"... counting the number of references to her being horny, feeling there were too many, but now thinking she’s good at them, so it’s the right number. And the 'Wicked' jokes were still fluid. Glaser was adding to things to obsess over. 'Do we have too many jokes about pedophiles?' she wondered. This wasn’t exactly the panic attack she had predicted. But Glaser said she had performed the jokes at clubs so often (91 times before the ceremony) that she could no longer tell if they were funny. How could she? She knew every surprise coming. She likened her relationship with her material to a marriage where she’s not gaga anymore. The jokes have been reliable, sure, but a political one that always kills recently bombed. That rattled her. 'Maybe it bums people out,' she said, sounding confused...."
Should a standup comedian reveal the inner workings like this? It can't make anything funnier for us, the audience. Eh, but who watches the Golden Globes? I used to, but now, I don't even know how to watch them. And I don't think I've even gone to the movies all year (other than to see that one documentary).
The political joke that always kills recently bombed — hmm. Wonder who that was about?
Do we have too many jokes about pedophiles? Are we suppose to experience that question as funny?
ADDED: I have one other post with the tag "Nikki Glaser," and it may shed some light on what sort of joke she might make about sex criminals. From March 28, 2022:
"... indeed, many parents of neurodivergent children have been harmful to their children and peddled harmful ideas, including the idea that vaccines cause autism. Rather, what makes the Walz family’s story so reassuring is that they seem to want to help Gus live a good life rather than change who he is. According to the Child Mind Institute, nonverbal learning disorder, or NVLD, affects nonverbal forms of learning like the ability to notice patterns or learn concepts, including visual and social patterns as well as concepts in language and math. Because of the similar traits, people with NVLD are often confused as being on the autism spectrum and vice versa. Most recently, comedian Chris Rock disclosed that he received a diagnosis after a friend initially thought he might be somewhere on the autism spectrum...."
"... during a 2008 performance in defense of Obama: 'There’s a lot of guys in jail that got captured. I don’t wanna vote for nobody that got captured—I wanna vote for the motherfucker who got away!'... What separates Chris Rock from Donald Trump is that Rock knows the liminal space he’s in, poised between actual revelation and wicked hyperbole—a truth to which we are clued in as much by his performance style (his constant nervous pacing, his sidelong glances) as by his words. The impieties are to be taken as possibilities, not as actual truths. It may be that Trump intuitively understands this, too, and that one reason his sneers and terrifying invocation of cruelty are not taken as seriously as they should be is that some people think of Trump’s discourse as that of the insult comedian: He doesn’t really mean it. He does...."
Do you know what "liminal space" that sentence about liminal space is in? "What separates Chris Rock from Donald Trump" — I'd say — is that we are all equally "clued in" to what Chris Rock is doing — because he's plainly and clearly a comedian — and we are differently clued in about Donald Trump. Some of us feel that we get him, and we can deal with the mix of humor and seriousness. It's even quite brilliant. Others hear the odd things as crazy and threatening, and they can't relax and enjoy it. And taking Trump's words seriously makes them useful to his antagonists. He said he'd be a dictator on Day 1!
"Everybody called him a b----.... And who’s he hit? Me. [Someone] he knows he can beat.... She starts it … I finish it.... I got parents. And you know what my parents taught me? Don’t fight in front of White people."
The article also quotes this, about January 6th: "When did White men become victims? White men think they’re actually losing the country. Did you see the Capitol riots? What kind of White ‘Planet of the Apes’ s--- was that?"
The commenters at WaPo are mostly picking up on that — restating the point with the humor stripped out. The most-liked comment is: "Yes, this whole 'white men as victims' is the craziest crap I've ever seen, and I'm a 65-year-old white woman. White men were born on third base by the virtue of being white and male, and as soon as society starts gaining a little equality, white men lose their minds. It's disgusting and insane."
In one posted clip, apparently after the incident, Chappelle is heard to quip, “It was a trans man,” a reference to his own transphobic comments in his Netflix special The Closer and the uproar, protests and anger that ensued....
Another person caught the end of the show on video where Chappelle and Jamie Foxx, who apparently rushed onstage to help apprehend the man going after Chappelle....“I thought that was part of the show,” Foxx is heard to respond.
“I grabbed the back of that N*****’s head,” said Chappelle. “His hair was spongey!”
There are also reports that "Chris Rock, who performed earlier, came on stage w/ him & joked: 'Was that Will Smith?'"
After the Will Smith incident at the Oscars, there was a lot of talk about whether it would inspire other attacks on performers, whose vulnerability on stage had been so vividly exposed.
"And I'm still kind of processing what happened, so at some point I'll talk about that shit. And it'll be serious and it'll be funny, but right now I'm going to tell some jokes."
Said Chris Rock last night, as he took the stage for his show at Boston's Wilbur Theater, CNN reports.
He said absolutely nothing more than the bare minimum. It was just on with the show. That's what he did on the Oscars stage too: On with the show.
"On with the show" is an old show business slogan. It's old-timey, so maybe you don't remember it. If you try to Google it, you'll get a first page full of Mottley Crue links. I know there's a way to exclude a term from the search, but I've forgotten how to do it and I've got the distracting prior question whether I need to use those fake umlauts. I see it's a Rolling Stones title too.
Ah, but there is another version of the slogan that gets me to a nice TV Tropes article: "The Show Must Go On":
[I]n live entertainment, the show must go on at all costs... This forces the characters into crazy improvisations, costume changes, awkward stealth to avoid further disrupting the show and any number of disparate things to keep the show going.
It must also be remembered that for live entertainers, not only is it about making sure people get their money's worth or ensuring a production continues, performing is something they've dedicated their lives to. It's not something they do, it's who they are, and it's a point of professional pride that no matter what, the show must go on....
Here's Rock making the joke, Will chuckling, and Jada not amused, and then Will striding onto the stage and hitting/"hitting" Rock:
At 0:42, I felt sure what I'd seen was a fake "Hollywood" punch. Rock stood planted in position and even leaned his face forward, then — it seemed — threw his head back after the seeming contact.
And Rock recovered so quickly, still smiling, and chattered out "Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me." But if it was scripted, would he have said "shit"? I haven't been watching the Oscars in recent years, but back in the days when I used to care enough to live-blog the hours-long show, I had the tag "fleeting expletives" to keep track of the litigation that arose after Cher's saying "fuck" at the 2002 Billboard awards activated the FCC. Who can even remember what the Supreme Court ultimately did about that threat to free speech?
But when Will Smith got back to his seat and proceeded to yell "Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth! Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth!" it was hard to believe it was scripted. But, as I said, I don't know where we are with fleeting expletives these days, and maybe we are right where it would be scripted precisely because it would create the illusion that it was unscripted.
Then Smith wins the best actor Oscar, and we get to listen to his speech, which give us another chance to assess the real-or-fakeness of the punch/"punch"/slap/"slap":
But if he's such a great actor — do we really still believe the stars who get the statuette are "great actors"? — he should be able to sell a scripted acceptance speech with faux-sincere lines about his being a "river of love" or some such nonsense and to cry seemingly real tears of apology.
What makes me think it was real is that it makes Smith look bad. He looked ugly yelling "Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth!" And he overshadowed his own winning of the Oscar. Why would anyone do that? The best explanation is that he lost his temper. But exactly why did he lose his temper? I think we'd need to know more about his relationship with his wife. Remember he was laughing at the joke, and she was looking grim. The camera wasn't on them continuously, but I imagine she said something to him or gave him a look that meant you'd better act now or you are not a man.
Finally, it's sad that the Smiths aren't proud of Jada's hair. She boldly shaves it down to almost nothing and that's a way of expressing great confidence in one's own beauty. I'm seeing some articles talking about her alopecia, but if you go to that link, you'll see she has a thin line of baldness across the top, and it's something that would be hidden if she didn't shave her head. She's highlighting the beauty of her face and the elegant structure of her head. She's not like those women in Chris Rock's movie who spend so much time at the hairdressers, use harsh chemicals, and cause so much importation of human hair from India.
Jada Pinkett Smith could have had any wig she wanted. To go to the Oscars with a shaved head is to make a strong statement that you think this is your best look. Chris Rock said she could play in a sequel to "G.I. Jane," which means she could play Demi Moore's iconic role. Demi Moore is famously beautiful.
The best response to the joke would have been an imperious smile that meant: Yes, I know I am beautiful. Not: My husband will now punch you in the nose!
"Alec Baldwin will have to be on," I said, eagerly awaiting the opening sketch and wanting to see what the show would do with the kick-in-the-head Trump victory.
... I recognize the chords — there's no secret — it's "Hallelujah." They're combining the election story with the story of the death of Leonard Cohen. How's that going to work?
"Oh, she's doing this in earnest," Meade says, and he turns out to be right. Kate McKinnon sang the song in a somber tone, an earnest expression of sadness about the election (and perhaps also about the death of Leonard Cohen). No Alec-Baldwin-as-Donald-Trump ever bursts in. She completes the song, then turns to us and says, earnestly, her eyes glistening with tears, "I'm not giving up and neither should you."
