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.

Last week, I wrote about what a catharsis Tina Fey’s slam on “grey-faced men with $2 haircuts” was, a reminder that what’s been going on in our national political discourse around women’s reproductive is not a serious, equitable exchange of ideas, but a sustained and bogus attack, and that it’s okay to feel an impolite level of frustration. For the same reason, I found this video from the This Is Personal campaign of the National Women’s Law Center pretty delightful:

While to be a joke, schtick has to be funny, the best jokes are genuinely revealing. The idea that a politician thinks that women’s bodies prevent them from ever getting pregnant when they’re raped has horrible implications for policy-making, but considered neutrally—or through a medieval gate-keeping metaphor—it’s genuinely, awfully hilarious and tells us an enormous amount about the people who believe these things. And while humor can be a great way to broach issues that it would be impossible to talk about head-on otherwise (see: C.K., Louis), this video is a necessary reminder that humor’s power to reveal the truth can also be one of the fastest ways to marginalize truly absurd ideas, rather than giving them space to be taken seriously.

It’s a great coup for the Alfred E. Smith Foundation, named for the Progressive, wet politician and first Catholic presidential candidate, that its annual fundraising dinner has become a mandatory stop on the presidential campaign trail. And it’s good for us for reasons of politics, if not of comedy, that we get to see President Obama and Mitt Romney show off what they think they need to lock down in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.

First, there’s President Obama, who chose to focus his jokes for the evening on the most ridiculous news stories of the campaign cycle in an implicit critique of the media and a funny, likable act of self-deprecation:

Perhaps most importantly, Obama went confidently after his performance in the first debate. “I felt well-rested after the nice long nap I had in the first debate,” he joked. And he went on to “apologize to Chris Matthews. Four years ago I gave him a thrill up his leg. This time, I gave him a stroke.” He made the crack that a lot of other people made that evening, telling the crowd that “I learned there are worse things that can happen to you on your anniversary than forgetting to buy a gift.” It was a comprehensively self-aware dissection of his own performance, one that was aimed at dispelling lingering doubts about where his head was in the first debate, and reassuring the audience that he was fired up for the final debate before the election.

Obama’s other jokes were a sly tour through the campaign’s most frivolous moments. “I went shopping at some stores in Midtown,” he said of how he spent his day in New York. “I understand Governor Romney went shopping for some stores in midtown,” a riff of Romney’s explanations about his friends who were NFL and NASCAR owners. Obama explained that he stopped by “The House That Ruth Built, though he really did not build that. I hope everybody’s aware of that.” He explained that though the campaign season felt endless, “Paul Ryan assured me we’ve only been running for two hours and 57 minutes.” The closest he came to an attempt to score substantive points was a riff about the economy. “I don’t have a joke here,” he said in a hanging punchline. “I just thought it would be useful to remind everybody that the unemployment rate’s at the lowest level since I took office.”

Romney, by contrast, spent more time on attempts to land hits on Obama:

Nikki Finke, the secretive and mercurial editor of Deadline Hollywood, usually sticks to reporting the news about casting, box office, or personnel movies in the entertainment industry. But ever so often, as she did while liveblogging the Emmys this weekend, she ventures into criticism. The results are…mixed. Her latest opinion? Beautiful women (and men) can’t possibly be funny. She wrote:

Listen-up, Hollywood: Beautiful actresses are not funny. They don’t know how to do comedy. (As Bowen demonstrated with her acceptance speech that repeated the phrase ‘nipple covers’ 3 dozen times. To zero laughter.) Only women who grew up ugly and stayed ugly, or through plastic surgery became beautiful, can pull off sitcoms or standups. Bowen isn’t a comedienne just like Brooke Shields wasn’t and a zillion more. Because it’s all about emotional pain and humiliation and rising above both by making people laugh with you instead of at you. So stop casting beautiful actresses when you should be giving ugly women a chance. (Tina Fey always points out she looked like a troglodyte when she was younger.) This also applies to handsome men, by the way. Now argue amongst yourselves.

