I guess there's always Chapo Trap House if you prefer your entertainers suggest nationalizing Amazon.

I've honestly never heard of either of these things

I don't want "carve outs" for this or that entertainer (which is a really really really strange thing to say for someone who insisted he was saying the entertainers are blameless, but whatever). I reject your whole premise that sharing politial comedy on facebook somehow competes with or inhibits actual political action. It is a ludicrous premise.

Would those people who don't truly GAF after watching a John Oliver video have GAF if they had never been inoculated with POLITICAL HUMOR on facebook? Seems unlikely!

edit: just watched the sheet cake thing, I dunno man, seems fine? I don't get it

What about the people sharing it, though? They're scratching an itch. Is sharing an Oliver segment an easy and ultimately fairly useless way of scratching it? Maybe it edges out other, more difficult, but more productive ways. At least in some cases.

The criticism of the sheetcake thing was that Fey was telling people to stay home and ignore the Nazis. General consensus was hell no show up in force. I thought it was a funny bit and probably didn't persuade anyone to stay home who wasn't already going to, but the criticism made sense to me.

Again, maybe? But there doesn't appear to be any actual evidence that people are doing this. And the opposite effect is just as plausible, if not more plausible. Basically it's just old man Dvault yelling at a cloud. KIDS THESE DAYS WITH THEIR TWEETERS AND THEIR INSTABOOKS WHY IN MY DAY WE HAD TO READ POLITICAL CARTOONS FROM THE BROADSHEET AND LET ME TELL YOU THE WHIGS WERE NOT HAPPY ABOUT...

Sure? But that criticism of Fey's specific message is unconnected to Dvault's point. Dvault is saying something something bad bad just from sharing BIG COMEDY'S politics videos.

The point of comedy is not just to inspire. Or get people to think they are involved when they are not if thats your view of what is happening sometimes.

Its also to make trump a laughing stock and delegitimize him in the eyes of the the roman mob so to speak. Comics are a powerful tool in that. Which fwiw the Sean Spicer thing did the opposite of. It more normalized him and trumpland which should never be done.

As far as who are the shills or not. I dont watch enough but if the criticism is of just that and not overall comedy. Fair enough.

did you guys even watch the emmys? sean spicer was the butt of the joke. the joke is that he has zero credibility now

If it was Mccarthy he would of been the butt of the joke. But since he was involved it makes the joke more like yeah i lied to you America haha jokes on who?

he wasn't the official announcer of the emmys or a representative of the neilson ratings company, he was brought out to make a demonstrably false and easily disprovable statement as a joke because that's what he's known for. the audience wasn't laughing with him, they were goofing on him.

I agree i guess but i kind of want anyone who worked for trump to be a pariah. Boycott the whole lot. Its not a big thing for me and either way i hope Colbert keeps on with the delegitimizeing.

Sure. That's all good. I think we agree then. Be vigilant. I hope we continue to have the appropriate reaction and don't let Trump Admin elites join the ranks of funny, rehabilitated celebrities that can lampoon themselves and be part of the acts. The reaction is hopeful; the act (having Spicer be part of the entertainment) is not.

I maintain the danger remains extent and the act proves it: the danger is turning too much authority and dignity to entertainers; don't let them become the figures we organize around ala the right. The act doesn't prove we're at the point of the right, but proves the entertainers often don't share our priorities, and reinforces the danger and the notion that we need to choose our leaders wisely.

That's not quite my premise. It can be a substitute for some people. Obviously if this is just a matter of quantifying the argument and demonstrating the thing empirically, it's hard to do. If you disagree that comedy and entertainment can become a form of empty signaling for some people, then fine. It's admittedly difficult to prove with any rigor.

The sheet cake thing is 'fine' in that it's funny and well-written and amusing on its own, but galling when you consider SNL let Donald Trump host well into his campaign. What the **** is Tina Fey complaining about in the end? Surely a lot of valid things about Trump, but the show she's on doing her bit contributed to normalizing Trump. *Maybe* Tina Fey herself is largely blameless but like the institution of SNL gave him a huge ****ing platform. It's a little like -- how dare people who aggrandized Trump and turned him into a lovable comedy character turn around and champion themselves part of some herculean efforts to resist him. At least like, apologize or something for the bad judgement. They were part of the problem of normalizing him! At best, SNL is sort of treating itself like a free agent comedy farm. In November 2015, they can normalize Trump, that's on the production staff in November 2015, but by the summer of 2017, Tina Fey is a free agent comedian speaking only for herself, and her comedy bit is sincere and has merit outside of what SNL the show writ large decided to do 18 months earlier. Which in the end is sort of my point here, that entertainers and comedy shows end goal is to entertain and draw eyeballs and put on a show and you absolutely should not count on these people to be ideological leaders or have any consistency. They just sort of follow the popular zeitgeist around and crack jokes, it's sort of principle free, don't count on it to be more than that.

