(10-09-2023, 08:41 AM)Besticus Maximus wrote: It's worth underlining that they do nothing for a cheap laugh or the general lulz.Laughter is the tool of the oppressor.
I shouldn't have to do the labor to educate you, but I will:
Spoiler: massive emotional labor I should be compensated for (click to show)(click to hide)
https://newrepublic.com/article/161200/alt-right-comedy-gavin-mcinnes-problem wrote:The recent comedy boom is popularly understood as an era in which new forms of media, like podcasts and streaming video, created massive new audiences for comedy, which in turn created massive new revenue streams for comedians. At the same time, the artificial intimacy of these platforms allowed fans to feel a level of connection with their favorite performers—and with each other—that could verge on the cultish. This was not simply an era of glorious bounty, in which little-known comedians could land massive Netflix paydays or leapfrog from UCB Comedy to College Humor to lucrative sitcom writing gigs. It was also the era of walled-off subcultures, like onaforums.net, which could transform into real, violent political factions, especially at a time when comedy was increasingly pitted against the forces of political correctness—the very forces that also fueled the grievances of Donald Trump’s supporters and the revanchist right, whose credo of “owning the libs” reads a lot like the traditional comedian’s defense of his right to insult and offend.
The mobs that descended on Washington, D.C., last month have intellectual roots in many places, going back to the bloody beginnings of this country. But they also have roots in specific areas of modern culture, including Facebook, BuzzFeed, and the increasingly online world of comedy. All the forces that incubated the rioters are still there, unchanged, chugging along as normal. The rot goes much deeper than you might expect.
Quote:If the far right’s origins in comedy are ill-appreciated, they were never particularly secret.
...
In retrospect, The Gavin McInnes Show’s function was not just to introduce the comedy world to the Nazi world but to let one legitimize the other. At this, McInnes was wildly successful, his influence long outlasting his own tenure in the New York comedy scene. In 2017, Dave Smith used a TGMS guest-hosting spot to interview Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell, giving both a friendly platform to lay out their vision for a white ethnostate. By then, he and the other two Legion of Skanks members had left Compound Media for a network co-founded by Gomez, GaS Digital, where they carried on the TGMS tradition: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and flirtation with the far right.
Today Legion of Skanks holds considerable sway in comedy, with a massive platform it’s lent everyone who’s anyone in the New York club scene—while remaining true to its far-right roots. In 2019, it hosted Milo Yiannopoulos after his fall from grace. In 2018, Gomez angrily chased a fan out of a recording when the man pointed out a Proud Boy in the audience. Smith, a Nazi sympathizer who believes Jews run “forces that are killing the society,” has become a powerful voice in the right flank of the Libertarian Party. He’s used his own podcast on GaS Digital to pal around with white supremacists like Cantwell, Spencer, and Nick Fuentes. “If I can use the government to do horrific things to [the left], I will, because they’ve been doing horrific things to us for centuries,” Cantwell told him after the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Smith agreed: “It’s almost like you’re having a conversation with somebody, and they punch you in the face … the only logical response is to get up and fight.”
Would extremism have found such a loving home in comedy without McInnes? Maybe. Much of the blame also goes to the man who gave him a platform during the alt-right’s formative years: Anthony Cumia. A racist Trump supporter who pleaded guilty to domestic abuse charges in 2016, Cumia certainly shares much of McInnes’s ideology. He’s spent six years mingling with reactionaries like Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump Jr. on Compound Media’s marquee program, The Anthony Cumia Show with Dave Landau. The network as a whole straddles the same worlds as TGMS: On one side, it is a breeding ground for far-right ideology, on the other a regular old gig for pretty much every club comic in New York City.
