Tuesday, June 13, 2006

History on Comedy Central

I was flipping through the channels last night and ended up on Comedy Central watching the Mind of Mencia, which seemed to be something of a cross between a standup comedy show and a show with comedy skits. One of the skits last night was entitled - "That's F*cking Historical."

"That's F*cking Historical" purported to be re-enactments of historical events. Last nights episode was inspired by the Divinci Code and was supposed to show what life really would have been like for Jesus if he had been married.

For example, one scene showed the disciples questioning Jesus' manhood after he allowed his wife to pick out a pink robe for him to wear. In another scene Jesus called for God's help, when his wife's only answer to whether or not she was mad was 'Well, if you don't know what's wrong, everything must be FINE.' The funniest one, however, was when Jesus returned from the dead and his wife accused him of having an affair since he hadn't been home for three days.

I'm not really sure that this says about the view of history in society. In someways, it suggeststhat the public does have a healthy historical consciousness - if you didn't have some awareness of past events, skits like 'That's F*cking Historical' would not be funny. But it also might suggest that people see history or the ability to really know what happened in the past a joke. The person who acted as commentator for 'That's F*cking Historical', for example, was continually making statements like - 'Could Jesus cure his wife of PMS? I don't know! Or do I?'

This seemed to strike a little to close to relativism and the belief that seems to be growing that if historicans can't prove something didn't happened - then perhaps it did.

No comments: