Roseanne's political comedy: "Joe Biden raped me."

#believeallwomen. #meshoe #bergdorfdressingroom #loosemeat pic.twitter.com/yzebab8syO

— Roseanne Barr (@therealroseanne) April 23, 2024

Is this good satire?

"Joe Biden. He raped me right here. In the shoe department of Bergdorf Goodman... I need to sue."

I get the point: You can't trust women who say they've recovered a memory of a rape from the distant past. That's not funny as an idea. Does it become funny when a comedienne enacts it? Theoretically, it could. I don't think this did. To me, it works more as a declaration that E. Jean Carroll should not have won her case against Trump.

Does comedy need to be funny? There is some debate these days on that questioning the centrality of funniness in the performances of some artists who are categorized as comedy. For example, "Does comedy have to be funny?," by the sophomore Monika Narain, last year in the Duke student newspaper. Excerpt:

"Not long ago, it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that they found avant-garde painting too difficult and preferred the comforts of story time."

"What Gadsby did was give the audience permission — moral permission — to turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch."

Jason Farago in "With Hannah Gadsby’s ‘It’s Pablo-matic,’ the Joke’s on the Brooklyn Museum/The Australian comedian turns curator in a show about Picasso’s complicated legacy. But it’s women artists the exhibition really shortchanges" (NYT)

This is a review of a Brooklyn Museum art exhibition called "It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby." Gadsby is a standup comedian who has lambasted Picasso for being a sexist. The show has a smattering of works by Picasso juxtaposed with various works by women that are presented as telling women's "stories," with inscriptions on the wall like "I want my story to be heard” and “entirely new stories”:

French Impressionism explained at long last: It was the air pollution.

From "Scientists confirm long held theory about what inspired Monet" (CNN).

I thought it was going to be cataracts, but, no... air pollution.

"In general, air pollution makes objects appear hazier, makes it harder to identify their edges, and gives the scene a whiter tint, because pollution reflects visible light of all wavelengths" [said Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University].... 

The team looked for these two metrics, edge strength and whiteness, in the paintings — by converting them into mathematical representations based on brightness — and then compared the results with independent estimates of historical air pollution.

Don't you love it when something you thought was a human being's inspiration turns out to be an outside force, something that happened to him? It's especially demoralizing when it's some malady or misfortune.

"Do not blame the LGBTQ community for any of this.... It's about corporate interests and what I can say and what I cannot say."

This is new video — 5 minutes of it — from Dave Chappelle — posted yesterday at Instagram:

 

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He says that everyone he knows in the LGBTQ community has been supportive of him. He made a series of comedy shows and a documentary about making them. The first show was about the murder of George Floyd, and the documentary was accepted into various film festivals. Then, after the controversy over his most recent show, "The Closer," he got disinvited from the festivals and no one wants to touch the documentary. 

He doesn't say, but you can infer that he thinks that has more to do with race and George Floyd than anything about transgender people. 

He says he's willing to meet with transgender people, "but you will not summon me. I am not bending to anybody's demands." He states 3 conditions, the first 2 of which are serious. You have to watch the entire show, "The Closer." And you have to meet him at a time and place of his choosing. The third condition is a punchline: "You must admit that Hannah Gadsby is not funny." 

He goes on to say that he's going to screen the documentary, free, in 10 cities (click through to the Instagram page to see the list), "And you will see what they are trying to obstruct you from seeing and you can judge for yourself." 

 He ends: "You have to answer the question: Am I cancelled or not?!"

"Hello, the men. My advice on modern masculinity would be to look at all those traits you believe are feminine and interrogate why you are so obsessed with being the opposite."

"Because this idea that to be a man you have to be the furthest away from being a woman that you possibly can is really weird. Why is everyone so scared of not being masculine? If you consider many of those in power, those who claim to be 'leading' the world at the moment, you've got a lot of hypermasculine man-babies, with terrible hair and no ability to compromise."

That's Hannah Gadsby, writing in (of all places) Gentleman's Quarterly.

With that "hypermasculine man-babies, with terrible hair," she's got to mean Trump. Right? But there's no way his hair is an attempt to be "to be the furthest away from being a woman." It's daringly unmanly. And so are a lot of things about Trump. In real life, watching Trump on TV, I am often exclaiming over his womanliness. He does these theatrical little bits with voices and gestures. No way does he seemed freaked out by approximating the feminine — not that I think he's attempting to imitate a woman, just that he's not trying to stay as far away from womanishness as he can. I think that's a source of his power — the combination of male and female.

Gadsby goes on:

So here's a thought experiment: What if you, the men, looked to traditional feminine traits and tried incorporating them into your masculinity?...

See, I think Trump is already doing that experiment! Not intentionally, but intuitively.

Now, I'm remembering this: "Donald Trump Talks Like a Woman/And strange as it sounds, it might be one of the reasons he’s done as well as he has" by Julie Sedivy in Politico, back on October 25, 2016. I blogged that at the time, here. I said:

Comedy "doesn’t feel right anymore," says Lisa Lampanelli, who is quitting stand-up comedy.

She announced on Howard Stern's radio show a few days ago.

Lampanelli’s rise to prominence as a top-tier insult comic came in 2002 when she showcased her crass style at the Friars Club Roast honoring Chevy Chase. She has since become a fixture at those events, skewering everyone from President Trump to David Hasselhoff. While she plans to remain a member of the Friars Club, she said comedy “doesn’t feel right anymore” and she’s glad to leave the jokes to other comics.

“I’m not going to lie, I’d get off stage and I’d go ‘I hope that guy I made fun of was OK’ or ‘I hope that guy doesn’t feel like he didn’t know what he was in for,’” she confessed.

Here she is talking to Stern and saying her "message of including people through insults is getting lost, and now maybe, God forbid, I'm being misunderstood by different races, transgender people, gay people, even though I have love in my heart":



She wants to do something that has a "clear message to make people feel better about themselves." Her new routine has a big weight-loss theme (which, I don't know, does that deliver a clear message and help you feel better?):

“Do you spend much of your day obsessing about what you’re eating and how you’re eating it,” Lampanelli said. “Do you feel guilty about eating, hate yourself for eating what you enjoy, and cram down foods that are ‘good for you’?”

Well, she has too, Lampanelli said, and the workshop will provide participants with the tools they need to get them on a path to inner peace when it comes to food and body image. The workshop will use storytelling, sharing, meditation, journaling, brainstorming, deep listening and self-reflection.

For old time's sake, here she is roasting Donald Trump, and you can see him laughing at her insults:



Those were the days... before The Era of That's Not Funny kicked in.

I imagine that Lampanelli's move is influenced by the critical acclaim bestowed on Hannah Gadsby's show "Nanette." Here's the NYT last May:

Her self-mocking nebbish is a familiar persona, but there comes a moment when she drops and deconstructs it.... “Do you know what self-deprecation means coming from somebody who exists on the margins?” she asks. “It is not humility; it is humiliation.”...

[S]he explains that good stories have three parts (beginning, middle and end) while jokes require two (setup and punch line), which means that to end on a laugh, comics often need to cut off the most important and constructive element, where hindsight, perspective and catharsis exist.

“A joke is a question, artificially inseminated with tension,” she says, before explaining the mechanics of her job. “I make you all tense and then I cure it with a laugh. And you say: ‘Thanks for that, I was feeling a bit tense.’” Then in one of many tonal shifts, she raises her voice, irritated at the audience’s hypothetic gratitude: “But I made you tense!”

Then she points to the audience and back at her and quips, darkly: “This is an abusive relationship.”...