Modified On August 8, 2012
That’s what we’ve taken to calling ourselves around here. It’s a pride thing.
We get some odd emails here at SHECKYmagazine.com HQ. When we launched 12 years and 307 days ago, we called our Letters To The Editor page “Like We Care.” We thought it captured our attitude rather well. (Of course, we cared… but we thought it sent a subtle, ironic warning to folks that, hey, we just might not care! In the nearly thirteen years we’ve published, the vast majority of folks have “gotten the joke.”)
Mind you, we are passionate about certain things. (In fact, we’ve been mocked for being a little too passionate about certain topics.) But, we pick and choose carefully. And woe to the goofball who tries to light a fire under us for this or that cause or crusade. We will drink a gallon or two of water just to piss on that fire. That’s when the “Like We Care” motto– and the irony– really comes into play. And most folks fundamentally, instantly understand that.
Once in a while, though, we hear from someone who doesn’t.
A recent missive sought to get us all stirred up and excited. It was an email about a bit… being done by a comedian… somewhere. There was a link attached, which led to a video clip of said comic doing said bit.
Hi there, I thought you might have an interest in this video clip of [NAME OF CITY REDACTED] stand-up comedian [NAME REDACTED] doing a fresh bit called [NAME OF BIT, YOUTUBE URL REDACTED].
To be sure, it is hilarious, but also raw and truthful. It’s a riff on a real thing that happened [DESCRIPTION OF BIT REDACTED].
Full disclosure, the show is mine, and I also filmed and edited the clip. Irrespective of that, [NAME OF COMIC REDACTED] is a brilliant young comic. And this clip is making the rounds among our friends online and getting a fantastically positive response.
Don’t know if this is something you would want to write about but thought I’d reach out.
Thanks!
We’re reminded of a quote from Firesign Theatre’s “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus”:
A: Why did the shorthair cross the road?
B: I don’t know.
A: Because somebody told him to. Why did the longhair cross the road?
B: Because somebody told him not to?
A: Aw– you’ve heard it already!
Well… we suppose we’re longhairs at heart. And the above email was urging us in so many words to “cross the road.”
More often than not, when we get an email that is obviously trying to prod us into doing something, we are amused. We send back a polite email (if we bother to respond at all) and curtly thank the sender and inform them that he/she is barking up the wrong blog tree.
In this case, though, we sent back an email dripping with sarcasm and condescension:
Dear [NAME REDACTED]:
We were just talking about this last week.You do yourself and your client a disservice by referring to a rape joke as “fresh.” It’s “the new hack,” about four or five “new hacks” ago. Just how isolated is [CITY REDACTED]? We figured with the internet and all, even folks in the [REGION OF COUNTRY REDACTED] would know that folks in New York and Los Angeles (and London and Sydney and probably even Vancouver and Toronto) have done rape jokes to the point where the audiences are inured to the shock value… along with abortion… and molestation… and a handful of other jokes that our colleagues have trotted out (sometimes out of obligation) in an effort to appear “raw and truthful.” (Mind you, we’re not for a minute labeling [COMIC’S NAME REDACTED] a hack. But we grow weary of the premise police who tell us that we’re not trying hard enough to explore new territory while they turn a blind eye toward the most egregious examples of tired and hackneyed repetition. Thus, our coining of the term, “The New Hack.”)
Of course, [COMIC’S NAME REDACTED] shouldn’t drop the joke. Nor should she avoid the topic in the future. But she should be under no illusion that she’s breaking new ground or setting herself that far apart from the rest.
Good luck to both of you.
We suppose the reaction was predictable.
Dear Mr. McKim,
Thanks for your response. With all due respect, did you watch the clip and actually listen to her tell her story and hear the audience’s supportive reaction? Or did you just see the title of the clip and decide it was hack?It’s not a “rape joke,” and it’s not for shock value. It’s the transforming of a crappy (universal) personal incident and a reversal of a power dynamic through creativity. She’s describing a real-life incident and her own internal reaction to it. By “fresh” I meant this incident happened to her a few days ago and here she is onstage working it out for the first time, not “wow, here’s a subject no one’s ever broached onstage before.”
The truth is, this sort of crap happens to women all the time, and it’s terrifying. So listening to someone like Ever grab ahold of something like this and transform it into something wonderful is an example of comedy transcending mere jokes and laughs.
Incidentally, every single response we’ve gotten to this set, from feminist blogs, gay blogs, comedy blogs – not to mention real live people – have all been overwhelmingly positive. As in “wow, I never thought someone could make a subject like this funny, and her bravery and honesty are amazing, thanks for sharing, I’m going to post this, too.”
She’s truthfully discussing a universally painful and terrible subject, and a room full of people are laughing. She wins. Comedy wins. We all win. If you can’t see that (and/or didn’t actually watch the clip), then no sweat. But don’t judge before seeing for yourself.
And, to be clear, she’s not my “client.” [NAME OF COMIC REDACTED] is a fellow castmember at a $5 stand-up showcase. This is the first time in five years I’ve ever promoted a clip like this online, because I thought it was worth the effort. We were all very proud of this show and this particular set, and wanted to share it with a broader audience. That’s all.
Also, thanks for the extra unnecessary dose of condescension in your “isolated [NAME OF CITY REDACTED]” comments.
[REST OF EMAIL REDACTED]
To which we replied:
You missed our point entirely.
The reaction to our reaction was, we suppose, entirely predictable. Seconds later, The Female Half of the Staff hops onto Facebook– not even knowing that she was a friend of the email author– to find this:
Wow! According to one – and only one – comedy blog, a joke that uses the word rape is hack, and I’d know that if I didn’t live in the backward, isolated Midwest! Also, I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually watch the clip, and is a total prick.
