There’s been a lot of discussion prompted by Good Men Project founder Tom Matlack’s recent essay, in which he suggests that women want men to be more like them, and that manliness is a good thing. I’ll leave Amanda Marcotte to take on some of the larger assumptions in this piece (and to mount a defense as Matlack appears to denounce feminists and insist attacks on him are unfair because he’s a simple oral historian, or something), because I want to address this one: “So are dudes as a gender really assholes? If you look around in the press, on TV, and in popular culture you certainly might conclude that.” I’ve written in the past about some of the best shows about masculinity on television. Sure, it’s true — there are men who behave badly on television, but a lot of women who do same. But I also think that there are a lot of great manly male characters in pop culture right now. Among them:

1. With a bullet. Or with U.S. Army issued mustache trimmers. Parks and Recreation‘s Ron Swanson: Ron Swanson eats steak, drinks whiskey, smokes cigars, venerates John Wayne, reads Patrick O’Brian, hunts, camps, lays wreathes, lights torches, and teaches fourth-graders the importance of libertarianism. He also mentors women, loves mini-horses, shows up with hangover cures, self-sacrifices for the greater good, and dances with a fascinator on when he’s drunk. And he makes the point that none of these things are remotely inconsistent.

2. Because sometimes mentoring means you call the CIA on your mentee. And sometimes it means you show up with chicken soup. Homeland‘s Saul Berenson: Dude has one of the most serious beards on television. He blackmails the vice president of the United States in the name of justice. He talks around homegrown terrorists into giving up critically useful information. He responds to improper advances from his desperate mentee in an entirely proper fashion. He tries to woo back his estranged wife when she announces she’s leaving him to his workaholic tendencies, but ultimately respects her decision to go. Saul’s personal and professional courage are admirable. I’m going to be really sad if he turns out to be a mole.

3. Because sometimes being a good father means letting your daughter get mentored by Oprah. Up All Night‘s Kevin: Jason Lee’s had a bit of a wacky streak these past couple of years, but it’s turns out he’s exactly what this freshman comedy needed. As a contractor, he’s a nice counterbalance to the glitzy world new girlfriend Ava spends most of her time in without being an exploitable working-class fling. He spends Christmas with his ex-wife to create a smooth transition for his daughter. And he trusts and respects that Ava will find her way to a relationship with his daughter—and in expecting her to behave like a normal human, or as close as she’s capable of getting, helps her level up.

4. Cable executive. Tuxedo-wearer. Single father. 30 Rock‘s Jack Donaghy: Now, let’s be clear. Jack Donaghy has his flaws: a pathological hatred for his (admittedly dotty) mother, a disturbing level of comfort with turning children permanently orange, and a willingness to fake Dominican birth certificates to bolster Tracy Jordan’s struggling baseball team. But he loves smart women, whether he’s marrying first wife Bianca or talented cable-talker Avery Jessup or mentoring Liz Lemon; he’ll do anything for his father, include arranging a one-beneficiary all-star charity concert; and even if baby Libby is Canadian, you know that man will take all the care of her in the world.

5. The mismatched socks. The mad marksmanship skills. The naked omelet-making. Bones‘ Seeley Booth: I know Bones drives a lot of you crazy. But in the post-Bush years, and in this particular moment after Christopher Hitchens’ death, there’s something really valuable about throwing down a marker and declaring that while it may be manly to be able to use force, it’s morally correct to abhor killing even if you’re good at it. And even though David Boreanaz makes it look effortless, the character of Booth is all about the fact that manhood — whether in the form of resisting addiction, caring for a wayward brother, respecting and loving a strong but difficult woman, and holding on to your faith — is hard work. But it’s worth doing.

The bridge is yours.

-io9 has seen the prologue to The Dark Knight Rises and has some concerns.

-The Florida Family Association: inspiring interfaith collaboration!

-Popular websites as Justice League characters.

-Maureen Ryan is totally right about Awkward‘s greatness.

-30 Rock is coming back!

There’s something very strange about declaring that just because Parks and Recreation creates a meme-a-minute that it’s a semi-intelligent show, or that it’s “less risky” than its relatively ossified counterparts, 30 Rock and The Office:

Welcome to the meme-ification of the sitcom, a phenomenon in which the latest iteration of television comedy writing anticipates and includes the Internet as a secondary delivery vehicle right from the start. In the last couple of years a particularly digestible style of writing has emerged, well suited to various attention spans and bandwidths: on these shows, and also “2 Broke Girls” on CBS and “Man Up!” on ABC.

