Saturday Night Live

https://www.vulture.com/2018/05/bill-burr-in-conversation.html

Like, it takes a great comedian to pull this off:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8b81UM74Ow

Bill Burr’s extremely high quality take on the SG stuff is that it’s a disgrace how SG is being treated, that if you go back 15 years (?!) into anyone’s past you’ll find the same shit, that nobody is actually offended, and that millennials enjoy ruining people’s lives

otm

Yeah that was the big criticism on SG. It was just two guys who seemed to have recently hatched in the world talking old bullshit. One can get away with a lot if you are actually funny (or attractive or rich etc etc).

I think Burr's been harping on this stuff for years.

Like, it takes a great comedian to pull this off:

not a huge fan of Burr but that is a masterful bit

Bill Burr’s extremely high quality take on the SG stuff is that it’s a disgrace how SG is being treated, that if you go back 15 years (?!) into anyone’s past you’ll find the same shit, that nobody is actually offended, and that millennials enjoy ruining people’s lives

yeah the characterization of this as "he made a bad joke long ago and now he's cancelled" is so stupid, because A) he has LOT of "material" like this B) it's all within the last year or two and C) the dude isn't "cancelled" he just doesn't get a coveted spot on a popular comedy show that tries to appeal to the widest possible audience. he's more famous now than he ever was and could now easily make tons of cash as a conservative martyr if he wants to

that if you go back 15 years (?!) into anyone’s past you’ll find the same shit, that nobody is actually offended, and that millennials enjoy ruining people’s lives

It seems obvious to me that people have always been offended but until recently haven't had a platform to readily register their displeasure.

i've been called chink a lot in my life, but I was honestly more offended by the puerile/ill-informed takes on chinatown

I did see Burr do a bit about how we're all supposed to call people in the military "heroes" and he was like "Really? even the guy with those flashlights who waves the plane in? He's a hero?" which I thought was kind of bold

I was thinking of watching the Bill Burr netflix but maybe he doesn't count.

Having not seen any of Burr's comedy but knowing he was well-regarded, I walked out ten minutes into his show a few years ago when he had done nothing but yell about how people who fly coach are slow at getting onto aeroplanes, and things his maid does which annoy him.

I don't have Netflix, but this review of Burr's new special makes it sound interesting.

It doesn’t look that different on the surface. Burr rags on his wife, calls sexual assault funny, and puts on a stupid voice and mocks male feminists. He makes fun of the idea that culture can be appropriated. He talks, wistfully, about a time where there will be high-quality sex robots so that women are no longer necessary. You could imagine versions of all of these jokes that are absolutely in keeping with the opening several minutes of his set, versions where they’re jokes about victimhood or oversensitivity. In every one of them, though, Burr at some point flips the switch, and unspools the initial premise of the joke.

“Sexual assault is funny,” Burr begins, before telling a story about a woman touching him inappropriately before a show. In his telling it is funny, because he’s quite capable of pointing out the absurdities of the situation. He plays up his futile inability to respond after the act, and how thoroughly he’d be mocked if he tried to explain his discomfort to other men. “Eyyyyy flick my balls!” Burr yells, in consummate character as a clueless asshole who Burr imagines laughing at this story about a man being assaulted by a woman. It becomes a joke about Burr wrestling with the intractable gender politics of vulnerability. It is a joke about how sexual assault has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power. It’s so far from his opening lines about how #MeToo has robbed men of due process that it feels like the message could’ve come straight off an anti-Trump protest poster.

Aside from the opening several minutes, Burr’s whole set is like that: thoughtful, surprising, introspective. He keeps yelling, of course, as if by bellowing his ideas while striding angrily around the stage he can distract from the fact that he’s delivering jokes so sensitive that some border on sweetness. In one of my favorite sequences of the special, Burr dramatizes the experience of watching a documentary on Elvis together with his wife. While he watches along in interest, he notices that his wife, who’s black, is making frustrated sounds at various moments of racism in the Elvis story. Burr turns his exchange with his wife into a canny stand-in for a clueless white troll arguing with a black interrogator, where Burr takes on the role of MAGA provocateur and his wife is the exasperated voice of the “liberal elite.”

