Whether in the explicit pronouncements of pop culture commentators or in a cursory cruise of off-network, late-night television, there is ample evidence that young men remain both the primary producers and targeted consumers of much mainstream comedic content.  In the two years since the above-mentioned pieces, however, a number of incidents have invigorated offscreen debate about comedy and gender: among them, David Letterman firing his booker for sexist practices and remarks; Daniel Tosh shouting down a female heckler with a rape joke; Seth MacFarlane’s embarrassing song-and-dance at the 2013 Oscars; Jerry Seinfeld’s curiously tone-deaf take on diversity in comedy; and, perhaps most notoriously, Saturday Night Live’s clumsily PR-controlled search for and eventual hiring of African-American female cast member Sasheer Zamata.

Although it may be optimistic to suggest a correlation between those conversations and the recent programming decisions of comedy outlets, such dialogue does affect the discursive context in which we watch and talk about their shows.  In this light, the seemingly necessary belongingness between men and comedy dissipates a bit when considering the representational politics of Comedy Central’s spring lineup–namely, Kroll Show, Broad City, and the soon-to-return Inside Amy Schumer.  It isn’t just that comediennes star and/or figure prominently in the programs’ sketchy stories, something into which the network has put perfunctory effort in the past with The Sarah Silverman Program and Strangers with Candy.  Discourses of gender and sexuality additionally provide a generative grammar for the shows, imbuing their comedic portrayals of race, class, and homosocial bonding with the kind of polysemy customarily ascribed to Comedy Central’s much-lauded news satires.

The most simultaneously silly and insightful segment of Inside Amy Schumer’s first season, for instance, was a recurring bit called “Amy Goes Deep” which had the host interviewing, among others, a well-endowed man and a female dominatrix.  To be sure, the segments (like most sketches on Inside) use sexuality as a way to provoke and titillate viewers initially.  As the interviews progress, however, Schumer refrains from the sort of moralizing too-often implicit in portrayals of sexual taboos and instead gestures toward broader discourses about the ways in which we talk about those taboos.

Although nominally starring a male comedian and trafficking in the gendered caricatures so common among male-targeted comedies, Kroll Show is actually a “full-frontal assault on dude culture and the ideologies that support it, but in dickfest drag.”  It’s also the most cuttingly satirical sketch comedy show about television since Mr. Show.  Kroll’s favorite targets are the vapid fame-mongers, low-rent aesthetics, and crass commercialism of reality television.  Instead of merely reproducing and displaying televisual conventions with the lazy referentiality of an after-“Update” SNL-segment, though, recurring sketches like “PubLIZity” and “Rich Dicks” consistently ask viewers to consider the cultural and industrial discourses that construct and make commonsensical certain gendered representations of reality.

Of course, there exists real danger in the potential that viewers will decode the superficially heterosexist humor in these programs with the same unblinking acceptance as they do a show like Tosh.0.  It certainly doesn’t help, either, that Comedy Central has a tired habit of promoting its shows with the most memorable, “I’m Rick James, bitch!”-iest of sound bites.  Nevertheless, the infinitely mutable nature of comedy (and of the media infrastructures increasingly invested in it) means that no matter how loudly any one voice shouts, there are always plenty of hecklers.

To be sure, Kristen Wiig, Andy Samberg, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney are not (all?) “Gangnam Style”-irrelevant over a year later, but few could have predicted how much more turbulent the new 2013 season would be for the show. In addition to the above-mentioned, gone are reliable everymen Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Jason Sudeikis. And when “Weekend Update” co-anchor Seth Meyers takes over Late Night early next year, as Splitsider notes, the remaining cast members will all have been born after SNL’s halcyon premiere year of 1975.

But you know the old saying: the more things change, the more they ObamacareshutdownDrunkUncleMileytwerk. Few television shows are as simultaneously resistant to and reliant upon rapid changes in casting, news cycles, and zeitgeists as Saturday Night Live, an ontological ebb and flow that owes largely to its liveness.  The first two episodes of the show’s new season capture this dynamic perfectly.

