MG 209 - Vote For Kennedy, Vote For Kennedy (with Ben Siemon)

March 4, 2019·1 hr 20 min·5 clips

Ben Siemon says he has not laughed at a single Midge Maisel joke in two seasons, and the hosts largely agree.

Stand-up comedy is the trapdoor here. Kevin and Alice start at full Maiselgoys volume: declaring the label, chanting the bit, and making the premise feel official because apparently saying it with enough confidence counts. They like fast-talking brunettes, sure. They also know the show lives or dies on whether the stand-up we hear can hold up. The opening stays deliberately loose: a little rap, a little mall nonsense, a fast-forward gag, and then the episode lands in that packed, slightly overheated rhythm Gilmore Guys runs on. Then the complaint gets sharper. Midge's stand-up often feels flat, especially when everyone in the scene reacts as if she just destroyed. Aaron Sorkin becomes the comparison point, with his imagined comedy writing treated as the same kind of problem: the audience sees the sketch, then the show keeps telling us it was brilliant. Maybe the act should stay partly offscreen. The episode kicks around the idea that Midge's comedy could work more like the painting in 207, praised and mythologized without always being placed in front of us. Or maybe the room needed different writers. That question gets blunt quickly. Kevin, Alice, and the group suspect Amy and Dan keep a very tight grip on the jokes, so the riff turns into a conversation about control as much as taste. Chelsea Peretti comes up because her WGA Awards monologue felt like the sharper Maisel roast the show rarely gives itself. Nobody turns it into a seminar. They hop from craft complaint to comedy gossip to pronunciation joke, until even the title becomes something to play with. The ending frays into baldness, depression, Linus, and a goofy sign-off, because of course the clean critique leaves through the weird door.

As heard by us

A sharp, funny complaint about stand-up that keeps finding new angles.

The episode keeps coming back to one clean question: if a show is built around stand-up, why do the jokes so often feel like furniture? It stays close to Midge's material, the show's distance from actual performance, and the nagging sense that a writers' room can imitate comedy…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a fast, funny gripe about why TV stand-up keeps missing, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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