When, oh when will people get over OJ Simpson. I don’t think it’s a commonly held belief that OJ was completely innocent, but rather that he should have been found not guilty (innocent). A very different matter. Either way, grouping that with a 9-11 conspiracy is a little tactless.
First, this:
If you haven’t seen her routine, then how in the world are you defending her stylistically? And I have no desire to feel like a victim. I’m just saying that she isn’t funny. I had a bad time at her show, because, the things that comedians do well, she did poorly. Like I said in my OP, even if I’m not in the “us” group of “us and them” comedy, it’s still pretty funny, because, when done well, “us and them” is funny. Margaret Cho’s “us and them” is not.
No, you have not. I didn’t mean to give the impression that you were, although, looking at my response to you, it certainly does seem like I am responding specifically to you. I don’t think you’re calling me bigoted, and I apologize if I gave you that impression.
What I am trying to say is that there is a circled-wagons mentality around certain groups and their representatives that trades defense on the merits for accusations of bigotry. Remember when there were Italian-American Leagues protesting the unfair and bigoted prosecution of Al Capone by the cruel anti-Italian government? Same deal. I did not mean to single you out.
And no, I’m not simple enough to believe that Martha Stewart’s case was cut-and dried- I’m sure she was the victim of an agenda, and she was made an example of, but it had much more to do with fame than with gender, and the McGreevey thing was just plain ol’ fabrication, yet there they are, used as ammuniton for Cho’s little crusade.
You have to see her show to understand what I’m saying here, Excalibre. Jon Stewart is in a different realm because he’s playing at being a commentator. He’s got it for both sides of the coin, and his main beef is with the fact that both parties do exactly what Margaret is doing.
Margaret is on stage, not so much doing comedy as rallying followers to a cause. I don’t have a problem with rallying people to a cause, but give a real reason. And I was sold tickets to a comedy show (which I knew would have rally-elements as a major portion thereof). And again, I have no problem with using comedy to do this, but it just goes back to “she wasn’t funny.”
My problem is that Margaret Cho is not funny. The only thing of which I have been made a victim in this case is bad attempts at humor. I knew what I was going to get on the way into the show- queer-centric humor poking fun at straight people, Catholics, conservatives, Bush, red-states, etc. And I have no problem with any of this. I do most of it myself.
But she wasn’t funny.
No, there isn’t. But if you’re a comedienne, you ought at least to be funny.
I mean, she’s at Andrew Dice Clay levels now. So securely entrenched in her niche that she can yell something slightly homocentric and get a standing ovation. She’s popular. That doesn’t make her funny; in fact, it’s removed all incentive for her to even try.
I don’t ahve any issue with Margaret Cho other than these:
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If she’s trying to be a comedienne, her jokes aren’t funny.
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If she’s trying to be a civil-rights activist, she should pick better examples.
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I don’t know whether or not Opal likes her.
(see? that’s bad comedy. you saw what i was trying to do and it didn’t work. just like cho.)
Happy Scrappy Hero Pup, you keep saying “Margaret Cho isn’t funny,” but in your first post you said this:
If you don’t find her funny, that’s one thing. But obviously your opinion wasn’t shared by a lot of people who went to the show. Would it not be better to just say you didn’t get/like/appreciate her humor and leave it at that? You’re attempting to argue a matter of taste, which is never a fun thing to do.
You seem to be of the opinion that there is a single, objective arbiter of humor, and that it is you. OK, so you don’t find her funny. Fair enough. But the fact that you don’t find her funny does not necessarily make her “not funny” in any universal or objective sense. It just means that you don’t like her humor.
On preview, what Sauron said.
Well, sure, Sauron, at the end of the day, I didn’t find her funny.
But I also thought her humor was weak.
As you can see, I attribute this more to partisanship than taste.
I got it. I got the jokes. They weren’t funny to me.
I like “us/them” humor. I knew I was (by proxy/association) gonna get roasted when I walked in. And I don’t mind getting made fun of. I’ve been stood up and insulted in comedy clubs, and sometimes, getting made fun of is funny. Not here.
Appreciate it? I appreciate it when it’s done well. But damn, it was done poorly here.
Nah, I disagree. I’m not going to insult anyone (or try not to, anyway) for no good reason, but arguing matters of taste is one of the few things that* is* fun these days.
