As I predicted back in February when the White House Correspondents’ Association announced that Conan O’Brien would be returning to host their annual dinner, O’Brien’s routine on Saturday was a fairly tame one that took harder aim at the media than at anyone in power. But in between his bit:

and President Barack Obama’s routine:

there were some decent gags. Here are ten of our favorites:
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As Netflix has launched its big original series House of Cards and Hemlock Grove over the past few months, their choices of genres and styles has indicated a great deal about what that company thinks is worth emulating on broadcast television. House of Cards is a clear attempt to enter the anti-hero genre that’s done so well for networks like HBO, while Hemlock Grove is a nod to the emergence of horror on television, mostly thanks to FX’s wildly inventive American Horror Story.

But when Amazon put out eight original comedy pilots last week as part of a process by which viewership and viewer reviews will help the company decide which projects to turn into full-fledged shows, their choice of material actually suggested more about the holes that Amazon sees in the television ecosystem and is trying to fill. The eight pilots currently under consideration have a great deal in common, and for good and for ill, they do differ with broadcast television in ways ranging from use of language to genre. Given that Netflix is ramping up its original content offerings more slowly, it may take some time for that company to develop a brand that’s anything like HBO’s or CBS’s. But Amazon’s selections give us a much clearer sense of who Amazon thinks its core consumers are, and what kind of identity Amazon wants its original content to have. Here are four throughlines that were most striking:

1. “Adult” content: All of Amazon’s originals come with warnings about adult language and content. And all of them make use of the leeway apparently granted them by the warning, from the cussing Congressmen who live together in a Capitol Hill townhouse on Garry Trudeau’s Alpha House, to Moby telling an app developer in Silicon Valley start-up comedy Betas “You ever fuck an octopus? I fucked an octopus. It’s why I’m a vegan now,” to Zombieland’s introduction of a character who explains that her name is “Regina. Kind of like vagina, but with an R,” and then counts how many times another character can’t resist joking about it. It’s no question that the show that uses its license to be naughty most judiciously, musical web journalism intern sitcom Browsers, gets the most mileage out of it in a number in which Bebe Neuwirth, playing a riff on Arianna Huffington, explains in song that ” I’m smart but I’m hardly a genius / And I can’t say I’m good with a buck / But throughout my career / I’ve made perfectly clear / I’m someone with whom not to fuck.”

But permission to use the F-word is not the same thing as having genuinely grown-up ideas, or using explicit content to get at the reality of adult experience. And the ability to swear and to be sexual and somewhat gross on television is hardly new. FX has made use of its ability to go there so successfully in shows like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and The League that it’s spinning off a second network so it has more room to develop and to air original comedies and dramas. Nothing in Amazon’s pilots is nearly as explicit as the sex scene in the first episode of Girls. If Amazon wants to beat its competitors by expanding the realm of what its characters can say and do, it’s not enough to let them cuss. The company’s going to think about what its shows do with the leeway it’s granting them, and what ideas and experiences aren’t making it onto other networks.
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In 1993, 42.4 million households tuned in to the series finale of Cheers. Last Friday, almost 42 million people tuned in ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC to watch the last hour of the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old who today was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property resulting in death in the bombings a week ago of the Boston Marathon. There’s no question that a national news event, particularly one centered on a spectacular and seemingly inexplicable crime, would draw an enormous audience. But the juxtaposition of those figures from twenty years apart serves to illustrate a useful point: national tragedies, particularly crime stories, are perhaps the last form of television that has a truly mass audience.

