What Shepherd called “the great difference between the life we live and the way we think we live” was for him the core subject of humor. As Shepherd put it, “The reality of what we really are is oftentimes found in the small snips way down at the bottom of things.” All are subject to the same trivial emotions and continual tiny frustrations, rich and poor alike.” The trivia of life, including the bric-a-brac of popular culture and mass-produced junk, was the stuff worth examining. It was no accident that Shepherd admired the now largely forgotten Midwestern author George Ade, of whose short stories he wrote, “Almost all of their humor is of the school of Futility.

In some ways, his sense of humor and comedic social commentary fit with the so-called “serious” and “sick” humor of the 1950s, which took cynical aim at social conformity and the grim but ignored aspects of everyday life. Sometimes described as “the inventor of talk radio,” he originated a unique type of show, featuring extended monologues, full of stories about everyday life, pranks, and self-reflexive, absurdist tangents. Nonsense, says Shepherd: Our most profound urges come from within. Critics warned then, in the 1950s and early ’60s, much as they do now, that media is controlling us like a puppet master, leading us to think and desire things we do not intend. But in the actual work of Jean Shepherd, the radio raconteur and author who first wrote these stories for radio, magazines, and novels, a darker message is at play that resonates uncannily well today.Īmong other things, Shepherd’s tales are about the role of mass communications and consumerism in American life.

To most people, fans and detractors alike, the movie is about nothing more than nostalgia, an idealized look at the pains and pleasures of childhood. The film follows Ralphie Parker and his family - mom, dad (“The Old Man”), and brother Randy - through a holiday season at the tail end of the Great Depression, with the primary plot revolving around Ralphie’s crazy desire for a BB gun, or as he puts it, an “official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.” His longing meets frustration after frustration as adults, including his mother, his teacher, and a department store Santa Claus, tell him, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Some people love it others hate it and still others see it as part of the anodyne backdrop to the march toward Christmas. Cable channels TBS and TNT feature the TV marathon “24 Hours of A Christmas Story.” It is a polarizing bit of popular culture. OVER THE WINTER HOLIDAYS, the film A Christmas Story ritualistically plays on television in the United States.

A christmas story book jean shepherd