image by J²_Chicago on flickr
First thing this morning, I woke to discover that some beautiful person had made an excellent recording of Chris Colfer’s interview at the New Yorker Festival. It was 90 minutes of pure early-morning delight for me — but that said, I could be pretty happy listening to that particular actor read the Fanny Farmer Cook Book for 90 minutes.
But there are things I’d love to hear him discuss. Whether he wants to discuss them is another story, and it’s my impression that he often skirts more serious and deeper questions, partly because he’s a very private individual in a world where that’s almost impossible, and partly because he’s 21 and hell, still figuring stuff out.
But a lot of people are disappointed and some are downright angry. Apparently the younger fans took too long asking questions and declaring their undying love and the moderator asked questions that are common questions, and the answers to them known.
And yeah, the questions were old ones, but Chris Colfer handled the questions so well that it seemed fresh enough, while basic enough that a non-fan would go away with a good base too. The quality moments were those when it was easy to forget the moderator existed and the fans and Chris Colfer were just having fun.
So yeah, what would you have asked if you’d had the chance? We’ll try and make up answers 😉
Deconstructing Glee 
I’ve become fond of this standby I’ve heard at cons a lot recently, “What do you wish someone would ask you that you’ve never been asked before?”
Also, wow, this New Yorker’s own recap does a huge disservice to the event: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival/2011/10/sighing-sympathy-chris-colfer-glee.html
This is the question I would have asked, had I had an opportunity:
I am the mother of a five-year-old boy who considers Kurt Hummel to be his best friend. But Spence is autistic, and Kurt Hummel is his only friend. In the past, you’ve joked that the lunch ladies in the school cafeteria were YOUR only friends. Could you speak to the topic of loneliness, and its role in make-believe, imagination, and your own creative life?
Yeah, that NYer recap is horrendous…
It’s very surfacy isn’t it? Kinda getting sick of the whole “I want a gay bestie” and “adorable gay icon to fall in love with” thing.
Oh! that’s a really good question!
You see why I was so very, very angry? 😉
… so what you’re saying is that you were really just bitter about not getting to ask your question?
I loved the interview. Yes, it seemed like most of the audience were teenage fangirls (and I am super impressed by Chris’ infinite patience and humor and understanding toward every single fan), but he did manage to give new answers even to old questions. I think he has grown much more comfortable in what he’s willing to share, as a celebrity who’s very spotlighted and relatively young. I’m fairly certain that he’s never talked this in-depth about his school experiences, or about how he feels about being a gay icon.
In terms of the fangirls, what exactly can the New Yorker do? Make the event 21+ with an open bar? The people who show up are the people who will show up and if they want to spend their question-time asking about the cologne he wears and kissing Darren and such, it seems like that was the mentality that most of the audience was at, so if the goal is keeping the audience happy, then I suppose it was achieved, right? It makes me think of Darren’s concert in London, where the fangirls singing along actually were drowning him out at times.
I think the New Yorker probably is not used to this sort of situation, and didn’t think about it beforehand (and therefore didn’t prescreen questions), but if 90% of the ticketholders were teen fangirls, than I guess they deserve to have the event catered toward them. It is unfortunate because Chris is really smart and has a lot of interesting things to say, and with an intellectual event like the New Yorker, it could have gone much more in-depth. He should do one of those really long one-on-one interviews like Inside the Actor’s Studio or something, where there isn’t really audience participation. I will say, though, that the organizers should have at least kept to one question/one person. I’m sure there would still be a lot of people unhappy, but if there are that many people there and limited time, that seems basic.
I must add that I thought it was particularly amusing that Chris turned the interviewer’s “probe the issue” into a double entendre, if only because she was fairly well-researched, but I doubt she had read all of the sex spoilers from the day before, and she probably had no idea why people were laughing.
I don’t think there was any reason to set an age limit (though a bar would have been AWESOME) on the event, but as Racheline pointed out in her post, a fangirl is not uninterested in in-depth questions; a teenager is not opposed to hearing Chris Colfer speak to topics not previously discussed. The fact that this was a highly motivated audience — of all ages — was a reason for the interviewer to take things further, be more inquisitive, ask more searching questions, not the opposite.
But because they equated his fan base with youth and inexperience, they took the easy, superficial road, which was a great disappointment to some and of no use to the many.
