Fwd: Wednesday humor

[Doug Millison]

>>  [FROM THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW]
>>
>>  Todd: Hi, Jerry.
>>
>>  Jerry: (reading from card) So, Todd, you're here to tell your
>>  girlfriend something. What is it?
>>
>>  Todd: Well, Jerry, my girlfriend Ursula and I have been going out for
>>  three years now.  We did everything together.  We were really
>>  inseparable.  But then she discovered post-Marxist political and
>>  literary theory, and it's been nothing but fighting ever since.
>>
>>  Jerry: Why is that?
>>
>>  Todd: You see, Jerry, I'm a traditional Cartesian rationalist.  I
>>  believe that the individual self, the "I" or ego is the foundation of
>>  all metaphysics.  She, on the other hand, believes that the
>>  contemporary self is a socially constructed, multi-faceted subjectivity
>>  reflecting the political and economic realities of late capitalist
>>  consumerist discourse.
>>
>>  Crowd: Ooooohhhh!
>>
>>  Todd: I know! I know! Is that infantile, or what?
>>
>>  Jerry: So what do you want to tell her today?
>>
>>  Todd: I want to tell her that unless she ditches the post-modernism,
>>  we're through.  I just can't go on having a relationship with a woman
>>  who doesn't believe I exist.
>>
>>  Jerry: Well, you're going to get your chance.  Here's Ursula!
>>
>>  Ursula storms onstage and charges up to Todd.
>>
>>  Ursula: Patriarchal colonizer!
>>
>>  She slaps him viciously.  Todd leaps up, but the security guys pull
>>  them apart before things can go any further.
>>
>>  Ursula: Don't listen to him!  Logic is a male hysteria!  Rationality
>>  equals oppression and the silencing of marginalized voices!
>>
>>  Todd: The classical methodology of rational dialectic is our only road
>>  to truth!  Don't try to deny it!
>>
>>  Ursula: You and your dialectic!  That's how it's been through our whole
>>  relationship, Jerry.  Mindless repetition of the post-Enlightenment
>>  meta-narrative.  "You have to start with radical doubt, Ursula."
>>  "Post-structuralism is just classical sceptical thought re-cast in the
>>  language of semiotics, Ursula."
>>
>>  Crowd: Booo! Booo!
>>
>>  Jerry: Well, Ursula, come on.  Don't you agree that the roots of
>>  contemporary neo-Leftism simply have to be sought in Enlightenment
>>  political philosophy?
>>
>>  Ursula: History is the discourse of powerful centrally located voices
>>  marginalizing and de-scribing the sub-altern!
>>
>>  Todd: See what I have to put up with?  Do you know what it's like
>>  living with someone who sees sex as a metaphoric demonstration of the
>>  anti-feminist violence implicit in the discourse of the dominant power
>>  structure?  It's terrible.  She just lies there and thinks of Andrea
>>  Dworkin.  That's why we never do it any more.
>>
>>  Crowd: Wooooo!
>>
>>  Ursula: You liar!  Why don't you tell them how you haven't been able to
>>  get it up for the past three months because you couldn't decide if your
>>  penis truly had essential Being, or was simply a manifestation of Mind?
>>
>>  Todd: Wait a minute!  Wait a minute!
>>
>>  Ursula: It's true!
>>
>>  Jerry: Well, I don't think we're going to solve this one right away.
>>  Our next guests are Louis and Tina. And Tina has a little
>>  confession to make!
>>
>>  Louis and Tina come onstage. Todd and Ursula continue bickering in the
>>  background.
>>
>>  Jerry: Tina, you are... (reads cards) ... an existentialist, is that
>>  right?
>>
>>  Tina: That's right, Jerry. And Louis is, too.
>>
>>  Jerry: And what did you want to tell Louis today?
>>
>>  Tina: Jerry, today I want to tell him...
>>
>>  Jerry: Talk to Louis.  Talk to him.
>>
>>  Crowd hushes.
>>
>>  Tina: Louis... I've loved you for a long time...
>>
>>  Louis: I love you, too, Tina.
>>
>>  Tina: Louis, you know I agree with you that existence precedes essence,
>>  but...well, I just want to tell you I've been reading Nietzsche lately,
>>  and I don't think I can agree with your egalitarian politics any more.
