Janeane Garofalo Never Sold Out. What a Relief.

July 14, 2022 1:24 PM

That concept might be the reason her trailblazing stand-up career has been overshadowed; it may also be the reason she’s still so sharp. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan (73 comments total)

Found via Sam Seder, who points out, "Janeane leveraged her celebrity in fighting against the iraq invasion in a way no one else did and made personal and professional sacrifices we rarely see in our society."
posted by Etrigan at 1:25 PM on July 14, 2022 [25 favorites]

How can you write an article about Janeane Garofalo and (tangentially) Ben Stiller and not even mention Mystery Men?
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:38 PM on July 14, 2022 [52 favorites]

She stole scenes left and right as the completely apathetic high school counselor in Strangers with Candy. Total thievery.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:41 PM on July 14, 2022 [16 favorites]

Found via Sam Seder, who points out, "Janeane leveraged her celebrity in fighting against the iraq invasion in a way no one else did and made personal and professional sacrifices we rarely see in our society."

I wonder why the NYTimes would leave that huge part of someone's biography out....LOL.
posted by srboisvert at 1:48 PM on July 14, 2022 [54 favorites]

I'm glad she's still working, and on her own terms now. I remember watching The Truth About Cats and Dogs in a theater as a teen girl and feeling just crushed at the idea, accepted by all as the premise of the movie, that Janeane Garofalo was not good-looking. She was adorable! And Uma Thurman had a bony weird face! (Not fair to think that, but I did.) If Garofalo wasn't good enough, what hope was there for me? But I was on a planned outing and I couldn't just leave the movie, so I sat there and took it.

How can you write an article about Janeane Garofalo and (tangentially) Ben Stiller and not even mention Mystery Men?

That was such an underrated movie and she was fantastic in it.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:52 PM on July 14, 2022 [38 favorites]

The author links to her 1995 HBO half-hour special, which I was blown away by the four or five times I saw it in the late 90's. I saw it a year or two ago and it holds up, a very influential style that was a major departure for the era.
posted by skewed at 2:05 PM on July 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

She’ll always be The Bowler to me.
posted by MtDewd at 2:07 PM on July 14, 2022 [14 favorites]

Respect.

I’ve always kind of had a crush on her since Mystery Men. Glad she’s still around doing her own thing.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 2:31 PM on July 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

Gen X calling in here. Regarding Reality Bites, at the time I very much wanted to punch Ethan Hawke right in the smirk.

Janeane, however, is sublime in all roles, and in every way.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 2:47 PM on July 14, 2022 [39 favorites]

I rode in an elevator with her once, right before I saw her and Tig Notaro live. That's it that's the story. It was a great show. Thanks for posting.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 2:51 PM on July 14, 2022 [29 favorites]

I like her straightforward/acerbic-irony. It didn't take courage to believe in something, it took courage to act upon it. funny, I can't see her with a comedic partner like French and Saunders but that's not really her style and let's face it there is real comparison to French and Saunders nonetheless it is a testament to her comedic genius.

From the article:
"There has always been something off-putting about self-righteousness over selling out. Indie music snobs are easy to parody. And obsession with credibility can paralyze artists. “Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche” than anxiety over selling out, Klosterman wrote, expressing a view darker than my own, so alert to cost that it gives short shrift to the benefits."

I'ii be gotdamned if these aren't extracts from Neo' therapy notes.
posted by clavdivs at 3:33 PM on July 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

I was like, is she THAT obscure? I've seen her in things fairly recently. Then I realized that the last time I saw her was in the wonderful 2018 double-part film A BREAD FACTORY, a fairly obscure film which y'all should check out.

(She was also in the Cannes Cut of SOUTHLAND TALES, recently released in the US on Blu-ray, a film that failed but which makes more and more sense with each coming year.)
posted by eschatfische at 3:33 PM on July 14, 2022 [8 favorites]

Oh man, Janeane Garofalo. One of my formative crushes. Me and my equally emo queer friends used to watch and rewatch Sweethearts in uni like it was our job. I should watch it again.
I'm glad she's still going strong.
posted by BlueNorther at 3:46 PM on July 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

I remember watching The Truth About Cats and Dogs in a theater as a teen girl and feeling just crushed at the idea, accepted by all as the premise of the movie, that Janeane Garofalo was not good-looking. She was adorable!