Burr, telling the story of this fight with his wife, describes himself trying to defend Elvis against accusations of racist cultural appropriation. Sure, Elvis may have stolen his dance move from a black person, but where did that guy get it? Why is it “carrying on the tradition” if the move was adopted by a black person, but “stealing” if Elvis does it? A lesser joke could easily end there, passing off that anemic observation as a comedic insight. But Burr goes on, first voicing his wife’s explanation that Elvis reaped endless profit and cultural acclaim while the original innovators did nothing, and then his admission that yes, she is right. He then goes on to spin the joke again, digging deeper into his own humiliation and then landing on a punchline that, almost miraculously, reinstates his ability to control a joke while also mocking his original cluelessness.

huh I might check it out, I made a Netflix profile called Chad in case I want to check out any shit like this or Sandler etc

wow thay sounds hilarious does the audience give itself an ovation at the end

wow thay sounds hilarious does the audience give itself an ovation at the end

― provisional ilx (darraghmac), Wednesday, September 18, 2019 3:24 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

don't forget to self-post this on the excelsior thread

ill give it a day or two to give an up and comer a shot

TBF most jokes are best experienced via second-order exegesis.

Billburr's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning of The Jokes

they and back again

I did see Burr do a bit about how we're all supposed to call people in the military "heroes" and he was like "Really? even the guy with those flashlights who waves the plane in? He's a hero?" which I thought was kind of bold

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, September 18, 2019 3:16 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

SIMPSONS DID IT

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S07E09/282932.jpg?b64lines=IFdheSB0byBndWFyZCB0aGUgcGFya2luZwogbG90LCBUb3AgR3VuLiA=

https://frinkiac.com/meme/S07E09/283933.jpg?b64lines=SSBoYXZlCiB0aHJlZSBtZWRhbHMgZm9yIHRoaXMu

wow thay sounds hilarious does the audience give itself an ovation at the end

― provisional ilx (darraghmac), Wednesday, September 18, 2019 3:24 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

don't forget to self-post this on the excelsior thread

― na (NA), Wednesday, September 18, 2019 3:32 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol owned

His philosophy is that confrontation, getting out of your comfort zone, is key to good comedy, and that a good comedian should be able to pull off a successful set in front of any type of audience

As far as my own tastes in comedy go, I pretty much bolt in the opposite direction of any comedians who think like this. Its always surprising to me how often people on both sides of these arguments say things like "its a comedian's job to test boundaries" as if its a truism, and I guess tons of people agree with that and want that from their comedy, but i just do not relate to that at all and never have. There are good comedians who do that, but to me it sounds the same as saying "its a films job to reflect reality" or w/e... like yeah it can be, but there are so many other approaches available. Of the many ways comedy and its place in culture has changed over the last bunch of years, one of the weirdest to me has been the hard swing towards difficult/introspective comedy that "addresses" things being considered the highest form of the art.

you know what is good comedy? those Bob Newhart one sided phone conversations

I don't think the idea is that you must do that, I think the idea is that you should be *able* to do that.

At any rate, the SNL thread is clearly the most appropriate venue for discussing the pros and cons of confrontational, boundary-pushing comedy.

Maybe they're trying to be anti-comedy.

you know what is good comedy? those Bob Newhart one sided phone conversations

Does anybody *not* love those things? The adman explaining jokes to a dumb Abe Lincoln always slays me...

(One embarrassing corner of the internet are the comment sections under clean comedy routines on Youtube where the most likes are garnered by "And not one curse word! Not like these comics today". I'm convinced it's the same person posting this under one hundred different aliases.)

Going back to SNL, it's becoming clear that all of the late 80s/early 90s male perfomers that I always found stellar on the show -- Lovitz, Spade, Schneider, Norm, Sandler, even Carvey -- are firmly in the "you can't say anything anymore!" white bro culture camp. Burr, Seinfeld, all these people now. I find this sort of self-righteous martyrdom posturing very annoying.

