Sophianotloren

thisbitchyellsback:

Reblog if yours will too (and feel free to include anything i missed)

Hello! I am going to answer your question, and then I am going to talk a little bit about GENDER IN COMEDY, because this is my tumblr and I can talk about whatever I want!

The vast vast vast majority of the animal jokes on BoJack Horseman (specifically the visual gags) come from our brilliant supervising director Mike Hollingsworth (stufffedanimals on tumblr) and his team. Occasionally, we’ll write a joke like that into the script but I can promise you that your top ten favorite animal gags of the season came from the art and animation side of the show, not the writers room. Usually it happens more the second way you described— to take a couple examples from season 2, “Okay, we need to fill this hospital waiting room, what kind of animals would be in here?” or “Okay, we need some extras for this studio backlot, what would they be wearing?”

I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that the croc wearing crocs came from our head designer lisahanawalt. Lisa is in charge of all the character designs, so most of the clothing you see on the show comes straight from her brain. (One of the many things I love about working with Lisa is that T-Shirts With Dumb Things Written On Them sits squarely in the center of our Venn diagram of interests.)

NOW, it struck me that you referred to the craft services crocodile as a “he” in your question. The character, voiced by kulap Vilaysack, is a woman.

It’s possible that that was just a typo on your part, but I’m going to assume that it wasn’t because it helps me pivot into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year, which is the tendency for comedy writers, and audiences, and writers, and audiences (because it’s a cycle) to view comedy characters as inherently male, unless there is something specifically female about them. (I would guess this is mostly a problem for male comedy writers and audiences, but not exclusively.)

Here’s an example from my own life: In one of the episodes from the first season (I think it’s 109), our storyboard artists drew a gag where a big droopy dog is standing on a street corner next to a businessman and the wind from a passing car blows the dog’s tongue and slobber onto the man’s face. When Lisa designed the characters she made both the dog and the businessperson women.

My first gut reaction to the designs was, “This feels weird.” I said to Lisa, “I feel like these characters should be guys.” She said, “Why?” I thought about it for a little bit, realized I didn’t have a good reason, and went back to her and said, “You’re right, let’s make them ladies.”

I am embarrassed to admit this conversation has happened between Lisa and me multiple times, about multiple characters.

The thinking comes from a place that the cleanest version of a joke has as few pieces as possible. For the dog joke, you have the thing where the tongue slobbers all over the businessperson, but if you also have a thing where both of them ladies, then that’s an additional thing and it muddies up the joke. The audience will think, “Why are those characters female? Is that part of the joke?” The underlying assumption there is that the default mode for any character is male, so to make the characters female is an additional detail on top of that. In case I’m not being a hundred percent clear, this thinking is stupid and wrong and self-perpetuating unless you actively work against it, and I’m proud to say I mostly don’t think this way anymore. Sometimes I still do, because this kind of stuff is baked into us by years of consuming media, but usually I’m able (with some help) to take a step back and not think this way, and one of the things I love about working with Lisa is she challenges these instincts in me.

I feel like I can confidently say that this isn’t just a me problem though— this kind of thing is everywhere. The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male.

You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster.

I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT BOJACK HORSEMAN.

mothernaturenetwork:

The face of children’s literature is about to change
Almost half of U.S. children have a minority background, but you rarely see them in books. One group wants to change that, and research shows more diverse books could lead to a more tolerant generation.

bzangy:

micdotcom:

Pittsburgh police are furious after this police chief held a sign hoping to end racism

Cops OUTRAGED that cop pledges to not be racist.

How am I not surprised??

chikorito:

Today in chilean news

"Deranged youngster, tried to steal balloon  for sexual reasons"

coolpixiekid:

my 4-year-old niece is in that “splattering colors all over the paper” stage of making art. i showed her a piece by Jackson Pollock and told her “this person is really famous, and he made art kind of like you!” but she just looked disinterested and told me “mine has prettier colors.” get wrecked, Jackson Pollock

afrofilipino:

awwww-cute:

Family Christmas picture photobomb

those assholes ruined this dogs selfie

I must go home to my people.

saxifraga-x-urbium:

arabellesicardi:

Today’s museum moment is this 1925 perfume by De Marcy, fittingly called L’Orange Variee. It came complete as a peeled orange of painted composition, holding 8 glass bottles with labels. One day I’ll own an edition.

