Unsolicited Advice

I am stuck on a thing. Not because I don't know what to write, but because I have no idea why I'm writing it. I used to not care, but then Colbert said a thing in an interview about working "with intent" and now I feel wholly inadequate because that seems like an important step that I keep skipping. I also don't normally care about conforming to other people's processes, but everything I've seen of his is a terrifyingly accurate mirror of how I do these things. I tripped over this a while ago, which is a reel of BTS/raw footage from an interview he did (in character) when Jon Stewart was asked to host the Oscars. They clearly told him what they wanted to talk about when they called him up, but also clearly did not bother to hash out a script, so he's running the character improv. There's a bit near the end where he knows what the character's response would be, but hasn't quite settled on how to phrase it, so he just runs it over and over, ...

[Addendum to the earlier note--] Firstly, I would like to say, God bless the obsessive stans of the world. They save me from having to track down each and every individual goddamned piece of media one by one when I go on a tare. There is no project so obscure that they cannot give me enough information to find some chunk of it somewhere on the internet. I can't honestly recommend Exit 57 for entertainment value (it's recognizably in Colbert/Dinello/Sedaris' style, but, uh, they got better) but if you ever wanted to know how they worked their way up to Strangers With Candy , that'll definitely tell you. The down side to this is that their laser focus sometimes gets a little too narrow. The hive mind tends to assume that anyone who's found their way down the rabbit hole already knows what's going on, or that nobody ever needs a reason for the "smexy", and they can edit things down to just the "good bits". This is aggravating if you're actu...

A friend of mine was tolerating my drunken fangirling last weekend, patiently agreeing that yes, it is the cutest thing ever when Stephen Colbert turns around to hit on his off-camera wife every time he fucks up a line in his monologue. And yeah, I keep watching that because he's being comfortingly sane/angry right now, but also because it feels like representation, in a weird sort of way. Colbert is, in many respects, what a lot of people would think of as the quintessential American: A straight, white, Christian man, married with kids, on a lifelong career path that has earned him substantial material wealth. Left to his own devices, he dresses like the dadliest dad who ever dadded. He's expressed some ambivalence about the knowledge that at least some of his media clout comes from this. On the one hand, he is perhaps not the best person to speak to the lived experience of institutional disadvantage; on the other, there are a lot of straight white Christian men in America who...

Stephen Colbert is really mad. It is not easy to push him into being mean. He generally stands for things like 'read more books' and 'get along with each other'. Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a reality where Colbert is a Jesuit scholar. Somewhere else is a timeline where he's the television personality who accidentally won his bid for President. I for one would like to apply for a transfer, right now. Colbert has a reputation. I've started to wonder if people who interview him are contractually obligated to describe him as 'the nicest man on Earth' because they all basically do. When he accidentally acquired an internet army at his old show, he put them to work alternately getting random shit named after him and organizing thousands, if not millions, of dollars for various charitable causes. After testifying before Congress on behalf of immigrant workers, he was asked why he would do that, and stammered before quoting Matthew ('the least of...

I gave up and spent most of yesterday curled up in bed. I hurt a lot less physically; for some reason, a metric fuckton of dextromethorphan to the brain seems to reboot a lot of things, often including angry nerves. I've no idea why. It's not even an analgesic; I use it for pain control when I've run out of other options because it's a dissociative, and if you're not in radio contact with your body parts, it's really hard for them to bother you. [It's an NMDA receptor antagonist, if you're curious. A friend of mine who's taken recreational doses of DXM and has had nitrous oxide for dental surgery says they feel more or less the same. This also inadvertently creeped out the dentist. She'd done the first quite a few times before the second, and was sufficiently used to handling herself in that state that she was able to chatter and ask questions whenever he took his hands out of her mouth. Most people do not ask for their loose teeth back, and th...

I just finished a brief biography of Jon Stewart. It was a remarkably uncomfortable read. Not that it told me anything horrible, or that the writing was 50 Shades-levels of atrocious. My own brain just nagged me the whole way through, you know, he doesn't really like talking about any of this himself, isn't this obnoxiously nosy?  Jon Stewart is the sort of person who will gladly tell you what he thinks of things whether you've asked him or not; it's just almost always in the present tense. He does not seem to have oodles of patience for navel-gazing, at least not with other people present. I did finish it, although I needn't have bothered. It was cobbled together almost entirely out of things Stewart has dropped over the years in interviews, so technically it was all what I'd consider fair game. It happened to be by the same author as the Colbert one I'd dug up, and while I found it annoying that she paid little attention to internal motivation in that on...

