What is American Culture?

so when you live in America or in my case America jr. it is easy to assume that every country in the world has a more interesting culture than your own a lot of Americans are very interested in the cultures of Asia and Europe for instance because those cultures seem so much more rich and authentic and I totally get it I mean I've been pretty fascinated with Japanese culture for a while now I particularly like decoding all of the little cultural references and in jokes that they stick in Japanese pop culture but you know when you learn to distance yourself from your own culture a bit you can find it every bit as fascinating I mean American pop culture is just as crammed with cultural references and in jokes too well some of it is at least the reason why American entertainment can sometimes seem a little bit culturally bland these days is because so much of American pop culture is now being designed with global audiences in mind and what this means is that there is a lot of pressure on American content creators these days to sort of tone down the American cultural references in their TV shows or movies or games or whatever so that they are not too exotic or confusing to consumers in foreign lands this is a big reason why modern Hollywood makes so much action fantasy type stuff this kind of thing tends to be the least grounded in American culture and is thus the easiest to export to other places pop culture from say France doesn't really have this problem because French creators just assume that their stuff isn't going to be seen by anyone other than other French people anyway today I just wanted to do a fun little video in which I offer my personal salute to a couple of TV shows and games and songs that are just unapologetically crammed with American culture a couple of works that I have always appreciated both as someone who likes good content and also is a big fan of the many things that make America America they are all comedy based which isn't a coincidence he tends to be one of the most culturally particular genres of entertainment just given the large role that social satire plays in effective humor which brings us to our first case study in my opinion The Simpsons is not only the greatest show in the history of television but the greatest piece of specifically American pop culture ever made this is because the Simpsons is a show that only exists to tell stories of American life through distinctly American characters and settings and themes Springfield might be a goofy place but in many ways it is still the most deliberately American place on television over the course of the incredible thirty years that it's been on the air there is basically no aspect of American society or culture that the Simpsons has not satirized in some way in fact I even wrote a whole article celebrating this for national review a few years ago so allow me to quote myself The Simpsons have dabbled in every American sport from company softball to YMCA basketball to lady's bodybuilding they've sampled indigenous food from five-alarm chili at outdoor cook offs to pizza fingers at a family restaurant boasting good folk good fun they've known hillbillies hippies disco studs and oil barons and have been preached at by Jehovah's Witnesses tent preachers and a Scientology esque cult they visited Hollywood New York and Amish country they've joined the Navy gone trick-or-treating and been abducted by flying saucers they've attended PTA meetings elected congressman taken membership in the NRA and been infiltrated by Eastern Bloc spies on that note an interesting thing that I have found during my travels around the world is how often foreigners will be familiar with some American thing because they saw it on The Simpsons so I'll be like have you ever tried to sloppy joes and they'll be like no but I think I saw it on The Simpsons once I mean after over 600 episodes the show is basically the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia of Americana at this point The Simpsons model has of course been copied by a number of other fanatically similar American cartoons like king of the hill and South Park and Family Guy and Bob's Burgers and the rest they are all just as aggressively American and there are themes and settings in fact I know that a lot of people would argue that king of the hill in South Park actually became quite a bit better than the Simpsons that's satirizing American culture as the years went on these sort of addled focused cartoon sitcoms have all been super popular in America but they have been famously hard to market in other countries just because of all of the American cultural knowledge you have to have to appreciate the jokes did you know they once tried to dub king of the hill into French and turn it into a show aboot Quebec yeah that went to boot as well as you might expect but I suspect that this is one of the reasons why American animation studios seem to have a lot more interest in making sort of fantasy based cartoons these days like Rick and Morty or Adventure Time although I guess Bojack horseman is pretty American so this is one of my most prized possessions it is a complete set of cards from the nineties irritable top game Illuminati a friend gave them to me for Christmas a while ago knowing that I am very into this sort of thing Illuminati is made by Steve Jackson the guy behind the munchkin series if you're familiar with that it is a kind of magic the gathering s game where you are trying to take over the world by conquering all of these different subcultures in American society as the game's name suggests it is based on the popular Illuminati conspiracy theory which holds that the guiding force behind all of the world's events is orchestrated by a secret shadowy elite now this is unto itself a delightfully American premise for a game because of course there is nothing more American than a good conspiracy theory but what really makes this game a fantastic piece of American culture is all of the individual cards both the group's you're trying to conquer and all of the various items and status effects pretty much all of them feature some clever satirical reference to some aspect of 80s or 90s era American culture not just conspiracy theory culture although there is a lot of that with cards like cattle mutilators and Rosicrucian and the 18 and a half minute gap but there's also a lot of cards that just portray the sort of ugly fringe of American society in general only lightly exaggerated like ditto heads or the Church of violent ology or the Fred Birch Society or the nephews of God and there are some shout outs to some infamously wacky episodes like bite the wax tadpole or ketchup is a vegetable now a lot of this is relatively high minded stuff pretty deep dives into like American politics and religion and civic society in general and unfortunately in 2018 they rebooted and re-released the game significantly simplifying or eliminating a lot of these cultural references in order to make the game more broadly accessible particularly to younger players