The rest of the show was under-written and flat. I'm sure they knew that, since in one segment, they resorted to the gimmick of going meta, stopping a sketch mid-scene and switching to the actors analyzing what went wrong with the sketch, and the meta part was also under-written and flat.
The host was Dave Chappelle, who was making a big comeback. His opening monologue seemed be the result of a decision to just let him go on however he wanted for as long as he wanted. Many of his lines were garbled, and nearly all of it was some sort of racial analysis of what just happened in the election, with the main idea being that black people have always known that white people are racist. The most memorable joke was that he's staying in a Trump hotel and he likes it because: "Housekeeper comes in in the morning and cleans my room and I'm just 'Hey, good morning, housekeeper!' grab a handful of pussy, say, you know, 'Boss said it was okay.'"
There were some humiliating, cringe-inducing sketches. 2 were based on pathetic couples getting sex — "Last Call with Dave Chappelle" and "Love and Leslie" — and one was about a grown man (Chappelle) breastfeeding on his mother (Leslie Jones). There was a long, unfunny impersonation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There was a passable sketch about young white people watching the election returns with their black friend, played by Chappelle, who, I'm thinking, the show's decisionmakers deemed insufficiently energetically funny, since midway through the sketch, Chris Rock shows up to play the role of the white people's other black friend. There was an elaborately produced "Walking Dead" segment that gave Chappelle a chance to bring back a lot of characters that some people may remember from his old TV show. I don't know "Walking Dead" and I didn't watch much of the old Chappelle TV show, so I found this segment very hard to watch. It was one black man forcing a group of black men down on their knees and threatening them with violence. When the violence finally comes — at 3:23 — it gets surreal, and you might enjoy this part if you can endure the n-word and decapitation.
The severed head does some comical things. At 4:10 it talks about the nation "beginning to heal, through laughing again": "Because even though our country feels irrevocably severed like a man from his head, let my example prove that we should continue to move forward." The head asks us "to see ourselves in one another," and the special effects put this talking head in various places, including on the body of Donald Trump ("I am every man") and Hillary Clinton ("I am every woman").
The severed head was the best thing on the show. But then, I like optimism and surrealism. Mostly, I think the show just couldn't get it together to digest the news enough to make it into comedy. It was a real test of comic skill, nerve, and endurance, and they didn't have what it took. I guess it would have been easy to celebrate a Hillary victory, to gloat and mock, but they got their comeuppance, and it showed.
"It pains us that any aspect of the show was considered offensive, and I apologize for any hurt the skits caused," wrote the chief executive of Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Dawn Hudson in response to a complaint by Academy members of Asian descent expressing "complete surprise and disappointment with the targeting of Asians at the 88th Oscars telecast and its perpetuation of racist stereotypes."
They wanted "to know how such tasteless and offensive skits could have happened and what process you have in place to preclude such unconscious or outright bias and racism toward any group in future Oscars telecasts" and what "concrete steps" would "ensure that all people are portrayed with dignity and respect."
Hudson's response — a classic nonapology — was not well received. George Takei called it "a bland, corporate response" and said: "The obliviousness was actually shocking. Doesn’t anyone over there have any sense?"
Oh, they are actors! They're always acting, so sitting there in the fanciest costumes, playing stars at a gala event elevating and celebrating what their character believes is a very grand enterprise, they laughed on cue, presenting faces that seemed to understand what the joke was, but not to the point where they realize that the man on the stage — he's an actor too — is accusing them of participation in evil. Their character is a bit dumb and obtuse, or so earnest about making this gala night beautiful that she pretends not to know that this man is telling them all — in the nicest possible way, under the circumstances — that this enterprise of theirs is thoroughly infected with racism — not lynch-you-from-a-tree racism, not cross-burning-racism, but we'll-always-hold-you-at-arm's-length racism, "sorority" racism, we-like-you-but-you’re-not-a-Kappa racism.
They had to sit there. They'd gotten the role and they were lucky to have it. The evening was, perhaps, a success. Was it? The spectacle felt so awful to me, especially the faces of the actors laughing. What else could they do? Me, I was sitting at home, so I could just turn it off, which I did, after I found myself, one too many times, talking to the TV, saying things like "Look at them laughing as if these are just the usual jokes and the jokes aren't about them and telling them that they are disgusting" and "They're supposed to be demonstrating to us how wonderful they are, and Chris Rock is appropriating the event for something I don't need to watch. But what choice did he have?" and "If they're disgusting, they're disgusting, and why am I watching disgusting people chuckling inanely? This isn't the gala event it's supposed to be."
