The following clip is not, in my opinion, among the best The Daily Show has to offer, but somewhere around 2:18, you'll see its relevance to "Holt Water."
Out-loud laughs there. Why? Does this scene provoke the same audience response that "Holt Water" elicits from the reader? Is the nature of the intended humor the same in both instances, or is something different going on in "Holt Water"?
Offer some reflections here.
If you have had further thoughts about Friday's discussion of this poem (remarks you didn't have a chance to make, concerns or issues you would have liked to discuss further), feel free to write about them here.
Deadline: Monday (1/26), 9am.
(Thanks to Professor Renee Trilling for alerting me to this clip.)
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3 comments:
Ignore this comment, everyone--I'm just making sure the comment feature works the way its supposed to.
Eh? Looks good from here.
Although I noticed the drinking of the "urine" in the clip, it was not until I went back and re-watched it that I realized that this was the reference to 'Holt Water'. It seems sad to me that I am so used to visual bodily humor that I barely even noted the drinking of urine...
Perhaps the difference in audience reaction to the clip is due to the purposeful choice to drink urine, and our knowledge that it 'obviously' was some urine colored drink. Or perhaps I have just seen to many not funny 'comedies' recently. Regardless, the clip did elicit a very different reaction from me than the farmer drinking the urine.
The humor of the Stewart show was contemporary and readily apparent. From the first second of watching it the stamp of John Stewart tells an audience that the clip is going to be funny and satirical. Perhaps the name Mary Jones is a similar stamp for 18th century readers. Maybe picking up a Jones' poem is like changing the channel to the Stewart show. The reader is ready to laugh and be outraged by whatever new scandalous thing the poem comments on. Although I found "Holt Water" to be a shocking poem, it may have merely been delivering a punch-line the audience expected.
It's not quite the same, because of the situating of the gag. In "Holt Water", the drinking of the urine was the punch line, even if the audience could see it coming from a mile away. In the sample of "The Daily Show," the drinking of urine was not the main mechanism for eliciting laughs, just one thing slipped in the mix.
Nevertheless, both "The Daily Show" and "Holt Water" touch on the divide between rich and poor; whereas living conditions are highlighted in "Holt Water," "The Daily Show" touches on healthcare, its derivative. In our society, the issue of healthcare is so much more of a political item, which was the main subject of the satire in "The Daily Show."
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