My favorite character so far has been the demented ventriloquist who’s dummy committed suicide. As a recovering ventriloquist myself, his act just slayed me. And then to see him entertaining a children’s party…
My wife and I have an arrangement: she explains the Jewish jokes in Mrs Maisel to me, and I explain the Catholic jokes in The Kids Are All Right.
It was interesting to me that when she needed a badass he-man to face down the club owner who locked Susie in the closet, she called Joel. Benjamin is bigger and more imposing, but a surgeon does not have the option of getting into a fistfight. Hell, his delicate hands may be the reason he didn’t want to row that rowboat in the Catskills!
I find this thread interesting but had to stop reading it halfway thorugh because we only just now finished Season 1.
I’m very torn about the show. It’s a great premise and the setting and Jewishness of it delights us, but what keeps jerking me out of it is… Mrs. Maisel.
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She is the biggest Mary Sue ever. No one goes on stage and just blows the audience away, effortlessly, without having done it before or preparing.
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She is a mother of two children who, so far, appears to barely ever even know where her children are. One of them is a BABY.
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As has been pointed out, she is not actually very funny. That said, the quality of standup comedy in 1958 was a tenth what we’re used to today so I’ll give them a slight pass on that.
My other issue with Season 1 so far as been Joel. It is just completely impossible to sympathize with him in any way, which is fine if he’s a throwaway schlub, but unfortunately he remains a major character. He’s selfish, shortsighted, dumb, drunk, immature, and irresponsible; he has no redeeming qualities. Everyone else has pros and cons. He doesn’t.
I do notice verbal anachronisms, but there’s nothing outrageous.
This is what always bothers me when watching.
Me too. But I find myself questioning: If this were about a male comic would it bother me? Would I even notice?!?
If he were a single dad? It might/you might.
See, for me, point 2 contradicts point 1. Her totally shittiness at parenthood is a major part of her character. It’s played for laughs, but she’s an AWFUL mom. Mary Sues are great at everything. She’s only really great at one thing: making people laugh.
It’s possible, but Google Ngram suggests that the use of the term went way, way up in the '90s.
I am going to respectfully disagree about Joel. I couldn’t stand the character in the beginning of the show, and I think that was by design. It made Midge’s situation more believable. But I think the writers made Joel show some growth and change and while I didn’t want them to get back together, I found myself liking him more by the end of the second season.
Ehh, I don’t see all that - I’d say she’s pretty much doing what her own parents did, and it’s nothing to call DCFS about. Micro-parenting wasn’t a thing then.
There’s a long tradition of TV children only being around when they’re plot-convenient. I don’t think we can read anything into Midge’s parenting skills; just the interests of the show’s writers.
Huh. I thought it was a running gag, how little she cared about her children. When they go to grownup summer camp, they leave the baby in the car so long that I thought the show-writers had forgotten–but then they finally remember, and don’t they like get a servant to go fetch the baby or something?
I sure would, especially if the guy’s wife left him with the kids. If a major plot point is that the guy is now the primary caregiver, that’s a Chekhov’s gun. Actually, Chekhov’s two guns. You either have to address it or, by not addressing it, it’s just hanging there.
But it’s not played for laughs at all. We’re through episodes 1 and 2 of Season 2 and so far there has been not one attempt at a joke, in the entire series, about her being a bad parent. It’s not being played for laughs if there are no jokes.
The show is beginning to grate on us; episode 2-1 was just atrocious, and 2-2 was a little better but, again, Midge steps onto stage and just blows everyone away with impromptu jokes that kill despite not being very funny. Joe started to show some growth as a character, but Midge herself just isn’t really a person.
In a very meta way, perhaps that’s the whole point.
Funny people are a mess.
Just like you or me.
That’s what I tend to assume, that her indifference (by modern upper middle class US standards) to her kids is supposed to mainly be ‘the way it as then, which is kind of funny’. Not that it’s a gag that she in particular is that way. Though this show is a mish mash in where it attempts to be true to period and where it doesn’t. The use of modern figures of speech is almost a kind of trademark of this show. But also in common with most period shows the characters they want you to like often tend to share modern social views with the audience that actual people in their positions would be less likely to. Mrs Maisel’s parenting though does not fit that mold.
I really like this show, second season about as much as first. Her jokes on stage that kill the audience are not that funny? I guess that’s true sometimes. But it’s ironic to launch that criticism from 2019 when a lot of ‘comedy’ is people applauding the ‘comedian’ for making a political statement the audience agrees with. Maybe stand up wasn’t very funny in the late 50’s, but much of it isn’t now either. Maybe somewhere in between it was. This show as a whole is funny though, IMO, some particular scenes are really classic, but there’s no arguing taste.
Personally, I find her comedy very funny, but it’s also the kind of comedy I grew up on. I listened to as much of Lenny Bruce as I could lay my hands on. Sofie Tucker, Phillis Diller, Joan Rivers, Totie Fields, were there too. I listened to all my parent’s music as well. I know a lot of her stuff isn’t funny to younger generations, but it makes me laugh out loud.
Tony Shalhoub stole the entire second season of the series.
The mother not being around the kids is one of the gags running through the series, it’s part of the joke.
Michael Zegen (as Joel, the husband) is the weakest part of the show.
Well, gosh, most of that isn’t very funny, either.
In clubs, most standup is NOT political. Maybe it is on TV, but frankly, if you have to write new material for Stephen Colbert or Seth Meyers four or five nights a week, you have little choice but to lean on current events. It is simply not possible to write true standup-quality material five nights a week. No standup comedian who ever lived was that prolific.
Of course most standup comedy is not especially good, but the conceit of the show is that she IS especially good.
The format of the show, and her act, is that she gets on stage and rants about the events in her life - and the audience laughs. It’s supposed to be funny, so we should go along with the convention and pretend it is. 