Hold my (woke) beer?

Kid Rock shot up some Bud Light because of transcans (kinda hilarious) which had me thinking about how weird it is that American tough guys love guns so much. "I'm really tough and that's why I need all these guns" is like saying "I smell great and that's why I need all this perfume."

Then, Miller Lite practically begged us to use that “hold my beer” line by releasing a feminist (!?) video about how their beer is made from “good sh*t.” Of course, right wingers got all up in suds over that too. To them, it’s proof that yet another corporation has “joined the woke cult.”

Sure, whatever.

Blue checkmate

Related to all that: The replies to any rightie tightie post on Twitter now immediately turn into a blue check anti-woke circlejerk…

Basically, blue checks are now the online MAGA hat.¹ It’s amazing how they took an icon of the coastal elites and made it their own; reminds me of how the phrase “fake news” was co-opted (originally it was a phrase lobbed against Trump until he jujitsu’d it and turned it into his own weapon).

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they take your attacky thing and make it their attacky thing until it’s rendered meaningless.

On the plus side, the blue check now (helpfully) communicates something else: “You can ignore this comment because I’m a fool who thinks the best way to shove it to the elites is to give the richest man in the world $8/month for an icon devoid of the thing (i.e. verification) that once made it valuable.” Thanks for the time saver, fellas. (They’re always fellas btw.) I legit have no idea why they think this icon’s valuable – all I do now is immediately ignore whatever’s underneath it.

Hip ©orps

Anyway, back to the beers. The weird thing about all this is lib snowflakes also find these desperate attempts by corporations to seem “with it” extremely cringe. On behalf of left-leaning cu©cks everywhere: Boycotting Bud Light and Miller Lite doesn’t impact us at all; we already despise them. We drink LaCroix Pamplemousse and Sanpellegrino Blood Orange while bitching about our dads. If you really wanna “own the libs,” you don’t need a gun; just go to a bodega in Bushwick and lick some of those cans.

The idea that Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors, M&Ms, and Disney are Team Left™️ is hilarious since the Disney Store and the M&M store in Times Square are the two places NYC hipster culture mocks the most. Conservatives attacking these corporations is just circular firing squad nonsense. Are they gonna turn against Duck Dynasty and the Blue Angels next!?

The actually offensive thing about the Miller Lite video is their marketing department thinks saying “good sh*t” over and over makes the brand seem hip and edgy. Reminds me of the endless stream of book titles with F-bombs:

Ugh, f*ck off with that sh*t. I’ll say it again: Cursing isn’t interesting.

If you think gratuitous cursing is funny, I’m going to assume some things about you. Basically, it makes me think you’re either a child, think like a child, are surrounded by children, exist in a Human Resources-induced nanny-state-of-mind, watch too much Disney, are a Jesus freak, work in academia or some other pretentious field, and/or belong to a country club (or swim in some other pool of property-owning propriety). Bummer about your cloistered life, but thinking curse words make something funny is like believing wearing a fedora gives you a personality.

For the rest of us, it’s straight up corny. It’s faux-naughtiness that elicits titters for the same reason typing 80085 in a calculator so it reads “boobs” makes second graders guffaw. You’re violating norms, I guess, but what you’re really revealing is an infantile view of boundaries. Spend a day on a construction site or a middle school locker room and you’ll quickly realize how little cleverness it requires to drop f-bombs.

Trump on CNN

We’ve also got the Great Trumpkin back onscreen thanks to CNN…

CNN exec #1: We really screwed up with how we covered Trump last time. What can we do to improve?

CNN exec #2: What if we add in a crowd of bootlicking sycophants who laugh at all his jokes and cheer on all his insults?

CNN exec #1: Yes, perfect!

They should let me host the next town hall. I’m dying to ask him these questions:

1) You constantly mention you're the subject of a witch hunt. During the actual witch hunt, which side would you have supported: the teenage girls accused of being witches or the old men who executed them?

2) You always come onstage to the songs YMCA and Macho Man. Why? Are you aware that both of these songs are gay anthems typically associated with the homosexual community?

3) Nearly everyone you hired while President you eventually wound up firing (typically complaining about their inability to do the job properly). Isn't this a clear sign that, at the very least, you are incompetent at hiring?

Geezerpalooza

I guess we all gotta just hold our breath and hope Biden can wheeze his way to the electoral finish line.

Something dumb about that: In ”The Manufactured Panic Over Biden’s Age,” NYT columnist Charles Blow argues people are worried about the president’s age because of, get this, political manipulation and media complicity.

I’d argue that the biggest change wasn’t the simple passage of time, but the decision of some Republican leaders to focus like a laser on Biden’s age as the factor weighing against him…

The idea that voters are worried about Biden’s age and capacity has been repeated so often that it no longer requires any proof beyond polling that reflects what respondents have consumed: reports that they’re worried about Biden’s age and capacity.

There’s a real chicken-egg conundrum here.

Oh, please. Voters aren’t worried about Biden’s age because they’ve been “manipulated,” they’re worried BECAUSE THEY HAVE EYES. People know when it’s time to take the car keys away from grandpa.

Standup crowds taught me long ago this issue ain’t a media creation. Mocking Biden’s age has been a surefire way to get laughs from the moment he became the first person to ever fall up a staircase. It’s already a hack topic, actually. And it works because 1) it’s true, 2) everyone can see it, and 3) most mainstream media keeps pretending there is nothing to see here.

Dementia'd Feinstein – who needs a constant chaperone to make sure she doesn’t ask Congressional reporters to tell her the Early Bird special – is the latest example of media folks tiptoeing around the age issue without saying what we all know: She’s senile, needs to go, and that there’s even any debate about it is, well, gross.

