Knocked Up / Superbad

Having recently been introduced to these two films, amongst the major successes in a bumper year of off-beat American comedy in 2007, it was heartening to see that American teen/ 20-something comedy is finally growing up.

Just when we thought the Ferrell/Wilson/Stiller gang was hitting its zenith, along comes the Apatow/Rogen/Goldberg crew to steal their thunder. Of the two films, Knocked Up is undoubtedly superior. It has heart where Superbad just has head (in all senses of the word), and manages to create a far more sympathetic collection of protagonists.

The fat/curly-haired anti-heroes (Seth Rogan - pictured - and Jonah Hill) of both films represent something of a new wave of American comedic leading man - although they undoubtedly have Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly to thanks for setting the precedent. What these chubby charmers achieve is an overhaul of the traditional casting of American 'dude' comedy. The down-to-earth, witty 'not-quite-nerds' are a new breed of comedy character, owing much to the Marx brothers in that the whole premise of their comedy is founded on interplay. Witty lines happily sit beside the ever-familiar nob-gags, and well-roundedness applies to their emotional make-up as much as it does to their waist-lines.

These are the products of a post-pop America. A generation of young men grown weary with high-school stereotypes yet helpless to resist them. But the use of the phrase 'young men' is significant here - for the women hardly get a look in. There is still a sexist core in both of these films that leaves one questioning when it is that these all-male production teams will wake up and smell the oestrogen. The nerds and jocks have been allowed to mature, but the cheerleaders remain shaking their pom-poms at the side. A depressing reflection of a country still riddled with ultra-conservative values and under-currents of religiosity.

Review of 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is perfectly apt, pretty much essential, that this book should be a black swan: an unexpected bestseller, topping the New York Times non-fiction lists. Otherwise Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s theory wouldn’t carry nearly the weight that it does. A quirky and engaging writer, Taleb’s central thesis is that we are frequently taken for suckers by the unexpected. Until the discovery of Australia, everyone in Europe believed swans could only be white. We should be careful of all the certainties we hold and be ready to be sceptical about our beliefs. Not in a Cartesian manner following the Descartes fashion (Taleb, for reasons not entirely clear, rejects this throw out all of your beliefs and start again line of thought). Rather we should be very wary of trusting established models for forecasting in economics, society, cultural and natural trends. Will the sun rise tomorrow? – probably, but Taleb takes great pleasure in chronicling the fallacies of the ‘bildungsphilisters’ – the intellectual economic forecasters who believe the world will conform to their platonic models only to discover time after time that, well, shit happens.

Taleb’s message is an apt one for the modern interconnected world. The future (which of course can’t be predicted) will probably be dominated by a few more J.K. Rowlings and Bill Gates who inhabit what Taleb calls extremistan, and a greater number of dissatisfied and disenfranchised unfortunates (mediocristan). As a Humanist, Taleb says, he hates this disparity, and it hardly tallies with those in mediocristan who cling to the protestant work ethic view of life, that the harder you work the proportionally greater the rewards. But he offers succour to the second rate towards the end of the book with the tale of Yevgenia Krasnova, a novelist whose first novel is an unexpected success and her second book is an equally unexpected flop. There is charm in secure mediocrity, and wild success is not always all it is cracked up to be. Take comfort in the fact that you are a black swan – the biggest black swan of all, by virtue of your birth against gigantic odds.

Once the central message is grasped, you don’t really need to plough through all of the book , which is overlong at some 300 pages, unless you want to take in all the quirky asides and stories about the author’s intellectual friends and colleagues and detailed economic theories deconstructing the Gaussian Bell Curve. A vast array of obscure economists and philosophers are referenced which comes across as intellectually show-offy, and Taleb’s style is a clunking dog’s dinner, peppered with faux yiddishisms such as ‘nobel schnobel’ and prefixing any thinker he admires with the Germanic ‘über’. Still, it is partially inthis linguistic naivety, uprooted from his Lebanese homeland (or Levantine as he anachronistically calls his roots), and finding a place in the world as an eccentric commodoties trader in New York, that he is an eccentric and admirable writer. Someone who sees a crowd, and deliberately heads off in the other direction.

By Fred Bosanquet