Just sent this to Apo. The intarwebs are cool.
The 'F' and 'U' of her signs faced towards her body instead of away, otherwise her signs were perfect.
Matt Damon: first, hot. Second, of all the big-name Hollywood types, he's got to be living one of the better lives. He's not in the TMZ so he avoids all the bs, and he married a non-celebrity, which both seem like smart moves.
A rundown of the video content for us oppressed types in open offices? Is it just an affirmation of the WWTDD post title?
I wonder if Silverman's a member of the Writer's Guild; seems like they're kind of skirting things.
Wow that's funny. I really adore him.
He's not in the TMZ
What does this mean?
"Thirty Mile Zone"-- the area around LA.
The video is a musical number in which SS and MD affirm that she is, indeed, fucking Matt Damon, in a variety of positions and contexts.
Ah. I hadn't known that the website's acronym had an actual referant. Yes, getting out of L.A. seems to be essential for actors' mental health.
12: yes! Man, who knew that GWH would have such comedic staying power?
13: I knew. No more tom foolery, no more ballyhoo.
The building he lives in (lived in?) is near my office and, when Bourne Whatevertheheck came out last year, said building amusingly was host to a 3-storey billboard of MD's face.
5: MD, as well. Can you win an Oscar for Best Screenplay and not be a member of the Writers Guild?
Do comments on blogs count as crossing the picket line?
Maybe they wrote it before "pencils down"?
13: Also, Damon is very good at playing the good boy who's said something awkward that he didn't quite mean. Ocean's 13 wasn't great but the line that's something like "She's a cougar. I didn't make up the term! I read it in Maxim!" cracks me up.
18: maybe she can still write songs?
I thought Kimmel basically crossed the picket line when he started his show back up. I'm not surprised at them. Neither are exactly left wing types.
Did I just cross a picket line by watching that?
SS is still really fucking funny.
22: Yeah, the Guild of Meistersinger isn't on strike!
You mean Maggie Gyllenhal had that lesbian orgy for nothing?
No, I think it's still on.
The 'F' and 'U' of her signs faced towards her body instead of away
See, females are concave and males are convex, so women and men symbolize differently. This goes back to the veldt, where hyenas also provide one of the rare exceptions.
24: MD is a sort of left-wing type though. Howard Zinn at the family table and all that.
They've settled with a few of the studios, like lion's gate, but they haven't settled with the big hold outs like viacom.
Also I guess Sarah Silverman is in the WG, since there's a picture of her picketing on the WGA site. Weird.
Wanted: rich older women interested in hot younger guys. Applicants must be over 35, earn at least $500,000 a year or have a minimum of $4 million in liquid assets, entrusted assets or divorce settlement.
The story in 31 was on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me either this or last weekend.
I don't get the video. Can someone explain the joke? She's f'n Matt Damon. And?
It's a song she and MD sing together. It's cute and he is adorable and game.
AWB, by "don't get", I didn't mean "can't watch"--I meant "watched and didn't laugh at". Perhaps my funnymeter is broken.
The video is funny because of Matt Damon. The only funny thing whose funniness owes to Silverman I have yet to witness is her bit in The Aristocrats.
36: You've watched every episode of her Comedy Central show, or you've deemed it non-funny, or funny for reasons other than her?
38: I haven't seen any episodes of it. I didn't say I'd done thorough research. I bet that at least 50% of its humor (if it really is funny) comes from Steve Agee, though.
Because of this link, I've looked at, for the first time, the comments section of a WWTD post. I'm now in very great pain. You should avoid those people should they arrive with knives; they won't fight fair.
40: You should avoid those people should they arrive with knives; they won't fight fair.
Au contraire, they'd be relatively easy prey. They learned all their moves from watching Beavis & Butthead cartoons.
35,36
also funny because MD and JK supposedly have a history:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PZNfOZXPJk
37 gets it right. Sarah Silverman is hilarious.
Brock, it's funny because she isn't really fucking Matt Damon, and he's a good sport for singing a song, with funny lyrics, in which she purports to be fucking Matt Damon. It's also funny because they showed this video on a show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, whom she is, in fact, fucking.