There’s a semi-intelligence to these sitcoms: smarter than traditional multi-camera, laugh-tracked shows, but less risky than single-camera progressive fare like “The Office” and “30 Rock.” The meme-ified series compose a new middlebrow, creative enough to alienate conventional sitcom fans and attract viewers in search of a challenge but not complex or jarring enough to be off-putting. (Despite its savvy writing “Community” on NBC is probably a hair too dense to fit this bill.) Their humor plays well for 30 minutes, but is also reducible and portable in ways that make sense online: punch lines are more like catch phrases that feel like Twitter hashtags, and scenes with celebrations, dances and odd body movements look hilarious when looped endlessly as a GIF.

First, if anything, 30 Rock‘s vastly more tied to the news cycle and the pop culture than Parks and Recreation is. And The Office is on its second cycle of the same story: that’s the defined inverse of risky. In both cases, Parks and Recreation‘s relentless optimism and commitment to making an argument about the value of public service are so square, so different from either the irony-saturation or the manufactured, bland cheeriness of most other fare on television that the show’s themes and tone have come out the other side and are cool again.

But more to the point, just because something’s meme-ifiable doesn’t mean it’s stupid. Juxtaposition humor is really hard: something like the Swanson Pyramid of Greatness has to come from a place of both deep character development and great writing. The sight of a very butch man in a tiny hat and veil, the kind of dance GIF this piece refers to, could easily get reduced to a bad drag joke, but in the Parks’ writers hands and on the capable head of Nick Offerman, it’s something far weirder and more delightful.

And it makes a lot of sense that the smart, generally sophisticated characters who populate these kinds of shows, would get meme-y in their actual lives: the Internet’s elevated the kind of in-jokes that groups of friends have had since Sam Malone ran a popular Boston watering hole, given people a tool to broadcast the narratives that govern their relationships. Sure, there’s a cyclical relationship between pop culture and real life, and shows provide grist for the mill. But having your characters act like people act in real life doesn’t mean you’re anti-intellectual or only partially bright. You can fulfill people’s fantasies of living in the culture that they love by letting them talk to their favorite reality stars, like Andy Cohen does on his Bravo late-night show. Or you can show them a riff on their group of friends that turns out jokes a little faster, that loves and fights at a slightly higher tempo, and make your audience wish they were that smart — and then go out the next day to prove it.

Hire Greenzo. Dude comes with some extreme environmental baggage, but after he quit NBC, he probably comes cheap. And he’s got conservative bona fides from working for the Lazio campaign:

Plus, then you don’t end up wearing the same jacket as a gay cinematic icon in an ad where you say incredibly regressive things about gay people

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally started playing Portal over the weekend, got through level nine, and enough cannot be said about how charming the game is. Because I haven’t played video games or been around gamers in any substantive way in a decade, I wasn’t as struck as Becky Chambers was by the opportunity to play as a woman (though Chambers’ piece is excellent). Instead, what struck me is the way the game’s sense of humor dovetails with larger trends in entertainment, particularly comedies set in corporations.

The minute GLaDOS declared in her menacingly chipper way: “Remember,’Take Your Daughter to Work Day’ is a great opportunity to have her tested,” I immediately thought of Veronica Palmer, the hilariously amoral executive from Better Off Ted. Veronica’s the kind of person who is perfectly comfortable freezing a man for science only to be annoyed when he emerges from the experience with a tendency to shriek unexpectedly; who when Ted, the senior vice president who works for for her, brings his daughter Rose to work and asks Veronica to look after the little girl, teaches Rose how to lay people off; who works with Ted to fake a major company initiative when rumor accidentally spreads that they’re on to something awesome. In other words, she is beyond the realms of usual corporate malfeasance into the realm of the hilariously evil. If she were Jack Donaghy, she’d be turning children orange and selling dangerously defective grills to North Korea. If she were Michael Scott, she’d run an office so depressing and No Exit-y that day-to-day life would become a comedy of the absurd. GLaDOS offers chipper warnings that various force fields might yank out Chell’s fillings, and that under certain circumstances, you’ll die and get a note in your permanent record (and I understand that worse is yet to come).

This mismatch between tone and content feels like an important hallmark of our corporate comedy to me. The things all these characters are doing are wildly malfeasant, but they’re not actually so malfeasant as to be unrealistic—in fact, sometimes, reality is worse than what we can imagine. Even Veronica Palmer would quail at Don Blakenship. But I think most Americans don’t really think we’ll do without corporations, or that we’ll radically change their role in American life. I’d like to believe that’s different. But until it is, joking about corporate power helps us reconcile ourselves to big companies’ role in our day-to-day lives, whether they’re employing us or building the world around us. It is to cry, but day-to-day, it helps to laugh.

In no particular order, things mostly political thoughts that struck me about the shows and roles that garnered Emmy nominations this year:

1. No love for Archer? I don’t adore the show, but it’s spiky and smart, a useful deconstruction of espionage in a pop culture that generally lionizes spies. And the animated programs feel tremendously calcified.

