Then you have Bill Burr who walls up on stage to thundering applause and opens with “Settle down people! Let’s See if Im good first.”
Not to defend all the idiots we see, but I have to say; the people who do any sort of creative work tend to want to explore a deeper meaning. Not that the aesthetic or technical skill isn’t valuable, its probably harder to have great technical skill.
I write, both poetry and short stories (just for myself not as a career or anything) and I don’t want to do the shallow stuff either. But that doesn’t mean your rupi kaur like ‘poets’ are ‘bad’. Clearly strike some form of emotion for the readers.
A lot of comedians do have some deep material, both philosophical and emotional. Not talking about your clap comedians, Trevor Noah etc whose ‘jokes’ are meant to make them seem righteous and nget claps and cheers instead of laughs. (Not saying Trevor Noah doesn’t have the capacity to pull laughs, he can be funny too).
But look at someone like Steven Wright, a postmodernist sense of humour that builds upon that kind of art.
“I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, ‘Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.’ I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”
Here’s an example, I love this joke, it builds upon the Borges story On Exactitude in Science and elaborates on a concept in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: a fictional map that had “the scale of a mile to the mile.” One of Carroll’s characters notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
Italian writer Umberto Eco expanded upon the theme, quoting the story as the epigraph for his short story “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1”, collected in his How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard cited “On Exactitude in Science” as a predecessor to his concept of hyperreality in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation.
(I copied the last bit from Wikipedia)
So we can explore massive themes and ideas as comedians. And quite a few do.
PS. You can read both SUPER short stories on !shortstories@literature.cafe and I post my poetry on !originalpoetry@literature.cafe
I miss George Carlin
Only thing I don’t like about him is that he didn’t vote and encouraged people not to vote.
George Carlin probably would have had similiar contrasts if he had podcasts as well
Carlin went full social commentary on stage, he didn’t need a podcast setting.
He went full social commentary less than halfway through his career…
Carlin’s podcast wouldn’t have ads. It would have breaks where he tells a specific corporation to go fuck itself.
For Carlin, I’d pay for Carlin+
It’s entirely possible.
The shitty ones like Joe Rogan say their philosophers. The good ones that should get that credit. Will be the first ones to tell you they are not. It’s always the rule if you have to tell someone you’re deep you are probably not.
It really hurt to read your comment, how did you write that and fail to see how much you fucked it up?
Mainly when I read, stuff moves around and I can’t read phonetically i learned to read by memorizing how words look as a whole. so I sometimes get words that sounds the same mixed up and my spelling is garbage. So whatever my keyboard gives me is what I go with. Thanks for the empathy and compassion.
Are you in a position to get some help with dyslexia/VPD? I have a friend in his 40s that is just getting his dyslexia/calculia addressed, and it is helping quite a bit.
Yeah I was taught coping skills back in the 90s. It hasn’t affected me that much. I hold down a good job and communicate just fine with everyone I need to. Only issue I have ever had is smug jerks on the internet lacking empathy. Saying like the stuff above instead hey I think you ment their vs they are and moving on with the conversation. Instead of the sad need to look superior like they are the god keepers of the language.
gotcha. I used to do very well with this stuff. However, as I get older, and my numerous neurological problems get worse, I find my typing, use of homonyms, etc. is in decay.
Yeah long covid doesn’t help ether
FriendlyJorides is both an absolute wordsmith and a middle aged man who watches too much Simpsons at the same time
“They are”
I always watch this video when I think of that
This was my issue with comedians in cars getting coffee. Felt like being talked down to by rich spoiled celebrities.
I did like that show for background noise tho.
Really? I felt like a fly on the wall listening to pros talk shop. The things they had in common were fascinating - like being on the road in hotels and sneaking leftover food off room service carts in the hallway. Seinfeld said that was how he first got to try key lime pie.
Maybe they changed things up in later seasons? I don’t recall the first season really getting into anything like that (and I think I only made it 1-2 seasons in).
