Tig Natoro on Conan

[Kevin M.]

Not sure if anyone else saw this segment, wedged between Ed Helms and
Alice Eve a few nights ago. I became a Tig fan after hearing her "I
have cancer" stand up set last year. For those who didn't see her
segment on Conan, which featured a few minutes at the desk and a
remote piece she shot around Hollywood, well, it bombed. And I don't
mean it met with mixed reaction; the audience stopped just short of
booing her. And the reason I think they stopped short was the entire
segment was centered around jokes about her double mastectomy, and
booing cancer survivors just isn't socially allowed. The audience was
uncomfortable, apprehensive, uncertain whether they ought to be
offended, and just plain didn't get it. I've heard people define "alt
comedy" as "comedy where nobody laughs," and if that is the case, this
was a good example of it. And I say all this as a fan. I actually
liked the segment and I took it to be a woman wanting people to see
that in the right light, anything can be turned into a joke. But this
specific audience was not with her at all. Anyone who remembers the
unfunny final season of Murphy Brown, that's the level of audience
rejection I'm talking about here. That said, the concept of a woman
calling attention to her flat chest for comedy could be something that
gets built upon.

Perhaps the most surreal part of the show was the entrance of Alice
Eve as the next guest. Never before have I seen a woman so
uncomfortable about the gaping neckline on her skin-tight dress,
revealing breasts that obviously had not been removed (note to Trek
fans: this is not your father's Carol Marcus). In my mind I pictured
her backstage, begging the wardrobe department to find a bulky sweater
for her to wear before finally saying "fuck it" and going on with the
show.

http://teamcoco.com/video/full-episode-tues-5-21-ed-helms-alice-eve-and-the-cast-of-workaholics

--
Kevin M. (RPCV)

[David Bruggeman]

Hell, *I* was uncomfortable about the neckline on Alice Eve's dress, though at the time I didn't (consciously?) pick up on how uncomfortable she may have been.  I guess Hollywood fashion laws made it impossible for her to re-wear the black dress she wore when speaking with Jimmy Kimmel.

That was the only part of that episode I saw live.  I will catch the full show over the holiday weekend, and may have thoughts on the audience reaction to Notaro's segments later.  I am reminded of another notable bit on Conan, where she managed to milk laughs out of scooting a stool across the stage to ridiculous lengths.

David

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From: Kevin M. <drunkba...@gmail.com>
To: tvor...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 10:09 PM
Subject: [TV orNotTV] Tig Natoro on Conan

[PGage]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:24 PM, David Bruggeman <bru...@yahoo.com> wrote:

Hell, *I* was uncomfortable about the neckline on Alice Eve's dress, though at the time I didn't (consciously?) pick up on how uncomfortable she may have been.  I guess Hollywood fashion laws made it impossible for her to re-wear the black dress she wore when speaking with Jimmy Kimmel.

That was the only part of that episode I saw live.  I will catch the full show over the holiday weekend, and may have thoughts on the audience reaction to Notaro's segments later.  I am reminded of another notable bit on Conan, where she managed to milk laughs out of scooting a stool across the stage to ridiculous lengths.

I was not uncomfortable about her cleavage, but I did have trouble paying attention to anything she was saying.

Honestly, I thought the audience reaction was muted mostly because Notaro just was not that funny, not because they were uncomfortable. The taped bit was forced and awkward. The set-up for the piece (that C-List celebs have face shots on the walls of retail shops in Southern California, so she might as well get one too) was pretty much undermined by the copy center clerk, was happily volunteered that he only puts up celebs he does not recognize before she could make fun of him for doing that very thing. She twice goes out of her way to induce a proprietor to say "rack" in reference to the pictures, just so she can point out that she does not have any breasts. The first time (involving a self-induced comparison between herself and Loni Anderson) she got a pretty good laugh from the studio audience.

If she really wanted to be funny and uncomfortable, she should have commented on Eve's boobs falling out of her dress herself.  

