This Won't Work

See what I did there? Or rather, see what I didn't do there? I had a great opportunity to make a twerking pun, but I didn't take it. I didn't take it, because the topic's really been taken too far.  We'd already taken it too far a couple of weeks back, but I finally snapped when I read today's comic strips.  Yes, the Capp Gap has gone by, and now we're reading comic strips making twerking jokes.

Now you may wonder: Jason, you appreciate satire - and you hate pop culture - so wouldn't you want lots of humour about a popular (and silly) trend?  Well yes, I do like jokes about popular culture, but hardly any jokes are actually about twerking. Mostly they fall into one of two categories:

• Generic references to the new tend without any apparent knowledge of it. These are the late night monologue jokes for grandparents who have heard the term but don't know what it means. E.g. "President Obama and John Boehner met to discuss the budget, but they didn't make much progress because they spent most of the time twerking!"
• Fearful references to the trend as something you wouldn't want to see. They assume you know what it is, or at least have decided you're not comfortable with it. E.g. "I missed the Nobel Prize ceremonies this week, but that's alright.  Who wants to see the opening number with Richard Dawkins twerking?"

So yes, I welcome real jokes about twerking.  Ridicule the idea that a woman miming sex using items she appears to have found in a younger sister's closet is supposed to be sexy.  Make fun of how were getting worked up over badly simulated sex twenty years after the Internet went mainstream.  Heck, even make fun of that poor middle-aged mother trying desperately to keep up with the times who confuses the words "twerk" and "tweet" at the worst possible moment.  But let's forget the brain-dead fill-in-the-blanks jokes. They are, to satire, what twerking is, to sex.