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    ‘The Curse’ Ending: What Just Happened?

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    The season finale of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s horror-comedy arrived on Friday. Three New York Times critics discuss the show’s curses, blessings and confounding conclusion.On Friday, the first season of “The Curse,” Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s cringe horror-comedy on Showtime and Paramount+, came to an audaciously unpredictable end. Three New York Times critics — James Poniewozik, chief TV critic; Alissa Wilkinson, movie critic; and Jason Zinoman, critic at large — discussed the confounding conclusion, the show’s religious themes and the sublime inscrutability of Emma Stone’s performance.JAMES PONIEWOZIK Greetings, “Curse”-heads! We have seen the finale, and I can now confidently say: lol wut?Ten uncomfortable, ingenious episodes ended with one of the biggest literal and figurative upendings in TV history (spoilers ahead). Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) has his personal field of gravity reversed like a horror-comedy Fred Astaire, hurtling off the Earth to an apparent frozen death in orbit, while his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), goes into labor and gives birth to their child. All this, and Vincent Pastore cooks meatballs!I haven’t seen an episode of TV this audacious, confounding and transfixing since “Twin Peaks: The Return.” I haven’t seen a series so thoroughly and unexpectedly shift direction in its finale since … ever?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Music

      Popcast (Deluxe): ‘Saltburn,’ Jacob Elordi and the New Heartthrob Era

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan, the two stars of “Saltburn,” who offer two different modes for the leading man of the momentElordi’s work in “The Sweet East,” in which he pokes fun at and downsizes his public imageJeremy Allen White, star of “The Bear” and the current Calvin Klein underwear campaign, as heartthrob rookieThe anti-heartthrob heartthrob Nathan Fielder, who’s been toying with his public image through canny character work as Asher on “The Curse”New songs from Starlito featuring NoCap and Playboi Carti featuring Travis ScottSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      in Television

      What to Watch This Weekend: Catch Up on ‘The Curse’

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      The second-to-last episode of this cringe dramedy starring Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie arrives this weekend. There’s still time to watch before the season finale.Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in a scene from Episode 5 of “The Curse.”Richard Foreman Jr./A24“The Curse,” a nightmare-tinted drama about aspiring HGTV hosts, starring Nathan Fielder, Emma Stone and Benny Safdie, is approaching its finale; the show’s ninth of 10 episodes arrives this weekend: Friday on Paramount+ and Sunday at 9 p.m., on Showtime. The show’s discomfort is so intense it becomes mythical, its white awkwardness so potent that those in its blast zone question reality.The show centers on Whitney (Stone) and Asher (Fielder), a brittle couple trying to sell a show called “Fliplanthropy” under the tortured guidance of Asher’s former bully turned reality producer, Dougie (Safdie, who could repurpose both costume and demeanor to play the disgraced megachurch leader in a recent Hulu documentary). Whitney is the heiress to her parents’ slumlord fortune, a fact she pretends to distance herself from but can’t quite. Asher is her largely dutiful acolyte whose strained encounter with a Black little girl in a parking lot ends with her declaring, “I curse you.”Does your culture believe in curses, Asher asks her father, Abshir (Barkhad Abdi). No, he says. “But if you put an idea in your head, it can become very real.” That’s one of the pillars of the show, this self-imposed reality of imagination. Whitney believes people want her arty, eco-friendly “passive” houses, though no one really does. Asher starts to believe he really is cursed, the rare character to recite Shabbat prayers and also experience backyard stigmata. If you see yourself as a savior, doesn’t everyone look like someone desperate for saving?A lot of art centers on a similar idea, that perception and fate are often the same. Where “The Curse” becomes more interesting is its exploration of the inverse — that when you take an idea out of your head, it can become very surreal. The jokes Asher scripts for himself become, in performance, tortured and grotesque rather than just flat. Whitney thinks her chiropractor could help Abshir with his neck pain, and when put into action, the result is as disturbing as any horror movie. Dougie nudges Whitney to envision the show with a more cynical, Bravo-ish tone, and suddenly a disenchanted cruelty springs forth, like a summoned demon.The line between surrealism and revulsion is often thin, and on “The Curse,” that emerges most often as “recontextualizing” — which the characters themselves discuss as an artistic concept and vaguely mock. But a loss of context is what drives some of the most jarring facets of the show: A heap of poached chicken would be normal and welcome in a packaged meal kit, but sitting