2. The movie or miniseries and casting nominations for Cinema Verite and Too Big to Fail are richly deserved. I loved both movies, which I thought were smart, stylish, and really valuable and entertaining distillations of big issues — the blurring line between reality and entertainment, and the financial crisis. Both augur good things for the large number of political projects HBO has on its slate.

3. Louis C.K. deserves every accolade he gets. I doubt he’ll beat Steve Carrell or Alec Baldwin for best actor in a comedy, but where those two performances toe up to the vast ocean of male insecurity and run away from it, Louis goes swimming in it. Presumably with his shirt on over a bathing suit.

4. Ditto for Idris Elba. The lack of Emmy love for The Wire or David Simon more generally is mystifying. But I do think Luther uses more of Elba’s range than Stringer Bell. And I’d like to see more British shows with short seasons get in the Emmy pool through the miniseries or movie category, if they’re not going to get in through the main series ones. I haven’t watched The Big C yet, so I’m yet to form an opinion on his guest role there, but clearly he’s an Emmy favorite. It’ll be interesting to see if an American network notices that and acts accordingly.
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There’s been a lot of discussion on political blogs about the way folks react to allegations of racism when they do something like call Obama a “food stamp president,” or dramatically misquote Attorney General Eric Holder. So it’s interesting to see Neda Ulaby take on (the blog post has the story embedded) the expansion of “that’s racist” as a meme in popular culture. Whereas in politics, people insist that there’s nothing that can be properly described as racially motivated, Ulaby suggests that in comedy, tossing around “that’s racist” as a catchphrase rather than as an actual argument waters down the accusation to the point of meaninglessness. Obviously, the scene she cites from Community is funny because it actually is about stereotypes — it starts with Jeff implying something white people probably shouldn’t say about black people, that they’re naturally athletic, and ends with Troy saying something about African-Americans that may not be true, but that he can get away with saying because he’s black:

Similarly, the first-season 30 Rock episode she cites is funny precisely because it’s about Liz Lemon tipping too far over the liberal white lady precipice, and getting so invested in what she thinks is her understanding of a broken educational system and poverty that she comes to the conclusion that Tracy can’t read. It’s funny because it illustrates the reach of racism, that it’s not just a matter of thinking, say, that black people are stupid, but that because people grew up in certain kinds of circumstances, they must be a certain kind of victim.

In other words, I think racial humor that maintains some actual sting, some actual revelation, is probably going to be funnier than a gif of a little kid, or newlyweds on Parks and Recreation tossing off the idea that sorting laundry is racist.

The AFL-CIO debuted a new series of comedy videos at Netroots Nation as part of a website they’re launching about collective bargaining. They’re a useful illustration, I think, of how to strike a comedic balance in critiquing corporate power—and of how much harder it is to use comedy to sell ideas rather than to criticize bad ones. Take this first video, with a Snidley Wiplash-esque corporate board discussing how to implement a new “Maximum Fun Workday” with extended hours and declaring, “We are discriminating against Americans under the age of 12 who should have the right to work should they so choose.” You can practically hear the moustache-twirling:

Now, contrast that with Portia di Rossi’s performance as Veronica on Better Off Ted:

The things the character is saying are much, much more ridiculous than the evil executives in the AFL-CIO’s video, and they’re funnier because of the utter sincerity of di Rossi’s delivery. She isn’t aware that she’s an avatar of corporate evil, and the juxtaposition of her evident conviction with the craziness of her ideas is simultaneously disconcerting and hilarious. It’s the same thing with Jack Dongahy on 30 Rock: his conviction that inventing dangerous microwave ovens or turning children orange is part and parcel with the American dream is a lot scarier than if he didn’t believe any of it and was just pure evil.

But any negative depiction of corporations is a lot easier to make funny than it is to make union organizing look wacky and hilarious. For a long time, the union narrative was essentially a dramatic one: life or death stakes, organizing as a means to reclaiming human dignity. That’s still the brand. Wacky things might happen along the way in a union campaign, whether it’s sexier-than-intended signs in Made in Dagenham or Pilar Padilla sneaking Adrian Brody out of an office building in a giant wheeled recycling bin in Bread and Roses. But the mechanics of the story are essentially dramatic ones, the power of the brand in stuff that’s tear-jerking.

