YouTube link here. No kitties. Why are you watching?
Part 1 of 2. We talk about things. Honestly, a lot of it is hard to remember, which was this episode, which was the next one. But I know we talk some about superheroes, and moving out of Iowa. Also, Tony has to confront himself. Enjoy!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
What Tony was saying about Freddy Boyle reminded me of the ContraPoints episode called The Darkness in which Natalie Wynn talks about edgy/dark humor in the context of Ricky Gervaise making jokes about trans people. What Wynn says in that video sort of explains to me what makes something funny or not funny when you’re making a joke about something offensive/taboo. (Which might in some ways be redundant? most jokes are about the taboo, I think.)
What it mostly boils down to is that the humor has to be in some way anchored in empathy/understanding. If you’re making jokes about an experience that you are ignorant of yourself, and don’t have any empathetic understanding of, it’s not going to be funny. Dark comedy comes out of taking things that are painful and making them funny, but if you don’t understand the pain, then you are basically just punching down at those in a worse-off position, most often using stereotypes, and thus creating, stale, hack jokes which may be “edgy” but aren’t funny. Another way of thinking about it is, that a lot of these comics, like Gervais, value truth and think that they are truth-tellers. But if they are joking about experiences they don’t understand, then they aren’t speaking truth, but relying on bigoted falsehoods.
I recommend the whole video (and ContraPoints generally). Initially the video seems to be about depression, but that’s more an introduction into thinking about what “darkness” might represent in dark comedy. If you want to skip into more of the section on dark comedy, start at 5 minutes in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtj7LDYaufM
(More later, I’m jumping back and forth from work to commenting :-))
What you were talking about as far as representation of Native Americans in various areas of the country got me wondering about whether things might be changing around here (Massachusetts) more recently. I say this because I just recently met a young woman in her early 20s who is Native American and grew up around here.
So the answer is yes, there has been population growth starting around the 2000s, and this is the first growth that there’s been since the populations were decimated across the 17th – early 20th centuries. This seems to have begun with the establishment of the Wampanoag as a federally recognized tribe. This gave them the ability to reestablish sovereignty over some areas of land especially around the town of Aquinnah. They also got federal housing money which allowed construction of affordable housing. So the number of people who identify as Native American or mixed race with Native American went from around 39,000 in MA in 2000 to around 49,000 in 2016. The population in the rest of the state is declining during the same time period.
Interesting! In Iowa, we only have the Meskwaki Nation represented. They operate a successful casino in Tama, Iowa. As far as I can tell, their population decreased over the past decade, but I don’t know for sure…
The Meskwaki Nation is just a little over an hour from where I live now and a bit further than that from where I grew up. Which is to say, I’ve always lived a distance from there that’s close by Iowa standards. But for years when I was growing up, I would have told you that we didn’t have Native American settlements in Iowa because nobody made me aware of them. That’s very different than what I’ve experienced in states further West, where Native heritage and acknowledgment of Native settlements seem to be everywhere, even hundreds of miles away from the nearest reservation.
I was also thinking about the connection between family history and why I’ve always lived primarily on the East Coast. I realized it’s because, with one exception, my family are all pretty recent immigrants. On my Mom’s side, I’m the first person in the family born in the U.S. On my Dad’s side, my Dad’s generation is the first generation from his mother’s family to be born in the U.S. His mother was born in Nova Scotia, and her parents were born in Scotland. Then my Dad’s father’s family goes all the way back to Plymouth rock. I know I’ve got one ancestor on that side whose name was “Fire & Brimstone Hall”!
Oh, and where I’d want to live if not in Massachusetts would be the UK. Probably in countryside outside of Cambridge.