Gabe and Catherine,
your characterizations of humor shuttle between apology and analysis of
power struggles underlying the destructive, shocking use of bawdy humor in
verse. Here are some concrete examples of illicit senryu (satirical haiku).
One is from the 1850s, just after Perry had "opened Japan" --
Visible to America between the rain,
the Japanese pussy.
Amerika ni amama miraruru Nihon bobo
It rained after on the "black ships" visited Japan. It's a textbook example
of the use of sexual imagery of feminization and violation in (here pseudo-)
colonialist situations.
Another senryu plays on the puns of the Satsuma region, which sounds like
sweet potato and is populated by potatoes just as New Zealand is by kiwis.
In comic reverence, on the occasion of a very famous former samurai's heroic
death in Japan's last civil war:
A potato becomes a fart
and Saigô becomes a star.
Anyway, these are quite memorable examples for me, and I thought they'd add
another point of reference.
dean
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From: Gudding
what I'm saying I guess is that I think dick jokes or fart jokes or
cunt
jokes -- even in their raunchiest
form -- are very complex (especially socially) and do say something
sufficiently grand -- or at least
sufficiently destructive. Aren't taboo jokes meant in many ways to
drive
away a particular kind
of audience -- or to mime the act of driving away an audience? My
point?:
though the packaging
of even a minimalist taboo joke can be quite scant (say, providing a
moniker to one's own genitalia,
by which I mean referring to one's own pooty by a proper name, for
instance), this act in itself
is amazingly complicated and, well, profound. At least to someone born
with
my taste, which is,
when it comes to jokes, maybe a bit, umm, forgiving.
Anyway, thanks: I'm grateful for the sketch.
Gabe
At 11:48 AM 7/17/00 -0700, Catherine Daly wrote:
>there are "levels" to jokes
>there are "levels" to poetry
>
>A first level joke is generally a dick joke or a fart joke. It exists
on
>the surface, and is
>(male) physical. These we put in movies for 14 year old boys. I say
>"we", though only the
>boys here are writing movies.
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