Which, though Finke styles herself a Hollywood feminist, actually sounds a lot like Adam Carolla’s declaration earlier this year that women are, on the aggregate, not as funny as men, and those rare few who he judges to be actually amusing are some kind of Aberration From Nature. They’re both totalizing statements that make the people in question sound parochial. And they’re both based on the idea that there is one essential way to be funny.

This is the problem about almost all of our conversations about comedy: they keep devolving into always and never statements. Rape is inherently funny. Rape is never funny. Men are funnier than women because they’re more willing to go for the gut, because they’re more willing to be gross, because they’re less sensitive, because it’s always funnier to be insensitive, because dominance is funny, because the differences between people are inherent and it’s inherently funny to point them out, because the most important thing humor can do is puncture political correctness. It goes on and on. But these discussions always blow up when someone tries to divine a hierarchy of comedy, a platonic form of it, something that suggests that some kinds of humor are better than others and ends up implying that there’s little or no value to be found beyond a narrow bit of spectrum.

And I also think that these conversations go wrong in part because they come from some places of real anxiety, be they realistic or not. Men like Carolla, who have some of the more marginal jobs available to comedians, start feeling pressure from the success of women. Chris Rock feels that recording at shows and distribution platforms like YouTube have made it nigh-impossible for stand-ups to work out their material in front of crowds in the recognition that it’s flawed and may improve. And…well, I’m not going to even try to speculate about what Nikki Finke’s motivations are, though as Glamour accurately points out, there are basically no women working in television comedy who are not, by any standards, quite pretty. But a point at which people feel that they have something to lose can be a bad basis for important conversations, or for welcoming innovation and innovators rather than pushing them out. And while I don’t have the answers for Chris Rock, I mostly feel bad for anyone who’s shutting themselves off from kinds of funny and different kinds of purveyors of it.

After six seasons, the CBC hit series Little Mosque on the Prairie finally closed up shop earlier this year, but it’s got a new lease on life on Hulu, which is releasing it as simply Little Mosque. It’s a move I’m excited by, for a lot of different reasons, not least of which is that I love the show and I’m pleased to see it picked up and brought to more potential viewers. The more funny, smart television people can access, the better, especially since this fall television season looks dismal and we’re going to need something to watch on long, cold nights.

Whether viewers are being exposed to it for the first time or re-watching, Little Mosque couldn’t be coming with more perfect timing. In fact, I’m desperately hoping Hulu brings on more older shows from other corners of the world, because it seems US networks can’t properly entertain us with their new ones. Perhaps they’ll get the hint if we all start turning to Hulu?

Hulu has been slowly but steadily picking up Canadian series of various vintages to expand its offerings, a delight to viewers like me who have a not-so-secret fondness for offerings from our fair neighbours to the north. Whether you want to watch Regenesis (with a young Ellen Page!) or Da Vinci’s Inquest, chances are that Hulu can hook you up. Given that it’s highly unlikely we’d see these shows syndicated to US television because they’re over and interest is limited, this is a great way of increasing distribution. Hulu’s also branching out into shows from other regions of the world, indicating a smart approach from the site, which has been struggling to deal with how to sustain itself. Read more

Some days, it feels like we’re in an arms race of stupid, as is the case when Dane Cook decides that the timing is right to pull this joke in response to the shootings at The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado:

So I heard that the guy came into the theater about 25 minutes into the movie. And I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, but the movie is pretty much a piece of crap. Yea, spoiler alert. I know that if none of that would have happened, pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realizing it was a piece of crap, was probably like ‘ugh fucking shoot me.

