If you've been following the Minnesota Senate race, you know that Democratic Senate candidate Al 
Franken, the comedian, has been getting whooped pretty good over his past writing, including a vulgar piece in Playboy about pornography and a proposed Saturday Night Live skit making fun of rape. Rep. Betty McCullum (D-MN) has been pretty tough on Franken.
Franken's foibles have now made the Washington Post in a column by Michael Gerson. Gerson considers the notion that Franken is engaged in serious comedy, the activity of the satirist:
Satire has been called "punishment for those who deserve it." Writers from Erasmus to Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have used humor, irony and ridicule to expose the follies of the powerful, the failures of blind ideology and the comic weakness of human nature itself.
So what is Franken's "provocative, touching and funny" contribution to the genre? Consider his article in Playboy magazine titled "Porn-O-Rama!" in which he enthuses that it is an "exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography." The Internet, he explains, is a "terrific learning tool. For example, a couple of years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth-grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved." Franken goes on to relate a soft-core fantasy about women providing him with sex who were trained at the "Minnesota Institute of Titology."
Orwell would be so proud.
"Porn-O-Rama!" is a modern campaign document every voter should read -- the Federalist Papers of lifestyle liberalism. It has the literary sensibilities and moral seriousness of an awkward adolescent nerd publishing an underground newspaper to shock his way into campus popularity. But, in this case, the article was written in 2000 by a 48-year-old man.
As they say, read the whole thing.
An important distinction to be made here is between public and private vulgarity or crudity. Most men (and probably quite a few women) have been around and perhaps engaged in what we can call "locker room" conversation. Crude, off-color humor is often part of this jocularity. It is one thing to do this in private, away from the public ear. It is another to present is an acceptable mode of public discourse, as the way adults talk to each other. Gerson is correct; Franken uses his freedom of speech they way an adolescent would: to say naughty words and giggle at them. Franken appeals to the low in us, not the noble.
Franken's sex talk appears to sink to the level of the puerile, never to rise again. This is not to say sex jokes are never appropriate. Shakespeare has plenty of sex jokes (think of the bawdy talk from Mercutio and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet). But this bawdy talk serves a purpose, to prevent us from talking sex too seriously, either over-romanticizing it or over analyzing it. In either case, Shakespeare's bawdy talk serve to provoke thought, Franken's to end it.
As Gerson suggests, Franken's endorsement by his party likely serves to lower the quality of our discourse. Franken's humor is not just vulgar, it is mean. The word "mean" literally has the connotation of small or petty (as in "no mean feat"). Franken makes us smaller, a lesser people. His election would represent a loss for simple decency.
The Democrats targeted the current office holder, Sen. Norman Coleman, as one of the easiest targets. Perhaps they nominated one man capable of losing to Coleman. Either way, whether Franken gains the seat or not, the Democrats come out as losers. They either lose an election or their dignity.
Recent Comments