Ungrammatical happy times
As I tried to look up the viewing rate of the latest installment of “The Bachelor”, the massively popular reality show about a highly eligible single man choosing his dream girl by way of an elaborate scheme of natural selection, I was directed to an unlikely website thus far unknown to me. It’s called “Happy Times” and dubs itself “the positive online newspaper”. A glance at the headlines confirmed its bold mission: if you report enough happy news, happy times for all will eventually follow. I guess they believe in self-fulfilling prophecies. In any event, given that the record viewing rate for “The Bachelor” is listed among the happy news, I conclude that it is considered an unequivocally positive event. I wonder.
The show was a huge hit, no doubt. But that is due to one reason and one reason only: Vujo Gavric, its verbally challenged star. As “The Bachelor”, Vujo is supposed to have lots of outstanding qualities to help him win the hearts of the female contestants: good looks, charm, a sense of humor, empathy, a good career and what have you. I’ll let you be the judge of that but let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that he did possess these qualities. They are not the ones that turned him into a pop culture icon. What did, were his outrageously non-sensical statements like this one: “I’m looking for that certain something, I can’t really describe it – a woman has to knock me off my feet with something I don’t know yet and that’s it, I’m sold”. There are dozens of these, some of them funny, others outright dim-witted. What’s more, they are all egregiously ungrammatical and littered with errors. Considering that Vujo probably got a little help from a scriptwriter, that’s even more worrying.
Vujo’s not the only one who’s riding on a wave of sympathy thanks to his apparent illiterate ways. Think “Jersey Shore”, “Gordie Shore”, “I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!” or “Duck Dynasty” – the verbal skills displayed in these shows are rudimentary, to say the least. I would surmise that it’s not even because the cast doesn’t know any better – in many cases, cast members are probably asked to perform way below their own standards. Thus, illiteracy has turned into reality TV producers’ favorite device to crank up viewership numbers. Yes, reality TV. It’s supposed to show average people’s behavior in different situations. And the goal is to project an image of “average” that equates to the inability to articulate properly?
It all started with “Forrest Gump”. The illiteracy of Tom Hanks’ character worked perfectly as a dramatic ingredient – it endeared him to us and made his achievements appear even more extraordinary. Maybe reality TV tries to replicate those positive feelings towards its stars. And it succeeds to a certain point: Vujo gained a faithful following over the course of the show, not the least because of his self-deprecating manner. But ultimately, I think it’s just plain wrong to collect brownie points for turning illiteracy into a virtue. Because it’s not. What’s more, only very few people actually speak as portrayed in these shows. So why bother pretending that they do. If anything, it encourages an unwanted reaction. I, for one, don’t want to wake up in “Idiocracy”, that sarcastic vision of the future, in which people only communicate by grunting and belching. It wouldn’t correspond to my concept of “happy times”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk