Heather Gold

-Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod and me, NYTimes op-ed

Van’s entire piece is worth reading about what it feels like to be caught in Washington DC doing politics in real-time right now via the web.

I’ve been exploring the process what it means to be “Private” (aka yourself) in Public for some time now. It’s what solo performer, comedians, performance artists and many performers do. When it’s chosen an you provide the context it can be very powerful. Of course the latest political episode is particular poignant because Shirley Sherrod spoke in public on behaviour of her government employer but apparently of her own choosing and gave plenty of context which made her story about race and class understanding really powerful. And it’s that context which was taken away by Breitbart’s selective editing and the ensuing political playout of anxious reactions.

And I still believe that it is this act that makes the world safe for you as I said during my 20009 SXSW panel Everything I Need to Know About the Web I Learned From Feminism. But the always brilliant and challenging danah boyd noted that it’s a privilege to be yourself in public. And of course people behave differently in different publics.

The “public” of the media and the blogosphere and political DC are all different. Of course our political “public” is theoretically supposed to be the place in which we solve common problems but this kind of judgemental-ness and harsh manipulation which serves political and media business ends isn’t always in the interests of our common good.

This rend is an old media and political one. It’s not new. The fact that the real-time web is speeding it up is a little bit new. What will be new and is necessary is what Van Jones mentions: not the truth about how people are or what they’ve said but when we can handle it.

An individual matures when they can handle difference. It’s called differentiation ( “the ability to separate one’s own intellectual and emotional functioning from that of the family”). An individual heals from depression or trauma when they get to a point when they feel they can handle their feelings. Our body politic and publics seem to me to operate just like a person.  And I think Van is right, the key word is handle.

As an individual you can’t control the world, you can only get better at feeling you can handle it and the change and challenges it presents you with. It’s the same thing for the media and our politics. And sometimes you have to bottom out before you are motivated to change. And it looks like our politics are heading there.

The Net provides a place to attack each other better and I wager it’s connectedness (and our real-life connectedness with each other and our selves) could also help us get better at handling once we decide that’s what we need to work on.

Fun video link: danah boyd’s comments on how gendered behaviour plays out in social networks (thx @allaboutgeorge)

(HT: Jerry Michalski)

 

More info and advance tickets at only $10, here.

 

Facebook goodness (RSVP to make make my day).

 

And yes, my Torts professor really did have Tourettes.

 

 

I made this in March 2007 .  We know how to make things and a way of life that is generative and sustainable. We need to give our attention to it, which is to say, each other. 

“I call upon [each in] the jury as a father to say whether Lord Queenberry was not justified in endeavoring to every man in his power to rescue his son from the baneful domination of the prosecutor [Oscar Wilde] [for]…making his son into a woman.”

-Lord Queensbury’s solicitor in Wilde’s prosecution of him for criminal libel, 1895

More on Wilde and the law in the beta of my show The Law Project NYC 7/28/10. BUY TIX. 

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This is the audio of one of the first if not the first events satirizing the web. I put it together at SXSW in 2000.

Details of all the performers are here and included 

Of special note is Thomas Scoville’s Howl.com (predating the McSweeney’s take on the next go round of web immolation 2.0 style) and Justin Hall, (@jah) the first “blogger” and link list creator reading a list of “Business Opportunities I’ve Missed.”

((tag: comedy, parody, Alan Ginsburg, web, Internet, dot com, web 2.0, social media))

photo: Melissa Gira Grant

I headlined at an event called Comedy in the Park last night in Brooklyn. 

Comedy venues are usually deep dark womblike basements. This was the opposite.

Nothing to contain the “room” but you. And of course, it’s tough to be more interesting to look at than the Manhattan skyline or the occasional unremarkable Burg hipster modeling with a fox mask on.

I was standing on a rock using a mic and little guitar amp with a wire run from the booker’s van. It gave you exactly the same delicate tones as the guy on the street corner screeching you into Jesus love through Spanish language hell and damnation. 

So I did a little Jewish version of what our evangelical sound would be and almost as if on cue a Hasidic men (orthodox Jew) wandered right in front of me and my bare shoulders and knees.    

There was nothing to do but buy an audience member a coconut ice from the ice cream man going by and up the absurd with a wedding story that really showed some promise. I was grateful to have finally found a NY ‘room” where you could actually work out long material for my interactive style because I really was able to bring people in and connect in that space. It was like the comedy equivalent of ankle weights.  

((tag: stand-up comedy, Williamsburg, Jewish, wedding, absurd, fox))  

This post by Andrew Ladd is the latest contribution by a male writing trying, in part to explain why we see so many fewer women in comedy shows like SNL and The Daily Show and also why, anecdotally, he believes most people (men) say they know more funny men than women.

Only men seem interested in writing these kind of things. Men who aren’t comedians.  I suppose anyone looking for traffic or attention like to drudge out the old: men and women are just different chestnut too then we can all have a Billy Jean/Bobby Riggs moment for a day or so. Women respond. I mean look at me. I’m responding. I guess it’s proof, finally, that I am a woman.

But this comes on the heels of last night’s post (which was lost, but written after being inspired by Melissa Gira Grant’s beautiful tumbleblog) to start blogging about my process of creating The Law Project and my own internal way of seeking to continue to smush stand-up, theatre, performance and interactivity. That is to say, I’ve been a little torn. Do I keep pursuing stand-up or commit only to solo shows ? I really am not a fan of either/or. And I love much about both. And storytelling, performance etc. More of this in future days. But i am explaining why I have decided to do the decidedly female thing of responding to a male article about whether and how women are funny. 

