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.

As with any sketch comedy program, Kroll Show – a vehicle for comedian and The League star Nick Kroll – is heterogeneous. But it privileges certain sketches through multiple segments and narrative progression. One sketch in particular produced a spinoff in this week’s second episode (“Soaked in Success”), suggesting particular importance within the series’ overall text. Last week’s premiere episode (“San Diego Diet”) parodied the “overprivileged, incompetent young women go to work” reality genre (think Kourtney and Kim Take Miami) in a sketch that spins off to a “successful at serving the overprivileged” reality parody (think Dr. 90210) in the second. The first, PubLIZity, centers on a pair of women, both named Liz, who run a publicity company. In response to a client’s request for “something tasteful,” they organize a branded party, “Pirate Girl Rum Presents a Rockin’ Beach Bash to Benefit Cupcakes for Canine Cancer.” The client, a rare straight man for Kroll Show, summarizes, “The event cost $20,000 and it brought in $4,000 and I feel foolish.”

Conflict arises in this sketch as the industrious Liz butts heads with the more easygoing one. The work of organizing overwhelms hardworking Liz who is left to manage alone as the other’s superficiality distracts from the party. Deciding that her dog is too ugly, second Liz visits an animal plastic surgeon, Dr. Armand. Addressing the doctor, Liz explains, “I don’t want something in my house that’s, like, ugly… you wouldn’t talk to an ugly person.” Dr. Armand reassures her, “No, I don’t. I only hire very attractive people and my third wife is one of the most beautiful people I know.” The second episode elaborates on Dr. Armand in a sketch posing as a spinoff of PubLIZity. Armand of the House, as it is called, follows the doctor’s exploits dealing with his bratty son and distant wife. His dysfunctional family life is due in large part to his image obsession. As suggested in the first episode, Dr. Armand chose his spouse based on looks and in return she cannot even bother to hide that her interest in Dr. Armand is purely material. In demonstration, the doctor purchases his wife’s intimacy with jewelry. When the moment comes, she fakes an Ambien coma while he awkwardly dry humps her in the least erotic sex scene ever. The younger Armand and, in another sketch, “Gerry” Bruckheimer’s son represent the offspring of the image-obsessed. They are, for lack of space to elaborate, the worst.

In the 1991 Steve Martin film L.A. Story, a character praises the city because, “No one is looking to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is alright.” These sketches criticize L.A.’s insular culture, but are simultaneously a participant in its navel-gazing. As a parody of reality television’s focus on the parasitic industries that groom the images of the people and things that in turn run Hollywood’s mass media image production, these sketches play a game of infinite regression. The meta-meta-meta-discourse brings out the mutant traits of its too-small cultural gene pool.

Straight men often function as an audience surrogate, offering an orthodox logic against which the humorous twisted logic can contrast. The one significant straight man in these sketches, who should infuse some level of logic into the situation, has no effect on the goings-on. In another, similar sketch titled “Rich Dicks,” L.A.’s idle rich completely ignore the warnings of a put-upon maid, reminiscent of Zoila from Flipping Out. In this way, these voiceless “straight men” represent more particularly in this the viewer of these fictional shows. Ignoring the techno-democratic promise that a showrunner might read our tweets, on this side of the screen from a unidirectional mass media, reasonability seems to have very little voice in that world.

Kroll Show thus reflects an implicit viewing strategy with regards to much reality television: we laugh with a sense of superiority at that insular, overprivileged world. The only difference is that most of the shows on E! and Bravo pretend to not be in on the joke except that once a week, Joel McHale shows up to paratextually snark on our behalf. With programs like the ones Kroll Show critiques, distinctions between dominant and oppositional approaches break down to the point where the categories cease to mean anything. So while part of a critical discourse of class and image, Kroll Show is not critically outside of the programming it critiques. Instead it recreates, albeit more explicitly, a dominant reading position that masquerades as oppositional.