The far right want women barefoot in the kitchen, where have you been?
Seconded. I feel like the real story of this special is “famed and talented comedian is driven insane by Twitter.” A lot of the show is him presenting his version of various online arguments and why he was right. I admit that I have done this myself occasionally, and talked to real people about the various ghosts and phantasms that populate the internet. Every time I have done so though I have cringed internally the entire time, since it is the most boring and uninteresting thing you could talk about to another live human being. Chappelle can kind of make it watchable since he’s an extremely talented comedian, but it is not his best work and it’s not that funny.
If anything I think Chappelle’s show brings out the supernatural horror element of social media. At one point in the special Chapelle talks about a friend who was quite possibly driven to suicide by Twitter bullying. And I was immediately reminded of my reaction to watching Occulus, that ok, there is this spooky mirror that drives people to suicide. Why are you trying to spend more time with with the mirror? Leave that mirror alone. Or as other people have formulated, that Twitter is a Madness Rune. If you stare at it, it will drive you mad. Some people will be driven mad quickly, others slowly, but it will happen if you stare at it long enough.
That’s just a rare sociopath. It sucks, but are they really going to come out of the woodwork in droves, insecure ego and all? Who’s going to ask for a certificate, and how discriminative would it be to less “feminine” women?
The issue with Joanne, if you have the time and are ok with the performance, is explored by Natalie Wynn or the shorter video from Lindsay Ellis on the cultural influences. I need to watch them again, cause my privilege makes me forget those arguments keep making the rounds.
Does it? Seems crystal to me, in so far as that doesn’t define a whole personality and look on life. It just another thing on the pile, does it matter to anything?
EDIT: sorry, was too tired to finished the thought. What I mean at the end is what does it matter to finding a common ground on their struggles on their today problems?
Yes, those ones.
They love how France treats Racism (by not acknowledging it at all) and they would love to treat sexism in the exact same way (by not acknowledging it) because then they can get away with treating women like shit (like the french do with their minority populations).
Idk I think Twitter and your online brand/identity is a huge part of the lives of young people now. Why is social media bullying a thing? Kids can just turn it off right? I watched my ex wife and her Facebook gang create all this drama online with PTAs and local moms and then they’d all gather and talk about it. And whoever was on the out that week wasn’t invited. That shit follows you into real life. Daphne perhaps felt ostracized by her own community because of what happened to her on Twitter and it was too much.
One of the things I think Dave is saying when he says “stop punching down on my people” is leave comedians out of your culture wars. I don’t agree with this perspective fwiw, if you’re going to promote your shows on Twitter you gotta take the shit sandwiches it regularly serves you. There’s definitely a view among many comedians that wokeness or cancel culture are stifling comedy, in the same way conservatives and the religious right did back in the 20th century (that feels weird to say). Dave, along with Joe Rogan, who know they are too big to be canceled, have been making themselves targets to essentially tank outrage for other comedians. The two of them have been touring the country trying to piss off the woke crowd intentionally.
To compare Dave Chappelle to a useless meathead like Joe Rogan is unfair to Chappelle, I think.
It’s not unfair, they’ve been touring together all year. They’re wrapping up this month.
https://www.ticketmaster.com/dave-chappelle-joe-rogan-tickets/artist/2657679
Joe Rogan is an idiot and not a talented comedian though.
I respect Chappelle less knowing this.
I have to admit this formulation made me inwardly chuckle.
“Hold aggro man, c’mon, hold aggro!”
“I’m losing it. Need to find someone else to offend!”
Which seems more likely, that Dave Chappelle is actually interested in defending cis women’s ownership of the historical travails of women…or that he doth protest too much about trans women?
I was surprised at how much of his act was about trans people. I had heard about some controversy and I don’t personally have a problem with him making jokes about it, but it just goes on and on and on. It’s gotta be like half the show, at least. There are some bits I enjoyed, but overall it felt very defensive where the goal was more to explain his views than it was to tell jokes and be funny. Whether you think there’s merit in what he’s trying to express or not, I don’t feel like he did a particularly artful job of communicating his message. At a minimum saying things like “gender is a fact” when he most likely meant “biological sex is a fact” makes him look like kind of an idiot and gives his haters something easy to latch onto.
I’ll agree with that, when the pandemic, an outrage comedic goldmine, gets maybe twenty seconds and another topic in 2021 gets 30 minutes, there’s a bone being picked.
Article on CNN that has the title all about Chappelle but never actual mentions anything about his act at all:
Have not seen the special, and I don’t plan to, but I read this
Which is a great read.
The idea of “free-thinking” or “doing your own research” or “just asking questions” is just bad, especially when it is propped up by individuals as a faux intellectual argument.
My problem with Chappelle’s special is that he wants the regard of an intellectual without being held to the accompanying standard of rigor. I’m fine with comedy that relies on contrived analogies and crude caricatures; being a real-deal cultural critic, on the other hand, comes at the expense of your comedic license. It’s a difficult balancing act, and while he succeeded in just enough places in a couple of his previous shows, he fell gracelessly from the wire in this last one. It has become impossible for me to ignore that Chappelle tends to employ his intellectually dishonest analogies not to clarify the hypocrisy or shortcomings of liberal orthodox thinking, but to excuse bad thinking and behavior by way of obfuscation. (The DaBaby, Kevin Hart, and Louis CK “jokes” being glaring examples.) When the laughs are few and far between, and you’ve planted yourself smack dab in the culture wars raging against criticism, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be a free-thinker who doesn’t believe you should have to answer for your thoughts. You can’t camouflage your self-interested rationalizations as an undertaking of a greater noble cause while having nothing besides judgment, condescension, and grandstanding to offer as proof. And that is where the free-thinker and liberal orthodoxy overlap: They prefer judgment and grandstanding to insight.
This is strikingly similar to a lot of the right wing grifter mindset. Attempt to make some sort of intellectual argument or point on a subject, but when you are challenged on what you say, you can’t just say “it is comedy” or “censorship” or anything else.
It is disappointing, because, while I didn’t enjoy all of his last few specials, I felt like there was enough interesting in there to make them worthwhile. It sounds like the latest one is all of the bad stuff.
But what if that’s just the opinion of the guy who wrote that piece, and not actually true?
I guess I am willing to take that chance, I found his spouting off about people getting mad about his previous jokes the worst part of his previous stand ups, and it sounds like he just hasn’t given up ranting.
Sad too, the guy is really smart and funny, but he has a serious case of ‘free thinker’ mentality that he thinks isolates him from criticism.
That’s reasonable. Honestly, having watched it myself, I didn’t find it “funny” in the traditional sense, as it was a lot more just talking about some weird issues.
But at the same time, if you look at the rotten tomatoes coverage of this, the difference in take from the critics and the audience seems quite stark.
Also see: Jon Stewart and descendants. It doesn’t matter how much I agree with them, “it’s just a comedy” sometimes isn’t good enough if people are taking your word seriously and mistakes happen (at least).
lol coldplay
I think the argument that you can’t just handwave away criticism on the basis that you were 'just telling jokes", is absolutely legitimate.
However, I think that Chappelle’s complaint isn’t simply that people are criticizing him, but rather that he’s got a bunch of people criticizing him who never even saw his work themselves, and are instead just repeating criticisms of him that they read on the internet. In those cases, I think that would be a fair complaint on his part.