During a radicalization there is a tendency for comedy to mock the rich and the powerful. During a downturn, such as the kind we face today, there is the opposite tendency. The weak and the marginalized become the targets. While most people are aware of the success of right-wing shock jocks like Don Imus and Howard Stern, who have made a career out of attacking Haitian immigrants and affirmative action, it is important to take note of how this reactionary brand of humor has seeped into high culture loosely interpreted. Some of the younger independent film-makers who have a reputation for edginess bordering on experimentalism are merely a carriage trade version of the morning shock jocks. What is also interesting is the connection that some of them have to Saturday Night Live, a television show that emerged as an anti-Reagan protest venue, but which now articulates many of the same right-wing values found on talk radio.

This became obvious to me as I read the July 5 New Yorker magazine profile on Neil LaBute, the writer and director of the monumentally hateful "In the Company of Men". John Lahr describes LaBute as courting "provocation not for the sake of shock but to make the audience think against its own received opinions". Which is just a high-falutin' version of the apologia that Howard Stern offers in defense of spanking naked women with a fish or his coon show brand of "humor". "In the Company of Men" is the story of two young corporate males who conspire to sexually exploit and then dump a deaf typist-receptionist. While offered as social criticism, it is really nothing more than a SNL sketch with a lot more venom. The brilliant Mr. Cranky sums the film up as follows:

"In attempting to convince a friend to join me at a screening of 'In the Company of Men,' I offered this plot summary: 'It's about two corporate ladder-climbers who decide to torture a woman in order to reclaim their male power in our politically-correct culture.' Her response was indicative of the heart-warming appeal this film offers to most well-adjusted people: 'Sorry, but I'm scheduled to spend my evening licking my toilet.'"

LaBute can be grouped with other hot young Hollywood "talents" like Todd Solenz and the Farrelly brothers. Todd Solenz's "Happiness" is essentially an hour and a half's worth of unrelieved misogyny. Here's what I wrote about it when it first hit the theaters:

"'Happiness' begins with a prologue involving one of the female leads and Saturday Night Live alumnus Jon Lovitz. They are on a date in a fancy restaurant. She, a plain but not unattractive woman in her mid-30's has just rebuffed Lovitz. He proceeds to give her a tongue-lashing, telling her that she is 'shit' and that he is 'champagne'. She sits there passively accepting his insults. This exercise in humiliation sets the tone for the remainder of the film, at least I presume it did since I walked out shortly."

Rounding out the group are the Farrelly brothers, whose "There's Something About Mary" got a rave review from NYC's Village Voice, an "alternative, hip" weekly. I walked out of this flick in the first ten minutes, a record for me, when it depicted a retarded adult going on a violent rampage when somebody accidentally brushes one of his ears. When a movie sells tickets by making stupid jokes about retarded people, you know there's something seriously wrong in the world of popular culture.

One thing that I discovered from the New Yorker article is that LaBute was an aspiring SNL sketch writer. After graduating college in 1985, he moved to NYC where he tried to find work on the David Letterman show or SNL. Letterman in recent years has peppered his opening monologues with racist jokes about NYC's immigrant cab drivers, getting his exclusively white audience to laugh about how cabbies smell and can't speak English. In 1985 SNL had already completed its mutation into a right-wing venue, with Eddie Murphy's version of Amos and Andy humor and rancid skits making fun of mentally retarded messengers and mail clerks.

While LaBute never was hired by SNL, Solonz actually worked for the show for a while. He produced a short for Saturday Night Live, titled "How I Became a Leading Artistic Figure in New York City's East Village Cultural Landscape" in 1986.

The real revelation in the New Yorker piece, however, is that LaBute is a practicing Mormon. He graduated from Brigham Young University and takes the cult teachings seriously. According to Charles Metten, who taught directing at Brigham Young University, "The 'shoulds' and 'have to's' of Mormonism make Neil struggle with the sinful life."

Struggle indeed. In an early Off Off Broadway play by LaBute, one of the characters says about AIDS patients, "I say, put them all in a fucking pot and boil them… just a precaution." An audience member stood up and shouted, "Kill the Playwright" which is exactly the reaction that many gays have to Don Imus and Howard Stern.

In the film currently in production--"Nurse Betty"--LaBute casts up-and-coming black actor and comedian Chris Rock. In one scene Rock, a drug dealer (what a surprise casting move), pumps the white female lead for information about a hidden drug cache while forcing anal sex on her. LaBute explains the motivation: "I think it comes down to the race thing. I really do."

Louis Proyect