The Ironic Kitsch

In The Simpsons, every cliché and stereotype, however noxious, gets a wink. The doctor is a cynical malpractitioner. The shopkeeper is a cynical fleecer. The clown writes bad gags and steals good ones. The bully reads Readers’ Digest. The evil mogul has a gay minion. The town’s only Scot is an angry, thrifty, uncouth janitor.

The raison d’être of the nihilistic comedy is that everything deserves to be mocked. That would be an out, if it were possible to ridicule all things simultaneously. We can, in reality, only ridicule those things for which we have notions. There is no sitcom in America about the foibles of Germans. There is no sitcom about commodities speculation. There is no sitcom about black astronauts, and if there were, the joke would be “Look, black folks in space! They’re acting just like black folks on Earth do!” Nobody would base a show on what’s funny about the life of an actual black astronaut because long before it got to production, TV execs would ask where the joke was and can the whole project.

Cynicism is purportedly more realistic than idealism. The story goes that the idealist is a wishful thinker whose veracity, however well-intentioned, is ultimately undercut by desire. The cynic says, “I don’t see the possibility of good, and that makes me a clear thinker.” But as television comedy illustrates, this begs the question. Does discounting the possibility of good excise bias? Or is it merely evidence of a different pervasive conviction?

I used the phrase “status-quo bias” before in reference to the anodyne worldview of archaic TV, but it’s equally applicable to the ironic worldview of The Simpsons. Springfield never changes. The characters have their births moved around, their backstories transplanted at a moment’s notice. Even their lineages are totally fluid. But the town itself is a rock: it will always have the same mayor, the same police chief, the same age and ethnicity demographics. It’s as though the whole show is meant to be subsumed beneath a banner: “It was ever thus!” Its characters are sacrifices before the implausibility of any change. 

Like dada and other forms of radical criticism, nihilistic comedy hinges on forswearing constructive impulses and saving all credibility for the attack (usually on family, friendship and other clichés of anodyne television). But only recently has such austerity been viable on TV, whereas this genre predates those conditions by some time, necessitating compromise with less-than-perfectly-critical mores. The Simpsons, at long last, locates good in children and family obligation. Everybody Loves Raymond finds it in familial feeling, whereas Everybody Hates Chris finds it in the mores of the urban working.

Weirdly, it’s not that compromise but another which finally transforms nihilistic irony into kitsch. Many people have hypothesized the cultural aftershocks of the Berlin Wall’s collapse; one story runs that the end of the Cold War coincided with a trend toward the denying-of-stakes generally, denying that the outcome of anything matters. The Simpsons and its ironic brethren cannot but end up there, whatever their intentions are. Television’s ironic regime says, “trust in nothing except for these: Murphy’s Law, Sturgeon’s Law, the Peter Principle, the law of averages. And trust in these absolutely.” But absolute belief makes kitsch. Here, the rock of certainty is that nothing matters, the outcome of all ideas is the same and therefore, all ideas are the same.

But that’s nonsense, and at no time is this more obvious than when looking at ideas as self-similar as those of mainstream comedy. One may be tempted to say, “if you’re so convinced that all things are toward the same outcome, then try something different” — which would be missing the point. The point is not trying, not having to think about it, because failure is a given. It’s not moral cowardice, exactly. It’s the expectation that the only alternative to anodyne totalism (i.e. judge a tree by its fruit, evil never wins, etc.) is total denial, accompanied by the fallacy that “everything” is a possible subject matter for art. And it’s less pernicious than it is boring.