Ari Shaffir: Double Negative

Shanon,

            This week I wanted to watch one of the netflix original comedy specials, partially because I didn’t have a lot of time, but I also happen to love stand-up comedy a lot and didn’t have a great day so I thought some laughs were in order. The one I chose to check out was Ari Shaffir: Double Negative. I will be completely honest with you, I picked this one entirely because it was the shortest one, and absolutely no other reasoning went into it. I did end up enjoying it pretty well though. I can’t decide if it’s the type of humor you would like, mostly just because I don’t feel like I know you quite well enough to pinpoint that. The humor style of this guy is SUPER crude, which I find really funny but I realize some people are not into that at all. I think when it comes to things of crude nature you really have to go big or go home. If there’s something that’s just halfway crude or is only crude when it comes to certain topics I feel like that’s when people get really offended. Family Guy, for instance, is probably one of the least politically correct shows in existence, but I personally don’t know a single person who gets offended by this show. I’ve often wondered about why this is, and I seriously think it’s because they make fun of absolutely anyone and everyone, there’s no bias in who they target. Things like this are a relief to see, in my opinion, because we all really need to make fun of ourselves sometimes and not take life too seriously.

            All this talk is super relevant to something that happened to me and I would like to write about it and vent a little, so there’s my tangent warning for you I guess. Today something that I tweeted got seen by a community of people that got really offended by it, and although I don’t exactly want to delve into the details of it, I’ll just say it got blown extremely out of proportion and people were being pretty mean to me and throwing out overly harsh comments that I couldn’t exactly defend myself to due to the nature of the arguments. This is something that I have never dealt with before, and to say it was overwhelming is an understatement; not gonna lie, I was on the verge of tears all day. I eventually sat down as soon as I had the chance to make a long and detailed apology statement to post in reply to all the people who were saying these things. I figured this would clear the air and stop all the hateful things people were saying. Yeah, I was wrong. I was attempting to be super reasonable and mature about the situation, and what I realized is that people on the internet are nothing close to reasonable. In my apology I basically chose to take the part that I did believe I had done wrong and run with that, because I also had a lot of things to say in my defense, but I felt like there was no point to that. People continued to ridicule me, and I do think it’s finally over, especially because I decided to put my twitter account on private(probably much later than I should have). I will say that I learned some valuable lessons in this experience, so that was cool, but I really just want to put it behind me. I also gained a belief that I think I always had, but had never really formulated into words, being: when it comes to words, the biggest thing to take into consideration is a person’s intent. There are an endless possibility of answers, and pleasing every single person with your words is an impossible feat. I said something that some people didn’t agree with, in which there is a lot of debate and no concrete answer to, but my intentions could not have been more loving and sincere. I know that, and there’s a chance that wasn’t conveyed to these people, and that’s okay because they have a completely different set of circumstances and were looking at the post through their own lens. Seeing the experience in this light(aka a teary phone call to my mom) made me able to make peace with all of it by the end of the day. Also writing about this just now helped a lot, wow.

-Molly