A few weeks ago, I had finished my Friday lecture and retreated to my office in order to get some work done with what was left of my day. As is my ritual, I allowed myself a half hour to check email, Facebook, and other tools of digital sociality. On this day in particular, my Facebook feed was filled with links to different versions of this story.

As most of us know, the academic job market can lead to emotional mood swings. On this day in particular, I was recovering from a crisis of confidence suffered the previous night. I felt better, but was still pretty raw. Luckily, I had the office to myself because Batkid was just too much for me at that moment. The real-life melodrama of Batkid fulfilling a life’s dream seemingly so close to the end of his short life (I had not yet read that he was in remission) struck deep. I cried. After catching my breath, I decided that Facebook was not going aid my productivity and I headed over to Reddit, where I saw more Batkid stories. “Alright. . .no more social media this afternoon.” Later in the day, after I emerged from my office to interact with people, Batkid again came up in conversation with people who had read about him via Facebook posts. I had to explain that he was “just too much” for me that day. Still, my request to not be made to think about Batkid was not entirely respected.

Hollis Griffin recently wrote about the experience of online dating in an environment of ubiquitous connectivity, noting how thoroughly “the intimacies enabled by technology get braided into the rhythms of everyday life.”¹ Griffin specifically describes the potential for the hurts associated with love to be “relentlessly” distributed throughout our daily lives. There are distinctions to be drawn between Griffin’s cell phone love and my Facebook-inspired empathy. Significantly, Griffin’s interactions are, I assume, largely person-to-person, whereas my connection to Batkid was filtered through my relation to a virtual group and a collection of publicly-shared performances. When people shared this story, they invariably added short notes to personalize their connection to Batkid. Some declared civic pride in the city of San Francisco or the state of California, while others simply expressed the emotional impact in personal terms.

These performances indicate an attempt to mediate between personal experience and the social body that is assumed to be experiencing the Batkid story at the same time. Milan Kundera writes that “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running in the grass. It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”² Setting aside the negative connotations of kitsch, Kundera captures an important aspect of the Batkid story. Not content to simply imagine all of mankind crying together, a number of people within my digital sphere of influence felt the need to actively encourage such reactions. Their desire to share in these feelings was apparently so ubiquitous as to make the story inescapable.

Although Batkid was covered by traditional television and print media, I was not exposed to him through those forums. Instead, it was social media that first made me aware of him and it was my inability to effectively avoid social media (or the social media of others) that made Batkid such an insistent story on that day. Public performances of emotion in relation to mass media events are not particular to online interactions. But Batkid suggests something particular about how and why this story spread the way it did. Strong affect played a particular role in this story’s spread through online media. The emotional impact of that story demanded a kind of sharing in search for the tears of “all mankind.” That this is a socially acceptable way to share in moments of civic emotion and requires little effort suggests that it was a particularly infectious case of digital virality.

As with any sketch comedy program, Kroll Show – a vehicle for comedian and The League star Nick Kroll – is heterogeneous. But it privileges certain sketches through multiple segments and narrative progression. One sketch in particular produced a spinoff in this week’s second episode (“Soaked in Success”), suggesting particular importance within the series’ overall text. Last week’s premiere episode (“San Diego Diet”) parodied the “overprivileged, incompetent young women go to work” reality genre (think Kourtney and Kim Take Miami) in a sketch that spins off to a “successful at serving the overprivileged” reality parody (think Dr. 90210) in the second. The first, PubLIZity, centers on a pair of women, both named Liz, who run a publicity company. In response to a client’s request for “something tasteful,” they organize a branded party, “Pirate Girl Rum Presents a Rockin’ Beach Bash to Benefit Cupcakes for Canine Cancer.” The client, a rare straight man for Kroll Show, summarizes, “The event cost $20,000 and it brought in $4,000 and I feel foolish.”

Conflict arises in this sketch as the industrious Liz butts heads with the more easygoing one. The work of organizing overwhelms hardworking Liz who is left to manage alone as the other’s superficiality distracts from the party. Deciding that her dog is too ugly, second Liz visits an animal plastic surgeon, Dr. Armand. Addressing the doctor, Liz explains, “I don’t want something in my house that’s, like, ugly… you wouldn’t talk to an ugly person.” Dr. Armand reassures her, “No, I don’t. I only hire very attractive people and my third wife is one of the most beautiful people I know.” The second episode elaborates on Dr. Armand in a sketch posing as a spinoff of PubLIZity. Armand of the House, as it is called, follows the doctor’s exploits dealing with his bratty son and distant wife. His dysfunctional family life is due in large part to his image obsession. As suggested in the first episode, Dr. Armand chose his spouse based on looks and in return she cannot even bother to hide that her interest in Dr. Armand is purely material. In demonstration, the doctor purchases his wife’s intimacy with jewelry. When the moment comes, she fakes an Ambien coma while he awkwardly dry humps her in the least erotic sex scene ever. The younger Armand and, in another sketch, “Gerry” Bruckheimer’s son represent the offspring of the image-obsessed. They are, for lack of space to elaborate, the worst.

