milliondollarextreme

[Retinend]

Mentioned upthread, but I'll shill for myself once again - I made a documentary (of sorts) about the Hyde/Heidecker feud (/spat, /vendetta, whatever), "I Am A Cuck: Tim Heidecker vs The Alt Right", link here: https://youtu.be/5LbzgANX398

Not proud, but I started the first CaB thread on Hyde when his aforementioned "2070 Paradigm Shift" TedX talk first came out. I was a big fan of Tim and Eric already, and I liked the idea of "anti-comedy" as a sort of new wave in comedy. So I was impressed with how he was making the audience of a TED talk, as well as the speakers at TED talks, the butt of the joke.

Anyway, my appreciation of Hyde cooled off quickly, because his YouTube channel was full of videos that were unwatchable, unlistenable, incomprehensible or indecypherable. I mean, the videos were just bad technically speaking: because of shaky camera or noise/inaudible bits. Most of them were just shot around their "production studio" with their cameras.

Just browsing around them on YouTube, the intent of most of MDE uploads was completely opaque. Perhaps a lot of them were originally posted on his toxic Reddit board, and not intended to be watched as a back catalogue, without context? I occasionally chuckled at the better-produced offerings, so I became a subscriber, but generally their videos tried my patience. I got the impression that it was as much a "community" thing as it was a "comedy" thing.

Anyway, eventually they had their Adult Swim show and that broke the spell for me. I was willing to give their YouTube channel the benefit of the doubt, but I knew my Adult Swim and I could tell when comedy just didn't have the right beats. Hyde clearly had too many toadies and yes-men laughing at anything he said.

My favorite bad example is the "How To Make Tap Water" sketch (go to minute 56 of my film to see it), which compounds its lack of humour with gratuitous homophobia. I read through many archived threads from the deleted MDE reddit doing research for the film, and if you'll take my word for it, even very few MDE fans considered the  Adult Swim show to do justice to MDE "at their best". The sketches that they seemed to like were "Moms", "Officer Maggot" and "The Prodigal Stun(na)". If you want to understand what the average MDE fan got out of MDE, watch the appalling fan-doc, "Blacklisted", which - you have been warned - contains disturbing alt-right propaganda.

[sevendaughters]

I think there is a joke (or a localised weather feature that goes by the name of 'humour') in the Wine Party sketch, I think they think they had made the US version of Jam there, all oppressive atmosphere and nihilistic payoff. Surrounded by good sketches and written by people who weren't that lot, it MIGHT work or make some justifiable sense, like Limmy's Building Bricks or something. But it isn't and it doesn't.

The one with John Maus - and I like John Maus, even though he has gone Trump, so don't get it twisted that it's all about politics, onlooking MDE fans who have turned up for another online scrap and navel gaze - is more an attempt at cinema than a joke: there's not enough meat on 'this guy was cocksure about not being in prison despite being sentenced to time' to be funnier than an in-room 'what if' scenario.

Can't bring myself to click more without turning my algorithm into soup.

[sevendaughters]

I got the impression that it was as much a "community" thing as it was a "comedy" thing.

Yes. Politics of that community aside, that was what I didn't understand. I'm part of a few funny communities online where I get a fair share of dopamine through chuckles (not here, definitely not here) but I know that all that shit would die a sad death if exposed to the harsh light of anyone outside of it, and I wouldn't expect the rest of the community to bleat for years afterward that I was a misunderstood genius cancelled by the liberal elite or one jealous gatekeeper.

[Retinend]

This is an enlightening post, from a one-time fan who was part of the community:


link to Reddit

Also, sevendaughters, don't worry about the recommendation algorithm. In theory I ought to be hounded by Hyde videos after having watched so many, but in the end it forgives and forgets pretty easily.

[Master Cylinder]

23:47 "No colleague of mine, believe me. No colleague" - Tim Heidecker on Sam Hyde. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaGkaBI9qFg

Tim arguing with an alt-right troll accusing him of getting Sam Hyde off the air and Baked Alaska and so on.

[sevendaughters]

23:47 "No colleague of mine, believe me. No colleague" - Tim Heidecker on Sam Hyde. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaGkaBI9qFg

Tim arguing with an alt-right troll accusing him of getting Sam Hyde off the air and Baked Alaska and so on.

he and Vic getting annoyed at him (far-right comedy troll Nick Fuentes) goes for six mins before, it's edifying to watch them patiently undermine him.

