SINGING IN THE RAIN

This entry is the second part of the section entitled "The Eternal Artist" in my essay "Yes, He Makes Movies", devoted to Mike's contribution to film. It deals with Mike as the heir of Charlie Chaplin : a satirist.

(above : Machine raging against Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times")

Like Chaplin, Mike chose humor as his main weapon :

"Political humor is a good way of providing a message -- as opposed to giving a sermon." - Michael Moore

http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/celebrities/michael-moore-faq/part1.html

In spite of being a preacher, Mike is a satirist first. He’s a satirist first BECAUSE he’s a preacher.

For satire alone provides the necessary distance to get intellectually angry. That is, angry for good.

Brecht, for one, had noticed that the phenomenon of catharsis generated by tragedy according to Aristotle was in fact a nuisance : people get stirred, people get moved, people cry… and then people forget. Whereas the hidden coldness of satire, behind its cool, deadpan LOOKS, drops the anger like a stone to the bottom in the well of your heart…

…and you don’t forget….

World: Canadian Bacon was the funniest film at the festival, at the same time one of the most serious. How does humor fit into political action?

Moore: First of all, I think humor is a very effective means of communicating a message to people. I think we've all seen that too many people are turned off by the sort of soapbox kind of preaching. That stuff's good when you're preaching to the converted, but when you're trying to convert, for whatever reason, wherever we're at now in 1995 in America, it doesn't work very well. So I decided to use my sense of humor as a means to affect change, to get people thinking about the issues.

Underlying the humor though is a very serious point, and underneath that is a lot of anger. I think some of the best comedy comes from people who are very angry about the situations they see in the world and the humor sort of acts as a means to deal with the frustration of living in the society in which we live.

http://www.pww.org/archives95/95-09-23-3.html