10 Good Things: Maria Bamford, Bill Burr, Larry David, and more

Also: Punching up/down, getting "triggered," Alan Rickman on listening, etc.

💥 Does it matter if comedy punches up or down? by

Caroline Clifford

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Write about what you want, joke about what you want, but always ask yourself why this subject? Do you really care about this subject, or are you trying to tick it off some edge-lord bingo card? If you write about yourself, you can never go wrong.

💥 Why Maria Bamford avoids traditional comedy clubs now:

I go where the love is. But I don’t want anyone who doesn’t know exactly what they’re coming to see coming to see me. That means: goodbye, goodbye, ‘great crowd’ at a bar in my neighborhood! Hello, Zoom one-on-one show for a stranger I met on Twitter. Hello, whoever is willing to meet me in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and laughs at everything I say! Yes, I’m sure my comedy suffers for it. I know I am limiting my work by keeping myself safe from rejection. But that’s okay. Life is short, and it’s more fun to spend it where you’re welcome.

💥 Larry David on comedy:

I went to The Improv and saw a bunch of comedians and I thought, 'Jesus these people seem just like me. They're complete losers who get up and do nothing but talk about how miserable they are. Are you kidding? I can do that.'

💥 A critique of comedians who bitch about people getting “triggered.”

There’s that word “triggered” again, the absolute worst thing a person can be in a comedian’s eyes, even though very few people, at least in my endless scrolling of the internet, seem to identify that way in earnest anymore. These comics—and the reactionary pundits suddenly cheering them on—are so obsessed with belittling the outraged that they can’t even take a second to bask in the victory of having banished ‘triggered’ from one side of the discourse. Instead, they churn out more material about how the people triggered by the wrong things are bad and the brave heroes triggered by those people are actually amazing. The irony of it all is lost on them.

💥 Mary Oliver on the importance of solitude to the creative process.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart––to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.