on the lip of a sink in a firehouse, that same chicken is terrifying and revolting; Dougie shocks Whitney with how easy it is, with reality TV editing, to turn one fleeting glance into marriage-threatening contempt; the sound of a car horn hangs on too long, until the tone melts into a panicky wail; an expensive stove is an emblem of green living, unless it’s chucked out to the curb as trash, in which case it’s a $7,000 icon of waste.Cringe comedies abound, but the cringe drama is a rarer specimen, perhaps because its discomfort just compounds; scorn does not discharge cringe the way laughter does. On “The Curse” especially, cringe is so intertwined with surveillance and recording, the paranoia that every misstep is on tape forever — which isn’t even paranoia, it’s just reality. But reality for the characters is also warped by reality TV, a phony interaction made “real” by dint of its record, and round and round it goes, every reflection distorted, every interaction a setup. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Curse’ Makes for Some of the Creepiest Horror of the Year

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      “The Curse” has been described as cringe, but look closely and you’ll see it plays with the classic tropes of horror like jump scares.There’s telling a bad joke. There’s bombing. And then there’s what happens to Nathan Fielder’s character, Asher Siegel, at the end of the fourth episode of “The Curse,” near the halfway point of a series that goes to disorienting extremes.Siegel and his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone, in a remarkable comic performance), are making an HGTV show about eco-friendly renovations. After a focus group takes issue with Asher’s sense of humor in the show’s pilot, he finds himself in a comedy class where an instructor assigns an exercise: Get laughs without saying a word.In the episode, which premiered last weekend on Showtime and Paramount+, the camera swirls around a circle of students mugging for chuckles until it focuses on Asher, looking nervous in anticipation of his turn. You feel for him. In his finest performance to date, Fielder plays a guy who prides himself on being funny but deep down has doubts. Suddenly, in a quick flourish, he grabs his ears and flaps them while emitting a piercing squeak that could be described as unholy. No one laughs. But this face is more than unfunny. It’s unsettling, almost feral, working like a jump scare more than a punchline. It’s a gesture gone so wrong, it’s destined to become a meme.The year began with hit movies like “M3gan” and “Cocaine Bear” that pushed horror into camp comedy. It’s ending with a nervy television series that moves in reverse. It’s been called cringe comedy, and there are funny moments, but they set up something darker and dread-filled, potentially supernatural. Fielder has always toyed with genre, elevating prank comedy and using reality television to make unexpectedly moving drama. He’s leaning on the tools of horror here. With “The Curse,” the jangly sound design, manipulative cinematography and periodic bursts of oddball monstrousness offer a few of the creepiest moments of the year.While the plot is involved, with several threads, its engine is a classic horror trope: Is this supernatural-seeming thing of the title for real?Action commonly takes place through windows in “The Curse.”John Paul Lopez/A24, Paramount+ and Showtime“Rosemary’s Baby” and “Get Out,” among other movies, both invite the viewer to ask this question along with their paranoid protagonists.Asher possibly enters the realm of the fantastical after balking at the criticism that his plan to “consciously rejuvenate distressed homes” is gentrification. “We don’t believe the G word has to be a game of winners and losers,” he tells a journalist. Rattled by this exchange and concerned about his image, he summons his camera crew to film his giving a $100 bill to a small Black girl. Then when the camera stops rolling, he asks for it back. She responds by saying she is putting a curse on him, which he initially brushes off but gradually becomes obsessed with. Whether Asher is actually cursed hovers over the entire 10 episodes until a twist in the final episode that should polarize the audience.In “Psycho,” Alfred Hitchcock proves that the easiest way to make us empathize with a killer is to keep the camera on him. Even when Norman Bates is trying to cover up a murder, audience members will eventually, if managed right, find themselves gravitating to his side. Fielder has always been preoccupied with this emotional power, the distorting impact of the camera, not only on its subjects but on viewers, too. It’s easy to sympathize with Asher’s struggles as he navigates a skeptical press, his troubled new marriage and a bullying father-in-law as well as his craven producer, played by Benny Safdie. “The Curse” keeps complicating this identification, subverting and questioning it.In Episode 3, Asher’s stern face is cast in a shadow at an auction as he buys a home he didn’t realize is housing the girl who cursed him. A scene in which he uses a drill to open her door is played for terror, focused on her cowering inside. The rumbling power tool and the fear on her face cast this as a classic home invasion scene with Asher as the terrifying intruder. His stated good