A Closer Look at Humor: An Analysis of Ehrenreich’s View
In Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, the author frequently focuses on the demeanor and appearance of the people she meets and sees during her research trips. Throughout the book she makes witty, opinionated comments that can easily be taken out of context. Because of this, her wisecracks convey the impression of her being narrow-minded. Also, these comments do not help her with any of her arguments because of how she comes off. Ehrenreich improper use of humor puts across the impression of her being biased.
Ehrenreich’s “biting humor” gives off the sense of her stereotypical views, bluntly stating her biased opinions. Some of these views are understandable, and sometimes even excusable, considering her background of high education and/or lack of personal experience that is like majority of the people she encounters throughout her journey. However, there are points in which her wisecracks go too far. During her time in Florida, there is a point when four of her tables fill up at once. When a customer from a table of British tourists complains, she states, “Princess Di refuses to eat her chicken strips with her pancake and sausage special since, as she now reveals, the strips were meant to be an appetizer.” (p. 47). She also refers to another table of customers as “yuppies” (p. 47). When making these stereotypical judgments of people, she puts herself on a pedestal, almost as if she disregards the fact that she may fall under the same category of those whom she is making the comments about. When she references the food at the location of second job she takes in Florida, she begins describing it with: “Picture a fat person’s hell, and I don’t mean a place with no food.” (p. 29)....
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... in her favor. Alzheimer’s isn’t preventable nor is it something that when someone has it, they can be compared to “wizened toddlers at a tea party.” That statement was uncalled for and unnecessary. It doesn’t work in her favor because it makes her seem ignorant.
Ehrenreich’s views throughout the book do not help her with getting the reader to agree with her. Her use of humor is more offensive than funny. She put herself in a position where she didn’t go into this project open-minded. She kept her own views, which got in the way of seeing people for who they are. She sarcastically makes fun of her place if work, when she didn’t out herself in the place of the people there. She also mocks people to the extent where it isn’t just a little side comment, but a rude, biased statement. Ehrenreich use of humor in Nickel and Dimed contains too much of an opinionated twist.
Both pieces attempted to show a certain aspect in life. They tried to inform others and evoke a sense of pathos, to convey pity in hopes of sparking a change in the situation. The difference in Eighner’s piece is that he shows that even though he experienced some of the worst scenarios, he was still satisfied for what he had. On the other hand, Ehrenreich depicts the hardships for those who are not at the complete bottom. Even though the people who were introduced in “Serving in Florida” were better off financially than Lars Eighner, many failed to recognise that the situation could always be worse. She shows how some are not grateful for what they have, but are instead searching for
Nickel And Dimed: Occupations Barbara Ehrenreich provides evidence in “Nickel and Dimed” that she’s an outstanding author with this book. Its engaging and compelling, no question about that. But it’s hard to get from side to side at times since of the authors attitudes. Her key summit is to carry concentration to the scrape of the working deprived, but she manages to be both abusive and divisive. Occupation on attacking our industrialist system, she fails to become aware of that the endurance of upper classes seems to be what motivates the poor, fairly than what dispirits them. She blames capitalism for the injustices of the world, slightly than easy bad management techniques. A company should be shown that would benefit from a union and it will be shown to all around that one that will promote even better from decent, gentle management decisions. Most irritating, she’s constantly negative about the whole lot, even the positive experiences she has. When one of her colleagues offers to allow her move in with her and her family, not only does Ehrenreich turn the propose down, but she still describes it sneeringly as a "touched by an angel moment." Does she have to dribble with irony yet when writing about an authentically type deed? She condemns "visible Christians," any and all organization, yuppies, anybody who hires and consequently exploits maids, welfare reform, and still tosses in a prod at people who study John Grisham. Is there someone she likes? Her logic is troublesome as well. She begins her research to see if the functioning poor have some financial endurance tactics that the center class don’t know regarding, and decides at the conclusion that no, they don’t, as if admitting that this would signify the poor are imp...
Paul Krugman’s humorous rhetoric both entertains and informs the reader towards America’s consistent uneducated assumptions of other countries. He opens with a critical approach of the Republican Candidate, Jeb Bush and his comment about French work weeks. Krugman immediately shot down Bush’s argument and referred him as “french toast”, in order to describe the weight of the outcome on his campaign in a joking manner. He inserts an interjection and utilizes common speech to convey straight messages about his possible political standing in the presidential race and elaborates on how groundless his statements were about the French work ethic. Krugman’s sour critique then moves onto yet another Republican, Ben Carson. Although there weren’t any
Barbara Ehrenreich employed the use of humor multiple times in Nickel and Dimed; it was perhaps her most frequently used rhetorical device. Ehrenreich was trying to portray the tragedy and heartbreak of the situation by using that sort of hopeless, sardonic humor. She also used her humor as a way to camouflage topics that would otherwise be off-limits. Although some of the humor included in the narrative may have seemed distasteful, it all had a purpose and was rarely used inappropriately.
Can someone really live and prosper in American receiving minimal income? Can someone create a good lifestyle for themselves on just six to seven dollars an hour? In Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover to find out if it is indeed possible. Giving herself only $1,000 she leaves the lifestyle that she has come accustomed too and goes to join all the people living the low class way of life.
