Direct Download!

I’m becoming more of a fan of Alex’s pithy (yet sometimes syntactically challenged) episode descriptions on our Libsyn page, so I’ll just copy/paste:

“Frank Liotti in studio. We talk Yale drama school, the art of acting, and getting acting notes from a washed up rapper. Angel really wants to talk about gay stuff. And because Alex is there, theres a 10 minute chunk about death.”

Yes, I admit it, the politics of race/gender/sexuality interest me way more than most other people, but since this is a stand-up comedy podcast and not “Liberal Arts Fancy Talk with Michelle Foucault,” we managed to keep it reigned in and mainly discuss the pathos of being a professional entertainer. I’ve been waiting a LONG time to do an episode with Frank, who’s one of my favorite comedians in New York, and he did not disappoint.

Now, as when any issue around something like gender or race comes up, people on one side are characterized as hyper-sensitive whiners who want any excuse to act like a victim, and the other side are characterized as ultra-reactionary assholes who interpret any plea for consideration or sensitivity as entitlement. I’ve seen people attack Brill for the fact that not that many women comedians have appeared on The Late Show, despite the valid argument that women are still a minority in comedy, and that comedians who make it to The Late Show are THEMSELVES a minority, so Brill could just be a simple victim of statistics. Then I’ve also seen other people blast anyone who takes umbrage at Brill’s comments as people who have a “everyone gets a trophy” kind of mentality that are just bitter that THEY haven’t made it onto TV.

Frankly, I think both sides have missed the point a little. People’s knee-jerk reactions have yielded just as much noise as signal, if not more. What should be discussed, I think, has nothing to do with who gets booked on Letterman or whether or not Eddie Brill is a decent human being, but instead we should take a break from yelling “SEXIST!” or “FEMINAZI!” at each other and maybe consider there are some problematic attitudes implicit in what he said and how that can reflect on the comedy community as a whole.

I take the following quote as my case in point:

“There are a lot less female comics who are authentic,” Mr. Brill said. “I see a lot of female comics who to please an audience will act like men.”

I have a whole lot of problems with the phrase “act like men.”

See, I grew up with a mom who basically did everything physical around the house. If something needed fixing, Mom got out the tools and got it done. Something needed moving? Mom was helping you out. I can’t remember a time I ever went to Home Depot without my mom. In fact, even the last time I was in Miami, she was, despite being a sexagenarian cancer survivor, still putting in the elbow grease around the house, taking out pipes to unclog the kitchen sink.

This is why the show “Home Improvement” was a particularly confusing premise for me as a kid, because it tried to establish tools and doing anything with your hands as an exclusively male domain. So was my mom “acting like a man” when she did all those things? Was she being insincere and inauthentic when she lent me her drill set when I needed it to build robots?

In middle school, before I got into wrestling, my predominant interest was cooking and watching cooking shows on TV. My sister often asked me for advice when shopping for clothes. Most of my friends were female. Other guys didn’t call me “inauthentic,” they just called me “a faggot.”

Maybe I’m being a little extreme, but that goes to show what kind of problems there can be with saying that there’s a certain way men or women should act. What KIND of comedy behaviors is Mr. Brill assigning as being “like men?” Being dirty? Talking about sex? Being mean or insulting? What is it about a Y chromosome that makes those behaviors somehow more inborn? Any way you slice it, the very statement sets clear boundaries that there are certain behaviors that are only okay for men and others that are only okay for women, and that is the very definition of sexism. The remark wasn’t made out of malice, I’m sure, but it’s a naked admission of the fact that he doesn’t believe there is (and possibly shouldn’t be) a level playing ground.

What ensues from that is the fact that female comics are also trapped in a serious “damned if we do/damned if we don’t” scenario. If a woman tries to make an attempt to relate to male audiences, she gets called insincere; however, I’ve also heard (non-comedian) people complain that female comics do “nothing but period jokes.” Meanwhile, a friend of mine who does stand-up recently showed me his notebook, and there was one page that simply said “my penis.” Nothing else. This wasn’t even the last page he had written on and simply failed to write more notes on. There were notes on the page afterward and notes on the page before, but “my penis” stood alone on this page as, I guess, a necessarily large chunk of material, which is perfectly acceptable and natural.

Then there’s the whole question of how this mentality applies to any kind of queer comedians. Should a gay man act more like a man to compensate for his transgressive nature? Or should he actually act more feminine to fit with the already established perception of people of his sexuality? I have friends who are transsexual, meaning they already struggle with people criticizing them in their ordinary lives for being insincere or inauthentic just because they’re not acting in the way prescribed by their biological sex. I can only imagine how frustrating it would be if they were comedians and had to deal with that criticism in their professional lives as well.

(Maybe I’m full of liberal arts BS and am just white-knighting. That’s also a possibility.)

