Jena Friedman's humor is dark, inventive, and timely. In the first installment of her Adult Swim special, "Soft Focus with Jena Friedman," she delivers a segment about campus rape where she gets the company Silicon Wives to donate luxury sex dolls and renames them as "cannot-consent-carrie dolls.
In Friedman's follow-up special, which premieres Jan. After interviewing women who had experienced this online abuse, Friedman conceives of an immersive virtual-reality sensory experience that is meant to recreate "what it's like to be a woman," in order to help men build empathy. In the second part of the special, she sits down with controversial programmer, businessman and hopeful libertarian candidate for president John McAfee, for a somewhat humiliating and probing conversation.
Friedman's voice and vision is refreshing in its originality, but still stingingly political and relevant to the current times. Through her experiential field work, she forces young men to physically see beyond the male gaze β to feel what it's like not to be believed, to be gaslighted, to be objectified and harassed and then called sensitive β if only for five minutes of their lives.
And while it seems like her specials will be particularly influential to men, as a woman there's definite pleasure in watching their assumptions get disrupted and dismantled too. I talked to Friedman, an alumnus of "The Daily Show" and "Late Show with David Letterman," about how to conduct field pieces ethically and how comedy has transformed under President Trump.
In your first Adult Swim special, you covered campus rape. In the new special, you're addressing the sexual harassment of women gamers. How do you come to these topics? It was so frustrating, because from personal experience, I know that campus rape is a huge problem.