That’s us! We are soooo proud!
What follows is the Facebook equivalent of showing up outside our blog with glowing torches, pitchforks and bloodhounds.
I am SO PISSED right now, sorry guys. This asshole didn’t even watch the clip.
But one more thing: this guy is SUCH A GREAT COMEDIAN HIMSELF, he’s performed in all 50 states – and yet you’ve never fucking heard of him. Dickwad.
Thank you, James. It’s really fine, I just need to cool off. I guess you risk being misunderstood when you’re pushing the envelope like this.
Of course, the asshole(s) watched the clip. What kind of asshole(s) would we be if we passed judgement without even watching the clip? Jesus H. Christ! What kind of asshole(s) are these people accustomed to dealing with if they assume that we didn’t even watch the clip?! What kind of delusions are these folks operating under? (See DSM-IV-TR)
The Female Half of the Staff was understandably hurt. After all, the email we sent back, snark and all, was co-authored. As is all the output of SHECKYmagazine.com. For someone to reply to just The Male Half was a blow to her delicate sensibilities. She was momentarily unable to function. The inability of [NAME REDACTED] to appreciate The Female Half of the Staff’s personhood, to appreciate her co-authorship of SHECKYmagazine.com (and any/all correspondence originating therefrom), was a blow. Her identity– both as a person and as a woman– was rocked. She eventually gathered herself and responded.
My husband isn’t a prick. For your information, we wrote the response together after watching the clip. You missed our point. We were trying to save you from embarrassing yourself. There have been plenty of funny rape jokes in the past. Sarah Silverman is known for her “being raped by a doctor” bit, for example. If you can’t handle criticism then don’t send out the clip.
We would add that, before she hit “Send,” she deleted the line where she called the email sender a “cunt.”
We expect this kind of sexism from men. (Well, not the kind of men we hang out with, anyway.) But when it comes from a woman… it is HILARIOUS!
We wonder how all the feminist blogs who favorited her clip would feel about such a gaffe.
And then there’s the hack tactic of attacking the editors of SHECKYmagazine.com by calling into question their relative notoriety– “….you’ve never fucking heard of him!” Yeesh! That’s the new, new, new hack! Some publication fails to give you the proper love and you diss that publication by dissing the editor(s)?
Hello, sweetheart (and that comes from The Female Half, not The Male Half): There are a lot of people in this business who know who we are– from open mikers who have bought our book, to veterans who have worked with us over the past 30 years or so, to comedy superstars, to a scared little rabbit who beseeches a behemoth comedy website to say glowing things about her comedy crush.
Grow the fuck up. Is this the first adversity you’ve ever encountered in your life? Did you get shiny, towering trophies for just participating in every activity in your young existence? You are unwittingly enrolled in a Special Olympics life. We’re sorry we didn’t give you a hug at your imagined finish line. We hope you can recover.
You may be wondering why we redacted all names, place, links, identity. It’s because we wanted to spare any embarrassment to the comedian that [NAME REDACTED] so clumsily represented.
We’re told that [COMEDIAN’S NAME REDACTED] was trying out that material for the first time (or one of the first times). And it shows. Perhaps, in six months or so, with some editing and some tweaking here or there, the bit will cook down to a decent 2-1/2 minutes. But worthy of some sort of viral buzz campaign that seeks to establish a beachhead in the war against humdrum comedy? We’re not convinced.
For now, however, the spectacle of a shaky bit, being guffawed at by her friends/sycophants/shills/fellow open-mikers isn’t worthy of internet viralism. As it is, in its current form, the clip is just eight minutes of beating a (not-so-daring) premise (with just a touch of daring racism? What say you, alts?) into the ground. To be sure, the clip, according to its champion, has garnered some buzz– the clip is getting a “fantastically positive response”– but we’re not convinced that the WWW response is anything more than some sort of Pavlovian response to certain prescribed topics and methods. We don’t even buy the genuineness of the laughter picked up by the camera’s microphone. (Believe us– between the two of us, we’ve done/attended hundreds of open mikes in dozens of cities… so we know forced laughter when we hear it.)
[NAME REDACTED] says that the clip depicts “One of the best sets I’ve ever seen. Words cannot describe it, so I’ll let this clip speak for itself.” There is more there to repulse us than just simple bombast. There is a certain sort of stupidity and cluelessness and arrogance that doesn’t just seek to elevate the performer in the clip, but seeks to unfairly downgrade those who don’t live up to the performance standards supposedly set by the clip.
Perhaps we suffer from some sort of paranoia/persecution complex (the same sort that our emailer suffers from!), perhaps we don’t. But this whole exercise seems sort of embarrassing (and redundant) since there are countless comedians out there– Laurie Kilmartin? Sarah Silverman? Nikki Glaser? Bonnie McFarlane? Patrice Oneal? Doug Stanhope?– who, in the space of 15 seconds, have said something more meaningful and pithy than [NAME REDACTED] can do in 8:05.
So… in summary… don’t give us shit when we disagree with you.
For now, the author the original email is our mortal enemy. In six month’s time, however, we will not remember her name. We will only be able to vaguely recall the details of this dustup. And that is perhaps the biggest diss of all! Booyah! (Yeah… upon further reflection… maybe we are total prick(s).)
THIS JUST IN– The emailer’s latest Facebook status as of four minutes ago:
I’m sorry, I don’t have time to care about your negative opinion, I’m too busy being awesome at what I do.
Somebody give this chick (the Female Half’s characterization) a trophy!!