It’s the new hack!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on December 8th, 2011

The new, new hack. Trashing wildly popular comics and their fans! It’s all the rage!

And this time, the trashing comes with a twist: It’s perpetrated by a comic! (Jason Serafino. We mention his name in passing.)

What is it with these bitter, maundering goofballs? Do they think that standup is a zero-sum game? How many Enlish-speaking people are there in this world? Wikipedia puts it at 375 million… and that’s just the folks who claim to use it as a first language. Throw in the Dutch and the other folks who are handy with it as a second language and you probably have nearly half a billion. That’s half a billion potential fans of standup spoken in English. That’s who we’re all competing for, now that we’re all connected via the internet.

So… why all the fuss if Margaret Cho manages to carve out seven-figure income while catering to one-tenth of one-tenth of one per cent of them?

Does the author think that toppling the top 15 comics will clear the way for him? Is he convinced that it’s a zero-sum game and that he’s number 16?

And the writing is atrocious. We’re not up for any Pulitzers here at SHECKYmagazine.com, but Complex.com might actually hire an editor or two. Carrot Top, “…bores crowds into submission with an array of props that are about as funny as being audited by the IRS.” Oh, really? How exactly does that work? Does he bore them before or after they fork over millions each year (at $49.95 a pop) to see him perform live here in Las Vegas? When does the submission happen? Before or after the ticket prices. (The packed crowd we were part of last year at the Atrium Luxor Theater was far from bored.)

Serafino calls Carrot Top a “ginger-haired dud.” Okay, Gramps, whatever you say! The writing is a cross between Daily Variety and a junior high school “how I spent my summer vacation essay.”

The Carrot Top description should be enough to discredit Serfino. It’s mostly just inaccuracies and pure snark.

But the attempted takedown of Bob Saget clearly demonstrates that Grandpa Serafino is in the dark when it comes to his comedy history. Saget’s comedy “…comes off as a sad attempt to shed an image that has been attached to him for the past two decades,” and he’s “…desperately trying to separate himself from his clean-cut sitcom image by profusely cursing and telling some of the filthiest jokes this side of Reddd Foxx.” One problem: Saget’s been delivering this kind of act since 1980 or so– long before Serafino was watching Full House in his jammies with a bowl of ice cream. Saget, he says, “simply isn’t funny.” (We suppose this nitwit’s never heard of the concept of comedy being subjective. Such pronouncements are embarrassing. But, we suppose embarrassment is yet another concept he isn’t familiar with.)

No doubt Serafino committed this heinous act to gain some sort of cred. We’ll put it in terms that Serafino can understand: “Fail!”

Has he noticed that even the least successful person on his list is pulling down millions? Is this immaterial to him? We suspect that he’s contemptuous of the fans of the top fifteen. Such impotent ranting is difficult to watch. It’s the new hack.