The Uncle Speaks

[Disclosure: the present author is a politically aware uncle.]

A political stereotype popular in quarters otherwise rightly critical of stereotyping is the loud, anti-liberalism uncle.

In the telling, he is a boorish buffoon plaguing family gatherings with right-wing diatribes inspired by "Faux News" airings. His vociferous denunciations of, say, Obama's defiant weakness as radical Islamic terrorist horrors are perpetrated, Hillary's Benghazi iniquities, or the latest campus disquiet are roundly jeered by those intolerant of all views but their own.  

This somewhat popular stereotyping is not limited to casual settings.

Saturday Night Live's Bobby Moynihan recently appeared on that show as his sloppy, befuddled "Drunk Uncle" character to loudly hail Donald Trump. The implicit message was that support of Trump and his ideas (strength, patriotism, adherence to laws) is laughable and the position only of fools.

(An NBC online description of Moynihan's loutish Drunk Uncle notes that his targets include "graduation, how students don't study real subjects in school, his life failures, and things that annoy him including E-cigarettes, Beatz by Dre and selfies.")

I'm fully aware that lampooning broad character types has real usefulness in comedy. It can help illustrate a point. Two examples are the Three Stooges' pin-pricking of pompous stuffed shirts and the acidic satirization of the Simpsons' ridiculously overly religious Ned Flanders character.

Audiences are more likely to appreciate humor if subjects presented are ones they find familiar.

Too, there is a grating gratuitousness to someone who complains endlessly about seemingly everything. Their unfocused railing indicates not just lack of ideological purpose, but that personal deficiency might well be their true issue.

But the political advantage of this stereotype warrants observation. When an entire belief system and moral/civic values store are flippantly ascribed to an exaggerated object of ridicule, all accordant ideas and ideals are simultaneously dismissed -- without individual consideration.

Forget the actual effort of listening to ideas and weighing them against others. Of thinking. 

For some, perhaps many, disposable, politics-laden entertainment product passes for serious and reliable information about world-stage figures and events. 
Baggy-pants commentators like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Oliver are cited as if they were wise men.

Perhaps such reverence for diversionary sideshow gag men and disinclination to reason for oneself is wholly natural in an era of emotion-over-common sense infantilism.

Comedy is needed in a world of storm. It can serve the invaluable purposes of making life not just bearable but enjoyable, and mocking human frailties. 

I've read that Ralph Nader once told a table of fellows that after general justice was assured, humor would become the most important thing. And that his friend humorist Molly Ivins termed that the saddest thing she had ever heard.

No one enjoys a good laugh, or a good think, more than I do. But I can tell amusement from education, and understand that while they sometimes travel together, they are not interchangeable.

But don't listen to me -- I'm just an uncle.