How White Men Do Humor That Isn't Oppressive: Andy Samberg's "Great Day"

[I actually have no idea what Andy Samberg's sexual orientation is, in part because I've not read this interview with him from Out magazine. I'm assuming he's het, because I'd probably have heard about it if he was gay. Regardless, the cover image is from here.]

I am currently reading the book Dry, by Augusten Burroughs. He wrote the very successful Running With Scissors. RWS is about his mother's decision to give him to her male psychiatrist, to live in that man's home with his own family and a few of his patients. This is a memoir, a true story, written with the kind of humor people need to survive really traumatic experiences that aren't shared with a whole community. Writing has saved Augusten's life, I would imagine, but this white not-poor gay man almost didn't make it, as he was drinking so much that many don't live to discuss it, let alone remember it sufficiently to write a memoir about it. Dry is that memoir, that chapter of his early adult life, when he recognises how his drinking was impacting him, getting help, and figuring out how to live without alcohol.

To me, it is a classic Western white man's story. Because it is so centered on one person's life only tangentially about other people's lives. White men often live this way, I think. And the ubiquitous drinking and drugging that white men do does nothing to ensure they will have meaningful connections to others, but they will, no matter what, have their race and gender privileges. I find Augusten to be racist and misogynistic, and of course I am not at all surprised at either. I am only surprised when a white man isn't overtly racist and actively sexist. I am utterly shocked when I find out a white het man is accountable, really, truly, to the women in his life.

It is said, by those who do not know or do not have a sense of humor, that radical feminists don't have one either. Every radical feminist I know has a robust sense of humor that is rarely used to put other people down. I personally like women's humor about men, such as Rosanne Barr's early work, but the radical feminists I know are not prone to find other people's pain hilarious. Very generally speaking, men, it seems to me, find other people's pain hilarious. Men laugh when men get hurt, not women. Men laugh when frightened; women, not so much. Men make jokes about prison rape, not women. I've never heard a feminist woman laugh about prison rape. I've heard many antifeminist men laugh too many times about it to count. Who, then, is callous to men's pain? I'd argue it is men, not women, again, very generally speaking.

So many forms of suffering are abstract to men, that men can be extremely and normally callous. But some men get how some suffering has potential for humor, without exactly making fun of the person who is, really, in trouble.

Andy Samberg is a U.S. white, early thirtysomething LA/NYC kind of guy. Raised on the comically extreme antics of Mel Brooks, Andy is best known for his short films made for a program that needs all the help it can get, Saturday Night Live. What the show needs is non-white, non-male writers, and to stop their ridiculously racist skits. And to have female actors write their own comedy that is not just about wacky women or sidekicks for men's misogyny to bounce off of, or bluntly hit.

Andy does something else, often enough to catch my attention and warrant this post. Andy observes white het men and white het male culture with a keen eye for what's tragic, pathetic, and humorous about it. And there's PLENTY that's rife with pathos and humor, with atrocious undertones. Beneath white men's lives, however comical or tragic, is the river or sea of blood of all the people our people beaten, whipped, raped, tortured, and killed in generations past. Well, some of my people. Not so many of Andy's, actually, as he's Ashkenazic, so his family's history is probably escaping pogroms, as is part of mine. Well, unless some of our European Jewish family have gone to Israel and have behaved as white het male supremacists do, trying to control or succeeding in killing people of color, usually Palestinian, and by being misogynistic in all the horribly usual ways to women of several ethnicities.

But his family and mine don't come from Israel, and no one in my family has ever lived there. Which is no reason to not oppose Israel's racist apartheid policies. I do oppose them. Not much because I've never been there and don't know anyone who is Israeli or Palestinian. Well, that's not entirely true. I have met and had some deep conversation with one guy whose dad is U.S.-Palestinian (his mom is white/european). He is a DEVOUT Christian, in a really oppressive way--a basically white missionary preacher of The Truth of The Gospel According to him. He's recognised the utter arrogance of his ways, actually, and has stopped being so preachy. Thank G-d. (I've written all about that talk, here.)

