I’m applying to be Donald Trump’s ghostwriter and I think I’ve really got a shot!

Trending towards nonsense

It feels like something has shifted. Trending topics are now unapologetically trending towards complete bullsh*t. In the past week, social media promised me all kinds of meaty NEWS, the kind the algorithm knows is right up my alley. 

1) I was supposed to get a Donald Sterling redux with a different NBA owner, Robert Sarver of the Phoenix Suns…

Jordan Schultz @Schultz_Report

🚨 Breaking: The NBA is preparing for a massive story accusing #Suns owner Robert Sarver of racism, sexism and sexual harassment in a series of incidents, sources say. With enough evidence to support such claims, there’s a real chance the league would forcibly remove Sarver.

October 22nd 2021

8,239 Retweets30,757 Likes

The Suns organization even responded to this report of an upcoming report. The only problem: The story never appeared.

2) I was supposed to get a massive walkout at Netflix. 

Then, reports say that one thousand Netflix employees — nearly 10% of the company’s workforce,” they wrote, “are planning an October 20 walkout to protest the Chappelle special.”

But it turns out only a few dozens actually showed and it was mostly just a clickgrab photo-op.

3) Then there was the “news” of John Mulaney and Olivia Munn splitting up. 

sam is crying about BTS @samanthaistan

I love how I found out about john mulaney and olivia munn breaking up from a tiktok where the guy was like “I hope I’m the one who broke the news to you”

October 23rd 2021

365 Retweets10,963 Likes

Or did they? Actually, it was just random anonymous gossip from Deuxmoi (what’s that?) and spread by something called Affinity Magazine (gonna guess that ain’t a Conde Nast publication). There’s been no confirmation since. 

So this is where we are now. We’re breaking news that there’s going to be breaking news that never actually arrives. The motto of social media: “Who cares if it’s true? As long as it’s trending!” It makes TMZ seem like the New Yorker.

Of course, there have always been National Enquirer-type publications floating crap, but the weird thing now is how social media elevates these rumors into zeitgeisty topics that everyone’s commenting on. Being 1st isn't enough anymore, now we need to be -1st. And by the time the truth catches up, we’ve already moved on to the next juicy fauxclusive. It’s the logical progression in tech’s race to the bottom of our brain stems.

ESPN could release that Sarver story today. Munnaney might announce it’s over tomorrow. But does it even matter? The clicks have already been counted. Irresistible force meets immovable object is passé; now the question is what happens to a society when media reports with a complete lack of accountability meet a public that has an infinitesimal attention span?

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“Kramer, you motherf*cker”

This Chappelle vs. Hannah Gadsby thing is Trump vs. AOC but for comedy – which I guess makes Bill Burr the Joe Biden of comedy and Bill Barr the Jim Gaffigan of politics and…phew, this analogy has really gone off the rails.

Also, people are using Rotten Tomatoes scores to "prove" the elites are out of touch with the masses – but if we’re going there, then we might as well use Twitter polls to decide elections and Yelp ratings to decide which restaurants get Michelin stars.

Personally, I find most of the conversation around this new Chappelle special tiresome; it all just smells like people talking over each other instead of to each other. (So, y’know, perfect for social media!)

That said, let’s take a trip back to an old Rubesletter I wrote titled, “Omertà, snitches, and the blue wall of silence.” In it, I discussed Dave Chappelle and why comedians are reluctant to criticize each other in public (but fyi, we talk major sh*t about each other in group texts). Let’s just say that feels, um, relevant right now. Below is an excerpt from that piece. I think it also speaks to why many Chappelle stans are fighting so hard for him.

Worth noting: As with manslaughter vs. premeditated murder, there’s a big difference between an improvised slip of the tongue and a planned, edited performance released to the public as an official special.

👇

(Originally published Aug 5, 2020) It’s easy to say others should turn in their colleagues, but it’s harder when it’s you being asked to turn on a coworker. What would it take for you to snitch on one of your colleagues? I know I’m reluctant to condemn another comedian for any issue of speech because I’ve said some godawful things on stage that I wholeheartedly regret. Comics often rush to defend each other when a fellow comic is called out for being offensive. You’ll hear otherwise progressive performers defend an attempt at humor that includes, to pick a couple of real-world examples, threatening a crowd member with rape or advocating gay-bashing…Critics can attack how us comics do the job, but they don’t know what it’s like to deal with a hostile crowd, try out an edgy joke, or ride the line between offensiveness and hilarity. They don’t realize the only way to figure out where the line is drawn is by crossing it.

