WHY SO SERIOUS!?!?!

Batman is boring and never has any fun; however, the joker is not! What does this have to do with our discussions? Academics tend to take themselves far too seriously because “critical thinking” and “philosophy” are serious business. So is saving the world, but Buffy Summers is still able to stop multiple apocalypses while maintaining a social life and wicked wardrobe. Irrelevant? I think not!
As “junior academics,” we are supposed to be engaged in the “serious” business of educating students and inspiring them to think critically about the world around them. Why do you want to think critically about the world around you? To improve it? To save it?
The film, The Examined Life, was boring and uninspiring. For the most part, it seemed as though the academics interviewed just enjoyed hearing themselves speak – but that is not important. Ironically, I found Judith Butler’s segment the most engaging and lucid, which is quite surprising given that her writing tends to veer into theoretical abstractions so obscure and nonsensical that I can’t help but right “bitch, please” on almost every page of her work.
Nonetheless, Butler was the only one to engage on a very literal level with the idea of what it means to be a philosopher that walks. More importantly, she spoke with someone that I assume is not a university professor, but who, nonetheless, was able to speak at a nuanced level with issues related to disability and impairment. What I found the most interesting was not what they said to each other, but that Butler acknowledged a form of knowledge outside academia: the filmmaker’s sister is a philosopher.
Gender studies classify “hegemonic masculinity” as the “ideal” masculinity to which all men aspire to, but ultimately fail to achieve. Is there not a “hegemonic philosopher” or a “hegemonic academic”? In other words, is there not an ideal that we all aspire to, or try to subvert? For those of us who watched the film together we discussed the stereotypical professor as a tweed-wearing, pipe smoking, old, white man sitting at Oxford or Harvard. For many of us in that room, and in this cohort, we will never be that professor, and yet there is still a demand to embody this “ideal”. This is the “serious” academic, for whom the “big questions” always matter – but do they really? Can we not have fun with what we study and fuck up, and admit our fuck ups? Would it be the end of the world if something we said at a lecture, conference or wrote in a paper was wrong or just plain silly? Shouldn’t we try to knock this professor off of his high horse and admit that despite the fact that we are academics, we are not Mary Poppins, and therefore not practically perfect in everyway?
I am not arguing that we should not take what we do seriously, but we cannot take it too seriously. If everything we do is super serious then failure to succeed will have catastrophic results because some academics do take themselves far too seriously and will tear our work to shreds and we will go home and cry because they didn’t like our ideas – but who cares? Ideas are not static. I do not really think we can be open to our own growth – intellectually and emotionally – if we take ourselves too seriously because we will not be as open to new ideas, and new perspectives.
In my opinion, super serious Batman is the status quo, and the Joker is the one who wants to mix shit up and have some fun: the joker is social change, while Batman is blah-conservatism. More importantly, the Joker always wears purple, which is just fucking fabulous!

Please watch: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7451115/