I don't fully understand the intersection of gender and comedy
I think it involves Milton Berle.
Comedy is supposed to be "light entertainment"? That seems very wrong to me.
Sticking up for the ancient Greek view?
ancient comedy originated with the komos, a curious and improbable spectacle in which a company of festive males apparently sang, danced, and cavorted rollickingly around the image of a large phallus
I don't care how big the phallus was, those laughy masks are stupid and creepy.
2: That's taking an offhand comment very out of context: she's talking about how surprised and grateful she is to have a positive reception, because she feared that people in their homes would expect some light entertainment if they tuned in for some stand-up comedy. She's not being prescriptive.
It seems that she has done a Broadway "one-woman show" or "autobiographical monologue" and smuggled it into the much less niche "stand-up comedy" category. Good job by her finding a way to do that, which Julia Sweeney never managed to.
That's a reasonable take. Of course, the choice of stand-up packaging is integral to the message itself. And she is a professional comedian, not an actor. (I'm guessing, I guess.)
It also reminds me of the Tig Notaro tour about cancer. She went up to the same audiences and did much more serious material than she or others normally do. Most people couldn't pull it off.
I'm trying to think of other comedians who shifted to doing less funny monologues. For men (e.g. Billy Crystal) it tends to be the opposite of the stark confessional type of show, he just switched from comedy to sentimental nostalgia.
Most people couldn't pull it off.
Because they'd have breasts underneath.
5: Avant garde comedy back then was cavorting rollickingly around the phallus while wearing the sad drama masks.
I watched like 20 mins of this after seeing the raves and it seemed like OK, not great stand up comedy, not bad but not really my thing. Then I fast forwarded to the middle and it seemed similar. Then I was tired so went to bed. Do I have some kind of straight guy forcefield that keeps me from getting this or did I turn it off at the wrong spot?
12:
I think you turned it off at the wrong spot. Strong finish.
I don't know! I found it beautiful and compelling. It does have a crescendo arc that you might have missed, but the basic tune is the same. It becomes less and less comedy, and more and more anger at the patriarchy.
It probably reflects really well on you that you didn't have much appetite for it, I wouldn't worry about it.
She acts (as some kind of version of herself, I guess) in Please Like Me, which is great. I recommend sticking past the first season. Not that the first one is bad, but the characters really develop and you end up loving all of them way past what the mostly-comic first season presages.
Presages? Shoot me. I haven't written in English for a long time, and the words, they are not to be had easily.
14 - whatever it says it doesn't reflect well on my taste. Before putting it on I had been watching "Grandma's Boy" on cable. I'll watch this 'til the end, I usually like anger at the patriarchy.
Oh, good. A place to semi-anonymously discuss. I was really impressed with it as work and as art, but it made me so uncomfortable. It was painful to watch. Those glimpses into her life were so vivid, and I almost turned it off a few times. Art is hard. I've spent a few days reflecting on one particular reaction, which was embarrassment on her behalf. She's up there, all raw and hurting and pissed, performing a one-woman act she has written and yet still, I was embarrassed for her that she was publically admitting she was damaged and traumatized. So, that's maybe something to work on.
The other piece was that I'd normally watch this kind of thing solo, but after it was recommended by so many people in my wonderful liberal bubble, I pulled it up with the BF, who is quite fond of standup comedy. Whoops. He felt awful and guilty and pissed about feeling guilty, and it was not something to watch right before bed with even a nice, liberal, straight while dude who takes things a bit personally when called out for perpetuating patriarchy.
18.2: Oh, goody! I get to mansplain feminism!
#MeToo means you don't have to feel bad for making a man feel guilty about perpetuating patriarchy.
I dunno, I'm a straight white make and I thought it was great. Not the greatest comedy show in its own right, but a fantastic mix of comedy and memoir and political monologue. I literally started clapping at the end of the show with the rest of the audience (before realizing I was home all alone and feeling sort of stupid).
21: Yeah, he took it a lot more personally than he should have, but it definitely wasn't the discussion I'd rather have had afterwards. My usual "well do your part to make it better, then" didn't seem to work.
19: Oh, thanks! I've been doing feminism wrong. Good thing you set me straight. (Kidding, of course, in the intended vein.)
a fantastic mix of comedy and memoir and political monologue and also I guess a bit of art history
21.2: That's why Gloria Steinem (whenever she sees me) says, "There goes God's gift to women"
Would not have guessed that peep and Steinem were an item
goddamn sexy librarians scooping up all the feminists
No one to blame but yourself, Halford. You could have left some room by passing on that last scoop of drifter.
24: Right, neither peep nor Jim Brown on the likely list, but turns out ...
a fantastic mix of comedy and memoir and political monologue
Watched it last night. Thought some of it shaded towards a Spalding Gray monologue (but he generally did not do much "political" stuff and the monologue/joke mix was quite different).
It feels wrong to be talking about the technical aspects and not the content, but it really is a masterful piece of rhetoric. It works really, really well as both polemic and as comedy, despite the tension (ha) between the two Gadsby discusses during the set, and there's a wonderfully poetic cadence to it. The closest comparison I can think of is Stewart Lee's more polemical stuff, eg the Richard Littlejohn monologue, also about misogyny funnily enough, but obviously it's coming from a very different place.
We watched this last night. She's very smart, and the show is so well-assembled. The switches between the artifice of jokes, confessional truth, and metacommentary are masterful. I don't know how I feel about a world in which Picasso can't sleep with a seventeen-year-old, but on the whole, totally worth watching the whole thing.
Won't somebody think of the teenage necrophiliacs.
Sometimes a crow's gotta do what a crow's gotta do.
I mean who can't relate
Swift suspects that during the breeding season, a minority of crows, whether due to inexperience or the cocktail of hormones in their brains, lose their ability to deal with unusual stimuli. A dead crow has some of the characteristics of food, an intruder, or a mate. Faced with several possible conflicting responses, the crows choose all of them.
But crows are smart. So if crows are fucking dead crows other, dumber, birds must be fucking corpses even more. People just want to discriminate against crows because they eat us when the opportunity arises.
This isn't about book smarts, Mossy. It's about when you see a dead crow and want to simultaneously mate with it, eat it, or peck it away. What do you do, hotshot? What do you do???