Why was Seth MacFarlane so awful Sunday night?

[ihpguy]

Seth MacFarlane hosted a slow-motion catastrophe of an Oscars broadcast
Sunday night. His terrible performance immediately sparked two internet
conversations: one about what a terrible Oscars host Seth MacFarlane
was, and a second about who had, if anyone, been an even more terrible
Oscars host. Many people were insulted by MacFarlane's sexist hostility.
And I was, too. But I was also insulted by MacFarlane's obvious
laziness and lack of professionalism. MacFarlane's shtick is built on
contempt, which is why he's so witlessly insulting. But it was his
obvious lack of effort, his confidence that his bush-league material was
good enough for the likes of us, that betrayed his total contempt for
the audience.



Many of MacFarlane's apologists bring up the awful James Franco/Anne
Hathaway show of two years ago. But that's a different question. Franco
and Hathaway failed because they are not comedians (which is no more an
insult than it is to point out that they are not acrobats). They simply
do not have the skill set that hosting such a program requires; they
could not have succeeded no matter how hard they tried. MacFarlane does
have the requisite skills. It's clear that he has sufficiently effective
comic delivery and he has a long track record as a head comedy writer.
He knew his job. He just didn't bother to do it. That is insulting.



Don't get me wrong: hosting the Oscars is a nightmare gig. The host has
to perform roughly 30 to 45 minutes of original and completely untested
standup material, in front of both a national television audience and
nearly every power broker in Hollywood. Most stand-up comedy that you
see on TV has been tested and tweaked in dozens, or often hundreds, of
live club performances. Any comedy bit that hasn't already been
performed in front of a live crowd is at best a hit-or-miss proposition
and at worst a bomb that can blow up in your face. (The few minutes of
standup by the hosts on late-night shows are untested material of this
kind, which is why those jokes are so uneven.) Doing half an hour or
more of completely untested material in front of Steven Spielberg is
terrifying.



Add to that the problem that you have two very different audiences to
please, neither of them easy, and each with very different tastes: the
room full of Hollywood luminaries in front of you and the vast TV
audience somewhere beyond. To succeed, you need to bond with both
audiences. Playing exclusively to one instead of the other is automatic
death. And worse yet, the last ten or fifteen years have set up an
expectation that the Oscar-night host will fail, which can turn
into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Potential hosts know this: Queen
Latifah was asked before the show if she would consider hosting, and
replied that the organizers would have to both "back up the Brinks
truck" and get her the world's best publicist to repair her image
after the show.) So all in all, an ugly seven-headed monster of an
assignment.



But if you're going to accept that terrible gig, there's no excuse for
giving less than your best effort. Sometime after 11 Eastern, MacFarlane
was waving off his own bits with excuses like "It's late." But that's a
lie. The material was not weak because MacFarlane was tired (at
something like 8:15 local time). That could only be true if MacFarlane
were making up the material as he went. The material was weak because
MacFarlane, given months to prepare, had prepared a script full of weak
and threadbare material. "It's late," is really MacFarlane saying, "I
did not bother to put together enough quality material for an entire
show. So you're just going to have to take whatever I give you from here
on out."



This particular expression of contempt for the audience went unnoticed
among MacFarlane's more blatant expressions of disregard for women,
gays, Jews, ethnic minorities and people with mild Spanish accents. But
all of MacFarlane's contemptuous misbehavior is rooted in that basic act
of contempt for the audience, his refusal to put in the effort required
to create enough A-level material.