Quote:What was cringe? Milligan defined the genre early on as “comedy that would offend many close minded individuals,” and its practitioners as “comedians who aren’t afraid to tackle subjects many ‘safe’ performers won’t touch.” As Kimowitz later described it, “We were the original rape joke people.” These are euphemisms, of course. Cringe means angry and aggrieved, hateful and bigoted. Milligan’s list of “awful comedians” included the categories “Ethnic Garbage,” “Racial Garbage,” and “Female.” (Misogyny was a running theme: In a 2007 blog post titled “Here’s to you, Slutty Female Comedians!” he wrote, “Who cares if you are funny? Odds are you are not. That’s why the good Lord gave you breasts, an ass and a vagina, and most of all a mouth.”)
The firm’s lineups in those early days featured comics like Jim Norton, Robert Kelly, Bill Burr, Louis CK, Joe DeRosa, and Mike DeStefano, all known for their brash sensibilities and hostility to political correctness. (These are also euphemisms.) Many were Opie & Anthony regulars, fitting in with Cringe Humor’s mission to bring old-school Opie & Anthony humor into the twenty-first century.
Quote:This past fall, the club boasted that SNL hosts Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle used it to workshop their monologues (Chappelle’s publicist confirmed that he tested his material at The Stand and other clubs). The show celebrated Chappelle’s election-week episode with an indoor afterparty at the club.
It took almost two decades, but the men behind Cringe Humor successfully created a major New York City comedy club. But it was not just any comedy club. While it now plays host to some of the most famous comedians in the world, The Stand’s roots are in an effort to create a space in American culture for the school of comedy embodied by Opie & Anthony—a space it still provides to their disciples. Its longtime booker is Patrick Milligan.
Quote:Then something new happened. A few days later—before I published the story—I discerned from my mentions that a user on onaforums.net had doxxed me in retaliation for my reporting on Cumia. They didn’t stop with me. Over a period of weeks, the user, SpaceEdge, doxxed my entire family; harassed me, my parents, and my brother by text and phone; doxxed and harassed several of my Twitter followers; and doxxed a man they believed to be my landlord. (I’m using the singular “they” to refer to SpaceEdge both because I don’t know their gender and I cannot know whether the onslaught of texts and calls originated from one person or several.)
As I pored over the forum trying to understand what was going on, I discovered this was a routine pastime for its members. Using tactics honed by right-wing extremists during the GamerGate movement—an online harassment campaign fueled in part by reactionary ideology—the forum’s users have targeted a science fiction author and his wife, comedians they don’t like, and even Brianna Wu, one of the original targets of GamerGate.
Quote:It’s easy to lose sight of a simple truth: Things are the way they are because people made them so. The far right did not come into being by chance. People shaped it. They went where they thought they could win people over, and they won people over. They offered permission to revel in racism and sexism, in homophobia and transphobia, and they earned devoted followings in return. They couldn’t do this alone, though. They had to be let in.
Donald Trump is out of office. Gavin McInnes officially left the Proud Boys years ago. ToxicCisWhiteMaleFat deleted his username a few weeks ago (his posts remain, albeit attributed to “Guest”), announcing his new alias, “Don Sterling,” in the private channel.* The far right has splintered into factions with varying ideologies and goals, each preparing for a new era of post-Trump violence. The people who gave this movement a constituency in comedy—who masked it in the language of free speech, who hid it behind the shield of more respectable artists—are all still in charge of their little fiefdoms. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
https://sethsimons.substack.com/p/some-thoughts wrote:To be very clear, though, the article does not describe Dodge as alt-right. It describes the way reactionaries infiltrated the New York City comedy scene by associating with comics of every stripe: established, unestablished, conservative, liberal. This is a crucial piece of the story. Comedians helped normalize The Gavin McInnes Show by treating it like any other gig. McInnes offered them a spot and they took it. Going on his show wasn’t just “doing a podcast,” as Dodge tweeted. It was doing a white supremacist’s podcast. The failure to make this distinction years ago is the whole problem. Gavin McInnes wrote his essay “Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural” before he went to Compound Media, a network founded by noted racist Anthony Cumia. This was all out there. As with many things in comedy, the only way to avoid seeing it was not to look.