Apparently the general public is not as familiar with Meyers-Briggs personality types as I'd thought. Whee! Let's go through this, then. Scale 1: Introverted vs Extroverted Basics: Introverts expend energy to interact with people. Extroverts gain energy from interacting with people. Introversion is not the same as shyness, awkwardness, or social anxiety. Extroversion is not the same as mania, obnoxiousness, or lacking any kind of verbal filter. All this scale measures is whether you go more crazy not being able to get to people or not being able to get away from them. One of my readers over on Facebook expressed surprise that Colbert, being a performer who quite obviously is intensely curious about other people, would come out as an introvert on the Meyers-Briggs scale. Introversion is not the same as misanthropy, either. Introverts who like people just have the sociability on a toggle switch. It runs entirely off of battery power, so you have to plan ahead to charge it...

I'm still watching  The Late Show . I have mixed feelings about this. It's the first piece of network TV I've actually wanted to watch in, I dunno, a decade? I haven't really watched television since I moved out of my college dorm and into an apartment where I'd have to pay for it. I eventually got tired of moving the television, in fact, and got a TV tuner card for the computer, so I could ditch the TV and use the monitor for my Playstation. I watch things that have been on  TV, usually in large blocks while sitting at a computer, but I gave up on this scheduled-shows deal even before the Dawn of the DVR. This whole thing where I remember that there is a thing that airs on a regular basis that I have to also consume on a regular basis -- CBS.com only has the last five episodes up for free, and remember, not paying for TV that already makes me watch ads to begin with -- is weird . I have this nagging feeling that a hipster is going to jump out of the bushes at me ...

I was really hoping Colbert would have a little more time before he had to write his first I Can't Make This Funny monologue, but it was not to be. Friday's opener, before the headlines, was Colbert being upset straight to camera about the most recent shooting incident. My first thought was: Oh my God, Dad is so  disappointed  in us. I think that's what Mr. Rogers would have looked like, if he ever got angry on camera. Which is disconcerting, because I've heard Colbert swear pretty creatively. He once capped off an argument over something biblical by crowing, "I teach  Sunday school, motherfucker!", a sentence that just gets funnier and funnier the more you think about it. The monologue is structured unusually. Traditionally, the arc on one of these things goes, 'I'm fucking upset by this, and I know I'm supposed to be funny now, but it's not going to happen until I get this out. What happened was horrible, and somebody needs to figure o...

I have now seen Colbert vs Trump. I have also seen a lot of complaining about Colbert vs Trump, mainly about how Colbert did not personally beat Trump to death with his stylish new Late Show  coffee mug and then mount his head on a pike staff outside the Ed Sullivan Theater as a warning to others. There are really two separate complaints out of people who say Colbert's Trump interview was too nice: That Colbert didn't say mean enough things, and that Colbert didn't say things meanly enough. Content vs tone. I do not think I have previously seen Colbert-the-human-being angry on camera. Everyone's seen Colbert-the-character angry and raving on his eponymous show, and a few times Colbert-the-writer-for- The-Colbert-Report  has gotten pissed enough that his pundit rant went borderline OOC. Probably the most infamous instance of that was the piece called "Jesus Is A Liberal Democrat", where he tore into Bill O'Reilly for claiming that Jesus said it was A-OK...

So I've seen the first couple weeks of The Late Show . I'm on a day delay now, because while this is very entertaining, it is not entertaining enough for me to give CBS $6/mo for five whole hours of TV a week, especially since they make me pause the ad blocker for the free episodes anyway. Colbert makes one thing clear from the very beginning of the very first show, and that is that he is going to sing as much as he possibly can. He's always had a tendency to burst into song at the drop of a hat, but this is now his show, which he gets to do as himself, so: Hat no longer required. I don't object. His is easily a professional-quality voice. I just find it amusing. I've seen a fair amount of Colbert out-of-character at this point, because I've been specifically digging up interviews. I understand why he had to keep asking people whether they wanted Colbert or "Colbert" speaking at their event, because a lot of invitations were ambiguous, but I've...

Maybe I'm just having an incredibly cranky-making week, but I am starting to get ticked at the slew of articles with headlines that talk about 'the problem with Stephen Colbert'. I keep reading them, and inevitably it turns out that the problem the author is having is actually with CBS -- they are pissed that the network didn't hire a woman. Getting women into positions of prominence in comedy may well be a problem, but it has nothing to do with Colbert per se . They would have that problem with literally anyone in the role who did not fit their favorite list of criteria. This is what I'm talking about with 'the perfect is the enemy of the good'. They think CBS's choice of host is unacceptable because he's not a she, even though Colbert arguably ticks most if not all of the other boxes they care about. I'm not kidding here. I'm not defending the guy just because, 'hey, dude makes me laugh, he can do no wrong'. I decided I liked him ...