There is, in fact, a point to be made about the extent to which images of gun violence are integrated into our culture, and the degree to which we’ve become callous about the prospect of shootings. But I’m not sure that this routine really conveys the horror of that disconnect between our everyday conversation and our reaction when the things we joke about become real. There’s a strain of comedy that relies on the people who stories are told about believing in things no one would ever believe, or reacting in ways actual humans would never react, whether it’s a disgruntled moviegoer wanting someone to end it all for them, or Daniel Tosh’s joke involving his sister thinking it’s hilarious that a prank he played on her left her unable to defend herself from a rapist. Jokes like that tend to reveal more about how the people telling them see the world than about the actual foibles and hypocrisies of their targets.

I’m relieved to know that I can apparently go back to thinking of Louis C.K. as the person I thought he was—though with some newly-acquired doubts about his taste in comedy—after his appearance on The Daily Show last night. Apparently, I—and the people who thought he was mocking Daniel Tosh—was wrong to interpret his Tweet to Tosh praising his television show, sent in the teeth of a…er…vigorous conversation about Tosh’s response to a woman at a show who told him rape jokes weren’t funny, as a show of support. And I’ve rarely been more glad to be wrong. C.K. apparently sent the Tweet while he was on vacation in Vermont, inspired by an episode of Tosh.0 that amused him, and not meant to condone Tosh’s actions at all, given that C.K. was largely offline and was unaware of them (an excuse that if it was anyone else, I’d probably be skeptical of, but that I’m willing to do C.K. the credit of believing). C.K. explained that chain of events—as of the original writing of this post, I thought he’d deleted the relevant tweet, but apparently it’s still in his timeline—and explained his reaction to the controversy since. Watch it:

The key bit is here:

It’s also a fight between comedian and feminists, which are natural enemies, because stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke…And on the other side, comedians can’t take criticism…I’ve read some blogs during this whole thing that have made me enlightened to things I didn’t know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women’s lives. They have a narrow corridor. They can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t get a certain way, because they might get—That’s part of me now that wasn’t before. And I can still enjoy a good rape joke…This is also about men and women…Couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes. That’s what I’ve been reading on blogs. But they’re both making a classic gender mistake on this. Because the women are saying ‘This is how I feel about this.’ But they’re also saying ‘My feelings should be everyone’s primary concern.’ But the men are making this mistake, they’re saying ‘Your feelings don’t matter. Your feelings are wrong, and your feelings are stupid.’…To the men I say, ‘Listen. Listen to what the women are saying for a minute.’ And to the women, I say ‘Now that we heard you, now shut the fuck up for a minute.’

The way C.K. talks about his education in rape culture is the kind of thing that’s made me extend him so much credit in the past—even though, yes, to all the people who’ve sent me disturbing bits he’s done in the past, I’m aware—and the reason I’m willing to reup here. His curiosity is interesting to me, and I think it makes the women in Louie‘s audience, and the audience for C.K.’s shows feel like, even if C.K. crosses our personal lines, there’s a chance that he’s working through something in a way that will be useful to both him and us. And if I thought we could get the same deal he’s proposing here—folks who have been impacted by and have a direct stake in an issue talk, people who are less directly impacted listen, we give them room to think it through—more generally, I’d take it.

Louis C.K. apparently decided that, after Daniel Tosh has been the subject of harsh criticism for saying it would be funny if a feminist heckler got gang raped at his show, Tosh is in need of his support. “Your show makes me laugh every time I watch it,” he tweeted. “And you have pretty eyes.” Given C.K.’s long record of comedy that’s self-reflective about privilege and smart about gender—though I do think he’s fallen down both comedically and politically in his attacks on Sarah Palin, and his episode of Louie where he goes after a heckler played by Megan Hilty can be jarring—this is particularly disappointing. Given the reaction I, and other folks, have gotten from comedians today, and a rash of unfortunate attempts at humor that have devolved into bashing women, I kind of think women who care about comedy need C.K.’s championing them more than Daniel Tosh does. And I’m feeling less disappointed by not pulling the trigger on tickets to see him live on this tour.
Read more

Novelist Chuck Wendig wrote a post on the difference between being offensive and being mean last week that I think is worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to pull out this section of it:

I don’t want to hurt anybody. That’s the thing. Offending people? Happy to do it…But I don’t want to be mean. Or cruel. Or conjure up words that ding a person’s armor. I care little about minimizing offense, but I care quite a lot about minimizing people.

