2016 Postmortem

Attorney in Texas

(3,373 posts) Tue Dec 1, 2015, 10:50 AM Dec 2015

The New Yorker: "Standing Up for Bernie Sanders"

link; excerpt:

On a recent fall evening, a crowd of about two hundred filed into the Bell House, a nineteen-twenties former warehouse with a rough brick exterior, in Gowanus, Brooklyn, to raise money for Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign, and to laugh. ... Near the ticket window, just outside the main event hall, a flyer decorated the wall. “Stand Up for Bernie Sanders: Bern’in Down the House,” it read, in an autumnal, chestnut-and-pumpkin color palette. A ghoulish drawing of Sanders sat beneath a burning building (maybe the White House?). Two women representing the Bushwick Berners, a grassroots organization mobilizing for Sanders in North Brooklyn, stood adjacent to the ticket counter, hunched over a fold-out table crowded with signage, stickers, a donation jar, pens, voter-registration forms, and pamphlets. ... Lauren Irwin, a Bushwick Berner dressed in a long black coat with fur-like fuzz on the shoulders, solicited new volunteers and registered voters. “It’s all very D.I.Y.,” Irwin said, enthusiastic and proud, pointing to the chaotic arrangement of papers on the table.... “This is something that I’m very passionate about—the physicality of a pamphlet or a zine, where you can pass them around,” Irwin said, beaming. “The zine is not just about [Sanders]. He represents this larger movement, this larger grouping of people who are not down with establishment politics.”...“Yell out some reasons you’re a fan of Bernie Sanders,” Miles, a comedian from Chicago and a co-host of Sunday Nights at the Knitting Factory, said. He had a thick mustache and wore a dark button-down shirt and dark jeans. “What do you guys think?”

“Socialism,” a man yelled.

“The hair,” a woman hollered.

“He’s not an asshole,” another woman shouted, her voice strained and groggy.
...
Each of the eleven comics had between ten and twenty minutes onstage, broken up by appearances by the hosts, and nearly all of the acts seized on some of the central issues in the 2016 campaign: Black Lives Matter, police brutality, economic inequality, feminism, mass incarceration, abortion and contraception, the regulation of financial institutions, and campaign-finance reform. The comedy show was, after all, also a political fundraiser. (Proceeds from the ten-dollar admission benefitted Sanders’s political campaign. The event’s organizers are not officially affiliated with Bernie 2016.) ... The “Saturday Night Live” star Sasheer Zamata applied a more melancholy tone to her dialogue. ...Zamata received her loudest cheers not for telling a joke but for testifying to the merits of open and sincere dialogue. “I don’t think race or gender or sexuality or religion are taboo subjects,” Zamata said. “I think they are just subjects that we can talk about. And if we talk about it more the less uncomfortable it gets.”... After the show, I found Seaton Smith, one of the night’s standout performers, who co-stars on Fox’s “Mulaney,” standing in the rear of the room chatting with a couple friends. Smith, whose long, untamed Afro extends his chiseled jaw line, explained the importance of having conversations. “I like to talk political shit with people,” Smith said. I asked him about comedy’s role in facilitating political discourse. Then Smith, in a blue denim shirt and taupe sport coat with an upturned collar, briefly glanced toward the stage. “Comedy allows you to say things poignantly, but in an easy way. So it’s not forcing down your throat,” he said. “It’s an easier way to deal with a problem.”