The fleeting nature of popular culture fame


Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel sent his crew out to interview people who attended the Fashion Week activities in New York. The crew threw out names of people who were NOT designers and asked the attendees what they thought of their creations. The people reacted as if they were familiar with the names and their designs and the show played those clips.

I am not a fan of such pranks because it is all too easy to make fun of ordinary people. Even if 99% of respondents knew that the names were not of actual designers, it is the poor 1% who will make the final cut and be shown and laughed at. But what surprised me was that the names that were given as designers were people from what I would have thought were popular culture (Joe Isuzu, Ricardo Montalban, George Constanza, Meadowlark Lemon, Eddie Munster, Willie Loman) and yet they did not recognize them. Even though I watch little or no TV, and came to the US in the 1980s as an adult, even I had heard of them, even though I had not actually seen them in their heyday.

What the prank reveals is that the shelf life of much of celebrity is very short. I wonder how long it will be before this kind of prank can be repeated using names like Brittney Spears, Justin Bieber, and Miley Cyrus.

Comments

  1. says

    “I wonder how long it will be before this kind of prank can be repeated using names like Brittney Spears, Justin Bieber, and Miley Cyrus.”

    Or Jimmy Kimmel.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *