PC killed the Ab Fab show

March 3, 2017 12:42 AM

Did Generation Snowflake kill Absolutely Fabulous? [slThePool]
posted by threetwentytwo (75 comments total)

Considering we can't seem to go a week without someone complaining about the kids being too sensitive it certainly seems Generation Self-Knowledge-Of-A-Housebrick killed irony.
posted by fullerine at 1:26 AM on March 3, 2017 [35 favorites]

Betteridge's Law of Headlines is BACK! And Better than ever!
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:35 AM on March 3, 2017 [20 favorites]

Meh.

On the one hand, AbFab stopped being funny or innovative years if not decades ago and should've been put to rest ages ago.

On the other hand, it is annoying to see one of the few female centered sitcoms disappear.

On the gripping hand, if AbFab didn't want to come up against the Dead Hand of Political Correctness, maybe not make shitty transphobic jokes? Irony only goes so far.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:36 AM on March 3, 2017 [39 favorites]

Yeah, I want there to be more comedy by and for women, and it sucks that someone like Jennifer Saunders wants to stop doing it because "people are too PC," or whatever.

I don't make shitty trans jokes, because they're not funny and I know people who would be hurt by them. So there was a time when it was more socially acceptable to make them? Big deal. Jokes operate in a social context. Some things are timeless, and some things aren't. I don't make jokes about how people have these Nokia phones that look like candy bars, but you don't see people getting all up in arms about that, because that ship has pretty obviously sailed. People don't complain about "snowflakes" if you say Amos n' Andy is shitty and racist, because most people can now agree that they're an embarrassing stain on comedy history (although I'm sure there's an overlap between people who use the word "snowflake" and people who are fondly nostalgic for shitty racist comedy).

If a comedian is mad because they have to learn to change their sense of what's funny or appropriate as the decades pass, then that's really their problem.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:07 AM on March 3, 2017 [57 favorites]

I saw the first 30 minutes of so of the film, and wow it was bad. Kathy Burke was brilliant in her bits, but the script was awful.
posted by DanCall at 2:10 AM on March 3, 2017

If Political Correctness is against jokes that now Make Awful Comedy, can we make it PC versus Mac
posted by solarion at 2:37 AM on March 3, 2017 [15 favorites]

I don't know, most of the show is stale, but I have never gotten enough Bubbles. Bubbles is a character that ought to become universal and re-occurent and transcendental across comedy TV.

But overall, maybe it's best that AbFab is best as a relic of the 90s, just as the The Young Ones was the quintessential Thatcher era show.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 2:37 AM on March 3, 2017 [16 favorites]

I have always loved Absolutely Fabulous, ever since I was a kid.

I mean (a) thanks for making me feel ancient, but (b) isn't that long enough?
posted by Segundus at 2:46 AM on March 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

I hear this from a lot of brilliant White British 50+ comedians who just don't understand how things have progressed in the past few decades. Also, there are layers of Britishness that needs to be understood.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:48 AM on March 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

Someone should form a company that helps movie makers avoid casting a white person as a Japanese person, etc. Employ a diverse bunch. Convince Hollywood that your review and approval are essential to making profitable movies. Make lots of money.
posted by pracowity at 3:43 AM on March 3, 2017

It wasn't funny in the 90s, either.
posted by kevinbelt at 3:59 AM on March 3, 2017 [12 favorites]

Does this mean I have to stop keeping vodka in my handbag, now?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:14 AM on March 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Absolutely Fabulous was, at the time, the most over-rated comedy around, and it's hard to look back at it now without radically re-appraising what it was saying.
posted by The River Ivel at 4:27 AM on March 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

I hear this from a lot of brilliant White British 50+ comedians who just don't understand how things have progressed in the past few decades.

