I wanted to highlight those 2 stray sentences that appear in "Biden Must Win. But How?," an opinion piece by Pamela Paul in The New York Times.
I really don't care what her "brain" "wants." Your brain is you. If it feels like a separate entity that you need to speak about in the third person, something is very wrong. Maybe you think it's humorous. But you're talking about withholding information from us. You're admitting that you know things that would hurt Biden's campaign, and you won't share it with the voters. You just wish you didn't know.
This is destructive of democracy. There must be a flow of information to the voters.
Paul goes on to argue that the Biden campaign should stress substantive policy differences between Trump and Biden. That's what I've been saying too. But you can't simply hide the candidate and forefront the party's policy agenda as if the man is nothing at all. You can't beat something with nothing.
If this becomes a personality contest — as hideous and inconceivable as that may sound to steadfast Trump loathers — Biden may well lose.
ADDED: Pamela Paul exhibits the problem that Ricky Gervais mocks Karl Pilkington about:
"But just as politically correct comedians trade on stories of their own oppression, anti-woke comedians now delight in referencing their own cancellations — Gervais and Chappelle’s shows are full of tales about people who have attacked them on the internet and in real life.... The outrage of woke comedians at the immorality of their enemies is echoed by the ceaseless outrage of anti-woke comedians at the absurdity and stupidity of their enemies. Comedy should offend. Comedians should speak freely.... But offensiveness is not synonymous with wit. And the best comedy is anarchic, not partisan. Surprising, not predictable. The antidote to an age of political polarisation and outrage is not more of the same. That men as talented as Chappelle and Gervais have succumbed to the temptation is a testament to just how powerful those forces are."
"... and when no one is secretly having their actual bigotry reinforced by the cruelty at the center of said irony. Toward the end of the show, he drags out an appalling sketch full of racist Sinophobic stereotypes, which he insists isn’t racist because it’s 'ironic.' Doesn’t matter that this kind of 'irony' is what allows white supremacists to operate in plain sight. Doesn’t matter that five minutes into SuperNature an audience member audibly laughs at a mention of rape, which might indicate that perhaps Gervais’s audience isn’t as ironically humorous as he wants them to be. No, Gervais seems to have decided that because words aren’t literal physical violence, nothing he says can cause harm.... We’re expected to speak his lingua franca of bad jokes and meet him halfway by agreeing that 'identity politics' should be just as susceptible to mockery as everything else...."
I love Ricky Gervais, but I have to agree with some of what Romana is saying here. In his new show, Gervais relies too heavily on just saying what he knows are terrible things to say and topping it off with a reminder that it's a joke. It's like something an unfunny uncle might do at an unbearable family gathering. He's taking license to say all the transgressive things, but ha ha doncha know it's a joke. I found that repetitive and tiresome, and at some point you really do wonder whether the laughter is based on a different understanding — not that we all know it's untrue but that we secretly think it is true. That's an especially nagging concern when the topic is transgender people.
I got through the entire blogging day yesterday without mentioning Will Smith, but this morning, reading the comments in last night's cafe, I took the prompt to watch a clip of Joe Rogan talking about it.
That's a 15-minute clip. I still intend to watch the rest of it, but 5 1/2 minutes in, I found myself wondering what Ricky Gervais has said about the incident. Ricky is brilliant, and he's a stand-up comedian who's hosted awards shows and roasted the big stars. Here he is at the 2020 Golden Globes.
I would expect Ricky to defend the role of the comedian versus the stars, but all he did was one little thing, retweet this tweet from the British "Office" twitter feed that shows the tiniest clip from an old episode of the show:
"Let's go out with a bang. Let's have a laugh atyour expense — shall we? Remember: They're just jokes. We're all going to die soon. And there's no sequel."
