- I like game shows,
and "The Bachelor" is a game show
where the prize
is a person.
(audience laughing)
It's a whole lot of people
who just want to get famous,
and we force two of them to get married.
(audience laughing)
(upbeat music)
- Everyone's involved with food now,
and I think it's because of the Food Network.
The ubiquity of these cooking shows.
Everyone loves cooking and the Food Network.
Even if you've never seen the Food Network,
you've seen the Food Network, right?
Like, we've all seen "Chopped," right?
(audience cheering)
Yeah.
"Inside your wicker basket,
you'll find a severed head and a grape.
Make a frittata."
Yes. (audience laughing)
And everyone's a celebrity chef now.
Everyone's like a "celebrity chef."
You can't just be a chef.
When I was a little girl,
I don't remember any boy saying they wanted to be chefs.
There were no celebrity chefs.
There were like a couple of 'em.
When your parents were kids,
there were like three fat French guys
and Julia Childs,
and that was it.
(audience laughing)
You weren't a chef; you were a cook,
and you were a cook on accident.
You were a cook 'cause dudes were coming home from Vietnam.
We didn't know what PTSD was yet.
They're like, "Bob's acting weird.
Stick him in the back."
(audience laughing)
"Female comic makes scathing social commentary
about our nation's treatment of veterans.
(audience laughing)
Accurate but hurtful."
(audience cheering)
And because of how many food shows there are out there,
the Food Network knows what kind of chefs you like to watch.
So they cast the same archetypes of chefs, right?
So there's always a bad boy chef,
and I didn't want people to think I was married to that.
(audience laughing)
Like just a sack of rage,
fully tattooed piece of shit.
Like, "This is a devil's tooth.
Here's your crepe. Suck my dick, Karen.
(audience laughing)
Yeah.
These are gauges in my ears.
They also measure out an ounce of responsibly sourced tuna.
Eat my butt, Susan."
Just tough. (audience laughing)
"Yeah," wallet chain.
"I keep a knife in my truck
to do a fine chop on parsley.
Lick it," just tough.
(audience laughing)
There's always a bad boy chef
and there's always a lesbian chef.
(audience cheering)
There's always a lesbian chef
that takes cooking a little too seriously
for this to be an enjoyable viewing experience.
They're always posted up, feet hip-width apart,
like, "Yes, chef!"
You're like, "Okay.
(audience laughing)
Can you just stand down?
(audience laughing)
Thank you for your dinner service,
but just relax."
(audience laughing)
"I make vegan wedding cakes."
You need to chill out.
(audience laughing)
This is so aggressive.
Right? They're always tough.
She always got a faux hawk and a bandana
and food-related tattoos
like, "Salt, pepper, sugar,"
like, "Yeah." (audience cheering)
Right?
They're always like meaty,
always a little mean-looking, right?
But she always got a dainty name like Charity
'cause her parents weren't counting on having a pit bull
for a daughter.
(audience laughing)
- Have you ever watched HGTV?
(audience cheering)
Real estate agents have to deal
with the dumbest people in the world
making the biggest decisions of their lives.
Every episode of HGTV is like,
"Craig and Stasia are looking for a two-story A frame
that's near Craig's job in the downtown
but also satisfies Stasia's need to be near the beach,
which is nowhere near Craig's job.
With three children and nine on the way
and a max budget of $7,
let's see what LoriJo can do,
on this week's episode of "You Don't Deserve a Beach House."
(audience laughing)
- Have you seen all the ghost hunter shows?
Oh my god, hundreds of ghost hunter shows,
years and years.
Celebrity ghost hunter,
all around the the world,
thousands and thousands of hours of footage,
but they've never seen a fucking ghost.
(audience laughing) Not one.
It's all like,
"Oh, what was that?
Was it...
Oh, it's just the..."
No.
"Oh, did you hear that?
Was it... Oh was it you?
Oh." No.
(audience laughing)
Imagine if wildlife programs were like that.
Imagine watching David Attenborough all these years
and then when he goes, "Here on Kilimanjaro,
we see the...
Oh. (audience laughing)
And by the banks of Limpopo,
the elusive...
Oh. It's gone."
(audience laughing)
You'd stop watching the cunt.
(audience laughing)
- Well, one of my favorite ones to watch
is "Naked and Afraid."
That's the best one.
(audience cheering)
If you haven't seen "Naked and Afraid,"
treat yourself.
(audience laughing)
They take a man and a woman
and they drop 'em off
in some uninhabitable island
or, you know, desert,
or Florida. (audience laughing)
You know, like the Everglades,
you know, the swamps?
Yeah. Yeah.
So they drop 'em off in there.
They gotta get butt naked
and they have to survive for 21 days.
And they get to bring one item.
Usually, the guy shows up
with like some crazy knife
or custom made ax or something, right?
