When Parents Fight

I get a perverse joy out of parents behaving badly at children’s sporting events. 

I don’t watch the news, but whenever I’m out in public and walk by a blaring television set, and I hear the phrase, “A little league game got ugly...” I perk up and stop like a dog hearing a dog whistle. I’m not sure what that it says about my sense of humor, but I love it when two (or preferably several) middle-aged blowhards start flailing at each other over perceived slights. 

The story is always the same: The kid doesn’t catch a ball, and some opposing parent applauds that. A weird phenomenon of narcissism by proxy kicks in. The child on the field who dropped the ball is an embodiment of the parent’s inner dreams, and that parent is certain that they will become the star athlete that they never were. When parents fight, I don’t think they’re fighting for their kid’s “honor”, but for their own fragile sense of self. The fighting blowhard feels like they’re the one who had dropped the ball, and they can’t deal with that.

I wish these kind of dumb fights would happen at a kid’s chess match.

“Wooo! Good move. Way to take control of the center of the board...”

“He’s castling! He’s desperate. Don’t stop Aidan!”

“How DARE you say that to my kid! I will KILL YOU!”

Then two balding and bespectacled intellectuals start wrestling, their corduroy Carl Sagan blazers scratching each other. They have to be pulled apart by blue-haired librarians.

“I assure you this isn’t over!”

“Indubitably...indubitably...”

Movie 43.

I’ve noticed with some wry amusement that “Movie 43”, – a sort-of gross-out, shock-for-shock’s sake, less-witty Kentucky Fried Movie, – is being called one of worst movies ever made. At the time of this writing, Rotten Tomatoes, an aggregate of total film ratings, gives it a mere 4%. Lest you think I’m some old prudish fuddy-duddy, one of the premises of the sketches is that a young girl gets her period and makes a mess. Hilarious, isn’t it? What? Pointing and laughing at a young girl isn’t funny to you?

Movie 43 is another example of Hollywood being creatively bankrupt. It seems like an industry run by Frat Boys who still think it's cool to wear their baseball caps backwards, whose tastes never grew from Junior High School. (Exhbit A: Transformers, Battleship, etc. etc.)

I should point out that shock humor has a place in comedy. One of my favorite things is South Park, which revels in a cesspool of scatalogical and political incorrectness. The difference is that South Park is speaking in good faith. Its power as cultural Court Jester is that it speaks truth to power and never lies.The shock of South Park is (usually) not from gross-out, although there is plenty of that too, but in the way that South Park exposes the fact that the Emperor Wears No Clothes. Comedy Central has two huge and influential cultural critiques. The Daily Show successfully critiques The Right’s Moral Culture War, and South Park skewers the touchy-feely-inclusive, but unimaginably intolerant, Left Wing Moral Do-Gooders who are decidedly NOT HELPING.