My Twitter feed serves up a strange run of male humor.

Suddenly, I get this:

Links: 1, 2, 3. 

I know Crosby's only passing something else along, and it's from an account that presents a female identity, but I'm counting that as Crosby's humor, replete with the casualness of masturbation and second-hand jokes.

Pick your favorite male humor style:

1

2

3

 

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"Are teens watching Pretend It's a City?" — asks Raphael Bob-Waksberg about the Martin Scorsese series — on Netflix — with Fran Lebowitz.

Are teens watching Pretend It's a City? Have the alternative teens discovered Fran Lebowitz? I feel like for a particular sort of high schooler this show could be It Exactly - a key into a different kind of being: "Oh, I'm That." If you are a teen or know a teen, please report.

— Raphael Bob-Waksberg (@RaphaelBW) January 19, 2021

Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the comic writer associated with the animated Netflix show "Bojack Horseman." I have read and enjoyed his story collection "Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory." I follow him on Twitter, and I loved his question. I've watched the Fran Lebowitz series, and I'm the same age as she is (and lived in the NYC in the 70s and 80s), so I liked it, but what about these kids today?

Bob-Waksberg hasn't gotten too many answers. A couple teens say they've watched it, but give no report on whether they found it to be any kind of "key into a different kind of being." 

But here's the most striking answer:

alternative teens discovered her a'ight pic.twitter.com/cJ7lUd9v3G

— ☹☹⌛⌛⚰⚰♻♻ (@zaws) January 19, 2021

I clicked around and found this: 

I love Fran Lebowitz too... & I would love to be simply excited for this new netflix thing but I have some awfully depressing news... Fran Lebowitz is a TERF! I know this because in this 2010 documentary about Candy Darling, Beautiful Darling, Lebowitz articulates the TERF position just about as explicitly as you can--that Candy isn't a woman, but a man tragically and fetishistically fixated on womanhood.... I suppose I am bringing it up because, as usual, it's that thing where an older cis lesbian has been just about as explicitly hateful towards trans people as you can be, but because she's an elder or whatever we're all pretending that never happened....

TERF = trans-exclusionary radical feminist. 

You can watch the entire documentary "Beautiful Darling" here, but I'll just embed the trailer, which begins with Lebowitz talking about Darling:

 

Lebowitz expresses the opinion that you cannot be a woman if you didn't begin life as "a little girl." The power behind Candy Darling was Andy Warhol, and Lebowitz knew Warhol — she wrote for his magazine — and did not like him, as you can see in this clip from a Scorsese domentary that was HBO in 2011:

 

"This is what happens when an inside joke gets into the water supply."

ADDED: I wrote "Lebowitz expresses the opinion..." but these are not "opinions" in the non-artist sense of the word. I like to quote Oscar Wilde: "Views are held by those who are not artists."

You've got to understand that Lebowitz is a humorist. She's releasing her inside jokes into the water supply. 

"I now understand that people of color should always voice people of color. We missed a great opportunity to represent the Vietnamese-American community..."

"... accurately and respectfully, and for that I am truly sorry. I applaud all those who stepped away from their voiceover roles in recent days. I have learned a lot from them. In hindsight, I wish that I didn’t voice the character of Diane Nguyen," wrote Alison Brie, about her role on the animated TV show "Bojack Horseman," quoted at Vulture.

Bojack Horseman showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg has also expressed regret over Diane’s casting, recently explaining his decision on Twitter and telling Vulture in 2018, “I allowed myself to believe that the world of animation was a little different than the world of live action. It is in some ways, but that’s not really a good excuse.” Bojack Horseman wrapped up its sixth and final season in January 2020.

So it's all over. No going back. Might as well express regret. Maybe he just regrets that he casually stuck a Vietnamese name on the character. Was there anything really "represent[ative] the Vietnamese-American community" about Diane Nguyen on "Bojack Horseman"?!

How awful for these artists to cave to manipulation to disavow their own good work! I'm guessing Bob-Waksberg originally thought it was cool to use a Vietnamese name for a character without it meaning anything more than just a little casual diversity. He didn't know he would bite him in his Horseman ass one day.

Here's an interview with Bob-Waksberg from September 2018 (also at Vulture):