{"id":2346523,"date":"2024-09-26T23:23:01","date_gmt":"2024-09-27T03:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/sigh-everybodys-a-smartass-washington-examiner\/"},"modified":"2024-09-26T23:26:04","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T03:26:04","slug":"sigh-everybodys-a-smartass-washington-examiner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/sigh-everybodys-a-smartass-washington-examiner\/","title":{"rendered":"Sigh, everybody\u2019s a smartass &#8211; Washington Examiner"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fsigh-everybodys-a-smartass-washington-examiner%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2346523&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The article discusses the shift \u2064in storytelling approaches \u2062in contemporary media, particularly emphasizing how \u200bhumor has become increasingly prevalent in\u200d genres \u200cwhere seriousness or tension might otherwise\u2062 dominate. The author reflects on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/why-this-average-american-is-voting-for-donald-trump\/\" title=\"Why This Average American Is Voting for Donald Trump\">personal experiences<\/a>\u200b in Hollywood and the evolution of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/comer-on-hunter-biden-suing-irs-irony-of-all-this-is-breathtaking\/\" title=\"Hunter Biden suing the IRS: The irony is breathtaking.\">writing styles<\/a>, noting that\u200d modern\u2062 writers often prioritize comedic elements over narrative depth. This trend culminates in a storytelling imbalance where jokes can \u200cundermine suspense and emotional investment,\u2063 leaving audiences questioning the stakes involved.<\/p>\n<p>The piece uses &#8220;Star Trek&#8221; as a case study, \u200ccontrasting the original series with \u200bthe newer &#8220;Strange\u200c New Worlds.&#8221; The\u200b original was imbued with a serious and respectful portrayal of its characters,\u2063 often reflecting real-life experiences of its creators, while the new\u200b iteration leans\u200b towards a lighter, quippy tone \u2064that may\u200c detract from \u200bthe gravity of its narrative.\u200b The article suggests that \u200bthis change \u2063reflects\u2064 a broader cultural\u200c trend in entertainment, where the desire for witty dialogue overshadows the need for\u2063 meaningful storytelling, resulting in characters that feel less authentic and more\u200c like self-aware caricatures.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<p><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><?xml encoding=\"utf-8\" ?><\/p>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><span class=\"tdb-mobile-menu-button\"><i class=\"tdb-mobile-menu-icon td-icon-mobile\"><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><span class=\"tdb-header-search-button-mob dropdown-toggle\" data-toggle=\"dropdown\"><i class=\"tdb-mobile-search-icon td-icon-search\"><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><span class=\"tdb-mobile-menu-button\"><i class=\"tdb-mobile-menu-icon td-icon-mobile\"><\/i><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\">\n<div class=\"tdb-drop-down-search\" aria-labelledby=\"td-header-search-button\">\n<div class=\"tdb-drop-down-search-inner\">\n<form method=\"get\" class=\"tdb-search-form\" action=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/\"><\/form>\n<div class=\"tdb-aj-search\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/#\" role=\"button\" aria-label=\"Search\" class=\"tdb-head-search-btn dropdown-toggle\" data-toggle=\"dropdown\"><i class=\"tdb-search-icon td-icon-search\"><\/i><\/a><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\">\n<div class=\"tdb-sacff-txt\">Magazine &#8211; Life &amp; Arts <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\">\n<h1 class=\"tdb-title-text\">Sigh, everybody&rsquo;s a smartass<\/h1>\n<div><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-title-line\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\">\n<p>During the years I kicked around <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/hollywood\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>Hollywood<\/a> grabbing writing gigs here and there, I would attend a weekly theater gathering &mdash;&nbsp;Tuesdays@9, produced by the Naked Angels. Writers would bring in about 10 minutes of material to workshop with actors who turned up to get in a little scene work. The whole event was an excuse to socialize and maybe find a date, but I&rsquo;d bring pages now and then. I never delivered a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/comedy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>comedic piece<\/a> on such a Tuesday night. I never welcomed so much as a smirk. But that made me the exception. It seemed every writer mounting a brief production brought in comedy, be it a complete sketch or pages of a feature or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/tv\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>TV pilot<\/a>. Whether offering parody, satire, meet-cutes, or social commentary, every writer but one came for laughs.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"article-paywall\">\n<p>That insatiable need for giggles infects our 21st century storytelling. Whether it&rsquo;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/movies\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>movies<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/tv\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>television<\/a>, or online productions, today&rsquo;s authors, writers, producers, and directors want to be amusing as quickly as possible. The writing industry remains dead set against allowing sobriety, suspense, or despair without laying in a one-liner or a comeback as soon as possible. It doesn&rsquo;t matter if that joke lands, as long as it immediately novocaines the ache. Nobody wants to be a storyteller. They all want to be smartasses.<\/p>\n<p>A quip to break narrative tension briefly is as old as popular entertainment. Across genres, <em>Casablanca<\/em> to <em>Lawrence of Arabia<\/em> to <em>Aliens<\/em> to <em>Silence of the Lambs <\/em>to<em> Zero Dark 30 <\/em>to<em> Oppenheimer<\/em>, skilled writers and directors allow a brief laugh to let the audience blow off a little steam before the onscreen tension builds toward another crescendo. Think of <em>Lord of the Rings<\/em>, in its film adaptation, which sees the dwarf Gimli turned into a very deadly sort of clown. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m wasted on cross-country. We dwarves are natural sprinters,&rdquo; he mugs, the screenwriters snarking away the grimness of the heroes&rsquo; mission. When James Bond fires a spear gun through an assassin and deadpans, &ldquo;I think he got the point,&rdquo; the viewer can smile or groan before settling in for the next threat.