CollegeHumor Final

Marni Newell
Arts Journalism Final
CollegeHumor
3/1/09
After a coworker hires a skinny, long-haired, tight-clothed intern to help him with extra office work, his colleges set out to find their own intern.
“The interns we hire should be skinny,” the short, pale one says.
“But not too skinny,” his equally pale bespectacled coworker adds.
“Just super hot,” the last closest-to-handsome coworker adds.
So begins the infiltration of the “hot” female interns to the offices in Mtv’s CollegeHumor Show’s second episode. Eventually, these skinny, long haired text-fiends overrun the working space, leaving the male workers shut up in walled offices, scared to emerge. The running joke of the episode, beside the unsuccessful attempts of the men to talk with any of the “hot girls,” is senior writer Sarah Schneider’s—the only woman in the workplace, and of average build and self-described “Holly Hunter thing going on”--attempts to show her coworkers how useless the “hot” interns are and the jabs at her image that ensue.
At one point, three men are in the stock room looking for a three-hole-punch and printer ink when they hear footsteps. “Quiet, I hear a hot girl coming!” one shouts, and they all lean against the shelves pretending to be cool but when Sarah walks in they burst in laughter. Confused, she laughs, too, and asks what’s so funny.
“We thought you were a hot girl,” one says. She stops laughing and points out how they’re doing the work the interns should be doing.
“Oh my G,” one says, as if it hits him, but he says instead, “You’re so jealous!”
The rest of the 30-minute show has countless nearly-identical jabs at Schneider and more instances of the male CollegeHumor writers doing both their jobs and the “hot” interns bidding while the women sit in their boss’ chairs and lick lollipops or text friends.
Before they had a regular spot on Mtv, CollegeHumor.com found a loyal audience with popular original videos featuring reoccurring characters like Jake and Amir, a straight man-funny man relationship reminiscent of Abbot and Costello but contemporary, and the Phantom of the Office, an office worker not much different than most, but with a mask, top hat, and operatic voice.
Perhaps that’s why the television series comprised of a compilation of already filmed original videos and a new scripted narrative of life at the CollegeHumor offices seemed so jarring as it continuously mocked Schneider’s appearance in all three episodes; just perusing the most-watched videos of CollegHumor.com could result in stupid-humor that had little to do with women’s appearance.
That’s not to say that the website is free from the exploitative user-submitted photos of college women in bikinis with their mouths hanging open to be named “Cute College Girl of the Day” or videos entitled “POV: Hot Girl. Get inside her. Deep inside her,” but the videos that don’t include bouncing breasts and shower scenes are funny, actually funny and have no hint of sexuality.
In one video, the men of CollegeHumor present Schneider with a birthday cake and attempt to sing “happy birthday,” but they have all forgotten the tune and the words. They each proceed in giving their version of the birthday song which includes, “Birthday, birthday candles on your cake,” and “You’re older than you were before sha na na na” as Schneider waits angrily for the actual birthday song. They end in a pseudo-barbershop rendition of “Baby it’s your birthday” with one of the men playing a keyboard. Although Schneider is upset, claiming their bad memory has ruined her birthday, the rest of the office gathers to sing and dance to this new song and the end shot is of Schneider grimacing in a cardboard party hat with her arms crossed.
Short videos like this one are put at the beginning and ends of each episode, but the episodes are also interrupted by ads for the new movie Miss March, about a high school girlfriend “a solid seven” according to one of the characters, who grows up to be a Playboy Bunny. “Do you think she’s still a virgin?” her ex-boyfriend asks his friend who’s peering closely at a picture in Playboy, “Nope, I’m afraid not.”
The saddest part of the series is the viewer comments of each episode on Mtv’s website. The comment at the top of the board for the episode “Interns” says, “WTF happened to the days when ‘hot girls’ actually had to have boobs?” According to “freduardo” who posted this, the “hot girls” CollegeHumor found weren’t actually hot enough, which begs the question, what exactly does it take for a woman to be attractive? The episode had enough painful moments of the men of the office attempting conversation with the “hot girls” to make the point clear that they weren’t “hot” enough men for the women, but, thanks to “freduardo” the “narrow definitions of beauty” as Schneider called them keep getting narrower. All the while, college women are taking flattering, or in some cases just hypersexual, photos of themselves in an effort to be named by these gawky, pale, unattractive men as one of the “Cute College Girls of the Day.”
In the March 2008 issue of Glamour, Gabriel Olds wrote an article about the women he’s dated who have had surgical enhancements and his reactions to them. After relaying awkward epiphanies of his partners’ breast augmentations and rhinoplasty, Olds decided the “surgical enhancements” were a sign of insecurity, “it didn’t seem like a celebration of beauty, but a scrambling attempt to fix something...It was as if something purchased to say, ‘Hey, check me out’ actually said, ‘I don’t like myself very much’” The article tried to spin this as positive by generalizing that all men want natural beauty, but the quoted men at the end of the article are counterproductive. Lee Cohen from Portland said, “I love the way fake breasts look—they’re a turn-on. But I couldn’t see myself getting involved with someone who’d go through that just to turn into a fantasy.” There you have it, women should be stick thin with large busts, but it needs to be natural or no dice. It’s all becoming so clear and manageable now.
Gabriel Olds is a semi-attractive, slightly chubby, very average-looking man as are the men at CollegeHumor, and probably all the men quoted at the end of the article yet these are the makers and enforcers of women beauty standards. Put as bluntly as this, the power seems to be in the hands of women now, why do they submit to these judgmental and unrealistic standards?