I still haven't forgiven Parker & Stone for telling people that voting didn't matter. If they've grown up, with some kind of mea culpa, I'll be happy to welcome them back to civil society.
Anyone have an anecdote of young BBT fans being drawn to physics or math?
Sure, it's a comedy, but it's not like there's a watchable Star Trek turning a new generation towards STEM. Mr. Robot, probably just breeding more anarchists.
Try searching for versions with laugh track removed to get a better sense of the writing per se without the extra emotional manipulation.
Compare with Silicon Valley, a comedy show which also mercilessly skewers nerds, but more for the sake of social commentary than just piling on insults, and which treats even the most caricatured characters with some dignity and humanity.
I think "dumb show" reflects more about the style of humor than the type of people who like it. Some people prefer clever, subtle humor. Some people want goofy and slapstick humor. Some people love awkward situational humor. There is no account for taste.
But yeah, it's an awful show.
I don't think that's quite what the parent was saying. It's not that BBT is a show for a dumb audience. Rather, BBT is a show about supposedly smart characters, with a writing staff that doesn't have anyone sufficiently-smart-enough on it to be able to accurately depict the thinking process of genuinely smart characters.
You can't, as someone with an average IQ, really write the internal monologue of someone with a much higher IQ. You can probably capture their personality, but you can't solve problems the way they solve problems (or write characters who do so) without, at least temporarily, actually being that smart.
This is an often-discussed aspect of writing military fiction: it's basically impossible to come up with the sort of strategic masterstrokes that a famous general would come up with, without yourself being a famous general. You can bring together ten lesser strategists and ask them to knock their heads together, and you still won't get a brilliancy† out.
† https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-to-play-a-brilliancy
Most people who write master strategists in fiction end up just doing one of a few main things:
• they crib all the "clever moves" from well-known historical battles. This limits you to just, essentially, writing history over again wearing a new coat.
• they get an actual master-ish strategist to consult. You see this in, for example, sports anime about chess or Go—the author usually relied on input from a high-level professional (but not master) player.
• they just make the characters' abilities entirely informed, rather than explicit. This is your Sherlock Holmes story: you can see what they came up with in the end, but you don't get any insight into how they went about putting it together. The author just decided what the solution was, worked backward to what sorts of clues would lead one to that solution, and then decided by fiat that the protagonist would notice those clues.
The whole "rational fiction" movement is basically about avoiding doing any of the above.
BBT as a minstrel show -- which is a way of mocking another group -- is an apt simile, regardless of whether blacks suffered worse fate or not.
Which is not even relevant anyway: what blacks suffered had little to do with minstrel shows, those were the least of their troubles. If parent had compared BBT to slavery, you'd have a point. But he made a much more precise argument.
But yes the live audience laughs moronically on cue and I totally agree with your assessment of the show.
Do we have to go through this every time BBT is mentioned on the internet. We all know the show sucks and why, and adding this descriptor only starts the same stupid fight that appears on every BBT thread and is never resolved and just makes everyone angry.