Hearing some of the complaints from people I used to admire like John Cleese is very disheartening. And hearing Ricky Gervais defend calling people Mongs, etc, is embarrassing and painful.
posted by jfwlucy at 4:52 AM on March 3, 2017 [10 favorites]

Just as a warning, I suggest folks not watch Fawlty Towers.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:04 AM on March 3, 2017

Gee, transphobic bullshit meets pushback these days? Yeah, literally impossible to make any kind of joke or humour then. Cannot be done.
posted by Dysk at 5:28 AM on March 3, 2017 [14 favorites]

Yeah, I tried to rewatch Fawlty Towers a few years ago and what I thought was hilariously funny forty years ago as a kid just seems ugly and nasty now.
posted by octothorpe at 5:28 AM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

(Also the article takes a pretty firm stance on yellowface but the only real objection she seems to have to the transphobic jokes is that they aren't funny?)
posted by Dysk at 5:35 AM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

She does have a point, that women are held to much higher standards as creators than men are. And also that yellowface and transphobia are not funny jokes. But I don't want to let women off the hook, I want to hold men to these same standards.
posted by jeather at 5:36 AM on March 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

Personally, I'm of the opinion that transphobic jokes are bullshit and unacceptable whether or not they're funny. "They're not funny jokes" as an objection has it between the lines that if it did make you laugh, it'd be grand. No. Transphobia us a problem in and of itself, not because it degrades your humour. It's shitty regardless.
posted by Dysk at 5:40 AM on March 3, 2017 [14 favorites]

No — that is wrong. Patsy is always drunk. Patsy falls over. Patsy wets herself. Patsy sets herself on fire.

That's it, the movie needed more fire gags.
posted by sammyo at 5:41 AM on March 3, 2017

"Did the generation that grew up long after the heyday of this popular piece of media betray the previous generation, their intellectual and comedic superiors, by daring to like their own media better?" -The Olds, constantly
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:53 AM on March 3, 2017 [40 favorites]

Philip Sandifer wrote a piece on The League of Gentlemen as part of his Tardis Eruditorum series, pointing out the terrible transphobia. Now, i loved The League of Gentlemen when it was on and my first reaction was to get really defensive about it but I knew it was because Sandifer was bang on the money with his criticism.

If it's impossible to make comedy without being transphobic or racist, then you aren't a very funny person.
posted by threetwentytwo at 5:54 AM on March 3, 2017 [6 favorites]

Remember, if you can't process criticism it's your critics who are being too sensitive. Not you. Nope.
posted by 1adam12 at 5:58 AM on March 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

Things can make you laugh even when they aren't funny, but it's not really the point. I didn't mean to suggest that a transphobic joke that really make you laugh would be acceptable, and I am sorry that I worded things so poorly.

Transphobia and yellowface are not funny, and not jokes, and should not be showing up, and no one should get a pass for them.

I still think there is a lot to be said for marginalised people of various groups being held to a higher standard than less marginalised people. But we can increase standards for everyone. There are all sorts of jokes that are left when you leave out transphobia as a punchline.
posted by jeather at 6:01 AM on March 3, 2017

So as Jennifer Saunders says she won’t be continuing to write Ab Fab, perhaps it is worth considering what we’re losing – and why. It’s depressing that we are allowing a show about women and for women to disappear because it’s come up against some (deserved) criticisms, especially as its seems so clear that as a culture we find it too easy to heap opprobrium on female-led shows.

That's stupid. We're not "allowing" anything. We're saying what we think about something, and Saunders is deciding how to respond to that. People shouldn't have to censor themselves because she's too much of a precious snowflake angel to hear any criticism of her work. I understand that members of her generation have an expectation that they can say racist or transphobic things without hearing anything about it, but they're just going to need to toughen up a bit.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:14 AM on March 3, 2017 [34 favorites]

It’s depressing that we are allowing a show about women and for women to disappear because it’s come up against some (deserved) criticisms, especially as its seems so clear that as a culture we find it too easy to heap opprobrium on female-led shows.

What. What the fuck? Whhaatttt, the fcuckkkk. The solution to "Men aren't held to standards as high as women" is NOT "drop the bar for women and allow them to be racist and transphobic, too". Jesus christ people.

