Real life: faster than the Speed of Satire!
One of the odd little problems faced by not just MAD but anyone doing comedy in modern America is: keeping your humorous exaggerations far enough “ahead of” or “beyond” real life that audiences will, in fact, be able to recognize them as exaggerations. It’s not as easy as it sounds: every so often, reality will take that outrageous thing you dreamt up to make a satiric point and regurgitate it shortly thereafter as an actual, non-ironic product, TV show, trend, etc. It’s happened so much with MAD that they’ve coined a name for it, “MAD E.S.P.”
My new favorite example, sort of: Take the only-on-DVD 2006 Mike Judge movie, “Idiocracy”; it’s about an America 500 years in the future that’s been dumbed down by 50+ IQ points via the process of “un-natural selection” (stupid people having more kids than smart people; plus reckless morons saved by modern safety devices, only to spread their moron genes). And what’s the most popular TV show of this really-stupid future-America? A show called “OW! My Balls!” - a distillation of “America’s Funniest Home Video”-style groin-punching and gonad-smashing — and nothing else!
“OW! My Balls!” WAY too stupid a type of concept to ever be anything but a joke, right? That’s
what I thought, until I got my latest issue of Entertainment Weekly bringing word of an actual upcoming reality show called…”HURL!” That’s right, I said “HURL!” — a half-hour show of people vomiting on camera! (Must be aimed at those “Fear Factor”-viewers who are too impatient to sit through all that people NOT-vomiting in between!)
“HURL!” I’m convinced this is a sign…a “Now Boarding”-sign for the express handbasket to Hell. (And to those people who believe the world ends in 2012, I’ve got a new name for you since I heard of “HURL!” — “Pollyanna!“)
[BTW: on a semi-related note -- why the heck haven't we seen a real-life version of the "Orgasmatron" -- Woody Allen's completely self-contained self-gratification device from his 1973 film "Sleepers"? Oh! Silly me, I forgot: you're using it right now! (Be sure and wipe down your keyboard before you come back to my site, y'hear?)]