The boorish "I saw your boobs" song actually might have been funny if
it had taken only ten seconds. A lightning-quick snippet of MacFarlane
singing "I saw your boobs," would be a perfectly good joke, and harmless
because it would come at MacFarlane's expense. (The context for the
I-saw-your-boobs song was a "warning from the future" that MacFarlane
was going to be disastrously offensive. If the audience then saw and
heard him singing the words "I saw your boobs," just once, they would
get the point: MacFarlane is an ignorant churl. It didn't get funnier
the second time.) Instead, MacFarlane stretched that single, weak joke
into a couple of minutes of material, requiring him to actually be
a boor and then double and triple down. He didn't need the routine to
be so long; it was pre-taped, so he could show as much or as little as
he liked. But MacFarlane was trying to fill time, getting three minutes
from a premise that only had one joke. He did the same thing with his
next bit, stretching out a sock-puppet re-enactment of Flight to
excruciating lengths. MacFarlane consistently tried to milk single jokes
into longer sequences, because otherwise he would have had to come up
with more jokes.



What he did write was lazy. The offensive lines weren't just
politically incorrect. They were comically incorrect. Several of them
were badly constructed. All of them were based on cliches. (A female CIA
operative didn't get over 9/11 because "women never give up on
anything?" Really? That's all you've got?)



Saying that MacFarlane was too "edgy" is absurd. MacFarlane is not an
edgy comic. That was not Pryor, Carlin, or Lenny Bruce up there. There
are comedians who can get away with material far more transgressive, and
subjects far more taboo, than anything MacFarlane dreamed about.
MacFarlane wouldn't have the stomach to do any five minutes of Bill
Hicks's act, or Sarah Silverman's. Even Robin Williams, who
all-too-desperately wants the audience's love, is far more of a painful
truth-teller than MacFarlane. But all of those comedians get around the
audience's inhibitions by breaking down cliches. Listening to
them is liberatory, not because the material is difficult but because
the execution is original. MacFarlane, who is lazy, prefers to build his
act on as many cliches as possible. Of course, that's easier. It just
doesn't work.



If someone tells you MacFarlane's detractors are being uptight, remember that MacFarlane got major blowback from a joke about John Wilkes Booth.
That is not cutting-edge material. People have been telling jokes about
the Lincoln assassination for many decades. ("Other than that, Mrs.
Lincoln ....") But MacFarlane actually managed to offend people with
that moldy chestnut of a premise, because the joke he told was
constructed so poorly. The punch line wasn't set up strongly enough to
feel natural, so MacFarlane sounded like he was straining to drag in
Lincoln's murder. It's the strain that made the joke off-putting. That's
a spectacular failure of technique. He could have gotten away with a
Booth joke, easily, if he had taken the effort to write a better joke.
But then, that would have required work. And MacFarlane had clearly
decided that none of us were worth that much effort.

[TampaYankee]

What is the source of that commentary?

I am not a critic, I don't even play one on TV. I don't think a much of most critics. It is easy to throw stones. It is much harder trying to create entertainment or something else for that matter than it is to piss on it.

I also don't give much weight to those who perennially piss and moan about the failed efforts of shows like this. By their very nature these shows are difficult to put on. They are an awards ceremony where people are recognized by the industry and who in turn recognize those who helped them achieve their success.

The Oscars is full of stars that people like to ogle. So they televise it. Then people complain that it is not very entertaining, more like an awards ceremony. LOL So they try to fold some entertainment in to the show for audience appeal which appeals to the show sponsors. Most people are not in character so we get their real persona which may not be as sparking as the characters they play on the screen. The timing is off which is not surprising as real people are interacting in a mostly unscripted environment. Off stage is probably chaos fifteen minutes after the show start. Like battle plans in a skirmish, show plans don't last long once the show dynamics stray from the course. So to coordinate so many individuals and set-ups with show tunes and vocalists with orchestras, get the presenters to their marks where the hopefully encounter a working teleprompter etc., jokes and commentary are used to provide segways between acts/performances/presentations or just to fill space while unplanned disasters occurring off stage are overcome. No doubt some is ad-libed as the backstage catastrophies unfold. So not all the jokes and commentary work all of the time. Big deal. It is live unscripted TV.

As for me. I liked McFarlane. I enjoyed the show. I'd like to see him back again but he said once was enough because of all the time it takes away from the rest of his life/work.

