Two points of exposure to the widespread stoner masculine culture this weekend: Watching Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay and watching some folks play the new Grand Theft Auto, which is based on a fakey version of New York City. It’s probably kind of hard to define the stoner masculine culture, and not everyone who enjoys its products are stoners or even men, but it’s something you know when you see it. It’s products that are designed with this widespread audience in mind: Young men who bask in modern bachelor culture, with heavy doses of porn and marijuana smoking, usually to a soundtrack of alternative rock and hip hop. To say this is not to diss it—this particular cultural strain has many positive values that lead to all sorts of excellent entertainments. There’s a hefty sense of humor and an anarchic spirit that has given us many wonderful things, from video games for adults to the Gen X comedy stylings of everyone from the South Park guys to Mike Judge. It’s a culture that’s become so ubiquitous that many of the things that have spawned from it have only marginal relationships to their origins. Video games for grown-ups have grown so popular that you don’t even think of stoner culture when you think of a game like, say, my obsession Rock Band. Irreverent Gen X comedy has become disassociated from this culture, to the degree that shows like “The Daily Show” can exist without much reference to their “South Park” forebears.
But GTA (a holdout of stoner masculine video game culture even as video games for adults become more popular with everyone else) and stoner comedies have held the torch of political apathy and anti-intellectualism, even as irreverence has become the major mode of discourse in our culture, subsequently becoming less gendered, less associated with pothead-ery, and more political. In a way, deliberate stupidity and political apathy work to shield these products from political complaint—if people wring their hands over cop-killing and car theft in GTA,* you can just wave your hands and say the product is apolitical and thus not part of that discussion. But I honestly think a lot of it was just the fear of blowback from the intended audience, who is presumed to find it annoying to be encouraged to think about politics while playing games or zoning out at the movies.
All of which is why I surprised to see that the new GTA is peppered with political statements about the Bush administration, right wing pundits, conservative moral scolds raising hysteria about sex, and of course the war in Iraq. The radio in the game has satires of Rush Limbaugh and the Focus on Family-type nuts. There’s a cartoon that mocks our imperialist war in Iraq on the main character’s TV set. Maybe I’m missing something, and prior games had such obvious political messages, but I don’t think so. It’s startling, because even though the Bush administration and the war are so unpopular now, it’s still the sort of thing that would make a marketer wring his hands in fear of turning off large parts of the audience.
Of course, there’s no surprise that Harold and Kumar was political, because the first one became a cult hit because it flouted the stoner comedy conventions that demand a political unawareness. The first movie was much better than it had to be, in part because it gleefully celebrated the lives of the non-WASP middle class, and because Harold and Kumar were three steps above most teenage/stoner comedy characters, in terms of being more fully realized as characters and just better acted, to boot. You can tell how good their characterization is in this second movie, that gets big laughs by just showing a brief scene of both characters in college, and the audience howled to see how much they’ve changed. It’s a joke that would have completely fallen flat if you weren’t invested in both characters as real people with real personalities, a really rare thing in these kind of dumbass comedies. Cashing in on what made the first movie a step above, this movie amps up the commentary on stereotypes, applying a broad comedy mentality to everything while still managing to play with these stereotypes in a way that mocks and even occasionally illuminates while avoiding offense. It does help to have the villain be an irredeemable racist.
The movie does take a few cowardly hedges to placate people who might not be as progressive-minded as the ideal audience for the movie. The process that lands Harold and Kumar in Gitmo is an obvious comment on the situation we’ve created there, just rounding people up and tossing them in there with no hope of a fair trial. But they hedge their bets by having their cellmates actually be terrorists, when it might have been the braver choice to show that non-American citizens are also being held despite being innocent. The President is shown to be a callous motherfucker, but also gets let off the hook a little for being presumably too stupid to realize that his sadistic “War on Terra” is wrong. And of course, it’s disappointing to see that while screenwriters were adept as hell at lampooning racial stereotypes, they don’t dare offend their targeted masculine stoner demographic by questioning gender stereotypes too harshly. The half-hearted attempts at giving Kumar’s love interest a somewhat complex personality are riddled with the fear of offending sexist sensibilities. And I really do think it’s more cowardice than ignorance, especially since they seemed to think that someone has to answer for Neil Patrick Harris’s routine use and abuse of women in his path of hellion behavior.
