Drawing on the work of Double, I will argue that this fifteen-minute video should be taken up in our Arts Studies Global Citizen stream due to the content that the author talks about mainly revolving around the authenticity of the stories told and the audiences perceiving the story. I think it is important in a literary discourse to take up the question as to whether the comic genre is a suitable way to portray life narratives and on what basis would we analyze that. It is important to know whether authenticity should be our utmost priority or is it to engage our audience in the conversation itself. In the end, I want to argue that the purpose of stand-up comedy is not to primarily deliver a life-narrative, it is to ensure that the story, real or not, is being delivered in a way where the audience is the utmost priority.

Starting his career when he was a teenager, Daniel Sloss is a renowned Scottish comedian having won awards, appeared on the famous American talk-show “Conan” several times, has two of his own Netflix originals and has performed a number of off-Broadway stand up shows. In his Ted Talk, “It’s Only a Story” Sloss talks about the ever so tendency of some minority of the audience to get offended at jokes that are based on a certain “incongruity” as Double would say (147). Sloss says it is their job as comedians to keep their audiences engaged and laughing and they do so by telling “real stories, exaggerated stories, stories that are completely and utterly made up. Total lies.” Double in his article calls this the “comic excess” (148). It is how a real story is presented using exaggerating details which would otherwise be a “violation of decency” (148). For example, Sloss says the reason he agreed to do the Ted Talk because his mom would otherwise put him up for adoption. “I’m 22 years old, I don’t know how she’d go about that but it’s best not to argue with her when she’s been drinking (laughter)” and as soon as he got his reaction from his audience he says “You see that? That was a perfect example, I made that entirely up.” This is how comedians take something absolutely inappropriate, tweak it according to the audience’s liking and turn it into a punch line (Double 147).

But is it ethically wrong to deliberately misinform your audiences and misrepresent the characters in a comedian’s story? To quote Double, “I employed various authenticating strategies to convince them (audience) that the experiences I described had actually happened – even when it had not happened in exactly the way I described.” Hence, the primary answer to that question is stand-up comedies are not platforms to present life narratives; it is a platform to present life narratives in the humour rhetoric. Secondly, stand-up comedies can be used to present a “traumatic personal experience” in an amusing way (Double, 143). Sloss says, “You seem to assume that comedians haven’t gone through any hardships when most of the time it’s a hardship that’s caused us to get into comedy. Our reaction to our hardships was to make light of the situation.”

Therefore, a storyteller should be able to tell their stories as they want because it is not only a piece created to deliver to the audience, it is also a personal coping mechanism and if using “comic excess” and “authenticating strategies” help to deliver the story in a more engaging way than the author should have full right to do so.

Hence, I feel this is a good form of text to study as it will help us to understand better the authenticity, responsibility and authority of the storyteller and his/her audience.

Work Cited

Double, Oliver. “Tragedy Plus Time: Transforming Life      Experience into Stand-Up Comedy.” New Theatre Quarterly 33.2 (2017): 143-55.

“It’s only a story: Daniel Sloss at TedxEaling” Youtube, uploaded by TedxTalk, December 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a-UUhW7-HU.

 

The record-keeping nature of archives contributes to “societal memory” (Carter 217). The “traces” left behind by people residing in that “society” is what is preserved in archival memory (Carter 220). Another notable abstract of archival activities is forming an “identity” (Carter 221). According to Villar, many take up the form of writing in order to create an identity so as to not be forgotten (503). While almost all archival documents do the work of both, this blog will particularly focus on how a journal acts as a type of medium to convey these abstracts and will particularly refer to the journal kept by a World War I soldier, John Moses Stickney or, better addressed as Jack Stickney.

Below I attached a picture of what the exterior of Stickney’s diary looked like. As you might see, it is a really small compact one. In the context of the deadliest war in history, one might wonder how did anyone have enough state of mind to make everyday entries in pages that barely would fit a hundred words and why. O’Toole and Carter argue that archives can “create” what an oral narrative might not (235; 222). That the narrative will be forgotten if it is not “created and kept” (Carter 222). Hence, we can look at Stickney’s diary keeping as a form of creation of archival material in order to be remembered. This we can see as creating “memory” and forming and leaving behind an “indentity”.

At the end of his diary, he wrote what seemed like a poem under the headline “Ambition”. It read:

“I’d rather be a Could Be
If I couldn’t be an Are;
For a Could Be is a May Be;
With a chance at touching par.

I’d rather be a Has Been
Than a Might Have Been by far
For a Might Have Been has never been
But a Has was once an Are” (Stickney).

