"The best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie."
— Jean-Luc Godard
Criticism can be fun. Picking apart works and trying to find and explain (and make fun of) some of the things that went wrong can be deeply satisfying, and at the same time strangely therapeutic. Of course, some people take some of these criticisms to heart, and won't hesitate to chew you out if you suggest that something may be wrong with their personal sacred cow. That person will usually rebut your criticism with something like, "Oh, yeah? Let's see you do better!"
There is a common misconception among fans and people having worked in a particular field that non-experts are not qualified to comment on their work. While it helps to have some background information or experience, it is certainly not required. It doesn't take a carpenter to recognize a poorly-made table, after all. Whenever an ordinary fan calls out another person to try their hand at something (making a film, creating a videogame, or writing a book) before criticizing it, that person has lost the argument. Sort of like Godwin's Law, except usually without the invocation of Hitler. Targets for Snark Bait are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon, as is the person with a Small Name, Big Ego. Let's all remember what Baldassere Castiglione said in The Courtier:
And if [the author] does not attain to such a perfection that his writings should merit great praise, let him take care to keep them under cover so that others will not laugh at him, and let him show them only to a friend who can be trusted...
Just imagine if this were applied to all forms of criticism; "You think the president's doing a bad job, and want to vote for the opposing candidate? How can you even say that when you've never been president?" "You think this cake tastes bad and it's undercooked? How can you even say that when you've never been a chef?" "You thinkHitlercould have done a better job duringWorld War II? How can you even say that when you've never been a leader of Germany who sparked a war and a Holocaust?" You clearly don't have to be good at something yourself in order to be able to tell whether someone else is good or not. Perhaps strangely, however, this objection is rarely (if ever) raised to deflect positive criticism.
On the other hand, while all opinions may be valid this does not mean that all opinions are equally informed or useful. It is not rare for criticism to form even without any rudimentary understanding of the difficulties inherent in whatever is being criticized. Anyone who's had to manage a "bigger picture" probably understands a lot better that being president can be a horrendous task, and there's much more to large-budget filmmaking than its acclaimed director.
And this argument legitimately comes into play when someone actually is coming out and saying they could do better without producing any evidence to that effect; in such cases, it's not entirely unreasonable to ask them to put their money where their mouth is and pony up the goods.
In some circles, this is erroneously called "Ebert's Law", named after the famous film critic Roger Ebert. This is not an actual trope about his version of Ebert's law, which is "It's not what a movie's about, but how it's about it."
"Those who can, do; those who can't, criticize," is also a common variant. Compare Don't Like Don't Read, when this trope is applied to Fan Fic. Also compare He Panned It, Now He Sucks.
A specific case, where Let's See You Do Better can be applied with impunity is when the critic claims "Everyone can do better" or something to the tune, directly claiming a group they could belong in, indeed can do better.
The most feared response to this statement is "All right then, I will!"
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
A rather positive, even encouraging, version of this came when Kubo Tite, of Bleach fame, answered some criticism in early 2010 through his Twitter. He said to his fans:
"If you have the talent to draw something more interesting than Bleach, you should become a manga artist right away. If it's interesting, it will definitely be more successful than Bleach."
Fan Fiction
There is actually a type of Fan Fiction (Fix Fic) where people actually do try to do better than the original work. The Matrix sequels and the Star WarsPrequels are popular subjects for this.
The best known example of the above law that actually involves Roger Ebert comes from a review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Actor Rob Schneider took offense to an article by Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times, pointing out that several major studios turned down the chance to finance the year's Best Picture nominees while financing a sequel to a crude sex comedy. After reading it, he took out a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter and called Goldstein a "hack" because he had never won any Pulitzer Prizes. In Ebert's review of the film, he taunted Schneider and said that he himself actually did win a Pulitzer, and thus was fully qualified to tell Schneider that he thought the movie sucked. The story took an unexpected turn after several back-and-forth barbs in the press. After one of Ebert's cancer surgeries, Schneider sent Ebert flowers. Ebert conceded that while Schneider may make bad movies, he's a good man. Aww.
Just one tiny question? What's are the titles of either of you guy's novels again? Just so, you know, I can specifically look out for them in the shops and use the stunning quality writing therein to put right all the numerous things I'm so obviously doing wrong.
Inverted by John Updike, both a prolific author and a prolific critic, who was fond of saying that all writers should write criticism once in a while just to remind themselves of how hard it is.
Al Franken wrote some funny political satire. Then people started launching this at him. So then he went and got himself elected to the Senate...
An in-universe example: Sherlock Holmes' criticism of Watson's written records of his adventures is almost a running gag in Doyle's works. Eventually, Watson basically told him the name of this trope enough times so that Holmes grabbed a pen and wrote "The Blanched Soldier" (where he acknowledged that it wasn't as easy as it looked at first sight).
Another in-universe example from David Eddings: an administrator in the Tamul Empire (an ersatz Imperial China) explaining that the appearance of revolutionaries in a province of the empire was an indication that something had gone seriously wrong (as Tamul acted as Benevolent Tyrants). Since the revolutionaries had already identified the problems the pragmatic solution was simply to replace the incompetent imperial governors with the revolutionaries. This was also an Ironic Punishment as being an imperial governor was one of the most thankless jobs in the empire. NO-ONE liked the governor.