intentions are repeatedly mocked in the ominous way his scenes are shot.This draws attention to the Siegels as privileged outsiders casually entering and destroying a new neighborhood in the guise of liberal do-gooder assistance. The focus doesn’t just hit the theme of gentrification, but also, in a subplot involving an Indigenous artist, the genocide and exploitation that built this country.Fielder in “The Curse.” By filming frequently from outside windows and doors, the show creates an alienating effect, as if we’re only seeing part of the picture.Richard Foreman Jr./A24, Paramount+ and ShowtimeIt’s heavy stuff but not always on the surface. “The Curse” has many long, mundane set pieces that double as metaphors. Take the physical comedy of Asher helping Whitney to take off her sweater as they fall over each other. They try to recreate the funny moment for the cameras. But it doesn’t work, so they try again, emphasizing more strain and resistance. It’s a sharp satire of how people fake struggle for clout and approval.The show is full of goofy humor about tragic subjects, a cartoon about oppression, a Holocaust joke. The main plot is just the old story of vain fools trying to make a show, but grim subtext comes through in the formal qualities of the show.For instance, shots are commonly filmed through a window from the outside looking in. Instead of bringing us into a vehicle where Fielder and Stone are talking, the camera is placed beyond the closed car window, in traffic. Most of a scene in a hospital room is viewed through the door or window. So much of “The Curse” takes place outside planes of glass that the mirrored glare is a signature of its aesthetic.This has an alienating effect, giving the sense that we’re only seeing part of the picture, a distorted one at that. But there’s also something creepily voyeuristic about the shot, a cool detachment, the sense that everyone is under a microscope. It evokes the most famous shot in all of horror: The classic slasher point of view, used most famously in “Halloween,” where we share the perspective of the serial killer looking through a home’s window.But there’s something about a peeping-tom perspective that adds authenticity. It comes off as less staged and slick than most television and thus more real. Does that make it more fake or less? Fielder has always loved exploring this question. “The Curse,” his most scripted show yet, is continually shifting between comedy and horror as well as naturalism and the fantastical. The lines are much blurrier than we think, but on this show, that’s where the action is.After his monstrous face in class, Asher looks humiliated. But also taken aback, as if he revealed more than he wanted or knew was there. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      The Creepiest Moment Onscreen This Year Occurred in a Comedy

      by

      “The Curse” has been described as cringe, but look closely and you’ll see it plays with the classic tropes of horror like jump scares.There’s telling a bad joke. There’s bombing. And then there’s what happens to Nathan Fielder’s character, Asher Siegel, at the end of the fourth episode of “The Curse,” near the halfway point of a series that goes to disorienting extremes.Siegel and his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone, in a remarkable comic performance), are making an HGTV show about eco-friendly renovations. After a focus group takes issue with Asher’s sense of humor in the show’s pilot, he finds himself in a comedy class where an instructor assigns an exercise: Get laughs without saying a word.In the episode, which premiered last weekend on Showtime and Paramount+, the camera swirls around a circle of students mugging for chuckles until it focuses on Asher, looking nervous in anticipation of his turn. You feel for him. In his finest performance to date, Fielder plays a guy who prides himself on being funny but deep down has doubts. Suddenly, in a quick flourish, he grabs his ears and flaps them while emitting a piercing squeak that could be described as unholy. No one laughs. But this face is more than unfunny. It’s unsettling, almost feral, working like a jump scare more than a punchline. It’s a gesture gone so wrong, it’s destined to become a meme.The year began with hit movies like “M3gan” and “Cocaine Bear” that pushed horror into camp comedy. It’s ending with a nervy television series that moves in reverse. It’s been called cringe comedy, and there are funny moments, but they set up something darker and dread-filled, potentially supernatural. Fielder has always toyed with genre, elevating prank comedy and using reality television to make unexpectedly moving drama. He’s leaning on the tools of horror here. With “The Curse,” the jangly sound design, manipulative cinematography and periodic bursts of oddball monstrousness offer a few of the creepiest moments of the year.While the plot is involved, with several threads, its engine is a classic horror trope: Is this supernatural-seeming thing of the title for real?Action commonly takes place through windows in “The Curse.”John Paul Lopez/A24, Paramount+ and Showtime“Rosemary’s Baby” and “Get Out,” among other movies, both invite the viewer to ask this question along with their paranoid protagonists.Asher possibly enters the realm of the fantastical after balking at the