Oh, but the "just jokes" defense — just jokes at the expense of the hyper-privileged — that's not going to work anymore. It's the Era of That's Not Funny, and the preening empaths are out there in force telling you never ever ever ever to joke about anything that's actually physically wrong with a person. Or something like that. Can we still laugh at bald men? At bald white women? Who knows? I'm guessing we've reached end of the entire tradition of comedians on stage at awards shows making fun of the stars for the amusement of the little people out there in the dark. Whoever they get to emcee will be telling the stars they are wonderful and beautiful. Will Smith smacked the comedy out of the whole show. Get all the jokes out ya fucking mouth, from now until the end of Hollywood.
"... because usually when you write something, you do the best job and you cast it, and you try and find the people that are right for it. But then with Season 2, you know who you’re writing for, you bring in their physicality, you know what their strengths are, you know [who's] good at ad-libbing and who isn’t. You hit the ground running. That was the case with this but it didn’t apply so much, because I asked people it before I wrote it. I’ve been around for a while, so I was casting all the people I knew that were right for it. It’s always an easy shoot with my stuff because I’ve already lived with it for a year. I use the same crew. I use the same ensemble of actors or I find someone new that fit in. If someone handed me Mission: Impossible 8 and said we’re filming this next week, I’d panic, but with this show, it’s like with boxers: the hard bit is the training, the rest is easy."
Said Ricky Gervais, in an interview at Deadline, as the third season of his show "After Life" begins on Netflix.
1. I wrote "[who's]" instead of "whose [sic]" because it's an interview. He was talking. It's no fun snarking at the transcriber.
2. "It’s like with boxers: the hard bit is the training, the rest is easy" — I have no idea if he's talking about the dogs or the humans with gloves, the men in shorts.
3. We watched the first episode of Season 3 last night. It's only about 25 minutes, but there's lots of detail, even though you can also get the sense that nothing happens and nothing can change, this is a random collection of bumbling, sad people. Obviously, that's why you shouldn't binge watch, shouldn't take the bait when Netflix starts its little timer down in the lower right corner, ready to fling you into the next episode.
4. Resisting, we switched over to the 2010 Coen brothers movie "True Grit," which we'd paused halfway through the other day. We stuck with that to the end. I've never watched the John Wayne "True Grit," so I had no basis for comparison with the old film, whether Wayne shambled and mumbled better than Jeff Bridges. Nor can I compare the young actresses selected from obscurity to play the 14-year-old girl who somehow begins with true grit and teaches each man she encounters something about it. I wondered what happened to this actress in the next dozen years, and I was dismayed to run smack into "EXCLUSIVE: Pink-haired Hailee Steinfeld goes braless in a chainmail mini while posing in the shower before rocking a red wig and flashing her abs in latex in sizzling new shoot" (Daily Mail).
5. RICKY: "I’m fascinated with ego and narcissism and vanity and fame. The last 10 years we’ve seen the rise of the narcissism; I think all the bad things in the world are about narcissists, usually men, wanting to rule the world. Now we’ve got Instagram where it’s people standing next to a boat with their shirt off. It’s not even their boat, sometimes it’s not their abs. You see it mostly in entertainment, acting and modeling and so on. But what is the worst job to be a narcissist? When you should be listening to someone else. I thought I’d make [the therapist character] a narcissist, mixed in with toxic masculinity. I remember telling Paul Kaye about all the lines and I said, 'Do it like a football hooligan who works in the city.'"
6. If you read that whole interview, you'll see something that might make you think that sounds like something Althouse said about aging the day after her birthday — here. So you should know that I was influenced by re-listening to an old Ricky Gervais podcast where he made that point — that as you age each day is a larger percentage of the number of days you have left to live. He's repeating himself in this interview, but I offered an observation without saying I heard something like that in his podcast somewhere, that has no transcript to search. I do prefer to link!
Said Paul McCartney, quoted in a NYT piece about the big Beatles documentary, "'Improvise It, Man.' How to Make Magic Like the Beatles." That's by Jere Hester, author of "Raising a Beatle Baby: How John, Paul, George and Ringo Helped Us Come Together as a Family" (NYT).