And now here's Rock saying "Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna's panties. I wasn't invited." He's calling out Hollywood for racism. How can that work if he doesn't take the higher ground? Here he is gratuitously bringing in the name of a woman, referring not to her as a person, but to her undergarments, for a laugh not about racism, but all of a sudden about sexual intercourse, as if tonight's not the night to concern ourselves with sexism. Rihanna is the human being who's name was chosen to fit that analogy. Why? The joke is written so we'll get it. Rihanna was chosen because we're expected to recognize her as the person Chris Rock would want to have sex with. It's as clear an example of making a woman a sex object as you're going to find. Not only do we get it — because we understand the woman to be sex — but she's not even a woman, she's her panties.
And this is a role given to Rihanna because she was black. As with so many other parts in Hollywood, the role goes to the black person because it's a role that's written for a black person. Rock chose not to complicate the joke with a racial crosscurrent a black man wanting sex with a white woman. A black woman was needed for this cameo appearance — used to insult another black woman (Jada Pinkett) — and that was it for her.
"You say the wrong thing — you see what happened to [Sterling]... I’m not defending what Sterling said at all, but if that’s not the First Amendment then what the [bleep] is? And what did he say, ‘I don’t want my girlfriend hanging out with black basketball players’? Me neither!"
White people loved “The Cosby Show,” especially liberal white people. They loved it ... because it offered a warm vision of a world in which shared experience might help Americans of all colors to see past racial divisions and instead focus on the places where they connected...
Any suggestion that white people were culpable in the history of racism that the show addressed mostly through reference to mid-twentieth-century activism. White audiences were never made to feel bad about themselves....
[A] decade after “The Cosby Show” went off the air... the comedian embarked on a speaking tour in which he told black audiences that the kinds of hardships they faced were of their own making.... Here was the white blamelessness that made his television such a balm to white audiences, writ all too real. It was an approach that earned him sharp criticism from some black critics like Dyson and Coates....
By the way, I never watched "The Cosby Show." I just didn't watch network sitcoms in that period of my life. I did, however, watch "The Bill Cosby Show" — which was on around 1969, when I did watch plenty of sitcoms. It predictably hit a note of sentimentality that made me cry. Cosby played a phys-ed teacher in L.A., and something about the way he helped kids always tear-jerked me. Maybe I saw Episode 5, "Rules Is Rules": "Chet goes to great lengths to obtain a valve needle which he needs in order to inflate basketballs for his gym class." I'm sure I saw Episode 4, "A Girl Named Punkin." Here, this is the sort of thing that really got to me when I was 18:
ADDED: You know, Rush Limbaugh, who is exactly the same age as I am, had a beloved cat named Punkin. Perhaps, like me, he was moved by that episode about a painfully withdrawn girl who learns about love from Bill Cosby.
The coffee was not enough. I had to top it off with chocolate. And now more than an hour has passed since the first post of the day. I feel I should have served up some meaty political posts, delving into... oh, who knows?... some right-winger demanding that his crowd get heated up over the income tax in New York, which is causing him to abscond to Florida... or some left-winger assuring his flock that the John Doe investigation is really, really, probably going to get Scott Walker, just you wait. But I did not do that. My words did not go down on this blog. They evanesced. There is no archive, only vague memories of a conversation. What on earth did we talk about?
I Would Like to Think 'Internet meme Row' Will Inspire in Althouse a Sunday Morning Proustian Memory Flow, but - Alas - It Will probably Just be Swept Along With All of Yesterday's Other Pixels.
The Internet Paints Over Itself Each and Every Day.
And I was saying — to Meade, here in nonvirtual reality — that's a subject that bedeviled me in the early days of this blog. Like here, I'm chiding myself in 2005 for taking the trouble to update something written in 2004: "Don't I realize the old posts sink into oblivion? These old posts don't really exist at all." I visualized each new post physically weighing upon the posts underneath, pressing them endlessly into the murk.
Now, I tend to think — and this was the beginning of the hour-long conversation — that blogging is like life itself, with everything happening now, here in person, but better, because we can all talk at once, have the feeling of immediacy and spontaneity, and still be able to hear each other, almost in the present, and because of the archive, at any time, if we happen to care to listen to what has gone before.
