Louie Juxtaposes High & Low Brow Performance Inspiring Perspective on Each

Why are we watching sitcoms and reading comics in class? Am I really learning something important by talking about movies and memes? Students can be just as confused about the prospect of studying popular culture as teachers committed to the canon of great literature in a given discipline.

Rather than arguing the case or justifying pop through analysis, I suggest jumping into the confusion with a clip from Louis CK's show that puts the pleasures of high art in sharp relief against a backdrop of grotesque burlesque. Use the clip below from Louie to discuss the following important questions for media literacy (that can apply in any media analysis):

• How and why do different people find pleasure (or revulsion) in this media text?
• What does pleasure from this media text afford the individual (do for you or for other people)--personally, socially and culturally?
• How might this media text appeal differently to members of different taste cultures or discourse communities (groups with identities built around common ways of thinking, appearing and communicating; e.g., fans of Louie, art aficionados, homeless advocates, high school teachers, media literacy educators, etc.)? Why?

Now that is a way to kick off a discussion about taste cultures! Asking these sorts of questions lead to discussion of how culture constructs identities and the role our tastes play in the friends we make, the jobs we pursue, and the parts of the world we explore or avoid. In addition to using the questions above to examine the contrast between each of the performances in the clip, the violin player's and the homeless man's, it's also worth exploring how each comments on the other through their juxtaposition. For me, the classical beauty of the violin piece creates an almost operatic, tragic quality to the homeless man's bath, and gives me ethical pangs about how we can enjoy and spend money on such high art while people we pass everyday on the street continue to suffer such indignity. The homeless bath also has its own beauty and honesty, and absurdity that is as hard for me to turn away from as it is to look at. It makes me think of all the ways we find pleasure in watching others suffer, especially in online video, and the presence of the violinist makes me wish I could overcome or transcend those impulses--but the honesty and brazen display of vulgar and debased humanity in the homeless man's public shower makes me marvel at his resilience and value his display as somehow noble, and I begin to re-imagine my sickened guffaw as a new kind of laughter, rather than laughing at him, laughing with the homeless man at the absurdities of elevated culture and taste itself. Anyhow, you can see how articulating responses to the clip might get interesting and lead to some discovery about your own and others' tastes.

[AFTER THE JUMP, I suggest having learners create their own high/low culture video mashups, and discuss moving beyond historical tension in media education]

How the Muppets Made Me Media Literate (& Why I am Psyched for their Return to TV this Fall)

The Muppet Show is back this fall in primetime on network TV and poised to call our attention to all the media production techniques our current popular sitcoms use to make us laugh and reinforce our notions of personal and cultural identity:

The original Muppet Show was appointment TV every week for my family in the late 70s, but it wasn't until this particular moment (below) in The Muppet Movie that I realized how those fuzzy puppets had been teaching me all along about the construction of media and representation of culture and identity. Use this post to prompt the following questions:

• How did you become media literate? 
• What popular media supported your media literacy development?
• How does parody call attention to media techniques and representations? 

In anticipation of the return of The Muppets to primetime network TV this fall, I reflect on this pivotal personal moment of critical distance, and discuss why parody in puppetry can be effective for media literacy development, as the new version of the show plans to lampoon confessional-style sitcoms like The Office and Modern Family while using the format of TV production sitcoms like 30 Rock that call attention to the making of a late night comedy show.

But first, let's set the scene. A darkened movie theater in Baltimore, 1979, I was six years old, and completely enthralled in the journey of Kermit the Frog (and his "weirdo" friends) to Hollywood with their goal of "making millions of people happy" and the love story between Kermit & Ms. Piggy that had unfolded over the past 45 minutes, which was falling apart before my eyes on the screen. And then...

Aha! This is all a movie, and a movie made by the characters on screen, no less! My young mind was blown! At that moment, I had a flood of awareness about all the ways that the movies and shows I watched were made to tell stories to audiences. I noticed the people around me in the theater watching, just like the muppets on screen watched the movie they had made in the story on screen. For the first time, I wanted to make a movie myself--at that moment, one where Piggy and Kermit would just be friends and go play with the other muppets (because the romance was making me a little uncomfortable!).

Parody Pulls Back the Curtain

This moment was the key for me that unlocked the constructed-ness of many other shows and movies, starting with the original Muppet Show, which was a parody of the most popular TV format of the 1970s, the variety show, but it offered backstage scenes of the producer (Kermit) and cast with audience commentary (remember the two old guys, Statler and Waldorf, wisecracking in the balcony, and the call and response moment in the opening theme song with the audience singing, "Why don't you get things started"). I began to see how the muppets were always making fun of how entertainment was made, always showing the seams in the otherwise seamless media representations in which TV and movies immersed me. Whether by singing slightly off key or subverting my expectations (like Gonzo's failed trumpet blast to start every show), the muppets always called my attention to my own expectations about how stories should unfold and I started to realize that those parodied TV shows and movies created those expectations, and that you could play with them and do things differently. I started to see how everything that the muppets did was making fun of popular culture, which I often encountered for the first time through their comedy. I think this had the effect of making me see everything as made by someone for some purpose, and that the purpose could be subverted or changed--and that subversion is fun!