I WANT ONE

spiritguide:

WHOA THERE COOL IT THAT’S WAAAAY TOO MUCH FROSTING FOR ONE DUNKAROO YOU GOTTA RATION THAT SHIT

ajebutter-21:

What began as a way of giving his daughter an alternative to Barbie - and the european standard of beauty she presents - led to Taofick Okoya creating a line of African dolls that not only celebrate the beauty of black women, but showcase Nigeria’s heritage in all its glory. Now Okoya stands as one of Nigeria’s most promising entrepreneurs and has seen his dolls even outsell Barbie. Of the dolls, Okoyo remarks in a recent interview with Elle: “African-inspired increase little girls’ sense of self-appreciation and confidence. When little girls play with dolls, they see themselves in or as the doll, they dress it in clothes they like and act out their fantasies. The more of their own likeness they see in the things they like, the more accepting they will be of their looks and culture.”

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

I love how they have so many different ethnic groups!!

Seriously cool.

Just a few days left to get a hardcopy or ebook!

the-unstoppable-juggernaut:

rnusicality:

fun statistics for adults!
“when I was a kid, I had no help with college tuition, I was hardworking and paid it all myself”
-Annual tuition for Yale, 1970: $2,550
-Annual tuition for Yale, 2014: $45,800
-Minimum Wage, 1970: $1.45
-Minimum Wage, 2014: $7.25
-Daily hours at minimum wage needed to pay for tuition in 1970: 4.8
-Daily hours at minimum wage needed to pay for tuition in 2014: 17.3

pangeachasmata:

unexplained-events:

Cat

Cougar breaks into man’s house and….destroys his blinds.

all cats is the same

“We have shifted from biological racism to cultural racism. Sixty years ago most people in America believed that Blacks were biologically inferior, made-by-God inferior. Today there is a cultural racism that says that Black parents are not giving their children the right values, and it’s often offered as the reason for why Blacks are not doing as well as other groups. It associates ‘Black’ with a range of negative assumptions that are so deeply embedded in American culture that people who hold them are not bad people. They’re just ‘good Americans,’ because it’s what American society has taught them. Researchers put together a database of ten million words from books, newspapers, magazine articles, various documents. They found that when the word ‘Black’ occurs, what tends to co-occur is not only ‘poor’ and ‘violent’ and ‘religious’ but also ‘lazy’ and ‘cheerful’ and ‘dangerous.’ Being violent, lazy and dangerous, other research shows, are widely held stereotypes about Blacks. All racial ethnic minority groups are stereotyped more negatively than Whites, with Blacks viewed the worst, followed by Latinos, who were viewed twice as negatively as Asians. Southern Whites are viewed more negatively than Whites in general. There is a hierarchy.”

- Dr. David Williams, “No, You’re Not Imagining It,” from the September 2013 issue of Essence (via digital-femme)

Smooth. (comic by Lunarbaboon)

majiinboo:

janemba:

zirbanchalib:

antfucker98:

myonteru:

just because you dont like being around black people doesnt makes you racist jfc

yeah it

yeah it really does

LMFAOOOOOOo

What do white people think racism is I need answers

calling them crackers 

fellow white people: feeling uncomfortable around black people is literally what racism is. really, you should walk into a waiting room, see a black person sitting there already, and want to chit chat with them (if you’re the kind of person who likes to make conversation — sometimes I am, I know, we’re weird). If you feel some other feelings — that’d be those years of learned racist bullshit kicking up. You can unlearn it! But first you’ve gotta admit it’s there.

carryonmy-assbutt:

theshadyslut:

owlcitymordred:

stagdoeandfawn:

catully:

brigwife:

latitudeoctopus:

brigwife:

wait you mean you don’t use the word ‘fortnight’ in america???

