Annotated 25-17
This material (and scene) was primarily Phil, and it’s a sign of our somewhat healed relationship that it plays fairly similarly to Emb’s other comic routines, which were me.
The difference is the audience he’s playing to, and Emb knows how to make his patron happy. Dean Reynolds the nonhuman gets jokes at the expense of his height, which clearly bothers him and is a slight against his entire race. Bedard gets a joke at the expense of his baldness, but even if you didn’t know him, you’d judge him unlikely to care about that much… especially since there’s also a thinly veiled compliment to his intelligence. And Reynolds is also balding and scholarly, whereas he’s not nearsighted. You can see how the jokes could be rewritten if Emb were really an “equal-opportunity offender.”
Emb has been mining human prejudices for fun and profit for ages, and so far, he’s completely in his comfort zone here. But now he has to turn to the primary reason he was invited to perform…
All those blue seats, reminds me of something…..
Another hint at this kind of predatory, punching-down “humor” is how he chooses to simply skip over Caneghem. You don’t want to risk the ire of the guy who is casually levitating an inkwell just because he can.