I remember hearing that line in passing — I'm about half way through the 7-hour Disney Channel extravaganza — and wanting to think about it, but missing the context. All Hester gives us is:
Even as wine, beer and more flows, the Beatles stay disciplined, working and reworking lyrics and arrangements until they get them right. “To wander aimlessly is very un-swinging,” Mr. McCartney says. “Unhip.”
I'm so fascinated by the insight that there's hipness and swing in discipline and order, and that chaos — wandering aimlessly — is what's really uncool. It's a great hypothesis. Who knows if it's true, but where did it come from in Paul? Without context, one is left to theorize that Paul criticized chaos because the other Beatles weren't rising to the level of organization he wanted, that came naturally to him.
Googling, I found this transcript of the whole conversation (published a few years ago). There's audio too, and it's crisper than the mix in the documentary. It's January 14, 1969 (in Twickenham Film Studios):
You can get a pretty good idea of what it's like from this trailer:
I paid for the series after listening to the first episode, which was free. I was a little irked that it's on Spotify, which I pay for, and I had to pay even more. But it costs something like $15, and I pay $15 for books all the time. Isn't it as worthy as a book?
I'm only interested in Ricky Gervais. I listened to the whole first episode with no awareness of who the other guy was supposed to be. "Sam." He felt like a complete nonentity to me, just a dull voice to make it so that Ricky wasn't just talking to himself.
I was surprised to see that it was Sam Harris, a famous name that I know, though not someone... I was going to say: not someone I'd ever paid much attention to. But when I search the blog archive, I see I've blogged about him many times, usually without adding a "Sam Harris" tag. The failure to tag means that when I wrote the post, I didn't think I'd be writing about the same person again. It's odd to see that's happened so many times with this particular person — especially after my experience with the podcast, where he made no distinct impression on me!
But now he has made a distinct impression on me as the person who makes no distinct impression. I'll honor the occasion by going back to all the untagged posts and adding the tag. Then maybe all the faint impressions will congeal into something interesting. [UPDATE: It didn't.]
And the podcast is good. I recommend it. It's mainly Ricky asking the questions, Sam giving bland answers, and Ricky bouncing off Sam's answers. For example, Ricky asks Sam if he had to choose between being 3 feet taller than he is or 3 feet shorter than he is, which would he choose? Sam gives the wrong answer (taller) and Ricky drags him through the wrongness of the decision.
ADDED: If you buy this podcast, you can listen to it on any podcast app. It's not like Joe Rogan, isolated on Spotify. That's why having to buy it separately makes sense.
In 1998, The Hill tells us: "The great Billy Crystal served as host of the show," but this year
There was no movie anyone was buzzing about. No household-name stars were nominated unless Anthony Hopkins – who won his last Oscar 30 years ago – counts. There wasn't even a host for the show, because the Academy thought it was a great idea to eliminate the position for reasons unclear when a raw, unfiltered talent such as Ricky Gervais would have been just the person to lift our spirits.
Oh, come on. If they'd picked anybody to host, that person would have been skewered for one thing or another. Billy Crystal is still alive, but I'll bet he wouldn't even want to be invited back. It's better for him to be remembered as the great Oscars host of his time than to be set up as a target. Not only would people say why him and not a person of color, he's vulnerable to cancellation for having boldly and repeatedly performed in blackface:
That wasn't at the Oscars, of course. Remember when Whoopi Goldberg hosted the Oscars in whiteface?
Those were simpler times. More racist times?
ADDED: I'm just kidding about "simpler times." I think those were more complex times. We're simpler now. And it's not a compliment.