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In 2024, storytellers are so eager to impress one another with their Kevin Smith\/Joss Whedon\/Kevin Williamson-trained dialogue needlepoint that they get the process backward. The action or horror sequences interrupt the jokes until they overlap so severely they obfuscate the narrative stakes. The audience member ends up asking, or subconsciously wondering, &ldquo;If they&rsquo;re joking around and not concerned, why the hell should I care?&rdquo;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>A prime petri dish for examining this decomposition of storytelling is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/star-trek\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>Star Trek<\/a><em>.<\/em> The longstanding franchise reaches across different media over more than 50 years as an unmistakable <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/pop-culture\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>pop culture <\/a>lodestone. Everyone&rsquo;s favorite Federation&rsquo;s sensibilities evolved over the decades to fit the next generation.<\/p>\n<p>The significantly longer than five-year mission began with <em>Star Trek: The Original Series<\/em> on NBC (1966-68) and now warps onward with <em>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds<\/em> on Paramount+. These test subjects are perfectly parallel. Both productions feature Starfleet personnel aboard the <em>USS Enterprise<\/em> exploring the stars and fending off endless alien threats.<\/p>\n<p>The original show was conceived and produced by <a href=\"http:\/\/t\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>Gene Roddenberry<\/a>, a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/world-war-ii\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>World War II<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/veterans\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>veteran<\/a> pilot who flew 89 combat missions. The writers, directors, cast, and crew Roddenberry hired were either veterans themselves or people unavoidably touched by the war 20 years prior &mdash; not to mention the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/korean-war\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>Korean War<\/a> and the looming <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/vietnam-war\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title>Vietnam conflict<\/a>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The updated <em>Strange New Worlds<\/em> was created by Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet. They&rsquo;re each accomplished Hollywood professionals, but the closest any of them, and the writers they hire, ever came to life and death, blood, and guts struggle is the Paramount commissary on Taco Tuesday. As a result of this stark (or snark) difference in developmental culture, the characters of 1960s Trek became immortal. We cared about them and remember them fondly. Whether exploring a solar system or locked in combat, the bridge of their original <em>Enterprise<\/em> was serious as a heart attack. No matter how corny the 1960s production values looked, scenes played out with committed, sometimes grim, military protocol.<\/p>\n<p>Today&rsquo;s fictional starship loads up on our titular smartass crew members. They crack wise in battle. They ridicule their captain. They spout casual profanity on the bridge. Every other remark is an acerbic cry for attention. They can&rsquo;t help it. Phasers and photon torpedoes aside, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/astronauts-could-be-stuck-in-space-until-next-year-as-boeing-starliner-puts-them-in-horrifying-situation\/\" title=\"Astronauts Could Be Stuck in Space Until Next Year as Boeing Starliner Puts Them in Horrifying Situation\">crew&#038;rsquo<\/a>;s constant, narcissistic desire to release their brittle bon mots is the most potent force aboard ship. They all think alike. They all sound alike. They behave under stress in a way we humans seldom manage in survival mode. It never seems real.<\/p>\n<p>With so many of this era&rsquo;s stories and mythology from the Marvel movie craze to over the top action yarns such as the Fast and Furious blurs, the audience can&rsquo;t invest emotionally in characters anymore. The protagonists clearly never believe they&rsquo;re under any genuine threat if they can do standup while fighting for their lives. The villains haven&rsquo;t really thought their dastardly plans through if they stopped to jot down a good zinger. Even as we may be entertained, do we not yearn for the writers to take all of this seriously so we can do the same? Do we not yearn for somebody, somewhere, to take <em>something<\/em> seriously?<\/p>\n<p>The great Aldous Huxley saw this coming. In his <em>Brave New World<\/em>, the conditioned population lived with a constant addiction to Soma &mdash;&nbsp;a mass-produced narcotic promoting contentment and relief from any form of sadness or anxiety. John, the novel&rsquo;s ill-fated hero, grew up outside the dystopia and knows the value of everything that isn&rsquo;t lost in a technology-soaked, insipid, numb existence.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t want comfort,&rdquo; John says in Huxley&rsquo;s stead. &ldquo;I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin. &hellip; I&rsquo;m claiming the right to be unhappy.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>For today&rsquo;s all-too-comfortable writers and storytellers, the very fact that suffering might exist is too uncomfortable to include in their brands of entertainment. Through a chortle at some glib badass, we all suffer for it.<\/p>\n<p><em>John Lewinski<\/em>, <em>MFA, is a writer based in Milwaukee.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"tdb-block-inner td-fix-index\"><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sigh, everyone\u2019s a wisecracker. While working in Hollywood, I attended a weekly theater event called Tuesdays@9, where writers shared short pieces with actors for feedback<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3277,"featured_media":2346524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/culture-john-lewinski-star-trek-comedy-092524C6-1024x591.webp","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[538],"tags":[21593,41821,32076],"class_list":["post-2346523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-washington-examiner","tag-sigh","tag-smartass","tag-washington-examiner"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/culture-john-lewinski-star-trek-comedy-092524C6-1024x591.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3277"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2346523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2346524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2346523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2346523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2346523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}