Ok man. You feel like WWE and Jerry Springer are on the level of shakespear. You think they are likely to be studied in 500 years- maybe as a precursor to the fall of humanity. I think its base trash appealing to the lowest parts of the human experience.
We can agree to dissagree.
Say what you will. The point is simply that Shakespeare was thought, in his day, to be appealing to the lowest parts of human experience... and if you take some time to actually read some Shakespeare, you'll see that he really was.
The porter in Macbeth has a monologue about how alcohol makes you horny but makes your dick limp. He's more crude about it than I just was. We won't even get into Lady Macbeth talking about how she'd bash her baby's brain out as it smiled in her face rather than break a promise, and all of the bloody, creative deaths that thrilled the crowd.
Samson and Gregory open Romeo and Juliet by catching the attention of the audience with a discussion about raping the women of the house of Montague, and the Nurse keeps everyone engaged with crude jokes on crude topics.
Lear has a torture scene take place on stage, complete with an eyeball being gouged out. In fairness, Lord Chamberlain's Men were competing for their audience with such highbrow events as bear bating.
It goes on and on. And it's not just Shakespeare. Go back as far as you like. Oedipus Rex discovers that he's unwittingly killed his father and married his mom. Now there's a WWE story-line, if ever there was one.
And so what?
Again, no one is saying you should like it or watch it (I haven't watched it for 20 years myself). No one is saying that WWE wrestling is on a level with Shakespeare, either (that's a false representation of what I've suggested).
All I'm saying is it's wrong to dismiss out of hand the audience of some particular form of art as being stupid, or crude or only being interested in the lowest parts of human experience.
As an MMA fan, you'd think you'd understand this. There are all sorts of MMA fans who watch for no other reason than the pleasure they get from seeing people hurt one another. But people watch different things for different reasons and in different ways. I wouldn't make assumptions about the sophistication (or lack thereof) of the lens through which people are viewing even something as ridiculous, on the surface, as Springer.
Or, even if you want to ignore all of that, maybe just save your righteous indignation for bullfighting or dog fighting or revenge porn or other things that actually exploit and harm innocent parties instead of things that explore the "lowest parts of human experience" through play.
