#liberal comedy

[thehalfwaypost]

[yashley]

Did she keep you trapped?

[mysharona1987]

[wazzi2ya]

Angel Dust, stealing the stage in Cannibal Town: Alright, sickos, my friend Charlie here told me you like a good show, so I'm here to deliver the most pussy-popping, toe-curling, pillow-biting routine any of youse have ever seen in your vintage postcard looking ass lives.

Cannibals: ...

Charlie: ...

Alastor: ...

Rosie: ...

Everyone: ...

Susan: ...I like this guy.

[whereserpentswalk]

It’s fascinating that you think trans people’s names come to them like wands in Harry Potter, you can’t just culturally appropriate bc you’re trans

Ok, this is about comments I made like a year ago on a comedy bit. While I stand by my feelings that the bit was bad and transphobic, my reasons why are a lot diffrent.

When I first wrote the comments my arguments were very thermian. I treated the story the comic was telling as if it was real and objective. Which feels right for most people, because stand up comedy is often presented like conversation, where we do treat stories like that as real things. But that's not how comedy works, comedians don't tell stories the way we do in conversation, they're creatives, the stories they tell are basically fictional, the art form might look like real conversations but it's not.

Comedians want to make you laugh, and sometimes want to send a message or make you think about things in a new way, but they have no reason to want to portray events accurately. They might be basing some things off of real experiences, but that's true for everyone, Tolkien might have chosen to explore his experience in world war one in lord of things, that doesn't mean we have to argue about orcs as if they're real entities when we're talking about if those books were racist.

So let's actually look at the skit, and analyze its outlook on trans people keeping in mind its a story that a cis man is telling, and not actual events: So the summery of the skit is that a white trans man comes out to his to his family, and he picked a name you'd expect a black person to have. He has older black relatives (who are implied to fully accept him, which would make him possibly the only trans person on earth with a fully accepting family) who refuse to use this name, and instead call him "the boy". The sketch ends with the comedian saying he should pick a name like Kevin, because even if he's trans he's not interesting (keep your thoughts on that last one).

Now, ignoring how this would play out in real life, what does this as a peice of fiction say about trans people:

First off: it's creating a plausible but unlikely situation where the woke thing to do is to not respect a trans person's identity. A lot of political humor exists to call ideas into question with hypotheticals, and the idea being questioned here is the idea that trans people's identities deserve respect.

Second off: it's creating a situation where a trans person is entitled and arogent for wanting his identity respected. In the fiction this trans person is that. But it's promoting the idea that they are in real life. Transphobes will show you a lot of spooky examples of trans identities that are unreasonable to respect, but that's not useally ever what it's like in real life. (An otherkin robotgirl isn't going to demand you communicate with her through beeps and boops, she probably just wants you not to laugh at her.)

Third off: it's pitting minorities agaisnt eachother. Conservatives love this, but it's super common when people try to convince progressives to a specific group from their advocacy. It shows us a world where trans rights and poc rights are at odds with eachother, in the real world they aren't, in the real world they're part of one larger struggle and diminishing one is diminishing the other. A lot of people do this with different identities, lgb types do it with gayness, terfs do it with womanhood, class reductionists do it with class, trscum do it between trans people. But it doesn't help one oppressed group when you shit on a diffrent oppressed group in their name. It's white conservatives who love it the most when trans people and poc at pit agaisnt eachother, and it's trans poc who suffer the most.

Fourth off: it's feeds into a very old myth amoung queerphobic progressives, which is the idea that queer people are privileged people looking to pose as the marginalized to get special rights. This is a myth we really have to get over, because its been internalized by a lot of people, and we get these hunts for fake minorities. This is why the "you're not interesting" line sticks out to me. Most trans people don't give themselves appropriative names, but trans people as a group constantly get accused of trying to steal other people's struggles. This is a myth that preys on the fact that white skined white colar queer people are more visible, and its one that is based on treating that disparity in visibility as a fact. We have to cut this out, nobody fakes minority status to get privileges because minorities aren't privileged. It's not true for queer people, even the queer people other queer people hate like bi people and ace people. It's not true about mentally ill and ND people, or converts to non Christian religions, or East Asian people, or anyone who gets accused of this. Stop it dearly.

Fifth off: this entire sketch is based in the idea that families can accept their trans kids, but only conditionally, only if they prove themselves to be doing it for the right reasons, and they please their family's whims. This is a transphobic idea, it's a transphobic idea most neolibs hold. Comedy bits are a lot like story books (no shade at either) where a problem is presented at the beginning, and a solution at the end, that the audience is expected to take for their own problems. And the solution here is a form of transphobia, the idea that trans people aren't owned acceptance, they need to earn it. I've seen a lot of trans people tormented by their families over that idea. And when a person of color goes and stage and wraps that idea in racial justice, it's young trans poc who get hurt by it the most.

Sixth off: not a huge point, but I feel like a cis black man, of all cis people, should be the most likely to understand that calling a trans man a boy is dehumanizing and insulting. I guess this goes to show he's not interested in thinking about how trans people's struggles are like his, he stands alongside a lot of marginalized trans people there.

Finally I kind of don't know how to end this. This is long. Really long. I don't know whose going to read this, because its a lot. Hopefully you got a bit of media literacy from reading all of this. Early on in my tumblr career, when I had just moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I had read an essay by @wifelinkmtg about a concept called the ditch. The idea was we often argue about media wrong, talking about things in hyper literal cannon obsessed terms, and that was the ditch, the ditch we dig for ourselves when we ignore things like themes and audience experiences. Hopefully this series of words dug less of a ditch than my words did a year ago. Sorry I don't have the actual sketch on hand. Mabye I'm wrong, but if someone wants to prove me wrong I'd rather they do it outside of a ditch. Mabye the ask wasn't even about that post. Mabye I'm tired. Maybe you should be tired too.

