THE COMING DROUGHT?
ok i watched c4’s 100 best cartoons last night mainly to punish david stubbs for a particularly thin editorial in this month’s wire (he sets out his stall by apologising for watching some previous c4 top 100, b4 wheelin out the cliche abt the format’s conservative laziness typifying how pop used to be all excitin in the 80s but is now entirely co-opted and compromised unlike avant-indie etc) (at which point i stopped readin…)
ANYWAY: as to the 100 itself, not much to say: i think the unpoliced golden-age saturday morning spasm of kidditoons has come and gone, and (unsurprsingly i spose) some of the best things have just dropped through the cracks) (no COW AND CHICKEN, no DEXTER’S LABORATORY: plus PPG far below not-all-that squarebob and the useless rugrats blah blah)
but i think what wz still naggin me WAS stubbs’s bad-stand-up shtick, bcz the thing i really started to notice was the HIGH NUMBER of UNFUNNY and UNKNOWN “COMEDIANS” scraped in to comment. Some of the reasons and implications of this are bein ilxplored here and here): i guess what i mainly want to say on FT is that where once opening the doors of light entertainment to alt stand-up wz as exciting as opening the tardis doors into raw space, now it’s just a plateau of feedback-cycle mirrors – since stand-up know what it’s “supposed to do” by watchin TV, and does it so as to get ON tv… eg it is no longer REMOTELY a source of new ideas an styles, but a recycling WAY more pitiless than the “100 top” concept (which at least in principle allows culture workers to get perspective on the dialectics of past and present, and confidently and informedly work at ESCAPING this circularity).