Splitsider

Here's an interesting interview with comedian Ian Edwards, who's currently writing for Fox's In Living Color. In it, he laments the modern comedy scene's lack of a real showcase for black standups (like Def Jam on HBO in the 90s, for example) and the distinctions that remain between black and "extra-white" hipster comics:

When I worked on Chocolate News, we were making a black news story and if we wanted to talk about stuff that was going on now, [Comedy Central] wouldn’t let us because that would go into Jon Stewart’s theme. He was going to allow us to follow him and we can’t touch his theme. The [...]

It feels like your comedy is so much cooler than mine.

You've never done an open mic before. Instead you did Fez. You did Luna Lounge. You did the old Largo. You did Eating It. You did Invite Them Up. You did Tinkle. You did Rififi. You did Comedy Death Ray. You did Big Terrific. You did Meltdown Comics before it was mainstream. Now you do your own secret show in the back supply closet of a bankrupt old record store that only sells really cool records.

You referenced Das Racist in one of your jokes and got lots of nods and smirks of audience recognition. You [...]

On the one hand, ragging on hipsters is kind of lazy and overdone. On the other, this video has a catchy song and is from England, so uses words like "vest" to describe a t-shirt. Plus, it's legitimately funny, so I suppose it gets a pass. [via]

Let’s get the eye rolling out of the way. We all know hipsters are the worst because they’ve been defined as such since the turn of the millennium when the term was reintroduced. They are all smug and unkempt and sheep-like and neighborhood-ruiners and privileged (if not over-privileged) and jerks and smelly-heads and dum-dums and HIPSTERS. They deserve to be made fun of as much as—if not more than—anybody else. But just because they’re an easy target it doesn’t mean their mocking must be effortless. Over the last four years or so, what was once a rich terrain for satire has been mired by laziness and a singular dependence [...]

Here's another excellent piece by former Daily Show/Colbert Report writer Allison Silverman taking on the denizens of Williamsburg in this week's New Yorker. Plus, this church occupied the oldest storefront in our corner of Williamsburg, and the aging churchgoers in their faded down jackets sipping coffee and speaking Spanish felt really authentic. That meant a lot after the bad experiences I’d had with fake upscale stuff. I won’t get too into it, but not far from our previous apartment was a holistic veterinary clinic. They called themselves “alternative,” but ask them if they could save a sack of oysters you bought from a raw bar and they sounded [...]

MadTV's Will Sasso has created Fox's newest sitcom, which "centers on a patriotic and conservative Army Ranger comes home after serving 10 years in the Middle East to find that in the last decade, his brother (the only family he has left) has turned into a liberal, skinny jeans–wearing, anti-establishment, street artist who lives in a hipster neighborhood." Oh, dear lord, not a- a hipster neighborhood! But he's the only family he has left! Oh noooo!

I moved to the United States five years ago, feeling very confident about my English vocabulary, only to find that my meager repertoire of cultural references made lively communication with other students difficult. The word that gave me the most trouble was "hipster" – my fellow freshmen used it frequently, and my inability to understand it made me feel horribly foreign. I eventually asked a local outcast (the inevitable companion of the foreign student on first days of school everywhere) to explain the concept to me. He said that hipsters never admitted to being hipsters, but that they could easily be identified by their tight uniform and hatred of [...]