The Scary of Mid-Summer Substack
It's a play on a movie called "The Scary of Sixty-First," get it? Anyway, here are some July thoughts
Summer is already halfway over — can you believe it? Even more shocking, though, is that my newsletter is almost six months old! I’ve been talking out of my ass on here for almost six months! And for some reason, many of you are still listening!! Taking cues from my beloved Sydney Urbanek over at Mononym Mythology, I plan on doing an AMA next month in honor of That’s Weird’s first half birthday.
Within the next couple weeks I will send out an email via this Substack, which I’ll use to pool questions that anyone may have for me. I’ve got a few potentially big solo essay ideas coming up after that as well, but before that I’d like to work through a hodgepodge of thoughts on a few topics. All of these I had previously attempted to flesh out into whole essays, but I no longer believe that they warrant such a length. Instead, I will amalgamate them here in small doses for your amusement and, perhaps, even your enlightenment.
Space Jam: A New Legacy is upon us, and there is nothing on God’s green earth that I am dreading more. I was previously very excited for it, but the film seems insistent on making it look as unappealing and horrific as possible — as if it is punishing the very people who wanted it so badly in the first place (me, I’m sorry). I was originally planning on doing a newsletter piece in celebration of the original Space Jam, despite the fact that I was quite set on my growing distaste for the impending sequel (increasing every time I remembered I elected to review it). I have been a long and loud lover of Space Jam — and had a genuinely fun time revisiting it in college with my then-boyfriend, who had never seen it before — but an attempt to rewatch the original phenom, alone, sober in my bedroom, was not the experience that I thought it would be. I am pained to admit this, because liking Space Jam has been so crucial to my brand, but I got about 45 minutes in before I turned it off (note: I will be sitting through the whole thing eventually in preparation for reviewing A New Legacy).
There were, however, a few things that I found compelling during this brief return to Tune World. For one, listening to the random, one-off lines that had become so ingrained in my memory that they felt like another groove in my brain, hearing them setting me off like a hair trigger. This was in addition to bearing witness to scenes and segments that my child mind had once enjoyed with a feeling of serene brain-offy, now rendered to me wholly abhorrent. I was constantly squirming, so I finally resorted to looking at my phone for the majority of my watch. But I figured soon after this that if I was going to be looking at my phone for most of the time, I might as well put something on that wasn’t going to make me cringe while it played in the background.
Some other thoughts I had included how utterly enchanted I was by the modest, upper-middle class suburban home the filmmakers decided world-renowned, NBA superstar Michael Jordan should live in for this film. I remember my mom or dad making an offhand remark about this at one point when I was a kid. I didn’t grasp it back then, but now it’s maybe the funniest thing about Space Jam. I also think that the film is quite forthcoming in its logic. When the Looney Tunes finalize their decision to play a game of basketball against the Morons/Monstars in order to win their freedom, it’s pretty airtight reasoning, and the subsequent epiphany that they’ll need to enlist the help of basketball legend Michael Jordan is equally sound.
Furthermore, the need for the aliens to improve the quality of their amusement park with the enslavement of the Looney Tunes makes sense to me. The steps that the script takes in order to get to the insane premise of Michael Jordan playing basketball against aliens with the Looney Tunes are all quite logical, and I believe the film should get some credit for this.
I would like to take the time to endorse one of my favorite shows, Limmy’s Show. I’ve realized that not nearly of enough of my likeminded American comedy fans know about it, let alone watch it, and I feel obligated to give a shout out to it in light of season 2 of I Think You Should Leave dropping on Netflix. I discovered Scottish comedian Brian Limond about mid-way through college by way of the sketch of his that has become the one he’s most known for, and the one he references the most often when new subscribers join him on his regular Twitch streams: “Steel vs. Feathers.”
I’d happened to come across this sketch on Tumblr sometime in 2016, where I watched it over and over and over. It entails Limond — “Limmy,” as he’s affectionately referred to due to the show — bewildered over the fact that a kilogram of steel is equal in heaviness to a kilogram of feathers because, generally, “steel is heavier than feathers.” The bizarre, genius sketch — formatted akin to an informational YouTube video — is broken up into three segments. The first portrays Limmy confidently declaring that a kilogram of steel is heavier than a kilogram of feathers, and the latter two involve his fellow castmates attempting to explain to him, to no avail, why physics doesn’t work like that.
