straightarrow372: September 2014

So I wanted to add the new messages to the previous blog, but I got confused looking through it, so I'm starting over here. I'm going to have to look through the tweets below again, to see if I can make it less confusing. It's so hard to capture conversations on twitter.

The conversations memorialized in these screen images were part of threads that were occurring partly simultaneously and it's hard to sort it all out. When I try to pull up a conversation thread, the thoughts don't appear any more sequentially than they do on the timelines.

So I am just going to write about what all this is bringing up for me.

In my personal story, there is this history that I was inspired to study improv comedy after watching Josh co-hosting Live ! with Kelly. I found his interactions with her to be positively delightful. I wanted to learn how to do that.

When I got to improv comedy school, I seldom saw what I had seen between Josh and Kelly. Instead, I saw a lot of crudeness -- and a lot of self-righteousness about being crude. People do this, because they think it's funny. I don't find it funny. In fact, I'm finding the constant vulgarity, and notably the profanity, tho not only the profanity, is feeling more and more like a continual verbal sexual assault.

People who behave this way feel that they are rebels, rebelling against some kind of authority figure. But, for me, they are the authority figures and I am the rebel. I do not want to be bullied into behavior that would seem like selling out to me.

Most of these people are younger than I. Josh's age, or younger. Yet, even tho I am 57, they have mostly been studying comedy and performance longer than I have, so I am the new kid on the block. And I'm feeling frustrated and put upon by them.

So that is the backdrop from my point of view behind my interaction with Josh.

When I first started out being a Grobanite, I thought that Josh must be very like me. Like me, he had older parents, father with Jewish ancestry, mother with Protestant ancestry, and raised Episcopalian. I thought that I liked his music, because we had this common cultural background.

Since being a Grobanite, I've found that lots of different people like Josh's music. Moreover, I've found that his growing up in a public school in Los Angeles was quite different from me growing up in a midwestern university town and later a suburb of San Francisco 25 years earlier. He has an entirely different vocabulary from mine, not just in the area of profanity, but also in many other respects. I often have to run to the Urban Slang Dictionary website to understand what he is saying.

I had assumed he must have put some effort into learning urban slang to sound cool and that he must really have learned to speak the same English I had learned to speak. But I realize now that his speaking urban slang is not an affectation. He truly speaks a different language from me, at least in part.

Profanity is part of this. I have noticed in my improv comedy school that these younger urban people seem to use the "f" word in virtually every sentence, sometimes several times in the same sentence. In fact, they are using this word in place of "um." They are educated enough to know that if they say "um" constantly they will sound stupid. They suppose that if they say the "f" word, instead of "um," they don't sound stupid.

In fact it's the same thing.

For me, though, this constant use of the "f" word feels like a continual verbal sexual assault. I feel traumatized by that.

I do not want to enter into Stockholm syndrome and start justifying the behavior of the people who are behaving in a manner I find painful.

Maybe some people in this conversation who just sound like they're lecturing Josh on his language are feeling what I'm feeling. That this language is painful for them to listen to -- that it feels attacking and harassing.

Unfortunately, tho, when they phrase this as if it were merely an etiquette lecture, they bring out the etiquette nerds who feel that it is rude to criticize others, especially when the criticism seems to lack substance.

Of course, this ignores the fact that the self-righteous etiquette nerds are themselves criticizing the people who criticized Josh's language. Apparently, it's ok to criticize other fans, but not ok to criticize Josh.

My experience is that Josh is open to meaningful dialog on all reasonable subjects.

My impression is that many people, like myself, grew up in dysfunctional families where criticizing the authority figure resulted in harsh treatment, or where heated dialog was punished. As a result, they feel that criticism of Josh must be silenced.

Josh, on the other hand, does not appear to have grown up in a dysfunctional family like that and does not appear to approve of group efforts to silence critics. I applaud that in him.

I have pointed out to Josh, and I hope he remembers, that I love him and want him to be the best person he can be -- and that I feel that his impressions of things can be tinged by the worship of sycophantic fans -- so I feel that the best way I can be helpful to him is to point out things as I see them.

I believe that we each have a responsibility to speak our own truths.

OK, now for a memorialization of the tweet images, below. There may be some tweets on the previous blog that aren't below. This might be because they were deleted, or it might be due to the mysteries of cyberspace. I would encourage the interested reader to look at the immediately previous issue of this blog, where there are also tweet images.

First, my timeline: