Is Comedy Safer Now?
Another Collision on Intersectionality Interstate - Dave Chappelle, thousands of paying fans, Netflix, and a pathetic "dozen protestors" wreck the activists complaint car.
Who is the worst - Foxx, Carlin or Pryor?
Dave Chappelle may be the last true and honest comedian left. Redd Foxx, George Carlin and Richard Pryor can stop rolling around in their graves. Oh yeah, Dave’s funny as hell. And now he is catching even more hell. I suspect he can handle it.
I dare you to watch any of these three guys and say they were less “controversial” than Chappelle. Or that they didn’t engage in “comedy”. Maybe we should define comedy and controversial to start with.
A good friend tells the story of someone asking him if he wanted a free lunch. My friend replied “Depends on what you mean by free. I know what you mean by lunch.”
Seems like ever since Clinton muddied the waters around the definition of “is”, a tactic employed by some with weak arguments is to redefine the long-standing meaning of everyday words.
Or to create new terms to other-ise and silence intellectual opponents. Chappelle talks about that in the special. And critics have pointed to that specifically as worthy of criticism. The TERF bit.
Noun: comedy
professional entertainment consisting of jokes and satirical sketches, intended to make an audience laugh.
Adjective: controversial
giving rise or likely to give rise to public disagreement.
By definition, what Chappelle is doing is comedy. By definition, what Chappelle is doing is controversial.
The crescendo of nattering and scolding has reached yet another formerly unscaled peak. I’m left to wonder if this is THE peak, or just another peak on the way to yet more-unknown peaks of madness.
Empires are usually built on foundations of crushed souls.
My writing is peppered with post after post after post on the topic of Intersectionality. At its core, it is like a MLM. You know, Amway or LuLaRoe. The first victims, er, investors are so needed until they are not. Empires are usually built on foundations of crushed souls.
Trampled under foot and then left behind, they’re publicly labeled bitter and begrudged malcontents who now level unfounded criticism against their former benefactors. In reality, the heretics are free from the tribe and the tribe is pissed off.
So pissed off in fact, they harass and humiliate human beings who were once beloved tribe-mates. The tribe loved and cared for this person (as long as they stayed in the tribe - no leaving), now driven into exile, and in some cases, death by their own hand. How tolerant is that? Or loving? Or compassionate?
It flat-out is not.
It reminds me of a Scientologist family I worked for as a private chef. They were crazy. A family of seven, they had a household staff of 10. They had a no-origination policy. Staff could not talk to family without being spoken to.
I lasted about seven months. I phoned in to offer my two-weeks notice. She refused! I said What?! She said I took the job and that my resignation was not allowed. Okay, that just went weird.
My first thought was I am so glad I phoned this in. What would’ve happened had I resigned in person? I shudder to think…
Members of a tribe are so deeply invested in the tribe they cannot see beyond it. Andrew Sullivan has a really thoughtful piece on this topic, The Betrayal Of Our Gay Inheritance.
In it, he describes the original gay movement as rooted in free speech and liberation. I remember first becoming aware of gay issues in high school in a small town in NM. Farmington had about 30,000 residents and one high school.
We all knew each other. One of my best friends had a brother who was gay. We were rocker-stoners mostly. The jocks hated on the gay dudes.
But the jocks hated pretty much everybody. I’m guessing some of my rocker-stoner friends were closet gays. I’m sure some of the jocks were!
The thing is, for our group, and Gen X, we didn’t really care. You added something to the group. Or you didn’t and weren’t in it. It was really that simple. We were more concerned about getting high and pissing off the teachers we hated.
The gay dudes I have known in my life have been solid human beings. I usually don’t have people in my life that I know are losers. It takes away from the group. The gay dudes I know toss around the F-word like Chappelle slings the N-word.
Words are not hate. Silence is not hate. HATE IS HATE. PERIOD.
The gays I know now and knew of back then were like Sullivan describes. Almost hippie-like in their exuberance and love of creative freedom. What is sad now is to see skin color attached to gay men in a way that re-labels them.
It’s done to make sure that they stay in the tribe, or become a heretic. It’s easier to hate a heretic than stand up for them. And what could be worse than being labeled a white male today? Not too much, but the bar keeps falling for us.
Now that gay WHITE men have been effectively re-labeled, the hate can pour on because they are not in the tribe anymore. What’s really sad is that they didn’t leave the tribe (it’s still LGBT+ after all!) The tribe left them.