That was the hardest part of the movie for me to suspend disbelief over. Like subjectively there are more attractive people, but she is in no way shape or form an ugly duckling or someone that you wouldn't want to look at a lot.

I could have maybe understood if it was a deliberate surreal choice like casting Dennis Haysbert and Michael Harris as twins in Suture, but I didn't get that impression.
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:48 PM on July 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

Perhaps a perfect stand in (up) for the long strange trip of Gen-X.
posted by djseafood at 3:54 PM on July 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

Loved this. I always see her name on lineups when I'm looking around at local comedy club calendars every few weeks and wonder, what the hell - is she working on material her new special or something? Then realized I've been seeing her name and wondering that for years. I'll have to go see her sometime.
posted by windbox at 3:56 PM on July 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

She was great in the final season of Younger.
posted by Clustercuss at 3:58 PM on July 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

i love janeane and what she's accomplished; always have. but this article is weird to me. it's more of an op-ed than a profile. the writer chronicles their own history with janeane's work, up to an including her current standup gigs.

but garofalo declined to be interviewed and all the other commentary is from other media recorded long ago. so even on the concept of "selling out" - the whole hook for the piece - we never hear janeane's perspective. it's just a lot of speculation.

it made me very curious to learn how she actually feels about her career and where she's at now. i guess i have to go track down her standup gigs.
posted by bruceo at 4:07 PM on July 14, 2022 [26 favorites]

but this article is weird to me. Agreed. I feel like this writer wanted to write about Cloisterman's book (which is great) but they're on a comedy beat so they're writing about Garafalo.

It had been so long since I have heard people earnestly talking about "selling out" as a genuine concern that when I read the book it was a bit shocking to remember that aspect of the 90s. To see someone presenting it as a potential ideal state seems deeply weird to me today. There's an idea that the unsold-out output is more pure, but the flip side is that there is a lot of output that could be great that requires financial support to make. It's hard to even know what it means to sell out or not today. Has Paul Thomas Anderson sold out? Has Bob Odenkirk?
posted by jeoc at 4:23 PM on July 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

bruceo, she's appeared as a guest on several podcasts in the past decade, although only a few since 2016 or so. If you use a podcast app, just do a search of her name and then filter the results by episodes.
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:25 PM on July 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hey, Janeane by the Hangdogs celebrated Ms Garofalo way back in the 90s.
posted by donpardo at 4:41 PM on July 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

We were on our island honeymoon (Manhattan) when I spotted her coming from the other direction. As we passed, I kept walking but said, "Thank you for not losing the weight."
posted by jocelmeow at 5:04 PM on July 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

This article resonates with an earlier revival profile of Lori Petty (previously) after she appeared on the HBO adaptation of Station Eleven.

I am glad that women who chose not to play into the sexist requirements for Hollywood success are getting some recognition. But this piece feels less like vindication and more like, "look at this curious relic from the last century!"
posted by bl1nk at 5:06 PM on July 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

i thought that the whole notion "selling out" had been thoroughly refuted by dave eggers in an essay written in 2000. i wanted to say "famous essay" but most links to the piece seem to be dead... the best source i can find is in this interview transcript (search for "Now, the addendum").
posted by bruceo at 5:24 PM on July 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

I love Janeane Garofalo. She should have her own podcast. No comedian deserves that big time youtube money more then her.
posted by hoodrich at 5:51 PM on July 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

The ugly duckling aspect of that picture did not make sense to me until I lived in Southern California for a while. Any woman who at that time did not aggressively perform femininity of one sort of another was basically a troll.
posted by bq at 6:11 PM on July 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

Has Bob Odenkirk?
Yes, as the film Nobody is just a run of the mill cheeseball action flick.

I'm not sure if Garofalo has, but the last thing I saw her in was Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, she was good and I was sad her arc was so short.
posted by The_Vegetables at 6:27 PM on July 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

So is this the horny for Janeane Garofalo thread?

👋🏻
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:58 PM on July 14, 2022 [24 favorites]

Put me in the "the whole idea of 'selling out' is hugely problematic, if the definition is supposed to be 'arguably compromised their ideals in order to achieve some sort of commercial success, or more likely, what you thought that their ideals should be', then probably almost anyone and everyone you've heard of has quote-endquote sold out" camp. I'd given up on that sort of thing way back in the eighties when a letter writer to Rolling Stone called Lou Fucking Reed, of all people, "a whore for corporate America" for doing a print ad in a previous issue of the magazine for Honda scooters. One. Henry Rollins did a Gap ad wearing the same sort of black T-shirt that he probably wears every other day. And Bob Odenkirk did an action flick? Oh dear, oh dear. (Shit, if you're going to go after him, make it for something like Let's Go to Prison, which he unfortunately directed and which fortunately flopped.) Nothing's more tedious than a purity test, except as a joke, and that joke is tired. The only exceptions to this are holding celebrities accountable for hawking crypto/NFTs, because that shit, as they used to say, is wack.

