"Give me the good old days!"

[muckefuck]

One of the benefits of going to a group event with other LJers for a change--besides, you know, the witty banter you'd expect from princeofcairo, mollpeartree, bunj, luckymarty, lhn, et al.--is the prospect that a better writer than you will write it all up. And so it happens that mollpeartree has a new entry on Saturday's movie night. (Not only that, but I'm flattered to see that she included my line about El "Synthetic Swede" Brendel being the "Sinbad of 1930".)

I know what you're thinking now: Okay, there's sharp commentary, but is there pointy-headed dissection of lighthearted comedy froth? And how! Just scroll down to comments.

Comments

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Comedy is serious, dammit!

I'd forgotten who'd said the Sinbad thing, or I would have credited you! Actually I probably stole a lot of other people's material too.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Can it really be considered stolen if they weren't going to make any use of it? You appropriated it for the good of the community at large.

I do appreciate your point about the unstated assumptions in a comedy flick often telling more about the society than the debates taking place in the dramatic foreground. I can't wait to see what happens when you and lhn apply that principle of analysis to the Martian sequences!

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Oh, you first. I'm not really willing to dig in and defend my "Martian as repository of colonial fears and fantasies about the exoticized other, see also: Africa" theory to the death in quite the same way.