C'est faisant nimporte quoi qu'on devient un enfoiré

Scott Hardie | June 26, 2024
I recently came upon old videos by Rémi Gaillard, a French comedian whose work I fondly remembered enjoying back in the 2000s. His Mario Kart cosplay attracted a lot of attention, and he had other fun short videos too, like buying groceries and watching soccer.

So, I decided to watch the entirety of his channel, and yikes, it does not play well in 2024. From trashing a store (justifying their losses by saying the "exposure" will be profitable for them), to stealing food, to acting like a criminal pervert, to tormenting low-wage workers, to lots of instances where he just acts like a huge asshole, I can't help but see him now like a school bully that thinks what he's doing is ok as long as someone's laughing. What a maladjusted jerk. I'm sorry that I ever liked any of his work.

Has any entertainment has not aged well for you when you revisited it? Or is there entertainment that you suspect would not age well if you tried it again today?

Erik Bates | June 26, 2024
Rewatching The Office a few months ago, even the jokes that were intended to be awkwardly inappropriate just didn't land the same anymore.

Samir Mehta | June 27, 2024
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | July 3, 2024
Good examples. It amuses me that we all cited the meanness of 2000s-era TV and video, I think of that decade's culture as an era of jerks being celebrated, especially on TV. It was a time when Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsey and Bill Maher ascended to cultural prominence despite being unbearable assholes. Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother had proud misogynists in lead roles. 24 and Dexter and The Sopranos and House and Lost, some of which I enjoyed very much, became big hits despite real bastards for main characters and deeply toxic worldviews. I don't know how much of that can be attributed to the psychic trauma of 9/11 and the Iraq War but surely some can. In the late 2010s and pandemic era, things finally started getting nice for a change, with feel-good shows like Ted Lasso and Great British Baking Show and Abbott Elementary and The Good Place offering us all hugs -- even genre shows like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and Star Trek: Discovery were exceptionally kind, albeit after a grim beginning for the latter -- but today, the world's drift towards mean-spirited politics suggests to me that a drift towards mean-spirited culture won't be far behind. That's a shame. :-(

As for The Office specifically, I could never get into it after several tries. The real world already has so many cluelessly cruel schmucks who have no business managing people (Michael) or remaining employed (Dwight), and I'm not interested in watching "entertainment" that normalizes them with jokes. What damage this show did in the world to make it seem like those people are a normal part of work life! (Common, yes. Normal, no.) I'm sure there are plenty of moments in the series that softened them or endeared them to the audience and made them palatable, but I just couldn't get past the show's toxicity to enjoy its humor, though I've laughed at clips now and then. Superstore had jerks too, and even a very Dwight-like figure in Dina Fox, and there are points where I almost turned it off as well.