criticism that his plan to “consciously rejuvenate distressed homes” is gentrification. “We don’t believe the G word has to be a game of winners and losers,” he tells a journalist. Rattled by this exchange and concerned about his image, he summons his camera crew to film his giving a $100 bill to a small Black girl. Then when the camera stops rolling, he asks for it back. She responds by saying she is putting a curse on him, which he initially brushes off but gradually becomes obsessed with. Whether Asher is actually cursed hovers over the entire 10 episodes until a twist in the final episode that should polarize the audience.In “Psycho,” Alfred Hitchcock proves that the easiest way to make us empathize with a killer is to keep the camera on him. Even when Norman Bates is trying to cover up a murder, audience members will eventually, if managed right, find themselves gravitating to his side. Fielder has always been preoccupied with this emotional power, the distorting impact of the camera, not only on its subjects but on viewers, too. It’s easy to sympathize with Asher’s struggles as he navigates a skeptical press, his troubled new marriage and a bullying father-in-law as well as his craven producer, played by Benny Safdie. “The Curse” keeps complicating this identification, subverting and questioning it.In Episode 3, Asher’s stern face is cast in a shadow at an auction as he buys a home he didn’t realize is housing the girl who cursed him. A scene in which he uses a drill to open her door is played for terror, focused on her cowering inside. The rumbling power tool and the fear on her face cast this as a classic home invasion scene with Asher as the terrifying intruder. His stated good intentions are repeatedly mocked in the ominous way his scenes are shot.This draws attention to the Siegels as privileged outsiders casually entering and destroying a new neighborhood in the guise of liberal do-gooder assistance. The focus doesn’t just hit the theme of gentrification, but also, in a subplot involving an Indigenous artist, the genocide and exploitation that built this country.Fielder in “The Curse.” By filming frequently from outside windows and doors, the show creates an alienating effect, as if we’re only seeing part of the picture.Richard Foreman Jr./A24, Paramount+ and ShowtimeIt’s heavy stuff but not always on the surface. “The Curse” has many long, mundane set pieces that double as metaphors. Take the physical comedy of Asher helping Whitney to take off her sweater as they fall over each other. They try to recreate the funny moment for the cameras. But it doesn’t work, so they try again, emphasizing more strain and resistance. It’s a sharp satire of how people fake struggle for clout and approval.The show is full of goofy humor about tragic subjects, a cartoon about oppression, a Holocaust joke. The main plot is just the old story of vain fools trying to make a show, but grim subtext comes through in the formal qualities of the show.For instance, shots are commonly filmed through a window from the outside looking in. Instead of bringing us into a vehicle where Fielder and Stone are talking, the camera is placed beyond the closed car window, in traffic. Most of a scene in a hospital room is viewed through the door or window. So much of “The Curse” takes place outside planes of glass that the mirrored glare is a signature of its aesthetic.This has an alienating effect, giving the sense that we’re only seeing part of the picture, a distorted one at that. But there’s also something creepily voyeuristic about the shot, a cool detachment, the sense that everyone is under a microscope. It evokes the most famous shot in all of horror: The classic slasher point of view, used most famously in “Halloween,” where we share the perspective of the serial killer looking through a home’s window.But there’s something about a peeping-tom perspective that adds authenticity. It comes off as less staged and slick than most television and thus more real. Does that make it more fake or less? Fielder has always loved exploring this question. “The Curse,” his most scripted show yet, is continually shifting between comedy and horror as well as naturalism and the fantastical. The lines are much blurrier than we think, but on this show, that’s where the action is.After his monstrous face in class, Asher looks humiliated. But also taken aback, as if he revealed more than he wanted or knew was there. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Popcast (Deluxe): What Is Going on With the Grammy Nominations?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The nominations for the 2024 Grammy Awards, which include multiple nods for the true pop stars Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, but also for the R&B sensualist SZA, as well as the loose-knit indie rock supergroup boygenius and the former talk-show bandleader and exuberant border-crosser Jon Batiste.“The Curse,” the new show on Showtime from Nathan Fielder that continues his philosophical and moral experimentation with the tropes of reality television.New songs from Dua Lipa and Jack HarlowSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      The Most Adventurous Comedy Right Now Is Also the Most Real