>>
>>  Crowd: Wooooo! Woooooo!
>>
>>  Louis: (shocked and disbelieving) Tina, this is crazy. You know that
>>  Sartre clarified all this way back in the 40's.
>>
>>  Tina: But he didn't take into account Nietzsche's radical critique of
>>  democratic morality, Louis.  I'm sorry.  I can't ignore the
>>  contradiction any longer!
>>
>>  Louis: You got these ideas from Victor, didn't you?  Didn't you?
>>
>>  Tina: Don't you bring up Victor!  I only turned to him when I saw you
>>  were seeing that dominatrix!  I needed a real man!  An Uber-man!
>>
>>  Louis: (sobbing) I couldn't help it. It was my burden of freedom. It
>>  was too much!
>>
>>  Jerry: We've got someone here who might have something to add.  Bring
>>  out...Victor!
>>
>>  Victor enters. He walks up to Louis and sticks a finger in his face.
>>
>>  Victor: Louis, you're a classic post-Christian intellectual.  Weak to
>>  the core!
>>
>>  Louis: (through tears) You can kiss my Marxist ass, Reactionary Boy!
>>
>>  Victor: Herd animal!
>>
>>  Louis: Lackey!
>>
>>  Louis throws a chair at Victor; they lock horns and wrestle. The crowd
>>  goes wild.  After a long struggle, the security guys pry them apart.
>>
>>  Jerry: Okay, okay. It's time for questions from the audience.
>>  Go ahead, sir.
>>
>>  Audience member: Okay, this is for Tina.  Tina, I just wanna know how
>>  you can call yourself an existentialist, and still agree with
>>  Nietzsche's doctrine of the Ubermensch.  Doesn't that imply a belief in
>>  intrinsic essences that is in direct contradiction with the
>>  fundamental principles of existentialism?
>>
>>  Tina: No! No! It doesn't.  We can be equal in potential, without being
>>  equal in eventual personal quality.  It's a question of Becoming, not
>>  Being.
>>
>>  Audience member: That's just disguised essentialism!  You're no
>>  existentialist!
>>
>>  Tina: I am so!
>>
>>  Audience member: You're no existentialist!
>>
>>  Tina: I am so an existentialist, bitch!
>>
>>  Ursula stands and interjects.
>>
>>  Ursula: What does it [bleep] matter?  Existentialism is just a cover
>>  for late capitalist anti-feminism! Look at how Sartre treated Simone de
>>  Beauvoir!
>>
>>  Women in the crowd cheer and stomp.
>>
>>  Tina: [Bleep] you! Fat-ass Foucaultian ho!
>>
>>  Ursula: You only wish you were smart enough to understand Foucault,
>>  bitch!
>>
>>  Tina: You the bitch!
>>
>>  Ursula: No, you the bitch!
>>
>>  Tina: Whatever! Whatever!
>>
>>  Jerry: We'll be right back with a final thought! Stay with us!
>>
>>  Commercial break for debt-consolidation loans, ITT Technical Institute,
>>  and Psychic Alliance Hotline.
>>
>>  Jerry: Hi! Welcome back. I just want to thank all our guests for being
>>  here, and say that I hope you're able to work through your differences
>>  and find happiness, if indeed happiness can be extracted from the
>>  dismal miasma of warring primal hormonal impulses we call human
>>  relationship.
>>
>>  (turns to the camera)
>>
>>  Well, we all think philosophy is just fun and games. Semiotics,
>>  deconstruction, Lacanian post-Freudian psychoanalysis, it all seems
>>  like good, clean fun. But when the heart gets involved, all our
>>  painfully acquired metaphysical insights go right out the window, and
>>  we're reduced to battling it out like rutting chimpanzees. It's not
>>  pretty. If you're in a relationship, and differences over the
>>  fundamental principles of your respective subjectivities are making
>>  things difficult, maybe it's time to move on. Find someone
>>  new, someone who will accept you and the way your laughably limited
>>  human intelligence chooses to codify and rationalize the chaos of
>>  existence. After all, in the absence of a clear, unquestionable
>>  revelation from God, that's all we're all doing anyway. So remember:
>>  take care of yourselves-and each other.
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