I get a very specific eye-twitch when someone leans over a dinner table, drops their voice like they’re confessing to a crime, and says, “I know it’s trash, but I love Love Island.” The apology is already baked in. The shame’s been marinating for hours. Then, ten minutes later, that same person will describe a three-hour black-and-white film about a man staring at a wall as “transformative” without a flicker of irony. Our cultural metabolism is shot, and the problem isn’t the bit that enjoys watching people with aggressively whitened teeth bicker about who said what near the fire pit.
I’m Zara Okonkwo, and I live by a simple rule: if a piece of culture sparks a genuine reaction in enough people to become part of the shared language, it deserves the same dissection you’d give a sonnet sequence. And, just as firmly, if a work of “high” culture can’t survive a well-aimed joke, it was never as solid as its defenders wanted you to believe. The whole border between high and low is a fiction propped up by people who are terrified their taste isn’t a mark of sophistication—just a pile of learned preferences they forgot they crammed for.
The False Cathedral of “Serious” Art
We inherit a ladder that plants opera above pop, literary fiction above romance novels, gallery-installation video above YouTube makeup tutorials. This ladder isn’t a fact of nature. It’s a story assembled by institutions—universities, museums, prize committees—that have a thick stake in guarding the gates of cultural legitimacy. The real loss isn’t that some things get called great; it’s that the yardstick for greatness is often just the petrified tastes of dead, rich, white men who would have despised your Spotify Wrapped on principle.
Real criticism doesn’t kneel. It asks what a work does, not what its pedigree is. The Mona Lisa is a masterpiece, sure, but so is the engineering of a Beyoncé halftime show that locks a global audience into twelve minutes of collective euphoria. Both demand a command of light, timing, emotional manipulation, and the human gaze. Calling the latter mere entertainment while the former is Art is a basic misunderstanding of how culture actually operates in people’s lives. It’s like studying botany and refusing to admit a weed is a plant.
Pop’s Intelligence Isn’t a Fluke
There’s a lazy reflex that treats popular culture as the stuff that happens when nobody’s paying attention. In truth, pop is frequently the smartest cultural form we’ve got, specifically because it can’t hide behind a fog of obscurity. A difficult poem can fail upward—it gets stamped “challenging” and left on a syllabus to gather prestige-dust. A pop song that doesn’t connect? It vanishes. The pressure to communicate immediately, to build a whole world in a three-minute track or a forty-minute episode with ad breaks, hammers out a particular kind of genius.
Think Abbey Road. Think Thriller. Think how a single Real Housewives reunion can unfold like a Socratic dialogue on loyalty, performance, and the ethics of talking behind someone’s back. The full toolbox of serious criticism—close reading, contextual analysis, ideological critique—works on these subjects not despite their popularity but because of it. If you can’t explain why a meme catches fire, you don’t actually understand the culture you’re standing in. And if your critical frame can’t handle a meme, it’s not a serious frame. It’s a decorative one.
The Joke That Holds the Cathedral Up
Now flip it. “Serious” culture needs a joke the way a cathedral needs a gargoyle: not as vandalism, but as a structural requirement. Humor tests for truth. If an artwork or an institution can’t survive being laughed at, it’s brittle, and brittleness signals weakness, not strength. The most profound works—Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, the Book of Job—already contain their own self-mockery. They know they’re built from words, and words are ridiculous.
Too often, the keepers of high culture treat laughter like a threat. They wrap their objects in a hush, a reverent silence that has less to do with the work and more to do with the audience performing their own sensitivity. I’ve stood in galleries where the air was so thick with unearned solemnity I wanted to ask, loudly, about the gift shop markup. A well-placed joke isn’t disrespect; it’s intimacy. It says, “I’m engaging with this thing as a living object, not a relic.” When a critic can make you laugh about a Rothko painting and then, a breath later, make you grasp why its color fields can produce a physical ache, that critic is actually working.
The Snobbery Trap: Why We Apologize for Our Pleasures
The apology I flagged at the start—”I know it’s trash, but…”—is a symptom of a culture that teaches us our pleasures need a warning label. We swallow the hierarchy so completely that we undercut our own taste before anyone else gets the chance. That’s not humility; it’s a species of self-erasure that keeps the gatekeepers comfortable. It leaves the canon unchallenged and makes us willing participants in our own cultural disenfranchisement.
