Shit Girls Say co-creator Graydon Sheppard
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Generally, anything that’s actually funny will probably piss off at least some people. Comedy is famously “subjective,” and its basic function is to prod at taboos, upset expectations, and all of that good stuff. It’s little surprise then, that Shit Girls Say, the insanely popular Twitter feed and YouTube video series created by Toronto comics Graydon Sheppard and Kyle Humphrey, is ticking people off.
Starring Sheppard as a vaguely recognizable, vaguely contemptible, vaguely sympathetic “Anygirl,” the videos are a barrage of airheaded girl-isms: stuff like “Get these chips away from me,” and “I had such a good sleep!” They’re really funny. And they’re coloured by a truth and savvy that differentiate the project from, say, something like the new ABC drag dress-up sitcom Work It, which seems offensive for a whole slew of different reasons.
As expected, not everyone finds Shit Girls Say funny, with accusations of sexism, misogyny, and gender-essentializing cropping up all over the Internet as the videos rack up millions of views by the day. We’re not saying the tweets and videos are not offensive, necessarily. We’re just saying that the ways in which they may cause offense are part of what makes them interesting and socially pertinent. Because yeah, good comedy will irk some people. Do you think the folks at the FAA liked Airplane? Probably not!
Anyway, who cares what we think? The A.V. Club talked to Sheppard about the Twitter feed, the videos, and the response (both positive and negative). His answers are much more interesting than anything we could say.
The A.V. Club: Whose idea was it to start the Twitter account?
Graydon Sheppard: Kyle and I started the Twitter back in April. We were sitting around one day watching TV, and one of us said, “Can you pass me that blanket?” It immediately struck us as a “girl” thing to say. I know that sounds terrible. But we immediately started thinking about what that means, to have a saying attributed to a sex, and then we started going back and forth. Kyle has a Twitter account. I tweet as well. So we thought it would be a perfect format. Within a couple days, we had a couple hundred tweets.
AVC: Where did these ideas come from? Women you’ve known in the past? You seem to have an infinite reservoir.
GS: At first we weren’t sure how long it would be able to go. First it was just us gleaning what we had heard in the past, and not necessarily any specific women or people. I grew up with my mom and sisters in the house, and then, growing up, had a lot of mostly girl friends. It kind of comes from being around women but not being a woman.
AVC: And from there, why did you decide to film the shorts?
GS: I’m a director, so a couple of months after starting the feed, I thought it’d be a fun project to do. I also wanted to perform. So that’s basically it. It started off as a little side project to supplement the feed, but now it’s kind of taken off more than the feed.
AVC: How did you get Juliette Lewis to appear in the first video?
GS: She was one of our first followers. I remember getting the e-mail from Twitter that she was following us, and it was so exciting. I forwarded it to Kyle. It felt like we were really catching on. One day in the summer, we tweeted something and she replied to us, and asked who we were. She wanted to know who we were and if we were girls. And she had just come to Toronto to start filming The Firm for NBC, and we met up and had a drink. After that, we kept in touch. After the day where we filmed everything, we showed her the cut, and she wanted to do a cameo.
AVC: The first one got, what, 4 million hits in a week?
GS: Yeah, it’s almost at 6 million now. And the other one, I think, is around 2 million. It’s been really, unbelievably popular.
AVC: Did you expect this sort of reception?
GS: We hoped it would do well. We thought it would be kind of popular. But we never thought it’d take off in such a way. This past week has just been crazy, with all the feedback coming in. It’s been amazing.
AVC: Formally, the videos are great because they work like the Twitter feed—they’re just little one-liners stitched together. The obvious precedent would be something like Shit My Dad Says, and the TV show, which spins these sayings into 22-minute episodes. Were you trying to keep things a bit more rapid-fire, in the spirit of the Twitter feed?
