Impact On Popular Culture
The Guignols have had a tremendous impact on French popular culture, in many case introducing or popularizing phrases. For instance, à l'insu de mon plein gré ("without the knowledge of my own free will"), repeated by the puppet representing Richard Virenque is now attributed in jest to people who hypocritically deny having willfully committed attributed acts. The impact of political caricature in the Guignols is unclear, but some polls have shown that they influence voters.
The show is known to be able to go further in challenging current popular figures and thought than many other forms of media. Some sketches displayed for example Raymond Barre, a former Prime Minister in a gonzo pornographic scene, President Jacques Chirac and his team in a Pulp Fiction–like destruction race to eliminate their competitors or the then Minister of Interior Department Nicolas Sarkozy as a flip-flopping politician.
The Guignols generally displays a left political outlook (although being tough on whoever is in power). While they generally focus on French politics, they occasionally parody international events, often concerning terrorism, including Osama Bin Laden, the Iraq conflict and Saddam Hussein, and United States foreign policy in general. These spoofs on international events are usually presented in an anti-Bush manner, mocking the fact that grey eminences lead the politic, not the president himself. They also sometimes mock Canal+ and its staff as for their former football club.
Read more about this topic: Les Guignols De L'info
Famous quotes containing the words impact on, impact, popular and/or culture:
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“For the people in government, rather than the people who pester it, Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination.... After the racist statutes are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.”
—Michael Harrington (1928–1989)