Highly recommended despite the flaws. Their fearlessness in the face of cracking wise about racial stereotypes frees them up to be routinely outrageous in other ways that really put this comedy a step above others like it. Watching it next to hearing these political critiques embedded in GTA made me think that maybe we’re coming to an end of the era where even the most hardcore stoner masculinity products are fearful of coming across as too intelligent or too political. Which is great—for too long, masculinity in our culture, at least this kind of masculinity, has been coded as anti-intellectual. It’s the “reading is for nerds and for girls” argument brought to the 18-45 year-old demographic. But at some point, the tides began to shift. Maybe it’s when Dave Chappelle, who was cooling his heels making stupid entertainments, made his own show that was funny because it was so intelligent.
*I’m avoiding the prostitute-killing because that’s a whole ‘nother discussion. It’s easy to justify it in the game as objectively the same immorality as getting into shoot-outs with the cops, but that ignores the fact that sexual violence is differently coded in our culture. In a world where the DC Madam is dead, and David Vitter is still a Senator, we simply can’t understand the fantasy of sexual violence, especially towards prostitutes, as the same as just rampaging through town running over pedestrians.
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So, the Colbert Report’s Mother is Mary Jane? heartening, that…
Re “In a world where the DC Madam is dead, and David Vitter is still a Senator, we simply can’t understand the fantasy of sexual violence, especially towards prostitutes, as the same as just rampaging through town running over pedestrians.”
…or shooting the cabbie to avoid paying the fare- & then selling the Shield?
On another note, Ken Lay’s dead, & Mike Milken’s teaching school… so will there be a future Reep candidate who runs as “The Atoner”?
^..^
You were, indeed, missing something in the previous games. The radio stations in GTA have almost always had parodies of right-wing talk show hosts. They’re one of the best parts of the game.
The open abuse of the Bush administration, I think, is what really impressed me the most.
Their previous games (at least the two I’ve played) were set in the 80s and 90s. I could be wrong, but I think this is the first GTA to be set in this decade, so direct abuse of the Bush administration would have been an anachronism.
Vice City and San Andreas both had the right-wing talk radio parodies. My husband was fond of just driving around and listening to the insanity play out. I have no idea how many hours of that they recorded for the games, but I don’t think I ever heard more than one or two repeats in either one.
Irreverent Gen X comedy has become disassociated from this culture, to the degree that shows like “The Daily Show” can exist without much reference to their “South Park” forebears.
South Park premiered on August 13, 1997, and The Daily Show started with Craig Kilborn on July 22, 1996… maybe a bad example.
It’s been a while since I played it, but I think I remember some commentary/parody of the mid-90s gansta rap? (Or at least the mentality of movies such as Juice and Menace 2 Society) I’d say the reason that we are seeing more political commentary is because within GTAIV there is a lot more opportunities to make a message.
The President is shown to be a callous motherfucker, but also gets let off the hook a little for being presumably too stupid to realize that his sadistic “War on Terra” is wrong.
I liked the change of pace - although the world of cinema has cooled off on it in recent years, there was a while in which every third movie that came out would feature a George Bush analogue that basically was a Darth Vader-esque child rapist who would take the lust for money to a ridiculous degree. (”Mr. CEO, why did you drown all of those puppies?” “Because I want to make money! You don’t get it, do you? Every action I do is motivated by money, because as president I value making money for the sanctity of human life MAWHAHAHAHA!”)
I think the most hysterical example (in every sense of the word) in recent history was the villains in V for Vendetta. Oh, the guys in Shooter where pretty awful too.
It is nice to see a critique of George Bush that, for once, does not succumb to whiney hyperbole and histrionics. Hell, it’s downright transgressive that they’d present him in something other than a downright negative light.
It’s been a while since I played it, but I think I remember some commentary/parody of the mid-90s gansta rap in Grand Theft Auto San Andres? (Or at least a commentary on the mentality of movies such as Juice and Menace 2 Society) I’d say the reason that we are seeing more political commentary is because within GTAIV there is a lot more opportunities to make a message.
The real Daily Show only started with Jon Stewart. Before that, it was a trainwreck of smarmy.
GTA has always been a fair bit smarter than it lets on; even the topic that Amanda Marcotte deliberately avoided is part-and-parcel with the series’ attempt to reflect the players’ own proclivities and attitudes. You don’t need to pick up a “companion”, and certainly don’t need to do anything except drop her off afterwards.