[Adam Bowie]

I tend to agree that it was more because the piece wasn't funny (and I say that as someone who did buy and like her breakthrough routine around her cancer). If the laughs had been much bigger it would have felt like someone was holding the audience at gunpoint to laugh. Sadly the piece just didn't really work.

I do think Alice Eve was awkward though, hence her getting Tig involved right at the start. 

Anyway, what I've learnt from this is that despite the video saying it's US only, Conan streams quite happily in the UK, and video ad system serves me no ads - I suspect, because I'm in the UK. In any case there's no other legal means to watch Conan since no UK broadcaster takes his show, and as far as I'm aware it's not sold on iTunes. 

Adam

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[PGage]

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 6:26 AM, Adam Bowie <ad...@adambowie.co.uk> wrote:

I tend to agree that it was more because the piece wasn't funny (and I say that as someone who did buy and like her breakthrough routine around her cancer). If the laughs had been much bigger it would have felt like someone was holding the audience at gunpoint to laugh. Sadly the piece just didn't really work.

I do think Alice Eve was awkward though, hence her getting Tig involved right at the start. (SNIP)

Right - and this may have been Kevin's main point anyway. The contrast between the two women could not have been more stark - including the fact that Eve was listed as a guest, and Tig was not, and Conan, apparently as part of the setup to her bit, introduced her as having asked if she could come on, and I was a bit surprised she stayed on the couch for the rest of the show. It is a comedy show, not an in-depth public affairs program; but her whole persona is about being uncomfortably honest, so it would have been honest and uncomfortable and potentially (at least occasionally) funny if someone (Tig probably, but Conan, Andy or, probably most problematically, Eve herself) had commented on the juxtaposition of  one woman who was publicly so defined by the absence of both breasts, and another was so defined by the over-abundance of her breasts.

[donz5]

I didn't sense any discomfort from either the audience during the
remote nor Eve's composure. I think the thought of the audience almost
booing Tig is ridiculous.

On May 25, 1:44 pm, PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Joe Hass]

On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 3:24 PM, donz5 <do...@aol.com> wrote:

I didn't sense any discomfort from either the audience during the
remote nor Eve's composure. I think the thought of the audience almost
booing Tig is ridiculous.

I would agree that it wasn't particularly funny, but it sure wasn't that bad. My response to Kevin would be "If that's borderline booing, moderate interest would've pegged the needle and blown out the amps."

I cannot imaging a situation now where a studio audience unsolicitedly booing a guest on a talk show would make it on the final broadcast.

[Doug Fields]

“I cannot imaging a situation now where a studio audience unsolicitedly booing a guest on a talk show would make it on the final broadcast.”

 

Wayne LaPierre on Bill Maher.

 

Michael Moore on any Fox show with an audience (I don’t know that there are any regularly-scheduled ones…you’d need one of those Sean Hannity Special Shows with the hand-picked peanut galleries).

 

But, yeah…the guest and the audience would pretty much have to come from polar opposites of the political spectrum to get actual boos.

 

Doug Fields

Tampa, FL

[David Bruggeman]

I finally saw the full episode last night.  My sense of the bit was that the cracks about Notaro's breasts registered with the people she talked to even less than the ridiculousness of the head shots.  It came across as though a different reaction was expected, but they went ahead and ran the full remote.

Given how underplayed the mastectomy was played in the taped piece, I think it would have felt a bit out of place to play up the difference between Notaro and Eve.  Perhaps if Notaro's segment had aired before J.J. Abrams' appearance the next night, where Alice Eve's appearance in the film was a point of conversation, then some comparison could have been played to decent effect.

David

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From: donz5 <do...@aol.com>
Subject: [TV orNotTV] Re: Tig Natoro on Conan

[Dave Feldman]

It's hard for me to believe that Tig wasn't aware of Merrill Markoe and David Letterman's transcendent explorations of celebrity photos on LNwDL.  Natoro has every right to explore the same material, but it's hard to see how she improved Letterman's bits in any way.