I’m guessing you meant incompatible here.
I’m not, but my wife is.
I personally attribute its lapse to the scene in Airplane!. You know the one.
I’m sure there’s a name for it but I call this cliche the “Oppressed-Minority Childhood-Trauma Memory Buzzkill Soliloquy”. It can be performed by black, gay, Jewish, American Indian, Vietnamese or any other minority and can happen in a dramatic movie but is worse when it’s in a comedy. They’ve been joking around with their mainstream WASP best friend and the atmosphere is kind of lighthearted until the subject of intolerance towards their particular minority status comes up with WASP Best Friend clearly making light of or not understanding the gravity of prejudice. That’s when the Minority Character says “Yeah… I know… I used to think it was no big deal” and then tells the story (at it’s worst sad music is playing) about how they lost their innocence as a child when they were beaten/set on fire/saw their mother beheaded/pelted with rocks and garbage/forced to eat their own child or whatever (something traumatic) and usually while somebody they thought was a (white) friend looked on or participated. “And that’s when I realized… it does matter…”.
I’m not saying that minorities don’t have bad memories of childhood or haven’t encountered prejudice in their past and maybe even had to grow up quicker or witness/experience violence, BUT the cliche is usually unfunny camp in its overplayed earnesty and “here it comes” paint by the numbers delivery and like as not by a screenwriter who probably has encountered no such thing in their own life and are, consciously or sub-, copying the other times it’s been used. And of course it always makes their friends see them- and themselves- in a new light.
Sound familiar?
I can think of once when the above (minority soliloqy) was actually parodied. It was in an episode of Barney Miller where Harris (Ron Glass’s character) is drunk, furious, and newly bankrupt after being sued for libel by an ambulance chaser who claims he was maligned by a character in Harris’s unsuccessful novel. He’s wallowing in self pity and when Barney says “we’re you’re friends and understand” he tells them they might work together but they don’t know a think about who he is or what he’s been through.
Harris tells Barney about how he’s fought all of his life, about how his daddy used to fight illness and injustice every day going into the coal mines until the day they carried him away in a coffin, and how “mama had to take in white folks washing to put a little somethin’ on the table for seven hongry children…” and how it made him want to leave the coal mines and all the white kids used to pass him by and call him names having no idea how horrible it was, etc…
Barney is moved and surprised and says, almost tearfully, “I had no idea about any of that…”. Harris admits “I made it up! It’s from a script I’m sending into Palmerstown! My folks owned a liquor store in Cleveland, Barney. Damn, you really don’t listen to a thing I say about myself!”
*Short lived Alex Haley produced Waltons-like drama about two families- one black and one white- in the Depression era south. Mainly remembered, if at all, for being Michael J. Fox’s first major Hollywood job.
: pushes up glasses:
“I…had to stop her from…screaming!”
What time period are you referring to? In the days when women wore corsets, heavy skirts, and layers of clothing, they most certainly did keel over all the time, seeing as how they couldn’t even draw a deep breath and must have been in agonies in hot weather.
I did. Janeway let those two letters get killed to satisfy her own self-righteous posturing. (That, and I’m typing with a busted finger. Can I blame Janeway for that, too?)
Showed up in the third or fourth season of Angel, but it was during a flashback episode set in the 1950s.
It’s not just a cliche of a plot twist but of the entire scene:
A young adult (or older) and his mother are fighting over a man both have known for many years.
Young Adult: I hate him! I hate him and I’m going to kill him!
Mom: No! You can’t do that…
Young Adult: WHY NOT!?
Mom (blurts it out): BECAUSE HE’S YOUR FATHER!!! {turns around, has a mini-breakdown, then says with tears and sobbing} Be-cause he’s… your… [sniff] father…
Young Adult: But… when…bhow…wha…
Mom: It was [short synopsis of when and how and what]… I always wanted to tell you, but I was waiting for sweeps week…
Young Adult looks into space speechless, then calls his mother a whore or some other curse word and leaves, slamming the door on the way out of course. Mother breaks into hysterical sobs.
In science ficition, you rarely have the Man of the Cloth or the Ivory Tower scientist slowly approach the aliens saying, “I come in peace!” only to be wiped out immediately by a death beam.
Similarly, stressful situations no longer cause ex-smokers to resume their habit, thanks to Airplane.
It happened in Mars Attacks though. Saying that, that film was pretty good for subverting the B movie scif-fi genre in general. Usually aliens either say they come in peace or they ruthlessly start gunning people down, not both simultaneously.
Law & Order did this one a couple of years ago. Actually quite a good episode.
Mars Attacks was a parody, it undoubtedly included the scene for parodic effect, not a genuine attempt at drama.
They, or rather he did both in the movie I Come in Peace*. Well, he also chopped people up and injected them with stuff.
- If you never heard of it that’s because it was really forgettable (not to mention stupid) except for a fairly cool alien gun.
That’s true - I forgot it was essentially a spoof (ages since I saw it).
Pedophilia as humor seems to have died out recently. Q.v. jokes in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On and Four Weddings and a Funeral. There are probably many others, especially from the 1960s and 70s.
Just wait 'til the first movie about Obama comes out.
Unfortunately this is still happening all the time.
This had me LOL except I don’t quite get it. If anything, Janeway was prone to overmoralizing to the detriment of getting home.
I don’t remember the jokes involving pedophilia in 4WaaF. Were they actually about pedophilia or was it more along the lines of ‘robbing the cradle’?