[After the jump, more on pop culture parody as provocateur of critical autonomy, how the muppets made me question notions of race and gender, and ideas for making puppet parodies for ML]

ML4ML Joke of the Week: "C'mon, Shakespeare. You can make a better shark!"

My sister-in-law cracked me up inadvertently with this one-liner, which made me realize just how much knowledge of pop culture is at the ready in my head enabling me to laugh at the mixed up references in the joke. 

We were talking about summer blockbuster movies, and she expressed worry over the realism of special effects in Jurassic Park: "It's like c'mon, Shakespeare, you can make a better shark!" I burst out laughing, as did the others in the room. Turns out, she meant to say "Spielberg" (the director of the first Jurassic Park movie), instead of "Shakespeare" (the Elizabethan English writer with the frilly collar and the "To be or not to be" and whatnot), and she meant "dinosaur," the scary creatures from the distant past brought to life in Jurassic Park, instead of "shark" (the scary creature terrorizing swimmers in Jaws). The interesting part, for somebody who thinks about media literacy all the time (me), is that we all instantly knew what she meant to say through the context of our conversation (a new Jurassic Park movie is just coming out this summer) and recognized the errors as humorously related to her intentions. To get the joke, we had to know Spielberg directed Jurassic Park and Jaws. We had to know that each film starred scary, realistic creatures--dinosaurs and sharks respectively. And, we had to know Shakespeare as the emblem of high culture entertainment and art through wordcraft in plays, in contrast to our knowledge of Spielberg's fame for visual entertainment blockbuster flicks of fear and adventure. But we didn't just have to know it, we had to know it instantly, or as humor researchers say, we had to know it for "Just-in-Time" psychological processing (for more, see Hurley, Dennet, & Adams), so that we could recognize, and laugh at, the mix up. It boggles my mind how much pop culture knowledge we must carry around, ready for access at all times. It's an important thing to sensitize teachers and learners to when we begin to teach about popular culture and about how to think critically about its role in our lives. So, why not challenge your group of learners to notice how much pop culture knowledge they must activate "Just-in-time" to get a joke or to laugh at something funny. You could start by relating your own story, or this story--see if anyone laughs or gets what might be funny about it, and congratulate the others who don't have a clue for investing their precious brain power in other cultural resources! Make it a contest to see who can notice the funniest moment involving the most pop culture references (rate the former by vote, and the latter by number of things you have to know from pop culture). The exercise could lead from an appreciation of the extent of what we know, to an exploration of what we should do about and with it...

C'mon Shakespeare, you can make a better shark!

Modern Farce, a Symphony of Screens: Modern Family Plays on the "New Normal"

Is your screen time out of control? It's tough to judge how our own digital media use is affecting us, but it's easy to judge characters on sitcoms--that's what they're there for! As far as I know, last week's episode of ABC's Modern Family (Season 6, Episode 16, "Connection Lost") was the first major network sitcom broadcast to set its comedy completely within the ubiquitous screens its characters use to communicate with each other.

Last week's Modern Family episode unfolds entirely on Claire's laptop screen, shot on Apple devices, portrayed in "real time"--ripe for media literacy inquiry.

This fantastic farce of misapprehension, misplaced assumptions, and dubious online ethics offers an opportunity for us to reflect on how digital environments have become a new norm as a setting for our daily dramas.

The gags call our attention to the limitations of the media we use to communicate and problem-solve, and to how they may complicate our attempts to understand and represent ourselves and each other. There's a central theme around parental surveillance, or as Haley says to her mom, "It's called privacy--Google it!" The production choices--sliding between frames, opening and closing windows, using natural sound from other media--all heighten the hilarity (IMHO), and it's in real time; so, I think we can look at this as innovative from an artistic perspective. It can also be seen as a relentless informercial for Apple products, which were used to shoot entire the episode and provide the context for show's dramatic action--the ultimate target for some analysis of native advertising techniques (but wait, Apple says they did not pay a penny!...). This is a mess for media literacy inquiry if there ever was one!

I think this whole episode is worth a group viewing, and can be used to connect with a wide range of media literacy issues for high school, college and adult learners in English or media studies classes. It's a great way to start an exploration of new literacies, multimodality, new media literacies, or critical media literacy in teacher education classes. Youth media groups and media arts classes can also benefit from studying the production techniques used in this episode to represent online experience in a televisual medium (in this regard, it's also great for comparison to this Portlandia clip discussed in a prior post). My (bad) instinct is to try to do it all, to milk a text with such rich possibilities for all its worth, and to offer multiple paths for diverse interests that we jigsaw together. So, after the jump, I'll set up a series of interest groups with particular things to look for and discuss in this episode, and you pick and choose to focus on what will work for you and yours. Deal? Deal.