Yeliz Anlatıyor – Yeliz Expresses

I like twisting words. The headline looks like a direct translate Turkish joke even a bad one but believe me this joke is the better than my experience that I had today. 🙂 One of the web-based broadcasting channels that I signed up in Turkey, that’s where I’m from, was sending me an informatory advertisement about one of its stand-up programs for a long time. Today, the name of the program was sending me signals like “please watch me, please try me Yeliz” because it gives the impression of being about “single” people. So, at the end of the announcement of second season’s final, I decided to give it a try. I will not give the name of the channel or the program’s name in here because I don’t want to make any publicity at all.

The program is organized for forty-five minutes but I can barely watch it for twenty-two or three. It categorized as a stand-up comedy with a moderator comedian but I didn’t laugh. This can be a shocking news for those who know me well because I’ve generally well known by finding most of things easily funny. However, I didn’t even smile. As a very brief summary, this whole session was about the life three independent single women from the society and their dialogue with the “comedian” moderator. At the end of this approximately twenty-five minutes session of forcing myself to get into the topic; I decided my free time is so valuable for spreading over for such programs and closed it.

If we consider the program that I tried to watch, it is hard to say that it is a talk-show or stand-up in a classical manner we all know. If we label the stand-up comedies that I like and I know as the classics or the modern and these one as “post-moderns”, I have to say that adding “post-“ to a label should not have to make it specifically positive or good. My point is these types of “post-modern” stand-up comedies which frontier the public citizens and puts the comedians as the moderators seems the laziest way of earning money in terms of effort of the “comedian” moderator. You may argue that “Yeliz, they completely natural, their jokes and everything is %100 natural.” Even though this is true, what would I do with this naturality, if all I see is a public-show like a circus of freak show where people humiliate each other to look smart ass and force themselves to make everybody laugh at the end. It is a “post” because it is beyond the modern terms, however not in an intelligent manner. By the way, the given program example is not leading example of these kind of “post-modern” stand-up comedies; there are also other variations which I could only watch for five minutes in other paid web broadcasts as well.

I don’t know, I just can’t sit and laugh to the kind of things where people made fun of each other by downgrading or similar type of seemingly jokes. In my own personal opinion, there is no point to laugh these kinds of things because they look pathetic in a manner that they have no traces of thinking at all. We are looking, watching, listening, giving our precious time and dedication to supposedly experiences of the ordinary people. These conversations seemingly have a theme but actually not, they did not have conclusion or even an outcome. The only outcome I got from these kinds of programs is that I’m a more complex or older for this kind of programs.

I guess I have to admit that I’m getting older day by day even if I do not feel that way. The reason for having such a thought or having sense of feeling is that I cannot understand to which direction the world of broadcasting is going in a precise manner. Even though we have much more diversity in terms of option to watch, from my own personal perspective, I think we started to suffer from the quality of the contents in many terms. In my own opinion, for the sake of the technological facilitations, we gave up from the quality of the contents. Due to this obsession of quality of content of mine, I felt older than I actually am.

With am I going to laugh at the end if the paid web broadcast options are like this? Is the “post-modern” world means everything will go worse? Will we give up from the quality for the sake of other things? What will happen to the concepts, ethics and the products of the efforts? I believe this is no longer just a trade-off between quality and quantity but also there are other factors which can be discussed at other writings. What I believe is that in short, the importance of quality and effort lost its importance with this “post-modern” era. This is a very sad incident to see and we are surrounded by this degeneration. Yeah, I got older because I missed the good old days where there was a quality of the joke; where there was a quality of the laughter; where there was a quality of the effort in the joke and although it was more planned but it was so natural that you would see the excitement of the comedian in his/her eyes and body language at that moment. That was natural, not the public humiliation.