The season premiere began with a cold open addressing the political theme of the week, a routine the program began at roughly the same time Jon Stewart proved the demographic utility of mixing comedy and news.  Host Tina Fey’s subsequent monologue lightly hazed the five new cast members in order to set up that most SNL-iest of sketches, the gameshow whose premise wears thin right after its title card.  “New Cast Member or Arcade Fire?,” however, seemed less about further embarrassing freshmen cast members than it was about reminding them (and viewers) of the show’s proud place in the American television heritage.

If SNL’s season premiere re-asserted its right to self-importantly navel gaze, last week’s Miley Cyrus-hosted follow up found the show manically reaching outside its comfort zone for relevance.  With more familiar faces behind the impersonations, sketches like the “50 Shades of Grey Auditions” or the Piers Morgan Live parody might have felt a little less slapdash. Instead, the episode struggled to turn its instantly dated cultural references into a proper showcase for both the veteran and new performers.

Certainly, given the dearth of competition at the timeslot combined with the growing size of its cultural footprint, SNL isn’t going anywhere despite a pretty forgettable start to the season.  What is clear from the early returns, though, is that this season marks one of those once-a-decade changings of the guard.  The show will additionally have to find an original way to engage with digital media culture, and it cannot continue to ignore its absurdly high quotient of white dude-ness.  Yet for all these changes, SNL will return this weekend, putting forth an effort very different from, and yet somehow fundamentally similar to, what it has offered for almost 40 years.  Doing so–even in today’s time-shifted, cross-platform, demo-obsessed media milieu–continues to make it a key case for understanding American television culture.

Sports writer Bomani Jones captured Heat fans leaving Tuesday’s game early.

During the game’s commercial breaks, I browsed cable news coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, America’s most recent instance of centuries of systemic racism distilled into one man doing a very dumb thing with a gun, then cowering beneath the defense of the even dumber Florida law made possible by the dumbest amendment in our Constitution. One pundit decried Zimmerman’s defense attorneys for articulating something akin to an Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer logic in their pursuit of jurors unbiased by media coverage of the shooting last year. “What is going on in Florida tonight?”, the pundit asked incredulously. I then caught snippets of The Daily Show’s coverage of recent immigration reform debates, in which John Oliver lambasted former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and current Florida Senator Cottonmouth for deciding it might be politically expedient to curry the favor of Latino voters in order to re-color Florida red for 2014 and beyond.

I lived in Florida this past year as a visiting assistant professor at Rollins College, a liberal arts school tucked away in a tony suburb of Orlando far removed from central Florida’s exurban theme park sprawl, yet intimately bound up with it economically and culturally. As such, I’ve developed a deeply ambivalent relationship with the state’s perceived wackiness so taken for granted in American media. On the one hand, I’ve been eager to disabuse visitors of the notion that Florida is all beaches and bath salt-huffing loonies, that it has all the same amenities and experiences necessary to sustain the habitus of “enlightened” academic-types. On the other hand, I’ve often been just as eager to join the chorus of pshaws whenever something from the Florida Man Twitter feed makes its way into national news.

More than anything, though, I’ve come to embrace this ambivalence and admire Florida’s totemic hold over the American psyche. Most of us have some version of a love-hate relationship with the place we’re from or where we live, but few outside our respective hometowns have strongly held opinions about these places in the same way non-Floridians do about Florida. It has been strange to absorb outsiders’ misguided conceptions of Florida from within it this year, one that began for me with the state again playing a contested role in the Presidential election and ending with the run up to what will likely be the highest profile American court case since that of O.J. Simpson. But it has been even more heartening to see the extent to which Floridians take outsiders’ diagnoses of their home state in stride.

Florida is such a loaded signifier that any mediated discourse about goings-on within its borders is quickly sloughed off as misrepresentative of a more serious, flattering, or authentic American experience. Zimmerman’s trial thus becomes an opportunity not to examine the country’s continued racial tensions and gun culture, but to excoriate a disturbed vigilante in some lawless backwater. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush courting Florida Latinos affords us not the occasion to consider the increasingly heterogeneous cultural identities of American immigrants, but the chance to speculate wildly about the 2016 Presidential election and wonder who’ll win the state. And those leaving Tuesday’s game early are not exhausted basketball fans just hoping to sleep six hours before work in the morning, but fairweather scenesters eager to party on South Beach. As I leave Florida next week, I’ll do so with a renewed skepticism of these and so many other snap judgements about the state, knowing that there might not be a more accurate microcosm of what American culture is right now–for better, for worse, and everything in between–and what it is becoming.

