If you haven’t had a chance to see any of those films, the most important thing to emphasize (and one you can gather from just about any clip from any of them) is that they are almost entirely, and very purposefully, non-thematic, overtly not interested in social or cultural issues and just trying to make audiences laugh as consistently and hard as possible. But in 2015, McKay wrote and directed The Big Short, a satirical dramedy based on Michael Lewis’s book of the same name about the 2008 housing crisis and financial meltdown. And 2018 saw the release of a second, very similar McKay film, Vice, a satirical dramedy based on the life and political career (to date) of Dick Cheney (starring Christian Bale as Cheney, Amy Adams as his wife Liz, Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush, Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld, and many more actors).

These satirical yet serious takes on hot-button contemporary issues parallel in many ways one of the 21^st century’s most popular cultural genres: the satirical news commentary and comedy program. Originated by Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (especially once Jon Stewart took over the hosting gig), this genre has become one of the most prolific in recent years, from Stephen Colbert and John Oliver to Samantha Bee and Hasan Minhaj (among others!). Even late-night talk show hosts have gotten in on the act in diverse but equally compelling ways. What unites all these satirical news programs is their desire to walk a fine line between making audiences laugh (not constantly, but at least consistently) and providing thought-provoking commentary on current events, and I would say McKay’s recent films are aiming for that same sweet spot. I haven’t had a chance to see Vice yet, but I did see The Big Short and it was most definitely seeking to provide both laughs and knowledge, often in the exact same sequences (as with the famous and controversial use of random beautiful actresses to talk about the fine points of housing policy and economics). As that hyperlinked sequence featuring Margot Robbie notes, knowing these seemingly boring details is pretty vital to understanding the last decade in American life, and the goal of using comedy and satire to convey such details links McKay’s recent films to these news programs.

Yet I have significantly more ambivalence about McKay’s films than I do about those programs, and I think it boils down to one factor: the use of talented, likable actors to create sympathy for figures who have contributed negatively and destructively to these recent histories. That was somewhat the case with The Big Short’s protagonists, mortgage brokers (played by highly likable actors such as Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale) who seemingly fought the system yet at the same time profited greatly by predicting and betting on the upcoming crash and crisis. And it’s very definitely the case with Vice—again, I haven’t had a chance to see it as of this writing, but part of the reason why is that I love watching Christian Bale in anything, and really don’t relish the thought of him playing Dick Cheney, to my mind one of the truly evil figures in the last century of American political and social life. Every historical figure is a flesh-and-blood human being, with various layers and sides, and so I suppose every one is also worth extended attention and even sympathy. But I don’t know that we need an entire film creating such a multi-layered portrait of Dick Motherfucking Cheney (that’s his full name, y’know), and I likewise am not at all sure that the lighter touch of comedy and satire are appropriate when it comes to depicting such a figure. I suppose there’s a place for such films, but they’re likely to remain non-favorites for this AmericanStudier (and for reviewers such as Slate’s Bilge Ebiri, it seems).

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: What do you think? Other satirical works you’d share?

April 4, 2024: Satire Studying: TV Satires

[If ever a year both needed and yet resisted a heavy dose of satire, it would be 2024. So for this year’s April Fool’s series I’ll share a humorous handful of SatireStudying posts—please add your thoughts on these and any other satirical texts you’d highlight for a knee-slapping yet pointed crowd-sourced weekend post!]

[NOTE: This post originally aired in 2017; I’m sure there’s lots of great TV satire since we could add to this list, and please do so for the weekend post!]

On four comic shows from which we can learn a great deal about our society and culture.

1)      Key & Peele (2012-2015): During its five seasons and fifty-three episodes, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s Comedy Central sketch comedy series was more than just consistently hilarious; it offered some of the most biting and insightful reflections on race in America that I’ve ever seen (in any genre or medium). (By all reports, Peele’s new horror film Get Out manages the same impressive balance of entertainment and social commentary within that genre.) If I were to suggest any one cultural work to represent race in America in the age of Trayvon and Obama, it would have to be Key & Peele; a viewer could dive into almost any episode and come away with a better understanding of the lightest and darkest of both this crucial issue and our national community.