The sketch was just one of many in Limmy’s sketch comedy series Limmy’s Show which aired on BBC Two Scotland between 2010 and 2013, but this sketch in particular gained massive traction on social media just a few years ago. From there, I sought out the rest of the series, all three seasons of which were at one point available on Netflix. During the pandemic lockdown last year, Tim Heidecker featured Limmy as a guest on his Office Hours podcast, in which the two comedians had a charming video chat where they discussed the fact that their respective fanbases had been clamoring for them to meet for years. I cannot stress enough that if you’re a fan of Tim and Eric or Tim Robinson, Limmy’s Show is for you.
There is occasional humor that doesn’t land and seemingly U.K.-centric stuff that I can never grasp, but the premise of most of the sketches are actually far more aligned with I Think You Should Leave than that of Awesome Show. Limmy’s Show exists on a similar frequency in playing on the well-to-do mundanity of everyday life by tormenting it with the surrealism of people who act out of step with society, or by pointing out/exacerbating real-life’s already-existing absurdities. Limmy enlightens viewers — and his own, shocked friends — as to the genius that is free tap water; a man finds a ten-pound note on the ground that belonged to Limmy, who then haunts the man by allowing him to keep the “tenner” but never letting him use it; a man on a walk believes that the joggers in the park are actually running from someone.
But there is a deep sadness to Limmy’s Show that sets it apart, making it far darker and more discomforting. This can be found, for example, in a string of connected segments in one episode, where a man takes his son to the town where his son’s favorite childhood show was filmed only to discover that it is destitute and plagued by poverty begat from the delightful show that was filmed there. There is also a running character named Jacqueline McCafferty — played by Limmy in drag — a recovering heroin and methadone addict who’s fruitlessly attempting to better her life. This sadder tone probably has something to do with Brian Limond’s own struggles with depression, a topic that he’s been public about.
As opposed to finding humor strictly in awkward or uncomfortable social situations, such as with ITYSL (Tim Robinson, ironically, afflicted with anxiety issues as opposed to depression), Limmy allows Limmy’s Show to operate on this darkly existentialist wavelength, in which humor can still be found in the aspects of life that make us the most disturbed or unsettled. The series has sadly been removed from Netflix and doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere in the United States, but full episodes were kindly uploaded to YouTube, along with a good chunk of solo sketches if you just want to wade your toes in the Limmy waters first.
Conner O’Malley released his first comedy video in four months entitled “Endorphin Port,” a fascinating, feverish descent into tech-fueled madness. In a similar vein to David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ or Videodrome, O’Malley envisions a world where the body becomes one with the digital. Such ideas are first lightly explored in his pandemic lockdown video “Leather Metropolis,” — more akin to an experimental short film than a comedy sketch — in which he vamps about an eerily desolate Times Square at twilight in a leather duster and sunglasses, posing in front of the lit marquees and trademark signs, musing inanities like “Life is exactly like a video game. I got the cheat codes,” and “I am a new being, made of digital flesh. I have merged with the cyber.”
In “Endorphin Port,” he takes these reveries and brings them to fruition, starting the video off by galivanting around New York City streets, underpasses, and construction sites in a suit with no tie, expounding frantically on a theorized digital paradise. Such a promised land must be created due to the current state of the internet, which O’Malley believes is simply no longer conducive to the betterment of humanity. Within this “Endorphin Port,” racism and sexism no longer exist because “people will get rid of their bodies,” and then “no one will be judged if they got a pussy, tit, or ass.”