The National Basketball Association’s lockout began July 1 and reached a provisional end on the day after Thanksgiving, but even if you’re the most casual of sports fans, chances are, you knew this.  And even if you’re the most casual of casual sports fans, chances are, ESPN played no small role in informing you about the work stoppage, introducing you along the way to vaguely noxious MBA-speak like “basketball related income” and “amnesty clause.”  All the while, non-ESPN media squawked about the lockout simply being a squabble between the rich and the super-rich; about how basketball isn’t football; even about how boring ESPN’s coverage of it all was.  I won’t deign to tell you WHAT IT WAS REALLY ALL ABOUT, though I tend to agree with Charles Pierce that by focusing so intently on money, we tend to miss the bigger picture.  Accordingly, I’d like to consider briefly not the content of the various back-and-forths among players, owners, and sports pundits, but the broader implications of ESPN’s mediation of this dialogue for televised sports.

If there is a takeaway point from Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s eminently skimmable (and purposely, polemically gender-biased) oral history of ESPN, it’s that the network fancies itself to be lifestyle television.  This manifests both in all the most banal ways you think it does (incessant talk of “the brand” and other Disney-fied corporate logics) and in more insidious ones that seek to make “ESPN” and “sports” as interchangeable as possible in viewers’ heads.  ESPN has a mixed, sometimes hilariously bad history of extending its own brand beyond the viewing moment, so its most valuable commodities are often the personalities on display in its programming.  Pardon the hacky Bill Simmons-ism, but if ESPN is Bravo, then at the present moment, the NBA is its Real Housewives, Top Chef, and Andy Cohen all rolled into one.  (The comments section is yours to work out the Housewives equivalents of the Miami Heat’s big three.)

This is not to ignore the significance of ESPN’s relationships with the other two major American professional sports leagues, but crucial differences exist between them and the NBA.  The NFL–the indisputable televised sports juggernaut of the recent past and forseeable future–contracts with three out of the four major broadcast networks and a number of cable (including the prized Monday Night Football franchise on ESPN) and satellite outlets.  Television is the NFL’s cash cow, and viewers seem to enjoy watching it.  MLB’s television interests are similarly spread among several broadcast and cable outlets, with myriad regional sports networks picking up the slack.  But baseball–with its 81+ home games per team per season, summer weather, and Tony LaRussas giving fans multiple opportunities for trips to the concession stand–prizes gate and gameday revenues much more than football does.

While it has long thrived on elements from both models, the NBA has become a decidedly more television friendly league, with ESPN leading the way.  In fact, the league’s only broadcast presence is with the also-Disney-owned ABC.  (TNT provides the other significant chunk of NBA coverage, but the netlet is more interested in using basketball as a promotional vehicle for Rizzoli & Isles than it is in building a brand identity around it.)  The outlets fortuitously renewed their deals with the NBA after a poorly rated Finals series in 2007, and it seems fair to say that ESPN was getting an undervalued property.  A change to the hand-checking rule the year before catalyzed a surge in league-wide scoring, and the LeBron-led class of stars would be entering their prime (and free agency years) over the course of the following decade.  Part of the pact also afforded ESPN wide-ranging use of the NBA’s digital content, an element commissioner David Stern saw as key in spurring the league’s global growth (and one that stands in stark contrast to other sports’ digital policies).  For ESPN, the NBA was fast becoming the most fertile land upon which to plant its flag as “The Worldwide Leader In Sports.”