Andy's humor has distinctly U.S. Jewish male elements; self-deprecation, never taking oneself seriously, mocking one's own life or the lives of those with similar privileges and social status. Which brings us to something that I think is both highly disturbing and very funny. What I often find funny about people's humor is  imagining them coming up with the material. The details, the building of little moments to tell one small story in a skit lasting only a couple of minutes or so. His humor has a certain quality that might also be termed "post-modern". I know too much about postmodernist philosophy and make a point to virtually never write about it, because its terminology is so annoying and boring to me. I don't think I've used "bodies" to mean people, or "discursive" to mean talking about something on this blog. I hope I haven't, anyway. What makes Samberg's humor quite different than what stand-ups do is that he's telling stories using so many elements--temporal and visual ones especially, that are as revealing as the words that accompany them. It's this fusion of words and images through an imaged period of time that strikes me in a piece like the borderline-sardonic "Great Day". Feel free to let me know what you like and don't like about this. In a later comment, if I remember to, I'll tell you what I see him saying about white het men. The video that follows is from here.

To All Men's Rights Activists: I DARE YOU to read this post and to QUOTE THIS: "People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals." -- Catharine MacKinnon

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Women's Day in Australia: Malalai Joya Announces that Sec. of State Hillary Clinton Lied to Afghan Women in Order to Continue Pres. Obama's Military Massacres in and Occupation of Afghanistan. Girls as Young as 11 are Being Raped by U.S. and NATO Men: WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE??!!

[image of Hillary Clinton is from here]

What follows is from here]

Hillary lies again to Afghan women

Posted on 15 May 2010

Secretary of State Mrs. Hillary Rodham-Clinton has once again lied to Afghan women. She said that America will not abandon Afghan women. It already has. America has not kept its promises to the women of Afghanistan.

The youngest woman in the Afghan parliament has used International Women’s Day to slam the “disastrous conditions” for women in her country and ask Australians to help bring change.

Afghanistan’s Bravest Woman Malalai Joya:

• “Taliban are logistically & militarily growing stronger as each day dawns.”
•  “Afghan women and men are not ‘liberated’ at all”
• Woman Among the Warlords: The extraordinary story of an Afghan who dared to raise her voice
• Diary of Malalai Joya: ‘Raising My Voice’ against occupation of Afghanistan
• Malalai Joya: Afghanistan’s angry conscience
• “Afghanistan is getting progressively worse. We are caught between two enemies: Taliban and US/NATO forces” — Malalai Joya

Malalai Joya, 28, told a conference at Sydney’s Darling Harbour today there has been “no fundamental change in the plight of Afghan people” since the US removed the Taliban five years ago.

“Afghan women and men are not ‘liberated’ at all,” Joya said. “When the entire nation is living under the shadow of gun and warlordism, how can its women enjoy very basic freedoms?”

Joya said the women’s rights situation was as “catastrophic” as it was under the Taliban.

She gave the death of 18-year-old Samiya, who hanged herself before she was to be sold to a 60-year-old man, and the rape of children as young as 11 by the US and international troops as examples.

“No nation can donate liberation to another nation,” Joya said. “If Australian policy makers really want to help Afghan people and bring positive changes, they must allign their policies according to the aspirations and wishes of Afghan people, rather than becoming a tool to implement the wrong policies of the US government.”

Joya, who survived an assassination attempt after speaking out againgst Afghan warlords, said the suicide rate of Afghan women was at an all-time high. As many as 1.9 per cent of women die during childbirth.

To celebrate International Women’s Day in Sydney, festivals are underway in Liverpool and Cabramatta to mark the day. Female MP tells of rights ‘catastrophe’. Email Print Normal font Large font Yuko Narushima. March 8, 2007 – 1:04PM

Afghanistan’s Bravest Woman Malalai Joya: “Taliban are logistically & militarily growing stronger as each day dawns.” “Afghan women and men are not ‘liberated’ at all”

Malalai Joya is an angry woman. She’s angry about the war being carried out by the international coalition in her country, Afghanistan, angry about the UN bombs that are killing civilians in their villages, angry about calls for reconciliation with the Taliban and the war lords. “Stop the massacres in my country. Withdraw your foreign troops so we can stop Talibanization,” is what the young Afghan deputy tells Western public opinion.

WASHINGTON: Women’s rights will not be sacrificed in any settlement between the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Taliban militants, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said late on Thursday.

Clinton ruled out US support, or at least her own, for negotiations with anyone who would roll back advances for Afghan women achieved since the militant Islamic Taliban movement was ousted from power in 2001.

“There are certain conditions that have to be met,” to hold talks with insurgents about laying down arms, Clinton said during an appearance with Karzai. Karzai and a large delegation of government ministers and advisers, including several women, were finishing four days of talks in Washington.

