Oh No! There's An Anti-Woke Twitter Cartoon And It's Got Us NAILED!

Is there a joke about 'identifying' as an inanimate object? How could there NOT be?

Screenshot from ‘The New Norm’ on Twitter

“The New Norm,” a three-and-a-half minute pilot for an “anti-woke” cartoon sitcom, made its debut Tuesday on Twitter, proclaiming itself “The South Park of X” and “the first animated sit-com on X,” even though there shouldn’t be a hyphen in “sitcom.” (A long-ago first-year writing student won my eternal admiration for writing that too many people passively watch “sit-calms on TV,” so maybe they’re now making bad cartoons for rightwingers.)

Its producers urge viewers to donate, to “help fight the ‘woke mind virus’ with laughter!”

The thing quickly went viral, racking up 19 million views in just its first two days online, which is a lot, but just under 8,000 “likes,” which isn’t great. This is one of those things that went viral because no one can believe how bad it is.

The premise for the show is easy to summarize: What if we remade “All in the Family,” set in 2024, only Archie Bunker is always right, his foils are always idiots, and it’s not funny? The main character looks like Archie, the house is a cartoon version of the Bunkers’ house, and the show’s website features a blurb from Kevin Sorbo proclaiming it “All in the Family for our time!”

Like most (all?) rightwing comedy, “The New Norm” — it’s about a guy named Norm! — is is supposedly a pointed satire of how leftists have made life in America impossible for Us (ordinary Americans) because all our institutions have been taken over by crazy leftists who want to impose a lot of woke nonsense (mostly LGBTQ+ stuff but also wimpy socialism) on Us.

Also, at some point last year, its working title was apparently “Woke World: A Safe Space for Laughs.” That version’s website (archive link) in 2021 pitched it to potential “network partners” as a sitcom (spelled correctly!) that “fills the space left by All In The Family,” even listing all the awards and accolades the Norman Lear series received, because maybe an unauthorized Flash-animation hard Right reboot might duplicate that success.

The pitch site also offers more detail on the characters, like how the daughter, Chloe, is a student at the “newly-renamed Colin Kaepernick High School.” Oh, that’s gold, Archie Jerry, GOLD! If they manage to make an actual show, we bet that stays in. There was also a web comic, and this very funny panel from its Instagram page can stand in for the whole series. You are never going to believe what a funny joke is on the way here!

This thing has been in Development Hell forever, and all that effort added up to a very short animation on Twitter; the makers are still begging for money, and it’s all kind of sad, or would be if the product weren’t crap.

So what the hell, here’s the “pilot,” in which poor Archie/Norm has to wear an ankle bracelet because he caused a fuss at a school board meeting, complaining that the high school was brainwashing Chloe to think that “girls aren’t girls and men aren’t men,” and do you get the subtle reference to “All in the Family’s” theme song? Maybe in a later episode, if any, there’ll be a funny joke about how Norm’s old LaSalle ran great, too.

Here you go. It’s only three and a half minutes of basically the same joke over and over. “Enjoy” isn’t the word.

It’s just such a sad mess that some people on Twitter wondered if it isn’t a clever lefty satire intended to make MAGA people seem stupid, as if that needed a parody to communicate. The voice actors include rightwing pundit Dave Rubin as Norm, failed presidential (and California gubernatorial) candidate Larry Elder as Chuck, Norm’s boss and Black Friend Who Agrees Racism Is Over, and some other guy I’ve never heard of. Haha, Chuck wears a Washington Football Team T-shirt and ball cap! Are you triggered, libs?

Thank Crom there’s a laugh track, or you might not notice where the dialogue is meant to be funny.

There’s also Chaz, who the old pitch site says is an “exchange student from Portland,” and has weird pronouns! Also, for some reason that may or may not be explained, Chaz’s eyes are two different colors, maybe just because two eyes of the same color wouldn’t be nonbinary enough. Just guessing. Chaz wears a mask, the idiot, and we guess the little glyph on it is supposed to indicate nonbinariness too, but it also looks like a shower head.

Nothing in the clip makes any sense; Chuck is at one point resigned to his son’s decision to be transgender in order to dominate women’s sports, which gives us the closest thing I saw to a joke.

As they sit down to watch football, Chuck says his “boy, or whatever it calls themself,” is planning to “transition” and Norm asks, “to what?”

An announcer on the TV says “another fumble!” and Chuck good-naturedly quips “Hopefully not a Jets fan!” See, that had the structure of a joke, at least.

But just as suddenly, when Chaz says they (haha!) can’t drink the rainbow-labeled beer Norm offers because “I’m not 21,” Chuck explodes at Chaz, “Y’all influenced my boy to cut off his junk, but you draw the line at beer?” Chaz wilts at this display of angry manly masculinity, haha, and gets on the phone to their government overlords, who reveal Chaz’s mission is to “break” Norm. Look, it is Assistant HHS Secretary Rachel Levine (with a subtle Star of David on her uniform) and other freaks, including a general who’s a FURRY but also in BDSM gear, because why not?

The mess ends with a wordless “cameo” by a cartoon Elon Musk, because maybe he’ll fund this shit.

No credits, so damned if anyone knows who made it, either. I really haven’t found anything at all on the “creative” team, not even on the archived pitch site. But that site does include plot synopses for future episodes, which may or may not survive the transition (ha! ha!) from “Woke World” to “The New Norm,” if anyone does throw money into this sinkhole. For instance, here’s an episode called — brace yourself — “Transitioning Part 1”:

Janice – the school guidance counselor and mother in Woke World – is counseling Charlie’s son Reggie who thinks they want to “transition” to Regg-ina. When the principal delivers the news that regulations require the school to hire a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer, Janice fears getting transitioned out (for not being diverse enough) in favor of Black, transitioning high school sophomore Regg-ina. Janice fights for her job, citing her Jewish heritage, but that doesn’t make her diverse enough. Charlie confides in Norm that his son is dating a white guy, leading to an increasingly ridiculous dialogue about: what if they get married, pregnant men, the color of the baby that comes out, where it would come out, and ends on a particularly ferocious Pete Davidson joke.

Wow, edgy. That will really upset some hypothetical liberals, won’t it?

In conclusion, we would like to thank the creators of “The New Norm” for sending us down a rabbit hole that led to the January 1971 pilot of “All in the Family,” which was actually funny. There are more laughs in this early scene than in all of rightwing humor put together, and it’s not even especially political, except in how the personal always is. Archie is explaining that courtship was a lot more proper in his and Edith’s day:

Archie (To Michael): When your mother-in-law and me was goin’ around together there were two whole years we never, I never … There was nothin’, absolutely nothin’! Not til the wedding night!

Edith: Yeah, and even then …

Those were the days, all right.

[The New Norm Show on Twitter / Woke World pitch at Internet Archive]

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