Comedy, in particular, is like stage magic. You have complete control, you know exactly what you’re doing, and you’re pulling tricks. You’re misdirecting, and you’re setting things up and paying them off, and moving them back around and surprising people, and then they laugh. And if you’re making a horror film, they shriek.
It’s dangerous. I don’t know how else to describe it. I think it’s dangerous. It’s not dangerous if it’s done just for thrills or laughs. But what’s happened is everybody has caught on. So politics is now nothing but weaponized narrative. That’s all it is.
And advertising figured out how to use narrative to sell you things you didn’t need. My favorite example is the engagement ring. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, there was an engagement ring, and it was a diamond. I heard that story and thought, well, that’s just the way it’s been. But no! The De Beers Company invented the diamond ring as part of an advertising campaign in the 1920s. Diamonds were kind of shitty and useless before then; nobody cared about them, and they’re not even rare.