"After years of neglect and boomer dominance in popular culture, someone had finally noticed us, in the sweetest way... 'Friends' was comfy, adorable, yet sharp."

"The hate-watch became a secret pleasure and, soon enough, we all had their haircuts... What nobody could have envisioned in the 1990s was the way children in the 2010s and '20s — born after 'Friends" first started to wear off — would form their own fixation on the show... My nearest frame of reference to this sort of cultural inertia would have to be 'The Brady Bunch,' the 1970s sitcom that, in reruns and brief revivals, acted as Gen X’s security blanket.... Irony was the key to it all.... But irony seems to have no place when it comes to the nonstop streaming of 'Friends'... [It is] slavishly re-watched with what appears to be an authentic and uncomplicated sincerity. Nobody watches [it] to make fun of the clothes or mock the message.... 'Friends'... acts as a soothing gateway to a time when people aren’t constantly looking at their phones. They sit on their Central Perk sofas and just talk, maintaining eye-contact. They listen to one another. They hilariously relate, in a constant state of mutual care. Their idea of stress is almost touchingly benign. No wonder people still want to hang out with them.... As the 'Friends' theme song goes, 'I’ll be there for you.' But those words referred to the bond among its characters. They were not an eternal promise to generations yet to come, and they should not have to be your friends forever. Let television take you somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else."

From "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most valuable shows?" by Hank Stuever, the WaPo TV critic.

Stuever is over 50, a Gen Xer. He thinks irony is key and these kids today are making a big mistake longing for sincerity and friendship. Something a quarter century old feels too "eternal" for him, and whoever wrote the headline for his column turned his dictate — "Let television take you somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else" — into a question — "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most valuable shows?" The market always answers that question. These shows are phenomenally valuable commercially. "Valuable" isn't really what's nagging at Stuever. He's objecting to the feelings and longings of younger people. They're not thinking right. The question — if you want to rephrase Stuever's opinion as a question — should be:  "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most emotionally rewarding shows?" And then it becomes easy to see that it makes little sense to tell young people to watch something else on television. The problem is in the real world, which is wearing on people in such a way that "Friends" feels restorative.

"[Sacha Baron] Cohen is still an undisputed genius at punking... But if 'Who Is America?' is worth any praise, then what are we to say about the techniques of Project Veritas..."

"... the conservative, undercover operation that has tried to infiltrate and expose liberal bias among news organizations and community organizers? What Cohen does is not all that different... To giggle at and delight in Cohen’s pranks is to believe that you can have it both ways: that you can be horrified at the collapse of truth and democracy, and then laugh at a guy who seeks to undermine whatever remains of trust. As watchably galling as Cohen’s techniques may be, America in 2018 doesn’t really seem like the right time or place for it."

From "Sacha Baron Cohen still knows how to punk America, but his new show erodes what little trust we have left" by Hank Stuever (WaPo).

I'm giving this my "Era of That's Not Funny" tag.

By the way, the commenters at WaPo are strongly resisting the comparison of this comedy show to the Project Veritas sting operations. The key argument is that Cohen presents his footage as a network comedy show. He just wants laughs. Project Veritas presents its footage as internet video, for the purpose of affecting real-world policy. But (I would add) there is a side effect of humor in some of the Project Veritas video, and Sacha Baron Cohen does have a political viewpoint and does intend to undermine the power of the politicians he targets.

No one — not Stuever or his commenters — mentions "The Daily Show." A few years ago, we continually heard the observation that Americans are getting their news from that comedy show. A satire was the primary source of factual information and opinion spin. The line between showbiz and journalism was blurred long ago. I mean, look at how the WaPo commenters are willing to call Project Veritas "journalism"! It used to be critiqued as not journalism at all, as if it really were more of a comedy show.

The line between seriousness and comedy — between journalism and entertainment — is just completely blurred now. The idea that it should be sharpened up... is that some kind of joke? I couldn't tell you, because the line between joking and sobriety is gone.

Why ostracize Louis C.K.?

I'm reading "Now that Louis C.K. has admitted he’s a pig, can we keep him? The answer is still no," by Hank Stuever in the Washington Post.

Why can't we hate the sin but love the sinner? To ostracize a person is to say: He's very different from us. His sins are of a different order. By cutting him off from us, we are restored. We're the good people, and we've demonstrated our goodness by ridding ourselves of that devil.

Steuver explains why the remedy is exile:

The end of Louis C.K. — who, at 50, is alive, but in a sense dead to us now — is a difficult but necessary loss.... A certain piggishness was always part of his act, wasn’t it?.... Onstage, he... turned such subjects (pedophilia, necrophilia, chronic onanism; but also marital strife, loss of libido, body-image issues) into a kind of perverted, guy-centric gold....

In [his TV series] “Louie”... Louie makes progress in his understanding of women by sharing the duties of raising his two young daughters as a single dad,....

So, is this goodbye? C.K.’s statement Friday, filled with everything but “I’m sorry,” could almost read as a treatment for that long-overdue new season of “Louie”....

The arc is clearly there: Louie’s behavior costs him everything, including some of his dearest friends, and he must scrape his way up from rock bottom, by listening rather than talking. Part of me wants to say I’m eager to see that show. But the far better part of me would rather see shows made by people who don’t assault and humiliate the people around them.

The exile is not from all family and friends. Stuever isn't talking about whether people who know Louis C.K. personally should "keep him." He's talking about whether people who don't know him at all should keep watching his shows. That is: Should we consume the intellectual work product of a mind that causes a man to behave the way Louis C.K. has done?

Yesterday, in this post, I interpreted Louis C.K.'s statement to mean that "from an ethical standpoint, consent is never enough." I said:

To share your sexuality with another person, you have to mean them well. You can't be taking advantage of them, even when they like you so much they say yes to what you're offering them. This isn't a legal argument. It's philosophy.

