Serious Comics

What do we call the collective activity of watching stuff online?
"Watching stuff online"?
I lump it all together and say I'm "watching TV".

Mostly comic-serious stuff these days.
Some of it really is made-for-TV. I've already mentioned The Good Place, which folds philosophy-lite into the comedy. And The Windsors, which... nope. Not serious.


Also I've watched stand-up Maria Bamford's serious comedy. She impersonates her Midwestern mom, and she spins the brutal reality of her own mental illness into comedy.
I like when she puts the two come together--for instance, impersonating her mother calling her sister, saying she (the mom) can't find Maria and thinks maybe she's committed suicide. . .
". . . and I have a hair appointment downtown at two."

I was in the reverse position--I was the daughter of a suicidal mother. I can relate to the inconvenience of it. It's sort of like this pandemic---a mix of panic and boredom.
Someone said this time is like The Terminator + Groundhog's Day.

From the NYT article, "The Weird, Scary, Ingenious Brain of Maria Bamford". 

"[Bamford] addresses the loneliest of gulfs, acknowledging the confounding intimacies of living with and in proximity to mental illness — the whipsawing, humbling forbearance required from everyone involved.
....
Bamford’s imitations of the family and their various blunders are biting in ways that can be painful ... — but they can be illuminating, not just inside the family but also inside a world rife with struggling people.
Bamford’s comedy swims with paradox.
She skewers the culture of self-improvement but relies on it, too.
She pokes fun at the people who blithely misunderstand her, but also credits them for giving her love and shelter. (“You’re horrible,” she thinks about a friend who visits her in the psych ward and says all the wrong  things. ['You just need to get out into nature!'] “But can you come back tomorrow?”)"

Also I've watched some interviews with Stephen Colbert.

Here, he talks with his Jesuit friend James Martin, about being Catholic--not comic, but interesting to me.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBg05f2M8A
Colbert says his favorite Bible passage is "Do not worry" (Matthew 6:25, part of Jesus' "lilies of the field" speech). It's not a suggestion, he points out.

Also, his 20-min. conversation with Anderson Cooper about grief--both men lost their fathers suddenly when they were ten. 

I don't agree with everything Colbert says here. He's wrong that if you're grateful to be alive, you have to be grateful for every part of it. Huh? That's just bad logic. He's usually so smart, but his thoughts about God are obviously not in the same category. Fair enough.

What interested me was hearing that having learned that the worst can (and does) happen at any moment, the young Colbert did uncomfortable things, such as singing in a crowded elevator, to induce the familiar feeling of free-fall.

This is not a comic conversation, but it's partly about comedy, which aims to induce bearable discomfort. (The audience can laugh because they (we) feel we're on a bungee cord---they (we) will come back up.)