Comedy Nonsense

 Oooooooh, someone's bitching about "docucomedy specials":

Complicating this is the fact that offstage personal moments have become their own kind of performance online; now that an audience can follow a comedian’s “real” life on social platforms, jokes that seem truer and more confessional, jokes that reflect those personal narratives, also start to seem better. And in docucomedy, filmmakers are eager to show receipts. In Slate’s Stage Fright, material about her grandmothers cuts to footage of those same grandmothers, forcing Slate’s onstage impressions into direct comparison with the real people. In Thomas’s very personal hour about his childhood and his mother, the documentary elements—which show Thomas hanging out with his family and asking them what they remember about his mom—become a shortcut, bypassing Thomas’s work in favor of a blunt visual record. It’s an attempt to give the audience some of the same closeness Thomas has to the subject, but it unbalances the production.

I enjoyed the Gary Gulman one, but only because I was so concerned about him after hearing his story. so it was a relief to see how the real guy was doing. Otherwise I agree: just get to the goddam jokes already. And I stand by this:

Comedians who release standup specials on Netflix seem to have an outrageously inflated sense of how much people want an extended intro before getting to the goddam standup already.