"I've got people in my family that are to the right of Attila the Hun. And when people tell me, like, 'How can you platform that person on your show?'..."

"I go, I platform my uncle every Thanksgiving. And by the way, I love him. He's a three-dimensional human being who has qualities that I really admire, things about him. And we've lost that. We've lost the ability to love people, because we litmus test at every point."

Said John Stewart.

For a contrasting opinion, here's Ben Shapiro savaging Tucker Carlson for platforming Nick Fuentes:

"[T]he burgeoning Nads were young Republicans. They had gathered at the Capitol Hill Club to drink cheap beer..."

"... in a room decorated with porcelain elephant statues and photographs of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. John McCain, and listen to a well-built man with a five o’clock shadow and an Australian accent tell them that '"nasty women" are coming for two things: your mind and your testicles!' In some ways, Adams’s shtick is conventionally conservative: He’s Christian, he’s very concerned about there being only two genders, he rails against 'woke.' In other ways, his version of MAGA manhood is so over-the-top, so uncanny that it almost seems like performance art.... He writes about how if your wife is 'high-maintenance' then you’re a 'loser' no matter how hot she is. And about his love of steak. 'Alpha males don’t care about time changes, we wake up at 4AM every single morning regardless of the circumstances,' he wrote on X last month, a few days after the clocks sprang forward for daylight saving time. '64oz tomahawk ribeyes aren’t going to eat themselves!' Is Nick Adams serious?... 'You remember Andy Kaufman?; Adams’s hired security guard told me, referring to the late comedian who was famous for never breaking character.... 'This is not a character,' Adams told me. 'This is not a bit. It’s not trolling. Anyone who thinks this is not me, that I don’t eat steak, that I don’t drink ice-cold domestics, that I don’t repel woke beer, they’re wrong. They’re absolutely wrong.”

Writes Ben Terris, in "The deeply silly, extremely serious rise of ‘Alpha Male’ Nick Adams/Meet the Trump-backed raconteur who is teaching America’s young men the art of being hard to deal with" (WaPo, free access link).

"Nads" = Nick Adams Disciples.

I hadn't heard of Nick Adams until this article. The issue of when a comedian is "serious" is kind of intriguing. I don't think the point of reference should be Andy Kaufman. It should be Andrew Dice Clay. I already lived through that. Another thing I lived through was the TV show "The Rebel." Don't reuse a name that already means something to some people who still roam through the west.

ADDED: As pointed out by William in the comments, there's also Nick Adams, the Hemingway fictional character. I don't have a problem with this new Nick Adams adopting the name in a reference to those stories from a century ago, just as I'd accept a comedian who called himself Hamlet or Captain Ahab. "Nick Adams" was taken as a showbiz name back in the 1950s, and I don't like seeing it reused. 

"The Gun Incident (as it lives in my brain) has become a metaphor for what’s transpired for all of us this past year—since we’ve been threatened with death and disruption brought on by the coronavirus?"

"Lately, I have asked myself this question: Could I have moved forward from that moment without any assistance with my mental health and state of well-being?... We’ve sequestered ourselves for months.... [H]ow do we step out into this new world—emotionally? What about the mental health costs of the underlying anxiety of the times?... [T]he administration has overlooked a dire need—and that decision is a reflection of our values and priorities in this country.... We need the loud, culturally relevant presence of an expert in mental health.... A psychologist general at the forefront of mental health research and delivery would send a strong message that psychological well-being is prized on a par with physical health—a message in keeping with the phrase 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'"... And someone whom we trust. Someone who might become so familiar to us that she or he would turn into a regular character depicted on Saturday Night Live.... [A]ll we’re left with are fictional characters from television—paging Dr. Frasier Crane (Frasier), Dr. Jennifer Melfi (The Sopranos), Dr. Noelle Akopian (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Charlie Brown’s pal Lucy, and, of course, all of Larry David’s therapists on Curb. In all seriousness, this speaks to a significant imbalance in our society."

From "The Forgotten F-Word in the Pandemic/Monica Lewinsky wonders if these times demand a prominent mental health czar" by Monica Lewinsky (Vanity Fair). The "The Forgotten F-Word" is feelings. "The Gun Incident" is that time in 2011 when she was stopped in her car and "someone... wearing a widely striped, bright turquoise and gray sweatshirt... gripping a gun, brandished [it] at his waist" in such a way that she was somehow "looking straight down the barrel of A Gun." The car was mightier than the gun, and she was able to "jam my Prius into drive, gun the accelerator, and move forward... [t]ires squealing." I didn't know you could jam and gun a Prius and get its tires to squeal, but Lewinsky deploys action verbs. I love that it's a Prius and that we're not told the color of the "someone" though we're told the color of his sweatshirt — bright turquoise! The point is, she had a traumatic experience in 2011, and she sought psychiatric care, which puts her in a position to recommend mental health care for those going through trauma, and since 2020 is so traumatic for all of us, the nation should have a Psychologist General, and it ought to be someone with such cultural prominence that she/he would get impersonated on "SNL." Instead we only have fictional characters as our centrally prominent psychologist, which is too bad.