43: wouldn't it be funnier if she were in fact fucking Matt Damon?
I dunno. Just didn't do it for me. Vulgar and not clever.
I'm not certain, but I think vulgar is Sarah Silverman's thing. But I've only seen one or two partial episodes of her show.
45: Based on what I've seen of her show, "acting brain-damaged" seems to be more her thing.
Sarah Silverman is hilarious and it's not because she acts brain-damaged, you sexist. It's because she juxtaposes "sweet good girl" with "vulgar" without so much as winking at the audience. She's playing two feminine ideals--innocent, naive; hot, slutty--against each other, and showing you how ridiculous they both are.
That's not all she does--the race stuff isn't so much about "hot, slutty," obvs--but it's kind of the basic structure.
47: Huh. Maybe I'll have to watch a bit of her show.
47 gets it right, except that "hilarious" should be "significant" or "of interest". I mean, that's all she does. I found it funny for about one minute and never again.
Parsimon, "vulgar" isn't exactly her thing. "Offensive" is, vulgar being a subset of that.
48: Do. She reminds me of a girlfriend of mine who is also hilarious.
49: The fact that *you* don't find it funny might simply be a matter of taste, you know. I find her hilarious.
If you want someone whose thing is "vulgar", try Lisa Lampanelli.
Among the reasons I have for finding things unfunny are:
- dumb
- a rip-off of something else
- bad timing
- too much randomness
- mean-spirited
- predictable
The last two are the ones apply to Sarah Silverman, and they're the two that I have the hardest ability to empathize with people who disagree. But of course people do disagree.
Sarah Silverman isn't funny. All opinions to the contrary are hogwash.
I can definitely assume that she would be hilarious to hang out with. But in the realm of scripted antics, her scripted antics are intensely predictable and mean-spirited, because of the extremely one-dimensional character that she plays.
Comity with 54!
It's because she juxtaposes "sweet good girl" with "vulgar" without so much as winking at the audience. She's playing two feminine ideals--innocent, naive; hot, slutty--against each other, and showing you how ridiculous they both are.
There's "naive" and then there's "would have to have been dropped on their head as a child to not understand". The little I've seen of her show falls squarely in the latter category; it would have fit in perfectly as a bit from "Dumb and Dumber". I've never understood why people find that shit funny, but obviously they do.
Unfortunately I can't get to Comedy Central's website right now to provide examples.
I find SS's standup funny, but her TV show not so much. I've only seen an episode or two of it, though.
Again: huh. I'd have said often vulgar, often dumb, and the two in combination ... kind of annoying because of the insistence that it's funny. But I see this analysis lacks nuance.
But I've really seen only a bit of her stuff. I may watch just in order to understand the sense of "hilarious" meant here.
58: I'd recommend her movie Jesus Is Magic over the TV show.
I laugh every once and a while at the show, but at other times it seems like an experiment in just how far a joke can be run into the ground.
I think this is the only thing I've ever seen Silverman do that I thought was funny. That's partly because of Matt Damon and partly because she's not exploiting the dumb/slutty dynamic as heavily -- a schtick which I find grating and, yep, sexist.
Sarah Silverman: still not funny.
Matt Damon: funnier than Sarah Silverman, with the whole awkward explaining of an obvious joke bit.
Also, if your whole skit revolves around repeating that you're fucking Matt Damon, having it bleeped out every time you say fuck really doesn't help with the funny.
47: Now hold on right there, B--what's "ridiculous" about a woman being hot and slutty?
Admittedly, I haven't seen her show, so I'm with Apo on this one.
Magpie, it's not sexist to hold sexist archetypes up to ridicule.
Her show is based on the humor of discomfort and that is something I get without being able to enjoy it. That said, I think she's very smart and probably very funny in plenty of other circumstances. I keep getting the feeling that her show is supposed to be mocking celebrity and the way celebrities allow their own high profiles to insulate them from the real world as well as the way normal people allow celebrities that same insulation and that she does this by portraying a celebrity who is openly terrible to everyone and tolerated by everyone. I have had extremely limited exposure to her show so I may well be completely wrong.
47 is right. All opinions to the contrary are codswallop.