They didn’t have to exclude those who were not adults from the venue, but they could absolutely have held them to an adult standard of behavior and conducted the interview as though it were being held for the benefit of intelligent, informed adults. Neither of those things happened.
The interviewer did not seem to have her act together, generally. She prefaces a clip by talking about the crucial relationship between Kurt and his father, and then shows a clip of CC singing Pink Houses? And then a clip of the prom outfit lecture? In what way do either of those clips illustrate the deeper nature of the Kurt/Burt relationship?
The same way she said she was going to show a clip of The Kiss — the audience, including Chris, got excited, and then she shows KAROFSKY kissing Kurt. For those who only listened to audio, the shock of that moment was palpable — except to Susan Morrison, who looked completely unaware of her gaff and totally bewildered by the reaction of the crowd (and CC).
I don’t know why I am so bitter that they did not meet my expectations — I don’t know why I feel like my needs as a Chris Colfer fan are more deserving than another’s. That is just hubris, I suppose. But I do know that if they had brought the intellectual level of the discussion UP from its very pedestrian tone, no one would have felt offended or disappointed. It would have hurt no one for this to have been a more elevated conversation in which Colfer was allowed to speak to a broader range of his talents and interests, if we had truly been given a talk with Chris Colfer, rather than a Kurt Hummel redux.
Yes — but I wrote that in the original post. I said I was livid at not being able to ask a question — a real question! not just a lot of emoting. How often are we going to be given the chance to get into this guy’s head? I think not often at all. And I feel like that was taken from me — not necessarily by the weeping teens, but because it was all so poorly moderated. And I was angry as hell about it. And I thought it was symptomatic of an huge lack of insight brought to the event by its planning team.
I’m finally calming down on the subject of all the teen girls, though!
You do have a point. I completely forgot how odd I thought those clips you brought up were. And they could have talked about Pink Houses, especially in the context of the last episode, but just to show it as an example of the great relationship between Kurt and Burt and then talk about the relationship? If I’m remembering right, they didn’t show the coming out scene, or the scene at the end of Laryngitis, or the sex talk, which are probably considered the most iconic scenes with those two.
I think when I listened I was focusing more on Chris and some of the fangirl questions (some of them were really good and better than the interviewers; you are right), and was impressed that he went into depth about some things that he hasn’t really seemed comfortable talking about more than superficially before, so I kind of didn’t notice the questions. I think your point is more that the interviewer was tailoring the whole thing down to who she thought the audience was, when she could have brought it up base don the fact that she’s presumably smart (New Yorker editor) and Chris is smart and a great interview, and the audience knew and cared enough about him to follow? Sorry if I kind of missed it before. Since you were there, what did you think the age and gender mix was actually like, just out of curiosity?
Also, I thought that the actual question you had was really good, and something that I would love to hear Chris’ perspective on. And I was kind of surprised that they didn’t prescreen questions — isn’t that kind of usual for something like this? To avoid the whole “I forgot my question but I love you” or “I have three questions and nobody is going to stop me while I go ahead and ask them, despite the fact that there are more people waiting than will get a chance” or “I am the second person asking this today” kind of thing. Or don’t people often written submit audience questions and then the best ones are picked out and handed to the interviewer? I am a bit surprised actually that the New Yorker, as such an intellectual publication, doesn’t do something like that.
I wrote somewhere else that of the 450 in attendance, probably 375 were under 25, and probably 250 of those were under 20. But it’s hard for me to say, because I was at the front of the line with the uber-hard-core, and those were ALL girls under the age of 20, just about as far as the eye could see. So the people at the back of the line, and therefore the back of the theater, are kind of a mystery to me. It was at least 90% female.
I haven’t been to NYer Festival before, as I was never able to snag tickets before, so I don’t know what the usual Q&A regime is for them. But the fact that they sent people in before the show to tell the audience at least 4-5 times NOT to film anything and yet couldn’t be bothered to give the same sort of “Question Responsibly” warning seems pretty pathetic.
But I’m okay in the aftermath. I thought I was going to continue to be upset for a couple of days, but in the end, I got to see Chris Colfer chat, and he was darling, and he’s so very smart and gracious… I just hope The New Yorker gets enough feedback that they understand they could have handled the situation and this type of celebrity a lot more effectively.