Stumptown Magazine

As fancy Mercury editor lady and “friend of the program” Alison Hallett pointed out last week, everyone and their great-grannies are lining up to take potshots at our city – and we probably deserve it. As the Merc reported, Lorne Michaels will have something to do with a new short comedy show called “Portlandia”, which will be “about the people and values of Portland.” It should be a constant source of shiver-inducing cracks about our far-left hipster commune. But it certainly won’t be the first source of Portland comedy for the rest of the country to enjoy.

Fred Armisen (from SNL) and Carrie Brownstein (from Sleater-Kinney) will direct and star in the show, which will premere on IFC at some point in the future (?). The show promises to be a lot like their (maybe defunct) short comedy series Thunderant – which is to say, sometimes very funny, sometimes not funny, sometimes completely over the top, but always biting and exaggerated just enough to make viewers think, “God, are there actually people in this country who act like that?” So, in just a few short months or whenever this show comes out, that’s what the rest of the country (and some natives) will be thinking about us: God, do people in Portland really act like that?

The answer, in reality, will probably be “No, not really.” But only by a measure of degrees. Some of the fully-retarded things that happen here are more than worthy of mockery, as we’ve demonstrated time and again. Like, remember that time that an anarchist coffee shop owner refused to serve a uniformed cop a coffee, as, what, protest? Or the time the vegan bakery put out a help wanted ad requiring someone be a vegan? Or that time, last week, when the county shut down a child’s lemonade stand because it didn’t have the required permits? These are all scenes that should have been born as a sketch comedy skit, but unfortunately weren’t. This is the reality of living here – at least one variety. And chances are, it will be the version of reality that gets plastered on everyone’s TV once a week, to be laughed at and mocked.

But don’t worry too much folks. The show will make the rest of the country laugh at our dumb antics for a while – like, three or four years or so. But then there will be the inevitable backlash, and suddenly making fun of Portland and its residents will become passé and lame. The show will eventually go off the air – it is kind of a limited premise, isn’t it? – and, eventually, sometime in the next decade, it will be completely acceptable to be from Portland again, and maybe then our self-conscious aggravation at being constantly made fun of will fade and we can all go back to being ironic, over-cultured hipsters again.

We can only hope.

* Thanks to the lovely Samuel John Klein for the lovely picture. Lovely.