It’s yet another example of old people in politics acting like bullies, clinging to power long past their sell-by dates. They keep solving nothing for future generations but adore the a**kissing too much to bow out. Young people are right to be furious. Yo, DF: Legislate, appoint some judges, or get out of the way.

Quickies

🎯 Not sure why the price of sandwiches doubled over pandemic. There shouldn't be a $7 surcharge just because the menu font switched to Garamond.

🎯 Ethical non-monogamy? Yawn. More into non-ethical monogamy — Bonnie and Clyde type shit: “Let’s stay together and commit felonies, baby."

🎯 Great guitar player and all but not sure how anyone keeps a straight face when Hendrix sings crap like, "Ah, move over Rover and let Jimi take over."

🎯 Being a "creator" means setting thousands of traps in hopes of catching a single mouse.

🎯 Women call men trash a lot. But we have our upsides too, like having no idea who the Hadids are.

Podcast

Wishing a belated Happy (dead) Mother’s Day to everyone who already buried their ma and had to deal with convos like this on Sunday:

“So what are you doing for mother’s day?”
“Actually, my mom’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
[Silence.]

I talked all about it in the latest episode of my podcasts Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby:

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 16 episodes

Also…

Podcast: I talked Jew stuff and comedy on ep75 of the Self-Consciousness Podcast with Jennifer Wai.

SiriusXM: I guested it up on "WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!" hosted by Dean Obeidallah.

Technocrap

💾 The algorithm can't tell the difference between love and hate. All it knows is if you're paying attention or not. The more we become slaves to the algorithm, the more hate becomes love and love becomes hate.

💾 Feels like we're not talking enough about Zuck throwing billions at The Metaverse™️ when the world literally couldn't care less about his giant, boring video game for dorks. He's just lucky Elon is such a massive dipsh*t of distraction.

💾 Saw a job posting for a "thumbnail artist" and a little piece of me died.

💾 The future will be constantly choosing from a spectrum of most to least human (from artists to content creators to AI).

💾 Big Tech keeps forcing us to meet in the same three places. In reality, there should be thousands of dating apps, hundreds of social media platforms, etc. Execs/investors keep trying to make monolithic platforms work because "scaling" is all that matters to their bottom lines. That’s great for efficiency, but it’s awful for humanity.

💾 I have seen the future and it is an inbox filled with friend requests from spambots that look like AI generated Asian women with enormous bre@sts who "own a plastic hospital."

Comedy

😈 I post clips of my standup at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

😈 Check out my other newsletter “Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian” – recent posts there talk about Steven Wright, Chris Rock, and the most important thing about making art.

😈 LA/NYC: MISGUIDED MEDITATION WITH MATT RUBY RETURNS IN JUNE...

6/1 LOS ANGELES - tickets
6/9 BROOKLYN - tickets
promo code "tunein" for Rubesletter subscriber discount

Misguided Meditation is a comedy show about the mindfulness journey of comedian Matt Ruby. The show is about death, therapy, psychedelics, meditation, and way more. Along the way, Matt offers hard-earned wisdom, discusses the thorniness of the mindful life, pokes fun at woo woo wackos, and discusses his own failures/successes on the path to wellness.

😈 Watch “Matt Ruby: Substance” at YouTube – some raves in the comments below…

5-spotted

🗯 The “conspiracy singularity” has me wondering: Are there anti-vaxx drag queens? ‘Cuz they might break some brains.

Previously disparate groups began meeting, merging, and sharing one another’s curious preoccupations. At the time, much of that new unity focused on covid skepticism, opposition to then-theoretical covid vaccines, and a suspicion that pandemic-era lockdowns were merely a pretext to a much larger power grab, a massive hoax designed to usher in a sinister Great Reset…And right now, that shared focus is an all-pervading panic and hostility about drag queens, “groomers,” transgender identity as being somehow “contagious,” the supposed sexualization of children by LGBT people, and the false claim that gender-affirming care is a form of abuse or mutilation.  

🗯 James Corden Bows Out.

There’s one essential bit of information that nobody at CBS or on The Late Late Show is daring to say out loud (at least, not on the record). And that is, Corden’s show was wildly unprofitable and may well have been heading to the chopping block whether he stayed or not.

We keep pretending late night is a thing, but there is no late night or daytime TV anymore. Every show is anytime.

🗯 Ram Dass on why he blesses his food.

Before I eat, I bless my food. For many people, saying grace in childhood was a time of impatience when adults were controlling the situation, but I’ve discovered that it can become a moment to reawaken a living truth. When I get food, I hold the food up or sit with my hands beside my plate, and I say a blessing. And then I just think about it for a moment and I realize that this whole ritual of praying over food is part of all form, it’s part of law, it’s part of the universe. The food I’m praying over, the bowl of oatmeal or whatever I’m eating, is part of God and I, who am making this prayer, offering up this food, am part of God. And the hunger that I’m using the oatmeal to quiet, the pangs in my stomach, the desires, the fire which will consume this food, that’s also part of God. And I begin to sense the oneness of everything; I start to experience a quietness and then I understand that the deeper I appreciate that it is all one, the deeper I become one with it all, and sense that all separateness is over.

🗯 The Supremes attempted to film a guerrilla-style promo video in 1965 on a busy Champs-Élysées until Parisian cops intervened. It’s pretty great.

🗯 Unexpected comeback for the Thompson Twins…

🎶 You say I'm a dreamer
We're two of a kind
Both of us searching
For some perfect alley oop
We know we'll never find 🎶

That’s it. Thanks for reading. Leave a comment, fwd to a friend, post on social, tell me to screw off in an email, etc.

-Matt