TOWARDS A REASSESSMENT OF THE ROLE OF THE PRIMATE IN BASE COMEDY
From Bedtime for Bonzo to B.J. and the Bear, monkeys have been a source of humor for millions of people. Burning Monkey Solitaire is a low-brow heir to that noble tradition, (and believe us it took nearly a year of development, and the addition of a particularly nasty vomit sound, to get lower-brow than B.J. and the Bear).
Plato, in his lost treatise on humor, is believed to have said, “wanna see me make an elephant?!” but perhaps more pertinently, “The nature of humor often involves making the audience uncomfortable.” Monkeys make us uncomfortable for the simple reason that they are so obviously human and yet, it is also so very nearly acceptable to beat them with a stick in your circus act. There but for the grace of rudimentary tool-using go we and it is because of, rather than in spite of this knowledge, that monkeys are intrinsically funnier than, say, the American Bison.
The combination of monkeys and “gutter” humor in B.M.S is an attempt to more fully explore the tension of where one draws the line; between Man and Simian, laughter and revulsion, between the noble and the base in all of us. We had every expectation of writing a scholarly article on the subject for a prestigious academic journal, but frankly, we kept playing computer solitaire instead. Thus, the idea of B.M.S was born.
We hope you will treat this program with the seriousness its thesis deserves and perhaps gain a deeper understanding of why we, as the most advanced species on this planet, are still inclined to be amused by an orangutan in a leather diaper slipping on a banana peel.
-The Authors.
NOTE: No cartoon monkeys were harmed during the making of this program and we are donating One Dollar of every registration fee to the Sierra Club, so please register!
