Chris Pizzello / Invision / AP
We Saw Your Satire
After the Oscars, the world seemed divided into two parties: those who thought host Seth MacFarlane's song, "We Saw Your Boobs," was hilarious and those who, well, weren't quite so amused.
Count me among the greatly amused.
That should surprise no one who knows me, or has read here of my fondness for art both high and low, or understands my appreciation for language. As a like-minded friend live-tweeted, "Boobs is just such a funny word!" Indeed it is.
To recap: MacFarlane, creator of the crudely humorous show Family Guy, opened the Oscars with an ode to female actors who've bared their breasts in their films. Outrage—along with a follow-up tit-for-tat video that turns the gender tables—ensued.
At worst, the song was merely the puerile snickering befitting a 13-year-old boy.
At least, it was Oscar-appropriate burlesque.
At best, it was even more: biting social satire.
Skipping over the MacFarlane-as-adolescent interpretation ("What do you expect from the creator of Family Guy?"), let's consider the act as burlesque. Burlesque humorously caricatures a serious work by making it ludicrous or even vulgar. It would be hard to get a better textbook example of the genre than MacFarlane's song, which reduced serious film scenes, some involving rape and abuse, to the exposure of the actresses' breasts. The entrance of the cabaret dancers, a staple of burlesque, cued us to the song's context within a long tradition of low art.
While burlesque is sheer mockery for the sake of laughs, satire serves a higher purpose. "I Saw Your Boobs" may rise to this level, even if unintentionally so. Satire—the ridicule of vice or folly to achieve correction—often looks childish on the surface, since it generally deals with the baser aspects of human nature. Puerility is in the eye of the beholder, so those who can't, or won't, see beyond the surface-level titillation remain near-sighted indeed. Unfortunately, as another writer has said, they will know we are Christians by our lack of irony. And sometimes by our lack of humor.
Perhaps everything we need to know about these matters can be learned from the ancient Greeks. The ancients used the word "obscene"—literally meaning "against the scene"—to designate anything that distracted inordinately or unnecessarily (gratuitously) from the unity or artistry of a work as a whole. The foremost category of the "obscene" for the Greeks was violence. While Greek drama gets filled with murder, mayhem, patricide, fratricide, and suicide, none of these events occur onstage. Though crucial to the plots, such events in classical drama are narrated by a character after the fact. The Greeks well understood human nature: our natural, visceral reactions to the dramatization of violence, as well as sex, can distract us from the aesthetic and ethical experience of art. For similar reasons, Aristotle, in his Poetics, rates "spectacle" as the least important element of the drama because, like "obscenity," spectacle is a distraction.
Auditing America's Political Integrity
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Obannon leo
The message is this: Women can show their boobs in film, but men are not allowed to sing about it. Tut, tut, men!
audrey ruth
Garbage in, garbage out. Philippians 4:8
Sarah Shaver
well, shootie-darn. i laughed out loud at the song, as did my husband. i'm not a fan of nudity or blatant sex in films or on tv, as i believe it objectifies God's creation. i took the song in my little pointed head as, "hey, you 'serious' actress, you sniffed and looked down your nose and said you got naked for 'art,' but you know what? you are no better than a girl gone wild! HA!" and i thought that was pretty hilarious. when the gay men's chorus joined in i almost fell in the floor. i'm not a seth mcfarlane fan (my kids aren't allowed to watch 'family guy,' unlike most of their friends) but thanks to my parents steeping me in monty python and early saturday night live, i'm pretty sure i know good satire when i see it. some of the rest of mcfarlane's stuff was gross and some was funny. like most of life.
PAUL ATWATER
Interesting to see that Jamie Lee Curtis and Jane Fonda expressed their disapproval of the song this week. So it seems that one cannot say that all of the actors and actresses in Hollywood were in on the gag. To be honest, I didn't see many smiling faces when the cameras panned the audience. Perhaps what is satire for one was over the line and offensive for those targeted - even in Hollywood.
audrey ruth
A major problem today is this matter of people (including Christians) giving their opinions without taking the time to compare their opinions with the Word of God to see if they measure up. This has been happening so long, it seems that very few people even care anymore what God's Word says about anything, only what they think. The Lord tells us of a nation that fell into terrible depravity and destruction because "each man did what was right in his own eyes". This begins with believing that whatever we think is right and good in our own eyes, not first submitting our thoughts to God's Holy Word for confirmation or correction. (Isaiah 55:8-9, Proverbs 16:25, 2 Timothy 3:16, et al)
Jeanne Coppola
Whether I agree with you or not is not as important to me as you giving an honest opinion as a Christian woman without being afraid. I love that!
Greg Smith
Why is her-meneutics always the column that gets it wrong?
Ken johnson
One of the things I like least about our culture is that everyone feels the necessity to respond to every little thing and analyze it to death. Maybe it's about time Christians just give up on some of these cultural events, realizing that they are never going to be satisfied with how the secular subculture behaves. I know it's nice to be involved in our culture as much as possible, but this whole thing reminds me of my Christian mother watching something on TV back in the day that was a little off-color (Not by today's standards, of course.) All the while she was watching it, she kept repeating,"this is terrible, this is terrible". I'm telling you folks what I told her, "Turn it off!" Read a book! (I'm sorry... a Kindle.)
audrey ruth
Karen Fahel, it seems the "family hour" has been a thing of the past for quite some time. Sadly so. There's been a general coarsening of society for years, it's only getting worse, and this is just one of the casualties. I even see non-family-friendly shows listed on "family channels".
steve page
I wonder why anyone watched the Oscars at all, to be honest.
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