Re: maybe you should reconsider Ghostbusters

[robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

https://qz.com/176613/ghostbusters-harold-ramis-greatest-movie-ever-about-republican-economic-policy
goes into painful detail about how Reaganomics played into the script.
Pretty interesting.

I don't think I could agree with Reagan having a sense of humor.  Most of
his humor was written for him and he just regurgitated it.  After leaving
the governorship of Ca, he became a mindless puppet.  Just ask
Linda Wertheimer.

 > From: Noelle <noelle>
 > Date: Sun, 21 May 2023 12:50:58 -0700 (PDT)
 >
 > J.T. in Greensboro, NC, writes: On the subject of conservative 
 > comedy: As a historian of late 20th century film and media I would 
 > argue that a lot of the most beloved comedies of the 1980s (think 
 > John Hughes and Harold Ramis) are at their core fundamentally 
 > conservative. Scholars and critics have published a fair bit on the 
 > Reaganism at the core of films like Ghostbusters and The Breakfast 
 > Club.
 > 
 > While I'm firmly left of center and love Rodney Dangerfield, it's 
 > hard to view the popularity of his schtick as the put-upon husband 
 > who can't get any respect as anything but a reaction to modest 
 > social gains made by women and others during the 1970s. Dangerfield 
 > was a nobody and was mostly out of comedy for a couple of decades 
 > until the social situation changed to make his schtick effective and 
 > to make him one of the most popular people in America. A film like 
 > Back to School (1986), which I personally find hilarious despite my 
 > political misgivings, is completely within the paradigm of 
 > Reaganism. At the risk of starting to paste in lines from my 
 > dissertation, I'll stop there and let readers go back and revisit 
 > the films themselves! Rightly or wrongly, Reagan-era comedy 
 > configured bureaucrats, cultural elitists, and old-money types as 
 > villains to punch-up at and did so effectively.
 > 
 > Conservativism isn't fundamentally unfunny, the problem is that 
 > conservatism lacks talented comedy stylists for, say, the last 30 
 > some-odd years. Shooting from the hip, I'd actually say that the 
 > decline in conservative comedy may be coincident with its embrace of 
 > the culture wars that began with Reaganism but really hit its 
 > full-flowering with the Gingrich years. Reagan at least had a sense 
 > of humor, even if you didn't agree with him.