(And nobody who had played the game for more than fifteen seconds would mistake the automatons that populate the streets of a GTA for real people in the first place.)
It takes a certain mindset to exploit it in the way that’s been all over the media, and it’s a commentary on the media itself that that’s what they choose to focus on, instead of the dark humor about the banality of crime and the venality of human nature. The constant mockery of right-wing memes is part-and-parcel of that, but you need to get beyond the idiots wailing about kids beating up fairly robotic avatars for that.
The real Daily Show only started with Jon Stewart. Before that, it was a trainwreck of smarmy.
Still, John Stewart joined the show on January 11, 1999 (about the time South Park’s second season ended) and South Park didn’t really turn their show towards political commentary until around the fourth season. They had done political commentary since the beginning, but the fourth season was when they brought it in on full force.
Video games have always had a certain anti-establishment slant. Can you think of one of them where big companies are good, for instance? Even as far back as Doom, the plot, as far as it went, was “The mega-corporation XXX has been doing something irresponsible, and has radically f*cked up and opened a path to Hell….,” which is hardly capitalist-friendly discourse.
The political humor in the GTA games has generally been a left-leaning version of the political humor on South Park, in my experience. There’s lots of pot-shots at humorless feminists and liberal guilt, but the real animus is reserved for the far right, and indeed the moments where the game creators forget to make a joke and instead just rail against a political foe (in contrast to South Park) are aimed squarely at censorship (for obvious reasons from their stance) and Republicans.
The last game was set in 1993, and the game before that was set in 1989, if I remember right. They both took a lot of shots at Bush I, at televangelists, and at consumer culture.
A stoner comedy in Gitmo? I was robbed!
I take issue with the term “motherfucker” as an insult.
I love this kind of movie, but I wish they would quit with the goddamn misogyny already. It always feels like a slap in the face to me when I’m enjoying a movie like H&K, and suddenly there’s some blatant display of woman-hating. I don’t even go to the theater anymore because it’s just not worth it.
Subtle political commentary has been present in GTA since at least GTA III (2001) admittedly a decent portion of it is sexist though, but a good portion is honestly funny.
Commercial Scripts:
1b. Maibatsu Monstrosity (1):
Man: “I’m a marketing manager who lives in the suburbs and commutes to work
on the highway. I live alone, so of course I needed a car that can
seat 12 and is equipped to drive across arctic tundra…it just
makes me feel better!”
Woman: “The new Maibatsu Monstrosity…mine’s bigger!”
1c. Maibatsu Monstrosity (2):
Woman: “Phil and I just had another kid. So of course we need a bigger SUV.
Being a mom is hard, with soccer, football and lacrosse practice,
so we bought the new Maibatsu Monstrosity. It’s so big…we lost
little Joey in the back and couldn’t find him for and hour! When
I’m rushing to the mall, or talking on my cell phone, I know me
and my family are safe. The Maibatsu Monstrosity has 4- wheel
drive, and in amphibious mode…it can cross rivers. So far I’ve
only hit a few puddles, but it’s good to know it’s there. With the
time I save taking shortcuts through the strip-mall parking lot I
can focus on the important things. Like gazing longingly at the
pool boy or…buying more exercise equipment off the TV. So what if
it gets 3 miles to the gallon!? I’m a mom, not a conservationist!”
Woman Voice: “The newMaibatsu Monstrosity…mine’s bigger!!”
1m. Aeris Running Shoes:
Man: “A good shoe starts from the ground up. At Aeris, we make high-
quality footwear. In fact, you can find Aeris running shoes in over
140 countries around the world. In the past, there’s been some
criticism about our workers! That’s why I’m here at one of the Aeris
factories so you can meet some of them…excuse me sir, do you enjoy
your job here?”
Kid: “It’s fun…we get to play with knives!”
Man: “Heh, I see…is there a real sense of teamwork?”
Kid: “My friend Joey sewed his hands together!”
Man: “Wow, you’re learning some real skills. How about the salary, and
benefits?”
Kid: “Yesterday…I made a dollar!”
Man: “You see, that’s the kind of dedication we have to our employees, and
the quality of our shoes. Aeris running shoes…always
running……from something!”
Let me try this again…I think my comment was eaten
Subtle political commentary has been present in GTA since at least GTA III (2001) admittedly a decent portion of it is sexist though, but a good portion is honestly funny.
