Dear Seth:
Just wanted to bang out a
quick note (I know how busy we’ve both been!) to say hi, hope you’re doing
well, and could you please apologize to my 6-year-old daughter for calling her
a cunt.
OK, you didn’t
technically call my daughter a cunt. *Technically* that was The Onion, which
*technically* tweeted
that Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis, not my daughter, was a cunt — but it
might as well have been you.
“Does this have to do
with that whole boobs-song thing?” you’re probably eye-rolling. It does! You
know me well enough to know I’m not generally offended by boobs or references
to boobs or even people who act like boobs, if they mean well. Did I send you the picture my 8-year-old son recently drew? It’s one of
my favorites:
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“OK, so are you
insinuating that my tongue-in-cheek song about breasts in Hollywood and a few off-color
jokes were worse than that Onion tweet? You've got to be kidding me. They called that little girl a ‘cunt’! She was sitting right in front of me at the awards and I didn't call her a goddamn thing!” you must be sighing in exasperation
right about now. You're so silly. I'm not insinuating anything — I’m giving it to you straight.
You have to examine
intent and patterns and numbers with these types of things. Let's look at The Onion first. I’m not
defending their tweet. There was obviously a judgment lapse somewhere
along the production line, and in general I don’t advocate calling young ladies in the prime of their prepubescence the C-word.
But let’s look at
precedence. The Onion has successfully harnessed its particular brand of dark,
brilliant humor to steer us through some of our darkest moments. It kept us
laughing while our hearts were breaking through bleak economic times and painful military conflicts and
even 9/11. How the fuck do you make people laugh after 9/11?! I don’t know, but
The Onion did an extraordinary job in this regard, and it did so by knowing
just how far to tip the scales.
I'm not giving them a pass because of this. It's just that, because of The Onion's past
ability to navigate these troubled waters so well, I’m inclined to consider a theory proposed by Wired’s Laura Hudson that says The Onion purposely made a “shocking, ugly comment to point out that the
way the media talks about women is often quite shocking and ugly.” Extrapolate that to a famous 9-year-old girl, and you have classic Onion hyperbole used to frame a known societal issue.
Of course, even if this was the case, it was a monumental misfire (someone should have had the savvy to know how the tweet would likely have been received) that was unacceptable. Children should be off-limits to the obscenities we sometimes use to sketch out our satire. That said, because it was a somewhat isolated incident in The Onion’s storied history, and because it issued a prompt, sincere-sounding mea culpa, I'll still be a customer. Lord knows I've said some stupid stuff and needed second chances.
Of course, even if this was the case, it was a monumental misfire (someone should have had the savvy to know how the tweet would likely have been received) that was unacceptable. Children should be off-limits to the obscenities we sometimes use to sketch out our satire. That said, because it was a somewhat isolated incident in The Onion’s storied history, and because it issued a prompt, sincere-sounding mea culpa, I'll still be a customer. Lord knows I've said some stupid stuff and needed second chances.
You, on the other hand,
Seth MacFarlane. You. Tim Grierson tried to rationalize
your performance as an attempt to “[deflate] the night’s most
high-minded pretensions and [remind us], in a giddy, old show-biz way, that
movies are still, at bottom, about stroking the lower impulses of the
audience.”
Oh boy. I’m all for
stroking lower impulses. In fact, I’m as low-brow as they come: Set me up with a
box of White Castle Sliders and a six-pack of PBR, fire up Freddy Got Fingered on the DVR, and that would be a pretty good
Friday night to me. But a) that’s really not
what movies are all about, and b) there’s a reason we left those “giddy” silent
movies behind for the talkies, guys (I’M USING PSEUDO-FEMINIST METAPHOR HERE).
I’d almost buy Grierson’s argument that Hollywood is tacky, and so Seth
MacFarlane purposely and shrewdly ramped up the tackiness of his performance to
match — if he had limited it to that one number. But the pattern started to
emerge very quickly before that song, and it continued long after it, and you didn’t have to be John Nash to see it.
It takes more legwork to decipher this arrangement, to first parse its elements and then analyze them as they coagulate, but the payoff is worth it. It’s the type of pattern that permeates our daily lives, creeping into our workplaces and our schools, insidiously telling our daughters that they will never be more than a nice rack and a smile. If someone calls my daughter a cunt, I can tell her to punch them in the face (with her WORDS, of course). Breaking the code to that other puzzle and offering real-world solutions — that’s a harder war to wage.
It takes more legwork to decipher this arrangement, to first parse its elements and then analyze them as they coagulate, but the payoff is worth it. It’s the type of pattern that permeates our daily lives, creeping into our workplaces and our schools, insidiously telling our daughters that they will never be more than a nice rack and a smile. If someone calls my daughter a cunt, I can tell her to punch them in the face (with her WORDS, of course). Breaking the code to that other puzzle and offering real-world solutions — that’s a harder war to wage.
I watch my daughter
every night as she masters her math homework. This is a child who, just one
year ago, came home from school and announced that she hated math and that she
was terrible at it and that girls couldn’t do math and that she would never be
as good as her older brother at it. And my heart sunk, because I couldn’t
believe that a 5-year-old had already so readily absorbed gender-based concepts
I had hoped to shelter her from completely, because I was enlightened about
these subjects and therefore my children would be enlightened and how
the hell did this happen?!
And so we started switching
up that paradigm. She received just as many math problems on the back
of the paper Friendly’s menus as her brother. Every Saturday morning when she
went to Grandma’s, she came back home with a stack of worksheets that she
couldn’t wait to complete because hey, Grandma printed them out! I told her how
good I was at math when I was in school. Her confidence increased, her skills grew
exponentially, and she learned not only that girls could be good at math, but
that SHE could be good at math and that she could love it (to me, the bigger
accomplishment). She started telling everyone how she wanted to be
an artist and a chef and a veterinarian when she grew up, and how veterinarians
needed to be good at math and she was good at math, so she could be a veterinarian!
And then you came along. You glided
onstage at the Academy Awards, resplendent in your Gucci tuxedo and accompanied by a big-band soundtrack. And you sang a song about boobs. And called
Jennifer Aniston a stripper. And made reference to Adele being fat. And ha-ha’d
about Chris Brown beating the shit out of Rihanna. And rehashed some tired old
jokes about women starving themselves and never letting things go. There was
some racist banter thrown in there, too, but I want to stay on point because I know
when women get too distracted and lose focus they end up heading to the mall
and spending all your money and I don’t want to do that to you.
I know you didn’t call
Quvenzhané Wallis a cunt, either. But there she was in the audience during your song
and dance, all dolled up in probably the most glamorous outfit she’s ever worn,
complete with a sparkly tiara and puppy purse, basking in the well-deserved
attention for a performance that actresses decades older than her would kill
for. She got to experience all of that AND try to make sense of the hilarious
man on stage singing about boobs and making references to her sleeping with
George Clooney. If she didn’t feel like a cunt, she must have felt kind of like a whore
— probably without fully understanding what those feelings were or why she was
having them.
These are the
hieroglyphics my 6-year-old daughter has to begin to muddle through and
decipher and reconcile with her blue ribbon in math and the 10/10 on her
spelling test and the Jackson Pollock-esque piece she painted during art class and her dreams of being a veterinarian.
This is a riddle that’s only just begun for her. This is what you've given her to look forward to.
I didn’t go into the
Oscars with a bone to pick with you, MacFarlane. I’ve watched “Family Guy,” and
I’ve laughed at it. I do a pretty mean Lois imitation. But I do have to confess
I’ve never laughed at it quite as much as I’ve laughed at The Simpsons, and I’ve never thought hard enough about it to fully
articulate why. Then I realized that, if you killed off the Griffin
family, those dead-behind-the-eyes zombie vessels for your fast-twitch
pop-culture references, I don’t think I’d feel a thing. However, if Matt Groening killed off Homer and Marge and Bart and Lisa and Maggie, I’d
probably cry. You tell me why that is (and tell your schadenfreude to simmer down, while you're at it).
Comedy is supposed to
break the rules, and all the best comedians do. Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, George
Carlin, Tina Fey, Chris Rock, Roseanne Barr, Louis CK, Ellen DeGeneres, Patton
Oswalt — they’ve all stretched the boundaries of what’s expected from the
genre, often running blue, occasionally inciting controversy.
But, unlike the Andrew
Dice Clays and the Dane Cooks and the Seth MacFarlanes, their humor comes from
a more honest place, born of real experiences and encounters and memories. The
way in which they choose to reveal these experiences and encounters and
memories may be scatalogical or vulgar or crass, but they’re authentic — and audiences
connect with authenticity. When Louis CK talks about receiving the saddest
handjob in the world from his (now ex) wife, you know it really was pretty
fucking sad, and that he's sharing it with us for a reason, even though we may not fully know what that reason is.
When you “performed” on Sunday night, that personal connection didn’t exist. Instead, you pandered to the lowest common denominator like you were at a Bowery bringer show. You offended not only my womanly sensibilities, but also (and probably even worse) my comedic ones. Your laziness was epic.
When you “performed” on Sunday night, that personal connection didn’t exist. Instead, you pandered to the lowest common denominator like you were at a Bowery bringer show. You offended not only my womanly sensibilities, but also (and probably even worse) my comedic ones. Your laziness was epic.
I wouldn’t be a good
friend if I didn’t end this correspondence with a recommendation of one of my
favorite flicks, “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” even though I’ve heard you don’t go
to the movies much. In this existential Woody Allen gem, sleazy television
producer Lester, as portrayed by Alan Alda, shares the basic
tenet behind all successful humor: “If it bends,
it’s funny. If it breaks, it isn’t.”
You broke it,
Seth MacFarlane. You can start to fix it by apologizing to Quvenzhané Wallis, who had to sit through that nonsense. And you can apologize to my daughter. Besides
math, she also enjoys art, music, and reading (in case you’re stumped for a conversation-starter
because she doesn’t have boobs yet). She will
have boobs someday, and there will be people who will see them (with her
permission), but I’m hoping that’s not what defines her — unless that’s what she (not some smarmy awards-show host
desperate for a cheap laugh) chooses.
