Untitled

Laguna assigned

-lots about how it's dangerous to ignore right wing comedy because of how important a tool it is in right wing shaping of cultural narratives

-also about young libs who understand comedy as a central part of their political identity

-an inevitable consequence of media coming at this new crazy rate is that each piece has to be built for a specific target audience

-sort of like a similar thing to the whole men dismissing abusive men w "that's not a man, that's a boy" sort of dismisses the harm that those specific men are having and the idea that they themselves could be harmful -- saying right wing comedy isn't true comedy ignores the very real impact it has in favor of making a semantic argument

*umberto eco

"I Think You Should Leave is filled with characters like this, who share Robinson’s desire to avoid embarrassment. Crucially, unlike Robinson, nearly all of them are incapable of making the prudent choice that will save them from humiliation. “There are tons of ways people will try to manipulate themselves or lie, or different tactics they'll use to save themselves from being embarrassed or to save themselves from being the joke,” says Robinson. “We find ourselves fascinated with people digging themselves in holes to save face on something small that ended up making themselves look stupider.” It’s the idea, he says, “of tripping, and then your first instinct is to look back and be like, ‘What the fuck's wrong with this floor?’""

calling them "micro humiliations"

~this sort of reminds me of when Jes Tom talked about harnessing the embarrassment and making it into its own character

this is actually really interesting about the piss dots

"It’s clearly preposterous, and yet carries a whiff of the confessional. You don’t just happen to write multiple jokes in multiple projects across multiple years about piss dots if you haven’t spent a lot of time personally worrying about them. “We all can make fun of these things, but everybody has some version of it,” Robinson tells me. One man’s piss dots are another guy’s pit stains."

i think i tend to see how easily embarrassed or thrown I am as a weakness, but I guess that Tim's whole thing is turning those moments into sketches. like yes it's dumb but also like Tim takes these characters and has them go to insane lengths to escape their embarrassment, which is ultimately counterproductive and that's how the sketch functions

"And though his characters all share certain qualities, he knows how to paint with every color of mortification: in one sketch, he’s the pained date caught in a lie, in another the teeth-gritted interviewee who refuses to admit he’s pulling a door that’s meant to be pushed. Robinson’s conventional appearance makes his inevitable turn to madness all the more striking." !!! useful in the first paragraph

Robinson started in improv

omg wait Zach Kanin as an illustrator

Tim was always sketch (heartening)

switch to writing from performing at SNL took some of the pressure off

taking a lot of syntactical stuff from kids

"t.r.: We’re writing about funny ways that people behave in situations where they’re at fault, or in trouble and don’t want to be in trouble. We’re trying to think of things that make us laugh, where people behave in those situations, and it just so happens that a lot of these people behave that way.

z.k.: There’s nothing funnier to us than someone who feels embarrassed or ashamed, and, to save face, digs themselves a way deeper hole and reveals much worse things than you thought at first."

henry beard

"you hate to admit it, but it's all luck." 73

james l brooks

"i can't imagine that any writer doesn't suffer from obsessiveness -- a humility that you feel toward your work. writing is not something you do offhandedly. it should continue to mean as much to you after years of doing it as it did when you first started. i sort of think it's supposed to be ever humbling."

rule of if you hear something three times while doing research you believe it to be generally true

mike schur

attribution is messy in comedy tv -- it's all collaborative

(w) sleeper

(w) midnight run

(r) infinite jest -- as a reconciliation between sincerity and humor

"in my opinion, really great pilots don't often later make great shows"

"in a perfect world, no one would discuss a new TV show until it had aired eight episodes, and the creative team had already worked out all the kinks"

schur thinks good stories beat good jokes -- p42 about wanting stories about people caring about each other

"character isn't important in sketches, where everything is two-dimensional by design. you can't really 'sell out' a character in three minutes."

a lot on 47-48 about how a lot of writing is losing any sense of complacency -- you can never feel like you know what you're doing