And the woman, she shows up with like fishing nets
or maybe a fire starter.
But it was this one episode,
this guy showed up with his ax
and this woman showed up with a fucking magnifying glass.
(audience laughing)
The look on his face said it all.
Like...
"A magnifying glass?"
Like, "Bitch, what you think, we out here solving crimes?
What the hell?" (audience laughing)
I love that show.
There was an episode that stood out
because it was a Black guy on the show.
Yeah.
This Black guy,
he's paired up with this nice little white lady
from North Dakota, right?
They drop him off on this island,
and they were,
things were going great, right?
So after like day three,
white lady's like, "Oh, Ronald,
he's a good team player,
and man, like the bugs and everything,
it's just,
nothing is bothering him.
Nothing is affecting him out here.
So I think we're gonna be good.
I mean, he keeps to himself,
but I think we're gonna be okay."
Two days later,
you find out that Ronald is homeless.
(audience laughing)
Yeah, these assholes booked a homeless man
to go on "Naked and Afraid."
(audience laughing)
So no wonder nothing was affecting him.
He got on that island,
he thought he was at Sandals.
He was like, "Ah, shit!
Yeah!
I can do this.
This is nice."
- I like game shows,
and "The Bachelor" is a game show
where the prize
is a person.
(audience laughing)
It's a whole lot of people
who just want to get famous,
and we force two of them to get married.
(audience laughing)
It's fucking belter.
If you've never seen an episode,
I'll walk you through an episode of "The Bachelorette."
So the bachelorette,
be like a 28-year-old girl.
She lives in a house.
You never really see this house.
She lives in this house over here,
and there's a mansion
that literally has 30 guys in it
that are all fighting for her attention.
Right?
And she comes over and visits them occasionally and...
Oh,
there's a petition going around the internet
for a gay bachelor.
No!
(audience laughing)
"The Bachelor" is a heterosexual show
for heterosexual people,
and it will remain that way,
thank you very much.
I'm not being homophobic;
it just wouldn't logistically work.
So say you got a gay bachelor,
his name's Darren.
Darren lives in a house over here.
Then there's a mansion over here
with 30 guys.
(audience laughing)
You're getting ahead of me, Toronto.
Don't do that.
(audience laughing)
And the producers come over to the house
to meet Darren.
They go, "We have a great group of guys over there.
They're very excited to meet ya."
(audience laughing)
"I'm excited to meet them."
(audience laughing)
And then Darren walks over there
with all of his hopes and wishes and dreams
inside this house.
And he gets to the doorknob
and takes a breath
and then he opens the door
and they're all fucking each other!
(audience laughing)
And the producers,
they know this isn't good for the show.
So they roll up a newspaper
and start whacking 'em.
"Get out of it! Stop fucking each other!"
They get a spray bottle.
(imitates spraying)
They get one of 'em
and rub their nose in their cum.
"Bad gay!
Bad gay!"
(audience laughing)
So no gay "Bachelor."
(audience laughing)
- A lot of people don't like Long Island.
A lot of people shit-talk Long Island.
And a lot of them are right,
but I wanna know why.
I'm like, "How do they know?
How do they know?"
And then I figured it out.
People do not judge an area
based on a book or research.
They judge an area
based on the reality show about that area.
And Long Island's most popular reality show
is a crazy woman
who pretends to talk to dead people.
(audience laughing)
This is true.
It's called the "Long Island Medium."
I don't know if you've seen it.
She's like an Italian gypsy woman.
I forget her name.
It's like Teresa AlaVodka, something disgusting.
It's like Teresa AntipastoForThree, I don't know.
(audience laughing)
But she gets these sad parents together
in the back of these shitty Italian restaurants
in Long Island,
because when kids from Long Island come back from the dead,
they will only do so
if they can eat ravioli one more time
in a strip mall with this witch.
(audience laughing)
Here's what you learn from the show.
You learn that people from Long Island
do not deserve to talk to their dead relatives,
based on the horrible questions they ask.
It's always a guy that's like, "Teresa, is that my daughter?
Is that her?
Is that Ashley Rosemary Nicole?
Is that her?
Okay, can you ask her if she's seen my wrench, please?"
(audience laughing)
And she's not a psychic;
it's just that Long Island
breeds a very specific type of monster.
It's one of the only places in the country
that she can walk out and be like,
"Excuse me, I'm getting a feeling.
Has anybody's toddler died in a jet ski accident?"
And seven people are like,
"Yes, Teresa, my son did.
He could not handle the power.
We were ashamed of him."
(audience laughing)
"Does anybody have Billy Joel lyrics
tattooed on their inner thigh?"
"My wife and her sister,
Teresa."
(audience laughing)
"Does anybody have a tattoo
of an American eagle cloaked in an Italian flag
riding a motorcycle through the Twin Towers?"
