Saturday, October 24, 2015
South Park Satire vs. Classical Comedy
So, we've talked about the topic of contemporary satire like South Park as a parallel to the comedic commentary that The Lysistrata provides of Athenian society. Now that you've watched an actual episode of South Park, what similarities and differences do you observe in the approaches to commentary and jokes between the two works? Please pay particular attention to who the hero of the episode seems to be and whether you are supposed to sympathize with the hero or find the hero ridiculous. Since I gave the option of watching 2 episodes, please make sure to state which episode you watched.
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I watched the episode “Safe Space,” and it was quite an experience. I drew parallels in the roles of the characters, especially between the boy who was reporting the shame free social media comments and the ladies who were trying, with all their will power, to go home to their husbands. Both characters provided comedic relief in the sense that they did not want to be there. Their actions were silly as they made attempts to leave.
ReplyDeleteAlso, South Park seemed just a little more ridiculous than the Lysistrata, and I think that this is because the issues were smaller, and more contemporary. In the Lysistrata the ladies begin the sex strike because they want the massive, societal issue of Peloponnesian War to come to an end. In their act, the women are literally saving lives and doing good for society. However, the solutions to the problem of shaming in Safe Space were unrealistic. By attempting to hide from the reality of what people have to say (and by having reality represented as a cartoon character) made the problems seem smaller and ridiculous. Additionally, the hero of the South Park episode was someone who has clearly never experienced the problem of shaming, which was probably meant to be humorous, but also did come off as ridiculous.
There is a lot of crude humor in both Lysistrata and the South Park episode “Bebe’s Boobs Destroy Society. Certain objects were very obviously used to symbolize the objects they were actually trying to talk about. Even though both pieces of work used objects and symbolism to get a point across the execution with said objects were very different. The characters in South Park were very open and direct with everything they wanted to say. When they weren’t using symbolism they stated frankly what they wanted to say. In Lysistrata the language was more elevated. Even if the characters were referring to sex, they sounded sophisticated while do it, at least more so than the characters in South Park. The two pieces were also similar in that they were critiques of the roles of women and their bodies. In both, the women were able to control the men with their bodies. This shows that in many societies and different times, women were only seen for sex.
ReplyDeleteIn both stories I think that the hero’s are seen to be on a higher level. Lysistrata was always strong during the sex strike, and Bebe was never hanging out with the boys for sexual reasons. Even though Bebe does seem a bit ridiculous during the episode, the other girls provides more comic relief because she went through so much to be noticed by the boys, but in the end she was laughed at.
I watched the episode “Bebe’s Boobs Ruin Society.” I was struck by how similar the episode and the Lysistrata seemed throughout. I think that both Bebe and Lysistrata both hold the ‘sane person in an insane world’ role. I was also interested, if the parallel could be made, that the main cast of boys who are normally pretty independent in other episodes all lost their ability to function as people and almost turned into a chorus.
ReplyDeleteI thought the best part of the episode involved the scenes in the office of the plastic surgeon. The simultaneous offering a breast implant while refusing a breast reduction was a really dense satirical idea. I don’t remember anything so apparent in the Lysistrata, though probably that’s because I’m not Ancient Greek. I think the crudeness of Lysitrata felt a bit more constant than in this particular episode of South Park because constant debilitating erections and double entendre. On the other hand, I agree with Katie that the issues the Lysistrata tackles seems a bit more important than the one’s South Park does if only on matters of scale. But perhaps these things aren’t comparable because modern society could be more socially volatile than Ancient Greek society, and war is really the only way of involving an entire peninsula in a conflict of one kind or another.
I watched the episode “Bebe’s Boobs Destroy Society”. This episode was actually quite similar to The Lysistrata. They are very similar in terms of the ways in which they show their commentary. Both works use a lot of dirty/ crude jokes in order to portray their commentary. I agree with Maya when she says that South Park’s jokes were a lot more direct and open than compared with the jokes in The Lysistrata. The characters openly made the sexual jokes throughout the episode without really trying to hide them. In The Lysistrata, there are many jokes, but they are more hidden behind references to things such as cultural stereotypes and “decorative” language. They are less direct to a point where you can read the story without catching a single joke. I think that this possibly shows that The Lysistrata held the commentary of the play higher than the comedy. The comedy was most likely a way to simply get the audience more involved in the commentary. South Park on the other hand seems to be the opposite in that the jokes come first while the commentary comes second.