Thank you, Slack.
Discussion closed.
Netflix sent me Jesus Is Magic this week; I'll try and watch it this weekend and then deliver to the Unfoggedariat a definitive verdict on whether or not Sarah Silverman is funny. Right now I'm in the tentative "yes". In any case, the video is hilarious.
I agree with 47 and 66. The thing for me is how ingenuous and eager to please she seems while she's saying all that weird shit, with a pony tail and wholesome makeup and so on.
I'm at the point where "hilarious" has lost all meaning for me.
Magpie, it's not sexist to hold sexist archetypes up to ridicule.
What if a substantial proportion of your audience isn't in on that part of the joke?
Kwame traded to Memphis! Where's SCMTim?
Let me propose a more complete Theory of Sarah Silverman.
1. When she is funny, she is skull crushingly funny.
2. There are some dry spots in both her show and Jesus is Magic.
3. B is right about the source of her humor: it is in the weird contrast between her chipper delivery and the slutty and racist things she says.
4. She is not making a political point with any of this, either feminist, sexist, racist or inclusive. She has simply found a formula that makes people laugh.
5. The popular story is that she was held back as a writer at Saturday Night Live by misogynist management who thought a woman couldn't be funny, a story that was fictionalized by her recurring character on The Larry Sanders Show. This story is true.
6. But more than that, her SNL experience had an effect on her humor. The one sketch of hers from SNL that I have seen was gentle and understated. I think she only started working blue as a reaction to being kicked of SNL.
There. That is my Theory of Sarah Silverman.
I agree with 69 as it applies to her standup act, now that I think back on it. The TV show is unbearably awful in the same vein as Wonder Showzen.
71: Yeah, that question of reception is a big one. I'm pretty strongly against the idea that you can't do satire b/c some people won't get it, but I know what you mean. I think my answer is that the stereotypes she's dealing in are definitely sexist, but that I don't think her act *itself* is sexist, because of what I said upthread. A fair bit of her popularity might be because the audience is sexist and is all, "ooh, hot chick saying naughty things!" But I don't see how it's possible to avoid that kind of thing, really--*anything* an attractive woman does is gonna get interpreted by a lot of people as "ooh, hot chick doing ____." Which isn't to say, of course, that that fact isn't something that should be criticized.
Anyway. I like her, and I think she's great. I really like her act.
Further: I think Helpy Chalk's #4 may well be accurate--but I think that people laugh because the juxtapositon undercuts the stereotype. (Of course, the fact that it's able to undercut anything depends on the stereotype in the first place; I realize this.) At least, I think that's why I'm laughing.
I used to watch a lot of the standup clips they would run ad nauseum on Comedy Central before they started doing original programming. There was a woman named Rita Rudner who did a schtick that I was greatly reminded of when Sarah Silverman appeared. She would come out and be the most meek polite soft-spoken woman but always be "accidentally" insulting her husband or telling these stories in which she was revealed to be selfish or criminally negligent.
The Rita Rudner of the 21st century can only become famous to a similar extent by adding extreme vulgarity and smugness to that style.
Silverman's show is a bloodbath.
"Humor of discomfort" can be seen done right in Extras, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the superior original British version of The Office.
77: Was this the woman whose shtick was to say a sentence in a normal mild-mannered voice that trailed off into something shocking?
76: From the little I've seen it doesn't strike me as undercutting a stereotype. It's more the absurdity of the clash of the delivery with the content, and reminds me a little too much of Alyson Hannigan in American Pie.
79: No no, Rita Rudner was much funnier than that woman.
Hm, she was more famous than I thought back then. I thought she was on the same level as Laura Kightlinger and Hugh Fink.
Seriously. Youse people are making me feel very old with your "some woman named Rita Rudner" thing. Didn't any of you see Peter's Friends? She plays Kenneth Branagh's wife.
According to Wikipedia, she not only starred in Peter's Friends, but wrote it. I have never heard of this movie before, but oudemia seems to think it exists.
oudemia's Tivo is set to record anything with Hugh Laurie or Stephen Fry. Thus, it records Peter's Friends 5 or 6 times a day.
