[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “I don’t have a girlfriend, but I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that” – Mitch Hedberg. And the other one, I think, is H.L.Mencken “Puritanism; the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy”
Rick Rosner: Fucking Mencken, a guy from 90 or 100 years ago, who remains pertinent because he was a cynical guy, a journalist of sorts, who thought people sucked which turns out to be more true now maybe than when he was working. But it’s weird because that quote is weirdly not applicable; the fear that someone somewhere may be happy. Because since Mencken, in the past 10-20 years, the people who would be puritans, Evangelical Christians have turned into evil fucks in America, have embraced Trump and just all sorts of vicious fucking creepy, just unethical bullshit in the service of getting their objectives met. In large part because they’ve been manipulated into thinking that preventing all abortion is their number one priority. Even though the protection of the unborn has not been a thing for most of history, even the Catholic Church for the most part, and most civilizations didn’t consider a fetus a life until there were signs of life in the womb and or until the fetus could survive outside the womb.
So, under most criteria historically, you’re looking at no harm, no foul if you abort before like 20, 22, or 24 weeks before you can feel the fetus moving around. And so now, Puritans or Evangelical Christians aren’t really good maintainers of moral standards; they don’t give a fuck. They support Trump, who is the most commandment breaking, lying, and sex abusing motherfucker who’s ever held the presidency. And so there’s no Puritanism among the Puritans anymore. There’s a hypocrisy, but really they’re just a bunch of assholes who just will do anything, embrace anything, no matter how shitty, in order to fight abortion because they’ve been played by conservative leaders.
Now back to Hedberg; I don’t have a girlfriend, but I know a girl who’d be mad to hear me say that. So he’s saying that he’s got a friend who’s a girl, probably a friend with benefits, who thinks that she is his girlfriend, but he doesn’t think she is. I guess he thinks that she’s just somebody that he hooks up with, which is weird for Hedberg. Hedberg feels to me, more like a stoner, not a player. So I get the structure of the joke. It just doesn’t feel very Hedberg-ian to me. He also doesn’t seem like a prick that way. So it’s more a joke; joke for the sake of the joke rather than a reflection of his personality, or at least his comedic personality.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
License and Copyright
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Rick Rosner 