I read this as Stickney’s attempt at escaping “marginalization” and having a strong “voice” in being remembered (Carter 224). As far as I could read into it, it looked as if Stickney did not just want to be added to the list of the millions who died in his time or would die a time after his passing. I speak of Sitckney being “marginalized” (Carter) in the sense that had his documents not been contributed to the archives, he would just be one of the many souls that lost their lives, perhaps only a name in soldier book keeps or similar military documents such as that. According to O’Toole, an archive can hold both “practical” and “symbolic values.” By “practical values” he means simply the record keeping of history, for example, Stickney might have his name recorded in the “Military Service Records” of World War I. “Symbolic values” refer more to the details going deeper than just the obvious (238). In this case, the diary not only shows that a Jack Stickney did exist but also gave an effort to leave a mark in the world behind. This is how Stickney’s diary creates a “societal  memory” (Carter 220) and “indentity” (Carter 221) in the minds of the people in the present.

Overall, the aim of this blog was not only to specify what significance a simple personal thing such as a diary holds as an archive but also to encourage a range of views, the stretch of narratives one document may hold and the importance of noticing them so that any “gaps” (Carter 217) in the knowledge can be identified and redressed for.

 

Work Cited

Carter, Rodney G.S. “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power,         Archival Silences, and Power and Silence”. Archivaria 61, pp.   215-233.

O’Toole, James. “The Symbolic Significance of Archives”. The     American Archivist, Vol. 56, No. 2 1993, pp. 234-255, Society   of  American Archivist, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40293731?   seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

Stickney, John Moses. Stickney Papers. Diary. 1-17. Jack   Stickney Fonds. University of British Columbia Library Rare   Books and Special Collections, Vancouver, Canada.

Villar, Marilia Santanna. “Archives of memory – or Your diary in   good hands”. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro,   http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1517-106X2016000300501&lng=pt&tlng=pt

Despite the significant use of social media to promote mental health awareness, some scholars and many popular sites argue that social media platforms such as Tumblr or Facebook are increasingly being used to “glorify” mental illness. In this blog, I would like to present that, asides from glorification, young people can also use these platforms in order to find a sense of identity and community through a virtual social construct.

A study published by Emily Turner in her journal, “Dissenting Voices” suggested the significant role of social media in glorifying mental illness (qtd. in Jadayal et al. 1). Glorification indicates the showcase of a particular object, person or topic in a more falsely exaggerated way. Youth have started to describe mental illnesses like depression as a “beautiful suffering” says Anne-Sophie Bine from her article, “Social Media Is Redefining ‘Depression’” (qtd. in Jadayal et al. 2). Teens consider themselves to have bipolar disorder as a result of being “moody” (Basu) and anxiety is practically a joke on the internet (Jadayel et al. 8). These trends that seem to simplify such medical issues to mere personality quirks may not only promote mental illness as a fashion statement but may also encourage young people who haven’t yet participated in such activities to pick it up as a type of coping mechanism, says Tanner. (qtd. in Jadayal et al. 2).

However, on a platform as abstract as social media, it is difficult to tell who is romanticizing and who is actually suffering through mental health issues. And where it is arguable that social media imposes many threats to mental health, I would like to see it as a way of youth building their social networks and community and eventually a sense of identity. One way to do this is to be a part of a social group which is a group that members of which have something in common and believe what they have in common is significant. (“Social Groups: Crash Course Sociology #16” 00:00:55-00:01:00). In his article, “How Social Media Helps Teens Cope with Anxiety, Depression, and Self-Harm” Dr. Sameer Hinduja states that teens use social media as a medium to connect with peers or mentors who encourage and inspire them and show them that they are not alone in whatever they are going through. Through media like Tumblr, they do not just gain emotional support but also become more aware of a sociological imagination that they are not the only ones suffering. Sociological imagination is a concept suggested by C.W Mills which describes the feeling of being mutually exclusive from what could be a daily phenomenon of life. By realizing this, teenagers may become encouraged to become supporters than sufferers and this may lead to them building a social community or a social group.

Besides that, social media platforms like Facebook also aid to have more frequent interactions with those social groups and which leads to higher self- esteem and improved psychological well-being (Steinfield, 436). Hence, a growing self-esteem eventually aids a growing sense of identity among teenagers as not someone who is “weak-minded” or “marginalized” but rather they understand that mental illnesses are a big issue and it is okay to be a victim of it and it is okay to seek help for it.

