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Netflix’s ‘Lady Dynamite’ Mocks Gun Owners

For starters, it’s on Netflix. That hardly sets it apart as much as the show’s format does. Or lack of a format, to be precise.

The new comedy is a blast of confessional storytelling steeped in fourth wall breakdowns. Creator/star Maria Bamford blazes her own trail with the show, mocking series formulas with alacrity.

Yet in one big way it’s as conventional as any three-camera sitcom.

The series’ first episode features a typically sprawling plot. One thread does get teased out, though. Bamford, playing a fictionalized version of herself recovering from a mental breakdown, agrees to do stand-up for pop star Mark McGrath’s charity, Open Arms.

What comic would turn down such a gig?

Only the charity in question … gasp … supports open carry legislation. Maria is aghast. But the show must go on, right?

Said “show” features a crowd straight out of Hollywood Central Casting, the Gun Nut Edition. Yahoos to the left of us, yahoos to the far right. Many are openly waving guns in their air. Others are firing them skyward.

RELATED: Amy Schumer’s Gun Sketch Fails Fact Check

Other charity attendees are wearing tea bags on their hats. They belong to the Tea Party, get it? One giveaway at the function is a gun from a company called Little Slaughters.

Bamford’s weak set is interrupted by comic Patton Oswalt, playing a cop. But, like everything else in the show, that isn’t set in stone. He keeps breaking character, like when he takes over for Maria and starts telling his own jokes to the crowd.

“I know you’re pissed off. I’ve been pissed off all day,” he tells the assembled pro-gun advocates. “The thing about being pissed off is, if you’re really pissed off, the joke’s probably on you,” says Oswalt, a reliably left-of-center star via his Twitter comments.

The forced sequence stalls an otherwise very funny – and promising – pilot episode. And it’s more of the same from an industry only too eager to take aim at the Second Amendment.

NOTE: Here’s Bamford’s recent appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast (adult language)

2 Comments

  1. I like the show and Maria’s comedy, but I’m always waiting to be sucker punched watching shows like this. The gun angle is just lazy writing and it’s obvious that the research for this episode consisted of the writers reaffirming their preconceived notions on guns with each other. I’ve met Maria before and she is nice, but this reminds me of my days in film school watching know-it-all college students make crap that had about the same amount of sanctimony and ignorance as was displayed in this episode.

  2. Insulting and mocking responsible, tax-paying, law-abiding firearms owners (many of them military veterans) by portraying them as a bunch of inbred, wild-eyed, shoot’em-up yahoos.

    Just more confirmation that Hollywood has passed its event horizon and is now rapidly swirling down the Black Hole of Galactic Stupidity.

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