It’s true that McInnes (and Compound Media) took advantage of systemic forces that compel comics to get as much exposure as they can. But we have to follow this thought through. Exposure is not a neutral quality. The exposure you get in one room is different than the exposure you get in another; the exposure you get on Compound Media is to white supremacists. I resist the idea that structural incentives to go where the gigs are erase the individual’s duty to make ethical decisions about what gigs they choose and what audiences they court. If exposure is currency, then it’s on the comic to figure out if they’re taking dirty money. If they decide that it’s in their interests to do so, then they must carry the weight of that decision, however light or heavy it is. That doesn’t mean they should be canceled or dragged for it, but it does mean someone might later point out they went on a white supremacist’s podcast.
Quote:I sympathize with the impulse to defend good people from association with bad people. The association, however, is the point. Almost everyone in standup is associated with bad people. It’s a very small world. Lots of people in it (as in all show business, and many other businesses) make the calculation that they have to do things they find unethical, with people they find unethical, in spaces they find unethical, in the hopes that later they’ll have the power to do things right and improve the system from within. I’ve had long conversations with artists I respect who worked at The Stand despite their problems with it because they felt it was a net good for them to take money from bad people, or because they thought they could infiltrate and reform the place. It seems clear now that the opposite was happening: they were the ones unwittingly granting legitimacy to the people actually infiltrating their community.
This is not to shame these artists. Everyone is susceptible to manipulation, no one is to blame for being manipulated. What I would suggest, though, is that while the calculation they make is often reasonable, it is rarely followed to its logical conclusion: a system where good people accept that they have to compromise their ethics is a system where unethical people thrive. This is a huge part of why there are so many Nazis in comedy. If good people want to drive them out, at some point they’ll have to reckon with the assumptions that let them in.
Quote:Nobody has a right to be a comedian. If your chosen vocation requires you to sacrifice your morals to get ahead—to make complex rationalizations about why it’s okay to associate with people you find reprehensible, who may be using you toward their own vicious ends—then you are accountable in some part for the consequences of those sacrifices. Accountability doesn’t have to mean exile or a permanent scarlet letter, but it at least means talking about things clearly and honestly. It’s important to be blunt about the complicity, knowing or naive, of good people, because we have to acknowledge our role in injustice if we wish to envision a world that doesn’t compel us to play it. (This goes equally for journalists who uncritically covered this part of the industry, as I did early in my career.) I’d love to hear other ideas, but at this point I struggle to see any solution to comedy’s Nazi problem other than a mass effort to deplatform the Nazis. We all know what happens when good people say nothing.
https://www.pastemagazine.com/comedy/saturday-night-live/michael-che-and-colin-jost-should-not-host-weekend wrote:Yesterday, two of television’s most visible satirists, Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost, shit the bed. In a series of tweets addressing rightful uproar over a stupid joke, Jost demonstrated a dangerous apathy toward the lives and dignity of marginalized communities. Meanwhile Che, in an interview with Vulture, said not only that he doesn’t care whether Donald Trump is a racist, but that it’s not his job to care. These positions aren’t just inane; they’re disqualifying. As faux-news anchors on one of television’s most popular comedy shows, it is Che and Jost’s job to call out bullshit—not to normalize it. Clearly their moral barometers are off, and they cannot be trusted with the task that awaits them under the Trump Administration. If they can’t do the job, someone else should.
Quote:That essay, an impressive feat of intellectual disingenuousness that includes such lines as “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity,” has been roundly rebuked up and across the web, so I won’t get into it here. What matters is that in citing it, as in his dodgy replies to Hopkins, Jost made clear that this was not just a stupid joke. He apparently genuinely believes that the language of inclusivity may have cost Democrats the election; he apparently lacks the not-all-that-powerful powers of reasoning necessary to see that protecting marginalized people is not a distraction, but an imperative. This is a man who served as SNL’s head writer for three years before stepping down to focus on “Weekend Update.”