Commercial Scripts:
1b. Maibatsu Monstrosity (1):
Man: “I’m a marketing manager who lives in the suburbs and commutes to work
on the highway. I live alone, so of course I needed a car that can
seat 12 and is equipped to drive across arctic tundra…it just
makes me feel better!”
Woman: “The new Maibatsu Monstrosity…mine’s bigger!”
1c. Maibatsu Monstrosity (2):
Woman: “Phil and I just had another kid. So of course we need a bigger SUV.
Being a mom is hard, with soccer, football and lacrosse practice,
so we bought the new Maibatsu Monstrosity. It’s so big…we lost
little Joey in the back and couldn’t find him for and hour! When
I’m rushing to the mall, or talking on my cell phone, I know me
and my family are safe. The Maibatsu Monstrosity has 4- wheel
drive, and in amphibious mode…it can cross rivers. So far I’ve
only hit a few puddles, but it’s good to know it’s there. With the
time I save taking shortcuts through the strip-mall parking lot I
can focus on the important things. Like gazing longingly at the
pool boy or…buying more exercise equipment off the TV. So what if
it gets 3 miles to the gallon!? I’m a mom, not a conservationist!”
Woman Voice: “The newMaibatsu Monstrosity…mine’s bigger!!”
1m. Aeris Running Shoes:
Man: “A good shoe starts from the ground up. At Aeris, we make high-
quality footwear. In fact, you can find Aeris running shoes in over
140 countries around the world. In the past, there’s been some
criticism about our workers! That’s why I’m here at one of the Aeris
factories so you can meet some of them…excuse me sir, do you enjoy
your job here?”
Kid: “It’s fun…we get to play with knives!”
Man: “Heh, I see…is there a real sense of teamwork?”
Kid: “My friend Joey sewed his hands together!”
Man: “Wow, you’re learning some real skills. How about the salary, and
benefits?”
Kid: “Yesterday…I made a dollar!”
Man: “You see, that’s the kind of dedication we have to our employees, and
the quality of our shoes. Aeris running shoes…always
running……from something!”
In spite of the pretty awful fact that the Daily Show currently has only one regular female correspondant, it has always been a bit above the standard masculinist sensibilities of Comedy Central. For one thing, it was created by Lizz Winstead and Madeline Smithberg. For another, Jon Stewart rarely trades in the oafish attitudes towards women that are so popular in the media.
And I could have sworn there was an undercurrent of antagonism between Stewart and Judd Apatow, the People’s Asshole, when Apatow was a guest on TDS.
Speaking of the People’s Asshole, check out Manohla Dargis’s superb anti-masculinist Hollywood rant in today’s NYTimes
From the Wikipedia:
Searching for a weeknight staple to replace Politically Incorrect (a Comedy Central program that moved to ABC), Comedy Central premiered The Daily Show in the summer of 1996. A fake news program originally hosted by Craig Kilborn, the show featured a humorous take on contemporary news events. Aimed to parody conventional newscasts, the show featured a comedic monologue of the day’s headlines, mockumentary styled on-location reports, in-studio segments, guest commentary, and debates. The show also took advantage of its visual medium, littering episodes with small touches like in-screen images labeled with their own gags, and presenting absurd bits of trivia coming back and going into commercials. Such segments included: “This Day in Hasselhoff History”, “Last Weekend’s Top-Grossing Films, Converted into Lira”, and “Final Jeopardy!” in which Winstead’s mother, Ginny, would ask and answer the final question of that day’s Jeopardy!. (Due to threatened legal action by the producers of Jeopardy!, this was replaced with various trivia questions and the name of the segment was changed to “Trivial Compromise”.) Originally the show was done without a studio audience, and would just prompt the laughs of its own off-camera staff members. A studio audience was incorporated into the show for its second season, and has remained since.
Under Winstead and Kilborn the show developed a somewhat relaxed atmosphere. Kilborn often made personal asides to the audience, even stepping out from behind the desk to dance, especially on Thursdays, as a celebration of the end of the week. In each show Kilborn would conduct celebrity interviews that would end with a segment called “Five Questions.” With the exception of the first question (which was always geography related) the questions were not bound by any pattern, and did not necessarily pertain to the guests, sometimes just aiming for random trivia or humor. The routine was derived from a pick-up line of Kilborn’s invention, which Winstead thought would make good material for the show.