Therefore, despite the obvious negative arguments against social media, we should shine the spotlight from a different angle and consider that such platforms may be used by the millennial as a way to build their social networks and sense of identity.

 

 

 

Works Cited:

      Jadayel, Rola et al. “MENTAL DISORDERS: A GLAMOROUS ATTRACTION ON SOCIAL

MEDIA?” Journal of Teaching and Education, pp. 465-475, University Publications, http://www.universitypublications.net/jte/0701/html/V7NA374.xml

Steinfield, Charles et al. “Social capital, self-esteem, and use of online social network sites:

A longitudinal analysis.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, pp. 434-445, ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0193397308000701

Basu, Rupkatha. “Please, Stop Glorifying Mental Illness.” Thought Catalog. 3 April 2017, https://thoughtcatalog.com/rupkatha-basu/2017/04/please-stop-glorifying-mental-illness/

“Social Groups: Crash Course Sociology #16” Youtube, uploaded by CrashCourse. 3 July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wFZ5Dbj8DA&index=17&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMJ-AfB_7J1538YKWkZAnGA

Hinduja, Sameer. “How Social Media Helps Teens Cope With Anxiety, Depression, and Self-Harm.” Media Literacy Week, Cyberbullying Research Center, https://www.medialiteracyweek.ca/2016/10/how-social-media-helps-teens-cope-with-anxiety-depression-and-self-harm/

Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) with some of my peers in Global Citizens to see an exhibition called “Arts of Resistance” which displayed various artistic mediums that represented the difficult lives of “marginalized communities” and how they used art to show those “times of political turmoil” (Arts Of Resistance, MOA).

One such display was the “Piraq Causa [Who Is To Blame?]”. This particular exhibit brought me back to the idea of how visual forms of life narratives can so broadly capture the story of ones lives in simple ‘cartoon-ish’ paintings but also leave “gaps” for that which we are to assume. It was much like reading Persepolis.

 

  Tablas pintadas (painted boards) was a traditional way of documenting everyday life activities of the Sarhuino community living in the region of Ayacucho (Sørensen, “Journal of the Society for Latin American Studies”). After the insurgence of the “Shining Path” (a guerilla fighting communist group), some Sarhuinos documented a sort of testimony of twenty-four such tablas pintadas which they named “piraq causa” which roughly translates to “Who Is To Blame?”
When the “Shining Path” first entered Ayacucho, Peru, they were able to win the people’s support. This was primarily because the indigenous communities were very much overlooked by the government, often conquered by more powerful colonizing groups. However, the Peruvian government soon took charge against the revolutionary movements of the guerrilla fighters and eventually it was the people of Peru who got caught in between in the conflict. Hence, the name of the series literally asks, “Who Is To Blame?” because the Sarhuino survivors wonder: Are they to blame for supporting a side in the first place? Is the government to blame? Or perhaps the “Shining Path”? (Sunnucks)

The “piraq causa” series can also be related back to something I learned in Sociology 100 called the “Conflict Theory”. The conflict theory argues that society consists of groups with conflicting interests and values. According to Karl Marx’s, all history is a history of class struggles where you have the oppressed and the oppressor (14). As in this case, the oppressor could be either the “Shining Path” whose interest was to overthrow the state (Shining Path, Wikipedia.org) or the Peruvian government who wanted to abolish the revolutionary movement by the group. And quite obviously the oppressed were the people of Peru, mainly the poor indigenous people whose only interests were to have a proper living standard.

Lastly, I want to talk about how this form of artwork is very similar to that of Persepolis. The paintings are very childishly drawn but still hold meaning. The painting also speaks of things that aren’t necessarily painted but is up to our imagination to assume. Such as are the people being tied to walls in one of the boards really the enemy? Because at that time of the conflict, it became a sort of a blur as to who was who. It is also said that prior to the entrance of the “Shining Paths”, there were already conflicts between communities regarding topics like land, adultery, etc. (Sørensen, “Journal of the Society for Latin American Studies”). So, how much of the conflicts in the painting are true? Is this the collective memory of all Sarhuino people or just an assumption made by one?

These sort of life narratives give rise to questions that need to be answered even in the contemporary political world and perhaps these art forms exist to provide us with those answers. Perhaps all we need to do is see what we believe and believe what we don’t see.

————————————————————————————–

Works Cited

          Sørensen, “Journal of the Society for Latin American Studies” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/blar.12094 . Accessed 30 September 2018.

“Shining Path” Wikipedia.org.

          Karl Marx. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848.

Sunnucks, Laura Osorio. Arts of Resistance. Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, BC. 17 September 2018.