ReplyDeleteI believe that the hero in The Lysistrata was clearly Lysistrata herself since she was a woman who came up with a successful plan to end a war between the Greeks. In the South Park episode, I would say that Bebe is the hero. I think that Bebe is a hero that is put into a ridiculous situation (showing South Park’s emphasis on comedy), but is supposed to be sympathized with (showing the “less important” commentary aspect). In reality, Bebe was simply going through a regular stage of growth and she was able to realize that her sexual features were giving her an “advantage” over the other girls when it comes to relating to the boys. She was unhappy that this dynamic existed. Instead continuing to be treated differently, she decided to bring everything back to normal. I think that we are supposed to sympathize with Bebe since she can’t help the normal human growth that is changing the dynamic between her and the boys and the other girls. I just found it really interesting that Bebe did not simply use her sexual features to get what she wanted. She wanted to “even the playing field” in a sense. This is the exact opposite of what Lysistrata did. Lysistrata used her sexual features to achieve the goal that she desired.
I have to agree with Maya and Ranjan in their reactions to "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society". The episode had so many similarities to Lysistrata, to the point I'm beginning to think if the episode was written based on Lysistrata. Both of the characters come to significant amount of power after using sexuality as their weapon; it's just that Lysistrata deliberately took sex away from men so that they listen to women, while Bebe was just going into a natural process.
ReplyDeleteWhat really struck me in the episode is how the other girls, except for Bebe, is shown. The girls seem weak, almost inferior to Bebe just because they have not developed breasts yet. They turn against Bebe because they were jealous of her sexuality. This part is very different from Lysistrata because she was supported by her fellow women in the sex strike. Whereas the joke of South Park focuses on the fight within the women and within the men, the joke of Lysistrata lies on men vs. women.
I watched the episode called Bebe’s Boobs Destroy Society and the parallels between the comedian style of the Lysistrata and South Park are very evident. One similarity is the extreme exaggeration. In this episode of south park the male characters become obsessed with a girl named Bebe and fight over her as if they were literally apes. This is similar to the way that men in the Lysistrata have raging boners the entire play because they cannot have sex.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, the biggest similarity is the hero in the story. In this episode of south park Bebe is the hero because she is the only one who is a serious character. Similar to the way the Lysistrata is the hero in the Lysistrata. It is very interesting that the only way that the audience can effectively learn from this kind of comedy is to have the hero be disconnected from the comedic characters.
I watched the episode “Bebe’s Boobs Destroy Society”, and I was surprised of how much that episode had in common with “The Lysistrata.” They both used very dirty, vulgar, and ridiculous jokes, such as an 8-year-old girl getting breast implant and an 8-year-old girl getting breast reduction, to express their messages. They are also similar in the content they present.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the significant similarities between the two works were that they both use exaggeration to portray guys as horny, sex-driven animals. The way that South Park portrays it is more direct. For instance, when the boys are throwing rocks at cars with Bebe, they all try to teach Bebe how to throw a rock. All wanting to teach, the boys fight with each other, and make a noise similar to that of an ape, or the stereotypical sound a caveman would make. The sound they make expresses their similarity with animals: they are driven by the desire for Bebe’s boobs. In "The Lysistrata", Lysistrata says to the other women: “If we sit in out quarters, powdered faintly, as good as nude in those imported slips, and - just - link by, with clothes nicely groomed, the men will swell right up and want to boink, but we won’t let them near us, we’ll refuse - trust me, they’ll make a treaty at a dash. (148-152)” This quote is obviously exaggeration. It also portrays guys as strongly sex-driven, horny animals.
I watched 'Safe Space' and being very similar with the show South Park while reading 'The Lysistrata' I would relate back to episodes of South Park. This episode like other South Park episodes I envisioned in my mind while reading had many similarities and few differences. South Park in general takes issues that our of serious matter and makes us dwell on the stupidity of it and makes us for a second make us rethink our views. The episode of South Park pointed out the stupidity of social media and how we pay so much attention and can feel so self consisous of what people think about us on the internet. Taking a serious episode of shaming and cyberbullying they turned it around and said if you don't want to get shamed stay off social media. This can be seen when the teacher Mr. Garrison suggest he should just stay off social media but gets shut down by the principle who in returns make a classmate delete the hurtful comments which I believe represents the stupidity. Here you can sympathize for the classmate that deletes the comments because its stupid it had to come to this. In Lysistrata it took a serious situation of war and showed the stupidity of it by proving it can be war that can end by women refusing to have sex with their husbands. This should how the war was not that important because it could be ended with such a simple action. Here you can sympathize for the women because they suffer from the sex strike as well because now they can not have intercourse with husband due to the stupidity of the men to engage in a non influential war.
ReplyDeleteThe current trope is going back into similar territory. As to stop a gender war the girls have ended their relationships with the boy characters because of an internet troll causing problems. The main parallels are females banded together, males having two sides troll and anti-troll (even though there is only one troll). The rest of the season will bear out if there are more similarities.
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