2)      Inside Amy Schumer (2013- ). I would say many of the same things about Amy Schumer’s Comedy Central sketch comedy show, which has aired four seasons and has a fifth coming at some point in the future; only her show focuses its social satirical lens most consistently on issues of gender and sex. Schumer is particularly adept at utilizing parody in the best ways about which I wrote in yesterday’s post: see this Friday Night Lights sketch on football and rape culture; or this clip from her transcendent, episode-long parody of Twelve Angry Men. But her entirely original sketches are just as biting, as illustrated by this one on female celebrities experiencing their “last fuckable day.” Between the two of them, Key & Peele and Inside Amy Schumer could comprise the entire syllabus for a course on 21^st century America and you wouldn’t run out of things to talk about.

3)      Last Week Tonight (2014- ): The Daily Show veteran John Oliver’s weekly news satire show on HBO is an entirely different animal, not only from sketch comedy shows like those but even from The Daily Show and its ilk. What Oliver does best—and, perhaps, what only Oliver does—is produce in-depth segments, usually running in the ballpark of twenty minutes, that examine a complex issue at great length, featuring a mixture of humor, investigative reporting, and impassioned arguments and activism. If you haven’t seen any, I don’t think you can go wrong, but I would recommend in particular this one on the death penalty, this one on prisons, this one on refugees, and this one on online harassment of women. Like many folks, I used to say that The Daily Show offered more accurate news than most of the news media; that might well still be true, but I don’t think any current show offers better reporting on vital American issues than Last Week Tonight.

4)      Full Frontal (2016- ): Another Daily Show vet, Samantha Bee’s weekly news satire show is the newest of this batch (it debuted just over a year ago), but has already impressed me (and everybody else I’ve ever talked to about it) with its blend of reporting and humor (a la Oliver’s show) mixed with Bee’s unique, fiery, and never less than compelling voice and perspective. Once again, I don’t think you can go wrong with any clip, but this one—Bee’s response to Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape scandal from last October—is a particular favorite and exemplifies all those qualities that have made this show much-watch television so quickly. As I wrote in this post on the media and the 2016 election (written in the halcyon days before that election actually transpired), to my mind the majority of the best coverage of that campaign came from the Olivers and Bees of the media world. That’s partly a disturbing reflection of the state of other parts of the news media, to be sure; but it’s also partly an illustration of just how vital these kinds of social satirical voices have become in our society and culture.

Last satire tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other satirical works you’d share?

April 3, 2024: Satire Studying: The Interview

[If ever a year both needed and yet resisted a heavy dose of satire, it would be 2024. So for this year’s April Fool’s series I’ll share a humorous handful of SatireStudying posts—please add your thoughts on these and any other satirical texts you’d highlight for a knee-slapping yet pointed crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On what’s problematic, and what’s important, about a hugely controversial comedy.

In the last post in my 2012 April Fools series, I highlighted five great, enduring works of American satire. Having had the chance to see the satirical film The Interview (2014) subsequent to drafting that post, I have to admit that I don’t see it ever landing on such a list. Directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, based on a story by Rogen, Goldberg, and Dan Sterling, and starring Rogen and James Franco as the producer and star of a celebrity interview show who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the screwball comedy throws a ton of jokes and over-the-top sequences against the wall, many of them vulgar, graphically violent, or some combination of both. There are certainly funny moments, both of the silly and the pointed variety; but for the most part the film feels like it’s working way too hard for much too little payoff. And much of the problem lies in that attempt to combine the silly and screwball with the satirical—satire, it seems to me, requires us to use our brain; and too much of the time, The Interview is trying to hit us far lower than that.

The film became far better known for its controversy than its comedy, of course, and on that level too I would argue that it’s problematic. I don’t have any problem with a work of fiction satirizing (and even, SPOILER and graphic violence alert, brutally killing) a world leader like Kim, and certainly I don’t support the North Korean government’s attempts to suppress the film’s release. But as I wrote in this January 2015 piece for my Talking Points Memo column, I don’t believe we Americans have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to critiquing such blind, uncritical worship of our beloved leaders. Since many of the responses to my piece suggested I was equating the two nations overall, let me be clear: America is not North Korea, in any sense. But I would stand by my point that far too many Americans expressed, in response to Natalie Maines’ far less incendiary depiction of George W. Bush, a level of outrage and anger commensurate to the North Korean response to a film portraying their leader in far, far worse light (as well as, y’know, brutally killing him). Which is to say, if we want to make the case that North Korea should be able to handle satire and criticism more calmly, we’re going to have to turn that mirror on ourselves and our own histories as well.

