Convos With My 2-Year Old, a 27-Year Old Who Hasn’t Tried a Banana, and Seinfeld As a Puppet

The Weekly Binge: 3 Web Series To Watch This Week

The Weekly Binge is a handful of recommendations based on what the Stareable Team has been bingeing on this week. Click through to watch and let us know what you think by leaving your own reviews on the site!

New Material Seinfeld

Ever been to a comedy club and notice that comics will stand at the back of the room or by the door or at the bar and watch the other acts? It makes sense — they love jokes. But it’s also hard to believe, given how competitive they are, that they’re not picking apart how others are getting the laughs they desperately crave. If you’ve never seen it, Talking Funnywas an HBO roundtable with Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais (maybe he wandered onto the set? He must have a lot of free time when he’s not ruining Golden Globes with that insufferable laugh/personality/ego of his) and Louis CK discussing their shared craft and how they perceive each other. It’s worth watching if only to hear them paraphrase each other’s jokes (and then correct each other when they feel they’re not being accurately retold.) New Material Seinfeld is a similar sort of deconstruction, with Pete Holmes caricaturing Seinfeld’s verbal tics, paying homage to his pioneering brand of humor, and mocking how narrow his style and perspective can seem after such a long and influential career. The set-up is great, with Seinfeld played by a puppet and trying out new material like a man on a Hyde Park soapbox, shouting at passersby to see what lands. Maybe that’s how he spends his time on the Upper West Side? One can only hope (but not enough to actually venture up there to see).

Convos With My 2-Year-Old

Children are confusing and terrifying and, if we believe the hype, they’re the future, which is especially concerning. But everyone ignores that because they’re cute and helpless and the government tells us we have to care for them. The show highlights that dichotomy by focusing on the power struggle between a father and his two year old daughter, recreating actual conversations but using a grown man to play the role of the daughter. This man is a genius. He brings the rage, insistence and randomness of the daughter to life in a performance that rivals Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. Watch just one episode and you’ll see that they’re addictive.

Watch An Adult Eat

It’s interesting to think about the unforced experiences that help define a shared cultural heritage. Sure, parents sit their children down and teach them how to tie their shoes. But how did we all learn to use chopsticks without any sort of centrally-enforced mandate? And no one told us that the best time for social media updates is while on the toilet but here we all are, tweeting away on cold porcelain. In Watch an Adult Eat, 27 year old Gawker writer Jordan Sargent tries a variety of foods for the first time. It’s a frustrating thing to witness because the mind reels at what it means if someone has managed to live for 27 years without trying a banana or apple pie. But it’s interesting to try and parse together his grand theory of food. Some things are too sweet — but he likes key lime pie. Some foods are too soft — but he likes Cool Whip. And perhaps most revealingly, he seems to think that pineapple has the same texture as watermelon — so maybe there’s just something physiologically wrong with how he experiences food?

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