Posts in English
This is what it looks like when we’re joyful: On Fern Brady’s Taskmaster run, improv & autistic representation
This is translated from a German essay I originally published in 2022.
After a session of my first improv class, my teacher took me aside. We had talked about stage fright in class and I had mentioned that, as an autistic person, I find everyday interactions more challenging than performing in front of an audience. After the session, he told me that the autistic tendency to say »the quiet part out loud« was a valuable quality in improv: an effective way to bring scenes to a satisfying conclusion, and something the audience loved.
I’ve thought about this advice a lot since, not only when I’ve been performing myself, but also when watching comedy I enjoy. I was particularly reminded of it during the 14th season of Taskmaster. Taskmaster, for those who don’t know it, is a British panel/game show in which a group of comedians compete against each other in absurd tasks devised by comedian Alex Horne. »Conceal this pineapple on your person«, »Make this coconut look like a businessman« — that kind of thing. The tasks are pre-recorded and then played in studio shows to an audience and »taskmaster« Greg Davies, who has the final say on the scores.
Season 14 was a special one for me because Scottish comedian Fern Brady was the first openly autistic contestant to take part. I had never heard of Brady before the season, but when I googled the season’s contestants and read the title of her current program — »Autistic Bikini Queen« — it was immediate cause for anticipation: Taskmaster tasks are designed to reward — if not in points, then in entertainment value — unusual, out-of-the-box ways of thinking, and what is autism if not an unusual, out-of-the-box way of thinking?
Brady, along with the also very entertaining John Kearns, ended up in last place for the season. But she was a crowd favorite, and while it may not have been apparent to the average viewer — the word “autistic” was never said — it was obvious to those who knew what to look for that Brady’s autistic perspective influenced how she approached the tasks, and how she defended her performances in the studio to Davies. As Brady herself wrote in a recent Instagram post:
It’s in the ridiculous way I solved my final task, in my openly stimming on camera while I concentrated on my next task, in my screaming at the birds to shut up because I hear all noises at the same volume, in my tendency to anthropomorphize every inanimate object on set.
Brady writes that she read the Taskmaster subreddit beforehand and realized how many autistic people watch the show, and then made a decision about how she wanted to approach the show:
I realized that by being my unmasked self while having fun I’d reach them way better than by doing some serious on-the-nose documentary about how shit my life had been when I was undiagnosed[.]
»Autistic representation« in media and pop culture is still mostly a representation of autistic suffering. Attempts at »positive« representation of autistic people often fall into the old narrative pattern of characters who overcome their autism, who »function« despite their autism. Whether in fiction or non-fiction, the narrative that a »successful« life for autistic people means standing out as autistic as little as possible is everywhere. Even in the few representations that assign value to an autistic perspective — say, Abed in Community — that value often lies in speaking up specifically about uncomfortable things, saying what needs to be said, even if it’s painful for the listener. And that’s all well and good, but what we too rarely see is that an autistic view of the world can be a source of joy, for autistic people themselves and those with whom we share our perspective.
That’s what makes Brady’s Taskmaster participation so special. Her approach is naturally rewarded in Taskmaster, she takes obvious joy in the show and spreads joy with her recognizably autistic perspective and behavior. Her enthusiasm for the show and the tasks was palpable from her first interview with Alex Horne, and she regularly gets Horne to break his deadpan persona simply by, for example, describing an everyday item, or explaining her peculiar but entirely coherent logic in solving a task, or, yes, saying »the quiet part out loud«, as when, when Davies goes to try an Asian soup she’s brought, she blurts out, »You seem like you just eat roasts« . Brady produces such quotable phrases with no discernible effort and says them as if they are self-evident, because to her, they probably are: they are the sort of thoughts that an autistic view of the world produces, but that most of us learn not to say out loud. Brady further writes in her Instagram post:
I knew a big part of doing well on Taskmaster was being yourself but if you’re autistic you’re so frequently punished for being yourself that it was a scary move.
Autistic people have a reputation for being »humorless« and this is usually attributed to our tendency to take things literally and therefore misunderstand or overhear rhetorical subtleties such as irony and sarcasm. And like many clichés, there is some truth to this, but I think another reason for our apparent lack of humor is that quite a few of us associate laughter and wit with trauma. In everyday life, especially in childhood and adolescence, people are more likely to laugh at us and make jokes about us than they are to find our own observations and thoughts funny. What we think is an interesting observation or simply an obvious truth, on the other hand, is punished for being »inappropriate«.