And just like that, here I am sounding like a “you just wound’t understand” cop. “You'll never know what it's like to approach a suspect unsure if he's reaching for a wallet or a gun.” But obviously there’s a huge difference: When comedians “kill,” there’s laughter and people doing shots. When cops “kill,” there’s tears and people getting shot. Different stakes, different mistakes.

Shortly after Michael Richards’ n-word meltdown at The Laugh Factory, Dave Chappelle articulated his views on Richards’ set while performing on the same stage. He explained how watching the whole thing made him realize he's "20% black and 80% comedian."

The black dude in me is like “Kramer, you motherf*cker.” I was hurt. And the comedian in me was just like "Whoa, n****r’s having a bad set. Hang in there, Kramer. Don't let 'em break you, Kramer!”

Chappelle is pointing out how we all have an urge to side with a colleague, despite the sins they’ve committed. It’s more than loyalty, it’s empathy for those who have endured similar ordeals in similar trenches. After decades spent in comedy clubs, Chappelle heard Richards’ rant and didn’t see a racist as much as he saw an inexperienced comic bombing. Plus, most comics live in fear that, one day, he or she will be the one under the outrage klieg lights. Indeed, a few years later, Chappelle faced withering criticism for jokes about transgender people. As a modern day Andy Warhol might say: In the future, everyone will be cancelled for 15 minutes.

Chappelle’s claim to feeling 20% black and 80% comedian shows how the sins we’re willing to forgive are like an identity reveal; whom we choose to let off the hook proves who we are, like a DNA test. It also demonstrates how our identities are fluid; they’re a mixture of race, profession, gender, religion, and more.

Read the rest: “Omertà, snitches, and the blue wall of silence.”

Quickies

🌀 How I feel about all these "Facebook is is evil" stories: Enough! I can't keep dedicating this much of my life to studying SPECTRE, I'm not James Bond.

🌀 I get excited when I like a TV show. But I get even more excited when I don't like a show. It's like I've been given the freedom to go ahead and live my life instead of tackling a 60-hour homework assignment.

🌀 Being hated by both sides is the only sane place these days.

🌀 The whole punching up/down thing is meaningless now because no one can agree on who are actually the powerful people and who are the victims. Like everything else nowadays, we're not even having the same conversation.

Vooza @voozahq

The idea that content on Netflix is too edgy is kinda hilarious. It's an ocean of bland, generic, curated-by-the-algorithm shlock. The second-rail is now the third-rail.

October 20th 2021

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🌀 Oddly, the true star of the Velvet Underground doc is Johnathan Richman. So eloquent, enthusiastic, and truly captured the musical uniqueness of the VU in a way no one else could. Made me wanna listen to the Modern Lovers all over again.

🌀 Fun fact about the VU doc: My mom lived with the Velvets in that house on Ludlow discussed in the movie. More about her connection to the VU here. FYI when I asked her about it, she said John Cale was cool but Lou Reed was a real a**hole. Seems to be the general consensus.

🌀 Listening to women discuss dating makes me realize male strip clubs are broken. If they understood female desire, they’d work like this: $20 for him to give you a lap dance, $40 for him to ignore your text messages but watch your IG stories.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

The upside to this supply chain crisis is it's revealing how many "patriotic" Americans get 90% of their stuff from China.

October 23rd 2021

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🌀 Re: the supply chain crisis, I've spent my whole life really enjoying knowing nothing about ports, supply chains, and logistics and can't wait to keep that going.

🌀 Re: those band cruises, anyone who decides to go on a "cruise" to see their fave artists perform is creepy. Just go to a show and go home like a normal person. You don't need to get all “we're trapped on a boat together and it's going to be FUN” like you’re in some Swedish horror movie.

🌀 Comedy lesson that applies to everything really: There is no hack subject, only hack approaches. A comedian can do a bit on airplanes, dating apps, or anything else. You just need to take an innovative approach that hasn't been heard 1,000 times before.

Standup comedy videos

Some of my recent standup video posts below.

▶️ We need to be careful about cancelling people for things they did in the past. I discuss here:

rubymatt

A post shared by Matt Ruby (@rubymatt)

▶️ Idea! Before you can vote on women’s bodies, you should have to pass a test. I talked about it here:

rubymatt

A post shared by Matt Ruby (@rubymatt)

▶️ Flying Basic Economy is cheap, but there are a lot of rules:

rubymatt

A post shared by Matt Ruby (@rubymatt)

Those last two are from my “Feels Like Matt Ruby” special you can watch on YouTube or stream as an album.