Regular correspondents included Brian Unger, Beth Littleford, and A. Whitney Brown. Stephen Colbert joined the cast a year after it premiered and was referred to as “The New Guy” for the remainder of Kilborn’s three year tenure. Lizz Winstead herself also acted as a contributor as well as a writer in a weekly spot called “He Said, Winstead” in which she and Kilborn would ad lib a point-counterpoint style argument.
Each show was capped off with a segment called “Your Moment of Zen” that showed random video clips of humorous and sometimes morbid interest such as a snake charmer pulling a snake out of his throat via his nostril. A controversy arose due to one clip in which Asian men and women were shown throwing live baby chicks at alligators as feed. Winstead reacted to complaints by creating a similar video in which she threw fake chicks into a pond from a row boat.
This is interesting:
Yeah, the college flashback scene was awesome. On the whole I think there were some typical sequel problems, and I liked the first movie a lot better, but this was good too.
This is almost too broad a point to be worth noting, but more good-natured stoner comedies are probably a positive thing from the viewpoint of eventually making marijuana legalization something that it’s politically possible to discuss.
Just to open that can of worms, I was trying to figure out how to settle accounts on the prostitution scenes. I was kind of pleased when they showed Harold and Kumar and the prostitutes interacting in a non-terrible way, and then horrified by the branding, and then my horror was mitigated by the fact that the madam took out that gun and blew NPH away. On balance I think we’re still pretty far in the negative zone, especially since NPH was portrayed in a fairly positive way throughout the movie.
The idea that wanton cruelty to prostitutes is just part of being a guy and having a good crazy time is probably the most negative message of the movie, even if they did mitigate it by having NPH get shot.
Okay, its probably already been asked in answered in a previous thread (hell I may have even asked it), but what instrument are you on Rock Band Amanda, or are you the vocalist?
I rocks the Bass!
Even seemingly innocent games can go bad in the wrong hands. One of my all-time classic favorite articles from Salon.com: “Sims in the Hands of an Angry God.”
“On balance I think we’re still pretty far in the negative zone, especially since NPH was portrayed in a fairly positive way throughout the movie.”
I don’t know that the NPH character was really that positively portrayed in either movie. His actions are all pretty horrific, and the leads’ reactions to him oscillate too much for them to be really generalized until after his death. And even then, there’s the bag of highly questionable items discovered post-mortem. He comes across as more of a complete lunatic than just a wild and crazy guy.
Exactly, Jonathan. Your, um, correction? reinforces my sense that TDS is a pinpoint moment when Gen X irreverence really became the dominant form of discourse, instead of a sideline thing that dwelled in sophomoric comedy.
Now for the real point of the post: Are young men demanding more intelligence in “stupid” entertainments? I like to think so, that the H&K franchise shows a real trend away from “stupid=more masculine” that has permeated so much entertainment aimed at young men.
Okay, its probably already been asked in answered in a previous thread (hell I may have even asked it), but what instrument are you on Rock Band Amanda, or are you the vocalist?
I usually play lead guitar as Panda Ramone, but once in awhile I sing under the name of Sheena. You may detect a theme.
I haven’t seen the H&K sequel, because the first one pissed me off so badly that I was barely able to finish it. The characterization of every woman in the movie consisted of nothing more than a fuckability rating. And for a movie that was so racially conscious, I just found that inexcusable. In fact, I think the misogyny in H&K is even more disturbing than the misogyny in a less intelligent stoner comedy, because it either implies something more deliberate or it implies that even intelligent, politically conscious men don’t stop and think that maybe women are people. I’m also pretty dismayed that so many of the people who praised the first movie for its intelligence didn’t seem to notice any problem with its portrayal of women.
Tonight’s Family Guy episode is somewhat apropos of this discussion. Chris has a gf, he is nice to her, she leaves, and Peter tells her “you’re treating her like a human being, you can’t do that!!” It’s tragically hilarious.
Peter tells him* sorry.
In fairness I think the upped misoyny on the part of NPH is intended to be ironic, what with its target audience being among the people most likely to know the Harris is gay.
Amanda, you need to watch The Boondocks.
And stoner comedy started getting smart with MST3K
MST3K is geek comedy, which started out smart. There is, of course, the obvious crossover however.
Reefer. Madness.
You like Screeching Weasel?
