More Cowbell

We live in a Golden Age for small breweries.  All it took was getting rid of a few out dated laws.  And tightening up a few that were too lax.  If you are going to have one beer instead of three or four you want it to be a good one.

I ran across this on the shelf of a local supermarket.  The oddly named town of Bloomer is about 15 miles away, and as you might guess from the theme is in the middle of dairy country.  There is lots of great art associated with small breweries.  I admire many examples even in style of suds I don't personally care for.  Technology likely helped with this bit of artistic expression...with modern software programs you can really do some astonishing things on a DIY basis.  They remind me more than a little of album art, back when you actually went to a record store and bought large, fragile discs that you put on something called a "record player".

It got me thinking.  And I've decided that for artistic expression generally we are living in a Leaden Age.  And the example shown above is both an exception and a confirmation of this.

The "Cowbell" reference is to a Saturday Night Live sketch from 21 years ago.  Which was referencing the recording of "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult 24 years before that.  I quit watching SNL circa 1980, and have not missed it a bit.  But it is still a sort of cultural touchstone, something that many people will recognize as a common experience.

And like so much of our pop culture it has been looking backwards for a long time.  Examples abound.  Peter Jackson has just released a retrospective of the Beatles.  Many of the popular movies of the last decade have been based on pulp comic books of the 1960's which themselves are echoes of a decade or so earlier.  I don't spend a lot of time listening to the radio when I drive but the dial is cluttered with "oldies" stations playing the music of my younger days.  It is almost as soporific as the mellow voiced NPR stations.  Genuinely new creations in TV/Movies/Music?  Hard to think of many outside the spectrum of stuff that was simply too crude and vulgar in an earlier and more civilized age. 

So what's going on here?  Why is a tongue in cheek reference in 2021 coming to us from a song 45 years old via the intermediate step of a buffoonish TV show that stopped being funny a generation ago?

Some would argue that stories have never been original, that there are a limited number of archetypes - seven seems to be the most common count - that just keep being recycled again and again.  The Hero's Journey,  Rebirth, Rags to Riches, The Quest, and so forth.  Comedy is a fairly broad category within this, many stock characters going back to Greek Drama.  

The picture above has a tongue in cheek depiction of Will Farrell in the SNL skit.  Here's a still:

I consider it a fair question: what sort of stock character, or archetype, is Will Farrell?

You could consider him a Jester.  This term for an itinerant clown, or fool, only goes back to the Middle Ages.  But there was an equivalent in Roman times, the balatrones.  These were performers who would entertain at the tables of the wealthy.  The term may derive from a similar word meaning the bleating of sheep.

Or as long as you were all the way back to the Empire you could consider the matter of buffoons.  Buffoon is a great word, one with lots of history and offshoots.  We get it from the French Bouffon, but it goes back to Latin where it was buffare.  In the Roman Theater this was a character who would puff out his cheeks in a comical way.  Possibly after being kneed in the groin or some such.  Comedy does not change that much over time.  It also gives us Bufonidae, the taxonomic designation of toads, who indeed do puff themselves up.

I'm not sure if Mr. Farrell's exposed and rather puffy midsection in the above is an intentional nod to the Buffares of Ancient Rome, but I suspect it is not.

Perhaps with so much going back to Roman times I should be expecting less in the way of original entertainment.  Anybody up for proposing totally new stock characters and/or plot devices from the last, oh, 50 years or so?