Live shows

Upcoming standup dates in Boston (Nov 5-6), Manchester, New Hampshire (Dec 1), and Portland, Maine (Dec 2). Check my calendar for more info.

And if you’re in NYC…

1) I'm doing this one-off show that'll be weird/fun on 11/11: “MISGUIDED MEDITATION is a comedy show about the mindfulness journey – including meditation, therapy, and psychedelics – of comedian Matt Ruby. Along the way, Matt offers some hard-earned wisdom, discusses zen concepts, and cracks jokes about his own failures/successes on the path to wellness. Musician/artist Steve Pestana provides musical accompaniment.” $5 off tix with code "breathe" here.

And I've also got these weekly shows...

2) HOT SOUP show every Tuesday night at 10:30pm at Comedy Cellar in West Village.

3) GOOD EGGS show every Wednesday at 8pm at NY Comedy Club in East Village. Ticket link with the code RAW applied for free tickets.

5-Spotted

1) “Words That Mean Nothing” explains how our political discourse is dominated by words that are functionally meaningless. See: Cancel culture, woke, CRT, etc. They’re all just “undefined words that serve to make the other side look bad and can never be pinned down enough to make your side look like hypocrites.”

Much of the time that we think we are talking about  “issues,” we are actually talking about words. One side will argue against one definition of a word, while the other side argues in favor of a different definition of a word. Each side can claim that the other is not addressing the issue, because the issue is defined differently on each side. In this way, political debate can carry on unimpeded by any barriers of mutually agreed upon terms, like separate superhighways rushing on at full speed in opposite directions. This characterizes a large amount of political discourse in this country: Torrents of people talking about different things, all of whom assume that they are talking about the same things. 

Bingo. I argued something similar here: The real problem with "cancel culture" is no one agrees on what it means.

2) I dig this tip on what to do if your phone’s about to die.

If you're lost and phone is low or has no signal, here's a tip. Change the voicemail message to give your location, time, date, situation and instructions ie. staying with the car. If your phone dies, voicemail still works, so anyone looking for you will know where to send help.

3) Why do some people love scary movies?

Mathias Clasen’s lab conducted a study measuring people’s ideal level of fear while visiting a haunted house. They discovered a “sweet spot” for terror. “ People who seek out horror want just the right amount of it,” Clasen writes. “Too scary, and it is unpleasantly overwhelming; not scary enough, and it is boring.” Somewhere between those two extremes is the ideal amount of fear — what Clasen calls the zone of recreational horror. “A zone in which you are enjoying yourself and might just be learning important things in the process, such as how to regulate your negative emotions,” he says…[It’s] benign masochism —  the thrill of being close to a potential threat, as long as it remains harmless. Horror movies work the same way. “People evolved to be curious about danger, and they use stories to learn about the world and themselves,” Clasen writes.

4) That study discusses how horror depends on arousal dynamics that are “just right.” (It’s all about fear and fun coexisting.) Well, comedy and horror have a lot in common; good standup also depends on getting it “just right.”

Jerry Seinfeld compares telling a joke to attempting to leap a metaphorical canyon, taking the audience with him. The set-up is the nearside cliff, and the punchline is the far side. If they're too far apart, the listeners don't make it to the other side. And if they are too close together, the audience just steps across the gap without experiencing any exhilarating leap. The joke-hearer gets far more pleasure from the joke if he or she has to do a little work.

5) ‘Summer of Soul’ Review: In 1969 Harlem, a Music Festival Stuns. Loved the doc and this Wesley Morris piece (he’s such a great writer) has a wonderful passage explaining the stunning duet Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson do of the gospel song “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”

They share the microphone. They pass it between them. Howling, moaning, wailing, hopping, but well within the song’s generous contours and, somehow, in control of themselves…They’re singing for the festival’s attendees. They’re mourning all of the death — of leaders, of followers, of troops and civilians. They are, if you’re willing to see it this way, lamenting what is obviously a generational transition from one phase of Black political expression to another, from resolve to anger, from the grandiloquence of Jackson’s pile of hair to Staples’s blunter Afro. They are singing this cherished classic of bereavement in order to mourn the present and the past. Listening to them now, in the summer of 2021, plumb earth and scrape sky, you weep, not only for the raw beauty of their voices but because it feels as if these two instruments of God were also mourning the future.

Until next time.

-Matt