Also, here's a crazy thought. Just, hear me out. A show cannot be "for women" if...and here's the part where we lose some people...a show cannot be "for women" when it harms ... women? Trans women are women, after all. I know, absolutely revolutionary stance on things.
posted by FirstMateKate at 6:18 AM on March 3, 2017 [25 favorites]

But but but ... Ab Fab is from the 90s, the decade when 'Political Correctness' took shape as A Thing. So you can't blame PC for the movie sucking, surely.
posted by Mocata at 6:34 AM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I never liked AbFab, I was always more a vicar of Dibley fan.
posted by Pendragon at 7:04 AM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

No one owes a comedian a living. The hippies weren't laughing at Bob Hope circa 1970. This goes for YOU, Jerry Seinfeld.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 7:17 AM on March 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

IMO AbFab's writing was always elevated considerably by the performances of Joanna Lumley and Jane Horrocks (Bubbles).* but also it sort of seems like Jennifer Saunders forgot what the joke was supposed to be. AbFab was at its best when making fun of the pointlessly rich, and Saffy was the foil who allowed them to make the point, over and over again, that meritocracy didn't exist and class and wealth were wasted on the worst people who defended their hoards of gold with a sort of vicious but casual cruelty that was, um, very recognizable. And then, idk, Jennifer Saunders got rich? And old? And stopped evolving? Maybe? Idk I haven't seen it in a while. But it's possible to make a comedy about terrible people without the comedy itself being terrible. Just not if you don't see the distinction.

*if you want your mind blown by performing chops, check out Little Voice. IIRC it's a movie about a quiet young woman who comes into her own by performing covers of various classic golden age type songs, and seems mostly written to showcase the fact that Jane Horrocks is fucking incredible. The review I remember said she wasn't just doing a dead-on Shirley Bassey; she was doing a dead-on replica of a particular Shirley Bassey performance. She was really incredible.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:21 AM on March 3, 2017 [24 favorites]

Comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff's fantastic book 'The Comedians' makes one thing perfectly clear: Kids these days have always never known what's really funny.

Harrumph.
posted by MrJM at 8:03 AM on March 3, 2017

Has anybody seriously investigated the possibility that all these hot takes are contributing to global warming?
posted by tobascodagama at 8:07 AM on March 3, 2017 [13 favorites]

It's probably not insignificant that there weren't as many options at the time, and there wasn't an instant feedback loop.

So first, you just couldn't be as picky as you can now. There were other options, but if you just wanted to sit down after work and watch something, you didn't have much to choose from, and anything that wasn't a standard formula US sitcom really stood out. And when they did something you didn't like, it wasn't as simple and easy to register your disapproval. I guess you could complain on Usenet or to your friends or something, but if you were watching in the US, it was probably a year or more past the original airing, so it wasn't exactly current and most people hadn't seen it at all and wouldn't know what you were talking about, so you'd maybe just grumble a little bit and eventually forget about it, because it was probably still better than whatever else was on at the time.

Nostalgia is a trickster god. Nothing's ever as good as you remember it, except probably for Get a Life.
posted by ernielundquist at 8:20 AM on March 3, 2017 [6 favorites]

I think the last time I watched Ab Fab was in the 90s, which I guess is probably part of the problem, and my dim recollection of it is being pretty progressive. Or at least, it was a favorite show of people who at the time I regarded as being pretty progressive, and still are.

But, I'm reminded a bit of the Friends suck-fairy debacle from a few years back: along with like 90% of the Internet, I was pretty surprised when the show hit Netflix and my warm, fuzzy recollections of the show (which was, in fairness, also reasonably progressive for its time and primetime US broadcast slot) got crushed under the elephant in the room which is number of casual gay jokes, irritatingly insecure masculinity, and, in a few episodes, really nasty treatment of a trans character. And then, of course, there was the predictable defense of the show because one of its creators is an out gay dude.

So maybe I won't rewatch. It's good, I guess, that the bar for what's considered both progressive and even just acceptable behavior is always moving upward, but I don't know if I want to put myself into the early-90s social headspace to appreciate a show, and modern audiences shouldn't be expected to if a show is in current production.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:28 AM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

"They're not funny jokes" as an objection has it between the lines that if it did make you laugh, it'd be grand.

