John Hodgman and the infinite mediocrity

I have been ruminating on the continued existence of John Hodgman and the role he plays in contemporary pop culture. I have been able to sum up my impression of him in the following way.
At any point in time, the comfortable middle class with a smattering of liberal arts education look to satisfies their urge to be edified, either for legitimate reasons or as a class reinforcing exercise of their leisure time. They will put up with an amazing amount of boredom in the name of edification. This stems from the belief that unmitigated emotion is crass or base, and that pleasure in particular is a dish best served cold. Thus feelings like anger, embarrassment, and sadness are distrusted and must be intellectualized (see This American Life). While this level of staid introspection suits emotional experiences like anger which are well-served by deep thinking, it is ill-suited to comedy. The result is a dry, almost puritanical version of comedy, usually referred to as 'humor', in which attempts at easy laughs are eschewed as below the 'humorist, and are replaced by more gentle humorous observations or humorous conceits embedded in intellectual subject matter. The humor is received with chuckles and knowing groans. These are responses, rather than reactions, a way to show solidarity with the uniformly middle- and upper middle-class and overwhelmingly white audience or simply a means of giving the needy-seeming humorist what he or she seems to want. The latter is a very typical reason for the laughter, since the audience typically respects the humorist rather than genuinely being entertained by him or her, and wants to win their respect by 'getting it'. Humor as such is essentially a social signalling device, and the sad, hollow laughter of recognition that it evokes are like the nocturnal ululations of bullfrogs: ephemeral, annoying, and ultimately pointless.
Notable practitioners of 'humor' are The Firesign Theater, Lily Tomlin, and especially Garrison Keillor (born, wouldn't you know it, Gary Keillor). In our own time the hottest star on the rise on the Chortlin' Circuit (I coined this term in this here blog post, by the way; feel free to use it but do credit me) is John Hodgman. Like Dave Eggers (whom I have never read) and others involved in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (of which I know nearly nothing), John Hodgman's stock in trade is old-timey phraseology. It would appear that we have the Simpsons to blame for this unbelievably restricted subgenre of humor. His aggressively uncharismatic persona and wry, obscure comedic bailiwick flatters his fans by acknowledging their specialness and broad frame of reference. Hodgman's book, The Areas of my Expertise, features the following subtitle

An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by Me, John Hodgman, a Professional Writer, in the Areas of My Expertise, which Include: Matters Historical; Matters Literary; Matters Cryptozoological; Hobo Matters; Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food); Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels; Haircuts; Utopia; What Will Happen in the Future; and Most Other Subjects; Illustrated with a Reasonable Number of Tables and Figures, and Featuring the Best of "Were You Aware of It?", John Hodgman's Long-Running Newspaper Novelty Column of Strange Facts and Oddities of the Bizarre

Now given what I've said above about humor, it is clear from the book title that, old-timeyness aside, Hodgman's book is relatively wacky and jokey compared to the work of the typical humorist. I submit that this is because, just as the majority of low-brow people gravitate towards the lowest of the low, so does the vast majority of middle-brow people gravitate toward the lowest of the middle. Hodgman represents the cachet of a McSweeney's without any of the challenging fonts, the feeling of superiority over belly-laughers that accompanies Garrison Keillor without the droning boredom. Hodgman's book is essentially the most respectable possible knockoff of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

On laughing, Mapbagi and Adult Swim

This morning in the shower I got to thinking on a somewhat strange question: Why don't I find Korean sketch comedy particularly funny? I often find myself choking with laughter while watching Korean movies (usually with the rest of the audience) and TV shows (usually at an unintentionally hilarious point in the show), but Korean sketch comedy not only leaves me cold; it angries up my blood something fierce to think about how bad it is.
Here's a case in point, the deliciously unfunny mapbagi (마빡이 - the transliteration is mine and mine alone, but the actual pronunciation is pretty close to "mop-boggy"). I recommend you watch just the first ten or fifteen seconds and then skip through the rest, because it really is like watching someone pull teeth:

