Friday, June 25, 2010

"Chaos Reigns"

Examiner.com wonders "Who gets this?"

5 comments:

Andy Jukes said...

I'm not sure whether he's complimenting you or slamming you, but I, for one, got the reference and thought it was funny.

tychotithonus (Royce Williams) said...

This is "multiple layers for multiple audiences", a tradition followed by everything from Shakespeare to Bugs Bunny -- and in this case, done quite well:

* There's plenty of context ("where I delight in making everyone miserable simply because I can?!") so that everyone can still get the joke.

* If the reader does know von Trier's work, they get a funnier, more nuanced view.

* Anyone else (with even a single curious bone in their body) can hop on the Internet and be reading Wikipedia, watching a clip, or adding von Trier to their Netflix queue in about thirty seconds. It's not an oblique reference; it's an opportunity, like a little optional puzzle.

I don't know which comics Mr. Steinberg has been reading, but it may be time to reflect a little more on the art that they can bring to the table.

Keep up the good work.

Charles said...

As MST used to say, not everyone will get it, but the right people will get it.

Susan D-L said...

I got the reference despite having never seen (nor desiring to see) a Lars von Trier movie.

And Royce is right; in this age where anything can be looked up in a matter of seconds (assuming an internet connection) there's no excuse for the 'I don't get it' defense. I had to Google Justin Bieber to figure out who the f*** HE was.

Dimestore Lipstick said...

I'm not sure what a "setuagenarian" is, but if he meant septuagenarian, I'd like to point out to the writer that being in one's seventies isn't exactly tottering on the grave. My mom, born in 1937, is a big Sally Forth fan, so I asked her about this--while she wasn't familiar with Von Trier, she understood the joke just fine, and "just assumed he was one of those depressing Scandinavian directors". By the way, I am to pass on a compliment--Mom says the writing on SF makes it one of her favorite comics. It's "even funnier than Mary Worth". (FWIW, Mom is a perfectly average middle-class mid-westerner.)