Ladd argues that women are funny in different ways than men are and that we (men) need to become more used to this other kind of anecdotal humor because we’re missing out if we don’t. He discovered this difference when a professor forced him to watch the sitcom Reba for his sociology thesis. Apparently you can get a PhD in Reba:

Even if we don’t get rid of any current forms of humor, we still ought to supplement those with new, more “female” ones. If Comedy Central had an “Anecdotal Humor Hour” alongside its usual nightly line-up, then women wouldn’t have to get their asses out on the The Daily Show or play bimbos in SNL skits or tell hecklers (à la Roseanne Barr) to “suck my dick!” in order to “be funny”—and then there would probably be a lot more women who wanted to give it a try. (Okay, so “Anecdotal Humor Hour” sounds awful, but all that proves is that I shouldn’t be a television producer.)

More importantly, having more “female” humor in the mainstream would help begin to re-teach everyone, in particular men, what humor really is—or at least, what it can be. My experience with Reba shows that men just need to experience enough female humor to start finding it funny, and that conclusion seems borne out, too, by a few more general examples.”

Ladd is essentially calling storytelling a feminine form of humour.

I am not such a fan of the “men are wired this way, women are wired that way” kinds of arguments almost ever. Mostly because:

•fluidity exists, hello. 

•even if they’re true, you can’ do shit about it

•it’s the most awesome way to avoid any responsibility to make things better

So here are a bunch of my reactions to his piece in no particular coherent order. Consider them Andrew, like a stand-up set. Just bits. 

1. The structure of comedy clubs (though i believe comedy clubs are in serious decline) is to give people only 5-7 minutes. So the majority of people who work up to headline who have only gotten 5-7 (most true in a place like NYC where comedy time is tight) is a 45 minute set built out of whatever they learned to do in 5-7 minutes. My favourite comics don’t necessarily sound this way, so much: Patton Oswalt, Paul Mooney, Dave Chappelle…their long sets aren’t set up/ punchline all the way through. But that’s harder to learn to do if all you ever get are 5 minutes with which to work.

2. The funniest person I’ve ever known is my Aunt Fraida. Period. I’m a comic. I’ve seen a whole lot of comedy. She makes me pee myself like no one else. Yes I know the relationships sometimes she’s talking about and yes she’s a storyteller. Many many people and especially women have friends like her. They’re not all up on stage. They are at the kitchen table. My main early comedy time was eating dessert after Friday night dinner with my aunts, mum and grandma. But i learned it listening to the ladies from the shul and how funny Betty Van Rijk was. And men found her plenty funny too when they wee around to hear what she was saying. They didn’t need a lesson.

3. Even today you wouldn’t see Betty Van Rijk’s humour in a comedy club or SNL because Ladd has this right, they’re not built for that kind of humour. Anxiety capitalism is what drives it. That’s my name for the stuff economist  Umair Haque spends his time skewering. To me it says : give me a result NOW. i don’t trust anything ($, laugh) will come later. Givev it to me NOW. Again, NOW. Give me conflict to generate the biggest energy (loudest laughs). 

4. I believe the unexpected and contrast (yes this means diversity of people and elements in your comedic material) drive engagement that’s more ongoing. I talked about it some in my talk at Web 2.0 about How to Tummel. is everyone with you and is the humour ongoing? Sound like a talk show? An Afternoon talk show? Sound like relationships over display? In the new economy building your business is about an ongoing relationship. Kathy Griffin tells stories, but quips and throws out one-liners with the best of them. And her business and comedy are enriched by her relationship with her very specific audience. 

3. Getting stage time early means getting booked by people who know you. Often people who like you, are friends, like your stuff or that you booked at shows you put on. There have been a lot fewer chicks than dudes doing this though it’s certainly changing.

4. Not caring about whether or not men will want to hold your hand and tell you they love you makes it a hell of a lot easier to say whatever you want. 

5. A lot of what you have seen depends a lot upon who has had the authority to hire people and greenlight movies and the assumptions they make and what they care about. 

6. When you tell stories or do things that are engaging and take time , or re different; you have to be ok without getting the laugh every 20 seconds. There’s the issue of the booker, is that the only way they evaluate you and you the much more primary thing. Can you tolerate not getting the laugh yet. Do you need that constant reassurance or can you tell there’s engagement and work to get there other ways? You then have to create a space in which you can learn to do that. That’s what I’ve done in every show I’ve built. When I created Tangent with my partner: the first alternative show in San Francisco we wouldn’t let comics do their material. I hadn’t done much stand up so I didn’t have any to not do. But I saw how uncomfortable the comics were-male and female – to let go of that rhythm even though we’d built a space with an audience (a very gender mixed audience) who *wanted* to be engaged and not just laugh every second. They w
anted intimacy, stories, thought-provoking stuff, feeling. And they were listening, You didn’t have to order them to listen to you by dominating the room, you could just be with them. 

Is that feminine? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s something only women can do. But it’s certainly not the mode of most comedy clubs. 

7. Alternative clubs which supposedly broke away from the strictures of the Ha Ha Huts don’t feel so alternative to me. There’s no new tension in snark. Snark is old old old now. And it’s so self-protected. My fave joke about comedy that I think really only works for comics is: What’s the difference between a mainstream comic and an alternative comic? A mainstream comic is angry that he didn’t get his dick sucked when he was 13 and an alternative comic is humiliated.

Oops. Did I just do a set-up / punchline joke? I must have been confused earlier. I guess I really am a man.

Random link: stuff from Esman, Griffin, Garafalo, Rivers etc on the comedy and the bullshit.

((tags:: TheLawProject, stand-up, performance, storytelling, comedy, men , women, genderqueer, humour))