GS: I think we were aware of Shit My Dad Says, and we wanted something that would live in the same Internet world as the Twitter feed. In a way, with Shit My Dad Says, it makes sense to do something longer and more anecdotal, because that was Justin [Halpern]’s story: his life with his dad. It was biographical, and there was a lot more material. But [our] tweets aren’t necessarily a single character. They’re not one woman. They’re a specific kind of woman. We don’t in any way purport to represent all women, and I think people understand that. I think our next video goes a little further than the tweets. It’s not a narrative, necessarily, but it’s a little more abstract.
AVC: Some of the criticism your project has received seems to miss this “certain kind of woman” concept that you mention. Something that refers to “girls” as an idea is essentializing, but it doesn’t seem like the concept would work if it were called Shit A Certain Kind Of Woman Who Has Been Socialized To Behave A Certain Way Says. How are you responding to criticism suggesting that the project is sexist or misogynist?
GS: You can’t really respond to it, other than positively. We respect women; we love women; we grew up around women; the people who helped us on the project were women. Obviously we can’t critique anyone for critiquing us in this way. Everyone has the right to critique it. It’s a really interesting dialogue that has come up because of the people criticizing it. It’s tricky territory. It’s sensitive territory. But people have the right to be offended. It’s par for the course, especially if something goes this big, which we never thought it would.
But I’m gay, and Kyle’s gay, and people put things out there about gay people. There are television shows about gay people, and I think we try to not let that define us. We know they don’t necessarily speak for us. I think it’s a really interesting topic. We’ve been learning a lot.
GS: Hmm ... it’s hard. I don’t want to deny anyone saying that. But I don’t know that it’s a betrayal of trust, because these are common phrases. I think it’s that people haven’t noticed a lot of these things, in this way. We’re very careful on the Twitter feed to avoid anything having to do with violence, or that’s clichéd, like “Does my butt look big in these jeans?” Those kinds of examinations, that were brought up in the ’80s and are so old and unfunny, maybe stopped any further examination of the complexity of these tweets. What we’re interested in, and what we think works about it, is that these things are layered and complex and they have a lot to them. I don’t know if people will agree with it. But we respect what’s in these phrases and how complex and layered they are. Like people tried to do Shit Guys Say, and it’s just not as complex and interesting. We hope that that reverence comes through. And obviously it doesn’t for some people, and that’s absolutely fine.
AVC: The copycats have certainly been cropping up. Shit Black Girls Say was up within days, and it was cut the same way as your video and everything. Is that flattering to you guys? There’s a risk that Shit X Say will just become a range of memes.
GS: No, it’s absolutely flattering! I mean, the Shit Black Girls Say guys credited us in the actual video, and below. And the other ones are all referencing back to us, so it only serves to bring more views to our videos. I’m not at all threatened. It’s fun to see people’s takes on it.
AVC: Does casting yourself as the girl, instead of getting a girl, come out of that desire to perform that you mentioned earlier?
GS: Yeah, when I was at Columbia doing my MFA in film, anytime [anyone] wanted someone to act in something, I’d always step up. And I acted as a kid and have always been involved in media. But the desire to be in front of the camera has always been there. And because it was our project, I got the opportunity. I didn’t have to cast anybody. I got to do it myself. It was very fun.
AVC: Drag has all of these thorny implications. But your performance doesn’t even really seem like drag. It’s like how The Kids In The Hall used to do drag, where the joke isn’t just that they’re men in dresses.
GS: Right. And that was a conscious decision. I didn’t put breasts on. The makeup wasn’t particularly draggy. I love drag; I’ve done drag. It’s fun. I identify with the female side; that’s all there. It’s a caricature, of course. It’s parody. It’s satirical. To give us some credit, we tried not to make it particularly girly. I used my own voice. I’m a bit deeper now because this is my business voice. [Laughs.] But I thought about the tone. I think part of the reason that it works is because I do identify with every single thing that I say. I catch myself saying these things in everyday life. And I don’t think anyone’s immune to it, either. That’s maybe why it ruffles some feathers.
