Word: shocked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even on radio, where the most common four-letter vulgarisms are verboten, a host of popular "shock jocks" consider giving offense is Job One. Their humor is guy talk, kid division. The victims of their gags are familiar from the schoolyard: racial and sexual minorities, scheming females, body parts and bodily functions. A few years back, a D.C. radio host was censured for observing, on Martin Luther King Day, that "killing four more" would get + Americans the rest of the week...
Jokes like these gave the FCC an excuse to muscle and perhaps muzzle the shock jocks, notably New York City's morning maven Howard Stern. Was Stern hurt by this notoriety? Not at all: his show is now aired also in Philadelphia and Washington. Turn him on, and odds are you can't gulp down your morning coffee before you hear him say "penis." Last year, in the guise of his comic superhero Fartman, he placed a call to Iran and mercilessly berated the poor Shi'ite who picked up the phone. Fans of shock-jock jokery highly prize this...
...well, but all too often everything else -- from a politician's promise to the Chernobyl disaster -- is so much show biz, ironized with shrugs and sick jokes. Today's children were bred in this atmosphere. With many of their parents past caring, how can the kids not be past shock...
That has always been the role of art: to shock, not just to ratify the prejudices of the generation in power. And no jolt is greater than the shock of the new. Original styles almost always look crude and excessive: Picasso's in painting ("My three-year-old could draw better!"), Brando's in acting ("He's got marbles in his mouth!"), Elvis' in music ("Photograph him from the waist up!"), Bruce's in comedy ("Book him!"). In their first outrageousness, these artists seemed to signal the end of the world; instead, they were heralding a new one. "A creator...
Gorbachev's announcement last week that he was postponing shock therapy for the Soviet economy -- the core of the remedy recommended by Hewett and Hornik -- has redoubled doubts about whether the U.S.S.R. will make it. Still, nobody is counting Gorbachev out yet. "We can't just take what he is saying, that he won't let prices float, at face value," says Hewett. "This is not the kind of thing that you announce with a lot of lead time." In the end, the Soviet President -- whom Hewett calls a "man I would not want to play poker with" -- may well...