The juxtaposed contrasts that she often uses are seen explicitly in anecdotes or implicitly in conscious thoughts. Such contrasts first appear in the first paragraph. Even before Ehrenreich makes any substantial effort to join the poor working class, she is hit with this sudden unease of being recognized. At that time, it is clear that she has not relinquished her middle class status since she feels ashamed of being identified as a poor worker. In the world that the author originally belongs to, name and reputation are considered important to one’s standing in society yet in the working class realm, as Ehrenreich later finds out, one is often “unnoticed” and names are “unuttered.” Not only are names forgotten but one’s ability and education are also ignored when looking for jobs. Oblivious to the “rule” for hiring for unskilled jobs, Ehrenreich initially worries about her over-qualification but only to be shocked when she realizes the employers are not even interested. Whereas jobs for the middle class often demand higher education and past accomplishments, jobs for the low-wage workforce are simply depended simply on luck or as Ehrenreich claims “ being in the right place at the right time.” One can convey this as part of a corporate scheme to ensure the
Nickel and Dimed is a book about the author’s trip into the working poor world. Her profession was as a professor in biology. She noticed similar traits of her studies throughout the years, their struggle with being working poor. This struggled she saw preempted her to create a social experiment that is about how to live as a unskilled, working poor person in America. Instead of experimenting on others she took upon herself to be the one who drives into this unknown world to her. This assignment she given herself wasn’t an easy task and Ehrenreich experiences many conflicting emotions about what she will take on. Before she drives into her social experiment, she create some basic rules she must live by: She has to take the highest pay job offered and do her best to keep it, no relaying on past skills, she has to find the most affordable living conditions in the area she was in. These rules were not easily kept during the experiment and eventual she broke them all at one point or another. She also set some reasonable limits that protect her from going hungry or homeless. There was a couple times throughout the experiment that she broke her
At the beginning, I was very skeptical of Ehrenreich and her set up of the study. She makes it very clear at the beginning of the book that she was not doing this for emotional reasons. She explains that, “My aim here was much more straightforward and objective—just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day (Ehrenreich, 2001, p. 6). This struck me as not only a bit on the heartless side, but a complete and utter flaw in her research methods. As a Ph.D in Bilogy, Ehrenreich is of course used to the objective side of research, but should have known from the start that the real world is not an objective laboratory. The people that she spent all of those months with working and interacting with were not simply robots that only went to work and sleep. They had emotions and dreams and aspirations other than simply to make enough money to pay next month’s rent. When starting the study, Ehrenreich did not take any of this into account. She simply set up a point blank experiment, to attempt to live how the other half lives, but she soon found out that this is not as simply as paying rent for a
In this book, Ehrenreich tries to work in three different places to see what it is like to work as a minimum wage worker. Ehrenreich worked as a server in Florida, housekeeper in Miami, and sales person in Minnesota, and still she didn’t make enough money to live comfortable. As she says, “Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rent too high”(Ehrereich’s 199). She notices how hard it is for poor people to try to survive when they have to work with a minimum
Ehrenreich accomplishes her goal in explaining why we should have the race of “none” by establishing credibility when she talks about how her own family has not followed the traditions of their ancestors and some of the social
In her expose, Nickel and Dime, Barbara Ehrenreich shares her experience of what it is like for unskilled women to be forced to be put into the labor market after the welfare reform that was going on in 1998. Ehrenreich wanted to capture her experience by retelling her method of “uncover journalism” in a chronological order type of presentation of events that took place during her endeavor. Her methodologies and actions were some what not orthodox in practice. This was not to be a social experiment that was to recreate a poverty social scenario, but it was to in fact see if she could maintain a lifestyle working low wage paying jobs the way 4 million women were about to experience it. Although Ehrenreich makes good use of rhetoric (ethos, pathos, logos), she is very effective at portraying pathos, trying to get us to understand why we should care about a social situation such as this through, credibility, emotion, and logic.
In today’s society, the question of minimum wage is a large political topic. Many people argue that it is impossible to live on a minimum wage lifestyle. In her novel Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich looks into this issue. In an experiment in which she mimics the life of a single woman, she moves into the low-wage workforce in three different cities in America. Within these cities, she attempts to make a living off of low-wage work and records her experiences, as well as the experiences of the true low-wage workers around her. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich utilizes both vivid imagery and data in order to persuade the audience to agree that the low-wage lifestyle is truly un-livable.
During the middle of the book, Ehrenreich writes, "Maybe, it occurs to me, that I 'm getting a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black (p. 100)." I found this interesting because African Americans continuously face inequality due to race, which correlates with the inequalities that lower classes in society face. Throughout Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich emphasizes that there are "hidden costs" to being poor, which includes those in poverty who cannot find a way out. The working poor, who Ehrenreich gets to know through work, live in hotels paying daily. These people in the book describe to Ehrenreich that that would rent an apartment, but they cannot afford the security deposit and starting costs. The working poor in the book also must buy unhealthy meals at fast-food restaurants because they cannot afford kitchen appliances or food to cook with. People suffering in poverty often believe they are stuck there and cannot get out, so they
The article entitled “A rationalist 's Mystical Moment” by Barbara Ehrenreich recants a “mystical” moment endured by the author who, a self-described rationalist descends from a long line of “hardcore atheists”. The author’s background is colorful as described by her biography in Wikipedia “… American writer and political activist who describes herself as "a myth buster by trade", and has been called "a veteran muckraker" by The New Yorker. During the 1980s and early 1990s she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. Ehrenreich is perhaps best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Ehrenreich)
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2001.