Anyway, Janeane. Yeah, she's great. But the FPP piece, for all its faults, does have something relevant and striking to say about her and her career:

When The Times did a story on the new generation of alt comics in 1997, Stiller recalled that when Garofalo had a bit that killed, she would not repeat it out of fear of being hack. “It’s almost like she was going too far the other way, because she didn’t want to be accepted,” he said. Odenkirk hit similar notes discussing her in “We Killed,” an oral history about women in comedy: “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in,” he said. “That’s not a good thing in the long run.”

I mean, there is such a thing as being too pure for this world, and that sort of purity has to be scrupulously maintained, and at some point one might consider whether maintaining it is really worth giving up, say, getting a little something to retire on. IMNSHO.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:13 PM on July 14, 2022 [10 favorites]

I really enjoy her work. I'm trying to find better corroboration than reddit...

But didn't she end up a 911 Truther? I kinda tuned out after that and feel like it not coming up yet in the thread means I'm a sucker and it's out of context.
posted by abulafa at 7:35 PM on July 14, 2022

"But didn't she end up a 911 Truther?"

No. I googled, and this video came up. She was making a joke about how if she was holding a puppy, she could say something controversial and it wouldn't matter.
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:43 PM on July 14, 2022 [7 favorites]

"The only exceptions to this are holding celebrities accountable for hawking crypto/NFTs, because that shit, as they used to say, is wack."

Right, right, as opposed to hawking a fast-fashion sweatshop, the CO2 industry or right-wing America-fuck-yeah corporate media products, which is fine.

As someone who never stopped judging people for selling out, just wait for another generation to come along and you'll read think pieces sneering about people calling people "shills" or "grifters" just for promoting cryto-scams, because how else are artists going to be paid. And then you all might come around.
posted by Infracanophile at 8:32 PM on July 14, 2022 [4 favorites]

"Phil, in the words of the great Emily Dickinson, end this unsavory fight OR I'LL RIP OUT YOUR NOSE HAIRS!"

To Steve Buscemi, even.
posted by MrVisible at 8:32 PM on July 14, 2022 [1 favorite]

I remember her coming on several Canadian news panel segments in the run up to the Iraq Invasion. I suppose producers figured she'd be great sport for the packs of right wing think-tank dipshits being paid to push all the 9/11 vengeance buttons. She never backed down, even when everything was transparently orchestrated to belittle her as a person, intending to dissuade other people from sharing her opinions. I hope she sleeps well….she's a righteous person in my book.
posted by brachiopod at 8:42 PM on July 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

Put me in the "the whole idea of 'selling out' is hugely problematic, if the definition is supposed to be

it's real simple. Only you know if you've sold out or not. Because only you know where that line is (ie: somewhere in your soul).

Otherwise, as somebody said to me once way back when (and they were right). "You sure do spend a lot of time judging people, finding them pretentious or whatever. You know what's fucking pretentious? Judgment."
posted by philip-random at 8:57 PM on July 14, 2022 [13 favorites]

The blanket anxiety of Gen X about selling out created a puritanical dichotomy where you were only pure if the most radical observer agreed that you were pure. But this NFT shit, or weird supplements and cannabis gummies marketed with dubious health claims, or people who know better hawking VPN services for privacy? I've heard some ad reads that sounded like hostage tapes that were way more shameful seeming than full throated trading on one's longstanding reputation to sell stuff. Using the most binary definition of morality left us morally stunted and easily exploited.
posted by wotsac at 9:16 PM on July 14, 2022 [5 favorites]

I like calling out the divide-and-conquer of "let's you and them fight" and see "selling out" as a filter between people who might add might not try to join the mainstream, a filter applied by people already in the mainstream directing hopefuls to fight the hopeless.

It turns out that "enough is a counter-cultural statement" also applies here. This internet rando thinks Garofalo is enough and I hope she does, too.