It goes without saying, then, that ESPN had much riding on the resolution of the NBA lockout, not so much that it might be accused of anything unethical, but certainly enough to be guilty of belaboring viewer interest in the minutiae of labor.  Its lockout coverage arguably started in earnest with last summer’s “The Decision” special on the free-agent status of LeBron James, a stunt aimed just as much at stimulating interest in non-NBA fans as it was at narcotizing the resentment of NBA die-hards about the upcoming work stoppage.  Or, it’s the other way around.  I don’t know.  Either way, ESPN’s NBA coverage since “The Decision” has been not about uncovering the real issues behind the lockout or picking sides between players vs. owners or Dirk vs. LeBron.  Instead, its goal has been to breathlessly, relentlessly fuel the idea that discovering that truth or picking a side matters.  If you care not for such things, if you like your displays of athletic competition virtuous and untouched by the tentacles of capitalism, well, there’s always the college game.

If you’ve watched television comedy in the last 15 years, you’ve seen the work of Louis C.K.  In addition to writing for The Dana Carvey Show (most notably, the program’s very first sketch, which allegedly drove it straight to cancellation), The Chris Rock Show, Late Show with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, C.K. is widely regarded as one of the top stand-up comedians working today.  In between stand-up specials and onscreen roles in The Invention of Lying and Parks and Recreation, the comedian has been courted by the major broadcast networks to develop his own half-hour sitcom.  C.K. turned down the bigger-money offers and went to FX instead; the first two episodes of his new show, Louie, premiered on Tuesday night.

This isn’t C.K.’s first starring role on television, though.  In 2006 HBO ignominiously made Lucky Louie, a multi-camera, live studio audience parody of/tribute to the ’70s Lear sitcoms, their first and only original series to be canceled mid-season.  The network’s leadership fought with C.K. over how the show fit its brand of “quality,” a struggle exacerbated at the time by HBO’s inability to replenish its stock of not-TV-like programming that had defined it for much of the 2000s.  Despite taking full advantage of HBO’s lack of restrictions on content, Lucky Louie just didn’t look right.  It was so, well, TV:

While FX’s Louie retains much of the comedian’s mordant sensibility, its visual aesthetic and narrative structure are refreshing changes of pace for the half-hour format.  Stand-up segments from C.K. provide interludes between vignettes that hew more closely to short films than to the A-plot/B-plot structure of sitcoms.  The technique isn’t entirely new (Seinfeld tried something similar before abandoning Jerry’s stand-up bits altogether), but its use in Louie is indicative of a different industrial moment.  C.K. took far less money up front from FX than he would have gotten from NBC or Fox so that he could maintain more control.  The resultant product feels like it comes from a much more personal place than a writers’ room tasked with shoehorning the stand-up’s persona into the jolly patriarch mold AND penning sassy quips for his kids.  To hear C.K. tell it:

“[FX President John] Landgraf is a very smart guy that he’s willing to do that. He has, whatever, $10 million to develop with. He’d rather break it into little pieces and try with a bunch of different people and let them do whatever they want and see which monkey with a typewriter comes up with a good show than to have this corporate science go into making two pilots that nobody wants to watch.”

Would Louie have worked better for HBO in 2006?  The program is certainly more akin to the single-camera docu-coms that have recently reigned as critical darlings than it is to the much-maligned multi-camera sitcoms, but so what?  As Michael Z. Newman notes, single-camera sitcoms are positioned discursively as “quality” against “primitive” multi-camera ones, a relationship that relies on hoary progress narratives.  Louie doesn’t represent another step towards the ultimate sitcom; instead, it adds to what Christine Becker calls “a range of available choices” in sitcom aesthetics.  We might think of Louie’s ebb and flow of stand-up to sketch-like segment as yet another possibility for a genre that has proven itself to be both dynamic and resilient over the years.  It’s comedian comedy for the post-network era.

Generation X has long railed against the hegemony of baby boomers, not wanting its contributions cast into the bargain bins of American cultural memory in order to make room for another Beatles boxed set.  What Xers (born between the early- to mid-1960s and 1980, roughly) are just beginning to grapple with, though, is the rising tide of millenials, those Facebooking, ZOMG-ing, narcissistic, consumerist children of boomers.  Of course, millenials haven’t contributed much to American culture that can’t be televisually caricatured by stock footage of screaming Twilight fans and grudging exhortations by onscreen personalities to “Follow us on Twitter!”, but it only seems a matter of time.  How will Generation X handle being squeezed by aging hippies on one side and nattering kidz on the other?