While it’s unreasonable to expect that our comedic institutions be perfect, I think it’s fair to expect that they be good—that they meet some baseline of honesty, rigor and respect for their audience. This isn’t just a matter of punching up; it’s a matter of knowing what you’re talking about. SNL is well within its rights to target liberals alongside conservatives, but jokes like these normalize, well, jokes like these: uninformed, intolerant and objectively harmful. Violence against LGBT, trans and genderqueer people is real and horrifying. To turn that violence into a punchline is to diminish and perpetuate it.
Quote:The more pressing concern is this part of Che’s answer: “…I really don’t know if he’s a racist or not. And it’s really not my job. I don’t really care if he’s a racist or not.” On the contrary, it’s exactly his job to care whether the President-elect is a racist. Che is the host of a satirical news segment on a comedy show watched by millions of people each week. His job is to be a voice of reason, which by default makes him a voice against racism—a voice for the oppressed, the marginalized, the voiceless. If he would prefer not to have this job, then he ought to find one elsewhere.
Maybe I’m not cynical enough. SNL isn’t The Daily Show, comedians aren’t newscasters, entertainment exists largely to distract—I know, I know. But I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: all jokes are political. All jokes contain a moral viewpoint, an implicit judgment of what we should and should not laugh at. A joke should not simply be funny; many terrible things are funny. It should also be good, especially when it has a platform as large as SNL.
It would be easy to believe this doesn’t matter, as Che seems to. Earlier in that interview, he makes the case that things aren’t all that bad; that rather than going after Trump, comedy should strive to bring the left and right together. “This isn’t 9/11,” he says. “This isn’t an ISIS attack. This is a democratic, fair election. Half the people of the country picked Donald Trump. This isn’t a national tragedy; not everybody’s sad about this. And we gotta be honest to those people. These are our neighbors, this is our America, this is our family. We live here and we gotta figure out how one can get that far away from where we are and feel that isolated from where we are. That’s something that comedy can do… We gotta figure out what it is and we gotta figure out how to remedy it because apparently they felt neglected.”
This is an immensely privileged argument that’s been bandied about time and again before and since the election. Forget that a thing needn’t be a terror attack to be catastrophic for millions of people; forget that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; forget that only a quarter of the country voted for Trump; forget that massive voter suppression allowed the GOP to win key states by targeting students, people of color and the poor; forget that “our neighbors” voted for white male supremacy. Quite simply, it is not comedy’s job to make racists feel better. It is comedy’s job, at least at SNL’s level, to confront and condemn them, especially when they’re in the White House.
This is Che and Jost’s job. It’s hard. That’s why they get compensated with money and fame. Their statements these last few days are sad and frightening because we all know the job is about to get much harder. Our incoming President cares very little for free speech and very much about how he’s portrayed in the media. Sometimes it seems that’s all he cares about. Given their platform, Che and Jost have a rare opportunity to speak to a man who appears to be listening. At the very least, they have a chance to speak to some of the millions who did not vote. We need them to speak with wit and clarity, with honesty and candor, or else not speak at all.
The simple fact is this algorithm caused hellscape has no place for laughter, it's incredible privilege to think you should have a chance to not just stop and take a breath but get to laugh when that's being denied to so many others. You're not just complicit you're actively arguing for concerns to be dismissed so some people can enjoy other people's misery rather than take the steps to bring about lasting change. You see those of us who are putting our lives on the line to teach liberation coming under attack and you join the oppressors just for a "cheap laugh" which makes clear the cruelty is the point.
I'm just so tired at no one being willing to make the world a better place like I am, you guys claim to be allies but won't even give up one little thing like laughter to help those of us constantly fighting for survival. It's exhausting to know others won't even bother to do the work necessary when I spend every moment of my life being such a good person with a cleansed soul. It makes me start to wonder what even is the point of my watching new Disney+ programming and putting my Bluesky handle in my Twitter name if others are just going to prop up capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy "for the general lulz."
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