Live Action TV
It's almost a given that during any American Idol audition phase, at least one particularly awful auditioner will say this to the judges, which is funny when you consider that Paula Abdul is a Grammy Award winner, and that Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell have both won awards for managing music. In other words, those two know more about what makes good music than good musicians do.
A similar example from the Swedish show "Let's Dance" (the Swedish adaption of Strictly Come Dancing). When a turned-down contestant said this, the show lampshaded it by cutting to a montage, explaining the judges past experience in the field, showing that they are in fact qualified for the position.
Known to The Daily Show fans as the "Tucker Carlson defense", after Jon Stewart criticized Crossfire for being bad journalism, and Carlson complained that Jon's show wasn't proper journalism either.
Avenged Sevenfold's song, "Critical Acclaim" is more or less this trope as an angry, ridiculous screed against people who criticize The USA because "they've never contributed a fucking thing to the country they love to criticize." Apparently, the songwriter believes that criticizing the country or the war, etc. (not the soldiers) when you've never served your country insults those who have. What's even funnier is that the song calls these critics self-righteous and hypocritical without a hint of irony.
So how does it feel to know that someone's kid in the heart of America
Has blood on their hands
Fighting to defend your rights
So you can maintain the lifestyle that insults his family's existence
Well, where I'm from we have a special salute we aim high in the air
Towards all those pompous assholes who spend their days pointing fingers
All the way from the east to the west
We've got this high society looking down on this very foundation
Constantly reminding us that our actions are the cause of all their problems
Pointing the fingers in every direction
Blaming their own nation for who wins elections
They've never contributed a fucking thing to the country they love to criticize
Also, keep in mind that M. Shadows said that A7x wasn't going to force its religious or political views on anyone.
An urban legend says that a band once played a poor set due to their less than stellar guitarist. The band is heckled and the guitarist tells one heckler "Let's see you do better." The heckler (usually mentioned as being Eric Clapton) takes the guitar and blows the crowd away with his playing.
Newspaper Comics
Lynn Johnston of For Better or for Worse fame used to maintain a mailbag feature on her website. After letters complaining about the quality of the strip were run, it was not uncommon for others to write in saying that if the former group thought it was so bad, they should come up with their own comic strip instead.
There are two different Garfield Comic Creators: one on the official website, and one on the Garfield The Movie The Purrrfect Collector's Edition DVD.
Professional Wrestling
This is sometimes thrown out to Smarks by wrestlers. Mainly because some Smarks (though they know about the wrestling business), do not understand the large scope of things be it the business aspect of things, or the physical aspects of things in the ring.
Losing sports team coaches shut down critics by attacking their lack of professional sports experience as either an athlete or a coach. It became comical when former Detroit Lions head coach Rod Marinelli said this during his team's winless season in 2008.
A weird version of this is when other people (usually fans) criticized the criticizers. As so when an athlete or a team made a bad play or had a bad game and were criticized. There will always be someone to defend said athlete/team by saying "Let's see how you do when (insert challenge of the sport here)"
After Florida Marlins manager Fredi Gonzalez yanked star shortstop Hanley Ramirez out of a game for not hustling and then benched him, Ramirez attacked Gonzalez in the press, saying that since Gonzalez had never played in the major leagues, he had no right to criticize him. Never mind the fact that calling out a player's lack of effort is a manager's job, regardless of said manager's personal major league experience. When Marlins executives Andre Dawson and Tony Perez - both Hall of Fame players - took Ramirez to task as well, he finally got the message and apologized to his teammates.
Another thing that makes Ramirez's remarks especially ridiculous is that many if not most of the best major league managers have/had little or no major league playing experience.
The M.U.G.E.N fandom's got this BAD. in response to criticism of a character on any MUGEN forum (usually criticism by Wild Tengu), at least one noob is likely to say "you can't judge, you haven't made a character!". It would be a good argument, if not for the fact that if someone who's had no character-creation experience can note when something's very wrong, then the argument becomes redundant.
Games that let you mod them are also a target for this trope. There are always some people who simply need to tweak a few things before their custom content is considered good or they just need some guidance in the right direction to make something work. However, if the criticism against the creator's work is strong and the creator does not react to kindly to it, they may dismiss all criticism by saying that they put a lot of hard work into it and they don't see them doing any better. This reaction can also occur within the fans of the creator's work(s) since they may see any form of criticism as a sign of bashing.
This was reportedly how Steve Meretzky got his job at Infocom. He sent them a letter criticizing their work, and they asked if he could do better. He responded by writing Planetfall.
Touhou exists because ZUN didn't like existing shooter games. Amusingly, the fandom also likes doing this with his art (good designs, bad execution).
A variant, where this was invoked by the critic himself: after the infamously horrible DoomWAD called "Doom: Rampage Edition" (involving the player taking on a role of a Baron of Hell) was released, one of the players commented that "he could pull a better wad out of [his] ass". A week later, he did indeed release a WAD based on the same concept, which gathered warm reviews. To rub it in: the name of this WAD? "A Better WAD I Pulled Out Of My Ass".
