What if Susan Boyle couldn't sing?

[drui_en]

By now, I'm sure most of you are familiar with Susan Boyle -- the 47 year old woman from a little village in Scotland who blew away a dubious crowd of cynics when she launched into "I Dreamed A Dream" from Les Miserables on the TV show "Britain's Got Talent".

This wonderful lady, with her glowing smile and cheery disposition, has captured the hearts

Comments

[berecyntia]

You've just articulated exactly why I'm so uncomfortable watching most comedy shows, and why I do not watch reality TV shows, ever. There's schadenfreude, and then there's what we deliberately do to each other, and reality TV seems to cross that line too much.

[toad_hall]

I was just about to say more or less the same thing.

[drui_en]

I can't watch them either.

[courtly]

Doesn't Mr. William Hung already show us what happens when someone appears on a talent show with mockable talent? We laugh and mock, and the internet seizes it into a twisted form of celebrity. William Hung has turned that circus into a force for good, and I think that's commendable in large measure.

But the internet mockery-meme has always been interesting to me. Gislain Raza is one of the most interesting examples. Yes, he was mocked, but nerds all over the globe spent hundreds of hours enhancing the video with special effects. It's a weird sort of mockery the internet propagates. If someone "makes the cut", derision is balanced against honour, support, encouragement. If someone doesn't, then their 15 seconds of fame is doomed to become a memetic commodity to be used on YTMND and Something Awful, mainly for the purpose of mocking the NEXT target.

It's a weird tribe, innit?

[anguissette6]

Agreed with berecyntia, reality television and comedy/competition based programs just irritate me. Television has such potential as this marvelous medium for educating and reaching millions yet we don't really utilize that potential in North America. Fuck, look at Disney's latest atrocity- taking the BBCs incredible planet earth documentaries and cutting them down to a digestible portion (aka American sized) and adding ridiculous VOICE OVERS!!! That makes me want to puke. Those documentaries are some of the most gorgeous inspiring things and they dont need to be Americanized just because a nation has become complacent in their ignorance and impatience

[frazzy]

There's also the opposite way of looking at what happened - would Susan Boyle have garnered the same amount of extreme attention and popularity if she had been a 19 year old hottie with the same voice? She would have been just another faceless aspiring starlet.

[willowing]

thank youououuou, exactly what i've been saying about it. ♥