five things tagged “standup”

Dennis Miller: Fake News, Real Jokes (2018) IMDb C+

Miller claims that he has ‘problems’ with his Orange Overlord. This was filmed in 2018 and there were many, many ‘problems’ with the administration he must have been aware of. The only filthiness he addresses is his non-chalant and charitable admission that separating children from their families might be wrong1. Everything else is lazy pabulum for the most ardent of Combover Caligula’s fans. The cruelty is the point, etc.

But what Miller loves more than his fondness for Mango Mussolini’s ‘outer voice being the same as his inner voice’2 is the fact that the Urinal Cake really winds up liberals. That’s it. There is no more nuance here. The sadistic glee of watching reasonable people lose their minds over a wannabe authoritarian and his sycophants fucking over Constitutional, democratic ideals and hurting immigrants and the marginalized is good American (Christian) fun!

  1. Before whining about Mexico and how it could have stepped up to prevent the abject cruelty of the practice this side of the border. ↩︎

  2. I am unsure of how this is a virtue. ↩︎

Racism and Astrology

Via co-worker DH. Dara Ó Briain on how Racism is better than Astrology:

Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these things about me, and you say I share these personality traits with this huge group of people, and I don’t know them, you don’t know them, and you say not only do we have the same character traits, but we have some sort of common history and some common destiny, and you make all of these horrible presumptions on the back of what? On the back of a fluke of birth. How dare you do that?

What? Ooh, Capricorn.

“Nanette” by Hannah Gadsby (2018) IMDb A

When I’m doing jokes that I do at the start of the show about lesbians, everyone laughs. It’s fine, it’s fun. I do exactly the same to men, and it’s not. That’s less to do with the men, but also the cultural practice. They’re not used to it.

That’s the way comedy is. Comedy is a man’s art form. It pretty much came from a time, post–World War II really — the 1950s are not really known for the subtle expressions of feminine life. There’s a lot of dick-swinging going on in that time, sort of like destroying modernism and bringing in postmodernism. Stand-up comedy’s come out of that era. It’s born from stand-ups doing jokes between burlesque shows. Then roasts, you know, which are basically misogyny and homophobia all wrapped up in “yo mama” jokes. The whole art form is centered around jerking off, so it’s no surprise that the endgame is Louis C.K.

A joke is a wank. Set-up … [does a jerk-off motion] punch line. Then you’ve got what I’m trying, storytelling. If the only reason to be on stage communicating with people is to tell them a joke and make them laugh, that seems thin for me. That has a place — I don’t think it should stop happening — but for me, I don’t know. I just don’t.

via Vulture. Also a contrast between Bill Maher and Gadsby.