peardg, photographer

This is what our “winter” Olympic weather is like. Cherry blossoms. In February. Gads, the implications.

Jeff Dunham tells some pretty dangerous jokes – ones based on religion, sex, politics – using the mouth of his puppets. And it works. This is really, really funny. Coming out of the bony mouth of Achmed the Terrorist, jokes about being a Jew, about being Catholic have the sting that make humor such a powerful tool in the reshaping of social and conceptual life. We can accept the reexamination of strongly held social beliefs from a puppet long enough to get a glimpse of another view, that of another possible world – one, in this case, where terrorists and other religious fanatics are not something to battle in the silent dark of a social nightmare, but rather something to battle in the light of the love of life and the enjoyment of each other. And while jokes like Achmed’s do sting, and you feel that it has taken you perilously close to that cliff of divisiveness, when Jeff then pulls us back, there is a shared surge of survival-joy that makes the adrenaline rush even more enjoyable.

What makes this all work is that he poking fun at terrorists – that thing that had been used to scare us into foreign and domestic policy submission for 8 very long years. The bit in the clip below about the 72 virgins is howlingly funny, but even more important it takes the terrifying unknown and reduces it to something that seems just silly and therefore manageable. This is one very important societal function of humor. Now, every time I see a picture of bin Laden, I know I am going to see Achmed the Terrorist’s bony little face flash up against this dude’s image in my imagination. That is a good thing.

I am definitely going to watch more of Jeff Dunham and his puppets.

I am struggling with Versluis. I keep running into things that tick me off. Why keep reading then? For a couple of reasons. The first is that the subject matter is important to understanding the Western mind and because he is an academic writing about a subject I consider to be important (I expect a certain quality and tenor to his presentation based on this.) It is this last bit, my expectation, that keeps getting nicked by the jagged edges of his presentation.

The thing is he appears to be a practitioner. Not that this is a problem in itself. Every human being comes to a subject with a point of view, with a set of beliefs and ways. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to be able to bracket his beliefs to allow for the reader’s, nor to take into account that some of his beliefs may need support. At least that’s what I think is the problem.

For me writing about the magical mind requires this bracketing as much if not more than any other subject. For one thing, the magical mind by its very nature posits more than one reality. To understand it, to get a glimspe of its workings as part of the human mind, multiple realities must be maintained, not just the belief in multiple realities.
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