Should Brill have been fired? No. When you simply look for someone to decapitate just so you can put his bloody head on a pike and dance around it, you don’t get anything done. It’s kind of like what Louis C.K. said about the Tracy Morgan situation. A lot of anger on both sides is just anger with no productive result. There needs to be both acknowledgment of something potentially destructive AND a level-headed, reasonable approach to correcting it.

Women are still a minority in comedy, and the problem is we have not decided if we want to admit that comedy for women by women is its own unique culture that should be recognized and given its own space or if we should measure female comics and comedy that appeals to females by the EXACT same rubric as that for males, and I think Brill’s remarks show that very confusion. The truth is, comedy is subjective, and while comedy that caters to a certain audience is just as valid as any other, there still happens to be a persisting perception that the only comedy that can be a “mainstream” success is that which plays to a white male audience.

Maybe it would be easier for women comics to get ahead if they actually knew what it is people wanted from them.

Direct Download!

Sorry I’m late putting this up. We’re finally recovering from our holiday/Alex-was-sick slow season. But here’s an awesome new episode!

We finally complete the trinity that is the Strawberry Hannukah creators (Nick Naney and Brett Ossinoff being the rest) with Max Hoover stopping by. We talk growing up in Arkansas, Woody Allen, and whether or not Angel should laugh at every joke he hears (seriously that came up).

One of those happened while I was studying in Beijing my sophomore year. Dartmouth had an affiliation with Beijing Normal University (“normal” in the sense of the French “ecole normale,” a school for training people to become teachers). Students from Dartmouth stayed in a BNU dormitory and studied Chinese with BNU teachers. All of the extracurricular activities were also programmed by BNU.

When I say programmed, though, I mean OVER-programmed. Every day we were not in class, we were herded into a bus to go to this temple or that tea house or that theater to see a kung fu show (seriously, we got shown a LOT of kung fu performances). Now, I did appreciate all of these experiences, but the fact that they were mandatory devalued them and turned them into a chore. So between the studying and the scheduled cultural immersion, when my classmates and I had free time, the only thing we wanted to immerse ourselves in was cheap hot pot and even cheaper beer (which was no problem for 19-year-old me thanks to China’s lack of a drinking age).

There was one hot pot place we liked to go on Friday nights, and one week we decided to go again as usual. It was a bunch of us Dartmouth people at our own table, and next to us was a nondescript Chinese family: two parents and some children. I don’t really remember many of the details because we weren’t paying attention to them. We were more interested in the fact that we could buy bottles of Yanjing for 2 RMB each, and the exchange rate at the time was about 8 RMB to the dollar.

But they eventually forced us to pay attention to them as one of the youngest kids, a little boy, went over to his mother, who was the one sitting closest to our table, proceeded to drop his pants, squat on the floor, and take a shit.

I’d love to say this kid was a toddler, like, 3, or something, but I remember him looking at least kindergarten age, maybe a little older, at least old enough to not do this. You can imagine if something like this happened in the middle of an Applebee’s, it would cause a bit of a scene.

But what happened was everything but a scene. As the kid was squatting, the mother was patting the kid’s head. When he was done, the parents calmly informed the wait staff, who then, just as calmly got a broom and dust-pan and cleaned up what the kid left. No scolding for the kid, no apologies to the wait staff, everything happened as if this was completely normal and okay, and since it was my first time seeing it, maybe it was!

Upon seeing it, I laughed. It was part genuine laughter because poop is funny, and part laughter of confusion, like a malfunctioning android would make after you show it that “The following sentence is true. The previous sentence is false.” paradox, because I had no idea how I was supposed to feel about the situation. On the one hand, if the Chinese people didn’t think it was weird, then I shouldn’t either. When it Rome, etc. Not too long before that, I had seen a father helping his kid take a dump on a piece of newspaper in the middle of the street. However, the streets of Beijing are filthy and nobody gives a shit (well, except for the little kid). This was inside a restaurant. Where people are eating. These are the people who are going to unseat America as the world’s superpower and their kids are shitting on the floor.

There was something about this whole scenario that just seemed orchestrated to challenge my open-mindedness, like the mother said “Ooh, look, American college students, they’ll accept anything so they don’t look racist! Don’t believe me? Look, let the kid shit on the floor… Look, they’re not saying anything!”

Perhaps that experience helped me get a bit of healthy perspective, because some Westerners tend to romanticize/fetishize Asian culture as being superior to us in every way, like the soccer moms who read an article about feng shui in Reader’s Digest then all of a sudden start covering their houses in Buddhas and wall scrolls. When someone who’s never left the country starts talking to me about “the wisdom of the Orient,” I always get an image of that little kid taking a dump.

For the first posted episode of the New Year, we have our newest favorite, improvateur (a new word I made up) and my classmate Brandon Beck. We went for two hours, so here it is in two parts to take you all the way to work and back home.

Part 1 and 2 on iTunes

Part 1 Direct Download

Part 2 Direct Download