"Glaser... was still questioning the point of view of a few jokes. She was still going back and forth about the sexual jokes..."

"... 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...."

From "Nikki Glaser Wants to Kill as Host of the Globes. Is She Overthinking It?/ To refine her monologue for Sunday’s show, she relied on two writers’ rooms and 91 test runs. Then came the fickle audiences and a crisis of confidence" (NYT).

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:

"Is Joe Rogan good at standup comedy?"

Asks Jason Zinoman in "In His Stand-Up Special, Joe Rogan Plays Dumb/On his podcast, Rogan indulges his own obsessions and eccentricities. But in 'Burn the Boats,' his Netflix comedy special, contempt for the crowd is a theme" (NYT).

I like Joe Rogan's podcasts, though I skip ahead in 5 minute jumps when he starts talking about drugs or aliens, and I skip whole episodes if it's about martial arts. But I've never been able to watch more than a minute or 2 of his standup, and I didn't watch his new standup when it aired live the other day.

So I'm interested in Zinoman's opinions:

"Hillary Clinton’s laugh was criticized, and also called weird. There was a suggestion that it made her seem inauthentic..."

"... which was a bizarre point, since genuine laughter is, if not involuntary, then very hard to fake. Lenny Bruce once dared a crowd to try it four times in an hour. Calling women overly emotional or hysterical is a sexist trope, and there’s a long history of positioning laughter in opposition to reason. Plato warned against a love of laughter, suggesting it indicates a loss of control. Ever alert to the theater of power, Trump rarely laughs... ...."

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Kamala Harris’s Laugh Is a Campaign Issue. Our Comedy Critic Weighs in. The Trump campaign sees Harris’s laugh as a vulnerability to exploit. But far from a liability, it is one of her most effective weapons" (NYT).

"What does a laugh say about a person? That he or she is human. In a divided country, it’s something we all do and enjoy. And as anyone who has hung out with friends late into the night knows, it’s contagious. That’s a powerful political tool. As the poet Ella Wilcox wrote, 'Laugh and the world laughs with you.'"

Ella Wilcox? She started that? Oh!

I am laughing at the surprise encounter with what looks like the childless cat lady J.D. Vance was talking about.

Here's the poem, "Solitude":

"One of his signature bits, where an advertising man coaches Abraham Lincoln before the Gettysburg Address..."

"... was a pointed critique of the cynicism of professional politics. 'Hi, Abe, sweetheart' begins the man from Madison Avenue, who encourages him to work in a plug for an Abraham Lincoln T-shirt. When the president says he wants to change 'four score and seven years ago' to '87,' the ad man first patiently explains they already test marketed this in Erie. Then he says: 'It’s sort of like Mark Antony saying "Friends, Romans, countrymen, I’ve got something I want to tell you."'"

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Bob Newhart Holds Up/He basically invented the stand-up special in 1960 and continued to be a source of comic brilliance until his final years" (NYT).

Listen to the Abe Lincoln routine here (at YouTube).

I would have blogged that passage anyway, so it is by mere chance that in 2 posts in a row I'm quoting something that contains a quote from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." The line quoted above is from Act III, Scene II, with Antony speaking at Caesar's funeral:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

In the previous post, Maureen Dowd had written that Trump, at the convention, "played the Roman emperor, like a Julius Caesar who survived that 'foul deed' and 'bleeding piece of earth,' fist in the air, sitting high in the forum, gloating, as his vanquished foes bent the knee." The internal quotes, from Act III, Scene I, are spoken by Antony over the dead body of Julius Caesar:

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.

"At one point in his show, he said the real divide in the country was not between rich and poor, Democratic or Republican, but between 'the insane' and 'the insufferable.'"

"The insane include the people who stormed the capitol. He calls them nuts, before adding: 'but fun.' Then he grew more animated describing the insufferable by their 'NPR tote-bag energy' and 'hall monitor' tendencies.... Minhaj... repositions him[self] less as a righteous political comic than a more self-questioning, personal comic, a move he had already begun to make; this scandal may have accelerated the shift...."

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Was a Scandal the Best Thing to Happen to Hasan Minhaj? At the Beacon, the comic took a different tack after posting a video rebutting a New Yorker article on fabrications in his work. The crowd went wild" (NYT).

Zinoman likes that Minaj isn't "playing the victim," like "seemingly everyone" these days, including Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. And Zinoman, in a sidetrack, praises the filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, and gives a tip about a new movie I might want to see:

"Musk’s interest in electric cars or Ukraine comes and goes, but the richest man in the world is constantly joking."

"A shameless punchline thief, he doesn’t discriminate between dad jokes or insult humor. On Twitter, he’s Beavis and Butt-Head, chuckling at everything.... His stated reason for buying Twitter is to expand free speech, a cause he took up in part because it suspended the account of a conservative parody site, the Babylon Bee, after a post. Days after taking over Twitter, he tweeted: 'Comedy is legal again.' Then people started making fun of him and you’ll never believe what happened next. Elon Musk, comedy savior, transformed into the joke police.... The reason he’s found himself cast in this public drama as the humorless square, the Comstockian scold, is that while labeling something parody might be bad for comedy, it can be essential for credibility.... While he’s not especially good at comedy, Musk is a wonderful comic character: The boss who thinks he’s funny but isn’t. He’s Michael Scott from 'The Office,' whose terrible jokes everyone must if not laugh at, at least put up with.... Musk doesn’t need to own his haters in a tweet. They already work for him for free." 

From "Hey, Elon Musk, Comedy Doesn’t Want to Be Legal/He’s Twitter’s chief jokester, but as his free-speech impulses conflict with his push to label parodies, he shows a misunderstanding of how humor works" by Jason Zinoman, the NYT comedy critic.

Zinoman packs a lot into that column. It was hard to excerpt! As a reader, I felt flattered to be assumed to know what "Comstockian" means. If anyone needs to brush up on the story of Anthony Comstock, here's his Wikipedia article. Excerpt:

"Those looking for any apologetic notes or reckoning with the damage he has done will be disappointed. He is not aiming for redemption onstage."

"If anything, he’s doubling down on the comedic value of saying the wrong thing. 'That’s the point of this,' he said, motioning to himself onstage. He didn’t repeat the now cliché comedian complaints about generational sensitivities or snowflakes, but the central theme of the night was the cathartic release of transgression. His subjects (Sept. 11, slavery, pedophilia, the Holocaust) made the case. He turned his new reputation in the #MeToo era into a springboard for jokes. 'Wait until they find those pictures of me in blackface,' he said. The audience, which gave him standing ovations, roared. Then he pushed further, saying he has done blackface for years. 'I didn’t do it to be funny,' he added. 'I liked it. Felt good. I do it for bedtime.'"

From "Louis C.K. Doubles Down on the Value of Saying the Wrong Thing/On his first tour since admitting misconduct, the comedian’s theme was the cathartic release of transgression as he delivered bits about his mother’s death and religion" (NYT), by Jason Zinoman, who laughed a lot and also found the show "uncomfortable." The discomfort seemed to be something Louis was "in control of" and also not in control of." Zinoman also credits himself with "a high tolerance for enjoying art from morally suspect places."