Fill in the Blank: It’s a ______________ thing, you wouldn’t understand.[list=A][]Jeep[]Female[]Male[]Black[]White[]Jewish[]Christian[]Muslim[]Buddhist[]Latin[]Asian[]European[]Australian[]African[]Straight[]Gay[]Young[]OldNone of the Above - Keep your labels[/list]
And that’s the point. A lot of people find her funny, whether it’s because she’s got a sharp wit and razor comedic timing, or because she’s pandering to their prejudices (certainly not a first in the comedy world.) So it’s a matter of “I saw Margaret Cho and I didn’t like her.” A weak concept for a pit thread, I must say, but there have been weaker. I could pit my share of things that I don’t find funny that some brain-damaged souls apparently do: Jim Carrey movies would be first on the list. They’d be relatively lame pittings, though.
It’s the way he spiced it up with social commentary that makes it look like he’s arguing with her on bigger issues. Either the OP has some political problem with her, which as we’ve all tried to point out is a difficult position to defend, or he could have skipped it entirely and just said that she’s not funny. Did you add the extra stuff to spice up a lame pitting? And the preemptive whinings about people thinking you’re a bigot?
Dude, you like COLIN QUINN and you complain about Margaret Cho? Colin Quinn is one of the unfunniest, lamest comedians out there. (Although you do like Denis Leary, so I’ll give you points there).
Debatable. Notice that, in his description, there’s shouting, cheering, and hollering… but no laughing. Which, I think, is significant. Cho, much like Jeneanne Garofalo (I’m pretty sure I just butchered that name) has ceased to function as a comedian and is now simply a demagogue. Which is a pity, as she used to be pretty funny, but now her routing seems to be “Bush sucks! I like gays! Funny Korean accent!” Meh. I don’t need to pay money to hear people agree with me. If you enjoy that, more power to you, but I’d be a little disappointed if I bought a ticket to a comedy show and ended up at a political rally instead.
First, I don’t think he’s arguing anything. He’s ranting. And second, if arguing matters of taste is never fun, why do so many people hang out in Cafe Society?
As a bisexual Zoroastrian from Madagascar, I’m angry in the extreme that you excluded my group. We’re sick of being ignored by the majority.
Well, she’s making social commentary the basis of her humor, but she’s commenting on things she MADE UP. That’s the heart of her unfunniness. I’m not arguing with her on “bigger issues.” I’m saying that her pretensions at relevance are based on pure fabrication, and that’s not funny. Do I need to deconstruc that any more for you?
And I did no whining whatsoever, pal. If you want to pretend that shrill protectionism doesn’t exist, then you go right ahead, but it will be just as unfunny as Margaret Cho’s insistence on things that aren’t true.
[QUOTEGuinastasia]
Dude, you like COLIN QUINN and you complain about Margaret Cho? Colin Quinn is one of the unfunniest, lamest comedians out there.
[/QUOTE]
I wholeheartedly disagree (but then, you knew I would). *Back to Brooklyn * is hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. *Tough Crowd * was not funny at all, because nobody buys Colin Quinn as a head of any kind of roundtable anything. I don’t laugh at his “drunken ignorant blue-collar Irishman tackles the issues” schtick any more than I laugh at Margaret Cho’s “aggressively queer-identifying ignorant Korean tackles the issues” schtick.
But Guin, if you tell me you can sit through two episodes of “Remote Control,” and not laugh your ass off at “Sing Along With Colin,” then you’re crazy.
What is “shrill protectionism”? It sounds like some sort of high-pitched tariff.
If you parse my post a little more carefully, you will see that I was responding not to Margaret Cho at all, but to the idea that just because a belief is commonly held does not mean that it should be respected or given any credence.
I was not trying to comment one the relative merits of either position, just noting that they are both examples of commonly held beliefs that are wrong.
The last part of your first post, specifically:
doesn’t quite jibe with your latest post, and that’s the part to which I was responding.
It appears to be eleanorigby’s assertion that there is truth in jest, esp. with regards to Cho’s quip about Stewart. Because you quoted eleanorigby’s sentence about Stewart and eleanorigby’s use of the pronoun she referred to Cho, a reasonable person could conclude you are either replying to eleanorigby or her sentence is the basis for your post. Your first post to this thread says not a word about respect or credence, but rather pandering. The only person doing the pandering in this thread was Cho. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer you were indicating it was Cho’s pandering with which you had a problem.
There’s quite a bit of difference between asserting commonly held beliefs don’t necessarily warrant respect or credence–an assertion with which I agree–and asserting “pandering” to “minorities” to feed their “persecution complex” is wrong. I parsed your post just fine and replied to it as it was posted. If you meant to say something other than what you posted, it is not possible for me to have replied to what you meant, rather than what you posted.
