An excellent question. I’m sure he’s a corrupt scumbag selling access to GOP politicians and our foreign policy apparatus. Fuck him too.
Just because this kind of nonsense has been normalized by both parties doesn’t make it OK. All of it is fair game for anyone who wants to pursue it IMO. Our government is being sold by corrupt insiders all over the world to all kinds of different interest groups. The only people not getting any representation with our government are normal citizens of our country who aren’t rich enough to matter.
Legality, especially after 35 years of obvious legal corruption, is no longer an important question. If anything the biggest thing Trump has done is show just how blatant you can be without there being any way to do anything about it legally. This is because the entire system has failed and is actively helping people to corrupt it.
If a corporations purchasing department was run the way the federal government is run that company would go out of business because of massive fraud in a week or less. We’re literally witnessing the mafia style bust out of our entire country. And it’s all legal because the people doing the looting write the rules.
EDIT: Don’t worry I’m not giving free passes to anyone on corruption. This is literally the big thing that Warren is running on, and it needs to happen ASAP. Nothing else will matter until we clean house.
I’m not saying that sort by dollars, become comedy expert is a valid approach to identifying good comedy – although I think Burr’s, Chappelle’s and Rogan’s new specials are all excellent as well as very popular. I’m saying they don’t have any obligation to adhere to some specified wokeness threshold. Their only obligation is to be funny, and if they can do good comedy poking fun of wokeness then more power to them. I think they succeed.
The complaint is that the very idea of folks monitoring every possible offensive thing a comedian says and then ganging up to punish him if they deem something sufficiently offensive is intrinsically antithetical to standup comedy. That’s why comedians are so against this. If comedians can’t get up there and take risks and be edgy and twist ideas in perverse directions then what are we left with? How can stand up thrive and succeed if comedians, especially unestablished comedians, are afraid to take risks? So the complaint is not that the cancel culture warriors have succeeded, particularly with established guys like Chappelle or Rogan or Burr. But that if they do succeed they will neuter stand up comedy. And they might have incrementally succeeded with marginal standups who are coming up now or will in the future.
And the idea that Lenny Bruce would somehow be on anyone’s side but Chappelle in this whole thing is just laughable. Come on.
This is fine in theory and, where the practice matches that description, fine in practice, too. Where the practice is some yutz doing ching-chong-ring-rong shit in a conversational format, I’m not inclined to indulge the conceit that this is some brave experiment whose results are both unknowable and highly promising comedically. It’s exactly what it looks like - hacky, lazy shit that was a punchline on The Simpsons twenty fucking years ago.
Sure. But that’s the thing – a comedian really only needs to be “cancelled” if what they’re doing is pretty funny. Otherwise they’ll cancel themselves by being consistently lame and bad.
Having said that, when a comedian is trying out brand new stuff in front of an audience then I think they need plenty of room to fail.
There’s a YouTube making the rounds showing like five of these dudes making the same “attack helicopter” transgender joke. Just sad to see these once-brilliant comics become so lazy and predictable.
SNL is where mediocrities go to get paid and never improve, so no, I don’t think this holds up.
And the only comedian I can think of who’s been anything approaching ‘cancelled’ for stuff in a live venue is Michael Richards, who absolutely fucking sucked balls anyway and was clearly just coasting on the appeal of seeing Guy Who Played Kramer live and in person. So I still think the anti-cancelers are basically tilting at windmills.
Only if you went to Harvard or Yale. None of the dudes we’ve been talking about even went to college. They’re real stand ups.
Sure? But does the canceling actually have to be successful and widespread before the comedians push back against it? That’s obviously what some folks who mine out-of-context and offensive stuff want to happen. Seems fair game to make fun of them for it if the comedians can make it funny.
I don’t think SNL grades pay based on where you went to college. In case it’s not clear, I’m talking about this Shane Gillis guy getting un-hired from SNL. If he didn’t get unhired, he would just moulder there for a few years getting even lazier and even less funny.
“Does the thing have to be real for you to take complaints about it seriously?” Like, yeah. It does.
I never said any of that! If you don’t think it’s funny then you don’t think it’s funny. That’s fine. Who cares. In fact I started this whole conversation by saying that the comedian’s only obligation is to be funny, and if they can be funny by poking fun at a phenomenon that imo actually does threaten their profession if it gains traction, then more power to them. And if you don’t think that’s funny, that’s fine too.
Why? Woke people trying to get comedians into trouble is obviously a thing. Why isn’t that a valid thing for comedians to lampoon? Joe Rogan did a whole thing about vegan cats in his latest special, are vegan cats a more important and valid target for his humor than woke folks trying to compile dossiers of offensive stuff that comedians have said to tell on those naughty comedians? Both vegan cats and woke tattletales exist, so if he can milk either for comedy I say have at it. Even if one or the other isn’t a particularly pressing societal problem.
If someone can actually make it funny, then sure. If it’s just grousing about Kids These Days then that’s never going to be funny. And, separately from being funny or not, doesn’t even represent a valid complaint imo. Louis CK is still gigging!
Louis CK isn’t even relevant to this discussion, even if he couldn’t find work right now. Being a sexual predator is not analogous to saying offensive things on stage.
I get what you’re saying, but I think the fact that his career survived committing multiple sex crimes is basically fatal to the idea that a bunch of twitter tattle-tales is anything to worry about.