The Meaning of Comedy

I wanted to let you know that I have been watching Whitney. It is not that great, yet it is maybe more tolerable than ‘70s immigrant/racial stereotype humor, lame attempts at hipster bashing, zinger-upon-zinger followed by laugh-track-sounding studio audience, Two Broke Girls. (Which by the way, James insists on watching before the million other things in the DVR queue that are better—and now I know why. I was making dinner while the show was on—barely authentic Korean bbq, if you must know—and when I popped back into the living room, he quickly closed the open window on his laptop like it was porn or something. I saw what it was, too: Kat Denning’s IMDB page.)

Whitney also suffers from the one-liner, telling jokes/not really acting problem and I don’t necessarily get why the couple is together or what their problem is or if they are meant to have one or believe that three years is an ungodly amount of time to date (clearly, me on year 12).

As an aside, I think it’s weird that both of Whitney’s shows are criticized for being mean. Meanness, which I don’t think they suffer from, is hardly the problem (to bring up a generational divide yet again—I do notice that Gen Y has a real aversion to anything resembling mean-spirited-ness. I pitched an idea based on my fascination with crying haircut ladies to a girly blog popular with young people and received the nicest rejection letter ever, totally friendly, encouraging, and full of exclamation marks. But what I gleaned was that the editor and probably a lot of the readers would cry if someone cut their long hair off…so, I’m just a horrible old lady who finds amusement the minor suffering of others.)

Tied to meanness perhaps is my appreciation of crass/lowbrow humor (minus the physical comedy or Adam Sandler playing his twin sister, but not necessarily all cross-dressing—Norbit was horribly hilarious) What I detest along the same lines as New Yorker cartoons is that McSweeney’s brand of yuks that gives inanimate objects a voice or does something ironic with a historical character or makes the mundane absurd—essentially, this entire column. No thank you, Friedrich Nietzsche, Chain Restaurant Bartender.

So, Whitney’s supposed to (I have not seen this first-hand but saw it mentioned here) standup bit about hating morning sex to the point where she’s considered warming a melon in the microwave, putting a wig on it and sticking it the bed next to a guy to get out of the act. Ok, that’s funny. 

Now I keep seeing this Dawn ad online (that I can not find anywhere at the moment—WTF?! I’m trying to be advertised to here) with a piece of fruit wearing an afro-ish wig and sunglasses that makes me think of that sex surrogate mixed with a Cheeseburger in Paradise garnimal. I am going to lose my mind if I don’t find this ad soon, and I’ve been waiting for it to pop up all week. Moat (yes, there’s a banner ad search engine) turned up nothing. Maybe it’s not Dawn?