Stephen Colbert Shares Why He Thinks Women Should Be In Charge Of Everything In  Glamour , of all places. I have mixed feelings about essays like this. It's great to get acknowledgement from outside that no, you're not overreacting, people like you really are getting glossed over a lot and this is a thing that ought to be fixed. But words, as they say, are cheap. These these tend to be slacktivism at its most pernicious. Hey, I've raised awareness of something! Man, I'm tired. I've done my bit by pointing at the problem, and it's probably above my pay grade anyway, so I'll just go have a nap and let someone else make the actual changes. Thing is, it's not above Colbert's pay grade. He could make these things happen. Colbert is already signed onto a multi-year contract. He was told to bring his Report staff with him. IMDb lists him as executive producer for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert , and he makes snarky reference in one of his toonif...

Hey, y'all remember that thing I was bitching about last week ? Where every news article I was sent about Stewart's last episode of The Daily Show conspicuously avoided describing that thing he was doing as 'crying', even though it obviously was, for reasons that were unspecified but which I suspected mainly boiled down to him being a dude? They're not doing it anymore! Know why they're not doing it anymore? (No, the press is not reading my blog. My stats are not anywhere near high enough for that.) Because Stephen Colbert gave an interview in which he mentioned that making Stewart cry was probably his favorite thing he ever did on the show. In those words. On camera . Top of the piece, even. One article notes that it was taped at the Television Critics Association press tour, where he was presumably promoting The Late Show for CBS on August 10th, but the datelines on everything I can find that quotes him say the articles didn't go up until yester...

I sat down and watched Jon Stewart's last episode of The Daily Show . I'm torn on whether or not that was a good idea. There are a lot of things going on in my life right now that I really just cannot handle, and he's leaving a job that he's worked the hell out of for sixteen years. I should have realized I was going to end up crying. They got Colbert to do the farewell thanks . I don't know they would have even thought to ask anyone else. Various cast and crew comments suggest my guess was right: The two of them snapped together like magnets as soon as they got within range. Their friendship became one of the meta-laws of the Daily Show  universe that was implied by the counterfactual narrative, like the acknowledgement that the comedians on the show were selected on the basis of being quite smart, even as the "correspondents" were written to be idiots and loons. The undercurrent remained even though the character of "Colbert" should logicall...

When last we met, I was explaining a lot of things about election regulation in the US which were equal parts terrifying and mind-destroyingly boring. Now, I give you: Part II: The Execution Thereof, or: The post where I link to all the funny bits.

It transpires, frighteningly enough, that not a lot of people in my age group quite get why Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert trolling the SEC was so funny. Non- estadounidenses  are probably even more confused. The explanation is long and convoluted, but I promise to try to be amusing. Part I: Shit You Need To Know First, or: Go pour yourself a drink, you'll need it.

This week is not a good week. This week is the reason I argued with the doctor until she gave me a lot more Xanax. I am getting tired of explaining this week to people, and it's depressing to talk about, so instead I want to show you this. It is the last question Stephen Colbert took in an interview for Google, promoting his second book, wherein a lady asks him why he chose to go into comedy. It is without a doubt one of the kindest things I have ever heard out of a fellow human being. I don't know if you could properly say it's unselfish to want for yourself the power to pull laughter out of thin air in an atmosphere of tragedy or failure, but neither do I think it matters. Joy is not a zero-sum game. I am glad to be reminded that this sentiment exists, and that he has fulfilled -- and continues to fulfill -- his life's ambition. Now if you will excuse me, I have some rats to squish and overfeed. Those store brand Cheerios aren't going to hoard themselves.

Are you all having a good day? I hope so, because I'm not, and I like to fantasize that the universe has some sort of built-in balancing mechanism. In the interests of making myself think about something less unpleasant, I am now going to intensely, bordering on  fractally , over-analyze a joke. It is always interesting to investigate what people think is appropriate to joke about, and what kind of snark is acceptable. I am of the mind that anything can be sporked from the proper angle and in the proper context, including the meta-analysis of when and where this is appropriate, which is probably why I tend to like comedians like George Carlin and Lewis Black and Frankie Boyle. All of them make a distinction between an abrasive stage persona who can get away with mocking just about anything, with creative profanity, and the person they are off-stage, who is generally horrified whenever they have to explain to other grown-ups the difference between comedy and real life. There i...