I don’t think it entirely succeeded in doing so, but it is important to note that The Interview does, in fact, attempt to true that satirical and critical lens on America as well as North Korea. It does so partly through the easy targets of the media and our culture of celebrity, both embodied by James Franco’s thoroughly annoying and stupid character (although he is eventually supposed to be a hero, so I’m not sure how much the zingers ultimately connect). But it does so more subtly through the film’s true heroine, Sook, the North Korean officer who hopes to overthrow Kim and establish a democratic government in his place. When Sook reveals her true intentions, Franco and Rogen exclaim that Kim must be assassinated; she replies, “How many times is America going to make the same mistake?,” and Franco responds, “As many times as it takes, sister!” Again, such moments of thoughtful satire of American foreign policy and perspectives are both few and far between and often overshadowed by the silliness and vulgarities and so on; but they’re there, and perhaps they even registered with the millions of viewers who sought out the film after the controversy. For a silly, mediocre screwball comedy, that’d be a surprising and meaningful effect.

Next satire tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other satirical works you’d share?

April 2, 2024: Satire Studying: Innocents Abroad

[If ever a year both needed and yet resisted a heavy dose of satire, it would be 2024. So for this year’s April Fool’s series I’ll share a humorous handful of SatireStudying posts—please add your thoughts on these and any other satirical texts you’d highlight for a knee-slapping yet pointed crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the double-edged satire at the heart of Mark Twain’s first big hit.

I haven’t done an exhaustive survey or anything, but it seems to me that most social or political satire is both directed at a particular target and driven by an earnest embrace of some alternative idea. Take perhaps the most famous satirical work of all time, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729): seems to be suggesting that the solution to the problems of Irish poverty and hunger is to eat Irish babies; is really satirizing English bigotry toward the Irish; and so is genuinely (if of course very subtly) pro-Irish instead. Similarly, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) satirizes virtually every aspect of war (even a war as seemingly noble as World War II) while sympathizing quite overtly and poignantly with its soldier protagonists; Heller’s satire would to my mind be entirely unsuccessful if we didn’t come to care about those soldiers. Certainly there are satirical voices which take on all comers (The Onion comes to mind), but for the most part, I’d say that social satire needs the accompanying earnest advocacy to function.

Mark Twain’s most famous character, Huck Finn, proves that point quite precisely: Huck is painfully earnest, almost always unable to recognize humor at all (for example), and it is through that earnest perspective that Twain creates his satires of numerous aspects of antebellum (and postbellum) Southern and American society. But Twain’s first book, the travelogue Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869, revised from 1867 newspaper pieces), is much more confusingly and crucially all-encompassing in its satirizing. At first glance Twain seems to be satirizing the reverent tone and attitude of typical travelogues, and thus too the Old World cultures which demand such reverence; but at the same time, his American travelers, including the author himself, come in for just as much ridicule, most especially for their ignorance of these other cultures and their tendency toward pro-American provincialism. If both communities are ultimately, equally foolish and silly, though, it’s fair to ask whether the satire has a point.

Innocents is unquestionably a messy and sprawling book (reflecting at least in part its origins in those many different newspaper pieces), but I’d argue that its satire is in fact pointed precisely in its multi-directionality. After all, one of the central goals of any satirist must be to create discomfort, to force an audience out of any and all comfort zones and into the space where established narratives or norms are challenged and made literally laughable. While Heller’s book (for example) certainly does so when it comes to any and all pro-war narratives, it might at the same time make already anti-war readers more comfortable, reinforce their existing views and ideas. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (again, having an earnest point can make the satire of other points more successful), but there’s something to be said for a satire that doesn’t let any of us get too comfortable in where we are or what we believe. And that’s doubly true for a travel satire—whether we think home is always the best or are just constantly searching for somewhere better, we’re likely to be over-simplifying both places, and Twain’s book forces us to push beyond those simplifications and continue our journey in a more complex perspective.

Next satire tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other satirical works you’d share?

April 1, 2024: Satire Studying: African American Satire

[If ever a year both needed and yet resisted a heavy dose of satire, it would be 2024. So for this year’s April Fool’s series I’ll share a humorous handful of SatireStudying posts—please add your thoughts on these and any other satirical texts you’d highlight for a knee-slapping yet pointed crowd-sourced weekend post!]

I don’t usually link to my Saturday Evening Post Considering History columns in this space (and I do hope you’re checking out my work over there too, dear readers), but for a Black History Month column earlier this year I used the acclaimed current film American Fiction to share a syllabus of African American satire. Didn’t seem to make sure to write an April Fool’s series on satire and now feature those thoughts, so in lieu of a full post today, please check out that February column if you would!

Next satire tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other satirical works you’d share?