Janeane Garofolo is great, thanks for this FPP making me realise that being-in-the-same-room-as will be the only way to enjoy her performing.
posted by k3ninho at 11:55 PM on July 14, 2022

Right, right, as opposed to hawking a fast-fashion sweatshop, the CO2 industry or right-wing America-fuck-yeah corporate media products, which is fine.

Most of those are products, that while detrimental to the world at large, are at least useful to the buyer, which can't be said about crypto and NFTs. Never buying anything that was probably produced in a sweatshop or increases CO2 actually requires quite radical lifestyle changes that might sometimes be hard to reconcile with participating in society. Not messing with crypto is super-easy.
posted by sohalt at 12:24 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Are we still calling people pretentious? I just realized that seems like it stopped being a thing over a decade ago, but maybe I just stopped noticing.
posted by Dokterrock at 1:10 AM on July 15, 2022

God, she's cute. And funny. And smart.
posted by The Adventure Begins at 1:42 AM on July 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

I still have this weird mixture of disappointment and relief that her character on Seinfeld didn't stick around longer.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 4:52 AM on July 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

NOW can I go back to graduate school?
posted by Billiken at 6:49 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Another thank you for the FPP. I'm glad she's out doing her thing on her own terms, but I miss seeing her in things.
posted by snwod at 6:54 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

it's real simple. Only you know if you've sold out or not.

I am a 46 year old, former MRR reader, who once described "Reality Bites" to her friends as "corporate ad sell-out culture being sold as something radical to sell-outs too oblivious to know they'd already sold out." And then I rented it so I could watch it, in secret, a stupid number of times (I was 18).

I also work, and have worked, in advertising since the tail end of the Clinton administration.

That it became unfashionable to discuss selling out at the exact same time that a large percentage of my generational cohort realized they needed health insurance was no coincidence.
posted by thivaia at 6:56 AM on July 15, 2022 [34 favorites]

"Selling out" and "not selling out" are ideas that were responses to a time and that made at least some sense at the time. I remember this very well because I am exactly the age where Janeane Garofolo was kind of a big deal and I believe I still have an old, old copy of Bust in which she was profiled. At one point I literally owned a copy of the hand-stapled paper zine that turned into Bust - probably valuable, no idea where it is now.

It made sense to talk about "selling out" and "not selling out" in the nineties for several reasons:

1. The "mainstream" had realized, once again, that it was possible to incorporate counterculture tropes to sell stuff - see Thomas Frank's dissertation, The Conquest of Cool, which is a really fun read, for the way in which this is a trend but not a constant in advertising. The "mainstream" had figured out new ways to absorb counterculture people and images, some very successful ("xtreme" everything) and some not ("Ok Soda"). So selling out was on the table for people in a way it had not been before - did you want to maintain a small audience who had some familiarity with your work and some investment in the milieu or did you want to have wider reach but make money for a big corporation and have your work distorted? (See Chumbawamba if you think "but people should WANT a wider reach, it's just elitist bullshit to think otherwise).

2. There was still an outside but the outside was visibly shrinking. Like, if you read novels about bohemian weirdos starting in the post-war period, you can see that odd jobs and low rents in big cities plus the welfare state were really important in creating space for queers, artists and weirdos, and that the rise of national identification systems, higher rents and the end of welfare made that a lot harder. In the mid-nineties nineties you still could squeak by with odd jobs and a crummy apartment even in New York; now that's virtually impossible. So "selling out" was on everyone's minds because "not selling out" was possible and getting harder.

How Things Have Changed: I went to a meeting of radicals doing a good, serious, important thing the other night and they all had cars, and from the way they talked about public transit, it was pretty clear that most of them never rode it. I was the only one who didn't. Twenty years ago, half the group or more would have arrived by bike.

And I realized that a basic trope of the left when I was coming up had been "don't sell out to car culture", but that was because we could mostly arrange our lives so that we lived within, say, three to four miles of downtown and could get to work by bike or bus. Rents and jobs have changed so much that unless you're lucky or locked into a career, you can't count on that kind of stability. Only the Olds with houses and stable jobs can really commit to bike culture.

My point being that if people can do it, it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that they "not sell out". Like, if you can get by without shilling for Pepsi, driving a car or working for, eg, Facebook or a bank, you should. It makes perfect sense to urge people "not to sell out", as long as they actually have another choice.