For me it's like: How can you both be a decent person and laugh at that? Maybe it does make some people laugh, still, but at some point you have to ask about who's laughing. Who still thinks jokes about trans people are funny and is trying to defend them? Are those people who I actually want to be entertaining? Are those people I want to actually be emulating?

"Mean" will often be "funny" to some subset of people, but the complaints about PC often suggest that somehow those of us who've changed still find it funny but object on moral grounds, and I think for the most part we don't. So, if they're content with an audience of the people who still find it funny, then they'd have nothing to complain about. But they often want it to be about how we let our politics override our sense of humor, instead of how we realized that they were being mean and it wasn't fun anymore.
posted by Sequence at 8:28 AM on March 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

I suspect if it's a case of getting through to the creators and fans, you're going to have more luck with "it's irrelevant if it's funny, it's not acceptable" than "you're wrong about it being funny, and now let me, a person on the Internet, tell you, a professional comedian, why you are wrong about what constitutes a joke" if we're talking practicalities. Alternatively, if it's funny, that must mean it isn't transphobic, right? Because transphobic jokes aren't funny!

Or we can just go with the 'fuck your transphobia, joke or not, funny or not, it doesn't matter'.
posted by Dysk at 8:46 AM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure political correctness caused the death of Ab Fab. I loved the show in the 90s and haven't seen any of it more current than that. Any comedic idea that tries to go on for 20 odd years is bound to fizzle out. I do agree with condemnation of the yellow face and trans jokes. But I also agree with the author of the article and Lena Dunham that the cards are stacked hard against women comedians and writers. In a male-dominated comedy if the male characters act stupid, disgusting, bigoted, cruel etc., we see that as okay as it's the character and it sets up the story/joke etc. But in female-dominated comedies, if the women characters are stupid, disgusting, bigoted, we often react against that with the complaint that they're representing women in a bad light, or they're making a political statement that I don't agree with, and so on and so on and so on. The sad part is that it is often women making the rush to judgment. Why do we have to see women in comedies as a statement about women? When I watch 3 Stooges, the Marx Brothers -- or Silicon Valley, I don't say to myself they're making a statement about men being stupid, inept or goofy. They're just being funnily stupid, inept and goofy. What I loved about Ab Fab in the 90s were that these women were unabashedly, warts and all, distinct outrageous characters and powerful in that too. Whereas in American comedies about women, we tend to get, no matter the age of the characters, the high school trope of good girl, best friend girl and mean girl (rarely "women") and the ever-dwindling variations on that theme.
posted by SA456 at 9:14 AM on March 3, 2017 [11 favorites]

In a male-dominated comedy if the male characters act stupid, disgusting, bigoted, cruel etc., we see that as okay as it's the character and it sets up the story/joke etc.

I can assure you that many of us who are objecting to the explicit racism and transphobia of Absolutely Fabulous are not exactly in the habit of giving male comedians a pass. I suspect part of what forms the impression is that the audience for dumb bigoted male-led comedy doesn't give a shit about said bigotry, whereas a greater portion of the target audience for a lot of more women-led comedy do. We give a shit about bigotry everywhere. But because we're the ones who were expected to make up the viewership of female-led comedy, it ends up looking like people unapologetically endorse bigoted male-led comedy while criticising bigoted female-led comedy with dwindling viewership, when in actual fact you're talking about two distinct groups.
posted by Dysk at 9:32 AM on March 3, 2017 [14 favorites]

I'm happy to be the first one to give a shoutout to Mo Gaffney and her genius portrayal of Bo. Hallelujah and can I get an amen?
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 9:45 AM on March 3, 2017 [9 favorites]

This seems like it only makes sense if they're literally defining AbFab by its poor-taste jokes and saying it can't exist without them. There are good points made about the different criticisms faced by woman comedians. But (and I do love a lot about AbFab), it's OLD and we don't actually need any more.

(and I feel like I interpreted that Girls episode completely differently than this writer did, but ok...)
posted by jeweled accumulation at 9:55 AM on March 3, 2017

When people say they are taking their ball and going home because X the solution isn't to give in to them.