Also I don't know why the guy doing mapbagi sounds like he's doing a Mexican accent. Korean doesn't sound like that usually. Mapbagi sort of means "forehead slapper", and the joke in the above clip is that the character is supposed to freak out the audience with his ugly creepiness. "Are you scared? No? You were supposed to be scared. Well I'll tell you something really scary: there's a bunch of other's just like me backstage waiting to some out." he says. As the sketch continues the first guy starts getting really tired and complains to the second guy, who says "You wrote this sketch." Big laugh. The other two guys come out, everyone's complaining about how hard it is to keep it up. Finally the last guy comes out and, repeatedly slapping himself in the front and back of the head, delivers the punch line of the sketch. "Is this all there is to this sketch?" The sketch reminds me of nothing more than the Kids in the Hall sketch about the comedy writer who forgot to write the end of the sketch he's in. That's the one where the boss realizes he's trapped in the sketch and he'll never see his wife again, so he decides to write her a letter and asks the writer what her name is, and it turns out it's Iris Picklefeather. But it's not nearly as funny.
Disturbingly the sketch got incredibly popular among people aged 4-35, but they dropped the meta aspect of the sketch and just focused on the repetitive head-slapping. Everyone imitated it for weeks. It's started to peter out, finally, leaving a bewildered nation wondering what they ever found funny about it.
Just like Adult Swim!

The major difference between the shows on Adult Swim and Korea's awful sketch shows is that the people who watch Adult Swim in order to develop an artificial non-mainstream sense of humor, while Korean sketch shows reinforce cultural unity. It's like gangs that force members to commit crime in order to join so they'll all be united by a shared shame: These shows force their audiences to pretend they find something funny in order to build a sense of unity. For any member of each group to admit that they don't think the jokes are actually funny would be like standing in a room full of naked emperors and saying "I have no clothes on."

Ted Haggard and the absurdity of life

There is nothing intrinsically funny about being gay. David Sedaris is funny.

Is he funny because he is gay? Partly. Is his gayness funny? Not particularly. Being gay probably fed into his humor to a great degree, but his sister Amy is funny and she's not gay.

At least I don't think so. Well she'll never be gay to me.
So often comedy is the domain of outsiders. This is probably why Christopher Hitchens said that funny women are usually fat, Jewish or lesbians. in other words outsiders. That's probably why fat people are often funny. Unfortunately most fat people also experience a crippling desire to fit in that sends them straight to the bottom of the comedy barrel. That explains Chris Farley, the truffle shuffle, and the entire cast of MadTV. Except Bobby Kim.

That's the stuff.
That's also why Jimmy Fallon, Chevy Chase and Brendan Fraser are not funny. They are comedic insiders. Go check out their work. They are almost always the person reacting to something 'wrong' affronting them from outside. They are the voice of normalcy poking lame fun at anything different. Same goes for Dane Cook, whose comedy is less a form of entertainment than a form of social glue for young people with poorly defined identities.

Yeah Dane, That guy's weird, we're all normal. Together
This explains both the charm and the failure of the Family Guy. The show is owned in equal parts by the fat Jewish Alex Borstein and cool guy insider Seth MacFarlane, and it has elements of both the acceptance craving fat comedy style (the FCS) and the group reinforcement style (the GRS) favored by frat guys, cool guys, and members of the dominant cultural strain. It's both extremely lowbrow and studiously unchallenging, never making its viewers feel like anything less than super-geniuses just for recognizing things from the eighties.
So the thing about humor is that it stems from pain, and any pain, if looked at by the right eyes from the right angle, as some humor in it. So the art comes in finding the comedy rather than living the comedy. That's why self-delusion (a la any Christopher Guest movie) is so funny.

Pastor Ted Haggard has just emerged 'completely heterosexual' from three weeks of therapy. Pastor Ted can't acknowledge the humor in that. Not publicly, anyway, but I bet a part of him hears the words 'completely heterosexual' pass his lips and, like the sea captain from the Simpsons, thinks "Yeah, for about five minutes!" And that's the funny part of pastor Ted, a person on whom, it seems to me, the humor of his situation is not completely lost.