I read **Weirddave’**s post to mean that Cho’s assertion that Martha Stewart was jailed for being a strong woman was just like “the Jews caused 9/11” and “OJ is innocent” in that they are widely held beliefs that are almost exclusive to a certain demographic, but that the popularity of these beliefs is not indicative of their truthfulness, and they should not be parroted in order to gain popularity or applause.
Which is my beef with Cho, and one of the things that I think makes her unfunny.
Gee, there sure was laughing when I went to see her in March. Maybe I imagined the deafening roar each time she told a joke, or the sharp cramp in my own stomach when I left, but people certainly did seem to find her amusing, in addition to inspiring and rally-the-troops-ish.
Of course, we do have a demographic there, which is “people who bought tickets to go see Margaret Cho.” Happy, life is far too short, and tickets too expensive, to see comics you don’t find funny. Feel free to avoid Ms. Cho in the future if you dislike her so much. It’ll make the line-ups easier to deal with, and maybe I’ll be able to get her damn CDs before they sell out next time.
That’s a fine way to read it. It seems to ignore his usage of the word wrong, but fine just the same. If you read his reply to me, however, he says he’s not “responding to Margaret Cho at all” which doesn’t seem right to me.
You said: ‘However, when I say “Margaret Cho is spectacularly unfunny,” I get a lot of “Why do you hate gay people, bigot?”’ Well, my tolerance for people claiming victim status because they imagine that someone, somewhere is calling them “bigot” has disappeared. The fact is that no one at all had suggested that you hated gay people, but you brought it up anyway - because you wanted to play the victim, and the fact that your audience wasn’t cooperating wasn’t going to stop you.
Maybe that’s not really what was going on in your mind. I can’t speak to the contents of your head. But I’ve sure seen a lot of that these last few years. A lot of this preemptive outrage - sometimes from people who truly are bigoted and simply wish to draw some nonexistent moral parallel between their own bigotry and others’ dislike of it. Most of the time, though, it’s just from people who seem to want to be outraged. As much as people joke about the “liberal offenderati”, we got nothing on the braying multitudes who wish to claim that some nonexistent PC bogeyman is oppressing them.
You saw that some people didn’t agree with you, and you immediately trotted out the “You guys are calling me a bigot!” line, when no one had done any such thing. “Whining” is a pretty innocuous word to describe that kind of behavior. Someone less charitable than me would have said much worse.
You raised three points. One of which (Martha Stewart) was perhaps a half-truth; your statement that she was simply prosecuted for criminal financial dealings was factually false - she was not even indicted on charges relating to the actual financial dealings. It also suggested a belief - that it was a simple, apolitical prosecution of a criminal - that is at best naïve, especially once one considers that she wasn’t a criminal at all until the investigation turned her into one.
The wedding planner joke you plainly did not get: she was simply presenting two contradictory viewpoints for the effect of the absurdity they created. It’s nonsensical to call that hypocritical (or at least imply it, since you don’t appear to have used the word itself) because that contradiction was entirely deliberate and it was the point of the joke. You might as well say that the person in Rilchiam’s example of a very old joke was a hypocrite - imagine demanding larger portions of food they claimed was disgusting! Except that it is not a serious statement but rather a joke based upon the conflation of absurdities.
You are free to think it’s not all that funny, but your protestations of it were based upon just plain not getting it - that much is plain from your OP. And your anger that she can get away with stereotyping gay people while most folks can’t smacks of the sort of kneejerkism displayed by the folks who are incensed that Chris Rock can use the n-word in his comedy routines when they don’t have the same privilege. If this offends you, then you’re a member of the aforementioned White Male Offenderati. It’s your right, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid.
The bottom line? She committed one straight-up untruth (the Jim McGreevy matter), one half-truth (the Martha Stewart matter), and told one rather old, but morally unimpeachable, joke. All I’m saying is that your case that she based her routine on lies is rather weak at this point, given that your own OP described the Martha Stewart matter a good deal less accurately than Ms. Cho did.
I don’t even know what this is supposed to mean - this is not the use of the word “protectionism” that I am familiar with.
I don’t tend to like any comedian much who decides they have a relevant stance on political issues. It’s why I’ve stopped watching South Park - funny as they can be at some points, the sheer juvenile idiocy of their political arguments and social commentary is just embarrassingly unfunny. His stint reading Weekend Update on SNL and a couple times wandering onto Tough Crowd are the extent of my familiarity with Colin Quinn. I’ll trust you that he’s funnier elsewhere.