At a moment when there’s a serious debate about the representation of women in the pages of major American publication, and serious efforts to spotlight the great work women journalists are already doing, there’s something…disconcerting about Edith Zimmerman’s profile of Chris Evans that’s on the cover of the latest GQ. It’s not so much this profile, which is really not so much a profile as a chronicle of hanging out with an action star, that read as odd to me. It’s that Zimmerman’s piece comes on the heels of the March issue, in which GQ published Jessica Pressler’s account of spending the night with Channing Tatum, a couple of Snuggies, and a bottle of tequila. For GQ, sending out a female reporter to get tipsy and a little frisky with an otherwise indistinguishable slab of beef appears to be their stab at creating a novel and enduring journalistic form, akin to the New Yorker’s revealing anecdote, followed by a statement of a larger problem, followed by an origin story. At this rate, I’ll be making it rain in strip clubs with Ryan Reynolds by November.

If GQ wants to get more women’s voices in the magazine, that’s a great thing, and I really hope they keep doing it! But the point of Ann Friedman’s work on Lady Journos, and of running the numbers on what magazines actually publish by women is not to convince magazines to run “girly” stories, or to get one woman in the door one time. If the relevant information the profile is supposed to deliver is anything other than Lady Writer Potentially Slept With Hottie, there are other ways to obtain that information, and other ways to frame the story — the revelation that Famous Dudes Drink is the equivalent of the newsflash that Famous Ladies Eat Truffle Fries. And women can do that reporting, and that framing. I’m pretty sure that Mac McClelland could go out, get glassed with Sean Bean, and find some way to use her experiences as a reporter in Burma to get him to tell her cool stuff about Game of Thrones.

I don’t know what the solution is here. If the way only way for women to published in certain kinds of magazines is to take these kinds of cheesecake assignments, should we say yes, and dunk them and then insist on better for the next thing in the hopes that there will be a next thing? If you’re a GQ editor trying to get more women in your magazine, and you feel like the only way you can sell that goal to your higher-ups, is it worth it?

My friend Tyler and I have talked a couple of times about how he feels uncomfortable watching 30 Rock because of the extent to which the show relies on Tracy Morgan’s real-world issues for humor. I was reminded of that today when a man named Kevin Rogers reported that at a club show, Morgan went off on an anti-gay tirade:

What I can’t take is when Mr. Morgan took it upon himself to mention about how he feels all this gay shit was crazy and that women are a gift from God and that “Born this Way” is bullshit, gay is a choice, and the reason he knows this is exactly because “God don’t make no mistakes” (referring to God not making someone gay cause that would be a mistake). He said that there is no way a woman could love and have sexual desire for another woman, that’s just a woman pretending because she hates a fucking man. He took time to visit the bullshit of this bullying stuff and informed us that the gays needed to quit being pussies and not be whining about something as insignificant as bullying. He mentioned that gay was something kids learn from the media and programming, and that bullied kids should just bust some ass and beat those other little fuckers that bully them, not whine about it. He said if his son that was gay he better come home and talk to him like a man and not [he mimicked a gay, high pitched voice] or he would pull out a knife and stab that little N (one word I refuse to use) to death.

It’s worth noting that it’s not like Morgan suddenly revealed new political opinions here. In 2009, he said sexual orientation is a choice in a performance that got him applauded by Spike Lee and Jane Krakowski.

This is the Charlie Sheen problem all over again, right? You can’t hire someone for their crazy*, and then expect to only get the crazy that’s beneficial to you, that’s harmlessly funny, the stuff of “I am a Jedi” skits, the falling asleep on your neighbor’s roof jokes, and an episode based on pretending you own someone else’s boat. Morgan’s latest rant is a very inconvenient form of crazy, especially since Tina Fey accepted an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation this spring for her work on 30 Rock (which in some way is sort of weird, since the show doesn’t have an out gay character in the main cast and the show doesn’t have any long-term engagement with gay issues other than running jokes about whether Liz dresses like a lesbian). I doubt he’ll get fired for this since the Hollywood apology machine is very efficient at helping people keep their jobs, and there’s a lot of leeway for comedians. Morgan’s already issued this apology through his reps:

I want to apologize to my fans and the gay & lesbian community for my choice of words at my recent stand-up act in Nashville. I’m not a hateful person and don’t condone any kind of violence against others. While I am an equal opportunity jokester, and my friends know what is in my heart, even in a comedy club this clearly went too far and was not funny in any context.

But 30 Rock‘s in need of a refresh anyway. The wacky-Tracy bits were getting old even before this added an ugly overtone to them.

*A couple of folks on Twitter have, I think fairly, questioned the use of the term “crazy” to refer to Mr. Morgan. I meant the term more in the sense of a “wild and crazy” guy kind of way, though Morgan’s character is meant to have diagnosable mental health issues, and to the extent that Morgan behaves eccentrically in real life (and my understanding is that he is a recovering alcoholic), I think that sense of unpredictability if not outright instability was one of the things that make him an appealing hire for the role.