Joss Whedon

TV wunderkind Joss Whedon, creator of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dollhouse," is at Harvard tonight to receive the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism. (Not bad for someone who’s 44.) Previous winners include author Salman Rushdie and Bad Religion singer Greg Graffin. "Joss’s shows talk about how to live a deeply ethical, moral life without traditional religion," explained Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard. "The older crowd in our community has no idea who is, but to the younger crowd, he’s one of the biggest heroes in their lives." In (sort of) related news: "Buffy" star Sarah Michelle Gellar is expecting her first baby with husband Freddie Prinze Jr.

Ajs.com :

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dr. Horrible and Dollhouse, tonight, accepted The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University’s "Cultural Humanism Award," otherwise known as the Rushdie Award in honor of its first recipient, Sir Salman Rushdie. The event was a mix of rather awkwardly inappropriate fan-gushing and serious Humanist introspection on the nature of morality in a post-religious world. Statistics were touted (1 Billion non-religious people in the world, increasing percentages of non-religious people in every U.S. state over the last 10 years, etc.); clips were shown from Whedon’s work; and a rather lovely award satue was given. Most interestingly, however, was Whedon’s acceptance speech. In it, he called for an acceptance of religion by the non-religious. He observed that religious faith required believing in something which cannot be proven to exist. Humanism, on the other hand, relies on an optimism about human nature for which a great deal of evidence to the contrary exists. Whedon believes that religion is not, in fact, the origin of morality, but rather morality is the origin of religion. Mysticism was a way to explain and enshrine a moral code which is fundamental to humanity, and thus cannot be abandoned simply by stepping outside of the context of organized religion. Humor abounded as well. "Who Wants To Be Pope," Whedon joked, should be a new reality show on Fox, creating a franchise of Popedom rather than a pseudo-monarchy. When questions began, the first four were from Harvard students who had been pre-selected, each rolling a clip from Whedon’s work to introduce their question. Angel discussing his reasons for continuing to be a champion, regardless of a lack of "higher power" guiding his hand; Wash and Mal discussing faith in human nature from Firefly; and finally a compilation on River Tam and Buffy Summers fight scenes to introduce the evenings first off-context question: "who wins, Buffy or River?" The audience voted for River. The evening was fascinating, but I wish the fan-boy crowd hadn’t dove forward to ask random questions about his shows. I would have enjoyed getting up to ask one of my own: "what is the role of humor in Humanism." I think the answer would have involved more discussion of Buddhism, but I’d have enjoyed hearing a master of comedic writing discuss the topic.

Tastefulgeekery.wordpress.com :

I just got back from getting my fangirl on at the Cultural Humanism award ceremony that honored Joss Whedon tonight. It was great! We got to see some fun clips, hear Joss give a great speech and get a few interesting tidbits of information, photos and an autograph. All in all, a pretty great evening.

The sad part was Joss’ talk about Dollhouse. He reported that he was going to do his best to get that 13th episode aired because it was really cool and apparently gave a lot of answers to some of the burning Dollhouse questions. (The complete deal about this was reported on EW yesterday. Caution, there are spoilers in the article, but if you gloss past the first few paragraphs, like I did, you can get the info without being spoiled.) In addition, Joss made a remark that seemed to indicate he wasn’t hopeful about Dollhouse’s renewal, which was saddening, but not surprising. He also mentioned that some of the choices made on Dollhouse were about the network pushing its agenda, specifically in terms of the look of most of the dolls being ideal model types. This was something I had assumed, but it was nice to get it confirmed.

He also answered the age old question: If Buffy and River got in a fight, who would win? He, like the audience, chose the programmed killer over the chosen one. As did yours truly. C’mon, River is scary!

When he signed my comic he was very sweet, although obviously weary. I couldn’t bring myself to say much more than thank you very much. And it seemed like he had taken all the gushing he could take.

It is a weird thought to know that for him it was a blur of people, but for me, it was so fun and exciting to see him in person. I just hope that the network stuff doesn’t drag him down too much.

Don’t give up making interesting and thought provoking television, Joss!