I am pretty sure that, in their heyday, the Three Stooges, were looked down upon as low comedy by some folks. To this day, I still do. The truth is, however, even chimpanzees yuck it up when one of their fellow primates falls out of the tree. Since we share a great deal of our DNA in common with them it should come as no surprise that many people tune into “America’s Funniest Home Videos” to watch other people sustain a variety of injuries and humiliations.
In these horrid times, we all need a bit of entertainment and a few laughs, but it is hard for me to scan the evening’s television schedule without concluding that what passes for popular culture these days suggests that our collective IQs are scraping the bottom percentiles.
I will skip the usual stuff on the networks. Cops, lawyers, physicians are the stuff of most TV dramas from its earliest days. Many of these shows are well written, acted, and produced. The situation comedies, however, are the lowest, most vulgar stuff imaginable. The animated versions, “The Simpsons”, “Family Guy” or “American Dad” are generally cringe-worthy and, if you think about it, a wholesale attack on everything society generally regards as virtues. If you tear them down, what is left?
A show like “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” gets a bunch of fairly smart kids together and some really dumb adults to demonstrate how much they have forgotten or never learned when they were in fifth grade. There is a serious aspect to the question it asks.