Embarrassment and riches

If you had reason to be embarrassed this year, if you spoke out of turn or had a public defeat, if you did something naughty that someone -- or everyone -- saw, there's no reason to fret. You had company.

Besides, as you might have learned, a little bit of shame can do you good.

Amid the highlights, lowlights, scandals, and hits of the past year in popular culture, here was a common theme: 2006 was the year of shame and shamelessness. It was the year when shame was entertainment in itself, when people learned to profit from well-placed humiliation, when embarrassment was converted into something we could celebrate.

Not that a public drubbing didn't hurt, sometimes. There were some prime examples, this year, of celebrity bad behavior, followed by self-flagellation and a plea for understanding. Mel Gibson may or may not be anti-Semitic; Michael Richards may or may not be racist. But they felt the public wrath, and that's worth something. To see them wrestling with shame just made the rest of us feel better.

And if a little finger-wagging could go so far , consider the thrill we felt when shame was channeled for good. What would "YouTube" have been, after all, without a collection of frat boys and foreigners, willing to be embarrassed as entertainment? What would comedy have been without the specter of shame, as when "The Office" -- the "No Exit" of modern working life -- turned the awkward pause into an art form? We even managed, gleefully, to turn shame on its head -- we could celebrate "Brokeback Mountain" for revealing forbidden love, but we could also take great joy in "Brokeback to the Future."

And then, when we look back at 2006, we'll always have Borat.

If there was a person of the year -- besides "you," according to Time -- it might well have been the faux Kazakh megastar, whose hit movie achieved a brilliant balancing act between comedy and cruelty. It could have been an uncomfortable hour and a half, watching British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen poke fun at the unsuspecting. But it redeemed itself, even proved itself kind, because Baron Cohen did such a thorough job of humiliating himself. The man was shameless enough to run naked through the halls of a hotel, and straight into a mortgage brokers' convention. The jokes were on him, except in those few moments when the people he was duping deserved to be mocked. (And those frat boys who sued him? They ought to be ashamed.)

In the process, he revealed an America with warts and fissures -- but also a country of kindhearted folk, welcoming to strangers and willing, for a while, to believe the best in people. It was a nice, uplifting lesson in the redemptive power of shame. A welcome gift, given America's place in the world.

It makes sense that embarrassment would seep into culture this year, since in 2006, America felt the sting of wounded pride. This was the year when the public, and then the administration, seemed to collectively accept the shameful truth that the war in Iraq has gone badly. This was the year when the United States had to eat a little crow.

And that sense of dreary destiny crept into public culture. This year, we seemed to lose our taste for easy happy endings. The uplifting message of "World Trade Center" got far less traction and critical buzz than the noble-but-doomed heroes of "United 93." The new James Bond was less campy swashbuckler than (literally) tortured spy.

The most enduring villains were the ones publicly shamed for their excesses: the fashionistas of "Ugly Betty" and "The Devil Wears Prada," the real-life toppled divas of "Project Runway." And "Heroes," the season's big television hit, considers superpower as a burden -- a source of shame. We're not quite so enamored anymore with the idea of being on top.

Maybe, in the end, we'll be blessed for that. Without a little shame, there can be no resurrection. And, as it turns out, people love the comeback almost as much as the fall.

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" would have lacked a certain punch were it not built on the foundation of prior defeat; when he delivers his standard line -- "I used to be the next president of the United States of America" -- it was hard not to cheer him on. (And when he went on "Saturday Night Live" to pretend to be the president, it was better, one suspected, than the real thing would have been.)

The Dixie Chicks, too, rode their post-Iraq-war flogging to a much-acclaimed CD and a documentary, "Shut Up and Sing." The Game turned the shame of a split with hip-hop mentor Dr. Dre into an album-long reflection on relationships lost.

Even Star Jones Reynolds, lately of "The View," admitted to her own astounding divahood, albeit months after her public comeuppance, when she made the sore mistake of embarrassing Barbara Walters on the air. And Rosie O'Donnell, brought on "The View" to inject the show with shameless opinions, found herself apologizing to Chinese-speaking people, for poking fun at the way they talk.

A quick apology, Rosie seems to have learned, is the best way to counter public shame. A long, drawn-out denial has more sting. That's what happened to Oprah, embarrassed by her overglowing defense of the fake-memoirist James Frey. When she finally turned her claws on her tormentor, one January afternoon, she made the publishing industry quake.

If only she could do that more often. For a few very-public embarrassees, we're still waiting for redemption. We could have used a bit more public flogging for Dick Cheney, who accidentally shot a hunting buddy in the face. And there has been no hint of true remorse from Britney Spears, who spent the year making a string of bad choices. It's hard to know which was more humiliating: getting caught driving with your baby on your lap, or going through a Matt Lauer interview with your eyelash falling off?

It's Kevin Federline, in fact -- "Fed-Ex," as he's now known -- who has the better chance at short-term gain, and that has to do with shame, too; he's building a career, musical and otherwise, on his imperviousness to embarrassment. That same willful shamelessness is what makes Stephen Colbert's TV persona so funny. But not everyone gets the joke. When he tried his shtick at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, he got the upscale equivalent of pie in the face.

It might be nice if that happened more often, too. Ann Coulter has yet to express a whit of shame for insulting 9/11 wives. And truth be told, it didn't seem to stop people from buying her book.

But, Coulter notwithstanding, we also seem to know, collectively, when shameless has gone too far. Witness the fast flame-out of O.J. Simpson's would-be book and TV special: "If I Did It, Here's How it Happened." Turns out, we didn't need to know.

That we remember so many embarrassments, know them so intimately, is a tribute to the wonders of technology. The advent of viral video, the sudden explosion of YouTube, abetted the rise of embarrassment as spectacle. It was the ultimate act of consumer power -- proof, as predicted, that the public can now control what it wants to see, and when. If you missed Oprah lashing out at Frey, or Rosie saying something else out of turn, you could always catch it at work that afternoon.

Whether that will last is an open question; now that YouTube is linked to Google's deep pockets, the copyright concerns are bound to increase. But all may not be lost; "The View" is posting its best Rosie-isms online these days, and there's word that the networks are conspiring to hatch their own YouTube competitor. Once skittish of YouTube, Saturday Night Live now leaks uncensored versions of its "digital shorts" online, outside the FCC's reach and available to all.

And that's a blessing, too. It would be a shame, really, to go back to the days when humiliation happened in semi-private corners, when it was something we only heard about, and talked about, and forgot. Embarrassment works best when it's very, very public.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. She blogs at www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog.