Humorism

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Humorism

A newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in comedy.

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"It's crazy how things work out."

Reflections on a dead platform.

The most unfunny funny thing I’ve ever seen was a show called There’s… Johnny!, whose stylization I will disregard for the rest of this column. Co-created and written by Mad About You star Paul Reiser, There’s Johnny was ordered by and set to air on Seeso, the NBC streaming platform that folded unceremoniously before it could show the world There’s Johnny, which was subsequently bought by Hulu and released a week after Louis CK’s cancellation. Please know that everything I’m about to describe is played 100% earnestly. There’s Johnny follows a 19-year-old named Andy Klavin who watches The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson every night with his parents in their quiet town of Valentine, Nebraska. One day in 1972 he writes the show asking for an autograph to give his parents and maybe even a

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Seth Simons

Oct 22 2021

9 min read

The Big Picture

A few more thoughts about all this Chappelle stuff.

It's true that wokeness poses no existential threat to comedy, but it’s not true that antiwokeness poses no existential threat to comedy. The normalization of racism makes comedy less safe for people of color; the normalization of transphobia makes comedy less safe for trans people. Sometimes these effects are visible only in aggregate—an art form dominated by the white and cis—and sometimes we are unlucky enough to see them in gory detail. To take one recent example, it’s bad for comedy when one of the only distributors in a rapidly consolidating industry gives millions and millions of dollars to a transphobic comedian, then makes a gruesome display of punishing trans employees who take issue with this. * The most convincing evidence of comedy’s power to influence people is the widesprea

Seth Simons

Oct 17 2021

7 min read

Sunday Evening Newsletter

I meant it to be a Saturday evening newsletter but I got distracted.

One of my longtime pet peeves is the tendency of certain types in and around comedy to remark, whenever some comedian's reprehensible statements reach the level of national controversy, that the real problem is a lack of craft. When you see this once, you'll start seeing it everywhere. It's not the racism that offends me, it's the lazy writing, they'll say. The issue isn't that it's transphobic, it's that it's hack. The implication is that better writing and funnier joke-telling would somehow elevate a bigoted joke out of its bigotry, which in turn implies that bigotry is an aesthetic failing. Followed to its logical conclusion, however, the criticism is really just a request for more skillful hate speech. Twitter postTwitter postWith the obvious caveat that formal analysis is an essential

Seth Simons

Oct 11 2021

4 min read