which makes sense from a business perspective but as a fan of American culture it has really made me appreciate this all the more as far as the most American video game goes I have two picks the first is a game that is in some ways quite fanatically similar to Illuminati and that is Sam and Max hit the road a 1993 PC point-and-click adventure game made by LucasArts so Sam and Max our characters made by a cartoonist named Steve Purcell who is a big fan of kitschy Americana they are two animal detectives who Tromp around middle America solving crimes they've been in comic books and they had their own animated TV series for a while but it is the 1993 PC adventure game that really made them famous the plot of salmon max hit the road is that you are traveling across the u.s. trying to rescue a frozen Bigfoot who has been kidnapped from a state fair by an evil country and western singer named Conroy bumpkin and the America you travel across is depicted as this kind of bizarre collection of tourist traps and identical chain restaurants and washed up celebrities and of course conspiracy theorists I've heard that this game actually has quite a bit of a cult following in England just because of how well it conforms to a certain romantic notion that some British people have of the United State it's this idea of America as like this huge colorful country full of all of these charmingly eccentric hyper individualistic people each pursuing their own weird little dreams with stubborn earnestness like the woman running the roadside stand of vegetables that look like celebrities nexium I want to talk about is the clay fighter series which is sort of a weird choice given that it has a bit more of a fantastical setting than some of the other things we've been talking about the clay fighter games are also not really regarded as being very good but I'm trying to do some cultural analysis here not game review time with Jake Baldy no anyway the three clay fighter games are supposed to be a satire on the American fighting game craze of the 1990s especially the Mortal Kombat series which was a huge American cultural phenomenon in its own right and as an additional gimmick the games were all animated in claymation style which was a kind of plaster scene based stop-motion animation technique that had become quite the hot thing on American television in the 80s and 90s largely due to the pioneering work of the late great American animator will Vinton but it is the clay fighter characters who make the game most interesting as an artifact of culture since the clay fighter games are just kind of a work of broad satire the characters don't really have a lot of purpose behind them they're basically just eclectic goofy caricatures of various random things from American culture so there is bad mr. frosty who is of course a take-off on Frosty the Snowman hoppy who is like an Easter Bunny crossed with the Terminator and there's an evil clown and Elvis impersonator the Statue of Liberty there's a ghost guy called Iggy bought clay if you get that literary reference there's even this one guy called Kung Pao who is a sort of racist caricature of a Bruce Lee type [Music] because it wouldn't truly be American with a would at least a little bit of casual racism right I really love this kind of randomness as a window into culture when you try to come up with a big list of random things what you wind up with is often a very big satisfying clump of cultural in jokes like a big satisfying clump of clay okay and lastly I wanted to talk about two silly little songs the first is Christmas is interesting by Jonathan Coulton who is a very talented comedy musician if you've never heard his work before I highly recommend that you do I think a lot of comedy musicians have a reputation for being quite right and cringy but Jonathan Coulton achieves that rare feat of writing songs that are hilarious but also good music that's worth listening to anyway Christmas is interesting is a very clever song because it basically just consists of a string of sort of non sequitur references to popular American Christmas theme TV shows and stories the joke is basically that a lot of the stuff in American Christmas themed entertainment doesn't really seem all that Christmasy if you take it out of its original context you have put on your feet pajamas it's time for a long winters now there's a knock on the door and a stranger there and wants you to sit on his lap it takes your watch and it gives you a hairbrush your wife gets a wig on a chain he says he can't stick cuz he's gonna way to go and a stunning array so just in that opening line alone you can see we have a reference to a Christmas story a visit from st. Nicholas mall Santas and the Gift of the Magi I also really like just how meta all of this is because you have Jonathan Coulton pointing out the weirdness of American Christmas culture while simultaneously participating in that most American Christmas tradition of all releasing a redundant Christmas single so the second song is the T by beloved YouTube personality Danny Gonzalez I've become a big fan of his channel recently he basically just dunks on other youtubers and weird websites and stuff like that but he also has very unique and charming personality that makes him a lot of fun to spend time with he is also a very talented comedy musician and I think the T is his greatest work it is a romantic song that he sings with fellow youtuber Ally Fitz but the joke is that all the lyrics are like painfully trendy American slang terms from 2019 so it's a really obnoxious satire of pop musicians who are trying way too hard to be cool and down with the kids the single is so dense with slang in fact that I think you have to listen to it a few times before you even get a sense of what they're saying I wrote this song so you would know that I stand I stay trying to turn you from my beta my fam my fan never really had a thing for locals but low-key I think that we're hike Eagles or at least I had to listen to it a few times but then again I am getting pretty old so here is my two part parting question for you Americans can you think of another good example of a piece of American pop culture entertainment that is equally intensely American in the same way some of this stuff is some movie or TV show or game or something that is equally reliant on American cultural references to work doesn't have to be comedy in fact it would be interesting to see if you could come up with an example from a non comedy genre and for foreigners do you have an example of some piece of American entertainment that you have found confusing or alienating or off-putting just because of how specifically American it is something you look at and think I just don't get this let me know in the comments do not forget to smash that like button and I will see you all next week [Music]

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 137,634

Rating: 4.8650489 out of 5

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Id: HfZmC-jLTIg

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020