The extent to which the American television audience has fragmented is extraordinary, and not entirely a bad thing, driven as it has been by dramatic increases in the numer of offerings available to viewers, and a dramatic increase in their quality. In the 1952-1953 second season of I Love Lucy, for example, the show averaged a 67.3 rating, meaning 67.3 percent of American television households were tuned into the show during its time slot. It’s hard to come up with a directly comparable number for Friday night’s news coverage because ratings are done by show rather than in the aggregate, but if 42 million households tuned in to watch the manhunt, that would represent 36.8 percent of America’s 114.2 million television households. Similarly, n Cheers’ fifth season, its highest-rated, the show, which aired from 1986-1987, pulled in an average rating of 27.2, which averaged out to 23.77 million viewers per episode. Friends pulled in an average of 24.50 million viewers per episode in its eighth season, which aired in 2001-2002. But the last year a show that won the Nielsen ratings had a rating of above 20 was 1997-1998, when Seinfeld pulled in a 21.7 rating. In 2011-2012, NBC Sunday Night Football pulled in the crown with a mere 12.9 rating.

I’m not sad that we have so much tremendous television on the airwaves these days, and that people have so many options for terrific viewing that are specific to their interests. But I am sorry that there’s nothing narrative that unites us as much as television viewers as a manhunt like this did. The reasons we tune into events like the chase after Tsarnaev are clear. The crimes he is accused of committing are real, rather than fictional, which raises the stakes on our desire for resolution and closure. The events are unscripted—unlike crime shows, where familiar detectives have a particular knack of ending standoffs, real life encounters between criminals and the police are far more volatile. And this is programming with great potential for further violence that could be aired live. Particularly given the recent death of fugitive former Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Dorner in a standoff with police at a remote cabin, and the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s brother, in a fight with police earlier in the day, the chase for Tsarnaev seemed like it could easily have ended in a bombing or a shootout, rather than with the surrender that eventually took place.

It’s fear and morbid curiosity—neither of which are unjustified emotions—that draw us to this kind of chase. In the past it was possible to create enormous audiences through compelling characters and long-established relationships. Now, that seems impossible, and the reactions that bring us together are darker. That doesn’t mean our responses aren’t genuine or valid. But it’s a shame that we’re sharing collective terror and anxiety on a greater scale than we’re sharing joy, transport, and simple humor.

This is a depressing statistic, crunched by writer and comedian Diana Wright: of the top-grossing 20 comedies for each of the last ten years, women have directed just 4.5 percent of them. Of those movies, all but one of them were directed by Anne Fletcher, Nancy Myers and Nora Ephron. And all of them are romantic comedies: there’s not a parody, an action comedy, road trip story, or buddy picture in the mix.

NPR’s Linda Holmes, who clearly is my main source of inspiration today, wrote in her very smart assessment of 30 Rock as that show wrapped up, that:

30 Rock may not have undone years and years of gender imbalance in running shows, and it may not have changed hiring practices, but it’s hard to remember now that before it came along, the entire idea of a woman having a comedy brand that translated to comedic opportunities for people other than herself was depressingly shaky as a public proposition. Again, that doesn’t mean women couldn’t do it or weren’t writing comedy — there were women writers from the very beginning at Saturday Night Live and elsewhere. But comedy’s creative centers of gravity in the public imagination were not generally women.

And one of the great things about 30 Rock was that romantic comedy was just one of the few things it did, whether the person with romantic troubles was Liz, Jack, Jenna, or even Tracy and Pete within the confines of their marriages. It did race comedy, class comedy, rural v. urban comedy, workplace humor, and political and cultural satire. We may be making progress in the kinds of comedy women can do on television. But clearly we’re a long way from women who can successfully build comedy empires in the movies based on multiple styles, much in the way that Adam McKay’s parodies are also both social commentary and effective romantic comedy.

Saturday Night Live is known for its topical humor, but the weekend before last, it sparked debate by wading into theological controversy. In what Hero Complex suggested was the “most blasphemous skit in ‘SNL’ history,” the show drew fire for airing a skit that satirized Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained by using a premise that is possibly even more controversial than Tarantino’s original: What if Jesus Christ rose from the dead…To exact revenge? As a thumping big-budget soundtrack rocks in the background, a voiceover touts the film as “A less violent ‘Passion of the Christ’” and quips “He’s risen from the dead … and he’s preaching anything but forgiveness.”

The studio audience seemed to love the skit, but, as happens with many of SNL’s forays into religious satire, the skit sparked a firestorm of criticism from conservative Christians. Twitter and SNL’s website immediately lit up with complaints about the segment, with commenters decrying it as “blasphemous,” “offensive,” and “just wrong.” The Catholic League was also quick to weigh in, calling the skit “vicious” and “uncharacteristically bloody”. Conservative televangelist Pat Robertson, for his part, reviled the whole thing “anti-Christian bigotry that is just disgusting.”

But there is something peculiar about the outcry over the “DJesus Uncrossed”: Most of the complaints aren’t emanating from the progressive Christian pacifists. Instead, much of the criticism is coming from hyper-conservative Christian circles, a world that, oddly enough, includes voices that preach a vision of Jesus eerily similar to SNL’s gun-toting Messiah.

Though the image of Jesus mowing down victims with a machine gun horrifies many Christians—and rightfully so—others, like Patheos blogger David R. Henson, have pointed out that hidden in SNL’s bloody humor is a powerful satire of an overly-violent, hyper-masculine subculture that has begun to influence not just our popular culture, also multiple strains of Christian theology. Influential mega-pastor Mark Driscoll, for example, has become famous for saying that he believes in a Jesus who has a “commitment to make someone bleed.” He reportedly refuses to believe in a “hippie, diaper, halo Christ” because, as he puts it, “I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” Meanwhile, churches across America have started creating “Fight Club” groups for men, and several Christian communities are even basing services around Mixed Martial Arts fighting.
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Jack Jenkins is a writer and researcher for the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

Because I read everything that Film Crit Hulk writes, I was particularly eager to see his take on the debates about what makes something funny, or not, in the wake of Sunday’s Oscar-related controversies. I was particularly struck by this section, and the question Hulk poses in it, after which he goes on to discuss the creation of comedic personas and the balance of revelation and harm in individual jokes, but that I wanted to take in a different direction:

COMEDY CREATES INHERENT DIVISIONS OF THOSE INSIDE THE JOKE AND THOSE OUTSIDE. AND QUITE FRANKLY, YOUR REACTION LARGELY DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU RELATE MORE TO THE MAKER OF THE JOKE OR THE VICTIM. OFTEN COMEDY IS CONSIDERED THE MOST PALATABLE BY SOCIETY WHEN IT’S IN THE FORM OF LIGHT RIBBING AND INCLUSIVE LAUGHTER, A COMIC RAKING OF THEMSELVES OVER THE SAME COALS AS YOU OR HULK. BUT ALSO WITH PURPOSE IS THE COMEDY OF SCATHING INDICTMENT, WHETHER DIRECTED AT SOCIAL MORES OR SOCIETY AT LARGE. BUT WHAT RESONATES WITH AN AUDIENCE IS LARGELY DEPENDENT ON THE COMEDIAN’S INTENT.

SO IN A WORLD WHERE WE ARE FREQUENTLY BOTH PERPETRATORS OR VICTIMS OF COMEDY DEPENDING ON THE IDEOLOGY, WHAT UNIVERSAL APTITUDE DO WE HAVE TO TELLS US WHEN A LINE OF COMEDY IS OKAY? HULK KNOWS WE CAN’T DICTATE THE TERMS OF “WHAT” CAN ACTUALLY BE SAID, BUT WHAT MAKES OFFENSE PALATABLE?

One thing I’ve been thinking about a great deal recently is the unique and contradictory ways in which we seem to react to jokes. I think we generally understand that there is not a normative definition of what is frightening and what is not because most of us have been exposed to the lessons of Room 101, the place in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where prisoners are exposed to “the worst thing in the world”—which happens to be different for everybody. When we look at paintings in a museum, no one has a problem with the idea that some of us are going to respond more strongly to Michaelangelo or to Robert Rauschenberg. And internet commenters aside, we tend to recognize that there are a lot of kinds of physical beauty it’s possible to respond to.