I didn't know anything about him before this other than a week or so before the Oscars I heard he was a creator of one of the adult animation shows -- maybe Family Guy? He can sing, he can dance, he can tell jokes, has an edge, he's easy on the eyes. What's not to like? Yeah, not all the jokes worked. Yeah, some of them were a bit off color. He's trying his stuff out. It was hist FIRST time. HE's a multi-dimensional entertainer. They make the best emcees.

I thought it was one of the better shows they have had.

[wayout]

Very interesting summary of the host's performance. I watched it and was not impressed overall (but there were some things that I did laugh out loud at). Definitely a very tough spot for anyone that hosts the Oscars.

With Seth as host, and his background in sophomoric humor, you pretty much got what one would expect. Nothing wrong with sophomoric humor (when done well) and I personally like it at times. However, I think his humor is more geared towards a younger audience and as such he missed the target with a significant portion of attendees and viewers. I did read somewhere that viewership in the key segment of 18 to 30something was up significantly. Not that he can take all credit but probably some. I suspect that is what the producers were aiming for but I think he alienated quite a few out of that segment so on balance it was a bust.

And, in my opinion, he doesn't really have the credits for such a big gig. Being a producer/writer of Family Guy and one movie (that I am aware of), Ted, just doesn't give him enough standing to be a host of the Oscars. That takes a whole different skill set and experiences I would say.

Having said that, with never having hosted a live awards show before or anything similar in scope, he does deserve some high marks for having the cajones to give it a try and probably did better than many others with similar background/experience would have done. And he does have versatility as far as talents as TY said. It is just that the material did not quite click with many people.

I think also he is a relative unknown with many viewers (over a certain age) and as such there isn't much tolerance for anything that might be off the mark or less than stellar. People tend to be more forgiving to those that they are familiar with and have already built a liking for.

All in all, not a good night for Seth and the Oscars.

[BiBottomBoy]

He was awful becuase he sucks.

[ihpguy]

TY, Segways? Sorry but I must have missed those during the telecast. What with the NAZI in SS uniform and the awful Lincoln joke for starters, I must have been in the john grabbing the jar of Tums when he rolled in on the Segway. In my memory, the only show more tragic had to have been the Rob Lowe-Snow White - Shelly Long, Allen Carr extravaganza.

In my opinion, the Franco/Hathaway train wreck seemed to have the hosts demonstrating some modicum of effort.

MacFarlane on Oscar Sunday, not at all.

[Guest EXPAT]

But ABC and The Academy got what they wanted. They got 20% higher ratings in the 18 - 49 category and an overall ratings bump. That was all they wanted and they got it. And it appears from everything I read the younger people under 35 loved him and almost everyone over 40 hated him and that was (well sort of) what they were looking for.

[Guest EXPAT]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-ostroy/seth-macfarlane-oscars_b_2764577.html?ir=Comedy

[ihpguy]

Except....well, err...except...ummm

Seinfeld = Funny

MacFarlane = Not Funny

[ihpguy]

Sorry, but I think that having a guy dressed in an SS uniform on the Oscars? And not even in a year when Christoph Waltz was nominated for Inglorious Bastards, not really necessary. Ya think?

[TampaYankee]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-ostroy/seth-macfarlane-oscars_b_2764577.html?ir=Comedy

If he's on next year then I'm tunin' in. Call me young at heart.

[Guest EXPAT]

Except....well, err...except...ummm

Seinfeld = Funny

MacFarlane = Not Funny

I think it's the other way around. I find Seth funny and I've rarely found Seinfeld funny.

[Guest zipperzone]

Guess I'm in the minority...... but I really enjoyed him and the whole show. Sure, if you want to be picky you can always find something that flubbed but all in all I think he did a great job. I had no idea he was so multitalented, his singing voice was very pleasant and as for looks--- HE'S A HOTTIE.

[Guest EXPAT]

For those offended by "We Saw Your Boobs" at the Oscars, we bring you "We Saw your junk". . .