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      John Wilson, Eric Andre and others are drawing on unscripted encounters to elicit deeper laughs but also more vulnerable moments.At the start of the second season of the HBO series “How To With John Wilson,” the titular star, a stammering innocent, visits a mortgage broker to get a loan. Asked his occupation, he sounds stumped. “I’m an, uh, documentarian,” he says, struggling to categorize his work. “Like, uh, it’s kind of like memoir, essay, um.”Pity him. It’s not easy to define this singular show. But one tip-off comes when Wilson offers as collateral a collection of printed-out reactions (including a Mindy Kaling tweet) inside a folder labeled “good reviews.” The exasperated look on the face of the lender operates as a punchline.Wilson, who writes, stars and narrates this self-portrait of sorts, is the quietly radical auteur of a rapidly ascendant branch of comedy that uses the raw materials of unscripted slices of the real world to make jokes. The latest Dave Chappelle controversy or topical “Saturday Night Live” sketch get more headlines, but in a less heralded corner of comedy, a quiet revolution is taking place.Chris (Eric André), center, and Bud (Lil Rel Howery) ask a woman for advice in “Bad Trip.”NetflixThe best gross-out comedy of the year was Eric André’s “Bad Trip,” a movie that blended public interactions between actors and real people into its fiction. The most biting political film in recent memory was not made by Oliver Stone or Adam McKay. It was the 2020 sequel to “Borat.” And the most innovative portrait of New York was not cooked up by Martin Scorsese. It was the HBO series “How To With John Wilson.” I’m not sure if this group of documentary comedy artists, who have elevated a legacy still connected to lowbrow prank humor, can be considered a scene, but they are cross-pollinating and growing in ambition.At the top of this family tree is Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”), whose blockbuster comedies take planned narratives and weave in ridiculous interactions between his outlandish characters and unsuspecting, real people. His heirs includes Jena Friedman, one of the writers of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” who in her “Soft Focus” Adult Swim specials added savvy feminist punch to daring documentary comedy, integrating scenes with real frat boys and online gamers into a comic exposé of our sexist culture. Her recent follow-up is the superb spoof of murder documentaries, “Indefensible” on Sundance TV. “Bad Trip” (2021) belongs to a broader strain, tied to the raucous juvenile stunts of “Jackass,” whose co-creator Jeff Tremaine produced the feature.Sacha Baron Cohen and Maria Bakalova hit the streets in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”Amazon StudiosNathan Fielder, who has also worked with Baron Cohen, pioneered a more personal, emotionally tender strain in “Nathan for You” (which ended in 2017) playing a mild-mannered consultant who helps small-business owners achieve their dreams. His cringe comedy often began as a spoof of the hustle of American entrepreneurs, but invariably spun off into melancholy, oddly poetic moments. This set the stage for the most ambitious and cerebral example of the genre, “How To With John Wilson,” whose executive producers include Fielder.Wilson builds every episode around teaching some new skill before getting interrupted by a diversion that seems to stumble into a philosophical meditation on a broader theme. An episode on appreciating wine asks how to engage with society without becoming conformist; one about finding a parking spot is a brief for the virtue of boredom. (“Maybe life is just circling just waiting for a spot.”) It’s a show that gathers loose parts (a montage of shots of personalized license plates, say) and somehow turns them into wildly eccentric, oddly poignant comedy.Wilson, our intrepid guide, is incredibly smart at playing dumb, alert to moments of minor revelation, disturbing oddness and layered meanings. But unlike most of the great deadpan comics, he stays off camera, telling his stories through narration, interviews with strangers and carefully curated scenes of New York. The show shares elements with critical video essays by the likes of Matt Zoller Seitz and with Thom Andersen’s fascinating documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” which also invites you to see a city through new eyes. But the new season of “How to,” written by a staff that includes the author Susan Orlean and the comic Conner O’Malley, is much more autobiographical. New York isn’t the main character, as the cliché goes, so much as shots of it are the language used to describe Wilson.Detours take us into his checkered early filmmaking career, including a disastrous early film, “Jingle Berry,” he has stashed away but can’t quite destroy, and brief video of old roommates and a girlfriend. The most surreal (and chilling) personal revelation is a story of organizing a failed rebellion in college when his a cappella group attended a conference hosted by Keith Raniere, the convicted sex trafficker who founded the cult Nxivm.All great comedy reveals the artist, but these intimate new episodes dig deeper, making Wilson more vulnerable than you’d expect. Wilson comes off as an anguished subject, anxious and afraid of confrontation but struggling to connect. This tension is reflected in the form: We