I'm Attention Deficit in High Definition

who is she

Really gotta put these together on the same post. I could have sword they already were.

There's a whole scene that gets cut from every production of Tempest because it is clearly supposed to be funny, but the punchline is "widow Dido," and the best guess is that it was essentially a meme that we just don't get anymore. So the scene doesn't work, it isn't funny, it's barely comprehensible. Widow Dido wasn't canceled, society just moved on to different stupid jokes. One of the bits in Merry Wives of Windsor, a genuinely funny play, that is clearly supposed to bring the house down, and probably did in 1598, is that this one guy is French. That's it, that's the joke. Hon Hon Hon baguette du fromage. Get a load of this Frenchman. At best these days it comes off as silly and juvenile. But to an Elizabethan English person, some French guy fumbling a good English girl was hilarious.

And yeah there's also an element of xenophobia and nationalism there and that's not great, but mostly it's just not really funny anymore that French people exist, it's just like... ok? And??

And i think a lot of like. Bits where the punchline is that people are gay, Steven, or like. A woman is doing something, a Trans person exists, this guy wore a dress, isn't it sooooooooo funny that these two dudes are saying romantic words at each other ironically or acting like a couple like...

Yeah the idea that this would be funny is rooted in bigotry. But also,

It's just not funny? Like ok? This guy is wearing a dress? So what? Like ok this character hit on someone thinking they were one gender and was wrong, that's just a random Thursday in a South End bar, we've all been there? Nu?? Sometimes people are from Wales, yeah, that's how geography works?

Certain types of humour, like the reference-heavily nerdy or internet-tinged ones, really have an expiration date. F’rex, I love Tazmuir’s Locked Tomb series and I’m confident a lot of the gags will hold up with time, but some of them?

The Dave Strider shades, the Llamas with Hats joke, “she studied the blade”? Give it 15 years and nobody’s gonna get that. If a joke is rooted in understanding a reference then once that can’t be relied on, it doesn’t land.

I’ve read plenty of these sorts of books over the years. As one of the lonely few who still talks here about Stross novels, an author who himself laments having fallen out of touch, he does this a lot. In 2012 or so, reading a Leeroy Jenkins meme in a pretty serious novel was hysterical. A new reader now just…isn’t going to find that funny. For a parodic spy series to have a girl whose codename is a pun on Modesty Blaise is a good bit…if you know who that is.

What does work though is to have the humour fall on multiple axes. If the reference is also a joke that’s funny in and of itself.

For example, when Tamsyn Muir has Gideon find a pair of ancient sunglasses that look incongruously out of place with her and Harrow’s dour, skeletal Ninth House regalia, and Harrow is annoyed by it, that is by itself a funny bit. Knowing “oh shit those are literally the Homestuck Ben Stiller glasses” makes it funnier, but it isn’t required for the joke to work. That’ll still be entertaining long after we’ve forgotten what None Pizza with Left Beef is.

Stross having a bunch of City of London bankers and tech quants turn themselves into literal bloodsucking parasites hits, even if the Twilight joke doesn’t.

In Searle’s The Terror of Saint Trinians there’s a bit I am absolutely convinced is parodying some sort of cliche from boarding school novels of the era, and I don’t know what the original looks like, but it’s okay because the writing is funny anyway.

He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.

Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.

In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.

Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now:

This page from one of my history books looks like a lesbian utopia.

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