Grawe and George Carlin's "Modest Proposal"

Yesterday in class, it was decided that the latest Carlin segment fits more with the "incongruity" theory Davis proposes. However, to me, it also fits in with Grawe's categorizations of the different types of comedy that reach toward survival: throughout the segment, Carlin often moves from everyman to buffoon to villain--encompassing several of the types.

The beginning speech on "modern man," though rendering Carlin to be a cliched, mechanized paradox, seems to embody Grawe's assertion on everyman comedy that "There are no clear categories of characters....The message [...is] that human survival is guaranteed by people's ability to lay down their own special gifts and cooperate for the survival of society" (40). Indeed, Carlin erases the "modern man" into nothing, but he is a cyclical nothing, patterned on catch phrases and marketing scams that cause American society (and the American consumer) to function and survive.

The next section, when Carlin digresses on about American obesity, education, and shopping habits, seems to reflect the "buffoon comedy," which, according to Grawe, "may present a society of eccentrics. But societal solutions are not generally open to the buffoon" (41). Grawe adds that the buffoon character is often an outcast, which is interesting to note, considering Carlin separates the audience in front of him from these buffoons--making common American characteristics seem separate from the constructed elitist crowd in front of him. Therefore, as an audience, we can ridicule these buffoons (even if we may demonstrate similar behaviors). Moreover, Carlin questions how these buffoon characters survive by contemplating their daily consumption, digestion, and reproductive activities. Still, they survive...even if they are "too dazed to feel all the slings and arrows that outrageous fortune hurls at [them]" (42).

Villain comedy surfaces once Carlin addresses business owners and lobbyists, who tend toward "evil and destruction." Grawe writes, "If the human race [in the case of Carlin, an American consumerist buffoon race] is to survive, there must be some way to avoid the destructiveness." Moreover, according to Grawe, the villain can be overcome, but he continues to reappear and challenge the human race--here, in terms of providing a lack of education, evoking a sense of complacence and devotion to 9-5 jobs, and enticing the American to purchase "gizmos."

The routine concludes with another episode of villain comedy; specifically, Carlin's ability to make the audience dislike the villain becomes Swiftian when he then proposes that the audience puts itself in the place of the villain--a TV executive plotting for a mass-suicide reality show. At this point, it becomes difficult to tell whether this portion of the dialogue even fits within Grawe's notion of human survival as comedy, since Carlin posits that all abject members of society receive free t-shirts or a small wad of cash to jump to their death. However, Grawe does emphasize that "a formal definition is not that comedy is an action of survival or an action in which someone survives. Instead, comedy creates a patterning throughout the work that asserts humanity will survive" (47, emphasis added). By placing the audience as one of the villains who does survive, Carlin satirically forces listeners to contemplate the current pattern American society treads upon, and, by extension, a call to action comes about: breaking the pattern of consumerism and physical destruction will lead to greater human longevity--the "modern man" can separate himself from the paradoxical patterning of consumerist discourse to survive...making Carlin's segment align clearly with Grawe's theory of comedy.