For the Record: Brandon

 

Makeup by Kevin Kirkpatrick, via Vulture, January 2012.

Posted this in comments at Roy's SubStack, on the "Let's Go Brandon" phenomenon, in response to a comment by SundayStylie wondering "are we supposed to believe that the Fuck Your Feelings crowd have suddenly decided to revert to dainty euphemisms?" and thought it was something I'd want to remember:

It's middle school boys pretending to clear their throats--"A-whore! A-whore!" The immaturity is kind of the point. It's pretending Biden is your mom or your teacher, baffled and unable to respond, whereas if you just said "fuck" they could just yell at you and not let you go to the dance.

This is what Trump is particularly a master of, not just saying the quiet part out loud but claiming deniability as he does it. "You know, they have a word. It sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist. And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist." Why is he not supposed to use the word? Because he's telling you he's a Nazi.

But whether you embarrass yourself by calling him out for it, or by not calling him out, you're the one who gets embarrassed, and all the cool boys in the class can't get over how funny it is.

I keep telling you Trump's base is middle-aged Beavis and Butt-Head.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Comedy

"Mother Nature is a woman because she’s trying to kill us in the most passive aggressive way possible. She’s like, ‘What? I raised the temperature a little. Maybe I wouldn’t have if you had taken out the recycling like I asked.’”

OK, so I love Michelle Wolf. Let's just come right out and say it. I think she's the best thing on the current iteration of the Daily Show—I like the whole thing fine, and I'm especially fond of Roy Wood Jr., but I think Michelle Wolf is truly gifted, funny, and original, deeply daring on subjects of sex and race, with a range from Gracie Allen ditzy to Stephen Colbert brutal, sometimes within the compass of a single clause, and always with that that Pennsylvania bray and  lunatic smile, like an overmedicated ten-year-old narrating the school pageant.

So in the first place I can't imagine why the White House Correspondents' Association offered her the gig at all, if only because she's so unpredictable. This is somebody who can start off sounding scholarly, though silly, on the Second Amendment, and veer into what seems like an approbation of "slave sex" before you know it. Did they watch any of her work? Or did they just Google "woman under 40 because #MeToo", the way Jared Kushner discovered Trump's expert on the China trade, the unspeakable Peter Navarro?

So if you think the routine wasn't her best work, I'm OK with that. I really think she's at her best in short bits with a straight man like Trevor, and I think she was creatively inhibited by the rigorous form of the thing, with its mandatory one-liners for each of 40 or 50 of the more famous guests.

Colbert in 2006 managed to break that thing, in a way that can never be repeated. Just watched it again for the first time in quite a while, and found myself unexpectedly very moved at the bit toward the end in his "audition tape" for the press secretary's job, where the late Helen Thomas chases him out of the White House demanding to be told why the US invaded Iraq. That's surely one of the greatest pieces of television in the history of the technology. But just don't blame Michelle Wolf, OK?

Hi, It's Stupid: Eros, Sex, and Comedy, Not

Eros, or sexual love, discovers Psyche, the soul, asleep in the garden. Edward Burne-Jones, ca. 1870, Yale Center for British Art.

Hi, it's Stupid to say I'm boycotting stories about the sexual errors, from misbehavior to actual crime, of male comedians, except maybe Bill Cosby, on whom I'm pretty sure I've passed judgement already so it's too late, and Fatty Arbuckle if any new evidence turns up. But I am. I'm not proud of this.

I might be interested in asking why it is that the current crop of stories of men abusing women fall so neatly into two categories, those involving men wielding immense political or financial power from Dominique Strauss-Kahn (a socialist, but that didn't stop me from denouncing him) through Harvey Weinstein (a noted supporter of liberal causes, but I'm not impressed) to Roger Ailes and President Trump, and those involving men who tell jokes for a living. With the peculiar overlap case of the man who used to tell jokes for a living and later became a Senator from Minnesota. What's up with that?

Forget it, Jesse, it's New York City. And you're not, you bumpkin.

Ronny Chieng and the Daily Show response to the ghastly Orientalism of Fox "News" correspondent Jesse Watters and his journey into the Heart of Darkness in Lower Manhattan that aired on the O'Reilly show on Monday, which was some of the most insulting, ignorant, and all-round shamefully terrible TV I've ever seen.

I wanted to write something about it as I was becoming aware of it yesterday, but this piece really says everything I'd want to say much better and more. It's just really well done.

Also I know a couple of the featured interviewees (the Alfred E. Neuman voter and the guy who says "fuck" a lot) somewhat—both are among many other things notably involved in community arts support—and the helpmeet knows them well, along with some of the others, and recognizes more or less everybody. (Also turns out that Chieng was raised in Singapore and born just across the Causeway in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, so sentimental about that.)

So I'm posting it even if you already saw it. Sue me.

We're only human

Image via Don Zeigler.

Spent a ridiculous amount of time playing BooMan's new game:

Here's an exercise. Tell me your answers to following questions. Which Republican presidential candidate:

1. is the funniest.
2. is the smartest.
3. seems like the most decent person.
4. would you drink a beer with (if you had to).
5. is the most gifted politician?

And then the opposite—the least funny, the dumbest, and so on. My solution is over the fold:

Pride goes before a pratfall too

Christian de Chalonge television version of Le Malade Imaginaire, 2008, via Le Figaro.

In a campaign speech before last January's parliamentary elections candidate Alexis Tsipras made a pretty audacious Greek literary reference, as The Guardian noted in a mysteriously Aristotle-bashing editorial:

The preceding five years had been ones of tragedy, he said. And after hubris, he warned, invoking Aristotle’s famous but flawed analysis of ancient drama, come nemesis and catharsis. The election, he added, was a battle between two approaches – on the one hand, the execution of austerity measures to the letter, whether or not those measures were working; on the other, a pragmatic notion – advanced by Mario Draghi, the head of the of European Central Bank – of “whatever it takes” to save the euro.

The latter view would prevail, said Mr Tsipras, and for an extra reason too: “Because Greece is the country of Sophocles, who taught us with his Antigone that there are moments in which the supreme law is justice.” Mr Tsipras was echoing the language of Antigone’s refusal to abide by her uncle the king’s edict that her dead brother be left unburied. In the drama she contrasts manmade laws, nomoi, with an ineffable, divine justice, Dike. Moral authority trumps mortal authority.

I'm not sure if he remembered that Antigone's view prevails in the end only after she herself is dead. King Creon's life is ruined too, with the suicides of his son and his wife, but that doesn't make it OK. It's a tragedy.

TV criticism

I did not much like the fat-shaming (Christie), gay-shaming (Graham), and Botox-shaming (Pelosi) in Joel McHale's routine, or in general the lazy dependence on celebrity names (Biden, Kardashian) as a substitute for jokes that has largely taken over the whole field of standup in the last couple of decades (including of course Maureen Dowd's [jump]