The Better of the ‘It Gets Better’ Parodies

The Daily Show’s It Gets Worse John McCain parody was a high point in political comedy for the week. Heck, maybe it’s the high point for the year. But it’s far from the only It Gets Better parody out there. What you’d think would be a sensitive topic for comedians to handle has in fact spawned its own mini-genre of spoof. These parody responses have (mostly) respected the premise of Dan Savage’s original project. That’s pretty remarkable: the speakers in the original videos are almost never mocked. Instead, comedians are joining forces with them to spread the word. The response videos can be just about evenly broken into two large groups: It Gets Worse for Bullies, and It Gets Better (for other things too). Here are some of the better It Gets Better parodies:

It Gets BetterUCBcomedy.com
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It Gets Worse, Bullies and Douchebags

It Gets Worse–Chad O’DonnellUCBcomedy.com
Watch more comedy videos from the twisted minds of the UCB Theatre at UCBcomedy.com

The Daily Show’s It Gets Worse belongs with the other message-to-the-bully videos because, really, that’s what it’s saying: John McCain is a bully. He’s decided to make himself the spokesperson against gay civil rights, but this also applies to any of the lawmakers who are standing in the way of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal. They are acting no different from the bullies in high school. As the Indecision Forever blog noted last month, that would include Barack Obama, who refused to let DADT be overturned by the courts even as he made his own It Gets Better video. The Daily Show’s John McCain segment put this political hypocrisy in the most scathing and honest terms yet, but it’s something that needs to keep being said.

The common message in these videos that bullies end up living horrible, horrible lives is shared with some of the actual It Gets Better videos. The comeuppance of the bully is one of our most enduring American myths. But I will say I started to feel bad, not for the bullies, but for some of the markers we’re pinning on bullies as symbols of failure. Like: community college. Community college or junior college figured in three of the five bully/douchebag videos above (the other two entered the work force directly after high school). I know they mean well, but let’s remember that there are some fine, hard working non-bullies who put themselves through community college, some of them even smart. Community college is by far the largest segment in American higher education. To those students: You may not be getting much respect right now, but it gets better.

The Colossal Donut Index

This week’s CDI is 27. that’s an unrefudiatable 400% jump over last week. And also, this was awesome.

Stephen Hoban is a writer living in New York.

The Better of the ‘It Gets Better’ Parodies