Just now, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed Colin Firth about his new movie Then She Found Me, opening this week in theaters. The conversation quickly dwindled into talk about Firth's penis; I tuned in to the conversation as Firth was talking about his penis, and how some aforementioned film or other performance allowed him to expose it -- larger than life -- in renowned cities worldwide. He even stacked it up against the Eiffel Tower, but then decided against that bold a gesture, a British one at that. Jon Stewart, of course, quickly deconstructed the phallic thread of the writer's remarks, remaking them into the classic "limp penis" joke, told in the voice of a 12-year-old boy for emasculating emphasis. The writer tried to defend himself by asserting his own penis as the empirical, world-renowned phallus, but Stewart again derailed the conversation into a comedic parody of the phallus, which, when uncrowned, is merely a wobbly dong or a wet noodle. The phallus, as Susan Bordo would have it, is only the phallus when we're in awe of it, and we're not in awe of most real penises (only those that resemble the phallus in size); we're in awe of the the manly man, the cock, the strong and always ready mythical man that most men never live up to. His penis -- not Everyman's -- is the phallus.
In essence, when the writer asserted his phallic power, Stewart deflated it with comedy, the fastest, most effective way to convert the authoritative, dominate phallus into a tiny wee-wee, weak, flaccid, and completely unusable except to produce waste. What started as a friendly conversation between the two powerful men became a power struggle.
Notice, though, in all of this that Stewart never claims the phallus that he strips from the writer. Why? My guess is, Stewart aspires to claim a different phallus because he's pitted against different competitors in another arena. Stewart's currency is comedy. And he who has the most of that fits Comedy Central's ideal masculinity (or femininity, in other cases). Stewart is, after all, so rich in the masculine currency of comedy that Comedy Central recognized their eggs were all in one basket and turned local currency into global currency: because comedy equals success, Stewart's show produced a spin-off, which is, in this arena, basically like Stewart's brilliance springing from it's own intellect a brain-child (Stephen Colbert's The Colbert Report). In Stewart's particular microcosm, he's earned enough in that one funny, phallus-shattering comment to continue competing for his own phallus at Comedy Central, a name that begs to be interpreted as a euphemism for comedy's marketplace.
I'm sounding like a broken Marxist record.
Someone should notify the local State apparatus... apparatus... apparatus...
2 comments:
Do you think the belittling of Colin Firth's masculinity came also from Jon Stewart's uncomfortability with the homoeroticism of the conversation?
Yes. Jon Stewart didn't know how to take Firth's assertive and unapproved conversation topic. Firth, once Stewart made his phallus comedic, completely dwindled. It was like watching a phallic penis soften after Stewart doused it with cold water. It was neat seeing Bordo's assertion come to life like that.
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