I get the larger point, which is that they want to be forgiven for workshopping heinous shit while they are building their A+ material. My point is, I am still gonna dock points for heinous shit and I would have done that 20 years ago during your halcyon "you could say anything days".

Like, I still think Eddie Murphy's homophobic Honeymooner's routine is funny. The real joke in it is the repurposing of the "homina homina homina" bit but that shit makes me break every single time. It's extremely out-of-fashion humor but I still hear jokes and see where the humor is. There wasn't any humor in Gillis's podcast. "Yelling is gay" isn't a joke; "Ralph Kramden says his catchphrase when he cums" is.

I am trying to get through the Bill Burr new netflix thing. I think I hate his delivery. Too much overperformative yelling, whining about how unjust it all is.

Gillis performed in NYC this week. He really needs to tighten up his jokes.

It’s funny to hear so many people these days be like, ‘I’m not racist,’ ” he continued. “Are you sure? Being racist isn’t a yes or no thing. It’s not like you have it or you don’t have it. Being racist is like being hungry. You’re not right now but a cheeseburger could cut you off in traffic and you could get hungry real quick. You didn’t even know you were hungry for that type of cheeseburger. The cheeseburger’s not Asian in that joke.

yeah that's the problem with "racist jokes", if there aren't any jokes you're just being racist. when I listened to those clips of Gillis it reminded me so much of the town I grew up in.

^^^ this, Gillis just reminds me of the morons that will lecture you about how you "don't get humor" if you call them out for their obvious shittiness.

Bill Burr is definitely an about-to-have-a-heart-attack yeller. That's his stage presence. Aggrieved.

yeah, I was thinking that list above of the snl bro culture comics that were great on the show kind of were great because they cultivated interesting, whimsical characters and didn't resort to such knowingly mean spirited, basic shit. It's so lazy.

yeah, often sketch people seem more recognizably human than stand-up people

SNL is mostly responsible for blurring the lines between those groups

Going back to SNL, it's becoming clear that all of the late 80s/early 90s male perfomers that I always found stellar on the show -- Lovitz, Spade, Schneider, Norm, Sandler, even Carvey -- are firmly in the "you can't say anything anymore!" white bro culture camp. Burr, Seinfeld, all these people now. I find this sort of self-righteous martyrdom posturing very annoying.

amazing because all of these people have been given tons and tons of chances despite some sketchy material in the past. its almost as if the public kinda understands that not all humor lands & some of it winds up coming off cruel?

Everyone in this thread trying to pinpoint exactly what moves the needle from "funny" to "racist" is some real

everyone should have to read the lindy west column from 2012 about how daniel tosh does rape jokes the wrong way and louis ck does them the right way before making any declarative statement about comedy in public https://t.co/MjZOIFY9TA

— suspense none the richard (@Lowenaffchen) September 19, 2019

I find Shane Gillis' racist bit terrible and lame. But I find this equally(?) racist thing funny. Comedy itself is not something that can be easily boiled down to a chart/graph about punching up and intention and meaning and context. Sometimes you're just a lame!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqdxHwaxrNM

yeah that podcast bit was mostly just wack and boring. Like if you heard those guys talking at the next table you'd text someone about the annoying dipshits you're overhearing

taken on its face, that podcast interaction was so unfunny that I thought it was ironic and/or a caricature of dumb guys

self-caricature is one of the hallmarks of dumb guys, so further caricature is kind of superfluous

lol Whiney OTM

i question your love for that south park clip whiney

tbf poop jokes are funny.

I could watch Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris all day long.

I still don't get Billie Eilish.

Zoomers are so mentally exhausted from growing up on the internet that they can only recognize emotion when having a rubbery-faced man screaming at them on YouTube or a girl whispering ASMR.

I still don't get Billie Eilish.

I saw just enough SNL last night to catch Billie Eilish's first set. I had no idea she existed until last night. Nothing I saw suggested she is in creative control of her career, yet. She looked to me entirely like a packaged product, perhaps a Gaga mini-me.

maya rudolph was great

i feel like kate mckinnon only ever plays one character. is that just me?