Wait what? Then what do they use?

they don’t have a word

what do you mean they don’t have a word what kind of uncivilised people are they??

the fuck is a fortnight

It’s a word for ‘two weeks’

We say “two weeks”

*thousands of cups of tea smash to the ground in shock*

garf-lyf:

The Wolf of Wall Street

lacigreen:

farfromthepacific:

cigarettesandwaffles:

Me if you use those fingers correctly.

omg I almost spit out the water I was drinking 

a million gallons of fun

http://thefabulousweirdtrotters.tumblr.com/


http://thefabulousweirdtrotters.tumblr.com/


http://thefabulousweirdtrotters.tumblr.com/


http://thefabulousweirdtrotters.tumblr.com/

thefabulousweirdtrotters:

My Little Cthulhu 

TYWKIWDBI will not be dwelling on the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, which is extensively covered elsewhere.  But I thought it worthwhile to excerpt a couple comments, first by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.

But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself...

Some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were not just offensive but bigoted, such as the one mocking the African sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens. Others went far beyond maligning violence by extremists acting in the name of Islam, or even merely depicting Mohammed with degrading imagery, and instead contained a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally, who in France are not remotely powerful but are largely a marginalized and targeted immigrant population. ..

So it’s the opposite of surprising to see large numbers of westerners celebrating anti-Muslim cartoons - not on free speech grounds but due to approval of the content... Indeed, it is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in “solidarity” with their free speech rights...

When we originally discussed publishing this article to make these points, our intention was to commission two or three cartoonists to create cartoons that mock Judaism and malign sacred figures to Jews the way Charlie Hebdo did to Muslims. But that idea was thwarted by the fact that no mainstream western cartoonist would dare put their name on an anti-Jewish cartoon, even if done for satire purposes, because doing so would instantly and permanently destroy their career, at least...

To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech - fired one of their writers in 2009 for writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?

Similar thoughts were echoed at The Dish (citing other sources):

Put simply, in France, racist and anti-Semitic speech, as well as historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust, is illegal, as is all speech that can be considered an incitement to hate. That is something that very few Americans understand—or approve of...

The last lawsuit to be filed against Charlie Hebdo in 2014 was declared ineligible only because Islam doesn’t qualify for the special legal regime that criminalizes blasphemy against Christianity and Judaism in the Alsace region. And the British Muslims in 1989 wanted authorities to invoke British blaspehemy laws, not the shar’ia, to sanction Salman Rushdie’s novel – but there too Islam did not qualify for protection...

It wasn’t that long ago that entertainers like the Dixie Chicks were being roundly denounced and taken off the air for having the temerity to question our country’s wars.

The counterargument is that this is comparing apples to oranges:

This is a completely false equivalency, and really gets to the heart of the cultural gap at play. To secularists like the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, Mohammed is a man like any other, he is no prophet, he is aggrandized by a religion, and is therefore a legitimate target of satire, just like the the Pope, or Jesus, or even the Dalai Lama if one is so inclined. The Holocaust was systematic genocide based on religion/ethnicity.

I'll close the comments here, because there's so much discussion elsewhere (everywhere), but I'd suggest that those who expect to address the Charlie Hebdo event at cocktail parties or around office water-coolers should ponder the above in order to be prepared for the discussions.

feministsorgnow:

"This world crisis came about without women having anything to do with it. If the women of the world had not been excluded from world affairs, things today might have been different." - Alice Stokes Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977)

Me: I would love it if Idris Elba were James Bond.
Dad: ...are you sure?
Me: (ready to get mad) YEAH DAD WHY WOULDN'T I
Dad: Well, it's just... James Bond as a character is misogynistic so would you really want to see him in that role? Treating women badly?
Me: *speechless* I... I don't know. Probably not now that I think about it.
Dad: James Bond is iconic but he is a jerk to women. It's what the franchise is built on.
Me: oh my god
Dad: there are other roles where Idris can wear a suit and is a badass that you won't hate
Me: holy shit
Dad: are you ok
Me: oh my god