"Did you know that Mozart died while he was writing the Requiem?
Yeah. Everyone knows that. It was in Amadeus."
Seinfeld S07E03 - The Maestro (1995)
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"I won't have you of all people cheapen what should be an endless pursuit of perfection just because you want the world to laugh with you tonight"
Scrubs S01E05 - My Blind Date (2001)
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Only after seeing a number of episodes in the early 2000s did I remember having numbered among the original target audience for a Family Guy precursor called Larry & Steve back when it originally aired in the '90s, not on Fox but on Cartoon Network, which is how twelve year old me still polishing my English by watching the Discovery Channel and other fresh yet untranslated cable wound up chuckling at the "youth in Asia" joke. (So if you hate my punnery, blame Seth MacFarlane.) Despite The Simpsons' increasing influence, animation in '97 was still firmly presumed children's entertainment, so future Peter and future Brian spend a few minutes bumbling through increasingly destructive physical comedy scenes that would've seemed at home in any old Hanna-Barbera cartoon, boing/awooga sound effects included. And yet, when Larry asks Steve how he feels after getting mauled by a massage bed* the more educated pup answers:
"Like Agamemnon after the fury of Clytemnestra"
Family Guy proper, once it launched, stuck pretty solidly to pop culture jokes and not the classics. S.O.P. for strictly-21st-century-Fox. But I can't help connecting that to another little divergence that Larry lived in an apartment building and drove into the nearby metropolis to shop while Peter lives in a cookie-cutter family home in a small town. "Urbane" is the word we're looking for here, and we'll come back to it in a moment. At around the same time, Frasier acquired a reputation as the smartest show on TV, despite the fact no-one ever held a high-brow conversation on Frasier. They had low-brow chats peppered with snooty references, which tendency Family Guy itself rather skillfully zinged in an early season. But, sadly, that still set Frasier above any competing sitcoms, in whose universes you'd think Wagner or Freud had never existed - and I'm betting still don't. It was also an improvement on the title character's previous incarnation on Cheers, where he played the decoy intellectual love interest destined to be spurned by the princess in favor of a manlier option. "Geek" is the word we're looking for here, and we'll come back to it in a paragraph break.
¶
"Geek" has both the original meaning of a carnival freak and a late 20th century one which has been suspiciously wiped from search engines: General Electronic and Engineering Knowledge. Or as it's better remembered, generally possessing any scientific, technical or abstract learning. Linking former to latter was one of the masses' many slams against the perceived weirdness of intellectuals' abstruse interests. While media sources will claim the word's pejorative status faded after Y2K, this is only because its meaning was gradually debased to ignore intellectual competence and refocus entirely on performative membership in fan/hobby circles. By the 2010s you no longer needed to understand The Lord of the Rings, just wear some pointy plastic ears. "Gooba-gabba, gooba-gobble" indeed.
This wasn't just about the engineering department at MIT. Seinfeld's characters were crass, mundane, loudmouthed, middle-class New Yorkies, just a bunch of rudderless jokers, but they nevertheless maintained an expectation of general knowledge. To keep up appearances at least they knew the names of obscure dictators, corrected each others' grammar ("statue of limitations") and kept abreast of at least second-hand culture like Amadeus. "Young Urban Professional" came with some modest expectation of mental competence.
I bring this up now because YouTube uncharacteristically pushed a couple of channels I actually found interesting: Jared Henderson boasts an improbably large number of subscribers over his three-year span talking about academia, philosophy and books, while Hilary Layne sits at about a tenth as many talking about the quality of modern writing over the past year. Presumably Google linked Henderson to me because I bitched out Emily Wilson, and Layne due to her somewhat incendiary take-down of "romance" novels hitting a couple points I've made myself, albeit not from the same angle (I'd be curious what she thinks of Yes Sex Scenes) but for the purpose of this post format interests me more than content. Either I missed a conference on reviving the nerd or both are being managed and marketed in a very similar style as reasonable, down-to-earth middle-class intellectuals. They are well-spoken, mild-mannered down to reassuringly cozy puppy prop or cafe au lait mug, well informed... and occasionally a mite huffy. A far cry from the heretofore dominant YouTube format of crying far and wide. They're...
Well, they're urbane.
Sensibly partitioned subsections for each lecture. Tastefully minimalist infographics and visual aids. They neither rage at the camera nor self-deprecate in standard nerd format. I can only assume there are more like them floating around. Funny to think someone might be trying to bankroll this return to respectability into a trend. Too little and way, way too late. I'd been planning to say I think that term has fallen out of fashion over the past generation when I remembered I need not think when we have The Google. Specifically their word use history thingamajig, Ngram viewer, confirming a sharp drop after 2014:
Just to check whether we might have a trend going, I tried the related "cosmopolitan" as well:
That one at least lasted until 2016, maybe from lingering magazine sales, I dunno. You can try the flip-side "provincial" for yourself. 2015, crash.
Now, fine, Google's little collator there has some serious issues, so take it as imprecise at best, but you can try it with some more neutral terms like "apple" or "sawdust" and not get nearly the same decisive swing. No, I do think there's a correlation with the culture war kicking into high gear in the mid-2010s. Except, weirdly, it's negative! During the several years when yuppie moralizing waxed strongest, when nothing could be published which did not toe the latte-sippin' urbanite view of social progress, terms comparing city folk's modern habits favourably versus backward hicks from the sticks... tanked. Exactly when you'd have expected a victory march instead. It's not just that nobody likes you. Even you can't stand being associated with yourselves!
However, it was not merely SJW fanatics' ferocity which poisoned the bourgeois well, but their insipid argumentation. The higher regard enjoyed throughout the industrial era by city dwellers always depended to some extent not just on money and manners but on being better informed, better educated, more cultured. Of the many factors contributing to the currently ongoing civilizational collapse, 2013 was far too early in the AI era for large trendy population centers to outright relinquish their role in cultural vetting and dive fanatically into nonsensical postmodernist claptrap about nothing being real and everything being a social construction, Yadda-Yadda we're all sinners repent Yadda-Yadda. Don't read anything by "dead white men" etc. Unlike in '97 it rapidly became obvious to everyone that a well-groomed city street mutt could no longer be counted upon as "well-versed in the works of Chaucer" any more than Huckleberry Hound. So why should anyone listen to Portlandia's Speshul Forces?
Urbanity has depreciated much like geekdom. You wanted to deny the primacy of intellect? Here's where that gets you. No, don't pass me the loving cup. I've had quite enough, thank you.
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* Whatever happened to the massage chair craze?
P.S.: Someone was apparently using "covfefe" back in 1958-59... who?! Damnit Google, now I need to know!
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