Last night's Samantha Bee segment on The Daily Show made me kind of uncomfortable. And it wasn't from imagining what it might be like to walk around in tight pants and a fake penis, as Bee did.
The premise of the segment is that Jonah Falcon, an unemployed New York City resident, is denying his natural destiny by refusing to do porn. You see, Falcon has a 13 and a half inch penis. This isn't a new discovery — in fact, his Wikipedia entry has a separate heading for it, listing appearances in an HBO documentary in 1999 and a Rolling Stone feature in 2003. And The Huffington Post picked up a Sphere video on Falcon's longtime unemployment back in January. He says there, and here, that he won't do porn because he still wants to be a serious actor.
Maybe Falcon's just playing up his mild-manneredness as a foil to Bee's swagger, but the whole gag made me feel bad for him, a jobless man who seems to want to be famous for more than his body, who is turning 40 and lives with his mother. After all, it boiled down to saying that Falcon's only value to the world is his penis. Yeah, it's a joke that cashes in on the novelty of Bee, a woman, being crude or objectifying a man. But it's not a message I found particularly funny or fresh.
Jonah Falcon [Wikipedia]