It Doesn’t Happen Often
Posted by
tgirsch
But Jimmy Kimmel actually made me laugh out loud. During the Comedy Central Roast of Flavor Flav, he noted that this was Comedy Central’s first carbon-neutral roast. He then added, and I’m paraphrasing here, “if Comedy Central is so concerned about polluting the air, they should cancel Mind of Mencia.”
Bwah!
I’m watching now. Funnier than a KTK post…
Comment 8/13/2007
I don’t even know what “. . . Mecia” is.
All I know is Jimmy Kimmel is making it with Sarah Silverman, and that’s so unfair!
Comment 8/14/2007
Greg Giraldo kills again. Everytime I watch him, I think to myself, somebody please reward this guy; he’s fucking awesome. Then I remember how Dane Cook used to be funny in the late 90’s, and it reminds me to be glad that nobody knows who the fuck Greg Giraldo is.
Here are a couple of the Giraldo highlights.
“Kat Williams, you are like Afro Shene, some white people have heard of you, but they have no idea what you do.”
“Ice T is so old that the first thing he bought with his record contract money was his freedom.”
“When Ice T dropped his first album, the n-word was Negro.”
Kimmel’s best line was also directed at the roastmaster, “Thank you tiny black man I’ve never heard of.” My other favorite Kimmel line was when the Flavor of Love girls went all ghetto on him, and he responed, “Yeah, that’ll change the perception of you…”
Carrot Top had the balls to make a Gallagher watermelon joke. I thought somebody would make a joke about Carrot Top breaking the homerun record, but it didn’t happen.
Honorable mention to Patton Oswalt for, “Ice T, Ron Jeremy, Flavor Flav are all here; who’s fucking all the skanks tonight? Bill Maher must be exhausted.”
Perhaps my favorite roast line of all time though was given by Kimmel’s better half, Silverman at the roast of Pam Anderson:
“You know a lot of people say that you wouldn’t be anything without your tits. But, that’s just not true. You’d be Paris Hilton!”
Comment 8/14/2007
KTK:
There’s a right way and a wrong way to do racial humor. The right way lampoons racism and racial stereotypes, and the wrong way reinforces and perpetuates them. Dave Chappelle did it the right way. Carlos Mencia does it the wrong way. His show, Mind of Mencia, is in its third or fourth season on Comedy Central. The first season was actually okay, but starting with season two, he just got more and more obnoxious, and for me at least, has devolved into just being a loudmouth jerk all the time.
Comment 8/14/2007
Oh, and I’ve just never understood the fascination with Sarah Silverman. I don’t really get her humor, and I don’t think she’s the least bit attractive.
Comment 8/14/2007
TG,
Did you ever see “Jesus is Magic?” When she talks about the pocketbooks made out of the dead Ethiopian babies…?
“I got raped by my doctor, but I’m Jewish - so it was kind of bittersweet…”
C’mon, dude. She’s one funny lady! A lot of the more famous commediennes don’t do it for me (I do really like Ellen). Sarah Silverman is pretty damn good though.
If you don’t like Mencia, this is a clip of Joe Rogan “outing” him for stealing jokes from other comics.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jsq1uTLBHBc
Comment 8/14/2007
I think part of the problem is that I’ve never really been a big fan of mean-spirited humor of any kind, and the overwhelming majority of her humor seems mean-spirited to me. Good-natured ribbing is one thing, and mean-spirited humor in the service of making a socially relevant point is another (and I’m not even really a big fan of that), but her humor seems to me to be mean just for the sake of being mean.
Comment 8/14/2007
Well, if you consider implying that debutante socialites who serve as walking advertisements for vasectomies would be proudly flaunt handbags made out of massacred African children if it were the style to be mean… Personally, I consider it fair social comment.
But, putting that aside for a second. Am I correct in assuming that the above paragraph can be read as a denunciation of George Carlin? I mean it sounds like a criticism that would apply to him. But that would just be sacrilege.
I’d rather not imagine an LL in which Carlin isn’t heralded as a god amongst men. Please tell me that I don’t have to…
Comment 8/14/2007
Carlin was good … in the 70’s. But if there are similarities between his humor and Silverman’s I don’t see them. There’s an important difference between angry humor and mean-spirited humor. Carlin always struck me as much more the former than the latter.