"... '[H]e declined to back away from any of his anti-woke jokes, his discussion of the n-word at a comics’ roundtable, or his insistence that everybody is fair game for mockery. To hold otherwise would be to grant classes of people special protections — comedy "privilege." He won’t do it.'... The same reasons Gervais is now a public enemy for the liberal-left, even though he is an atheist who votes for the Labour party, is the same reason Tucker Carlson is hated, or the reason Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are despised. Tucker Carlson is supposed to be instinctively free-trade and open borders, given his socio-economic background. A New York Billionaire with three wives, is not supposed to be defending Evangelicals from ever-encroaching sexual liberation. A classics scholar from Oxford shouldn’t oppose a European superstate in favour of a narrow national interest. And yet, they all went against what their supposed class interests are. And thereby, for good or for bad, broke the consensus. Anyone who goes against scripture is naturally deemed a heretic. Gervais has also joined the ranks. Good."
In my own little way, I identify with this. It's how I got myself perceived as a right-winger. And now I'm taking a second look at the quote I put in the headline: "Gervais cannot understand why supporting free-speech will make him a rightwinger." I don't believe that for a minute! Gervais can understand. I wouldn't put anything that is humanly comprehensible beyond his understanding. It's the intensity and vigor of his understanding that makes him the comedian that he is. He's using his powers and refusing to be boxed in by the strictures of leftist comedy-killers. And there's no richer comedy material than the controlling prudes who say That's not funny.
This made me think about the recent episode of Joe Rogan's podcast where he interviews Jon Stewart. I tried to listen to it...
... but I didn't get very far, and I don't think Joe was enjoying himself too much either because the thing doesn't even reach the hour-and-a-half mark. Joe normally goes well over 2 hours with his guests and often over 3 hours. That's the idea: Things flow and open up. But Jon was a drag. He wasn't funny. He did, interestingly enough, admit that he'd burnt out on "The Daily Show," that the routine of reading the script the writers prepared for him in that outraged tone felt awful from the inside.
Ricky Gervais writes his own material and keeps going, thank God.
"And it’s when you look into their eyes, you know that, even if they’re doing something good, they’re sort of thinking, 'I could weep at what a good person I am.' Oh dear."
"... the government as the 'efficient' branch, running the country by passing laws through Parliament, which is elected. The two cannot mix. One is apolitical and unifying, the other political and inherently divisive. The royal family’s website puts it succinctly: 'As Head of State The Queen has to remain strictly neutral with respect to political matters.' Harry and Meghan’s popularity is, in part, tied to this unifying neutrality.... Once they start to behave like ordinary people, giving ordinary opinions, then people will treat them as ordinary.... He and his wife will be pilloried for their decision, for their hypocrisy or greed, sanctimony or privilege, depending on who is dishing out the criticism.... You say you’re woke, but the companies you work for [in China are] unbelievable,' said Gervais on Sunday night, tearing into the cream of Hollywood. He was right to say Hollywood is pro–having cake and pro–eating it. But so too, it seems, are Harry and Meghan."
"I'm such a snowflake, liberal, I can't even really hate them for it. But my job is to take the piss. I did that."
Tweeted Ricky Gervais (after some people criticized his comic performance as host of the Golden Globes).
On Fox News ("The Five"), Greg Gutfeld analyzed the politics and guessed at the structure of Gervais's emotions:
"He's [Gervais] is upset because he's so confident in his liberal ideas that the refusal to listen to other ideas, which is happening right now on the regressive left, enrages him.;.. It's a pathetic sign of weakness...and I think that's what's fueling his fire and why he's so disgusted and angry -- but do not mistake that for him becoming a conservative."
I don't know if that explains Gervais, but I understand the dynamic. What Gutfeld said would work as a key to explaining what I've been doing on this blog these past 16 years. Suddenly, I think Gutfeld is talking about himself. I read Gutfeld's Wikipedia page, which links to this 2009 interview in Reason, where he says:
As a teenager, I was a liberal. It helped me in school.... I started to re-examine myself when I went to Berkeley. It was a really bad idea. It was just walking around with a target on your back.
I became a conservative by being around liberals and I became a libertarian by being around conservatives. You realize that there's something distinctly in common between the two groups, the left and the right; the worst part of each of them is the moralizing. On the left, you have people who want to dictate your behavior under the guise of tolerance. Unless you disagree with them. Then the tolerance goes out the window. Which kind of negates the whole idea of tolerance. That's the politically correct moralizing. Then when you become a conservative, the other kind of moralizing comes from religion....