The solution is to go and get a new ball and continue playing without them.
posted by srboisvert at 9:56 AM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Mentally I'm working on contrasting AbFab with It's Always Sunny, but idk if it's going to go anywhere. I know I'm frequently more troubled by the fans of It's Always Sunny than I am by the show*, and I'm wondering how much of a pass It's Always Sunny gets because a bunch of its fans are, um, not the most sensitive demographic.

*i am not UNtroubled by the show itself, but on the whole I tend to agree with Emily Nussbajm that there is a great big progressive heart beating underneath the sometimes errant but always bitter satire. Still, It's Always Sunny frequently runs into the Dave Chappelle "are they laughing for the right reasons" problem, but doesn't seem to care. It's also not technically a woman-dominated comedy, except by way of the sheer blinding brilliance of Kaitlin Olson's talent. That entire cast is hall of fame amazing, and yet they are consistently eclipsed (except when Charlie Day gets his own episodes, but sometimes even then!). It's sort of incredible.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:02 AM on March 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I tried to rewatch Fawlty Towers a few years ago and what I thought was hilariously funny forty years ago as a kid just seems ugly and nasty now.

Huh really? I haven't seen it in... a few years, but while there's stuff in it that was Obviously Not Okay Now when I was a kid fifteen or twenty years ago - and not all the episodes are so great - that wasn't really what was bearing the load, jokewise. I mean the good bits are pretty much at the expense of Basil, and he deserves it.
posted by atoxyl at 10:38 AM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

My brain also went straight to Always Sunny when I saw this post, schadenfrau.
posted by offalark at 10:42 AM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I tried watching Ab Fab a while back, and found it mostly tiresome. "Aren't these awful people, ha ha" and "isn't it funny as these less awful people get wrecked by awful people" gets old for me right quick as humor.
posted by tavella at 10:57 AM on March 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Whenever I hear "PC is killing comedy", I always want the proponent of this argument to explain how It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been extended to a 14th season.
posted by Errant at 11:45 AM on March 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

A point, I see on non-preview, which has already been raised.
posted by Errant at 11:46 AM on March 3, 2017

How can PC culture be killing comedy if there are great, popular comedy shows that people of my generation love? If PC culture was actually killing comedy we'd all be sitting at home watching nothing but dreary, serious dramas.

This complaint is just a bunch of comedians who can't stand the fact that tastes change and they haven't been able to change with them. And yeah, part of the change is that our standards about what's acceptable have changed -- but if you argue that you need jokes that are no longer "PC" in order to make your audience laugh, well, then you're admitting you had a really narrow sort of talent to begin with.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:57 AM on March 3, 2017 [6 favorites]

oh hell yes generation snowflake killed ab fab, we straight up got together and put that shit in the wicker man when poffin wasn't looking

and we'd do it again
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 12:05 PM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

late afternoon that article was fuckin' dumb and i threw it in the wicker man too

like oh no lena dunham is getting rightly owned for her shit television show

god what's become of the world
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 12:07 PM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I don't know if I'm misremembering, but it seems like in the past when the issue of racist jokes was made, (not that they still weren't there in a big way) that quiet adjustments were made instead of all the pushback about PC culture. I do recall pushback about sexism and misogyny (George Carlin's insistence that telling a rape joke was all free speech and whatnot). It seems like this PC-backlash is a thing as Boomers have aged and have now become the Don Rickles, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin of the day, outdated and stuck in another era and they absolutely are not having it. Boomers will probably never adjust to becoming irrelevant because of the media's focus on them for decades. They can't not see themselves as a defining force of culture, therefore Everyone Else is Wrong. They will always see themselves as the forward-looking rebels and innovators that they may've been decades ago.

