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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • I think people sometimes want their favorite lines/scenes adapted, while not realizing that the core story isnt changing. Like there has been a lot of discussion about the cool lines being removed >!from some Viltrumites on Thraxa!<, but I don’t really remember those lines, so to me they don’t matter. I think it’s important to keep the core story, and if it’s doing that, then it’s just a matter of preference. People want whole episodes dedicated to certain fights, but a comic functions different than a TV show.










  • No, and this is a crazy conspiracy theory.

    Clare Malone explained on the podcast Infamous that she started doing some investigating because she caught wind of some discrepancies due to the trail of the storytelling. For instance, brother Eric’s infiltration of mosques took place in 2006.

    In addition, Maher has never been threatened by the Daily Show. It has an even smaller audience than it did in the Jon Stewart days, and he coexisted with the Stewart and Noah eras. This thread is just crazy thinking.




  • But his stuff was based on what his generation experienced, and apparently based on people living in his neighborhood.

    This is what he call emotional truths in the story, and as a comic, I don’t believe it has any validity. Those type of lies are not in service to the joke, but talking about the struggles of your community. Which is an understandable goal, but given the controversy around his special, it definitely had consequences for his community and the discrimination they faced. For instance, imagine he had told the brother Eric joke, and then gave the punchline that brother Eric coerced a confession out of him, and he’s been in prison for the last twenty years. And then he could reveal that story is not about him. Brother Eric coerced the story about another Muslim that was the same age. Same jokes. Same laughs. More honest.

    I personally think he made the wrong choice by centering his comedy around himself, rather than just being honest about the struggles of his community and it affecting other people.

    As a former Daily show writer put it in the article:

    A comedy writer who has worked for “The Daily Show” said that most comics’ acts wouldn’t pass a rigorous fact-check, but, if a show is built on sharing something personal that’s not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, the invention of important details could make an audience feel justifiably cheated. “If he’s lying about real people and real events, that’s a problem,” the writer said. “So much of the appeal of those stories is ‘This really happened.’


  • Truth is? Most standup is bullshit. Of course it is! The idea of taking a real feeling or a real scenario and creating a fake story with a beginning/middle/end is literally the gig. You pull from every part of you to try and make it genuine, but its usually not real.

    Standup also choose the stories they tell. I’m Filipino, so as a stand up comedian, I talk about my experiences. But as middle class Filipino growing up in SoCal, I haven’t experienced the racism and discrimination that my past generations (or fellow Filipinos) have experienced. So I can’t just invent or take inspiration from other experiences of discrimination, and pass them off as my own.

    That’s always been my standard personally as a comedian, because it also intersects with my political identity. Creating that type of distrust with an audience would hurt myself and my community, and my own personal success would not be worth that.


  • The issue is that some of the stories don’t add up. For instance, any of the stories where he mentions it being related to his time on Patriot Act would raise a red flag for some folks, especially if they knew people working on the show. You can tell any joke you want, but when you fudge the details about things that happened while at work, people would be suspect. The anthrax story is a good example. Hasan had a security detail and Netflix was working with him to ensure his safety, by it’s strange that an anthrax scare went unreported, especially in NYC.

    The comedy scene does care about accuracy regarding experiences with racial discrimination as well. A fair amount of comedians came out against his type of storytelling after the New Yorker story broke. But there were some people supportive him as well.