Oh My Aching Sides

[Content Note: Misogyny; heterocentrism; cissexism.]

I've mentioned many times before that I am a huge fan of stand-up comedy—and there's almost nothing I like to watch better than a great stand-up comedian who can make me think about something in a new way with a great joke.

Because I love it so, I watch a lot of stand-up comedy—but most of it is garbage. And the reason most of it is garbage is because somewhere close to 99% of it is tired, hackneyed, rehashed rubbish (which wasn't even funny the first time) about "relationships." Men are always horny! Ha ha ha! Women are shopaholic chatterboxes! Ha ha ha! Mars and Venus, baby. Mars. And. Venus.

*thatface*

The most unremarkable, uninspired, unchallenging, and unrevolutionary subject in all of stand-up comedy is relationships. Across the comedy spectrum, that well has been mined totally, utterly dry by hundreds upon hundreds of men and women who obligingly insert into their routines some barely indistinguishable variation on the same old unoriginal (and heterocentrist and misogynist) battle-of-the-sexes shtick—observations regurgitated ad infinitum in insipid sitcoms, interchangeable romcoms, and adverts hawking everything from deodorant to luxury cars.

Anyway.

I have been half-heartedly watching NBC's latest season of Last Comic Standing, and I don't even know why I do it to myself, because it's always an exercise in disappointment and frustration, as I watch virtually all of the comics I like (i.e. the ones who do non-oppressive and original material) cut from the competition before the final round.

So many women, many of them women of color and queer women, pushed aside before the competition even begins in earnest.

This season has been less overwhelmingly depressing than usual in that regard, making it merely enormously depressing. And then last night, it just went completely south, as a straight white male comedian started the show with a set that was entirely about the differences between men and women, wrapped inside the frame of video gaming.

So, jokes like: You can tell men make video games for men because you kill the dragon, rather than having an insufferably long conversation about why the dragon is mad at you. Har har.

One of the actual fucking jokes from this actual piece-of-shit set was: If women made video games, there'd be once a month when you wouldn't even be able to play them.

And the judges (Keenan Ivory Wayans, Roseanne, and Russell Peters) thought this guy was amazing. Keenan Ivory Wayans even complimented him on being able to take that familiar material and make it seem new by doing it though the frame of video gaming.

Oh well. I guess Tim Allen will want to retire someday, and there's got to be someone to inherit the kingdom.

The gross, gross kingdom.