[madhair60]

Extending my sympathies to the OP, who no doubt just hoped for a glowing, convivial discussion of a show they like. Comedy needs to have COMPASSION here! *thwacks with frying pan*

it needs to have something to offer besides the uncritical airing of, if not a hateful ideology, a worldview that just so happens to exactly line up with that of a hateful ideology

[madhair60]

i've gotta expand on this and at the risk of being exclusionary myself I'm very sceptical that you can just rock up and go hey guys, how about this Sam Hyde character, and not know exactly what you're doing

[Famous Mortimer]

i've gotta expand on this and at the risk of being exclusionary myself I'm very sceptical that you can just rock up and go hey guys, how about this Sam Hyde character, and not know exactly what you're doing

I thought the OP was fairly obviously a troll and treated them as such.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Just sounded like someone who liked this show to me

And everyone else just commented on how they felt about it

Don't know how it's trolling, most people, me included LOVE talking about comedy, stuff we like, stuff we hate

[Bazooka]

The rule of CaB is, if it's a minority opinion then it's been proven in a lab to be trolling.

[The Mollusk]

Haha made you talk about an interesting topic! Can't believe you fuckin idiots fell for that! YOU JUST GOT LE TROLLED, master troll walkin away from an epic trolling, make way, legend coming through

[Barry Admin]

Let's get this one back on topic please folks :-)

[PlanktonSideburns]

Trying to think of some pure nihilistic comedy that doesn't annoy me the way MDE does, maybe this?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5J9ha9iXEaM

I guess in the context of limmy's show this sketch is funny as it's amidst a range of light and dark humor, with lots of pathos and earnestness. If I'd just seen that in isolation I'd probably think limmy was a bit of a twat.

[madhair60]

I thought the OP was fairly obviously a troll and treated them as such.

I never thought OP was a troll, I just raised an eyebrow

Edit: Sorry, on topic.

[Retinend]

It's interesting to compare MDE with Limmy's Show re nihilism in comedy. I think Limmy really is nihilistic,  at least in the realm of comedy. He is a Scottish nationalist, politically, but he's never done a sketch promoting his politics - and even when he has done political commentary on his webcams/streams it's in a deliberately OTT way, for laughs.

Hyde cast disdain on all kinds of groups (from hipsters to jewish people), and his fans would say he therefore makes fun of white people as much as anyone. Possibly, but he also came out with stuff like this diatribe which professes solemn allegiance to his white ancestry. The MDE community had a philosophy of "post-irony", which means that you pretend to be aloof to politics in your presentation, while secretly holding sincere political beliefs. So I don't think MDE is nihilistic in a strict sense - there were things Hyde held close to his heart that he wouldn't treat lightly. You can't be a nihilist who is also fighting a "culture war".

In the end, I think being nihilistic is good for a comedian, because, like Limmy, it means that nothing is above the question of whether a joke is funny. In MDE:WP, a lot of the sketches had other motivations - such as the tapwater sketch wanting us to get pissed off at the high taxes paid by residents of Flint, MI, or another sketch wanting us to scoff at women in their 30s having standards in dating, or another sketch wanting us to feel sorry for teachers in inner-city schools (definite dog-whistle).

[sevendaughters]

It's interesting to compare MDE with Limmy's Show re nihilism in comedy. I think Limmy really is nihilistic,  at least in the realm of comedy. He is a Scottish nationalist, politically, but he's never done a sketch promoting his politics - and even when he has done political commentary on his webcams/streams it's in a deliberately OTT way, for laughs.

Hyde cast disdain on all kinds of groups (from hipsters to jewish people), and his fans would say he therefore makes fun of white people as much as anyone. Possibly, but he also came out with stuff like this diatribe which professes solemn allegiance to his white ancestry. The MDE community had a philosophy of "post-irony", which means that you pretend to be aloof to politics in your presentation, while secretly holding sincere political beliefs. So I don't think MDE is nihilistic in a strict sense - there were things Hyde held close to his heart that he wouldn't treat lightly. You can't be a nihilist who is also fighting a "culture war".

In the end, I think being nihilistic is good for a comedian, because, like Limmy, it means that nothing is above the question of whether a joke is funny. In MDE:WP, a lot of the sketches had other motivations - such as the tapwater sketch wanting us to get pissed off at the high taxes paid by residents of Flint, MI, or another sketch wanting us to scoff at women in their 30s having standards in dating, or another sketch wanting us to feel sorry for teachers in inner-city schools (definite dog-whistle).

I find Limmy a low-key moralist and empathiser - Jacqueline McCafferty might seem like drag mocking but I find it quite affecting, same with Dee Dee, he presents vast inner worlds and people who are hurt and confused in and amongst the mix of weirdness.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Nhilism in art I find quite interesting. Most people who say they're nhilists, it just means they cant/won't tell you what they really think, which can invite you to look for yourself. Been reading some ligotti recently, and the presentation of Nhilism sends you looking, and leaves you finding someone quite humane and socialist, with a heart full of empathy despite his own admitted cowardice. Limmy does this for me, when he is despairing at things, there's still empathy there. Lifting up the Nhilistic rock of Sam Hyde reveals the tawdry slugs of entitlement, self pity and fear, and as reinted eloquently points out, completely humourless tub thumping conservatism like what your dad might do, which is particularly galling, given their supposed no fucks given stance.

[Master Cylinder]

I remember getting into an argument with what believe was actually Sam Hyde's account on reddit, he'd pop into MDE discussion threads on the adult swim reddit- I retorted to the calls of the fanbase that the show was subversive by pointing out for example there was nothing that subversive or new really about the male emotional prostitute sketch in the first episode. This back and forth was normal Reddit troll stuff until Hyde started ranting that husbands are always depicted as stupid in commercials

[ajsmith2]

Good post by Retinend immediately above re: how MDE aren't nihilists or iconoclastic equal opportunity offenders because they have ideals and values to their worldview that cannot be mocked and are taken as fundamental truths. And those ideas and values tend to be of a hateful and narrow minded nature, so it's the worst of both worlds. Both po facededly humourless about their beliefs and heartlessly offensive to the oppressed.

I think 'Thank You White People' as posted by Retinend above is a good example of this. Here it is again, a few more views for this piece of crap: https://youtu.be/4CC5N1_bZsQ.

Here I disagree slightly with Retinend as he posted it as an example of mocking Jews, but I don't think it's mocking them so much as this is just a straightforward unvarnished depiction of Hyde's honest worldview. If there's a joke meant to be here it's that the White Mans Burdenesque setup presented is, let's all get real for a second, completely self evident to anyone being honest and it's crazy when you think about how this totally obvious truth has to be explained using a Brant-esque visual metaphor because it's lied about so much, right?

In this sketch Hyde shows the emptier, more boring and hatefully conceived world that according to his cognition of his surroundings is the 'harsh reality' of existence, one where Jews are comfortably, reliably evil baddies, where women are identical mindless gynoids, and all other races are NPC forces working against the solipsistic driving true storyline of Real Life, which seems to be the White Mans self regard and self pity. For all the reality and depth of understanding this sketch offers, you might as well stick your head inside a shoebox inside Platos Cave for the rest of your life. Bleccch!!!

[PlanktonSideburns]

Was listening to a podcast yesterday talking about carpenter's They Live, which argued that despite starting with carpenter's right on, but Potentially didactic idea (in his own words, making a film that sticks it to yuppies and regan), carpenter's CRAFT as a film maker makes the film totally standup on its own, and has almost endless applicability and readability for people. Brasseye/the day today - the shows MDE is so clearly making a thoughtless impression of, does this also i think - its a satire of news and things, but the stuff that people here still talk with awe about are the things that are CRAFTED from that premise: brilliant characters, the total applicability of these surreal and relatable situations, whimsy and horror at the same time. Recalling them, I'm not thinking, 'hah, that's the news bloody well told'. I'm sympathising with the hook that Peter ohanrahahan wriggles on, or marveling at the weird malevolence of Morris, it's stuff that's open to loads of different readings, pregnant with interpretability.

MDE's biggest fault is it's transparency, its didacticism. Oh that sketch is about how you're really angry about how men are portraid, fair enough. Oh that one is about how you think women expect too much of men, fair enough. It's more like a first year film student's manifesto left to be found after their school shooting, there's not allowing for their craft to let the work transform and open its self up to interpretation by someone else, it's completley indigestible

[Retinend]

I think 'Thank You White People' as posted by Retinend above is a good example of this. Here it is again, a few more views for this piece of crap: https://youtu.be/4CC5N1_bZsQ.

Here I disagree slightly with Retinend as he posted it as an example of mocking Jews, but I don't think it's mocking them so much as this is just a straightforward unvarnished depiction of Hyde's honest worldview. If there's a joke meant to be here it's that the White Mans Burdenesque setup presented is, let's all get real for a second, completely self evident to anyone being honest and it's crazy when you think about how this totally obvious truth has to be explained using a Brant-esque visual metaphor because it's lied about so much, right?

In this sketch Hyde shows... the 'harsh reality' of existence, one where Jews are comfortably, reliably evil baddies, where women are mindless gynoids, and all other races are NPC forces working against the solipsistic driving true storyline of Real Life, which seems to be the White Mans self regard and self pity. For all the reality and depth of understanding this sketch offers, you might as well stick your head inside a shoebox inside Platos Cave for the rest of your life. Bleccch!!!

That's true: he does not mock jews so much as fear and loathe them. And yeah, if you try to put that sketch's metaphor into words it's completely straightfoward in its white supremacy: the white man's life force creates civilization, which lifts all other races up with it, while the jews connive to poison the white man's mind and reverse that progress.  Not strictly nihilistic if he thinks that his protest against the supposed state of affairs is worth making in the first place.

For those who don't know, he incited antisemitic harrassment of the jewish journalist, Joseph Bernstein, after he published the article that put heat on Adult Swim for commissioning the show, eventually leading to its cancellation.

[McDead]

Sam Hyde isn't a nihilist, he's a bigot.

I don't think Limmy is a nihilist either, he's far too angry for that. He seems more like an embittered idealist, to me.

[McChesney Duntz]

I don't think a true nihilist would whine about their show being cancelled, would they?

[Retinend]

He seems more like an embittered idealist, to me.

I don't want to argue for the sake of it but....  there's a fine line between "nihilist" and "embittered idealist"

[H-O-W-L]

To refer to the comparisons of Brass Eye and TDT:
It's only been four years since MDE: World Peace and the hateful shite propaganda in it has already dated, and not just because I'm politically or morally opposed to it, but because it concerns topics that have moved on and ignores relevant topics.

It has been almost thirty years since TDT aired and it is still as potent and as powerfully relevant than ever; if not more so, thanks to the oversaturation of over-the-top in-your-face news anchors screaming "PLEASE WATCH US!". Morris picked a broad but pointed enough topic and hit it with an arrowhead perfectly. An idea that will stand up so long as media as a concept stands up. Unless we undergo a massive technological devolution, TDT will always be relevant.

Hyde and his cronies legitimately just want to rag on what's currently in their purview. The current oppressed and the current right-wing topics. Once those move on, once biases and oppressions and prejudices shift (as they already have begun to anyway) their commentary will be outdated even to the racist twats they're pandering to. Even their supporters will see their work age like hot milk on a windowsill.

[Enzo]

I personally can't believe Tim Heidecker would put a stop to such genius comedy such as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5lcSSrwP0Q

I think the top comment under that video says it all:

in another dimension we got a second and third season and the Axis nations won WW2

[Master Cylinder]

I think the top comment under that video says it all:

You also have some MDE fans accusing this Tim & Eric bit from their 10th anniversary special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lHHVcpuGfk as ripping that one off - why? Cause they involve riding in cars? At least I can tell what's supposed to be funny about that Tim & Eric bit that doesn't amount to just homophobia.

[Clownbaby]

I think there was always shards of interesting ideas in their stuff, but a lot of feels very undercooked. Poor writing for the most part and there wasn't a natural, charismatic performer in the gang to really elevate the shoddier material. The whole troupe felt like a bunch of forum trolls promoted way above their natural level - which is pretty much what they all were I suppose.

Exactly my problem

[Dickie_Anders]

Kind of a sad case with those boys. When I first watched their videos I'd felt like, for the first time in a while, I was watching new and very original comedy.

I think someone else in this thread said that as performers they weren't very good and the writing wasn't great. I think that might be fair criticism, in a way. Nick is probably the strongest traditional comedic actor of the bunch, in that he can actually pretend to be other people. With Charls he's just a very odd mannered guy with a strange cadence. His "character" is almost always that of a paranoid potential terrorist. I found him funny.

Sam tries but fails at comedic acting. He was at his most funny when he embraced being a furious geeky-looking loser type that vented his frustrations with the world. You got the sense he was making fun of himself, to a degree. But this somehow blossomed into a strange cult of personality. He started positioning himself as some sort of self-help guru and political commentator, and he became incredibly unfunny.

When I first watched their YouTube video Ideas Man I remember being very excited by how new it felt. As a traditional sketch show yeah it probably fails hard. The writing wasn't especially clever or well-written. Instead it was this total sensory overload, just a weird audio-visual assault with mental editing. "Sketches" usually amounted to two lines, three second clips that seemed to be impressions of stupid people they'd come across in real life, and somehow it was quite funny. There was another video they did where Nick and Sam had gone around some meth dealer's apartment and put a camera up facing them as they sat on his couch and listened to him rapping. I found it hilarious, it's just the two of them trying not to laugh the entire time. Their strength definitely was not traditional sketch comedy. What they did well were these weird audio-visual comedy spectacles, and capturing awkward real-life situations.

This is probably why their TV show World Peace was so poor. They were trying to make more traditional sketch comedy, and it's just not what they're good at. It was also the point where they'd fully committed to being cheeky young conservatives, and their comedy suffered horribly because of it. It's not so much that they're conservative. There are comedians who likely identify as conservative that are funny (Norm Macdonald for one). I think early on they had some success parodying and documenting the kind of vacuous hipster lifestyle you see in the American (and British) middle class. Their Williamsburg videos are some of the best stuff they did for this reason. But I think because of this they got high-minded ideas about what their comedy could be "saying", and it ended up amounting to little more than empty race-realist soundbites.

In the end I think they could have been something exciting in American comedy TV, but they squandered it by getting above their station and, in a way, trying to make something more easily accessible. Maybe after their more traditional, lukewarm TV show they could have made something more true to their YouTube stuff. But they fucked it up by trying to score political points. I think Sam is mostly responsible for this.