But we also recognize that if a movie, television show, or book fails to achieve what the author seems to have intended, including in cases where those pieces of art—be it intentional or unintentional—glorify sexual assault, racism, or violence, we’re allowed to critique its creator without being accused of violating the First Amendment. But criticize a comedian, whether he’s standing on a club stage, soft-shoeing in front of the Dolby Theater audience on Oscar night, or Tweeting from an institutional account, and a different set of rules seem to apply. The act of criticism is taken as proof that the critic speaking lacks critical judgement. We’re told that comedians get a pass because their job isn’t to make people comfortable, but to speak difficult truths—but if that is their privilege, we’re also not allowed to ask questions about whether or not they’re fulfilling that responsibility. Criticisms that suggest that jokes were cliche, ineffective, or fail to live up to the standards that are invoked to argue that comedians deserve special protection get recast as evidence of bias or humorlessness. A perfect example of this is how frequently feminist calls for rape jokes to be constructed precisely and their targets to be chosen with care are recast as evidence that feminists don’t understand comedy. Unlike every other form of pop culture, comedy seems to have a special status. At one stroke, the idea that people are allowed to have multiple opinions is invalidated, and replaced by the idea that there is an objective correct view of any joke—that it’s funny, and the comedian was correct to make it.

This is a rotten state of affairs for any number of reasons. It’s an incorrect and unproductive interpretation of the First Amendment, one that suggests that the right to speak also includes the right to be free from judgement and criticism, a profound distortion of the functioning of the marketplace of ideas. A related problem, as my friend, Salon TV critic Willa Paskin, put it a conversation between us, is the presumption in many of these discussions that it’s a normative good that we shatter all taboos, simply for the sake of shattering them. It’s an attempt to shut down discussion, which is always a sign of intellectual anxiety. And it denies people who are doing comedy a discussion of efficacy and joke construction that could help sharpen their material, which you’d think would be sad for them, or for any artist. Immunity is rarely a helpful state for people who want to grow in any professional capacity. And if we’re going to give a class of people extra credit for calling out societal hypocrisy and harm—an argument defenders of comedians under fire often employ—of course we have an interest in making sure that they’re actually doing that job, not just hiding behind the job description, and doing it well.
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Beasts of the Southern Wild star and youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis is a lovely little girl who shows plenty of signs of turning into a reliable talent and a charming presence on the awards-season publicity circuit. And for some reason, she became the target of some of the most unpleasant jokes both during last night’s Academy Awards and in the commentary about them.

Seth MacFarlane cracked that “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It was a line that could have been at Clooney’s expense, if it hadn’t seemed so congratulatory—both MacFarlane and Clooney have a tendency to date much younger women. And as I wrote earlier today, MacFarlane immediately defused any sense that he was going after Clooney by tossing him a mini-bottle. Mega-stars, it seems, must be protected from any hurt feelings or criticism, but little girls? Not so much. Things got worse later in the evening when the Onion’s twitter feed Tweeted, and subsequently deleted “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c—, right? #Oscars2013.” It was jarring and appalling to see that kind of language directed at a nine-year old girl, even if there’s a world where the concept of the joke could have been funny. Suggesting that a little girl who carries purses shaped like puppies and has a habit of flexing adorably on the red carpet or when the camera comes to her is secretly a Machiavellian schemer or a diva is a reasonable joke to me, and a similar schtick was a long-running and successful plot point on 30 Rock. It even could have been a riff on the irrational haterade directed actresses like Anne Hathaway. But the Onion’s choice of sexual, nasty language blew up that possibility: it was programming to the character length, not the actual quality of the gag.

