“Borat” was great. “Bruno” was pretty good.
Sasha Baron Cohen turned into kind of a Nazi, but — being capable, unlike any leftist, of separating the artist from the art — I appreciate his work.
As I do Tim Dillon’s. His peculiar and blistering satire is needed perhaps now more than ever as the American mental health epidemic that has a death grip on half of the country floats to the foreground yet again.
Related: #Resistance Liberals Tattoo Themselves Blue to Oppose Fascism, Spot ‘Safe People’
Dillon — whom I believe to be one of the best working comedians of this era — has been producing high-quality satire for years now.
If you never saw his side-splitting impression of Swamp nepo-baby Meghan McCain, for instance, during her ill-fated days feuding with Whoopi Goldberg on “The View,” it’s golden (and highly profane).
[language warning]
His latest work is a resurrection of the genre of 90s-style daytime talk shows a la Jerry Springer that were all the rage at the time. I know they were all the rage because I was a child and these shows colonized my mind every day after school. Springer came on at 4 p.m., which I consumed like clockwork and which probably warped my mind in ways that may never be fully realized or rectified.
"This is an unscripted program. These are real people. Tragically, this is your country,” reads the intro to Dillon's new show, “This Is Your Country.”
“Hello, pigs,” Tim Dillon greets the audience. The pigs: that’s us.
Lights, camera, action.
Via The Direct (emphasis added):
Based on the nature of the material seen in Tim Dillon's new comedy special, This Is Your Country, viewers have questions about whether the guest speakers, audience, and stories are real or fake*.
The show gives viewers a taste of the political landscape in America ahead of the 2024 Presidential Election through supposedly real guests sharing their unique life experiences…
Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Dillon divulged that he and Netflix discussed delivering something that was "a unique, unscripted thing." He had the idea of "[bringing] back '90s trash TV" in the vein of The Jerry Springer Show, even admitting that the final product is not something he would call a comedy special…
Dillon further explained how the show winds up being "a better satire of America than a political special," describing the guests as "real people that have come to talk about things that are real cultural themes" without a script.
Related: Is the Infamous Prosthetic-Breasted Teacher Just a Performance Artist?
*The article above questions whether the guests are real and the show is unscripted — the question posed is itself a testament to the quality of the satire. As with all the great works of the genre, if you have to ask whether it’s scripted, it either really is unscripted or it’s really great satire. I frankly don’t care whether it’s real or staged because it gets the job done.
For the first episode, Dillon interviews a guy who does Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) massages for a living, which his girlfriend knows about. He then discloses that he once did porn, which his girlfriend doesn’t know about but finds out about on the show, to great fanfare.
Then we get a guy who lost $200k dabbling in cryptocurrency, a woman who struggles with weight and her mother fat-shaming her, an immigrant who wants to go back to Mexico, etc.
It’s a slice of modern Americana with an edge that only a comedian of Dillon’s caliber could deliver.
A+.