Right now, one of the most fascinating arenas of popular culture to watch this dynamic play out is the NBA finals.  The best-of-seven championship series began June 3rd with heavy sponsorship by the movie Grown Ups, starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Kevin James.  The first four all joined the cast of Saturday Night Live (with James acting as the presumed Chris Farley stand-in) in the 1990-91 season, coinciding with the rise of Generation X presences in other cultural forms and with increased interest by corporate America in the demographic’s spending and tastemaking power.  The comedians (sans Schneider, who apparently had something more important to do?) all appeared courtside and logged heavy camera time.  Rock, a New York Knicks fan who’d been razzing the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant, has his in-game interview awkwardly broken up by Laker coach Phil Jackson:

One might see a generational clash in the incident, with the boomer “Zenmaster” Jackson having his buzz harshed by the snarky Xer Rock.  More importantly, however, is Rock’s reason for being there in the first place.  Grown Ups, a movie about a group of Xers confronting middle age in ways that may or may not entail hilarity, is in dialogue with many other iterations of recent Gen X ennui.  A.O. Scott, with gaze-fixed-squarely-on-navel, incredulously assesses Xer midlife crises in Greenberg and Hot Tub Time Machine, while even MTV recently announced that Gen X is no longer welcome there.  As Jeff Gordinier notes in the groan-inducingly, yet, you know, totally ironically, subtitled X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking, “The mantle of contemporary adulthood descends at that moment when you figure out that MTV doesn’t love you anymore.”

On the court, these Finals abound with Gen X stars–Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen among them.  And while attempting to lay a confident finger on something as shape-shifting as sports stardom opens the door for Bill Simmons-esque grandiloquence, it’s clear this is Rajon Rondo’s coming out party.  Rondo, the electric 4th-year guard who alienated his elder statesmen for much of the year before commandeering the role as leader, made the following play at a crucial juncture in Sunday night’s game 5:

Rondo is freakishly athletic, to be sure, but look at who he’s outjumping:  the 6-10 Lamar Odom, and Kobe Bryant, he of the 1000+ career games, 37,000+ career minutes, and 27% 4th-quarter field goal percentage for the Finals.  Granted, Bryant had just gotten done scoring 23 straight Laker points in just over a quarter of basketball, but on this play, the man long-known as “The Closer” (and not just for potentially lucrative TNT tie-ins!) looked tired.  Bryant had an amazing run of success alongside Shaquille O’Neal in the early 2000s, likely has three or four good years left, and will undoubtedly go down as an all time top-10 player, but his sun is setting. Millennial stars like Dwight Howard, Kevin Durant, and the much-heralded draft class of 2003 (which includes Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade, and LeBron James) are all at or entering the primes of their careers.  As Bryant and lone-wolf Xer compatriots like Allen Iverson and Vince Carter continue to concede the spotlight, the NBA is moving toward a more open and fluid style of play reflective of its increasingly global reach, and Commissioner David Stern is making the NBA brand accessible to as many audiences in as many places and on as many digital platforms as possible.

Generation X has spent the better part of two decades being justifiably indignant about the world-beating bombast of their elders, but as James Murphy presciently said, “The kids are coming up from behind.”

E-pundit and male-human-who-is-a-fan-of-sports Bill Simmons has cashed in nicely on being among the first to Web 2.0-ize sports journalism (a topic addressed here). He’s also likely the most knowledgeable person under 50 on professional basketball, so I found myself revisiting a much-discussed column of his in trying to process the unlikely run of success my hometown Milwaukee Bucks have had in the NBA playoffs.  Essentially, Simmons proffers the sports equivalent of “Better to have loved and lost…” as a way to hierarchize whose fans have suffered more than others.  Fans of the New York Knicks, for example, are more “tortured” than, say, those of the Pittburgh Pirates not only because the former has gone longer without a title (1973 for the Knicks; 1979 for the Pirates), but also because the Knicks have since played in more “gut-wrenching” games and suffered through the historically ruinous tenure of general manager Isaiah Thomas.  All the Pirates have done recently is set the North American record for futility last fall when they completed their 17th consecutive losing season.