That’s why I don’t think the Tomb Raider thing is about political correctness — because I think it’s about minimizing women and, in a way, minimizing the men who play those games. That’s also why I don’t think that profane “in-your-face” blog posts that use words like the ones I noted are in what you might call “terribleminds-style” — sure, I’ll mock things within the industry or the bad habits of writers, but I won’t call those “retarded.” First, because it’s lazy. Second, because while that word may not seem to mean what it says, it still says what it means — and it’s short-code for being mentally handicapped no matter how you slice it. Third, and most importantly, because I don’t want to hurt people.

I think that one of the common defenses whipped out by people who make art—or hell, say things in any forum—that’s sexist or racist or transphobic is to say that they’re brave, speaking truths others dare not utter. The thing this, these people rarely speak these so-called truths to unfriendly audiences. And the easiest thing you can do with any audience is to confirm the beliefs they already hold. Sometimes, that can be a useful thing to do. Confirming that people aren’t alone in their beliefs or reactions to things can be a powerful way to bring marginalized people together. And telling people that their beliefs matter and are actionable in the world is a major mobilizing tool. But there’s a difference between those kinds of conversations and affirming people’s fears, prejudices, and need to be superior to someone. If you view giving offense as a sign of courage, it’s much more courageous to poke at your allies rather than the people weaker that you’ve determined to keep that way, to take a broad view, really see what the conventional wisdom is, and then challenge that. There are pieties in every movement, be it left, right, or center. But if you want to skewer them, you have to do better than “bitches be crazy” or “trans people are gross.” Smashing things and causing pain are not the same things as making a point.

Deadline’s roundtable on female-driven comedy has some interesting stuff in it, particularly these observations from House of Lies co-executive producer Jessika Borsiczky on the state of women’s employment behind the camera in television, which mostly serves to illustrate that things are good relative only to the movies:

We are sort of hitting a place where there’s some real seniority to women in television. When I started at HBO (in the movie division) in 1992 I certainly wasn’t running television shows, it took a long time…We have two women on the staff and three men. I ran an action movie company, and in 90 percent of the meetings I’d be the only woman in the room. When I shifted to television, it was a much more balanced environment. There are more women in comedy – the last show I ran was Flash Forward, and there are a lot more men in science fiction. I think it’s really important to be expressive and not self-conscious in a writers’ room when you’re going for comedy. On our show it’s not only women’s issues, but also race. We devoted an entire episode of House of Lies to anal sex, you have to know going in that when you are breaking that story there are going to be some very raw moments in the room. I have to say nobody felt uncomfortable, and we were laughing our heads off. That being said, there are limits, I know stories of women who were discriminated against for taking maternity leave, or sexually discriminated against by their bosses, I think that still exists.

An industry where you face the prospect of discrimination for taking maternity leave you’re allowed by your contract is probably not one that’s going to be exceptionally thoughtful and sensitive in its explorations of the issues faced by women in their real lives.

I’m also really interested in the arguments Borsiczky and other women in the roundtable make in favor of a boundary-pushing environment in the writers’ room that seems to imply that women have to be sure they want to be in that sort of environment before they proceed. From what I’ve seen of folks writing television dialogue in the moment, it absolutely is a tough editing process: every line is diamond-cut, and that requires a particular kind of ego to hold up under. But in terms of busting boundaries, you can get there both by creating safe spaces and by making your willingness to go to difficult places a mark of toughness. The ability to tackle impolite topics is not gendered, and just as women can thrive in filthy, frattish writers’ rooms, I’m sure there are a lot of men who would do just fine in the kind of bonded environment Lena Dunham, for example, talks about trying to create on Girls.