I don’t have a sense of when I noticed this about the show, probably right away. I’m always alert to that sort of thing, having done some performing myself (at a much lower level) and I relate to some of the experiences. Things they say hit home because they’re so basic. Can’t think of anything specific right now besides the key lime pie, but I haven’t watched the show in probably a year. I got the same feeling once hearing Jimmy Stewart talk about his thought process while preparing for a role - it was stuff I had thought about myself as a beginner, and that felt really cool.
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And then there’s Conan O’Brien, who’s just generally hilarious.
One of the greatest…
His appearance on hot ones is one of the greats episodes they’ve had.
Every dumb hack comedian has mixed themselves up with Lenny Bruce.
Who…?
I only know Lenny Bruce from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Was he a real figure?
All of these comedians who whine about not being able to say things, and being so brave to go ahead with their bigoted material, all just wish they were Lenny Bruce. Lenny was funny, said the truth, and while some stuff wouldn’t fly today, he was very progressive for the 50’s, and early 60s. He literally had police camp out his shows to arrest him as soon as he started saying something they didn’t like. He was actually getting beat-up by police, expelled from countries, and making land mark civil rights law, because of his routines.
The show actually captured a fair amount of that. Interesting. Thanks!
Nice, haven’t seen it myself, glad that came through.
He was not afraid.
Fuck comedians like that. I did standup comedy for years. I wasn’t a modern day philosopher, I was a guy that (hopefully) made you forget about the shitty week you were having for 5-15 minutes depending on the set (I was never a headliner).
I spent a lot of time crafting my jokes, I did a lot of rewriting and honing and testing of material. I wasn’t a philosopher, I was a joke engineer. That’s really the best way to look at most standup. It’s joke engineering.
Got any good one liners from your old sets?
Sorry, not that I would want to write in text form. Part of the engineering process for me involves things like getting the inflection just right when I tell it. Also, I’ve forgotten 99% of it and I’d have to go dig up old notebooks in storage. I haven’t been on stage and behind a mic in at least 15 years. Also, I did somewhat longer-form stuff than one-liners in general.
I had a good long bit about how dogs are better than kids because they’re stupid so you can trick them more easily into doing things to amuse you, but it really is in the way you tell them.
That said, as someone who now has a kid and dogs, I stand by that statement. Fake throwing a ball and having the dog try to find it is one of the funniest things in the world to me.
Well, you could try it with your kids and see how it goes 😁
I already know what would happen. My daughter would ignore me and continue talking about obscure anime most Americans have never heard of or whatever. Teenagers could not give less of a fuck. I forgot about how that was.
Get her to help you make meme templates from that obscure anime, as a bonding exercise. ;)
And what’s the deal with cab drivers? I’m thinkin’ hey!
Airline food, don’t get me started…
Jokes about airline food are so plane.
However, cab drivers always go an extra mile.
At first I thought this was unrealistic because the comedy portion was so bad. Then I realized it is probably about Joe Rogan, in which case this checks out.
Rogan thinks he’s a philosophy major cause he has friends like duncan trussel. While duncan is rather intelligent let’s not act like he’s Socrates
I’m surprised Duncan still hangs with Joe after Joe’s shift to being an absolute right-wing cunt. I guess it’s hard to bail on old friendships, especially when getting on the wrong side of Joe can fuck your comedy career.
I feel like Duncan whole schtick is live and let live.
On the other hand we have had some that we called comedians who spoke about the ridiculousness of people and society they observed, and we found that funny. Then we saw those comedians got bitter over their lifetime.
Good comedians actually are like modern day philosophers for the most part. This strip is smugly trying to claim to be above that 👎
The comic strip is about the shitty comics who think they are modern day philosophers. The bald guy is most likely Joe Rogan, and they both there to smell their own farts.
I feel like that’s seeing even more meaning in this than I saw.