It's sad to see AbFab go down that road because they had a lot of great jokes about how vapid celebrity culture was and the silliness of trends. I also liked Patsy's never-say-die hedonism even when it was the butt of jokes.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:12 PM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I sort of get the point she's making with Girls, but for most of the Girls cast, that show was their first credit, their first major credit, or their only credit. (I believe Jemima Kirke has said she's going to retire from acting after the show ends.) Further, the show's creator is both the star of the series and one of its writers, and she's made autobiographical media prior to and concurrent with working on the series...and enough of her other work has been reflected in Girls. OTOH, Silicon Valley (for example) has a principal cast of character actors with long resumes, and while one of the creators worked for a Silicon Valley startup, he's not the face of the show. I understand why the writer brings up that point, but it really doesn't work for the larger point she's making.
posted by pxe2000 at 12:18 PM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I mean Jerry Seinfeld, John Cleese (and dare I say Jennifer Saunders- ooh that makes me sad) should just go to Vegas and stay there. That's where irrelevant comedians go out to pasture.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:23 PM on March 3, 2017

I just wanna chime in to add another vote that PC is not killing comedy, and take it one step further that there are more, better, comedies out right now than I could ever remember there being before. This year alone we got several new comedies:

Search Party (dark comedy making fun of shallow NY 20somethings, and yet manages to NOT be a "ugh, millennials" show)
Chewing Gum (bright, awkward and sweet comedy about a british shop girl who wants to get out from under her mother's religious thumb)
Insecure (down to earth slice-of-life about a woman trying to feel comfortable and get what she wants)

And-Gasp! ALL of these star women of color! Then we've got Brooklyn99 and Fresh off the Boat, sitcoms that feature/star actors and actresses of color, who both explicitly tackle issues of racism and bigotry in America. And are hilarious!

So, yeah. just echoing everyone else who says that we don't owe comedians an audience. A successful comedian tells jokes that people like. If your show is getting killed because the audience doesn't like your jokes, that's nothing but a sign of failure on your part. How it started being the audience's fault that a comedian's jokes fall flat, I have no earthly idea.
posted by FirstMateKate at 12:44 PM on March 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

Also, I'm ambivalent about the idea that more criticism is heaped upon female comedians, especially where ill-behaving characters are concerned. Didn't we just have a lengthy discussion on this very angle in regards to "Seinfeld"? In general, I've noticed a lot of ambivalence about when you're supposed to laugh with or at a character who behaves badly. That ultimately lies with the audience in how they choose to interpret a joke.

And I didn't see AbFab as spiteful at all; I thought it was a hilarious take on fashion culture, celebrity culture and trendiness of things like celebrity charity and causes as career-boosting publicity. I didn't see it, as one linked article did, as just mocking women's failure. The joke was that they were shallow, and you were supposed to laugh at that.

I think the angle of celebrity/fashion culture is pretty timeless; if anything, it's more relevant now in a time of Reality TV culture and in a culture when plastic surgery era very common. It's a real shame that yellowface and trans jokes torpedoed that; they just didn't need to go there.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:44 PM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's a real shame that yellowface and trans jokes torpedoed that

To be a teensy bit pedantic, they were transphobic jokes. Trans jokes are a lot funnier and generally not shared with audiences beyond The Cabal (TM).
posted by Dysk at 12:47 PM on March 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

makes sense; the 'inside' joke vs. 'outside' joke. I think many comedians just don't get that.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:49 PM on March 3, 2017

d'oh, pardon my mangled sentence. "in an era where plastic surgery"...ugh editing...
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:50 PM on March 3, 2017

Re Girls and Dunham's point about audiences projecting female characters onto the underlying actors, she's probably onto something, but her show is a tricky place to start making that comparison from. I mean, I watched the first season totally cold, on a friend's recommendation, and it wasn't immediately clear to me how meta, or how autobiographical, the show was supposed to be. And pretty early on in the show's run (season 1 sometime?) there was a dustup over the diversity (or lack thereof) in the cast, which IIRC Dunham defended by saying that she was writing the show based on her personal experience and, therefore, she wasn't comfortable inserting a bunch of token POC that she lacked the experience to write authentically, just to diversify things. And, okay, that's reasonable enough if that's where the show is coming from. But that's probably also part of why people think they know Lena after watching a show about Hannah: she more or less said that was, to some extent anyway, the case.