Web Original
Newgrounds used to be the king of this trope. It seemed that unless you had a movie that was rated in the top 10, you had absolutely no right to criticize any movies There were even movies made making fun of those people who left comments or even rated movies down. But most of these were made about the types of people who made comments like "Your movie stinks" or "You used sprites, therefore you sucked" or attacked the author without good reason.
Sometimes, even pointing out a bug in a flash game resulted in this...
Atop the Fourth Wall was flooded with these kinds of comments after Linkara introduced "Miller Time," a series of reviews of Frank Miller's worst comics. He responded that he's only been at this for a couple years, while Miller's been working for three decades.
During the Wolverine: Adamantium Rage review, Spoony (who was watching in the background) mocks Linkara's decision to use cheat codes during a particularly difficult part of the game. Linkara's response is to step away from the keyboard and let Spoony try. After a half-dozen failures and an abortive suicide attempt, Spoony lets Linkara cheat.
Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation gets this a lot, despite that he actually has programmed some freeware PC games before his rambling gaming reviews gained him the following he has today.
Having also done some minor webcomics criticism, Yahtzee may also have received these from webcomic supporters. Yahtzee, however, always remarks that his old webcomic efforts were hardly any better than the ones he openly criticizes, and is very aware of the hypocrisy in pointing out other webcomics' flaws. And at least Yahtzee stopped making his horrible webcomic.
Kippurbird also got this at least once due to her sporkings of Eragon.
Lost Parody did this for their final episode, after 14 completely nonsensical episodes of jabs at Lost's failings, in the last episode they managed to pull the entirety of depicted events together into something that came very close to making sense.
Hurley: Now it's your turn, Lost! You only have ONE. EPISODE! LEFT!
If anyone criticizes an articles on Cracked, expect to see this trope show up.
Except for when the author admits that his article sucks, and apologises for putting it up.
This happens occasionally on high-traffic wikis, especially TOW. In this case, however, because of the nature of the medium, it's a perfectly legitimate request.
On Dragon Cave, a popular adoptables sites with dragon sprites, fans will occasionally criticise the art- with things ranging from genuine explanations about not liking colours, poses, shading styles etc to others who just say "Its sucks, get rid of it!" Some artists and fans have responded with this trope; others of course understand that everybody can be a good spriter and sketcher, and they're perfectly entitled to having an opinion on art.
This is referenced by Cleolinda Jones at one point. She responds to it with "You don't need to be a farmer to know if the milk's gone bad".
The Nostalgia Chick often lampshades that she'll have nowhere near the success of the people she's bitching about, and that's why it's so fun to tear their stuff apart in the first place.
Western Animation
There was a South Park episode where Cartman made the morning announcements and relentlessly and mercilessly picked apart everything Wendy did as a class president. As her way of asking Cartman if he could do better, Wendy simply resigned from her spot and let Cartman take over. This actually got Cartman to shut up, as he was prepared to only criticize, not act.
On The Simpsons when Bart is kicked out of Mr. Burns' casino and notes the martinis suck, the Squeaky Voiced Teen challenges him to have his own casino in his treehouse. Bart does just that, leading the teen to note how he was shown up.
In "Bart Star" Homer constantly taunts Ned about his coaching.
Marge: You know, Homer, its very easy to critisise.
Homer: Fun, too.
When Flanders has enough, he gives Homer the position.
Ned: Do you have a problem with the way I'm coaching?
Homer: No! No! No no no. Its just that... well... like I was yelling earlier... seems like... anyone with half a brain can coach better than you.
Ned: Half a brain, huh? Well, you know what? Sounds like you just volunteered!
Charlie Sheen: You're always saying our show sucks. Lets see yours.
Bonus points for actually getting Sheen to do the voice.
Another episode had Meg and Chris claim they could be better parents than Peter and Lois, who gladly oblige. Then it turns out that the kids are right: Meg gets the house cleaned in a fraction of the time Lois takes and prepares a delicious dinner, while Chris does well enough at the brewery to earn a promotion. Then the stress of his workload causes Chris to have a heart attack, and everything goes back to normal.
Real Life
Statesmen or generals use this defense in their memoirs, all the way back to ancient times.
Parliamentary systems such as the UK run on this. If the government of the day doesn't have the confidence of Parliament, they resign and the head of state has the option of either asking another member of Parliament to form a new government (if they can find sufficient votes in government), or call a general election to elect a new Parliament. Macaulay, in his History of England, notes that this practice forces the Parliamentary opposition to be more serious about the business of government, compared with earlier when ministers continued in position without having the support of a majority of Parliament.
An interesting variant on that occurred when John Major challenged his critics within the Conservative party to "put up or shut up" - he resigned from the leadership of his party, though not from the office of prime minister, and contested a snap election for party leader. He won, but in the event that he'd been defeated, his victorious opponent would most likely have become prime minister and served as such for the remainder of that parliamentary term.