Now, Simmons is a bar-room philosophizer and an unabashed homer.  His version of Theory is mostly fun and innocuous as a conversation-starter (except when, um, it isn’t), but something about his terms of debate seem sympomatic to me of how mainstream sports media institutions cover various teams, markets, and their fans.  That is, the teams/fans we define as most “tortured” or “suffering” are almost always the ones that have first been deemed worthy of our attention.  Part of this definition, obviously, is based on history.  The Chicago Cubs became the nation’s “Loveable Losers” in large part because they haven’t won the World Series in over 100 years.  The other part of the definition, though, is based on narrative.  Teams with a long history of losing have ready-made stories for sound-bite-sized consumption; others have charismatic superstars or cancer survivors or some other compelling triumph over adversity^TM.  But what about the teams that have neither history nor story; the ones that simply loiter in the lower half of the standings year-in and year-out; the ones so unremarkable that they don’t even have a bandwagon?  And what happens when these teams do, every once in a while, become relevant?

This brings me to the Milwaukee Bucks and their unexpected playoff success against the far superior Atlanta Hawks.  Both teams share similar histories of middling success, but the Hawks play a camera-friendly brand of basketball that’s led to their home court being nicknamed the “highlight factory.”  Talking points and b-roll for games telecast from Atlanta were a no-brainer, but what of their star-less, style-less opponents?  Some tidbits about the telecasts from Milwaukee:

• When coming back from commercial during game 4, ESPN showed stock footage of the Capitol building and State St. in Madison, WI.
• Responding to an Atlanta player’s complaint that “there ain’t nothing to do in Milwaukee,” color commentator Jon Barry half-jokingly sang the praises of the city’s beer and bratwursts.
• Marvelling at the unusual sight of capacity crowds in Milwaukee’s Bradley Center, players, coaches, and broadcasters alike asserted that the Bucks were “doing this for the city,” the ultimate trope for narrativizing sporting “success” in a small market.

Regarding the last bullet point, don’t mistake this for a big-market vs. small-market beef (the Los Angeles Clippers are just as pitiful and ignored by sports media as the Pittsburgh Pirates).  I just want to know more about the isolated incidents of irrelevance like the ones I experienced this past week, ones that are inexorably swallowed up by coverage of the Yankees’ victory parade or LeBron’s free-agency or Tim Tebow, lemme tellya, this kid, he has HEART, but he has no chance in THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE ^{TM, must never be said as acronym and must always be shouted}.  I want to know more about the teams that perennially make first-round playoff exits, or ones that had no business being there in the first place.  I want to know more about expansion franchises and league contractions and the flotsam and jetsam of teams that relocate.  I want to know about season-ticket holders for the WNBA and the MLS.  I want to know how a Toronto Raptors fan feels about Vince Carter, how a Seattle SuperSonics fan feels about Kevin Durant, or how a Florida Marlins fan feels about Scott Stapp.

Mostly, I want fans who claim to suffer so much more than those not fortunate enough to follow a tortured team to recognize the difference between being “tortured” and being irrelevant.  If you’re really not sure which you’d rather be, try meeting a 17-year-old Pirates fan.

After failing in its first attempt to put a cheaply-produced show by a once-loved comedian in the last hour of primetime, NBC is shaking things up a bit starting this Thursday (after a preview last night). Five thoughts on The Marriage Ref:

1:  The clumsy, focus-grouped-to-death opening sequence for this program sets an ominous tone.  Look, Dick, the winter games provided a nice (if troubled) change of pace during what is traditionally one of the year’s slowest stretches in sports goings-on, and we’re all thankful for that.  But just because the three major American sports are a non-entity on NBC six out of seven days of the week doesn’t mean we don’t know baseball doesn’t have any refs.  The purpose of the opening seems to be to communicate Jerry Seinfeld’s endorsement before the bait-and-switch reveal of comedian Tom Papa as host.  Which leads me to wonder…