"Everybody I know."
(audience laughing)
- Once you get married and have kids,
your wife gonna boss you around.
(audience laughing)
And you would know that
if you watched "House Hunters."
(audience laughing)
"House Hunters" is a show on HGTV
where a couple pretends that there's a decision
to be made together.
(audience laughing)
And they go on this fake-ass journey,
looking at three different houses,
and the audience is meant to be left in suspense.
Which house are they gonna choose?
It's whichever one Barbara wanted in the first place, okay?
(audience laughing)
And Barbara, who lives in Boise, Idaho,
or wherever the fuck these HGTV shows are filmed
where houses cost $5,000 an acre...
(audience laughing)
Barbara, she don't got money, power, or respect,
but Barbara is a woman,
and all women are very good
at being extremely unpleasant
(audience laughing)
and holding your happiness and self-esteem hostage
until we get what we fucking deserve, okay?
- Does everybody here watch "Shark Tank"?
(audience cheering)
So...
All I want,
all I want is a live episode of "Shark Tank."
That's what I want.
A live episode.
It's a reality show,
but if you watch it,
you'll notice it's heavily edited,
heavily produced,
and what bothers me
is the presentations from the entrepreneurs
are too polished.
There's no grit to them.
They come out like a fifth grade Thanksgiving pageant
like, "The Natives called it maize.
We've bottled it."
I don't wanna fucking see that, okay?
I want to see you mess up.
I wanna see you trip.
Maybe you forget your words.
Maybe you chip a tooth.
I wanna see you crumble
as an entity
before my eyes.
Only then will I tolerate you rising from the ashes
with any degree of hubris.
That's the way to consume American reality TV.
The sheer schadenfreude
of watching someone shit themselves on TV
and then building them back up.
That's what we like to see, okay?
(audience cheering)
These are cattle farmers from the middle of Iowa
and they get in front of a camera
and all of the sudden, they're Winston Churchill?
I don't buy it, okay?
(audience laughing)
I speak for a living,
and even I mess up.
So there's no way these two fucking dye jobs from ASU
with, like, a new take on cookies,
there's no way...
(audience laughing)
Flawlessly orating.
There are three archetypes
of women
that they like to have on "Shark Tank."
They love to have moms,
'cause most of us have moms.
(audience laughing)
But what's crazy and creepy
is that all the moms on "Shark Tank"
have the exact same voice.
It's a little Stepfordian.
They all sound like this.
"Hi, sharks.
My name's Nancy from Laguna Niguel,
and I discovered a new way to get your toddler
to eat their blueberries."
(imitates choppy laughter)
(audience cheering)
Then they have really smart women.
They do.
They'll have brilliant women.
But it seems that the smarter the woman,
the longer the last name,
like they'll hyphenate their last names.
I can't stand hyphenated last names.
If you're in this room
and you got a hyphenated last name,
chop it!
Chop it in half.
Okay?
You're not Spanish royalty. Chop it.
(audience laughing)
I barely care about your first name,
(audience laughing)
let alone the entire questionable heritage.
When you have a hyphenated last name,
all that makes me think
is that Mama was a big old strong lesbian
and she didn't wanna give up her family inheritance
so she'd begrudgingly married your father.
Now they have an "arrangement,"
separate twin beds,
and are like co-Women's Studies professors at Wellesley.
That's what that is.
(audience laughing)
It's also just so much information.
I'm trying to hear you,
your valuation,
listen to the equity,
and you're coming up there with a phone book like,
"Hi, sharks.
My name's Michelle Leeda Julia Friedman Serial.
And I'm Rebecca Lynn Stacy Fitzgerald Yang.
And together, we sound like five dudes."
Like, it's a lot
of information.
Are you inventors or a law firm?
Like what is that?
(audience laughing)
And then in the final category,
the toy category,
we have the hot women.
Not attractive,
not cute,
hot.
Teeth, tan, tits, hair.
"Sharks!"
(audience laughing)
Sometimes they do this.
They'll have very smart women on that show.
Sometimes it feels like the hotter the woman,
the dumber the product.
And I believe it's done to keep us in line.
But a lot of time,
the women's products will have to do
with one of two categories.
It's either wrangling your femininity...
"Sharks, it's a flap you put over your vagina
so no one knows you have one.
(audience laughing)
Move through the workplace with ease."
(audience laughing)
Or it's a product so stupid
it will just confirm
any preconceived notions you might have
about female intelligence.
Like, "Sharks, it's a shower cap
that you can wear while you're cooking
so your hair doesn't smell."
(imitates gunshot)
No!
(audience laughing)
You just set us back like a week with that shit, Lexi.
(audience laughing)
But that's the one that I'd like to see live,
the hot one.
Because I believe watching an attractive woman
mentally unravel
on national television
is the reason we all watch reality TV.