That has me remember when the nation did have one most-famous psychologist, and it was somebody that got joked about and impersonated. Do you remember? It was Dr. Joyce Brothers!

"Calm down with your political conversations. Whoever is running the country, nobody else's life changes."

"We still gotta go out there and make a living. Enjoy your family, enjoy your friends, bang your chicks and make your money.... We're both excited because we both don't give a shit what anybody thinks about anything.... I decided not to run for president because it would be embarrassing for everybody else losing. It would be too easy."

Said Andrew Dice Clay quoted in "Roseanne Barr Joins Andrew Dice Clay for 'Mr. and Mrs. America' Comedy Tour."

"I felt that, in that moment, he was being typically Donald, which is performing and shocking. Almost like Andrew Dice Clay, the stand-up comedian."

"Does he really do the things that he's saying or is that his act? And in Donald's case, I equated it that way. When he said what he said, I'd like to think if I had thought for a minute that there was a grown man detailing his sexual assault strategy to me, I'd have called the FBI."

Billy Bush speaks.

I think a lot of people don't get Trump's statements because they don't understand the humor. But why should they? They don't want to let him off the hook more than they don't want to look like they have no sense of humor.

There's the famous feminist punchline: That's not funny. 

I think it's important to perceive the humor, so you can understand why he says some of the weird things he does. You don't have to think it's funny or have a taste for that kind of humor, but you should understand that it is humor, unless you have some reason to want to stand on your obtuseness. It could serve some political purpose that you like, perhaps for yourself, perhaps for others. But if you can understand how a statement is humor and you engage in speech that treats it as if it is intended to be taken seriously because you find it useful for other people not to see the humor, you are a propagandist.

"The University of Kentucky has punished me in a 'sexual misconduct' case, in part, for singing a Beach Boys tune covered by Alvin and the Chipmunks."

Instapundit quotes the first line of a column by Buck Ryan, director of the Citizen Kentucky Project of UK’s Scripps Howard First Amendment Center. It's fascinating that the University of Kentucky punished the director of its First Amendment Center for his verbal expression. You'd think they'd steer clear of trouble with someone in that position, but — as he tells it — the university's Title IX coordinator deprived him of travel funds and an "award worth thousands of dollars" without offering him any process whatsoever.

Now, what did Ryan actually do? He had taught a course called "Storytelling: Exploring China’s Art and Culture" in a University of Kentucky program at a Chinese University, and during "closing ceremonies for an inaugural Education Week," he sang some version of the Beach Boys song "California Girls." We're expected to assume that the Title IX coordinator was plainly wrong to judge his performance to be offensive "language of a sexual nature," but we are not given a full text of the song, let alone a video that would convey the tone of voice and any physical gestures.

If you care about process, give better process to us, the people you seek to enlist in your outrage. Don't begin with the distraction of The Chipmunks. I'm not going to assume that any song covered by The Chipmunks is impossible to rewrite with sexy lyrics. Even if something is an outright children's rhyme from the start, it can be rewritten dirty, as brilliantly demonstrated here (NSFW):



But "California Girls" is not a children's song. It's about finding lots of different women sexually attractive. Evans only quotes one line of the song he sang: "Well, Shanghai [changed from East Coast] girls are hip; I really dig those styles they wear." That sounds relatively inoffensive, but why is a teacher singing to students about digging clothes worn by females? Other lines are sexier, notably "And the Northern girls with the way they kiss/They keep their boyfriends warm at night." And "I dig a French bikini on Hawaii Island dolls."

However that may sound coming from a cartoon chipmunk, it is at least arguably creepy for a teacher to be singing that to students. And I don't know what variations were made in the text — who wore what and how they behaved at night.

I love The Beach Boys, and I think this is relatively wholesome...



... especially when males are singing about females their own age who are not their students.

I'm all for due process, so let's hear the point of view of the Title IX coordinator, and let's see the evidence that person relied on, such as the full lyrics to the song.

The new Woody Allen movie seems kind of like "A Streetcar Named Desire"...

... with Andrew Dice Clay as Marlon Brando:



"'Back when your sister had all that money she wanted nuttin' to do with you; now that she's broke, she's movin' in,' says Andrew Dice Clay, proving that a guy from Brooklyn can handle the cadence of Woody Allen dialogue just fine."

He has less (and much grayer) hair and has put on a few pounds, but the 55-year-old is still unmistakably the guy who once upon a time sold out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row – the only comedian to date to ever do so.

It's great to see Andrew Dice Clay make a comeback. Do you remember how he was destroyed? Interesting to think about how Woody Allen might empathize with a man's destruction, but what happened to ADC is nothing like the problems Allen had. I remember the first time I saw Andrew Dice Clay — on TV, doing his typical routine — and I thought it was obviously a spoof of exaggerated masculinity. Later, I found out that right-thinking women were supposed to assume the "that's not funny" position.