2:  Who is the star of this show?  Papa, a forgettable television “that guy” who appears to have powerful friends, is billed below the rotating cast of celebrity chucklers.  He’s joined in taped segments by two feuding couples and in-studio by legendary sports broadcaster Marv Albert and an NBC news personality who contributes relationship-related trivia seemingly ripped from the headlines of US Weekly.  Seinfeld has a history of well-meaning cronyism, but at least Spike Feresten got to sit down and talk one-on-one.  Papa looks as though he’s just waiting his turn to chime in on how men, boy, they sure are pigs, and women, don’t even get me started, with the shopping and the yakkety-yak.

3:  What is at stake in this show?  “Winners” are declared in a decidedly anti-climactic fashion after Papa listens to the input of the celebrity panel, and it’s not until the episode’s end that we learn everyone gets a vacation.   The re-enacted arguments don’t give us any time to get to know/care about any of the couples, so it’s clear they exist merely as fodder for the strained banter and over-laughing of Seinfeld and company.  It’s like eavesdropping on the world’s most boring cocktail party or, perhaps more appropriately given the program’s overstuffed design and cacophonous cackling, like forgetting to hit mute during halftime of NBC’s Sunday Night Football.

4:  The combination of variety show-style breeziness and sound-bitey reality segments provides for some troubling representations of gender and ethnicity.  The first couple, Italian-Americans from Long Island, quarrel over the husband’s desire to have his deceased dog stuffed and displayed in their home.  He gesticulates and speaks forcefully in trying to convince his wife, a motion Seinfeld apes in a split screen:

In an interview with the couple later on, the husband again aggressively tells his wife to shut up, something that, under any other circumstances, would be cause for concern.  Thankfully, though, we’re given an immediate cutaway to the original-Jersey Shore-girl, Kelly Ripa, who finds it hilarious.

The next segment features an African-American man in Georgia who wants to install a stripper pole in the bedroom.  While his wife rebuffs the request with increasingly calm conviction, the husband (who at one point claims that if they were home alone and he “put some rap music on, [she]’d be twirling all around that pole”) devolves into a televisual iteration of the hypersexualized black male stock characters that Donald Bogle identifies as having been an integral part of American visual storytelling since cinema’s earliest days.  After the taped bit, we’re fed dubious statistics about the growing popularity of pole-dancing as exercise, with Ripa saying the wife “should get freaky-deaky with him” and Alec Baldwin chiming in with Donaghy-esque smarm.

5:  Jerry Seinfeld has lost whatever goodwill he gained back with last fall’s Seinfeld non-reunion reunion on Curb Your Enthusiasm.  I’m reminded here of a pop-culture eulogy written by The A.V. Club‘s Nathan Rabin for John Travolta after, well, you remember:  “…bad enough to negate the last 25 years of his career…from now on, he will be seen not as the charismatic star of Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction, but as John ‘Battlefield Earth’ Travolta, the perpetrator of a film that will go down in history alongside Howard The Duck and Heaven’s Gate as shorthand for Hollywood at its out-of-control worst.”  Jerry Seinfeld, this is your Battlefield Earth.

Last week, various sites began circulating the red-band trailer for MacGruber, a feature film based on the most popular (I guess) Saturday Night Live sketch of the moment.

5 thoughts:

1:  Admittedly, this movie looks worthwhile, and, to paraphrase Liz Lemon, I want to go to there as soon as it opens.

2:  I did not say I think this movie will be funny, but that it looks good.  Directors of SNL movies–often either Lorne Michaels’ in-house hacks (A Night at the Roxbury‘s John Fortenberry, Wayne’s World 2‘s Steven Surjik) or his mercenary cronies (Superstar‘s Bruce McCulloch, Stuart Saves His Family‘s Harold Ramis)–tend to favor the flat lighting and staging characteristic of live television sketches, and understandably so.  I’m not saying MacGruber director Jorma Taccone (the other cute one in Andy Samberg’s Lonely Island troika) is the next John McTiernan, but he’s clearly gussied up the flick a bit.  From an industrial perspective, MacGruber is a product of the post-Apatow world, where comedies can no longer drive in the middle lane and be content with a $40 million domestic gross.  Some big budget ‘splosions go a long way to playing up the action in the “action-comedy” tag, as does the casting of AB-list actors like Val Kilmer and Ryan Phillippe.

