11.20.08
LOLcats representing the human spirit
A while back, I wrote about LOLcats being a stand-in for ethnic groups, allowing us the humour of shared stereotypes but without having to saddle an ethnic group with those stereotypes.
Jay Dixit has a more expansive, romantic take on it: LOLcats are stand-ins for humans in all their glory and pathos. By being stand-ins, they are less emotionally dangerous:
By articulating profound feelings through cats and marine mammals speaking garbled English, we’re able to shroud genuine emotions in pseudo-irony — which means those animals can evoke deeper emotions without fear of mockery or cheapness.
I’ll put it more simply: humour is pain at a distance. Using cats (or dogs or walruses) lets us put even more distance between us and the pain. We can thus tolerate situations in LOLcats that would be too painful if it were about humans.
Hmm, I wonder if this is why animated cartoons so frequently starred animals (e.g. Mickey Mouse, Roadrunner, Foghorn Leghorn)…
Tamfang said,
December 2, 2010 at 7:12 pm
And yet Elmer Fudd, a white male human, did most of the suffering in his encounters with nonhumans.