Dear Seth Green:

[yendi]

Regarding the otherwise-hysterical season premiere of Robot Chicken (which we only just caught on the Tivo):

Two rape jokes?

Really?

Both of which served to make their skits infinitely less funny, and neither of which was in any way vital to the rest of the skit?

What the hell? Is there a mandate to make the show less funny?

Comments

[unwilly.livejournal.com]

Seth doesn't write all the jokes, tho' he does have final cut.

Lady Un's friend was Seth's room mate, so I'll toss word that way, to think first.

[yendi]

Oh, I know he doesn't write it all (they've done skits featuring their writers, after all), but he's very much their public face, and (as you note) has final cut. I hadn't realized that Lady Un had a connection to him; I do appreciate a word being put in.

[sir-alf.livejournal.com]

Hey, I stopped caring about the show when they started using the equation murder = yuks and hilarity. Beyond the Star Wars eps it's pretty much just 15 min of the lowest common denominator, least the one's I've tuned in for.

[wednesday]

Specify? Robot Chicken sketches just kind of flow through me at this point. I can tell you they beat the smear of dead horse of the spring of drowned girl, and that's about it.

[yendi]

They had one skit in which a beached whale asked a young woman to come closer so he could rape her (seriously -- that was the punchline), another in which the Star Trek: TNG writers were in a panic because fans had taken out a sign threatening to "assrape" Wil Wheaton.

[yendi]

See, when they're sharp, they really don't go LCD (which isn't to say they don't go tasteless, of course). Their take on M.A.S.K. was brilliant, and if their use of Chairface Chippendale wasn't exactly G-rated, at least it showed an understanding of the silliness behind the character. They're really at their best when they're taking on pop culture within its own context, as per their original intent.

[wednesday]

Oh, right, those. OK, thanks.

I feel like some kind of tool for saying this, but those didn't upset me because they were rape jokes. They just dropped out of memory because they were lazy writing.

[yendi]

Other than in rare circumstances, rape jokes tend to be the result of lazy writing (and that's exactly what happened here).

[wednesday]

Yeah, I'm not arguing that, but I think it's the underlying process which needs scrutiny here, not just the symptom.

(If I hadn't let Robot Chicken do the flow-through thing, I'd be up all night having the panic attacks every time the show, say, did something brutal to a little kid. Same underlying issue, same checklist of unspeakables they run through when we're out of M.A.S.K. parody-grade stuff.)