3.  There’s something more at work in the look of the movie.  The hacky-one-liners-delivered-amidst-kick-assery align with Taccone and company’s continuing love affair with the pop culture of the late 80s/early 90s, but it’s one that transcends mere parody.  What makes the Lonely Island’s comedy album Incredibad so enjoyable, for example, is the craft and care apparent in its production and songwriting.  They seem just as invested in re-creating genuinely fun music of the era as they do in saying “Wasn’t Color Me Badd silly?”  With MacGruber, I see the same balance of reverence and ridicule for the work of Mel Gibson, Steven Seagal, and, of course, Richard Dean Anderson.  This impulse was on display in 2008’s underrated Pineapple Express as well, a movie criticized for suddenly turning unfunny in its climactic shootout.  Good action movies with comedic elements are a dime a dozen; why can’t we try it the other way around?

4.  Also, ok, this movie looks funny.  Will Forte has been responsible for nearly all of the post-Weekend Update bizarro sketches worth remembering, and I think he’s got a talent for the absurd (see his work on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, for example) that goes untapped week after week by Seth Meyers’ writing staff of–if all the clumsy gay and fart jokes are any indication–11-year-old boys.  Bill Hader recently said MacGruber would be “a hard-R comedy,” an indication that the movie will go to places forbidden by broadcast regulations.  The R rating also expands the film’s story possibilities.  The most common knock on sketch-to-screen movies is the difficulty of adapting a sketch’s one-note-ness, when, actually, it’s the very quality that should allow creators to expand the premise anywhere they want to.  Films like Wayne’s World and The Ladies Man arrived onscreen with their characters and storyworlds rather fleshed-out in comparison to those of MacGruber.  MacGruber is just as much a recurring character as the other SNL characters-turned-movies, but its meme-friendly run time prevents the sketch from having to be the guiding narrative force for the film.

5.  Man, Val Kilmer looks terrible.

The Gap has long had a knack for exploiting cultural detritus and ruining things you love. To wit:

Hey confused Xers and bored boomers, looking for attire to impress everyone else at the community center as you embarrassingly dally in a faux-fad? No? What if we sold it to you with egregious bullet-time shots? People like that sort of thing in 1998, yeah? Nice.

Hey most influential electronic musicians of the decade, want a shitload of money? Yeah? Ok if we let The Other Sister stiffly gyrate in front of you? Sweet.

There’s nothing really noteworthy about The Gap’s latest campaign, other than that it’s presently on television often. All your favorite warmed-over cultural touchpoints are there. The drum-machine. The not-so-coincidental Glee vibe. The flannel, dear God, the flannel.

There’s even a manufactured controversy. In between grooming pundits for various cable news appearances and supportin’ everyone’s favorite hockey mom, the American Family Association found time to launch a boycott of The Gap because of the ad’s shocking, SHOCKING tagline, “Happy do whatever you wannukah.” (What scamps!) Maybe it’s because I’ve seen this ad so many times admist the deluge of Sarah Palin coverage, but it seems there’s some basis for comparison there. On Wednesday, Jon Stewart asserted that we shouldn’t hate Palin because she’s a gerund-defying dolt, but because she’s a walkin’/talkin’ simulacrum, “a conservative boilerplate madlib…delivered as though it were the hard-earned wisdom of a life well-lived.” Gap holiday ads serve a similar function, passing off the discourses of Christmas consumerism as cheeky omnireligiousness. Look, I’m not trying to be cynical. I rocked the hell out of those khakis in my Dawson Leery phase. Just don’t be surprised if, the next time you stop by a Republic of Gap Navy, the store employees have been replaced by smart-alecky mannequins adorned in garish woolen garb. Sounds crazy, I know, but this is a crazy time of year.