Actually it looks like they never did (released) Sheena…, so maybe the Queers then.
You’re probably right, Mantis, especially as far as the second movie was concerned. In the first one I’d stick to my positive characterization, since his buying the guys all their burgers and stuff is crucial to the happy ending. But the second one (creepy mask? 12 cans of mace?) had him more as a total maniac.
I’m glad that Harold and Kumar and yes, even GTA take unapologetic aim at the Bush administration.
How audacious, to go after a dude once his approval ratings are lower than Nixon’s were when he resigned. They’re really taking a bold political risk there.
But one of Amanda’s points here is that irreverent is not synonymous with political. Portraying corporations as evil, or simply dehumanizing, can serve simply as an affirmation of the stoner mentality. The easy-going individual wants nothing more than to hang out, smoke bud, and get laid; capitalism and the puritan work ethic interfere with that. That kind of resistance to authority is still several steps removed from a real class awareness.
How audacious, to go after a dude once his approval ratings are lower than Nixon’s were when he resigned. They’re really taking a bold political risk there.
I’m with Mighty Ponygirl. I really don’t have anything but contempt for the people who were calling me a traitor in 2002 for protesting the war(s), but who have now jumped on the Bush-hating bandwagon. This includes most of the South Park Republican crowd, as well as the Clinton Democrat crowd.
Also, while I liked H&K2 (I saw it last night), I think you’re understating the degree to which they let Bush off the hook: he’s presented as exactly the guy his campaigns presented him as in 2000 and 2004: a cool, regular guy you’d like to have a beer with. It’s a little shocking to me that anyone could still think of him this way.
One little moment I liked was at the end when Harold finds Vanessa in Amsterdam and she say’s “That’s so sweet.” Harold: “Oh, good, it’s sweet” calling back to the earlier conversation about whether she’d think he was a crazy stalker if he showed up in Amsterdam.
Reminds me of the Onion article, “Real-life man arrested for romantic comedy behaviour.”
Stoner masculinity? Um … stonerness obliterates masculinity one toke at a time. Like, dudddde, THC will totally give you manboobs.
What was I saying??? Oh.
For those interested in stoner comedies’ takes on gender, you might check out Smiley Face. Standard plot (pot enthusiast inadvertently gets REAL stoned, causes problems, goes on nightmarish quest to remedy the situation), but starring Anna Faris as the stoner. While Faris’s Hollywood attractiveness is downplayed into sloppy-but-cute-girl-next-doorness, the men she encounters just want to fuck her (and only do favors for her because of that; and are shocked to discover that she’s intelligent; and probably plenty of other patriarchal behavior that I just don’t notice).
It isn’t a great movie, not even a great stoner-com, but worth it just for the novelty of a female protagonist. Plus Faris is generally funny in it, as are several of the supporting cast.
Tree, I think she’s talking about The Ramones. Panda Ramone. Sheena (Is a Punk Rocker).
“Plus Faris is generally funny in it,”
She’s becoming the queen of ‘This movie is terrible, but I liked Anna Faris in it.’
“In the first one I’d stick to my positive characterization, since his buying the guys all their burgers and stuff is crucial to the happy ending.”
I dunno. Him swooping in with a fifty is crucial to the happy ending, yes, but I just rewatched the first one a few nights ago, and I was struck by just what a dick the character is. I would have categorized it as a mostly positive portrayal, too, but looking at it again….He’s an asshole to them pretty much as soon as they pick him up, after which he steals their car, after which he passes them on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere whilst trashing the car.
He throws down for their burgers and then cops a major attitude when Harold is still upset about him having stolen the car. He also, one can surmise, managed to smear the interior of the car rather obviously with genetic material. $200 is not enough to cover having Doogie Howser’s semen cleaned off your dashboard.
It’s kind of like the President Bush character in the second one. He’s not given the classic Darth Vader treatment and shown eating a puppy for breakfast, but the aw-shucksing demeanor is in direct contradiction with him knowing about the daily routine of abuse at Gitmo and finding it funny, him not seeming at all surprised at their predicament, his complete “I’ve got mine, fuck everyone else” take on the War on Drugs, etc. The handling of the character seems much more sympathetic than it actually is.
For as long as GTA has had a radio it’s had *HILARIOUS* parodies of right wing thought and personalities.
GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas all had radio parodies that would stand up on their own in a compilation IMHO.