Of course that gets us back to you saying "but WHO does that, it's all funzies and laffs, no one finds any of this meaningful, if people don't GAF welp they just don't care!" herp derp but then that gets us back to me repeating myself about how famous entertainment people chumming with Trump and his apparatchiks and doing comedy bits with them for fun and profit is precisely what normalization looks like, it's how the culture and social norms degrade to allow things like Trump to happen, it's how normal people without much of an ideological or moral filter get signaled that Trump is OK-enough, he's allowed to be part of the elite clubs and rub shoulders with them, he's not a pariah, and the end signal to the average don't-give-a-****-about-that-much person gets implicitly told Trump can be President, it's not a problem really.

At the end of the sheet cake thing she specifically tells people not to protest white supremacists. Go to 6.14 as idk how to get the embedded time thing to work.

I don't know that the bolded is true. Hitler was arrested and sentenced to jail for high treason, the Nazi party was banned and the Bavarian government tried to deport him. Not typically how absurd clowns are treated. The problem wasn't that he wasn't taken seriously but that far too many people were sympathetic to his cause.

Right. I don't begrudge people if they say I like SNL or John Oliver more than Chapo Trapo House. Like I'm not naive enough to say we all join DSA and take purity tests or else your entertainment is problematic. I think there should be space in society to be either apolitical or have your politics stop at passive entertainment and go no further, and I don't have that much disdain for that. Minor enough that I'd spend a half hour writing about it here and I might let my hottakes fly among friends over a few beers but I wouldn't hector people about it. It's not the world's worst sin. But then I think you have to drop the resistance hash tags and admit you -- frankly many, many of us -- far too many of us -- are just passive observers of all of this.

And as I said: that's a fair enough choice but history won't look kindly on it, imo, in sort of the terms I'm laying out. I doubt future generations will have simmering anger at passive people among us now, but probably wonder aloud if we weren't so caught up in circus acts and self-congratulatory performative art that we were lulled into large scale political and social degradation of the thing our art assumed we cared deeply about.

It can be an empty form of signaling. But is that an important phenomenon? Is it destructive? Seems very unlikely and the reverse could easily be true.

wait so are you now coming back to pinning blame on political comedians? Really I have zero idea what your argument is here.

All this talk of John Oliver... show is still awesome, but it lost a lot of credibility for me after its pathetic nuclear waste episode that was very misleading and uninformed too. It talked of nuclear weapons sites and didn't distinguish them from nuclear power sites which is just fear mongering.

This whole discussion is basically what the Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits is about. Media (or for my DSA friends, capitalism in general) mines whatever it can to drive audience engagement that can be used to create profit for the performer. Political comedy is mining your political concerns to create highly rated shows that can sell ads to pay performers, writers and the network. It's not about #resisting or angering Donald Trump or "punching up," it's about creating engagement because engagement = $$. If what you're seeking is to be amused, then that's a salutary process. If what you want to is to see your political concerns addressed though, you have to be a bit uneasy.

Just remember that Donald Trump's candidacy and presidency put money in John Oliver's pocket. Sean Spicer's propaganda is a nice source of material for the whole political comedy industry. I'm not suggesting that anyone is secretly in the tank for Trump or that they're trying to see him do well. But the fact remains. These are generally people who do well financially when things get worse for everyone else.

Right. Exactly. Unease is the right word. I think that's the wariness I am recommending people have here: political comedy makes commodities out of political concerns and can bend them to unwitting outcomes. I think the entire right wing infotainment complex and 1-2 generations of funneling political ideology into the entertainment industry is demonstrative of what can happen when those forces take hold. I appreciate goofy's points that we're not at the level the American right-wing is at, and that's valid. I still think the underlying potential is apparent, and you can see signs of it emerging. SenorKeed will stop by again to say he doesn't see it, which fine. I maintain it's extent.

The same thing is true for print media, television news, everything. Why doesn't sharing a news item from Washington Post on Facebook provoke the same 10,000 word Dvault lecture? More directly, why doesn't sharing a Rachel Maddow segment provoke the same lecture?

potential...for what exactly? Signs...of what? What's the potential? What are you seeing?

I agree we are seeing SIGNS OF JOHN OLIVER VIDEOS BEING SHARED ON FACEBOOK. This doesn't seem to be prima facie alarming.

LOL Dvaut, using confusing definite articles in his writing. SPEAK ENGLISH BRO

Hey just trying to pin down what exactly Dvault is saying, he hasn't exactly been consistent

Dvault: guys guys guys most of this political comedy out there is NOT HEALTHY, not healthy at all. Bad!
SenorKeed: Hey these guys are just comedians, that's all they're claiming to be!
Dvault: It's the sharing on facebook, competes with actual political action. Yes the comedians are not to blame
SenorKeed: Doesn't seem intuitive that sharing comedy videos on facebook competes with actual political action. Could motivate political action. Is there, you know, evidence of what you're saying
Dvault: lol no. But I never said competes! (but it does compete, is obvious). Also it's the comedians' fault.
SenorKeed: Wait what?

Try harder.

**** off

This conversation was prompted by a noted political comedian hosting a segment that featured a former Trump flunkie laughing it up about all the lies he used to tell to the press for his boss. It's absolutely true that similar dynamics exist in all media (witness WaPo's Democracy Dies in Darkness subscription drive), but there aren't stark illustrations in the media right now. I certainly think you should exercise skepticism as a consumer of straight news media too though.