Learning and performing improv comedy has become a central part of my life over the last couple of years, and it’s honestly disorienting — in a good way, for the most part — how much I’ve had to recalibrate what’s desirable and what’s not. What the audience findsfunniest, what I get the most praise for, is usually something that just seemed like the most obvious, natural reaction for me — it’s not sentences I laboriously, actively think up, but the most obvious thoughts, just my first, authentic reaction that, for once, I actually allow myself to say out loud. This is much more difficult than it sounds: I’ve learned over nearly three decades to suppress or hide these instinctive reactions. »Saying the quiet part out loud« is rarely welcome in everyday communication with neurotypical people. Being in an environment where these very instincts that I have internalized as »wrong« are rewarded, where they are cause for joy, forces me to question fundamental assumptions about myself. It takes effort to allow that to happen, and I’m far from being able to do it reliably on stage.
Watching Brady in Taskmaster has shown me a horizon to work towards. I want to allow myself, if not in everyday life, then at least on stage, to reliably respond as authentically and unfiltered as Brady did in the show. And, something I’m even further away from: I also want to embrace the weaknesses that come with my autism, such as my rather below average body coordination, as enthusiastically as Brady did — like in a task where she has to perform synchronized choreography with a recording of herself and fails absolutely gloriously. I’m not there yet, and I might never be, but it feels good to be able to point to a representation of autistic joy and humor on screen and say: I want to be myself just as much, as scary as that is.
January 7, 2024 improv comedy taskmaster autism neurodivergence english text seblikesimprov
Netflix is in the anti-Netflix business (a sort-of review of Squid Game: The Challenge)
(deutsche Version hier)
This is machine-translated and then very lightly edited. There will be some clunkiness.
I don’t think any company has ever presented a Torment Nexus quite as shamelessly as Netflix has with its adaptation of Squid Game as a reality/gameshow. The term, for those less chronically online, is a reference to this tweet by author/game designer Alex Blechman:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus
The tweet is quoted whenever some tech CEO — not always, but often enough Elon Musk — announces some new idea suspiciously reminiscent of technology in dystopian science fiction. Usually, though, there’s still a little bit of distance between fiction and reality — the latest excesses of AI hype, or Elon Musk’s plans to implant chips in people’s brains, or surveillance technology disguised as »smart home assistants« or door cameras, or whatever else, are reminiscent of dystopian sci-fi technology, they may be inspired by it, but they’re not exactly modeled on it.
Squid Game: The Challenge, however, goes one step further: Netflix has explicitly tried to transfer the dystopian-allegorical game show from Squid Game into reality 1-to-1. Or, well, as close to »1-to-1« as you can get: of course, losers aren’t actually shot in the reality version. But an ink capsule in their shirts bursts and they have to perform a dramatic death and remain »dead« until the end of the respective game, so while they may not die, at least their dignity does.
It is remarkable how little the reality version deviates from the fictional series: not only do the set design and staging try to copy the look and feel of the original as closely as possible, not only are almost all1 games taken from the series, but through clever construction of the games and borderline deceptive editing tricks, an attempt is made to match the internal »story-arc« of the games as closely as possible to that of the series. As in the fictional series, for example, the contestants are tricked into forming pairs before the game »Marbles«, only to find out that they have to compete against their partner. The hook of the game, as in the fictional series, is for the contestants to overcome their moral scruples about competing against friends or, in one case, their own mother.
This meticulous imitation of fiction actively makes the game show more boring. Every opportunity for subversion is missed, there are no surprises for those familiar with the series. At times, the whole thing has the vibe of an amateur theater production of Squid Game, and I regularly asked myself why I should watch it when the version with »professionals« exists. The game show offers me little as a reward for trying to forget the unacknowledged but hard-to-ignore aftertaste brought by the fact that an allegory conceived as an anti-capitalist satire has been adapted as a real reality show in which real people play for sums of real money that could significantly improve their real lives in real capitalism. It doesn’t just make you wonder why exactly you should keep watching, but also, as some viewers on social media expressed, whether Netflix missed the point of their own show?
One feature of the capitalism »without alternatives« that Mark Fisher describes in Capitalist Realism is that it appropriates even anti-capitalist ideas. »Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it«, writes Fisher in reference to films like Pixar’s Wall-E, which depicts the humanity of the future as obese, mindless consuming-machines:
It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. The role of capitalist ideology is not to make an explicit case for something in the way that propaganda does, but to conceal the fact that the operations of capital do not depend on any sort of subjectively assumed belief.
This idea of the audience itself becoming the target of satire is taken up by Alexis Nedd in her review of Squid Game: The Challenge in Indiewire:
Whether or not this show is “good” could not be further from the point (or further from its own concern). This is a grudging ovation for the ability of “Squid Game: The Challenge” to exist as a reality competition show that hates each of its competitors and its audience in equal measure and doesn’t even try to hide that contempt…presumably, and this is just one interpretation of the vibe, because we’re naughty little piggies and they wanna make us squeal.