So the real question seems to be: why do women feel the need to be super authentic to be taken seriously (see also: Tig Notaro's well-reviewed One Mississippi, which Notaro is quoted as saying is "85% real"), while e.g. Mike Judge can get away with creating show after show centered around characters he presumably has very little direct personal experience walking in the shoes of..? I don't think audiences should be blamed for thinking they know Dunham or Notaro when they purposefully write semi-autobiographical shows, but if it's only or largely women being required to provide that level of intimate authenticity for commercial success, that's obviously pretty gross.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:09 PM on March 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

It seems like this PC-backlash is a thing as Boomers have aged and have now become the Don Rickles, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin of the day, outdated and stuck in another era and they absolutely are not having it.

It makes me cringe, actually. The UK alternative comedy of the 80s was about sticking it to racist, sexist Bernard Manning and the like, so you'd think they'd have some mind to actually listening to "millennials". But I suppose a huge amount of inbuilt privilege plus millions in earnings does that to people.

(This Country, available on iplayer, is so far pretty funny and co-written by a woman).
posted by threetwentytwo at 1:27 PM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

In reading the commentary about women being taken seriously primarily when they are super authentic, I'm thinking back to the summer I spent listening to everything Sparks released up to Exotic Creatures of the Deep. For those unfamiliar with Sparks, they're contemporaries of David Bowie whose songs are both richly melodic and deeply absurd. I loved how surreal their earlier albums were, but when I got to their post-millennial output I found a few of the songs disturbing and assumed they were autobiographical. The weird thing was, a lot of their earlier output was just as weird and disturbing, but because the recent songs were in minor keys and slower tempos, had minimal arrangements, were sung in the first person, and were about things that could plausibly happen--and because the lyrics were easier to understand--I assumed they were autobiographical.

Putting aside One Mississippi and Girls--both of which come from female comics who were known quantities before their shows aired--I think women comics who anchor their own shows are seen as "authentic" and "relatable" because their shows are anchored in something resembling the world they inhabit. Many of them are set in recognizable milieu, the characters have cultural and material markers that are close to where they'd be socioeconomically (as opposed to the giant midtown loft where the characters in Friends lived), and in some cases they made their name on social media before their shows went into production. (Insecure came from a YouTube series, for example.) With a show like AbFab, I never would have assumed that was autobiographical because it was so broad and over the top, both in the comedy and in the production design and costuming.

To get back to my initial point, I do wonder how much we see something that ticks certain boxes (be it first-person lyrics when the voice is prominent in the mix or shows where the protagonist wears H&M and lives in a shoebox) and assumes it's autobiographical. It's worth asking why there are so few comedies with female protagonists that aren't completely broad, and if audiences would assume that intimacy=autobiography.
posted by pxe2000 at 2:00 PM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

The comparison to It's Always Sunny is interesting, because it's very clearly meant to be a show about wretched, broken people. In the first season, Dee was cast as the generic Female Voice of Reason, but the actress pushed back, saying that everyone else got to have all the fun, and over time since then one of the greatest things about the show has been that her character clearly thinks of herself as the voice of reason, but may be the worst of the bunch.

It's also worth noting that for as awful as the main characters are, pretty much everyone around them is generally depicted in a fairly human manner — Mac's trans-woman ex shows up occasionally and it's heavily implied that she's just sort of normal, and eventually depicted as just being in a fairly healthy relationship on the rare occasion they cross paths later. Granted, The Gang is generally kind of awful, and it's heavily implied that Mac was interested in her specifically because she was pre-op when they were dating because it's progressively more and more heavily implied that Mac is gay and lying to himself about it, etc.…

I can definitely understand Chapelle's Show-style concern over whether it found the wrong audience, though. It certainly seems to walk that line overall.
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:16 PM on March 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

the characters have cultural and material markers that are close to where they'd be socioeconomically (as opposed to the giant midtown loft where the characters in Friends lived)

I will never try to convince anyone that Friends is a show they should like, but I will push back against one of -- if not the -- biggest criticism of the show:

