Carlton Mellick III

Recently, somebody online said that Jeff Burk’s bizarro novel “Shatnerquake” walks the fine line between genius and retarded. I don’t know how Jeff feels about that, but I think it’s a big compliment. Most of my favorite movies and books are pretty retarded works of genius.

Although it’s not a definitive element of bizarro, I do think a lot of bizarro walks the fine line between genius and retarded…as well as the fine line between garbage and art, or scary and funny, or simplistic and complex. In other words, bizarro is low brow entertainment and high brow entertainment at the same time.
That’s something I really like about bizarro fiction.

Here are some other examples of genius/retarded works of art/entertainment:

SOUTH PARK

DEVO

JOHN WATERS

KATHY ACKER

AEON FLUX

This entry was posted on June 14, 2009 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Writing Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.