Victory Soap v. 2.0

Oh hells no -- this article on comedy movies that flubbed the comedy part was going good, but then the writer had to ruin everything. First, he included the hilarious and biting paean to hating New York that is Quick Change among the failures. I beg to differ: that movie made me and my New-York-loving friend laugh ourselves sick. There's something about growing up in Miami, which as everyone knows is a detached borough of New York that drifted south and got stuck on the end of Florida, that brings out instant empathy with all anti-New-York rants. Then again, I have noticed that a certain type of people who actually live in New York -- who tend to be in their late 20s to early 30s and part of the self-consciously "cool" crowd that still thinks it's the height of fashion to have a reproduction of that Andy Warholl poster of soup cans on the wall of their fifth-floor walk-up hovel (for which they pay $1500 a month) -- are somewhat humorless about their city of residence.

And then there is this nonsense:

In a landscape as xenophobic as America post 9/11, the idea of a documentary examining what makes other cultures laugh should have been a slam dunk, delivering a feel-good "We're not so different after all" message with plenty of fish-out-of-water laughs along the way.

What the fuck is he talking about? After 9/11 America was so frantic to stave off accusations of xenophobia that we went far out of our way to tell our Muslim citizens what great, upstanding folks they were, we loved them, we didn't blame them for the actions of a few, we'll even cover ourselves up like some Muslim women do to show that we really, really, really are "citizens of the world" and love foreigners more than our own children. In any other country in the whole enlightened, xenophilic Rest Of The World, there would have been riots and mass slayings of anyone who looked even a little bit out of the ordinary if an atrocity on the scale of 9/11 had happened there. Or at least that would be true in the non-Western part of the world, which is the only part that counts to the sort of people that call the degrading "we like you, we really, really like you" lovefest we inflicted on the world after 9/11 "xenophobia."

I didn't bother reading the rest of the article.

(Via Tom McMahon's news feed.)