Among the conditions for peace talks, midlevel Taliban leaders would have to renounce violence, cut ties with al-Qaeda and its affiliates and abide by Afghanistan’s laws and constitution, Clinton said.

“And on a personal note they must respect women’s rights.” Karzai nodded beside her but did not mention the women’s rights aspect of possible talks with the Taliban. The other conditions apply, he said.

The Taliban regime forced women to wear a traditional head-to-toe covering called a Burqa, forbade school for girls and beat women seen walking without being accompanied by a man. The Taliban has surged back over the past several years to become a persistent insurgency seeking Karzai’s overthrow. Insurgents and their sympathisers routinely intimidate or attack women who work outside the home, wear Western dress or try to attend school.

Clinton, whose bid for president in 2008 got further than any American woman before her, made a similar point when she met with Afghan women earlier Thursday at the State Department.

“We will not abandon you; we will stand with you always,” Clinton told three senior female Afghan officials who were part of Karzai’s delegation. The trip ends on Friday with Karzai’s visit to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division that is deploying en masse to Afghanistan.

Clinton said it was “essential that women’s rights and women’s opportunities are not sacrificed or trampled on in the reconciliation process.”

Karzai sought US blessing this week for wider talks with the Taliban when the time comes. President Barack Obama seemed noncommittal during a White House news conference with Karzai on Wednesday. Saturday, May 15, 2010

Here’s how Joya sums it up in her own words:

“The people of Afghanistan are fed up with the occupation of their country and with the corrupt, Mafia-state of Hamid Karzai and the warlords and drug lords backed by NATO…. It is clear now that the real motive of the U.S. and its allies, hidden behind the so-called “war on terror,” was to convert Afghanistan into a military base in Central Asia and the capital of the world’s opium drug trade. Ordinary Afghan people are being used in this chess game, and western taxpayers’ money and the blood of soldiers is being wasted on this agenda that will only further destabilize the region….Afghan and American lives are being needlessly lost.

“Afghans live under the shadow of the gun with the most corrupt government in the world.”– Malalai Joya

• The US occupation has not brought security to Afghan women
• Total collapse in Afghanistan:-Chasing the ghosts of the “Ho Chi Minh” …
• Afghanistan’s Bravest Woman Malalai Joya: “Taliban are logistically & m…

JOYA’S SOLUTION: “Withdraw All Foreign Troops”

Malalai Joya: “Some people say that when the troops withdraw, a civil war will break out. Often this prospect is raised by people who ignore the vicious conflict and humanitarian disaster that is already occurring in Afghanistan. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people. The terrible civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal certainly could never justify… the destruction and death caused by that decade-long occupation.” (p 217)…Today we live under the shadow of the gun with the most corrupt and unpopular government in the world. (p 211)

This Just In, no, OUT, From The Atlantic: On Gay Actors Playing It Straight

[image of not the current cover of The Atlantic magazine offline is from here]

Okay, A.R.P. peeps. Here's the latest analysis on dominant culture and "gay" stuff. My comment is at the bottom. Why is it ALWAYS last?! Well, better last than "DNF"... Get used to it. Sites like the one you're about to see love the abbreviations. (SYTYCD = So You Think You Can Dance. That's the only one I'm giving ya.)

But before we get to that, I'll try and answer some of the pressing questions raised on that past cover above.

SHOULD WOMEN RULE THE WORLD? Yes. (Why can't all questions be this easy to answer?)

WILL BLOGS KILL WRITING? No, video games already did writing in. Anyway, blogging is to writing what reality tv is to reality. Only much more varied and therefore better. And without commercials including infomercials.

SHOULD CHILDREN HAVE SEX CHANGES? If the change is to not having to be one or the other that's assigned and enforced? Definitely. But not with knives. Just with radical ideological and institutional change.

CAN CANADA SAVE AN AMERICAN FOOTBALL TEAM? "America" includes Canada. Whether Canadian football = soccer, I can't say. Can Canada save a U.S. football team? Is THAT what they're asking? The answer is: who cares? Canadians care about hockey, and the U.S. cares about baseball and basketball... OH, and warfare, racism, and sex tourism, of course.

IS CREDIT DEBT A GOOD THING? Only if by "a good thing" you mean "not a good thing".

I can't make out the other questions, but I see the whitest, most conservative "liberal" gay man's name listed there on the "far left". (Funny that.) It's "Andrew Sullivan". Don't get me started on him or we'll be here until a week from Thursday. His idea of "gay politics"... please. I told you: DON'T get me started!!

