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)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“It is said the city was spared a golden-oak period because its residents, lacking money to buy the popular atrocities of the nineties, necessarily clung to their rosewood and mahogany.”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)