Don't offer bad sex, even to those who will consent to it. Don't take whatever you can get. You should know when you're extracting perverse pleasure from humiliating or hurting someone else.

The commenter Jupiter wrote:

Is it permissible to buy a hamburger in a restaurant if I don't actually hope and believe the chef will get a kick out of frying it? People use each other all the time.

I said:

The chef, if he's not a slave, is working for money. You get an exchange by adjusting the money to the level the chef is willing to work for.

Sex is different. You should not be adding other benefits in a sexual exchange. Either the sex alone is good for both, or, under the morality I am advocating, you should not be having sex. If you have to throw in money to equalize the exchange, you shouldn't be doing sex. Go out and get a hamburger instead. Have a conversation. Maybe some day someone will actually want to have sex with you.

To get closer to a better hamburger analogy, consider the situation where the chef knows he's using meat tainted with e coli, and the customer either doesn't realize it or is too dumb to care or thinks it will somehow still be okay or he's just so hungry he's only thinking about now. The chef wants to make the money, but he should not serve the meat.

What I hear Stuever saying is: Don't consume the tainted product.

By the way, if you're thinking of reconsidering all the intellectual work product you consume — movies, TV shows, books, political arguments — here's a great place to start: "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson. Johnson shows why you won't want to consume what's been cooked up by Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Noam Chomsky.

Maybe it's time bring back the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

"[Megyn] Kelly arrived with questions, a few of them somewhat good: Has Trump made any mistakes in this campaign, anything he wishes he could take back?"

"Has anyone in his life ever hurt him emotionally? Is he setting a bad example for America’s children, whose parents are constantly reminded not to become bullies? These are things one can imagine Walters asking in a soft-focus setting. Trump, to no one’s surprise, came with his usual array of incomplete sentences, unfinished tangents and an obfuscating lack of specifics. Entirely too much time was given over to Kelly and Trump rehashing their spat, with editing so choppy that you couldn’t even trust the hidden meaning in their eye-contact and attempts at frenemy rapport. It’s certainly not news to anyone at this point that the only thing Trump is good at talking about are his ratings, his number of social-network followers and the size of the crowds at his appearances. Granting this interview, of course, will simply serve as another way for him to measure his popularity."

WaPo's TV critic Hank Stuever didn't like Kelly's show any more than I did.

As Stuever observed, Kelly seems to be trying to fit the niche long occupied by Barbara Walters, who has a knack for getting into the emotional particularities of her subjects. Walters has her style, her way of warming up celebrities and extracting choice psychological nuggets. But Kelly doesn't know how to create a semblance of an atmosphere of warmth. How could she disarm anyone? She doesn't listen to the answers and try to figure out how to nudge into whatever interior space her interlocutor has given a hint might exist.

Stuever blames Trump: He's only "good at talking about... his ratings, his number of social-network followers and the size of the crowds at his appearances." I say it was Kelly's job to draw him out, and she didn't do it. Trump offered her some leads, saying more than once that he sees himself as "a person." What did that mean to him? Why was that worth saying? It was rather obvious that Kelly's idea was to turn any indication of sensitivity into a challenge about why he's so mean to other people, so she never got access to whatever might be sensitive about him. I'd love to hear him analyze where she missed her opportunities and why she's no Barbara Walters, but he's going to be needing to use her going forward, so there's no reason why he would.

ADDED: When I say "I'd love to hear him analyze where she missed her opportunities," what I'm picturing is a version of "The Apprentice" for apprentice journalists vying for a network celebrity interview slot and tasked this week to interview a presidential candidate. In the end, there's a  meeting, where Trump confronts them all with incisive analysis of what they did wrong and right. He'd do that really well, but that's unlike anything he can be giving us in the context of the real campaign.

AND: Here's the video:

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry... WaPo is soooo so so so sorry Donald Trump was on "Saturday Night Live."

I went over to The Washington Post to read "Trump’s sorry night on ‘SNL’: An overhyped bummer for us all" and I couldn't help noticing the sidebar:



Nothing like showing us how you really feel. I get it. You hate Trump and you're irked that he got the platform of "Saturday Night Live" to pose on — just like Hillary Clinton a few weeks ago and all the many other politicians who've had a shot at hosting over the years. What was so bad about the episode?

Hank Stuever, the WaPo TV critic calls the episode "an anemic and halfhearted dud" and a "boring and misspent episode," but based on what? He says that the cast members seemed to lack the "desire to participate" or "play with him." There was one sketch that was about the cast doing a sketch while Trump was tweeting about them and feeling bad about that, and maybe that signaled how they really felt about him, but that doesn't make the show halfhearted and dull. That showed them going meta with whatever distance they felt they needed, which isn't necessarily dull.

Stuever seems to demand that the show do sharper political mockery, but the failure to insult and abuse a guest host doesn't mean there won't be stronger satire on other occasions or that the comedy we did get wasn't good. So what was such a "sorry" "bummer"? Well, Stuever didn't like the "You're a racist" yell from Larry David in the cold open. But that was great! And:

From there it was one dud after another — some of it featuring Trump, much of it not, the minutes slowing to a crawl. A sketch set in 2018, in a wildly successful Trump White House, fell apart quickly. “Weekend Update” did a fair job of playing a little offense.... The “Update” segment also made good use of Bobby Moynihan’s “Drunk Uncle” character — turns out he’s the ideal demographic for the Trump message...

I'm sorry, Stuever, you have not marshaled the evidence that this was a sorry, boring, dud bummer. You're just pissed that Trump was showcased.

ADDED: Here's my earlier post on what I thought of the show.