O’Malley goes on to explain that since the human body is disgusting and imperfect, we must build avatars in order to achieve true happiness. However, instead of simply creating this idealized digital space as a finite replacement for real life, such as with VR, O’Malley is able to open up a portal to his conjectured Endorphin Port and enter, he himself becoming fully digitized. “This is the final evolution of humanity. A non-religious, digital Christianity,” he contemplates in a murmuring, lyrical voiceover, as an absurd, virtual reality unfolds before us. Assumedly shot at some point during winter of this year (inferred from the snow on the ground during the live-action part of the film), and directed and edited by O’Malley’s “Leather Metropolis” editor Danny Scharar, “Endorphin Port” continues the comedian’s exploration of a brand-oriented, dystopic technostate. Apart from “Leather Metropolis,” O’Malley has occasionally used his style of surrealist comedy to fixate on this hypothetical point where capitalism and technology supersede God.
While Cronenberg had used eXistenZ to satirize distinctly Y2K anxieties about the impending new millennium, the trajectory of immersive modern technology, and panic surrounding explicit entertainment media, O’Malley reworks these themes and fashions them for the year 2021. He exploits ideas surrounding our increasingly puritanical, brand-positive age in Western society, and creates a world in which the aversion to sexuality and the embrace of digital spaces as the most influential grounds for societal change breeds the desire for a utopic negation of both reality and the human form.
And where Cronenberg once saw virtual reality as physically coalescing with the body to forge an unholy union between tech and flesh — something also seen in Videodrome — O’Malley envisions virtual reality as subsuming the body altogether. It all ties into the overall fascination throughout O’Malley’s comedy with cult-like, capitalistic devotion and deifying political figures, businessmen, and tech bros. All of this to say, both “Leather Metropolis” and “Endorphin Port” prove that Conner O’Malley is shaping up to be one of our most singular and vital modern filmmakers, and I may or may not utilize a future newsletter to go deeper into the themes of his body of work as a whole.
Lastly, I watched all three Jackass films while on vacation a few weeks ago (notwithstanding the .5 installments or Bad Grandpa, all of which I’ll be getting to shortly) and I cannot stop thinking about them. Less in terms of the revolting, horrific, often very funny stunts and pranks that the men in these films are wont to inflict upon themselves and each other, but the unabashed homoeroticism that the men revel in. This isn’t anything new that I’m pointing out — Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O having attested to the overtly homosexual nature of their films over a decade ago — but it’s interesting to consider in terms of the audience for these films when they came out in the mid-to-late-2000s. Much to my reluctance at the time, I went to see Jackass 3D in theaters with my middle school boyfriend, the kind of guy who was extremely quote un-quote straight and heteronormative (though painfully insecure, and thus overcompensating for it). And yet, he and his friend who took me to see Jackass 3D could not get enough of these naked, screaming men touching and defiling each other’s bodies.
This time around, I was struck by how the Jackass crew so cleverly subverts heteronormativity in their “gay jokes,” never punctuating a gag which involves thongs or ass play or nipple torture or penises with a “not gay” subtext. Everything in Jackass is incredibly gay, and incredibly earnest in its depiction of male intimacy — the camaraderie that the men afford one another in the face of extreme agony and humiliation is always present even when they’re laughing at each other’s misfortunes, eager to assist when a gag’s gone too far.
In the above linked interview with Knoxville and Steve-O, the latter celebrates the idea of subjugating their male, hetero audience with their naked forms, while the former laughs at the interviewer suggesting that the crew’s desires to fuck one another is at all suppressed rather than totally conscious. Still, these concepts were, as far as I’m concerned, entirely lost upon my then-boyfriend and his friend, who viewed the Jackass films as the pinnacle of heterosexual machismo. I suppose it had all to do with their respective affinity for the Jackass lore of the original and various other television series, and the fact that it was all presented as comedy. It is interesting to me, then, to consider what sorts of male physical closeness are deemed as “straight” and therefore acceptable, or “not straight” and therefore perverse. Under the guise of comedy, male touching is permissible, even if there is no disclaimer presented at the end to assure audiences that no homosexual feelings were felt.
In this way, even if the “heterosexual MTV generation” that made up their core audience were not necessarily being penetrated (no pun intended) with the pro-gay connotations, at the very least the Jackass franchise forced their audiences to not only find enjoyment in sexually-charged, male-on-male contact, but see it as completely warranted. Anyway, I’m looking forward to Jackass Forever, and I’m praying every night for every bone that’s left in Johnny Knoxville’s body.*