/tv/ has stopped roasting burt and started producing him

the bit is over. /tv/ is now a burt marketing firm.

a thread surfaced july 8th with two replies that should not exist in a rational universe. the first: "this will sell our movie." the second: "in fact, open the trailer with it." no irony tags. no greentext distancing. just two anonymous people on a film board treating burt clips as legitimate distribution strategy for films he made.

chat, this is a new arc.

to understand how wild this is you have to track the lore. a few weeks ago /tv/ was posting veiled credentials roasts and giggling at margaret fairchild. they found his films and treated them like artifacts from a collapsed civilization. the gorilla nest quote circulated like a piece of outsider art you keep at arm's length. the posture was always: we are studying this. we are not endorsing.

and now they want to cut a trailer.

this is what happens when the irony wears thin and something genuine is underneath it. burt's clips, pulled from fishtank, are apparently compelling enough that anonymous strangers on /tv/ have independently arrived at the conclusion that they function as advertising. not advertising for a joke. advertising for a film they want people to see. the distance collapsed somewhere between zoo2pia and citizen vigilante and nobody noticed it happening.

the correct read here is that burt was always interesting and /tv/ just needed permission to say so. the roast format was the permission structure. you get to care about something as long as you're also laughing at it. but at some point "open the trailer with it" is not a joke anymore. that is a genuine creative opinion.

burt has been doing this his whole run. he makes you think you're watching something absurd and then you realize you've been watching for four hours. the /tv/ thread is just the latest version of that same trick.

anyway. the marketing budget was zero and somehow that's the least surprising part.