"writing is an art that has a weird aspect to it... part of its success depends on how the audience reacts to it. You can get philosophical about it, and say that a perfectly written script, just exist in space and time, as a beautiful testament to the power of the human soul or something but the practical reality is that you have to film it and put it on TV actors have to act in it, and the audience gets to weigh in at some point. If you ever feel complacent with yourself, then you’re basically saying you don’t need the other part of the equation and if you’re a TV or movie writer you definitely do. Not just for your career but to have people who way in on whether or not you successfully communicated what you wanted to communicate. It’s a strange business it’s really where the rubber meets the road, the rubber being art, and the road being commerce”

"While these men sold out stadiums, however, women comedians, still combating the social construction of humor as a masculine practice, remained largely excluded from comedy-club main stages and cable network specials, and were hindered from exercising the expanded expressive possibilities of stand-up comedy (Zoglin 2008, 183)."

"In the comedy-club circuit, [Danitra] Vance recognized a “tradition” of performers yielding to audience expectations to secure laughs (Vance 1994, 383). Unwilling to let audiences remain “who they were when they came in,” she made the decision to “say to hell with the audience,” in part by pivoting to performance art and theater (Vance 1994, 384)"

"I use the metaphor to illustrate the challenges of eliciting laughter from an audience whose referents for the performer are girded in a gaze that Toni Morrison assails in The Bluest Eye. In the novel’s afterword, Morrison frames her writing in relationship to an “immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze” ([1970] 2004, 210)"

"Misogynoir speaks to how the great distances between the somebody elses’ invented by “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” and the self, are a distinct conundrum for Black women comedians (Du Bois 1903, 3)."

~not starting with deadnaming caitlyn jenner

"But as the late political satirist, and quite humorous, Molly Ivins once put it, "Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel- it's vulgar.""

Garry Trudeau "Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful...Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny--it's just mean."

"Here, in the land of unbridled speech and plucky self-reliance, even the lowliest among us is free to snark upon the high and mighty-- and playing the scrappy David our entitled Goliaths is, arguably, more important to us than actually being funny."

~i think that being kind and good is more important than being funny, and i think maybe that's unique to me, but i think that that is one of my core beliefs about my life. it's not necessarily how i view comedy, but for me, i'm not going to make a joke that i don't think is good in the moral sense. to me it should hit both of those metrics.

talking about comedy in the time of slavery, "What they reveal is that to punch up, you only have to convince your audience that you are the little guy, while your satirical targets represent the powerful, the elite. In other words, to own the moral high ground, you have to play to the cultural low ground."

maybe this is why it's easier for marginalized comics to make jokes that punch up -- they don't need to convince anyone of their oppression because it's readily visible

talks about how in "chris rock's poisonous legacy" that whoever does respectability politics shit positions themselves as a truthteller that's revealing truths from the inside about black people

interesting stuff about amy schumer~ should look into her more

~ooooo amy.....

describing the bro-centric new york comedy scene "In this crowd, explanations weaken jokes, apologies ruin them, and even Cumia is worth defending."

"Hipster irony is a thin defense for racist jokes, particularly with several centuries of unironic, blatantly racist humor in America preceding them. Last year, comic Heben Nigatu summed up this threadbare line of thought in a cogent tweet: "'It's satire'-ancient white people proverb.""

"in early July, Schumer backed off from the joke. "I used to do a lot of short dumb jokes like this," she wrote. "I played a dumb white girl character on stage. I still do sometimes. Once I realized I had more eyes and ears on me and had an influence I stopped telling jokes like that on stage. I am evolving as an artist. I am taking responsibility and hope I haven't hurt anyone.""

"Schumer's aligned herself with the safer side for now, the liberal comfort comedy you rarely have to explain to Americans--punching up."

sort of talks about amy schumer as someone who was like maybe scorned by like "liberal comedy" and sort of changed as a reaction to that response