"There’s just mutual headshaking. It’s like you lock eyes and you shake heads and you move on"/"It’s a sense of betrayal, like, who are you? Were you always like this? I don’t know you anymore!"

Said unnamed acquaintances of Cheryl Hines, quoted in "Cheryl Hines’s MAGA Makeover Has Her Hollywood Colleagues Scratching Their Heads: 'I Don’t Know You Anymore!'/'It’s a sense of betrayal, like, who are you?' says one industry insider, of the Curb Your Enthusiasm star and wife of RFK" (Vanity Fair).

“Whatever her reasons for staying with that weird, imbecilic husband and whether or not she subscribes to his inane positions is of no real consequence,” [an unnamed "Hollywood heavyweight"] says disdainfully. "It isn’t as though we’re talking about Zendaya, whom one would desperately want to get into their movie.'...

One of the few close pals to publicly speak up about Hines in the Trump 2.0 era is Tig Notaro, who once cohosted a podcast with Hines called Tig and Cheryl: True Story.... “My friendship with Cheryl predated her marriage to Bobby.... And then he endorsed Trump, and then it just got hard.... It’s really sad, because Cheryl did bring me so much joy.”.. 

Sometimes it seems like Hines is living out some dementedly cringed-out Curb episode, where ordinary events spiral out of control. As Notaro pointed out, it was one thing when RFK Jr. was a free-floating conspiracy theorist (“a gnat on the arm,” as she put it); it’s quite another now that he wields so much power over the health of the American populace.

Remember how sometimes the rule is you never — ever — liken a person to an insect? That rule comes and goes, but I will deal with my dismay by savoring the small pleasure of using the "insect politics" tag one more time.

Try this AI prompt (I did): Tell me about the idea that it is very wrong to compare a human being to an insect, that once you start saying people are gnats or flies or something in need of swatting, you're going down a slippery slope to Auschwitz... or something like that.

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:

Take for example Tig Notaro’s 2012 performance at the Largo, a major club in Los Angeles... [S]he began with “Hello. Good evening, hello. I have cancer,” and spent the next 29 minutes working out her feelings onstage....

Or take Hannah Gadsby’s special Nanette, where... she unpeels the psychological layers of building a career off of self-deprecating humor, and what that not only does to a person, but the communities they represent. That if you poke fun at the aspects of your identity that make you a “loser,” then who’s really winning?...

There are numerous examples of comedians who have offered up intimate performances that grapple with the darkest parts of society and break expectations of any one definition of what comedy is “supposed” to be. To say that comedy has to be funny is like saying visual art has to be pretty, or music has to be melodic....

The top show on Netflix right now is "Baby Reindeer," a drama about a comedian. We see some of his comedy routines. In Episode 4, we see how his act begins. He's dressed clownishly, romps about manically, and stops and delivers his first line: "So my mom died today."

That's got to be a reference to the highly respected comedy novel, "The Stranger," which famously begins: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." Oh? It's not comedy? It is comedy? I can't be sure.