"Because it turns out that this may be exactly what makes people hate hypocrites so much: They fool us into giving them credit for holding potentially costly moral beliefs without actually paying those costs. A 2017 paper from the journal Psychological Science reported a series of experiments demonstrating that we give people moral credit for condemning bad behavior — more credit than we give them for just stating that they themselves behave morally. But by the same token, we resent people who condemn others while privately indulging the same vices even more than we resent those who falsely claim to do the right thing. In fact, the people they studied seemed willing to give people a pass on hypocrisy if they admitted they didn’t live up to their own ideals. What bothers us most, this suggests, is not the disconnect between values and behavior, something we’re all guilty of, but rather trying to gain social status by pretending to be more moral than you are."
I don't care enough about movies and TV shows and awards to watch the Golden Globes, but I almost did, just to watch Ricky, and I kind of regret missing it. And I missed it hard, because I was sitting with the remote control within reach when I knew it was on, and I knew I could record it and then just watch the Ricky parts, but I actively held back, because I didn't want to see the Hollywood faces in the audience, phonily howling at jokes (or otherwise making faces, if something crosses whatever line they're able to calculate has been crossed).
But NBC gives us the whole monologue on YouTube, so I have no regrets:
ADDED: The stars object to SO many of the jokes. Now, that's pretty funny. I like the grace with with Martin Scorsese takes the joke at his expense. Scroll to 4:29 to see that segment.
AND: Don Jr. loved it:
OMG🔥🔥🔥 If you watch one thing today watch this. It’s about time someone in Hollywood says is it. RT!!!pic.twitter.com/DhGeMvyWNZ
Click through to the article to understand the controversy and to see a funny way to do a nonapology on Twitter. Oh, I know most of you won't click. Here:
This tweet upset some people yesterday so I think I should apologise and delete it and never make offensive jokes like this again. https://t.co/AbNKESkKHL
I really did wonder whether "quick-drying cement" is the name of a real product. It seems like a phrase that would be written on a package delivered to a Looney Tunes character. Ah, yes! Here:
So I googled the term, and I'm seeing a lot of packaging, and "quick-drying cement" doesn't seem to be the standard term. I'm seeing "fast-setting" and "rapid set." I do think "quick-drying cement" is the more comical way to put it.
I condemn assaults, including assaults with humorous-sounding objects like milkshakes (or, in the old days, pies). But let's get the facts straight. My link at the top of this post goes to "How a Dubious Claim of Cement Milkshakes in Portland Became a Right-Wing Meme/The police claimed that left-wing protesters were hurling cement drinks. There’s no evidence to back that up" at Mother Jones:
"... I have to make sure the second season is even better so I’ll probably have to work much harder than usual. Annoying really," said Ricky Gervais, about the renewal of his TV show "After Life," reported at Variety.
The show centers around Tony (Gervais), a middle-aged journalist whose “perfect life” has been reduced to dust since his wife died of cancer. After contemplating taking his own life, he decides instead to live long enough to punish the world by saying and doing whatever he likes from now on. He thinks it’s like a Super Power, but eventually finds out life is more complicated, when everyone around him tries to save the nice guy they used to know.
"At the end of the day, it’s all those little mundane interactions that actually save your life — they’re the variety of life, they stop you from feeling too sorry for yourself. He’s got to take the dog for a walk, he’s got to go to work to make money to get drunk, and after all that, time heals,” Gervais explained to Variety in an interview.
I've watched 4 episodes, and it has my recommendation. It's beautifully filmed in a distinctive small city in South West England. It is a dramatic comedy about living again after your loved one has died. There's also quite a bit about the subtle pain of working on a little newspaper that reports inanely uplifting stories about local people, like the man pleased with the water stain on his wall that looks like Kenneth Branagh.
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