But this DOES makes for a lovely segue, or shall I say, "segay"? Okay, okay. Segue. Geesh. You readers are so persnickety sometimes. Not as persnickety as moi, of course.

Of Course Gay Actors Can Play Straight
MAY 15 2010, 8:00 AM ET

Derek Thompson is a staff editor at Atlantic Business, where he writes about economics, business and technology. Derek has also written for BusinessWeek and Slate.

Newsweek's Ramin Setoodeh wrote an article a few weeks ago arguing that gay actors had a hard time playing straight people, and the outcry basically broke the Internet. Blogs ripped Setoodeh into confetti. Actress Kristin Chenoweth called him "horrendously homophobic." Glee creator Ryan Murphy called for his fans to boycott Newsweek.

Setoodeh's argument was silly. The response was silly, too. Setoodeh saw a play called Promises, Promises starring Sean Hayes (the best friend from Will & Grace) and didn't think Hayes was a convincing straight guy. Also, he watched an episode of Glee and thought another gay actor playing straight came off like a "theater queen." In the real world, two unconvincing performances in a week is, you know, two unconvincing performances in a week. For Setoodeh, it was part of a larger trend: gay actors can't play straight!

He probably should have kept the thought to himself. Or rented Return of the King. Gay actors play straight all the time: Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother; David Hyde Pierce in Frasier; Ian McKellen in Lord of the Rings, and X-Men, and everything.

Gay actors face serious challenges in film and television. The last thing they need is Newsweek knocking their chops because a couple of them weren't sufficiently macho in musicals some guy saw last week.

But the response to Setoodeh's article has veered into weird territory, too. West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin, in an articulate piece, challenged the idea that "playing gay" is even a thing.

An actor, no matter which sex they're attracted to, can't "play" gay or "play" straight. Gay and straight aren't actable things. You can act effeminate and you can act macho (though macho usually ends up reading as gay), but an actor can't play gay or straight anymore than they can play Catholic. The most disturbing thing to me about this episode is that the theater critic for Newsweek didn't know that.

Oh, come on. You can't say gay isn't actable in the same sentence you say overly macho acting reads as gay. Either there exists a certain set of characteristics, expressions, and vocal modulations that can indicate sexual orientation to an audience or there aren't. And it's pretty clear that there are.

When Ricky Martin told the world he was gay, the Internet's collective reaction was some variation of: "duh." We didn't know Ricky. Why were we so certain he was gay? Well, we just ... knew! It was the way he ... danced? ... sang? ...shook his bon bon? Who knows. But it turns out there's a science behind what some folks call gaydar. One study found that 75 percent of gay men sounded gay to a general audience over tape-recordings. The biological and cultural implications of that finding deserve a fuller treatment, but for the purposes of our discussion, suffice it to say that it is a finding. Gaydar detects some sort of gendermap of characteristics that can indicate homosexuality. And actors draw on this "gendermap" of characteristics to play gay -- or straight. Is it terribly homophobic to point that out?

At the heart of Setoodeh's piece is idea that gay and straight people act a certain way, and that actors who are well-known to be gay might have a higher bar to clear to be persuasively hetero. I don't disagree.


Julian Real's comment:
The whole matter doesn't only rest on what characteristics the viewer [read "presumed straight person"] is deciding is or isn't gay. Does [the straight] audience accept Jodie Foster as heterosexual--or not--in The Accused or Contact? Were Cher and Meryl Streep believable as a lesbian couple in Silkwood? (And why do straight men want ALL women to PLAY lesbian and no het man to BE gay? Hmmm. Answers may follow.)

The undercurrent, not quite spoken out loud, is that being gay ruins it for an audience who wants to believe het performances are for het actors--because heterosexuality in men is valued more. Hollywood doesn't have to give a..consider whether het actors playing lesbian and gay ruin it for us--lesbian and gay people. Reverse the sexual orientations of the entire discussion above this comment and see what gets revealed.

"The problem" is being gay, again. Why, through most of my life, has the only problem for straight actors playing lesbian or gay been how it would negatively impact their careers? Why did Ricky Martin have to wait so long to come out, and why do only white folks seem to reply "duh", while the rest of humanity gets the significance of a Latino performer coming out? Why aren't we as concerned with how unbelievable it is that out het actors just can't transcend our knowledge of them being THAT way for us to buy them in a role where they are not? If being gay wasn't stigmatised (and socially despised), we wouldn't care one way or the other. And if being a straight man wasn't naturalised (and socially adored), we would care more about the reverse happening.