Yeah, Rita Rudner ws one of the highlights of the standup-saturated 80s which conveniently coincided with the high water mark of my TV watching.
I have seen bits of SS, and been underwhelmed. OTOH, I found this vid hilarious. That said, I find "Humor of discomfort" intolerable.
The problem with Sarah Silverman is that she comes up with no new material. She's been recyling the jokes from Jesus is Magic for years. I'm almost surprised she made that movie -- now she can't keep using them over and over and over and over without being called out for it.
It's on the Logo Channel a lot. Kind of a British AIDS era Big Chill.
87: Becks gets it right. Silverman has a fair amount of moderately funny material, a little very funny material, and a glacial delivery apparently intended to turn a ten-minute routine into a half hour or more.
oudemia's Tivo is set to record anything with Hugh Laurie
I've been getting House from Netflix. Good show.
I've been getting Jeeves and Wooster from Netflix!
And I somehow missed there was a new House episode on last week. Boo!
Okay, I finally watched the clip. Verdict: hilarious. Also, Sarah Silverman reminds me of my cousin. I'm not sure how that affects my reaction to her act.
I'm sorry, Logo Channel or Logos Channel?
Seriously, WTF is the Logo Channel? Some sort of branding slideshow?
OK, too much standup on Youtube, I'm trying too hard. Never mind.
91: Is your cousin that attractive?
I must confess to a serious weakness for the Jewish-American type. I kind of regret never having had an opportunity, except for the first girl I kissed, which was a staggeringly missed opportunity. But I was barely 16, right? Stupid.
Any minute now, my wife will call me downstairs, and I can stop embarrassing myself.
Alternately: Why don't you c'mon over here and say that, Sailor.
The Logo Channel is teh Ghey channel and my Tivo loooooves it. Beyond taping Peter's Friends every other hour, it also tapes Wilde. (I remember remarking to a professor right after having seen Wilde that Jude Law [Bosie] did gorgeous and petulant remarkably well. "What actor couldn't?" my professor replied.)
Is your cousin that attractive?
Yes.
I tried to post this comment like an hour ago but the fucking piece of shit modem that Comcast gave me, which has been frequently and unpredictably losing its connection to my computer ever since I got it, went out again just as I was posting. I finally called Comcast and explained the problem, and they're sending a new modem tomorrow. In the meantime, I decided to get some coffee.
97: God, Wilde was bad. I don't think I even finished watching it.
Super Obama Girl. Let it be noted.
I was surprised to learn recently that like Mrs. Rudy Giuliani #3 and blatantly racist anti-immigrant town statutes, Obama Girl is an export of Hazleton, PA. Which, did you know? according to data I just made up, is the largest city in Pennsylvania not on any sort of waterway?
is the largest city in Pennsylvania not named Altoona not on any sort of waterway?
Hazleton is a great example of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
Hazelton shows up as the hometown of folks on American Justice a lot. The guy who killed Dominique Dunne. The father of Lyle and Erik Menendez.
(Also, my grandparents left the mines of Wigan for the mines of Luzerne Co., before wising up and moving to White Plains.)
Another vote for video: funny; SSShow: flop. I haven't seen her standup or movie.
22: "18: maybe she can still write songs?"
Writing is writing. There's no exception in the WGA contract (so far as I know) for writing lyrics (why would there be?).
23: "I thought the strike was over?"
Absolutely not.
It's pretty simple: the ambiguity is whether someone who is both a writer, and a performer, when performing, is "writing" for themself, or simply spontaneously performing. Thus Jay Leno is arguably borderline.
Writing a video, with lines for two people, rather than engaging in a live monologue, would seem to me to be over the line, but I'm not a WGA member, let alone on the relevant committee, and as suggested, there may be factors of which we're unaware. Maybe they can claim the words were all improvised on the spot (seems unlikely to me, but I couldn't say for sure it wouldn't fly). But I'd consider it an open question as to whether it was a violation of WGA rules, until I heard otherwise, yeah.
I thought it was funny, myself.
@47,53:
Sarah Silverman is hilarious and it's not because she acts brain-damaged, you sexist. It's because she juxtaposes "predictable" with "too much randomness" without so much as winking at the audience.