Eccentric Flower:200908/Saturday

Joy remarked in a comment on the previous that I sounded like I was having a good time, and I am. I mention that so that people who are not familiar with my con habits will not be alarmed at the very tiny number of actual con events I attend. This has been the case since I attended my first con way back in the day. Two panels yesterday, one-and-a-bit panels and the masquerade today. I would have watched a movie they were showing, it's a 2006 animated film called "Renaissance" which apparently won all kinds of awards and attention everywhere but in America, where no one has heard of it ... but it was cancelled.

In fact there have been a lot of cancellations and rearrangements, it seems - I'm not entirely sure why. I hope it's not just people being bums. The first panel I attended this morning, the one I had to leave, would probably have been salvageable if all four of the panelists had bothered to show up. With two it was bound to be a disaster, and when it deteriorated into the audience having an argument with itself I knew I could not stay. (Nonelvis tells me it did get better later.)

I've written about this before, and the last time I did it I got slapped around a bit, and I have never forgotten that. But I think I can approach my point with new insight and in a way that doesn't sound like I'm insulting anyone: What I have come to realize is that, for me, the panel-discussion format that has become the backbone of these conventions is really unsatisfactory.

For a long time I thought this was my impatience with certain tics of the average SF-fan-audience-member - the tendency to ramble, to want to speechify, to butt in - but then I realized that some of this is just the way fans participate in the discussion. They want to participate, and moreover, many of them came to the panel to participate. They feel that their opinion is just as valuable and as important as the panelists, and who am I to say it isn't? Sometimes it is. But I didn't come for that. I don't want to be part of the discussion; I want to be the audience. I don't want to hear audience members talk. I came to hear the panel talk. And, in truth, I would be just as happy with listening to one person talk for an hour - if that person were an adequate speaker and had something interesting to say. I don't find what the audience has to say interesting.

This is that expert/tyro (or, in other contexts, pro/fan) line that I continually insist on drawing rigidly and is something many other SF fans of my acquaintance don't understand my insistence on. I figure someone's opinions have got to be worth more than someone else's, or we have anarchy. Furthermore, I figure what John Scalzi has to say on humor in SF is going to be far more valuable than anything an audience member has to say. If an audience member had something just as valuable to say, then why isn't he a panelist? I can see why you'd want to come hear Paul Krugman talk about economics (he was actually at the con, by the way!); I cannot see any reason on earth why you would want to hear me, or any other layman, talk about it.

Extending that, I can't see why a conversation between three people who are equally unfamiliar with a subject regarding expert knowledge* is even worth having. It's not only not going to be a very informative conversation; it's not going to be a very good or very interesting one. Now, two laymen and an economist talking about economics? You might have something there. One layman and two economists? Fine. Even hearing three economists argue with one another would be okay. (This all assumes, of course, that you have an interest in economics in the first place; but if not, just substitute another word in the blank. Law. Programming. Screenwriting. Being an author. Why would anyone want to have or overhear a talk between three amateurs about writing fiction?)

I realize in many ways this is a product of my own insecurities and grudges - that I desperately seek some "award of credibility" and thus I have to keep a very rigid class system of credibility or my pursuit of it is a farce. I know this. But I stand by my assertion. Someone's gotta be the expert, and what I want is to listen to the expert talk. I cannot imagine a way in which the Humor in SF panel would not have been improved by just putting Scalzi behind a podium to riff for an hour. I'd go to that readily.

What I have become aware, though, is that I'm in the minority and that's not the experience most of the other attendees here are after. They are looking for a collective experience. I'm looking for a show.

Not that I undervalue the importance of these conventions as a way to see your friends, socialize with your peers, et cetera - hell, that's often the best part. It's just that for me those opportunities take place in the halls, or when you go out to dinner, or so forth. Not at the programming.

I know other people have debated this because JournalCon and others like this - partway between a convention and a social gathering, caught in limbo - have wrestled with the question of, "Why have programming at all? Most of us just want an excuse to hang out together. Why can't we just hang out together?" And I think the answer to that is that the programming is the skeleton. If your con gets large enough, you have to have programming, just to have something to hang structure upon.

But since the panels don't seem to be what I'm looking for as entertainment, and I do my socializing and people-watching outside them, I don't usually attend many of them, and I never have.

Anyway.

Scalzi (there was another panelist and a moderator, but Scalzi said everything interesting that was said) raised three points in the humor panel which I can't decide if I agree with. You may discuss or dispute as you like.

1. Everyone believes they're funny. But since comparatively few people are actually funny, most of us believe we're funnier than we are.

I have a problem with this because I don't personally think I'm funny and I never have, as far as I can tell. If there's one like me then there must be more like me, right? Do you think you're funny?

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy set back humor in SF for years - perhaps a decade or more. Because it worked so well, suddenly everyone thought the only way to be funny in SF was to write British farce, and all other attempted ways to be funny in SF ground to a halt.

I'm on the fence about this one. I think he has a point but I also think it is damned hard to be funny in SF successfully in any way, so for me that muddies the water.

3. Geek humor has leaked into the mainstream and continues to do so, and so it becomes steadily easier to perpetrate a geeky joke on the general audience.

I can't address this one because I only know geeks. (No, no, in this case I mean that lovingly. It's just that when you're surrounded by people who know how to set up computer networks, then you can't really tell whether an infant's onesie with "I TCP/IP ... but mostly IP" on it is going to be comprehensible to the rest of the world. See?)

So. I could tell you about the Masquerade which I attend faithfully because I am a drag queen at heart and I love the pretty costumes and am always jealous of the people who can make them and walk around in them ... but if I told you about that, that would be the extent of what I had to tell you, so now you have heard it, and I'm just going to leave you with the questions above while I go eat chocolate and read a rather interesting but disjoint book about gangsters.

* I phrase that as I do because there are some topics which everyone can have a discussion on which don't seem to require expert knowledge - like whether a film sucked. Unfortunately discussions like these tend to end up - because of their wholly subjective nature - as "everyone states their opinion in turn, and then we go around the room and everyone repeats their opinion again, and repeat until we run out of beer." So on the whole I tend to want to have conversations with people who know more about a topic than I do, or less about it than I do - or someone whose opinions I find valuable, despite their being on approximately the same tier of competence as my own, for my own personal reasons. The best conversations ever are when you each know about the same amount, but you each value each others' opinions, and each comes away with something new - even if they still don't agree at all.