In the 1991 Steve Martin film L.A. Story, a character praises the city because, “No one is looking to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is alright.” These sketches criticize L.A.’s insular culture, but are simultaneously a participant in its navel-gazing. As a parody of reality television’s focus on the parasitic industries that groom the images of the people and things that in turn run Hollywood’s mass media image production, these sketches play a game of infinite regression. The meta-meta-meta-discourse brings out the mutant traits of its too-small cultural gene pool.

Straight men often function as an audience surrogate, offering an orthodox logic against which the humorous twisted logic can contrast. The one significant straight man in these sketches, who should infuse some level of logic into the situation, has no effect on the goings-on. In another, similar sketch titled “Rich Dicks,” L.A.’s idle rich completely ignore the warnings of a put-upon maid, reminiscent of Zoila from Flipping Out. In this way, these voiceless “straight men” represent more particularly in this the viewer of these fictional shows. Ignoring the techno-democratic promise that a showrunner might read our tweets, on this side of the screen from a unidirectional mass media, reasonability seems to have very little voice in that world.

Kroll Show thus reflects an implicit viewing strategy with regards to much reality television: we laugh with a sense of superiority at that insular, overprivileged world. The only difference is that most of the shows on E! and Bravo pretend to not be in on the joke except that once a week, Joel McHale shows up to paratextually snark on our behalf. With programs like the ones Kroll Show critiques, distinctions between dominant and oppositional approaches break down to the point where the categories cease to mean anything. So while part of a critical discourse of class and image, Kroll Show is not critically outside of the programming it critiques. Instead it recreates, albeit more explicitly, a dominant reading position that masquerades as oppositional.

1600 Penn

By most accounts (conventional, moderate left) political comedy has flowered on American television in the last decade or two. And while scholarship on this phenomenon largely focuses on the more daring fare offered by late-night and cable programming, this trend is not foreign to primetime. In addition to the old stalwart Simpsons, the various Seth MacFarlane shows – especially American Dad – engage in national political issues on a near-weekly basis. Parks & Recreation offers another example, as Ron Swanson’s lovably misguided libertarianism contrasts with the lessons showing government efficacy – itself a political stance.

Judging by the pilot, NBC’s new 1600 Penn does not fit into this historical trajectory. Instead, it relies on traditional domestic comedy in the form of interpersonal conflict. Admittedly, the officious situation of this Bill Pullman and Jenna Elfman-starring situation comedy adds a level genre contrast. This amplifies the inherent humor in stock conflicts like those between a button-down father and mischievous child implicitly, and by the press secretary’s attempts to minimize the scandal. However, even in the one plot that is explicitly political – trade negotiations between the U.S. and Brazilian leaders – there are few points to be made about anything explicitly political except for throwaway asides (“Your trade deal will crumble like your nation’s aging infrastructure,” taunts the Brazilian president). Instead, the respective presidents’ machismo exacerbate tensions that are ultimately resolved more by personal appeals and pathos than economic reasoning. And while this resolution is ostensibly political, it serves the narrative more as a way to resolve personal conflict.

To this end, 1600 Penn invites comparisons to That’s My Bush, the short-lived 2001 Comedy Central sitcom parody by South Park‘s Trey Parker and Matt Stone. That’s My Bush operated on a similar conceit of contrasting the high seriousness of the presidency with idiotic sitcom plots, but did so with a sense of gleeful absurdism. Even so, Parker and Stone managed to insert trenchant political points about abortion and capital punishment into their show despite the fact that the primary target of its parodic satire was not politics, but rather the sitcom style itself.

But in its own way 1600 Penn serves as an interesting document regarding the presidential politics of the last fifty years. Historians like Mary Ann Watson and Barbie Zelizer point to Kennedy’s friendly relationship with television as foundational to the current familiarity we have with presidents. Indeed, the recent 2012 presidential election was at least the sixth in a row where discourses surrounding the losing major party candidate focused on his personal squareness and/or stiffness in contrast to the winning candidate’s relative personability and/or coolness. In a world where the personable has become political, we should not be terribly surprised that a television show taking place in the White House can act largely as an nonirionic dom-com.

On the other hand, elements from the pilot show promise to engage with significant political issues. Two seemingly burgeoning serial plots involve female sexuality in instances where the personal is explicitly political. As the first episode draws to a close, the thirteen-year-old daughter reveals that her crush is named Jessica. Will the first dad (Bill Pullman) be persuaded at the last minute to veto some piece of anti-gay legislation because he comes to understand the issue through the eyes of his daughter’s innocent and inherent love? Or will this become a comedy of hiding her scandalous sexuality? It is difficult to imagine this narrative element not becoming a more pointedly political issue as the series develops.

Similarly, we discover in the pilot that the elder teenage daughter is pregnant, and not by choice. Assuming it lasts long enough, the first season could also offer this plot up as a point for political discussion regarding reproductive rights and unplanned teenage pregnancy or it may become a comedy of bad excuses for morning sickness and loose-fitting blouses. If the latter, it will be obvious that 1600 Penn is explicitly avoiding political engagement of any depth. And if that is the case, why does this show exist?