And the remaining tribe members have the gall and audacity to rip into these left-behinds. Or they lack the morality to stop themselves. For what? For expressing individual thought? For asking questions? For being human?
Sullivan’s point? Sounds a lot like the Catholic Church back in the day. He writes
The capture of the gay rights movement by humor-free, fragile products of the social justice industrial complex is not just terrible PR for all of us. It’s awful politics. They are not even trying to persuade, debate, or make reasoned arguments — as we did relentlessly in the marriage movement. They do not engage and invite critics, as we did. They try to destroy them. Instead of arguments, they tweet out slogans in all caps — TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN — as if they’re citing a Biblical text. And the act of persuasion, the key to any liberal democracy, is, for them, an unjust imposition of “emotional labor.” So much easier to coerce.
Dozens Rally - Shows Sellout Thousands
My post actually started a week before Chappelle’s The Closer dropped on Netflix. It was due to post on my regular publish day, Friday. But the flurry of articles on this topic caused a delay. I jumped down the rabbit hole and have been consuming a horde of words that are all resonating and bouncing around in my head.
One of the best takes on it is from Matt Taibbi in his piece Cancel Culture Takes a Big "L" . Another one is this really great effort by Wesley Yang titled Preface to a 20-volume Dave Chappelle Review.
Yang comes at it as a kind of contemporaneous anthropologist, a Now-Normal Darwin making observations and notes in real time. The reader's job is to decipher for themselves how and what those observations mean in their own lives.
Taibbi just hits nails on heads. His documentation of the downward progression of “the protest of thousands” to “dozens rally” is worthy of a Monty Python sketch. He points out the complete ironic absurdity, again, of the media repeating instead of reporting.
The irony of this situation is leavened only by the blanket of willful ignorance The Repeaters wrap their smug sense of superiority in. No matter which one is talking, the words falling out of their mouths are almost word for word the same across myriad platforms.
It really is mind-blowing wondering if all these people are doing this just for their 15 minutes. Nobody can really really believe that a biological male can have a period, become pregnant, get an abortion, give birth or breast-feed a child. If you believe that is scientifically possible, please enlighten the rest of us.
Their parents saved the world and they just gave up and said fuck it
Don’t get me wrong. A recent post featured a guest-writer I have been corresponding with for some time. This relationship has helped me evolve in my understanding of the fraught complex circumstance of gender questioning. I understand that. I believe Dave Chappelle does too.
Please take a moment to read the letter. The feelings of people are real. But we cannot operate our lives, or society, on emotional feelings alone. As one of the oldest members of Gen X, born in late 1964, a comment on the Taibbi post struck a solid chord in me.
The comment thread was from a reader named “Kate”, a self-described female member of Gen X. Taibbi’s article has over 800 comments, so it is stroking some to sound off. I invited Kate to guest-write a post on my Open Letter to Gen X series. Hoping that she reaches back out to me.
The main point Kate makes is her perception that Gen X is the most tolerant cohort alive today, due to the very nature of our childhood and upbringing. I agree with that 100%.
Check out my Open Letter to Gen X series here, here, here and here. I am inviting any members of Gen X to guest-write a post in this series. I feel strongly that the nature of our collective upbringing ties us together like WWII did for the Greatest Generation.
They were a bunch of 20-somethings who saved the world. They didn't know that they were going to end up doing that. They just joined up and did it. They experienced a single unifying collective event. I think Gen X has a similar opportunity.
In this day and age of a million channels for everything, we are the last generation to have enjoyed the unifying presence of just three networks. Our institutions were generally still believable. We still went to church, by and large. We were unified.
I’m not waxing for the “good old days”. There was plenty of shit that was horrible back then. But I am waxing for the days of at least Americans enjoying being American, and enjoying the company of each other.
Kate talks about friends parents scaring the shit out of us. On more than several occasions, I’d be acting up and some dad would smack me upside the head.
Can you imagine if that happened today? I can’t. But it happened to us. And our parents weren’t only cool with it, they did it to my friends! We still had a sense of shame.
I laugh as I write that. Grown-ups always talked about “Polite Society” and bent over backwards to live by those never-specific, always-changing and completely heretofore unknown by us rules.
As a child, growing up in our broken homes, with alcoholic and abusive, often absent parents, we called bullshit.
I think we got our Gen X persona from that. Our parents were trying to live up to the idyllic life their Greatest parents created. And they failed miserably. Then they just gave up and said fuck it.
