Hannah Gadsby

Friday

Cockburn

Is E. Jean Carroll’s second pay-day coming?

Has FreedomWorks gone FreedomWoke? FreedomWorks has gone FreedomWoke? That’s the charge of a new campaign by Berman and Co, which says the Koch-funded group’s new COO, Marty Irby, has a history of working with radical animal rights groups with close connections to PETA... and Democrats. FreedomWorks, meanwhile, is a grassroots organization that advocates for free markets, personal liberty and lower taxes.Cockburn notes that Irby’s biography on the FreedomWorks website leaves out these details, instead listing only his lobbyist and consulting work with Republicans. According to his LinkedIn, the last time he worked directly for a member of the GOP was between late 2013 and early 2016, when he served as a communications director for Representative Ed Whitfield.

e. jean carroll

Friday

Paul du Quenoy

Scarface lands on post-woke Netflix

“I always tell the truth — even when I lie,” says Tony Montana in Brian DePalma’s 1983 cult classic gangster film Scarface, which on September 1 became available for streaming on Netflix. The line resonates well in a post-truth world. In the film’s climactic scene, Tony, the drug kingpin played by Al Pacino, has just started his slide to rock bottom. His wife, Elvira, played by a young and then-unknown Michelle Pfeiffer, has publicly dumped him in an embarrassing scene at a high-end restaurant as well-manicured bourgeois types look on aghast. His erstwhile business partner in the drug trade is closing in after Tony failed to dispose of a troublesome investigative journalist.

Monday

Art Tavana

How Netflix saved comedy

Comedy has been absorbed into Twitter’s zeitgeist tornado: a whirling panopticon inhabited by 23 percent of the most humorless and opinionated denizens of the internet (and the top 25 percent of them produce almost all the tweets, according to a study by Pew Research Center). Twitter’s superusers are journalists who have never left the eye of the storm; Twitter has become their “ultimate editor.” It has what the New York Times calls an “outsized role in shaping narratives around the world.” But what kind of comedy clicks for these dopamine-addicted trend chasers?

Netflix

Monday

Godfrey Elfwick

The best comedy is the type that makes white people feel terrible about themselves

  Portland, Oregon Allow me to introduce myself. I am Godfrey Elfwick. I am a genderqueer Muslim atheist. I am also WrongSkin, which means I was born white but identify as black (West Indian to be precise). I came out on Twitter as transrace in January 2015. When Rachel Dolezal confirmed her WrongSkin status later that year, it was a great comfort to me to learn I was influencing others to be proud of their transethnic identities. I only wish this level of awareness had been around in 1990. It would have been so much easier for Vanilla Ice. Living with so many levels of minority status can be extremely difficult. As a biologically born white male who identifies as a black woman, I am constantly vilified.

comedy