A lot of the nineties/early-2000s "ha ha the selling out discourse is so pretentious" stuff was actually from, uh, corporate product - movies and music that simultaneously drew from and satirized or critiqued the counterculture. Of course Sony, Pepsi and Paramount want you to feel that it's wrong to judge people, because they are the ones judged by the counterculture.
posted by Frowner at 7:00 AM on July 15, 2022 [28 favorites]

So is this the horny for Janeane Garofalo thread?

👋🏻

absolutely. she wasn’t (isn’t!) just hot she was cool, nothing more confusing than being 13 and wanting her and wanting to be her. also a great voice, i remember liking her air america show better than maddow but can’t remember why more than the voice
posted by dis_integration at 7:05 AM on July 15, 2022

"Selling out" and "not selling out" are ideas that were responses to a time and that made at least some sense at the time.

I'm finding the discussion of 'selling out' to be interesting, and even the way it arose in this context is kind of funny.. to be having a beer with Garofalo right now, reading these comments.. I am guessing the historical record features evidence of this tension as far back as a person wants to go, it just happens to have 'coagulated' in a certain way during the late 80s up to the end of the 90s, from what I can see.

This item doesn't tell you a whole lot about anything, but I included it because a) The Brooklyn Vegan? and b) there is just something ridiculous about talking about 'selling out' these days.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:16 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I agree that this article was sort of weird - fan service without an interview that was more patting the writer on his own back.

I really love Garofalo though I have to admit I haven't followed her work much over the past decade. Back in the early 90s I used to go to comedy shows at Luna Lounge on the Lower East Side where you would see her along with Marc Maron and Louis CK and a bunch of other "alternative comics" I can't remember, when alternative comedy basically meant they read thoughts about their lives from a notebook instead of memorizing and telling jokes. Some things were really funny but a lot of it was hit or miss. It was always an interesting show (especially when you were raised on traditional standup). So I'll always associate her with those two comics, and find it fascinating how different each of their trajectories have gone.

I think the whole conversation around selling out is kind of ironic, since at the time (at least among my Gen X friends) Reality Bites was considered the sellout version of Singles.
posted by Mchelly at 7:34 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

cue: the next cooler person to tell us what Singles was the sell-out version of
posted by elkevelvet at 7:48 AM on July 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wait does that mean I'm cool?
posted by Mchelly at 7:52 AM on July 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

cue: the next cooler person to tell us what Singles was the sell-out version of

Obviously, it was Crowe selling out on the cred he got from Say Anything....
posted by Etrigan at 7:57 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Wait does that mean I'm cool?

the only thing I can say with any certainty is that you are cooler than me :D
posted by elkevelvet at 8:24 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

cue: the next cooler person to tell us what Singles was the sell-out version of

For me, Singles was guilty of a far worse crime than selling out. It was dull. It got a lot of notice for setting itself inside one of the coolest, most vital cultural scenes we'd seen in a long time ... and I can't really remember anything about it, beyond Eddie Vedder being a terrible actor and long, extended scenes of morose young hip-types morosely hanging out a gigs, not really paying attention to the bands that were playing because they were so morosely overwhelmed with their own rom-com issues.

Almost Famous was fun though.
posted by philip-random at 8:40 AM on July 15, 2022

Wait, we're this deep into the thread and no-one's mentioned her roles in the various Wet Hot American Summer shows?

Gad, and also zooks.
posted by The Outsider at 9:15 AM on July 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

After reading this article I ended up reading the 1995 NY mag article about SNL where she appears quite miserable. It paints quite a picture of shit to endure.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 9:21 AM on July 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

we're this deep into the thread

like Garofalo's comic timing, it's all unfolding exactly as it should
posted by elkevelvet at 9:22 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I loved Janeane during her 1990s heyday and have been rooting for her to succeed in any format she wants. That said, her defense of Louis CK makes me sad.
posted by pxe2000 at 9:27 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Wait, we're this deep into the thread and no-one's mentioned her role in

Larry Sanders
posted by philip-random at 9:51 AM on July 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

That it became unfashionable to discuss selling out at the exact same time that a large percentage of my generational cohort realized they needed health insurance was no coincidence.

