The history and longevity of influence which traces back to the original kings of comedy from the Sixteenth Century is a testament to the universal appeal of watching the worst examples of human character and behavior play out for entertainment purposes. Italian productions of the 1500s known as the widely popular Commedia dell'Arte focused entirely around the imprudent and profligate shenanigans of a repertoire of stereotypes drawn from two distinct perennial social classes: The Haves and Have-Nots. The former culminated into the cunning and miserly businessman and his vain scholarly associate, and the latter as the lazy and stupid mischievous servant and his fool of a sidekick. Want for labor and need of salary pit them to suffer the imbecility and sinister egotism of the other, all the while relentlessly pursuing their own greedy, gluttonous, deceptive, slovenly, promiscuous appetites at the expense of everyone around them.
Audiences were so engrossed by the wild spectacle that the self-indulgent and boneheaded antics of Commedia dominated stages across Europe for over four hundred years, giving rise to such universal classics as the Harlequin, Pierrot, Scaramouche, Pantalone, Dottore, and Capitano.
From the genre emerged vaudeville theater, mime, circus clowns, and the slapstick comedy of stage and screen. Versions of these Medieval archetypes of ninny and nincompoop have reincarnated along a continuum of characters through every medium, generation, and genre, giving us Ebenezer Scrooge, Punch and Judy, Charlie Chaplan, The Keystone Cops, Laurel and Hardy, Silas Barnaby, Fatty Arbuckle, The Three Stooges, Abbot and Costello, Burns and Allen, Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton, and, perhaps most notably, Homer Simpson and Montgomery Burns.
The buffoonery of lummoxes and debauchery of shallow self-serving rich people seem entrenched in our collective sense of humor. It's no wonder the phenomenon of reality TV should produce some of its biggest hits exploiting the banality of real people driven by the crudest instincts, defaming their own character and undermining peers in sight of the world to grab fifteen minutes in the spotlight.
Being a Jersey native, I spent at least fifteen summers in Seaside Heights as a kid. Thirty years later, out of nostalgia, I watched a few episodes. Times have changed radically since my youth. Seeing mammas' boys coiffing, primping, pampering and flaunting their figures like schoolgirls testing their blossoming sexuality on Spring break; and daddies' little girls knocking back shots and getting into barroom brawls like cowboys from an old western was somewhat amusing. But a little disillusioning all the same, as I found myself confronted by how much of an old fart I must really be.
Then I caught a segment on some other show which got hold of a clip from the series that was edited out of the broadcast. It revealed one of the boys taunting a young man walking alone down the boardwalk. He was calling him “fagot” and threatening him with violent intimidation. Out of conscience, I never watched another minute of Jersey Shore and tried even to urge friends and family to do the same, one of whom replied, “And that surprised you?”
Well, yeah, a little. All that gender-bending, I might have assumed at some level, wouldn't be a context in which you'd expect homophobic aggression to rear its head.
Boys will be boys, I guess. Even if they pluck their eyebrows, strut around in midriffs and bikinis, frequent tanning salons, castrate themselves with drugs to look pretty, and spend more time on their hair in one weekend than I have in 48 years. Go figure?
