Chris

Idle Thumbs 152: Piercing the Fourth Dimension

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Come the fuck on. No real comedian feels this sorta horseshit persecution and perpetrating it is ridiculous.

Actually, I think some comedians do feel that way, as, for them, humor is sacred and open to all subjects all the time. The big movement to be more friendly, more inclusive, more etc. can definitely be detrimental to their career if they're the kind of comedian that thrives on being super rough and offensive. For them, it's a matter of "you have the right to be offended, but I also have the right to be offensive", where a lot of people fighting against that sort of thing don't believe in the second half of that statement when it comes to certain subjects. Though I guess if your definition of "real comedian" does not include that group of comedians, then fair enough.

 

Well this post got a little longer than I expected. Anyway, it's not meant to be an argument for or against anything. It's just something I know definitely does happen in some circles of comedy.

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You know what? The new intro song is still awesome!

 

Also, great cast, a bit low on subjects. I enjoyed the lengthy discussion around the South Park game nonetheless.

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Super glad to have Jr. Mintz back!!  Also happy she has a nickname so I don't have to remember where all the vowels go in her last name.  I'm a big feminist (jokingly? misandrist), so I'm incredibly happy that this stuff is finally a part of the video game conversation.

 

I had a similar reaction to Escape Goat 2's trailer as Mr. Remo.  People were buzzing about it, but when I saw the trailer there was a slight deflation of expectations.  2D Puzzle games are just a hard sell, I think.

 

They tried to make it dramatic:  "It was once a sanctuary of knowledge, beauty, and comfort...", followed by a goat jumping around puzzle boards.  "But things have changed and I'm afraid your friends are trapped here...", followed by a goat jumping around puzzle boards.  None of the aforementioned "friends" make an appearance, which subconsciously made me believe that this game is JUST a series of puzzles, with little-to-no narrative or world-establishing/quest-establishing/raison d'être.  Which then undermined the whole aesthetic and made the choice of "goat" feel rather arbitrary.

 

So the launch trailer does the game no favors! :D

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I like the launch trailer for the same reasons you apparently dislike it. U:

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Actually, I think some comedians do feel that way, as, for them, humor is sacred and open to all subjects all the time. The big movement to be more friendly, more inclusive, more etc. can definitely be detrimental to their career if they're the kind of comedian that thrives on being super rough and offensive. For them, it's a matter of "you have the right to be offended, but I also have the right to be offensive", where a lot of people fighting against that sort of thing don't believe in the second half of that statement when it comes to certain subjects. Though I guess if your definition of "real comedian" does not include that group of comedians, then fair enough.

 

Well this post got a little longer than I expected. Anyway, it's not meant to be an argument for or against anything. It's just something I know definitely does happen in some circles of comedy.

 

:tup:  Thanks for saving me all that typing.

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RIP comedy. You had a good run.

Actually, we're pretty much in a golden age of comedy right now. Podcasting and the internet in general has really changed the game a lot in terms of being able to put yourself out there. There is also SO much comedy out there that revolves around these topics that apparently should be taboo.

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They tried to make it dramatic:  "It was once a sanctuary of knowledge, beauty, and comfort...", followed by a goat jumping around puzzle boards.  "But things have changed and I'm afraid your friends are trapped here...", followed by a goat jumping around puzzle boards.  None of the aforementioned "friends" make an appearance, which subconsciously made me believe that this game is JUST a series of puzzles, with little-to-no narrative or world-establishing/quest-establishing/raison d'être.  Which then undermined the whole aesthetic and made the choice of "goat" feel rather arbitrary.

 

Huh, yeah, it made me wonder if it would be possible to sell Braid or Limbo based on their stories—or the weird book text in Braid that Chris mentions in this podcast.

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Not to belabor this point too much, but the idea that a writer/blogger/cultural critic saying, "hey, we should talk about this thing that is potentially kind of messed up" means that that piece of media should be enjoyed by anyone is a little off base. Raising concerns about a work doesn't mean that it doesn't have the right to exist or that others aren't allowed to enjoy it. It is just one of many possible responses that people can have to it. Shutting down that whole branch of critical response in the name of some ideal of journalistic objectivity seems misguided at best.

 

If Sean loves the South Park Game and Danielle plays it and has some problems with it, that sounds like the makings of a fruitful conversation, not something to be avoided at all.

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Actually, we're pretty much in a golden age of comedy right now. Podcasting and the internet in general has really changed the game a lot in terms of being able to put yourself out there. There is also SO much comedy out there that revolves around these topics that apparently should be taboo.

Yeah, to actually express an opinion, now: I really don't think comedy is in any danger. If any type of comedy has any audience, it will never die. If the audience dies, the comedy dies with it (as with any other form of entertainment). So it's not a problem.

 

(Also feelthedarkness was being sarcastic, I'm pretty sure!)

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I'm hyped up to play the southpark game now! Last time idle thumbs got me all hyped up for a game was sim city.... Oh

Also, I think Danielle has a lovely voice and would like her to read me a story. Wait, when did I turn into Doug from house of cards

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I'm hyped up to play the southpark game now! Last time idle thumbs got me all hyped up for a game was sim city.... Oh

 

Sean talked me into buying it the other night, and he's 100% correct that it's a great game. Like, super good.

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The dagger thing used in place of an asterisk is also called an obelisk, hence these two being named Asterix and Obelix.

Whaaaaaaaaaat?!

