That's Not Funny

A couple weeks ago, there appeared on Cracked.com an article by Daniel O'Brien entitled I Can't Tell If the World Is Being Serious Anymore (link below):

http://www.cracked.com/blog/i-cant-tell-if-world-being-serious-anymore/

In short, do you ever see something that just makes you think, or even say, "Is that for real?" I get that a lot, more and more every day it seems. There are a couple prominent reasons for this, mostly that A) we as a culture are completely over-saturated with sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek remarks, and B) we still feel compelled to at least attempt to take everything seriously. But Ryan, I can hear you shouting at your screen, those two things run totally counter to one another! Of course they do, my friends, and that is exactly why it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern the legitimate from the farcical. It's like trying to force your eyes to look in two different directions at once; you can't do it, so you have to choose. This is either serious or it's not. This used to be okay, but the line is becoming blurred. As Mr. O'Brien points out, we now have to decide if Donald Trump or Sarah Palin is seriously going to run for President of this country, when we've got competing concepts vying for leadership in our brains. The media is trying to convince us that yes, these people are deserving of the sort of attention that is granted to actual politicians, while our common sense is screaming that these people can't even keep their crappy reality shows afloat, how could anybody actually believe that they could do any better for an entire country? Unfortunately, far too many people will assume that the collective media couldn't possibly make such an egregious mistake, so they go with that because hey, that way they won't have to actually think about it. Consequently, the rest of us are left dumbfounded that such debates even exist.

For my part, I tend to notice ridiculous creations that somehow not only find their way to the market, but actually sell in quantities significant enough that I have to re-stock them at work. Exhibit A:

http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Iron-Man-2-Edition/dp/B002VECGUU

Yes, that really is what it appears to be, the board game Operation with an Iron Man theme. When I saw that on the shelf, I actually said out loud, "Are you fucking serious?" I'm ashamed to be part of a society that looks at the already tremendous wall of board games that can be found at any department store and thinks, You know what's missing from this? A game where you operate on Tony Stark! There are a lot of very superfluous things floating around out there, and perhaps worse, a lot of things that just scream MONEY GRAB. This is one of those things that will ultimately drift under the radar of things that are laughably absurd, just because there are so many bigger, flashier, louder and more expensive things with similar amounts of absurdity, but to me, this in some way represents the zenith of the mountain (or the bottom of the pit, depending on your perspective) with regard to the ceaseless garbage that is the primary export of the United States. Of course, I've thought this before, and somehow it manages to keep getting more appalling. And people wonder why I'm so cynical--it's because the things that are meant to be humorous have become formulaic and repetitive, and the things that are supposed to be serious are just a joke.