**This post is part of our series, Mediating the Past, which focuses on how history is produced, constructed, distributed, branded and received through various media.

In a 2009 episode, Family Guy joked about a world in which JFK had never been shot. This was not an earnest exploration of historical causality however, but a setup to a gruesome site gag replacing JFK’s assassination with Mayor McCheese’s. To make matters worse, after the parody’s eerily accurate recreation of the event, Jacqueline Kennedy climbs onto the back of the car not to flee, but to eat the McViscera. Of course, offensive humor is Family Guy‘s stock in trade and a spin around the young-skewing dial from FOX to Comedy Central to Adult Swim reveals a host of gags about collective traumas from the assassinations of the 1960s to the catastrophes of 9/11 and Katrina in the 2000s. Even more recent events like the Penn State scandal and the Aurora shootings have comics laughingly asking, “Too soon?”

Joking on these topics offends because they are sacred moments in popular culture’s understanding of its own history. Reportage defines these events using a combination of extreme seriousness and emotion, marking them as sacred in the senses of their importance, uniqueness, and as common touchstones for popular memory. Indeed, the two most archetypal “national traumas” remain the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. The cliche stating that everyone recalls where they were when they first heard about either highlights their importance to both individual and national history. The rules governing humor in bad taste highlight the complex and often ambiguous conflicts of different values in culture. In these instances for example, solemnity regarding the events runs against the respect for free expression tested by sick jokes.

More practically for television, this humor represents an attempt to corner valuable young demographics, but risks public, advertiser, and regulatory flak. So while this humor is governed by the time elapsed since the initial event and decorum of the period, its appearance on television gives particular insight into the growth of narrowcasting and sick humor in the last half century. As the archetypal national trauma of the television era, the JFK assassination not only demonstrates this growth, but the ways in which television comedy has come to play with these events, in a sense rejecting the sacred framework.

In 1983, Eddie Murphy grew tired of his signature SNL character and decided to kill Buckwheat. While obviously in dialogue with the recent shootings of John Lennon and the pope, the bit alluded most directly to the recent Reagan shooting. Certainly, Reagan’s survival helped make this event available for SNL‘s humor, but while Buckwheat’s assassin was a composite of Reagan’s and Lennon’s mentally ill shooters, Buckwheat’s assassin, John David Stutts (also played by Murphy), was killed while being led down a hallway in handcuffs. SNL thus played it relatively safe by limiting its most direct references to Oswald’s death and not JFK’s. Nevertheless, this is one of the first (possibly the very first) example of a comedy show parodying the assassination in any way and it occurred notably on a late-night show known, even as late as 1983, for its edginess.

When the cultural zeitgeist of the early 1990s turned towards conspiracy theorist’s view of history, JFK’s death figured heavily. Along with The X-Files, Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK was arguably conspiracy culture’s central text. Television’s growing penchant for parody in the 1990s meant shows like The Simpsons, The Critic, and The Ben Stiller Show would reference the film. But a 1992 episode of Seinfeld left the greatest mark on pop culture. In explaining why they “despise” Keith Hernandez, Kramer and Newman convey the story of having been spat on, launching into an extended stylistic parody of JFK.

Although airing during prime time, Seinfeld skewed young, urban, and liberal–especially in 1992 when it had yet to dominate the ratings. During the season in question, the program aired at 9:30 Eastern in between the risque, if juvenile, humor of Night Court and Quantum Leap, a show often about working through historical trauma. More importantly, though playing with the imagery of the assassination, Seinfeld acts more as a parody of Stone’s stylistic excess rather than a joke about Kennedy’s death.

Despite its apparent edginess, the magic loogie bit would pale in comparison to the ways in which parodists like self-consciously sick Family Guy played with this imagery later. Despite rocky beginnings this program has surpassed The Simpsons as the crown jewel in FOX’s valuably young-skewing Sunday night lineup and acts as the centerpiece to a growing cadre of Seth MacFarlane productions. In 1999, but since cut from reruns, a young boy holds up his “JFK Pez Dispenser” just as a stray bullet shatters its head. Ominously, the child consoles himself with his Bobby Kennedy dispenser.

Like the 2009 Mayor McCheese gag, this joke plays on juxtapositions between sacred politicians and childhood trifles. But they also elicit “I-can’t-believe-they-just-did-that” laughter. They stack uncomfortable humor on top of the fundamental joke. Even by Family Guy‘s standards though, the 1999 gag was edgy. But the shattered plastic of 1999 is downright tame compared to Jackie Kennedy eating Mayor McCheese’s head.

Since the early 80s then, this type of sacrilegious humor has not only grown more extreme, but has moved from fringe programming hours into prime time. To some extent, general social factors like generational shift, the time elapsed since 1963, and broadly-labeled “permissiveness” account for these examples’ increasingly flippant attitude towards sacred history. More pointedly, the network tendency towards ever-more-specific demographics has allayed standards & practices, network, and FCC fears with the assumption that easily offended audiences would not be watching. For a particular demographic, often one too young to remember the moment directly, moments of common historical importance are increasingly being inflected with the flippant attitude of sick humor.