To the publication’s credit, the Onion appears to have realized this. The company’s CEO, Steve Hannah, just published a Facebook post asking for Wallis’ forgiveness:

I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

But beyond the Onion’s apology, it’s worth thinking more deeply about why the attempts at satire aimed at Wallis went so badly last night.
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I like Sarah Silverman’s political videos as much as the next girl—the Great Schlep, in which she encouraged young Jews to turn out their Florida-retiree grandparents to vote for then-Sen. Barack Obama for president is inspired—but I actually think that, while the idea of enlisting men to support reproductive rights is a great impulse, this doesn’t quite hit the mark:

“Does your fight have to be yours to take it on?” she asks. But simple solidarity is actually aiming a little low in this case. Women may be the people who get pregnant, and who are subject to transvaginal ultrasounds, but men are affected by our access to contraception, too. Before Obamacare covered contraception fully, it was a household expense, and one that in some cases, could be a real strain. If neither half of a couple want to get pregnant, an unexpected pregnancy, it may be a woman who has to go through an abortion or pregnancy, but the decision-making process and resulting strain and expenses affect both parties, and it’s in both of their interests to avoid getting to that point.

There’s a balance, here, of course, between getting men invested in women’s reproductive rights and health issues, and making it clear that men and women are affected in profoundly different ways by access to medical contraceptives, prenatal care, abortion and adoption services, or by being subject to transvaginal ultrasounds or required viewings of ultrasounds. But being affected differently, and respecting women’s agency, isn’t the same thing as not being affected at all. That’s a difficult needle to thread, particularly in a political comedy video. But it’s a distinction that’s worth trying to make when we talk about men’s support for reproductive rights.

The late Christopher Hitchens’ article in Vanity Fair arguing that women aren’t funny has done a lot of harm over the years, lending pedigreed intellectual credence to an argument made by lots of incredibly dumb comedians and commentators everywhere. But one useful thing the response to the piece has accomplished is to push Vanity Fair to do somewhat better at covering female comedians. There was the 2008 feature “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” The “What Tina Wants” profile of Tina Fey from 2009. And now, even better than separating out female comedians from the pack, the magazine is doing its first ever comedy issue, putting female comedians, including non-white ones and non-tiny ones, on three separate, great-looking covers.

And even more than that, it’s published an interesting poll, conducted through CBS facilities, of 1,132 adults, that suggest some revealing things about how audiences view comedy. More men than women think sexual assault is the one topic they’d most like to see comedians put off-limits: it was the choice of 38 percent of men, and 32 percent of women, ahead of “September 11,” “the sick and disabled,” and “religious figures.” The second most-popular response for women, at 28 percent, was “all of them,” the choice of only 14 percent of men. So maybe women do have a sensitive streak when it comes to humor generally. But among everyone else, men may be just as uncomfortable with bad jokes about sexual assault as women are, even if they aren’t as vocal about it. Comedians who assume they’re on safe ground in mostly-male audiences might want to check their set lists twice.

Both men and women in the survey think men are funnier than women—65 percent of men said male comedians were funnier and 54 percent of women agreed. 30 percent of women said women were funnier, compared to just 13 percent of men. And 18 percent of men and 12 percent of women said that there was no difference. Some of this may just be a result of who men and women see being funny in our media environment: there are a lot more extremely famous male stand-ups than women, and more male sitcom stars than female sitcom stars. Or maybe it’s Hitchens, and Adam Carolla, and everyone else. But that perception does suggest that women going into the comedy business face some hurdles in convincing audiences that they can be just as funny as men.

I’d recommend taking the survey with a grain of salt—after all, its best sitcom of all time question didn’t even offer up the option of I Love Lucy. But it’s still nice, in a debate that is on a lot of levels completely and utterly ridiculous, to see an organization that has a record of Not Helping, at least pulling together a little data that can help us have more productive conversations.

I agree that Hollywood often does a rather sappy job when it tries to tell stories about people with disabilities, but unlike Ian Buckwalter, writing on The Sessions, which I reviewed in February (when it had a different title), I don’t actually think the answer is that our depictions of disability need to get more despairing:

There’s no rule that says the tougher film has to be the better one, but the problem with Intouchables and The Sessions is that they achieve their sunny dispositions by pulling punches. Any hint of difficulty is immediately tempered so as not to upset the lightly comedic tone of both films. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the scene in The Sessions when a power outage causes a failure in the iron lung that allows Mark to breathe. While it’s in character for the devoutly Catholic Mark to greet potential death with the same beatific acceptance he carries through much of the rest of his life, that doesn’t mean the film can’t recognize the dire nature of the circumstances. This should be a tense moment, but The Sessions refuses to acknowledge highs and lows, tension and release. It flatlines from start to finish, even if Mark doesn’t.