See, I agree that comedy that is based upon an incorrect or (in the case of South Park or Tough Crowd) just plain stupid ideas is not funny. I just don’t think you’ve made a strong case that Margaret Cho’s humor was like that. I’ve also never heard anything about her routine that made me want to watch it, either - I suspect I wouldn’t be all that amused. But you argued this based upon some social conflict between queers and heteros - and you weren’t convincing. You prefaced your OP with defensive statements trying to establish how “down” you are with the homos, and then later whined that people were calling you a bigot when they weren’t.
I think a lot of gay issues can be elucidated somewhat by comparing them with hypothetical situations in which race is the issue. If you decided to proclaim how much you didn’t like Chris Rock or Wanda Sykes, well, I’d think you were crazy but I wouldn’t argue. But if you decided to present it as some huge racial issue and get defensive about how you weren’t racist, and pull out the “Stop calling me a racist”-card because people disagreed with you, you’d look like a fool. If you decided to imply that Chris Rock was a hypocrite for making broad generalizations about black people, again, you’d look like a fool. Well, you did both of those things here. And thus, you look like a fool. Not a bigot, just a guy puffed up with anti-PC self-righteousness whining because he can’t get the joke.
Giving people self-affirmation is the easiest way in the world to get them to cheer and spend money. Telling people “your own prejudices, beliefs, stereotypes and self-images are all one hundred percent correct” is a guaranteed hit. Thats why they sell so many management books; businessmen read the various management guru books because they’re convincing themselves they they ALREADY live up to the ideals in the books. Makes them feel better about themselves. Affirmation is money in your pocket if you do it right.
Doesn’t make it good comedy, though.
The usual Cho fans have shown up to defend her, so this train’s headed for a fiery end, but I will add a second point: once people become dedicated fans of a comedian, they’re pretty much immune to the comedian’s inevitable lack of funny later in their careers.
Robin Williams’s manic act stopped being funny about twelve years ago; he’s recycling the same tired jokes and the same tired shtick, but people laugh almost reflexively at him because it’s a cultural meme that Robin Williams Is Funny. Eddie Murphy still got big laffs after he had long stopped being funny, because it’s Eddie Murphy, you’re supposed to laugh, right? People still said Dave Barry’s columns were funny long after they’d passed the point of self-parody where you couldn’t tell if it was Barry writing, or The Onion doing their version of a Barry column. Successful comedians always get laughs at least five years longer than they deserve them.
Is this the use of “wrong” in question, UrbanChic? Because I’m reading that to say that Margaret Cho is wrong to pander to her audience by repeating the Stewart fallacy the same way other “demagogues” or what have you would be “wrong” to pander to theirs by repeating the Jew or OJ fallacies.
As far as **matt_mcl ** goes, you’re right on target.
From what I know of you, you’re certainly closer to her target demographic than I am, and it is likely that, where I get hung up on certain elements, you may not.
In any case, I’m not crying for my money back. The Miss and I made an entertainment decision for our Saturday night and I ended up not being entertained. I won’t be back, while the vast majority of the audience will be. Enough people were entertained by her that she’ll book the place again, I’m sure.
You can say this based on the assumption that the only place I express my opinion that Miss Cho is unfunny is here on the SDMB. And besides, you’ll forgive me if I’m a little punchy because, while preemptive outrage certainly exists, it is a natural reaction to the same “shrill protectionism” I decried earlier. I admit my bugaboo exists. You should do the same for yours.
to which I reply:
Chris Rock can do what he likes. I find him funny, mainly because he takes broad social stances and has a message that he doesn’t feel the need to back up with regurgitated and misunderstood headlines.
to which I reply with a quote from an earlier post:
Excalibre, I never said/implied I was “down with the homos.” I did say that I was prepared for a serious skewering of my own demographic. And I did get one. I’ve just heard it done a whole lot better, that’s all.
And I’ve seen Margaret Cho do standup before. Twice before, as a matter of fact. Both other times, she was hilarious, which is why, when the Miss suggested we go on Saturday, I was all about it. Her impressions of her mother forbidding her to go to clubs because of drug use- hilarious, as was her description of the gay book section in her parents’ store. She was damn funny with her Pope material on Saturday (and I think we all know that there are few bigger fans of the Papacy than me), and when she tore into Jiltin’ Jenny for a good five minutes, finishing off with “They’ve got it all backwards- STRAIGHT people should be banned from getting married,” I laughed out loud.
But the long and the short of it is that the fifteen to twenty minutes of funny didn’t save the rest of the show from being stereotypical AND stereotyping and just plain lame.