On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Tom Wolper <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 3:30 AM, Kevin M. <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> I quite liked her stand-up back in the day and even found her a decent >> comic sidekick for Brooke Shields on "Suddenly Susan." But when she started >> marketing/branding herself as the go-to D-list celebrity, she began to >> remind me of Zsa Zsa Gabor, famous for being famous, but not really doing >> anything. That got annoying quickly. >> >> I believe I mentioned a while back that she and Marc Maron had a good >> chat on the WTF podcast; it is worth a listen. >> > > The Washington Post's Style Blog called Griffin out for hypocrisy, showing > 7 video clips of her making fun of famous women for their weight or looks. > > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/03/13/kathy-griffin-doesnt-want-to-make-fun-of-peoples-bodies-here-are-all-the-times-she-did/ > Unlike Kevin, I despised "Suddenly, Susan" , and had no real sense of Griffin as a potentially tolerable person until her arc on Seinfeld. After that I had no sense of her until I saw one season of the D List, and surprised myself by not hating it. I still find most of her stand-up act unfunny, and she is almost unwatchable on New Year's Eve with Cooper. So, I am something of an unlikely defender. But I think the WaPo is missing (perhaps intentionally) Griffin's point. The key part of her explanation for leaving the show is "I am a freedom-loving female and gay rights activist who loves to find the > funny in all people, attitudes, beliefs, and appearances...But I do not > want to use my comedy to contribute to a culture of unattainable > perfectionism and intolerance toward difference." She acknowledges that she makes fun of people, including their appearance, so citing incidents in which she makes fun of Zellweger's plastic surgery, or the weight fluctuations of Janet Jackson, or the meanness of Barbara Streisand, is besides the point. The context that she mentions as being important is relevant in how it mediates these kinds of jokes in relationship to the culture of perfectionism and intolerance of difference. There is a big difference (or, at least Griffin is claiming there is a big difference, and I tend to agree with her) between making fun of "fat Oprah" (one of the more wealthy, powerful and well-liked women on the planet) on the one hand, and making fun of a 23 year old minor actress for looking fat because her 130 pounds do not fit quite "right" into some designer gown. In my experience with FP (admittedly limited most to only after the major award shows, though I have seen a few of the regular ones) most of the time when an established, older, famous and powerful woman who is way overweight comes down the runway they speak in deliberate code about how great she looks in a "body-appropriate" outfit, and save the majority of their snark about women's bodies for younger, less established, and "normal" weight women - the kind of comments most likely to contribute to a sense among young women watching that there is something wrong with their own bodies. Of the examples cited by WaPo, probably the joke about Bristol Palin is the only one that comes close to constituting an example of hypocrisy by Griffin. But even that is besides the point - Griffin is not really claiming to be perfect, or to have never told a joke she regrets or now thinks is inappropriate. She is saying she does not want to be part of a show whose philosophy is based on a premise she finds inconsistent with her own. I doubt she would have resigned from the show if the Zendaya Coleman joke was an infrequent exception. I was actually watching the show when the Coleman joke was made. I had never heard of Coleman before. I did not find the joke funny (given its punchline I assumed she was famous for smoking weed somehow), but did not find it strikingly offensive. When I later read that the mj reference was based merely on her hair style, and that the joke was written for Rancic, and was not just off the top of her head, I saw it as more problematic - not because the joke itself was so intolerable, but because it did seem to indicate an intentional strategy by the show. It also suggests that the split between Osborne (and now Griffin) and Rancic is not so much about telling that one joke (originally it seemed to me that Osborne was overreacting) but a split over whether the on-air talent should conform to the producer's underlying main stream perfectionism. When Joan Rivers was alive a lot of this was finessed, since her persona suggested equal opportunity offensiveness. Griffin apparently thought she could come in and shift that subtly to her brand, which is offending those she things are in need of, and can tolerate, being taken down a peg. Griffin found the show did not like her approach and Osborne, who apparently had a great deal of personal affection for Joan, became uncomfortable with what the show was becoming without her (or perhaps with what it had always been though obscured by Joan's personality). It is less clear to me if the tone of the show is a product of Melissa Rivers, or if she is just committed to giving E! what they want. Fashion Police is a fluffy and unimportant show, and its seemingly imminent demise is of no note. What is of note though is that there may have been an opportunity to position the show more clearly as a snarky deconstruction of not just celebrity culture but also of a patriarchal, diversity-phobic culture, which may have had some positive influence. Instead it has been revealed to be nothing other than what it most obviously always has been, which is a celebration and propagation of middle class consumer culture based on envy and fear of the impossible and narrow standards of the Eurocentric elites. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