This discussion could play out with regard to race in the U.S.: "we" (pssst: usually meaning whites) don't mind if non-Black actors play Black (think Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart) but when "we" (meaning Black people) do care, it's our problem, not whites'. And "we're" seen as irrationally complaining. (See this as an example: http://heatherwilliams.wordpress.com/2006/10/11...) Little white boys in the middle of the last century played "cowboys and Indians", without complaint from whites. But objecting to the objectionable Cleveland Indians logo and name is, well, really going too far. (You're seeing the pattern, I hope?) Non-Indigenous and non-Latina/o actors play American Indian and what the U.S. government calls "Hispanic". (Think Natalie Wood in West Side Story.) The audience is always presumed to be white and heterosexual, and too often, also male. And good luck to Taylor Lautner if he's typecast as "The Indian", because he'll be working on TV and major motion pictures once every decade.

And then there's the little matter of dominants getting almost all the damn acting jobs, so it's a little annoying, as well as economically impoverishing, when the dominants to be able to play it all and the socially subordinated are only allowed to play what they are seen to be by dominants (read: only gay/lesbian/Black/American Indian, never "just human").

All the whites are "we" again, unless otherwise indicated--just like in U.S. history books and the way whites tell stories... "So there were like five people shopping at the 7/11 and then this Black guy comes in... ". We couldn't possibly buy it if a Black actor wants to play a, you know, just plain ol' All American human. Because this is the point: het (and/or white and/or male) = the All American human, so the straight white U.S. male actor is believable, or hilarious, all the time as whatever kind of human he plays, but gay (and/or non-white and/or female) = that kind of human, who, once identified as that way cannot be unseen as that because that is them and they aren't "we". What we're all being told is that being "that way" isn't quite as human as being het/white/male. And, alarmingly, being Black truly isn't "as human" in the U.S. white imagination, as is being white. So whites, yes, can allow one another to play Black; and when and if they do so so stereotypically, whites don't complain: it wasn't primarily white opposition that stopped minstrel shows; it was the presence of African Americans as human beings who got to have a voice* that mattered almost as much as the white voices impacting white audiences bigotr..tastes. (*Just the one voice usually, maybe two: you know, Doc Martin and the Malcolm who wasn't in the middle.)

We're not supposed to negatively stereotype the dominants in any social hierarchy (like, say, as "always complaining about something", uppity, dirty, diseased, or terroristic), and if we do, we'll hear about it from the them who militantly refuse to be identified as a them. (If one more straight white guy tells me how negatively stereotyped he is on TV "all the darned time"... not realising exactly how many times The Greatest American Hero is on TV, doing everything, like reporting the evening news, selling trucks, judging singers, sportscasting, and getting honored for killing people of color... well, I won't scream, to spare you the reinforcement of a negative stereotype.) We're only supposed to negatively stereotype the socially subordinated in any hierarchy. Male contestants on SYTYCD are never told they're dancing it too straight. And what does *that* mean?! Ask me. I'm gay. I'll tell you. You het guys are most hilarious--or is it dangerous?--when you don't even know how friggin' straight you're acting.)

So men [straight or gay] who PLAY women don't play diversely human people--like say, women--but that's what we say the fellas are doing, without complaint by men. And WhiteStraightMale God-forbid if women complain about that, or, well, anything at all really. (Because that'd make her a [rhymes with kitsch]!) We say Robin Williams is hilarious when he "plays gay" but when he's hilarious when not playing gay, he's never hilarious *because* he's playing straight.

Being socially subordinated is an endless source of humor for social dominants. Just watch practically any SNL skit since the 1970s. Watch Bill Hader play the oh-so-gay kinky Manhattan club reviewer sitting next to *normal* Seth Meyers. Is Seth funny because he's not gay? Betty White as sort-of-Black = funny [to whites, who are the majority demographic who even watch that very racist program, without ever "complaining" about the racism]. But Betty White playing white? Wait, what does that even mean? How does a white person play white? Ask people who aren't white. Whiteness is, actually, utterly hilarious. I laugh all the time about it with my friends--the ones who are "non-white", that is. (The white ones just look all confused and irritated.)

The issue is who is socially statused and who is stigmatised, and we can't have stigmatised socially subordinated people play statused dominant ones, believably.