Audiard strikes a better balance in Rust and Bone, demonstrating that one can take a pat inspirational story and infuse it with the hardship required to make that inspiration feel earned. Following the loss of her legs, Stéphanie is nearly as defeated as the stroke victim of Amour. As a whale trainer, she makes her living on her feet, and her character’s despair is palpable. More importantly, Audiard makes it impossible to turn away from that despair, unlike the glossed-over expository conversations in Intouchables and Sessions about how their characters dealt with that loss.

The thing is, there’s a difference between a story about someone learning to cope with a newly-acquired disability, and a story about someone with a disability doing something else, like having sex or falling in love. In that first category of story, the goal of the movie is presumably to communicate to a majority able-bodied audience that their negative expectations for what their lives would be like if they suddenly lost, say, the ability to walk, aren’t accurate or complete, and that joy, love, and physical pleasure are still possible. As much as I dislike the idea that movies about people with disabilities need be tragic, I understand why these categories of films include that register of emotions, because they’re a way of hooking in audiences who fear the idea of grave accidents or infections that suddenly change their capacities.

But I don’t think The Sessions is a movie about a man learning to cope with a disability—in fact, it’s a movie about a man who’s coped very well with the limitations in his mobility for years. The film explains those arrangements because it assumes that an able-bodied audience will be interested in how Mark gets around and makes a living. But it’s emphatically not about him coming to terms with the fact that he has to use an iron lung, or hire an aide, or even that in a power outage, Mark could be in considerable danger. Instead, The Sessions is a sex comedy with Mark’s experience with polio as the reason he never lost his virginity. It’s a more concrete explanation than The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the tone is kinder and more emotionally attuned than that movie (Legit, which FX plans to put on its schedule at some point, has a pilot that is basically a glorious mashup of The Sessions and em>The 40-Year-Old Virgin). But it’s essentially a similar concept.

And I don’t see why a movie like that has to be dark, or despairing. In fact, way the arcs for a lot of the best sex stories work is that there’s a lot of anticipation, and then an anti-climax, rather than an enormous climb and an inspiring victory. The 40-Year-Old Virgin ends with relatively brief sex and a goofy sing-a-long: the emotional work’s done, the victory achieved. Rats Saw God, one of my favorite young adult novels, actually draws some wonderful drama from the main characters’ reactions to the first time they have sex: the fact that it isn’t a transformational experience leaves them feeling confused and somewhat alienated from each other. In The Sessions, the obstacles are Mark’s anxieties, premature ejaculation, his desire to give pleasure as well as to feel it. These are not the things of triumph-over-disability movies: they’re things that a lot of us experience, and Mark’s confinement to his iron lung is the particular thing that inflects his journey through them. But that doesn’t make these experiences and emotions unimportant—if anything, that Mark is concerned with giving pleasure even though it’s harder for him to, say, touch his partner, makes him a hero in comparison to less thoughtful people, whether they have physical limitations or none at all. Sex comedies shouldn’t have to automatically move into a tragic key because a person with a disability is involved in them. Rather, how persons with disabilities—not all of whom acquire those conditions dramatically or suddenly—navigate circumstances that they share with those of us who don’t have disabilities tells us about the universality of those experiences, rather than offering testaments to the resilience of the human spirit.

There’s something disquieting about the idea that the only uses of characters with disabilities should be to provide those testaments. As with, say, gay characters, telling stories about difference is only a first order accomplishment when it comes to diversity. By all means, tell stories about what it means to suddenly move into the ranks of people with disabilities, the legions of wheelchair users. But remember that people are born with disabilities too, and people who have disabilities do far more with their lives than accommodate themselves to the limitations and difficulties they face.