Promotion Corner
Two things to promote, both of which with my good friend and collaborator Natalie Rotter-Laitman.
There’s still a few seats left for my show at Union Hall, Exploration: LIVE!, this Sunday at 5:30pm. It’s a great show and I’m honestly not biased: I’ve done a lot of really bad shows so I know the difference.
I just launched my podcast, “Exploration: LIVE! the podcast”!! You can listen to the first two episodes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The premise is basically the same as our show: we each bring in 4-5 ideas (theses/postulates/theorems/questions) to consider. People have said really nice stuff about it so far.
What I’ll Be Talking About In My Newsletter Today
Today in my newsletter I’ll be talking about Talking Shit.
Talking Shit
A few years ago, I worked in development at a non-profit youth chorus. “Development” is a funny euphemism – what I really did was write letters to wealthy people (or the foundations that they’d endowed) asking for money in the tens of thousands, thanking them in advance for their incredible generosity in choosing us as the means by which they could avoid taxes. All things considered, it was a good job. My two direct bosses were kind and understanding, the office occasionally had free food spillover from fundraising events, and I liked working in support of children’s arts. Around 4pm, kids would flood the office, and I’d hear them rehearse as I wrote my letters asking wealthy benefactors to fund them, which was sweet unless I didn’t like the song, in which case it was horrible.
The office was divided into two wings: an artistic wing, which is where the conductors and musical directors sat; and the business wing, where I sat along with my five or six colleagues – almost exclusively women in their 30s and 40s. For the first few weeks, I was fairly lonely. My work, though in service of children’s arts (which are good, in my opinion) was unsavory, and I wasn’t sure if my anti-wealth ethics would be met kindly by my colleagues in an enterprise that lived by being sycophantic to the wealthy. There were other discomforts, too. I found the founder to be megalomaniacal, the HR director – the brother of the founder, no problem – to be a bit creepy. Nobody said anything about this to me, so I assumed I was alone in feeling this way.
Something happens when you’re isolated in your assessment of the world. If you think something’s bad, corny, and unimpressive, but everyone around you is proceeding as if it’s good, interesting, and impressive, it creates a fissure between your internal and external worlds, a gulf, across which connection becomes challenging. It can be crazy-making. Think Frank Grimes in The Simpsons, broken by his solitude in his (correct) perception of Homer’s laziness, incompetence, and boorishness. It’s a very particular kind of loneliness, finding that no one around you shares your opinion. I remember feeling this way after reading Hanya Yanagihara’s critically lauded novel A Little Life in 2016 and hating it, finding it voyeuristic and maudlin. Finally, people are coming around, as in this fabulous review by the best writer working today Andrea Long Chu. Vindication feels amazing.
As a comedian, this happens all the time. I see things or people get widespread adulation for work that I find to be mediocre or bad, and am perplexed at the disconnect (until, of course, I find out that everyone who posted about it is friends with the people who make it. Fair enough). I would give specific examples here, but I can’t because it would be professionally bad for me. BUT if you ask me directly I’ll tell you immediately, no problem.
At my job, it was only after meeting my friend, name redacted, that things started to open up. It was one of those office meet cutes – after several weeks of our schedules misaligning, and her working on the other side of the office, we met in the office kitchen, and immediately clicked. She was my age, so funny, and, I could tell from the beginning that she maintained similar skepticisms. Over a transcendent first lunch together, we talked shit – tentatively at first — as you have to be, in case your shit talk isn’t matched — then enthusiastically. Yes, he was a megalomaniac! Yes, his brother is creepy. We shared our evidence, exalted and liberated, two private worlds meeting and affirming each other. Beyond confirming observations I felt alone in having, our shit talk also surfaced other observations and insights that had been below the level of my conscious awareness.
This is what shit talk, at its best, does: frees you from isolation. It’s a lifeline, and can be the basis of the strongest type of connections, built on a foundation of “everyone’s wrong except for us”. (Think: Raven, Acid Bath Princess of the Darkness, and Tara). In the comedy scene (and, I imagine, in other creative or professional scenes), it’s absolutely necessary. Someone gets booked all the time but their work is derivative or boring; someone gets a job others would do better. It’s not even always fueled by professional jealousy (though it often is): it can be that someone’s creepy, or hard to work with, or secretly funded by their wealthy parents. Shit talk is a subspecies of gossip, which, as have argued, can be healthy, and is often unfairly maligned because of its feminine associations. As a form of gossip, shit talk can help inscribe artistic standards and best community practices. Maybe not everyone agrees with this, but judgment and criticism, I think, are healthy for creative communities. They encourage you to be better.
Shit talk’s pro-sociality, though, is obviously not the sole source of its pleasure. As I joke in the first Tweet above – shit talk is delicate. You reach a point where you do it too much and it becomes poisonous. Shit talk can be just as motivated by malice as it is by finding community. Usually, in comedy, I talk shit because I’m jealous: because other people get things I feel like they don’t “deserve,” that maybe I “deserve.” This is mostly a specious distinction anyway, and a distracting one: who really “deserves” to make a living writing for TV shows. Nobody does, or everyone does – it’s not actually that meaningful a distinction. We all deserve to live comfortable lives, and not be worried about access to health care and housing! This kind of shit talk encourages you to determine who deserves the scraps, without asking why there are only scraps in the first place.
And while it can be healthy to acknowledge your negative feelings, it isn’t necessarily helpful to stoke them, or give them a permanent place in your personal schema for how the world works. I’ve had relationships that relied on it for sustenance. At first it feels freeing to have the mean-spirited parts of yourself validated and celebrated, but soon the world seems to curdle. If everything and everyone is so annoying and bad then what’s the point? Inevitably you turn the negativity on yourself, so practiced is your muscle for judgment. Shit talk can be addictive — the salacious thrill of transgressing the social directive to be nice and generous. That directive can feel oppressive — some things do actually suck – but so too is the reflex to be critical, to consistently consider things in the most unflattering light. Few things, after all, are unimpeachably perfect. Most works fail at some of their aims and succeed at others.
Talking shit can also be dangerous, especially to people within your world. We’ve all had the experience of initiating shit talk about someone only to realize you’ve misread the situation and the other person doesn’t feel the same way, and subsequently having to backpedal. “No, no, but they’re great! I do really respect their tenacity” or whatever. Humiliating. For this reason it’s crucial to have people outside of your world to talk shit with. It won’t hit quite the same, but they’ll probably unconditionally agree with you. If you’d like, I can be that person for you. Feel free to respond to this email with some shit you’d like to talk, and I promise I will make you feel valid in your dislike.
I’m dreading concluding this essay, because I think it lends itself to one of the most boring conclusive thoughts you can have: that it’s about finding a balance. BORING!!! I was really trying to figure out a smarter conclusive thought, maybe a diagnostic to determine when shit talk is helpful and when it’s not, but I couldn’t get there. One idea I’ve been practicing is being critical without writing people off. Neither “everything is amazing” nor “everyone sucks,” but rather acknowledging that someone’s work is derivative and boring and cloying and also that they are working hard and trying and making boring work is literally not a big deal. Tons of people do it! Or that, yes, someone is creepy, or megalomaniacal, or overeager, and that doesn’t mean you have to decide that they’re a Bad Person, just that maybe you should stay away from them, and watch out for those qualities in yourself. Everyone is trying, and acknowledging when people fall short can be, maybe, a way to honor that work.
i don’t get the hype around ‘my year of rest and relaxation’ someone shit talk me into loving it before yorgos’ film comes out