I imagined a theater full of 2,000 people, with everyone talking out loud, expressing their thoughts at once. No one would hear what anyone was saying and it would just be an annoying variation of everyone sitting there silently and thinking. Blogging is the equivalent of having the superpower to go to everyone in that theater and to close enough to hear that person and to repeat time, the same few seconds, over and over, until you'd gotten around to everyone and heard what each one had to say. No, it's even better than that, because you have a way to find the words you'd most like to hear, and to jump from one part of the theater to another at will.
You might think it would be better to write a book, that could exist and last and be read for 100 years, but perhaps in that 100 years, there would be no more readers than will read this blog post in the next 2 hours. And what of this conversation — this conversation from an hour ago, which I wasn't planning to blog about — this conversation that evanesced? There's no archive at all, unless I can pull it out of my memory and blog it now. There was all that and many more observations, including much talk of this panel discussion of 4 comedians where (at some point) they get to the topic of using what I will refer to as "the N-word"...
... and we talked about what it means to be "edgy," the subjectiveness of the edge with respect to comedy as opposed to the edge in slope snowboarding (and our own subjectiveness about what we were calling "the edge" as we nearly got into an argument), and how Michael Richards got into trouble by thinking he could be Lenny Bruce (and what was it Lenny Bruce did anyway? was it the same as the way Dustin Hoffman did it in "Lenny"? (NSFW)), and how comedians in a panel discussion are not the same as comedians doing standup, and panel discussions seem like they are supposed to be friendly conversation, but really involve a lot of competitive hostility, which maybe is what Chris Rock was doing to Louis CK in that part of the panel discussion that Meade described, but I still haven't watched, but I've been on plenty of academic panel discussions and I have a bit of a superpower to detect passive aggression, and that's why I like to do things in writing, from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, where the second post of the day, 2 hours after the first, is way overdue.
I’ve seen a lot of shitty primary candidates in my time, so I’m ready to buy that a relatively inarticulate nobody with a closet full of skeletons would spend $10K on a quixotic run for Senate. What feels off about Greene is his complete lack of excitement and engagement. Usually a nut who’s going to blow his last dollar on a campaign does it for some crazy reason that animates them, and they talk about it incessantly. Greene has none of that. Put that together with his resume, and I smell a ratfuck.
Well, at least he's only "relatively inarticulate." What induced that restraint? Why not call him inarticulate? There's a longstanding issue of patronizing black people by calling them "articulate." Remember discussions like this after some clueless folk — e.g., Joe Biden — called Barack Obama "articulate"? (And here's the old "He speaks so well" Chris Rock riff about Colin Powell.)
Now, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has called for an investigation. Into what? People had to vote for Alvin Greene, and he got 60% of the vote. It would be interesting to know why the people of South Carolina voted the way they did, but I don't think you should sic the government on someone who wins against the odds. Bring out the information informally, if you like. Don't use the government to intimidate him.
And then there is the obscenity charge, based on Greene's supposedly asking a woman "to look at pornography on his screen at a computer lab in a University of South Carolina dormitory" and saying "Let's go to your room." That could have been talked about during the primary campaign, but apparently, no one saw fit to say anything until afterward. Now, Greene says:
"I'm on the not-guilty side of things... I have to be. I mean, I mean, I mean. I have no comment, I mean."... Greene is at first reluctant to talk about the charge. But once he starts, he goes on at length.
"It can go away," Greene says. "Just think about a charge. It can be dropped by the solicitor. It can be dropped and erased like it never happened. . . .
I kind of think it will be remembered.
"Folks should be given a chance to correct themselves. Somebody could just be trying to get somebody in trouble. You see, somebody, you know -- you just can't work around somebody. It's hard. I'm just trying to talk about something, frankly. I'm just trying to talk from my perspective. People should be friendly. I mean, leave it alone."
Noting that “President Bush has f----- everything up so much, he’s even made it hard for a white man to become president!,” Rock became the voice of the electorate: “‘Give me a black man, a white woman, a giraffe, a zebra, a mongoose ... anything else!” He goofed on people’s perceptions of Barack Obama’s name (“Like he should have his foot on a dead lion, holding a spear!”) and their fears about Hillary Clinton’s gender (on the wrong day of the month, she could bomb North Carolina).
Eh. Sounds like material that could have been written a year ago. Remember when comedians did timely commentary? And were actually daring? Say something new about Jeremiah Wright, why don't you?
Jude Law reveals the pain and sorrow, how Chris Rock hurt him so much at the Oscars in 2005 when he joked and then just kept joking about how Law was in so many movies these days. Oh, it's such a mercy that there are profoundly humorless souls like Sean Penn to come to the rescue of that poor man.
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