This thread is just full of fantastic, fun facts! :tup:

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Since someone brought up the whole recent Colbert thing, I thought I would just give a shout out to this New Yorker blog post that I think is a much stronger piece than the legion of articles written by people tripping over themselves to defend a comedian's right to engage in satire.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/03/twitter-campaign-to-cancel-colbert-report.html

 

This line in particular resonated with me:

 

There’s a long tradition in American comedy of dumping tasteless jokes at the feet of Asians and Asian-Americans that follows the perception that we will silently weather the ridicule.

 

I don't have any great point about any of this, but it's something that resonated with me.

 

Anyway, good discussion about media literacy. I'm a big fan of the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's work, and I sometimes have a difficult time articulating what I think is good about his films because at face value a lot of his movies are just awful people doing awful things to each other, particularly men doing awful things to women, or gay men treating each other horribly. His movies are really good at eliciting strong emotions, and then crystallizing them so that you can then view those emotions more analytically. That's a valuable thing for a director to be able to do, but it definitely requires a certain awareness of film language to really grasp so it can result in some awkward conversations with someone else that sees a movie of his and is just grossed out by it.

 

South Park never clicked with me. As feelthedarkness said they kind of have "a pox on all houses" attitude that I find really diminishes the capacity for any interesting point of view. But the question of what sort of ethical obligation do ironists have to their audience is a really interesting, thorny question. Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia was incredibly ironic, but plenty of people didn't pick up on that, and wound up in experimental societies where they died as a result of that misreading. I'm still glad he wrote it, but it's troubling.

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Great episode. I do have one request, though. A web page (or forum thread) with the current sponsors would be really handy for remembering things like whether I'm supposed to use a code when ordering savory peas from Nature Box.

 

Regarding comedians responding to changing modern attitudes: have you guys seen what Gallagher's up to lately?

 

Yikes, I had not. The last I had heard of him was the Gallagher Too dispute.

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Junior Mints are is so, so, so good. Also, the candy is great.

 

e: I'm surprised no one brought up Bill HIcks as the torch-bearer for offensive 90's stand-up comedy.

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Holy shit. Did someone ring the basic bell? They're coming out of the woodworks.

 

Happy to hear Jr. Mints again though. She's a smart lady and I've enjoyed her thoughts more each time she's been on.

 

 

Since someone brought up the whole recent Colbert thing, I thought I would just give a shout out to this New Yorker blog post that I think is a much stronger piece than the legion of articles written by people tripping over themselves to defend a comedian's right to engage in satire.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/03/twitter-campaign-to-cancel-colbert-report.html

 

I didn't particularly like the tone of that article when I first read it, and this other article kind of gets at why: http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/this-is-when-things-got-weird-and-ugly/

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That was a closer and better read than my own! I agree with the criticism. What I liked about the piece was the idea that even if a lot of the noise on twitter seems offbase, it's always worth paying attention to real grievances. Looking at it more closely though I agree that the New Yorker thing was framed poorly, and has a lot of unfortunate subtle put-downs.

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A few notes on comedy. I apologize in advance for being such a poor writer who uses too many parentheticals. I'm thinking about getting into footnotes.

 

-Sean, the Gottfried example you brought up was at the Hugh Hefner roast, but I think you possibly may be thinking about the response to his tweet about the Japanese Tsunami that brought outrage and lost him his Aflac commercials. The general way the joke about 9/11 (which was something along the lines of "I'm sorry I'm late, my plane took a detour through a building" and 

) has been contextualized is as sort of a sharp relief by the comedy community. The transgressiveness of the joke (contextualized by the Aristocrats joke that followed it) was sort of a message to the comedy community (whose industry is heavily centered on NYC) that it was ok to laugh about their grief, the same way they tend to deal with all grief. 

 

Obviously the key difference between a New Yorker making a 9/11 joke right after it happens and the joke about the Japanese tsunami right after it happens is context.

 

-Eddie Murphy Delirious is the radically homophobic one. Eddie Murphy Raw is the radically misogynist one. Murphy was never a political comedian (the way Pryor or Rock or CK are) but his contribution (much like the first couple seasons of South Park, before they truly got satirical) was to assault "the tyranny of good taste". Murphy was aiming at the moral majority mentality with vulgar glee. I think that's significantly different than, say, Chris Rock's signature bit "Black People Vs. ******", but in the same ballpark as progressive (whether politically or through attitude) cultural forces.

 

- Matt Stone is Jewish and the character of Kyle is (or at least, was, in earlier seasons) a specific depiction of what it was like to grow up Jewish in Colorado. The idea that all these kids' classes are based on personalities (fighter, wizard, whatever) but one would just be defined by religion/ethnicity feels like a pretty amazing expression of that.

 

- Dave Barry was a newspaper columnist who wrote a humor piece FIVE DAYS A WEEK FOR OVER A DECADE. I don't care if 90% were dumb or cheesy, that is IMPRESSIVE AS HELL. Most his books were just collections of the best of those pieces.

 

 

 

 

If you are interested in the combination of suburban kid boredom and RPG elements in the South Park game, I would suggest Dungeon Quest. It's from an older perspective than South Park (high school), but it basically feels like a potent mix of

, 70's underground comics and D&D.

 

Also, do you have an internal rule about not picking episode titles from the little interstitials in between main segments? Because "Piercing The Fourth Dimension" is good, but that gazoo run netted a dozen amazing potential episode titles.

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Hey so Alan Simpson, according to Wikipedia (according to a Court)

 

But no remorse shown for the extinction of the old gazoos? Wow.

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Holy cow, the cover of Alan Simpson's book.

 

9780688113582.jpg

 

Is it too late to get an Alan Simpson painting in the Campo Santo offices?

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If anyone needs me I will be at the school Patrick R just took me to.

 

Thanks, man! Great post.

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If a portrait of Alan Simpson showed up at this office I would lose it.

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