Jeff Dye and Jim Norton mock Ryan Reynolds' 80s take
One earnest celebrity quote, two comics, zero mercy.
Ryan Reynolds went on the record about the 1980s and two comedians were waiting.
Variety posted the clip, in which Reynolds says 80s nostalgia "paves over all the trauma" of the decade. His argument is that people remember the fun and skip the fear. "The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people," he says. "It was a fucking mess and people forget that." He brings up socio political tensions, and notes the Cuban missile crisis was only 15 to 20 years earlier. Then the line that did the damage. You look back now and think Top Gun and cocaine, he says, when really it was scary.
It was a fucking mess and people forget that.
The context is a press run. Reynolds stars in Apple TV's "Mayday" as a US Navy pilot who befriends an eccentric ex KGB agent, played by Kenneth Branagh, who is obsessed with 80s American culture. So the decade was the topic. He just took it seriously.
Dye goes first
Jeff Dye's reply was short and did the whole job. He called the idea that you cannot have nostalgia because bad things happened silly, then offered a parody version of the logic. How could someone have nostalgia for the Ninja Turtles in 1993, he asks, when the Battle of Mogadishu was happening. That is the entire post. No tag, no thread, no follow up.
How could someone have nostalgia for the Ninja Turtles in 1993 when the Battle of Mogadishu was happening?
Norton lands the straight face
A few hours later Jim Norton quoted the same Variety post with one sentence and no wink. When a learned man speaks, he wrote, it would serve us all well to heed his words. Read flat, it is a compliment. Read at all, it is not.
This is not a feud, and nobody involved is pretending otherwise. Reynolds did not respond, Dye and Norton did not tag him, and neither comic went back for a second round. What happened is two comics found the same earnest quote on the same day and did the obvious thing to it, which is roughly the entire function of comedy Twitter.
The read is that Reynolds handed over a clean setup. A serious take on a subject nobody was being serious about is catnip, and the sincerity is what makes it funny rather than anything he actually got wrong. Norton's fake reverence is the better of the two swings, mostly because he never breaks.
When a learned man speaks, it would serve us all well to heed his words.