Comment 8/14/2007
Carlin’s still good.
I think Silverman has a slightly Carlinesque sensibility, but not as keen a political/social edge. That is, if you “get” them both, you walk away from Carlin with a better understanding of the way the world is; you walk away from Silverman with relief that the world’s not really like she says it is.
Worse, I think her jokes are frequently offensive - not mean, but just crude and racist. I think she thinks she can say things because everyone knows her heart’s in the right place and that makes it OK - and that when the people she’s talking about tell her it’s not OK, they’re just wrong. Plus she has some weird obsessions (notably rape) that I just find creepy. But there’s a certain fascination about her . . .
Comment 8/14/2007
I dunno, we are getting into some real semantic hair splitting right now, it seems.
Bottom line for me is, I can’t get worked up about mean jokes being directed at people for whom I have no respect, compassion, or sympathy.
I don’t really see Silverman as being particularly mean-spirited either, but I’m far from familiar with the complete library of her work.
But, whatever, since I’m always game for these discussions anyway, let me go ahead and ask why it is okay for somebody to express themselves from a perspective of anger, but it is not okay to actually express a desire for retribution for that?
Why is it okay to say that Lindsay Lohan is a worthless, spoiled, and untalented whore that represents what is wrong out society, but it is not okay to wish the she were to get run over by a bus?
[Edited by tgirsch at poster’s request.]
Comment 8/14/2007
digg:
That’s just it. Silverman’s humor is sometimes directed at those people, but most often it doesn’t seem to be. Also, I recognize that this is my issue, but I’m generally okay with humor that picks on famous people, and not so okay with humor that picks on everyday nobodies. The Daily Show’s investigative reports often irk me for this same reason.
KTK:
Worse, I think her jokes are frequently offensive - not mean, but just crude and racist.
Add mean to that, plus a healthy dose of making fun of the retarded (while claiming you’re really not), and you’ve got Mencia.
Comment 8/14/2007
I guess I didn’t address something important:
[W]hy it is okay for somebody to express themselves from a perspective of anger, but it is not okay to actually express a desire for retribution for that?
I didn’t say it wasn’t ok — I’m not saying it is, either; I simply didn’t make a statement about that — I said that it wasn’t funny, at least, not to me, not all the time. Noteworthy exception: Jon Stewart’s stated desire to have Michael Vick covered in liver and then let the dogs see if he really is as fast and as elusive as they say… But again, this is aimed at a very prominent individual, rather than at some nobody or at people in general.
It seems that you subscribe to the Mel Brooks school of comedy: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger; Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”
Getting back to my problems with Silverman, apart from the overtly offensive and often racist nature of her humor (as KTK so adeptly pointed out), she also tends to over-rely on gross-out humor, another thing that bothers me. I like a good fart joke as much as the next guy, but a little goes a long way, and it gets old very quick.
Comment 8/14/2007
The Daily Show reports actually get to me sometimes too.
What seems to get me to cringe is when average people are just completely embarrassed.
I guess we all have our own idiosyncratic sensibilities.
To be clear, Silverman isn’t one of my absolute favorites. I just think she is pretty good, and when she hits, she can really hit. That Pamela Anderson roast line is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. Everything about it was just so perfect.
Comment 8/14/2007
That roast line was very good. It’s just that for me, it was the exception, not the rule. But again, there’s no accounting for taste. One man’s crap is another man’s gold. Obviously a lot of people LIKE Mencia, or he wouldn’t still be on the air.
Comment 8/14/2007
[…] So recently, I took a little bit of grief about my lack of appreciation for Sarah Silverman in comments here. Commenter digglahhh in particular seemed to find not much wrong with her style of comedy, and compared her favorably to George Carlin. But where Carlin engages in a lot of social commentary, I don’t see that anywhere near as much in Silverman’s stuff — her comedy seems to me to be mean just for the sake of being mean, and offensive just for the sake of being offensive, rather than to make a larger point. And that’s not at all to my liking. […]
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