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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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https://www.twitch.tv/watchmeforever a seinfeld spinoff hosted on twitch that is produced by AI (originally the davinci model) was banned after it made jokes referencing transgender people. weirdly the joke seemed to be making fun of comedians making fun of transgender people but i guess using the word transgender in standup comedy is a third rail that cannot be touched.

https://livestreamfails.com/clip/150015

"anyone have any suggestions

i'm thinking about doing a bit about how being transgender is actually a mental illness

or how all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone

or something about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society

but no one is laughing, so i'm going to stop

thanks for coming out tonight --"

What’s the joke, here?

Punning on “coming out?”

i think the joke is 'but none is laughing, so i'm going to stop'. i think it's meant to be making fun of what conservatives think, or the jokes a conservative comedian might make. but it is AI so it's hard to tell.

I spent half an hour or so watching this the other day. You a reading tea leaves here - there is no joke. I must have seen a couple dozen brief scenes in that stretch and not a single one of them had any kind of joke. The AI is just spitting out the kind of dialogue that Seinfeld characters generally talk about without any goal of making it funny.

Yeah I think it's playing on the premise 'right wing stand up comedians use stand up as a political platform, not for telling jokes.'

Which seems almost exactly wrong to me, but it is an AI.

It's a meme I'm starting to see more and more frequently. There's a kernel of truth to it - stand up is one of the few irl venues left where a non politician can make right wing jokes to an audience - although I assume it's the fact right wingers are speaking at all that's the issue, because that fucking Nanette shit was lauded as a revolution for stand up.

It would probably be funnier if there were right wing stand up comedians.