Serious criticism of pop culture snaps that loop. It insists: your reaction counts, your analysis counts, and the thing you love can bear the weight of thought. This isn’t a claim that everything is equally good; it’s a claim that everything is equally available for thinking. The quality of a cultural object isn’t set by its genre but by what it does with the possibilities of that genre. A reality TV show that nails its format is more successful on its own terms than a prestige drama that fumbles its themes and masks the mess with moody lighting.
When High Culture Forgets It’s Also a Product
One of the funniest blind spots in the whole high-low scrap is that “serious” culture routinely pretends it isn’t a market commodity. But gallery openings? Networking events with canapés. Literary fiction? A publishing category with marketing budgets. The symphony season? A subscription model. Pretending otherwise isn’t purity; it’s a branding play. The most radical move a critic can make is to run a Marvel movie and a Man Booker winner through the same analytical toolkit—not to flatten them into sameness, but to expose the different ways they construct meaning, value, and pleasure.
I’m not saying every review of a Chekhov play should open with a comparison to Keeping Up with the Kardashians (though I once saw a Cherry Orchard that could have used some Kardashian-level pacing). I’m saying the critic’s job is to follow the energy. And energy today doesn’t respect the velvet rope.
The Critic as Party Guest, Not Priest
My whole stance as a critic rests on this refusal. I’m not here to float down judgments from a cultural mountaintop. I’m here to be the person at the party who can talk with total sincerity about the color palette of Mad Max: Fury Road and then, a beat later, make you snort your drink with an observation about Kant’s wig. The tone is sharp because the material can take sharpness. It’s playful because play is a form of intelligence, not the absence of it.
When we take pop culture seriously, we honor the craft and the audiences who fill it with meaning. When we joke about serious culture, we honor its humanity. Both gestures are acts of love, and both are non-negotiable for a criticism that’s still breathing instead of embalmed.
FAQ: Pop Culture, Serious Criticism, and the Art of the Joke
Isn’t some pop culture genuinely mindless? Why waste critical energy on it?
“Mindless” is often just a label we slap on things that skip the analytical brain and head straight for the nervous system. But that shortcut is itself a fascinating mechanism worth studying. Even the most formulaic pop artifact leaks information about the desires, anxieties, and economic structures of its moment. Critical energy isn’t a limited resource you can squander; it’s a muscle that strengthens the more you use it. The real question isn’t whether something merits attention but what kind of attention it gives back.
How can humor be a legitimate critical tool? Doesn’t it just tear things down?
Humor is a precision instrument. It can pop pretension, uncover hidden assumptions, and build a sudden intimacy between critic and reader. The best jokes are a form of understanding: you can only truly parody what you’ve fully grasped. Comedy tears down false pedestals, not the art itself. If a work can’t survive a laugh, the hollow was already there. The aim isn’t cruelty; it’s clarity, offered with a wink.
Are you saying there’s no difference between The Bachelor and a Toni Morrison novel?
No. I’m saying the difference isn’t a matter of inherent worthiness but of ambition, execution, and context. A Toni Morrison novel operates at a level of linguistic and moral complexity that The Bachelor doesn’t even attempt. But The Bachelor is a rich text about performance, gender, and the construction of romantic narrative under late capitalism. They’re different kinds of objects, and both can be examined with rigor. The mistake is to assume one is automatically beneath notice and the other beyond question.
How do I stop apologizing for my pop culture tastes?
Start by catching the apology. When you hear yourself say “guilty pleasure,” ask who’s making you feel guilty. Then try talking about the thing you love with the same vocabulary you’d use for anything else: discuss its structure, its effects, its context. The more you treat your own tastes as legitimate objects of thought, the more the old hierarchy loses its grip. And if someone at a dinner party still raises an eyebrow, ask them to explain, in detail, what they think “quality” means. The silence that follows is often deeply satisfying.
The line between high and low culture is drawn in pencil, not chiseled in stone. It’s time we brought our erasers—and our sense of humor—to it. Pop culture isn’t a break from critical thinking; it’s one of the most demanding terrains for it. And the temple of high art could use a few whoopee cushions in the pews. Both acts are a kind of devotion, and I, for one, refuse to choose.