It's not even about whether women are "funny;" "Daily Show" covers current events and, if one used it, alone, to gauge who is, or is not, influential in culture and society, one would think OUR women were wearing burkas and not allowed outdoors! This is a lot of fun. I'm putting it in my blog & on Facebook. It really rocks, no pun intended. Too bad the song ain't "Too Many Whites, Straights, Rich, etc."
Uploaded by rebelliouspixels on Sep 8, 2011An episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is interrupted by a remixed critique of the show's gender imbalance and "boys' locker room" comedy style. The remix takeover was created by pop-culture hacker Jonathan McIntosh using clips borrowed from over 100 episodes of The Daily Show edited to (and subverting) the song "Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor" by Flight of the Conchords.
I'm a fan of The Daily Show about 50% of the time but often find myself disappointed with the overwhelmingly male-centered style, jokes, segments and guests. I can't help but feel that there are, in fact, just too many dicks on the dance floor.
The serious lack of women in on-screen or leading creative roles on The Daily Show and other late-night comedy shows has been well documented and discussed in recent years. But here's a quick recap: Only 3 of the 12 regular correspondences/contributors on The Daily Show are women. Only 2 of the 16 writers are women. And so far barely 15% of the guests in 2011 have been women.
Read more about this video on my site:
http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/2011/too-many-dicks-on-the-daily-show
INSPIRATION:
This remix was inspired by the practice of fan vidding and specifically by the vid Star Trek Dance Floor created by Sloane. She used the same song to point out the lack of female characters in J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deQuFc3BP74
In 2010 Feminist Frequency video blogger mashed-up the same song in order to highlight the violent phallic imagery in modern video games.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?src_vid=uzU1_CsOnJA
Interestingly the original Flight of the Conchords song is in no way meant to be critical of sexism -- in fact its slightly homophobic -- but when it is combined with any male-centered media source it instantly becomes a critical commentary. Try remixing it and see for yourself!
ON COMMENTING:
I welcome good comments but I've decided to hold all comments for approval on this one (for obvious reasons) in an attempt to provide a space for a somewhat productive conversation. Sexist comments will not ever be approved. Any variation of the "women just aren't funny" or the "there aren't many funny women" nonsense will also not be approved so don't even try. The old "its just comedy" defense will be denied as well because comedy is one of the primary ways that sexism and sexist messages are normalized and reinforced in our culture.
FAIR USE NOTICE:
This transformative remix work constitutes a fair use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. "Too Many Dicks on The Daily Show" by Jonathan McIntosh is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License permitting non-commercial sharing and remixing with attribution.
