Last week the opportunity to have a regular column here in SEE dropped into my lap—out of the clear blue sky. So what am I doing here? Well, to be honest, I’m still sorting that one out myself, but in the meantime you can expect to find me here twice a month, riffing on the visual aspects of popular culture. My Little Eye is about “signs”—and a sign is an object, an image, a thing. It’s the media and the medium, if you will. 

Let’s pretend I’m the secret decoder ring you found in your cereal box. In some entries I might unravel a potentially interesting message. Other times, you may be as disappointed in me as the kid from A Christmas Story who learns Little Orphan Annie’s secret message is actually “Remember to drink your Ovaltine.” Fear not: I won’t make a habit of recommending Ovaltine. 

Here’s the plan, Stan.

The medium is the message—hey, thanks, Marshall MacLuhan, for summing things up so efficiently. For our purposes here, interpreting “signs” will be about reading between the lines. It’s how we make sense of media, how popular culture reaches out and affects us, and what we do with that.

As for the Socratic method... well, I know about as much about Socrates as Bill and Ted. I hope that you, dear reader, will find this agreeable. I operate on the premise that “true wisdom is in knowing that I know nothing.” 

I’ve been making “astute” observations about pop culture for years now on an amateur basis. They don’t always go over well with everyone. It’s true: not everyone cares what I have to say. I may know nothing, but I certainly have a lot to say about it. More importantly, I have some questions to ask.

Jumping right in, have you seen the cover of the April Vanity Fair? First of all, the cover refers to a feature story on whether or not women can be/are funny. This is in response to an article in Vanity Fair’s January 2007 issue in which Christopher Hitchens investigated why, in his opinion, women aren’t funny. 

This is a fallacy deeply ingrained into the psyche of popular culture. Turn on the TV and you might observe how wives and mothers maintain the order and keep the family unit together. They are the straight (wo)men to the antics of their sitcom husbands. 

Back in the 1990s, much to my disappointment, actor Jeremy Piven made a similar claim as Hitchens. In 2000, comedian/actor Jerry Lewis more predictably asserted on Larry King Live that he didn’t care for female comedians. It is commonly thrown out and accepted as cold hard fact: women are not funny. 

And yet, clearly, women are funny—especially when Amy Poehler gently grabs Tina Fey’s delicate lily-white breast. Fey, Poehler, and Sarah Silverman grace this Vanity Fair cover, posed like ancient Greek muses. But the image begs the question: if they’re the muses, whom are they musing? There is a difference between being amusing and being a muse. Got it? 

So then, I will interrogate popular culture—the signs that catch My Little Eye and make me think. I’ll ask some questions and then I’ll tell you what I think, hopefully serving both as muse and amusement in the process. Sound fair?