Tweet of the Day

If you're not a regular reader of Sean Tejaratchi's LiartownUSA Tumblr site you really have no idea what you're missing. It's one of Patton Oswalt's favorites and both it and Tejaratchi's Twitter feed -- @ShittingtonUK -- are generally hilarious and surreal. For the most part Tejaratchi sticks to being amusingly twisted, but this morning he decided to get into a debate with a couple of people over the use of the ridiculous term "mansplaining," which has fast become my least favorite social media neologism, the kind of thing that as soon as I hear or see it makes me utterly disregard the person who felt the need to throw it out there.

Tejaratchi's take on "mansplaining" is that it's a silly, condescending term and that when you fight condescension with condescension, you automatically lose.

By the way, this was my favorite response to the above tweet:

Incensed of Humor

Yesterday's column over at the Daily Banter took a look at a piece in Salon from last week that targeted Patton Oswalt. The problem, according to the author, is that Patton hasn't used his considerable forum and eloquent voice to speak out against the very serious problem of rape and "rape culture."

Here's an excerpt, and you may recognize some of it from a quickie post here on Saturday:

"Patton Oswalt didn’t do a damn thing wrong. He’s a comic. He believes in being funny. He believes in doing whatever’s necessary to ensure that he and other comics like him — male and female — continue to have the freedom to take chances when it comes to being funny, because humor is so subjective and, one more time, no one has the right to tell somebody else — or to dictate as the voice of an entire culture and for the alleged benefit of society as a whole — what is or isn’t funny, what can and can’t be poked fun at as long as there’s no genuine malice intended. Patton’s history as a comic is one of brilliance, insight, and, yes, a lack of malice toward anyone; what Molly Knefel did to him was cheap and unfair and the only person it should make look bad is her. Maybe her intentions were pure, but as she so piously lectures Patton on, intentions mean shit."

Read the Rest Here

Since being posted yesterday morning, the piece I wrote has picked up quite a bit of steam, mostly due to Patton Oswalt thanking me for it via Twitter. That of course brought out a lot of very angry women and men who took me to task for what they believe is my insulting and condescending tone and, well, my "just not getting it." Once something takes off, you tend to go back and reread it and try to see it through someone else's eyes, particularly the eyes of those having a problem with it. I did that. And I stand by what I wrote and the overall point I was trying to make.

That said, there is something in the column that I want to apologize for. While I may think that what comedian and writer Molly Knefel said was wrong in the sense that she was blaming Patton Oswalt for something he didn't do and was under no obligation to do -- and I'm sorry, but the "if you're not part of the solution" argument is just ridiculous since you could make that claim pertain to anything -- it was wrong of me to refer to her as a "small-time" and "quasi-professional" comic. It truly did sound petty, condescending and insulting and that wasn't my conscious intention. I don't think Molly's heart was in the wrong place and I believe she was trying to be respectful to Patton even if her overall goal of dragging him into a fight that she personally deemed should be his was more than a little questionable. I'm sorry if I personally belittled Molly Knefel; I shouldn't have.

Again, it's a damn shame that I have to say this since it shouldn't need to be said, but I'm pro-women and stand against rape unequivocally -- no hedging, no excuses, no "legitimate or illegitimate," none of it. Rape is a despicable wrong, full stop. There are rotten men working in our government right now trying to either chip away at women's rights or swing a wrecking ball at them, and I suppose that's why, in my view anyway, there are far bigger and more important battles to fight on the subject of women's sexual sovereignty and authority than raising hell over a bad joke made by a comedian or, certainly, the lack of a soapbox stand by a comic who's proven time and time again that he's a good guy and someone who espouses liberal politics in the best possible sense of the term. No, by saying this I'm not telling you what you can and can't get angry over or be offended by; I'm offering up an opinion, the same way you are, which has as much value -- or lack thereof -- as all those other opinions that people are free to shout into the ether.

The issue I've always had when it comes to call-out culture and the outrage "machine" that ramps up whenever someone finds himself or herself offended by something these days has been well-documented: Thanks to social media, indignation can now snowball until it becomes an avalanche, the resulting cacophony vastly disproportional to the original offense. Our furious quest for satisfaction can sometimes have unintended consequences and can take a toll far greater than any sane person should be hoping for. That's the danger of reacting to everything with the same level of outrage. And the way that a column that may have been written with good intentions and meant merely to start a conversation can spiral downward into a guy who didn't hurt anybody being accused of making jokes he never made and generally suppressing women through, at best, silence which a select group interprets as a tacit admission of guilt and, at worst, public displays of misogyny.

The overall fight may be a noble and necessary one, but Patton Oswalt was the wrong person to pick it with.

That's Not Funny!

So, let's go ahead and spin the Wheel of Outrage and see what we land on this time. Oh, look at that -- we're back in familiar territory: The Onion.

I'm sure you all remember the Quvenzhané Wallis tweet-heard-round-the-world during the Oscars; our nation's psychic wounds are just now, finally, starting to heal in the wake of it. Well, now it looks like any chances the almost across-the-board brilliant satire site may have had of making amends and winning back fans within a certain segment of the perpetually indignant liberal intelligentsia have apparently been dashed because of a story it just posted just a little while ago. The target this time: Chris Brown.

Here's the piece in its entirety:

"LOS ANGELES—After revealing yesterday that he had recently split up with longtime girlfriend Rihanna, a heartbroken Chris Brown tearfully told reporters that he always thought the 25-year-old singer was going to be the woman he’d beat to death one day. 'Despite all the ups and downs, I was so sure Rihanna was the one I’d take by the throat one day and fatally assault, and even toward the end I continued to hold out hope that we’d be together until the day she died at my hands from blunt-force trauma,' Brown, 24, said in a radio interview this week, telling DJs he still has abusive feelings for his ex-flame and is hopeful that he might punch her again one day. 'It’s hard knowing that there’s some other guy out there who gets to beat her senseless. In fact, for all I know, there might be someone out there assaulting her right now. And let me tell you, that guy is the luckiest guy in the world.' A saddened Brown added that, should the couple not reconcile, he remains confident that the special someone he was meant to beat to death is still out there for him, and when he finds her, he’ll waste no time in slapping her."

Now you'd think that something this vicious that was obviously intended solely to demean Chris Brown -- an unapologetic woman-beating dickhead who should be in prison right now -- would be embraced by the usual names within the feminist media community. You'd think that, however only if you didn't allow for the fact that those same usual names believe that when it comes to certain predetermined subjects, satire should always be watered down at the risk of very stupid people maybe getting the wrong idea or the already victimized -- literally or figuratively -- being victimized all over again by something they read on a website that deals in smart humor.

And so, compliments of Salon, of course -- who immediately busted out its stock "Did _____ Go Too Far?" headline -- come these breaths of pure fire, designed to hopefully cleanse The Onion, and us, of our cultural sins.









As you can see, there are some thing that can't be the subject of biting satire, no matter who that very nasty bite is taken out of. There are some things that just aren't funny. There are -- eh, fuck it, how many times have I said this now?

It's Unhappy Bunny

You know, I'd love to pay attention to Gloria Steinem bitching about the Playboy Club, still, in 2011, but unfortunately I'm busy doing macramé, playing backgammon and talking to my analyst about all the unresolved issues I harbor after that Summer of Love fling with Marshall McLuhan.

CNN: Gloria Steinem Hopes You'll Boycott The Playboy Club/8.10.11

Trust me, Gloria, you don't even need to bother with this weird little acid flashback. This is an NBC show we're talking about -- when it comes to getting people to not watch, that's better than any boycott.