Sorry for the long post. Media literacy matters. Black trans lives matter. Goodbye, enjoy your night well.

[dudja]

When the DM brings back the NPC you looted and left for dead: #memes #npc #funny #comedy #dm #loot

[addictivecontradiction]

Edge of seventeen, 1998

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

And another thing! Literally any queer story that takes place during the colonial age would have a huge gaping hole in it if it didn't have anticolonialism as a theme. Especially one that centers indigenous people. Like the reason that every culture had their own concepts of gender until something happened and then suddenly the gender binary was ubiquitous is because western European colonial powers made their view of gender the only acceptable one as part of christianizing and colonizing the world. You're not gonna have a show set in 1717 in the Caribbean where the love interest is a gay Maori man and the main deuteragonist is a non-binary mestizo catholic and just skip over colonialism. Like these are exactly the people who western gender roles are being forced on at fucking gun point during this era. Jim and Ed are both mixed race characters who's gender and sexual identities are in active defiance of the colonial powers that be. And this is the fucking Stede Ed and Jim show.

And there's something to be said for the fact that Stede's toxic masculinity plot line is internalized and Ed's struggle with toxic masculinity is largely external in the form a white guy who rubs elbows with the British Navy when Ed doesn't behave to his standard of masculinity. That choice didn't come out of nowhere and it shows a deep understanding of where homophobia comes from. That's not to say that precolonial communities of color were paradise for people that we today would consider queer but the rich tapestry of sexual and gender expressions that existed in those communities were erased in the name of colonialism. That's going to affect literally any queer person at the time when OFMD is set. These two things are inextricably linked.

Like when David Jenkins says a lot of what we're taught about being men is wrong, motherfucker who taught us what a man was. Who taught Ed what a man was? Who taught Stede what a man was for that matter? It's the white dad with the English accent who is violent (derogatory) and overbearing.

Like you get what I'm saying right? Like it's a silly little rom com but also it must necessarily be that deep because of who these characters are and when and where they exist.

[shredsandpatches]

Read a review just now of a production of Doctor Faustus I'm seeing this weekend which described the lead actor as having "Shatnerian pomp" (complimentary) and this made me side-eye until I remembered that actually, the young Shatner, back before his self-parody days, probably would have made a pretty good Faustus.

(The reviewer does seem to think of the play as fundamentally a comedy that makes its point by sending up the genre of the morality play. I don't agree with this--I don't think it's fully supported by the text or by an actual knowledge of what morality plays are like--but that doesn't necessarily reflect on the production's take, and some of the play does have to be funny)

[thehalfwaypost]

[ms-boogie-man]

Ahem…

Go HERE for details on this British, Colbert-wannabe, racist loser attempting to bribe a United States Supreme Court Justice

… and while I am at it, since Mr </sarc> Oliver saw fit to tell Justice Thomas to get the fuck off the Supreme Court, I am going to suggest that Oliver get the fuck out our country; Oliver is not a US citizen — he is a guest in America — and has not any business telling anyone here what to do

Btw, his video was not a comedy bit… John Oliver is serious. Change my mind yo!

#liberals grrrrr

Angie/Maddie🦇❥✝︎🇺🇸

[i-like-books-and-women]

Okay so I haven't listened to the book in the past couple days but there's this line from one of Zach's chapters that I can't stop thinking about cause it's like "good God that's so fucked" he says something along the lines of "I might have to work to transition from cute to hot but Rubens already there" and potentially in the same line but also maybe not cause I don't remember he says something close to "I have to make the switch from cute to hot if I want to have a career" which is like? Like it's so gross dude. Zach and Angel are barely 18 like tf- like yeah sex sells but Jesus christ what in the fuck. And then like the internalized issues?? Like it's not quite the same vein it's similar tho. I've always been "the fat kid" since I was in elementary school and let me tell you comparing your body to your friends' is literally the quickest way to start resenting them and hating yourself. Quite literally chorus was kinda pitting them against each other and started instilling body image issues in very impressionable teenagers and then was like *surprised Pikachu face* when they were all starting to show signs of depression and anxiety and started fighting and started doing dumb shit and drugs to try and cope.

[joe-england]

Liberal Redneck - Boo, SCOTUS, Boo

[dworkinsdaughter]

Asking for myself. I got asked to do an educational video by my job for international women’s day and I’ve written a fantastic skit but our team all believe that it won’t fly for HR so I’m looking for some YouTuber to make it come alive

[tomorrowusa]

« JD's great at one thing. He's great at knowing when, where, and to what precise angle he should bend over. »

— Comedian Trae Crowder on acquaintance Sen. J.D. Vance. Via YouTube.

One more (of many) good lines...

Trump's VP pick is a Machiavellian sycophant with less integrity than a Boeing 737.

[mrmissmrsrandom]

Another thing since I’m thinking about Subaru and Kamui— if they met each other at the beginning of their respective stories (teen Subaru and just-got-back-to-Tokyo Kamui) I think Kamui would try to throw his weight around and unlike anyone else who would react to it in some way, Subaru either doesn’t notice or flat out ignores him, and that starts eating into Kamui’s “edgy boy” facade quickly.

Kamui: I don’t give a shit about anyone but Kotori and Fuuma. The world sucks.

Subaru: -One of the only days he’s on campus, they are in one lab together and Kamui tries to be edgy and then Subaru immediately just, Blocks him out and does it himself with Kamui being the one who feels iced out while everyone else fawns over Subaru.-

Kamui: -Immediately developing a complex and will crash an onmyoji job later that week.-

Seishirou: -His inward ‘wtf that’s the Kamui’ is represented by a slight raise in his eyebrows and smile.-

Hokuto: -Ready to kick Kamui’s ass.-