Hacker Cinema
I Love You, America
2017 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 1 season
Follow Sarah Silverman as she looks to connect with people who may not agree with her personal opinions through honesty, humor, genuine interest in others and not taking herself too seriously. She feels that now more than ever it's crucial to connect with un-like-minded people.
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Anyone read a practical 20 year plan to decrease divisiveness in the US (say, to 1990s levels)?
Or: Ignoring funding, what would you do?
An example year 1 goal: "Get X million people to watch 10 hours/year of strangers who they would normally not encounter or agree with, and to see them as real people."
To do that, produce and televise + stream a long-form TV show, like a version of Braver Angels' Red/Blue Workshops[1] that's actually fun to watch. Imagine a well-produced show with deep participant profiles - a cross between a reality TV show and a HBO/Netflix long-form movie.
It would humanize the participants first, then after viewers care about them, their lives, and their families, the actors gradually explain their backgrounds and opinions - some of which a viewer will disagree with. Viewers would "meet" people they may not interact with regularly. (Sarah Silverman's "I Love You, America"[2] is the closest I've seen to this, and it's not all that close.)
This would need to be a multi-decade plan, probably with philanthropic and public funding.
[1]: https://braverangels.org/what-we-do/red-blue-workshops/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmQpf-B94mc
Like Bill Bailey, Burnham is known for writing funny, clever songs; he's not some jackass like Jake Paul. He also wrote and directed the movie "Eighth Grade" which shows him to be a smart, thoughtful person.
I assume Sarah Silverman was lumped in with Burnham because of her current show "I Love You, America" but she's 48, 20 years older than Burnham, and a national comedy figure since the early 90s.
> she describes her own humor as "gee did i do that"
By describing her humor that way she's engaging in the very thing she describes, a recursive joke.