This is the American health care system working as intended. Always remember that health insurance is not intended to deliver health care—it's a mechanism for capital to control labor.
posted by vibrotronica at 10:06 AM on July 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

It’s in TFA, but if we’re up to the part of the thread where we’re “has no one mentioned…” I adored her in Romy and Michelle.
posted by Mchelly at 10:16 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Who is Janeane Garofalo? (or is this something one would need a television to know the answer?)
posted by Gary at 10:39 AM on July 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

I also loved her part in Mystery Men but she also has a little bit part in Dogma [SLYT to whole movie queued to her part] that makes me want to be her character's friend.
posted by Mitheral at 11:13 AM on July 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Now I'm reminded of her odd guest appearance on '24' as one of M.L. Rajskub's many antagonists. (I hated '24'. It came on after 'House', which I also hated. Lot's of hate-watching good actors battling bad scripts in those days.)
posted by ovvl at 5:19 PM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

That action movie she did with Sandra Bernhard and Jon Favreau though.
posted by box at 5:19 PM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Can I put in a few good words for The Matchmaker , which seemed to lean in to 'Janeane Garofalo works for an asshole boss but meets with romance'?

"If you flatter me any more I'm gonna have to toss your pale, Irish ass off the side of this boat."

"Is being an idiot like being high all the time?"

"I'm assuming that you don't mean incredibly hard drugs."
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 5:20 PM on July 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

J.G. after making a fat joke about Rush Limbaugh:

"I would never make an ad hominem attack on someone with a moral compass."

That remark comes in handy more and more as time passes.
posted by Flexagon at 5:32 PM on July 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

The problem is there are a lot of people out there who hold the opinion that having a high BMI is a moral failing in and of itself.
posted by Mitheral at 6:46 PM on July 15, 2022

didn't she end up a 911 Truther?

You might be thinking of Kennedy, who went from MTV VJ in the '90s to Fox News commentator. I'm not seeing anything about her being a 9/11 truther though.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 4:02 AM on July 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

How can you write an article about Janeane Garofalo and (tangentially) Ben Stiller and not even mention Mystery Men?

That was such an underrated movie and she was fantastic in it.

Indeed it was underrated. Too bad as it was very funny. It also has the saddest superpower in *any* superhero movie: the invisible boy. His origin story was so depressing, but he was able to harness that into a force of good for the world.
posted by NoMich at 8:21 AM on July 16, 2022

Can I put in a few good words for The Matchmaker

Yes please!

" I always thought you were just really good at your job. But you really are an asshole, aren't you?"
posted by Preserver at 8:47 AM on July 16, 2022

I read the article linked by mandymanwasregistered, which was good, but there was also this part:

Meanwhile, they make grudging progress on a sketch written by Norm MacDonald. It’s a parody of Andy Rooney—not exactly a fresh target. Rooney, played by MacDonald, is cleaning out his desk and finds a bottle of sedatives, empty except for cotton.

“Should I mention cotton more than once?” MacDonald asks, and it’s debated for ten minutes. No—just one cotton reference stays in, but now they can’t decide whether the pills are for the treatment of “hallucinations,” “mood swings,” “dementia,” or “NRA dementia.”

“That’s too much,” Downey says. “It’s his attitude that’s funny, the fact that he’s ignoring something that’s obviously important.”

MacDonald: “So I can say, ‘I don’t know what the pills are for—what I do know is, the bottle is mostly filled with cotton.’”

Franken: “And, ‘I give the pills to Lesley Stahl. Then, when Lesley’s passed out, I take her to the closet and rape her.’ Or, ‘That’s why you never see Lesley until February.’ Or, ‘When she passes out, I put her in various positions and take pictures of her.’”

Downey: “‘Here’s a picture of Ed Bradley.’”

MacDonald: “What if Rooney rapes Mike Wallace? And then says, ‘I guess that makes me bad.’ Is it funnier with a black guy? Or two old white guys?”

Franken: “What about, ‘I drag Mike into my office and rape him. Right here! I guess that makes me bad.’”
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 2:32 PM on July 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Another visible project of hers that I was surprised not to see mentioned was her role on the last couple years of The West Wing as Louise Thornton, communications director for the Santos campaign.
posted by replayer at 11:57 AM on July 19, 2022

didn't she end up a 911 Truther?

You might be thinking of Kennedy, who went from MTV VJ in the '90s to Fox News commentator. I'm not seeing anything about her being a 9/11 truther though.

There was this: she spoke up for a Scientology detox program in 2006. They had people on the ground during the 9/11 cleanup if memory serves, and Garofolo got labeled as truther-adjacent for a bit.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 12:40 PM on July 19, 2022