only actually see him in quick glances in mirrors or old clips, but the stories are told entirely from the perspective of his camera. Most of his emotional reactions are illuminated by street scenes. When he talks about feeling shock, he shows an image of a Gothic building whose windows resemble a face with a mouth agape.The roots of this brand of comedy date to the pranks of “Candid Camera.” Another touchstone is the late-night talk show tradition of turning interactions with strangers into comedy, from Steve Allen in the 1950s to the literate remote segments by Merrill Markoe on “Late Night With David Letterman” in the 1980s. It’s a strain of comedy that inspired artists like Billy Eichner. The recent documentary comedy examples stretch the canvas created by their forerunners, offering a wider emotional landscape and more complicated ideas.“How To With John Wilson” turns to Quick Evic to get advice about tenant-landlord relations.HBOBut a dark undercurrent remains, one that exploits the humiliation of unsuspecting foils for cheap laughs. Wilson is clearly aware of this and even cops to it. The first episode of this season begins with him buying a building from his landlord. Describing his online real-estate hunt, he says: “You feel like the invisible man. Getting to be a voyeur without any consequences.” His self-awareness doesn’t erase the smirking pleasures of his show, which emerge in the handling of characters like the person who claims to be the reincarnation of President John Adams or the businessman who makes car-shaped caskets. But Wilson rarely mocks. And he isn’t aiming for quick laughs as much as compassionate consideration. His camera treats the figures it encounters with loving attention and usually a lack of judgment.His shows are a reminder of how rarely you see banal details of city denizens doing their jobs on prestige television: The unglamorous everyday of real estate agents, construction workers, commuters. Wilson balances the mundane with the extraordinary (every episode has a moment or two that you can’t believe really happened), heavy subjects with light jokes. He introduces us to people who look like targets (a fan group of “Avatar” obsessives) and makes us see the beauty in their community. This isn’t a show of heroes and villains, but quick portraits of real, complicated people, and its foundational faith is that they are funnier than anything performed by actors. There’s plenty of evidence.Consider a recent viral video of the Fox host Laura Ingraham having a frustrated conversation with a guest talking about the Netflix show “You.” Every time he mentioned the show, she thought he was referring to her, and the dialogue came to seem like a cable-news update of an Abbott and Costello routine. Almost immediately, this minute-long misunderstanding went viral with people of all political stripes retweeting and praising it. One of the only dissents came from Andy Richter, who tweeted: “The fact that people are actually laughing at that Laura Ingraham thing makes me feel like I’ve wasted the last 35 years of my life.”Why did people love this? It was delivered with spot-on comic rhythm, and of course, people love to laugh at cable hosts embarrassing themselves. But part of the reason it worked is because it seemed like a genuine moment, a true burst of spontaneity in a media climate filled with predictable narratives. As soon as the participants confessed it was fake, the interest online vanished.To take another example, the Sacha Baron Cohen comedies that forgo unscripted encounters with real people, “The Dictator” and “The Brothers Grimsby,” did not have the urgency and verve of his documentary comedies.Authenticity has been rightly picked apart by critics, who argue that it’s easily manufactured and so vaguely defined as to be meaningless. And yet, its power and influence on audiences remains undeniable. Authenticity is part of the popularity of stand-up, with comics performing in characters bearing their names and likenesses. And when a standup does something that seems at odds with his persona, the public’s fascination is intense. See John Mulaney, a squeaky-clean comic who recently became a staple of tabloid coverage after drug rehab, divorce and news of a new girlfriend and baby on the way. “You know your life has gone a little downhill when you announce that you’re having a baby, and you get mixed reviews,” he joked at a recent show.Wilson gets at the enduring power of the real in an origin story of sorts in which he describes being denied entry into a Dungeons and Dragons group as a kid and rebelling against fantasy. “When I watched fiction, I could never suspend disbelief and fully immerse myself in the world.” I suspect he’s not the only one.And yet, in the same episode, he tries to change, searching out the value in fantasy (“If you only think about stuff that already exists, the world will never change”) and even recording his dreams. One is of a laundromat where the washers and dryers are replaced by stoves. In one oddly magical coup de théâtre, he actually builds this business, then trains his camera on New Yorkers cracking up and marveling at this bizarre new addition to the neighborhood.It’s a bizarre stunt, proudly random, but also, what a perfect joke for this boundary-blurring genre: Actually making your dream come true. More