You're All Being Annoying About Overcompensating
Tuesday Brain Rot
Tuesday Brain Rot
In this newsletter:
Patti LuPone apologizes
You’re all being annoying about Overcompensating
What I consumed this week
Patti LuPone *gasp* apologized for her comments about Audra McDonald and Kecia Lewis. Now, this ain’t nothing that you’re used to. Out of the ordinary, unusual!
Why did Patti apologize? Well, for one, a bunch of people signed an open letter urging the Tonys to disinvite her. Can I say something? Most “open letters” are silly and I din’t find this any different. An open letter asking the Tonys to disinvite Patti, when the Tonys have let Kevin Spacey host, is comical! But anyway, the open letter stated: “We write not to shame or isolate, but to speak with honesty, clarity, and care. To publicly attack a woman who has contributed to this art form with such excellence, leadership, and grace — and to discredit the legacy of Audra McDonald, the most nominated and awarded performer in Tony Award history — is not simply a personal offense. It is a public affront to the values of collaboration, equity, and mutual respect that our theater community claims to uphold.”
Can I just say that… nowhere did Patti discredit the legacy of Audra? In fact, all she said about Audra was “she’s not a friend.” If saying you don’t like someone constitutes discrediting their legacy, then I guess I’ve discredited a lot of legacies. Good for Patti for apologizing, but writing an open letter asking for someone to be disinvited from the Tonys (that Kevin fucking Spacey has hosted, btw!) is silly.
I have another critique of the response to Patti’s comments. I’ve seen a LOT of comments online saying that there’s a double standard at play here, because if Audra or Kecia made the same comments, they’d be canceled unlike Patti. Well, for one, the response to Patti’s comments kind of shows that she didn’t get to do this unscathed, so the argument’s premise is already faulty. Second, this offers an argument that equality is Audra and Kecia getting to be rude bitches just like Patti. I personally don’t think “this white person is awful, this Black person should be allowed to be awful too” is the answer to equality. We love Audra because she’s classy. She would never do what Patti did! Meanwhile, we like Patti because she’s rude. And some people hate her because she’s rude, which is the price you have to pay.
You’re all being annoying about Overcompensating.
A couple weeks, we reviewed Benito Skinner’s new series Overcompensating on Keep It. My co-host Louis Virtel and I both enjoyed the show, with some minor critiques. We’ve since received accusations of being “paid” to like the show. Someone also commented on one of Tell the Bees’ recent TikTok posts, “This has to be paid content. The show is… ill-conceived, at best.” My response to these kinds of comments are usually… bitch, is it my fault you don’t have any taste?
Have we all been conditioned to fucking HATE everything? I know the internet is a cesspool at times, and I know I’m saying this as a person with a podcast literally named after a phrase I popularized to say “No thanks,” but the idea that you have to hate everything online has gotten obnoxious. Particularly because it’s only some thing that we’re supposed to hate. If I were to post something effusive about a popstar, I wouldn’t get as much pushback. In fact, I know that for a fact. I OFTEN effusively write and talk about pop music on my podcast never receive pushback. If anything,
I think the real problem with responses to Overcompensating is that some people just don’t enjoy it. And we’ve all become conditioned to heavily associating what we like with our personalities. My former employer, Jonah Peretti, wrote a long blog post about how “algorithims make it hard to express your identity authentically and just for fun.” Well, BuzzFeed is largely responsible for this phenomenon. It’s why people share meme accounts about the shows they watch, it’s why they used to take BuzzFeed personality quizzes. Posting about a show you like shows people who you are. But it also allows you to seem like you “fit in.” It’s why when the finale of The White Lotus dropped, your feed was annoyingly full of screenshots from the episode, many of them spoilers! It’s not that people wanted to spoil the show for their friends, but it’s because they felt the need to show their friends that they belong.
Which is why, if I praise a show you don’t like, it calls into question what you think about yourself and that, sadly, makes people angry and uncomfortable.
Speaking of a horrible future with algorithims ruining out life, the gorgeous book There Are Reasons For This by Nini Berndt is a must read.
I Don’t Understand You premiere party at Cafe Maud. I attended the premiere of I Don’t Understand You last night, a new comedy from my friends Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig. It’s a DEMENTED comedy about horrible white gays and the chaos they can create starring Andrew Rannells and Nick Kroll. I fucking loved it.
I’m currently obsessed with Adults on FX!
Tiktok failed to load.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Loved following your take on Patti, Audra, and Kecia. Looking ahead, I'm excited to read your opinions on 28 Years Later!! I'm psyched Jodie Comer is in it.