Friends wiki: Monica's grandmother is the official tenant and lived there before Monica. After she moved to Florida, Monica stayed in the apartment, sub-letting the apartment illegally (this also covers the fact that Monica could afford such an expensive apartment with her chef's salary

The show never claimed or implied that their living situation was normal or attainable.
posted by Room 641-A at 2:57 PM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I was not aware of that. In my defense, I haaaaaaaaaated Friends.
posted by pxe2000 at 3:04 PM on March 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

That's why I always mention it. :)
posted by Room 641-A at 3:22 PM on March 3, 2017

Sounds like a real deus ex Monica.
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:17 PM on March 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Mac is gay and lying to himself about it, etc.…

Mac came out a few episodes ago, and The Gang's response was just an exasperated "FINALLY!"
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:24 PM on March 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Oh man, I need to track down a way to watch the last few seasons from out here in Foreign. I do really enjoy the sense of continuity in that series.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:40 PM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

They've also hinted that Charlie and Dee are now on again off again sleeping together after they slept together in...season 10? It's handled kind of brilliantly. I think the strength of Always Sunny is the commitment to character (which I know sounds boring and pedantic, but whatever it's true -- the episodes that feel off are where they veer from that).
posted by schadenfrau at 6:56 AM on March 4, 2017

Weak writing and an exhausted original concept killed AbFab, not "snowflakes."

Nothing lasts forever, no how much we want to believe that some things can last forever, which is how we end up with great new things instead of the same old beat-to-death horses clopping along trailing clattering IV racks because the US market is so addicted to the idea of franchises being magical eternal things that people will love forever and ever. The nice thing about dead-empire series is that they have short runs, usually written by one person with a unified vision, and that they stop when there are no more ideas…unless American imbeciles push for zombie afterlives. Watch Please Like Me instead, which is fresh and complex and humane or, if you're addicted to mean, ugly characters pointlessly doing shitty things to people, aka the humor of bullies, revisit Seinfeld, anything Apatow, or It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

Amusingly, in my strange life of suddenly finding myself building a relationship with a slightly-younger man who, in his forties, has never been with another guy and who literally does not have the slightest clue about anything that counts as "gay culture," I decided that he needed to watch a few things that were part of my young queer identity-seeking media consumption…and holy, crap, even "France" and "Morocco" didn't make an impression on the poor guy, who watched them like aliens watching I Love Lucy episodes in the depths of the hydrocarbon oceans of Trappist-1's third planet. With fresh eyes unclouded by my long-lost post-Reagan-years joy at seeing something emerge anew from the wretchedness of the eighties, AbFab is a curious artifact.

Of course, there's great stuff out there. Nothing lasts forever, or should.
posted by sonascope at 2:48 PM on March 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm interested in the results of this. Could some millennials please watch some old stand up routines of Andrew Dice Clay and let us know what they think?
posted by conifer at 7:18 PM on March 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm on the border of maybe millennial maybe too old (1980), but for what it's worth, I always thought Andrew Dice Clay was utterly dire.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 8:47 PM on March 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

In general, comedy ages incredibly badly. As my fellow Gen-X peers age into the grim pudding of stupidity that is nostalgia for our youth, I'm continually reminded that our beloved comedy sucked. Like seriously, all of it. Hell, watching everyone falling over themselves to see Eddie Murphy reminded me of how fucking miserable Murphy and other "comedians" of his kind made people like me in the dark heart of the Reagan Memorial AIDS Epidemic™. Our beloved films were racist, nationalistic, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic rape fantasies, and the weird insistence people have on defending bad shit because it's tied to our sentimental notion that our youth didn't actually suck is just…oy vey.
posted by sonascope at 7:20 AM on March 5, 2017 [3 favorites]

I was going to use Buster Keaton as a counterexample to say that some comedy can be timeless, but then I realized I was about to type "as long as you don't watch the ones with the bad racist stereotypes." Which, fortunately, isn't all of them. But yeah...
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:10 PM on March 5, 2017 [3 favorites]