From this perspective, the »bugs« of Squid Game: The Challenge are actually features: The unpleasant aftertaste that the perversion of anti-capitalist art brings with it, the feeling that we are being sold something a second time as an inferior, boring copy — all of this further implicates the audience and only makes the criticism of us harsher.
This reading tracks — and suits Netflix. Even in the reality genre, not exactly known for its humanity, Squid Game: The Challenge’s treatment of its contestants often stands out as particularly cold-hearted: We learn how much winning the money would change contestants’ lives moments before they are eliminated; contestants are exposed to ridicule for the drama, such as a contestant in the game »Red Light, Green Light« who apparently cannot manage to hold still for a few seconds and gives up in tears (in reality — according to descriptions by contestants on TikTok — shooting this game did not take 5 minutes, as it is presented, but several hours, which makes the contestant’s giving up more understandable); and of course there is the staging of the elimination, with the ink capsule and the »dying« and the compulsion to remain motionless for the rest of the respective game (i.e., see above, probably several hours) — even when there is nothing in it for them anymore contestants aren’t really allowed to withdraw from the game, but basically have to continue working for the production.
Netflix allows itself this particular cold-heartedness not because they misunderstood Squid Game, but precisely because they understood it. As Fisher explains:
So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.[…] [W]e are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.
This perhaps explains why even viewers who know and understand the original watch Squid Game: The Challenge with a reasonably clear conscience. But it also illustrates the position from which Netflix produced this show: out of the certainty of being invulnerable. If it weren’t for the original Squid Game, Squid Game: The Challenge would be just another reality show, one that is somehow both needlessly cruel and frankly pretty boring one. The context of the original series, however, allows for readings like Nedd’s, according to which every flaw of the show really just sharpens the satire. And, yes, technically speaking it also exposes Squid Game: The Challenge and Netflix to criticism — Torment Nexus and all that — but what does Netflix have to fear when it has long since formulated the harshest possible criticism itself, in the form of the original series? At worst, Squid Game: The Challenge just confirms the relevance of the original Squid Game, so at the very least it’s good PR for Netflix’s content.
Netflix has realized that the smartest way to deal with criticism of them, their business model and the capitalist logic behind it is to integrate this criticism itself into the business model. The synergy of Squid Game and Squid Game: The Challenge is just the latest example of this: A dystopian Netflix stand-in called »Streamberry« also plays a role in two episodes of the latest season of Black Mirror. Black Mirror author Charlie Brooker explained:
They went away and came back quite quickly - weirdly quickly - and said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ There wasn’t any resistance to it, that I could tell. Which is a bit disappointing, because it would be good to be able to say ’I just did it anyway, because I’m an anarchist! But no.
But it really isn’t »weird« that Netflix accepted the idea: they simply recognized the marketing potential. They published a »real« Streamberry website, let users create »accounts« there and used the photos they collected from it in marketing material.
And with Blockbuster, Netflix produced a heartwarming workplace sitcom about the last Blockbuster video store, a chain that was displaced by Netflix and their streaming model. I honestly find it hard to believe that anyone would have really thought Blockbuster was a good idea for a show, something that real people would actually watch — I wouldn’t be surprised if this show had been produced exclusively for the PR stunt, precisely for media to emphasize the irony of this show’s existence and thus generate attention for Netflix.2
So, no: The decisions that led to the production of Squid Game: The Challenge and Blockbusters and Black Mirror’s »Streamberry« are not weird and are not the decisions of a company that doesn’t understand the criticisms of its business model (and the system in which that model exists). They are the decisions of a company that understands such criticisms so well that it can reproduce them, repackage them, and sell them back to us. A company that considers its model, not unjustifiably, to be largely without alternatives and knows that this lack of alternatives is ultimately just a gap in the market.
Oh, hey: Thank you for reading! I’m experimenting with translating some of my writing to English, and I might do some original English writing in the future. You can subscribe to my English-language writing via RSS or email:
One exception is the finale, which is not, as in the series, the titular “Squid Game”, but “Rock, Paper, Scissors”. However, this is to be understood more as a kind of “translation” than as a subversion: While the fictional series was produced in South Korea, the reality adaptation is a British production, and has international contestants. “Rock, Paper, Scissors” is internationally better known, simpler and more readable for the international audience, but the effect is similar: a schoolyard game becomes the all-decisive duel that determines the future lives of the candidates.↩︎
Netflix is not alone: the Apple TV+ series Severance is not a satire about streaming, but one about tech companies and modern work, and it is no coincidence that the aesthetics of the offices of the fictional company in the series are reminiscent of the design language of Apple stores and products.↩︎
December 11, 2023 review essay tv netflix squid game reality gameshow english text