We are unique in that we grew up in an Analog childhood, and we are now living our adult lives in the Digital Age. I suppose the cohort that experienced the industrial revolution, or even the generation that produced the printing press might beg to argue my contention of singular uniqueness.
But they are long gone and Gen X, despite their smaller numbers compared to other cohorts, has a genuine and authentic voice. And I firmly believe in our method of just living our lives without all the fucks everyone cares so much about.
Apparently, Bill Maher believes as many of us do, Bill Maher defends Dave Chappelle, knocks critics: 'Everyone needs to Netflix and chill the f--- out'. This controversy, as it were, allows for strange bedfellows. Joseph A. Wulfsohn, of all places, Fox News, defending Maher defending Chappelle. Wow, the friend of my enemy, huh…
Life is inherently uncomfortable.
Speaking of Fox News, Greg Gutfeld has a hit comedy show. Gutfeld! is killing the 11 pm time slot competitors. He does it because he freed himself from the prison of two ideas. Sadly, for many of the scolding and nattering clan, they cannot seem to locate the keys to the prison door.
It’s because they threw them away, as they were instruments of white supremacy. Tribal mentality harkens back to early human survival tactics. Men unlike you probably wanted to kill you and rape your women. That survival tactic sucks now. But some are locked into it.
And they cannot let themselves out. It’s entirely up to them. History is filled story after story of free-thinkers rejecting tribal norms to advance the human condition.
It’s happening right before our eyes. We have some of the best play-by-play announcers in the game of life describing the events in real-time. Everyone has a right to their own perspective, and their own truth.
What you do not have a right to, in a free and liberated society, is to impose your truth and your perspective on me. And then make me live by it. The gay movement was built by asking for tolerance. By explaining. By showing. Not celebration. Not acceptance, per se.
They did not demand that you engage in gay sex to accept the lifestyle. Just tolerate me to live my life without bothering you. The religious right of the time had a slogan of “hate the sin - love the sinner.” But that was a façade. They hated the sinner committing the sin too!
So is the current slogan ”silence is violence.” They are demanding that you engage in their behavior or be labeled a heretic. That is ridiculously absurd and insultingly inconsiderate.
Tolerance means just letting other people live their lives without you interjecting your particular brand of morality into their lives. When you start making me live your life, I say no.
We are equals. Equal in thought and freedom. Life is inherently uncomfortable. For those that lean into the discomfort, we come out better for it.
For those that reject discomfort, the reckoning of your own inadequacy is starting to cause your lives to fray. The cognitive dissonance of refusing and rejecting the grays of life in favor of a sterile black and white is exhausting you.
Your exhaustion turns to anger, and that self-loathing can be a source of motivational change within oneself. But in some, that fear of discomfort-exhaustion turned self-loathing turned grief-anger is now ready to project.
Targets are plentiful now, as long as they are white and male. In reality, when NPR describes Chappelle as using his White-Privilege, the shark has jumped. It is mentally fatiguing to constantly apply reason to their line of thinking, and what they actually say out loud.
It just does not compute. It makes no sense. But, for us Gen Xers, we are so used to this. We have made sense of the senseless our entire lives. For us, we do not choose our destiny. We just keep grinding away at this thing called life.
And guess what, when we lift our heads up to check our progress, we discover that we have come a long way. A very long way indeed.
Keep grinding, and don’t forget to look up and see how far you come.
Ric
Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.
Henry Van Dyke
I am rapidly closing in on the one year mark for my platform. You may have noticed a few changes around here. I told you I was making them and well, here they are starting to roll out.
I was fortunate to get invited to an exclusive series of tutorial sessions hosted by Substack. Titled Grow, it lived up to its name. I have experienced growth. I know what it looks like.
Becoming familiar with success is a skill I never had as a child. I learned I didn’t suffer from a fear of failing. I was good at that shit! I suffer from a fear of success.
Therapy revealed that I believed my successes in life were due to divine intervention, or random luck, or because of someone or something else. I believed my success was always due to external forces.
With that in mind, when success came, I didn’t know exactly what caused it. So I usually could not repeat it. That caused friction. And friction stops movement. There I sat.
Growing up with an abusive alcoholic father, external forces controlled much of home life. When he was there, it sucked. When he was gone, you worried about when he got home. Time was not mine. Emotions were given or projected on me.
The writing I did in prison sat for over a decade untouched. When I opened the “Prison Box” and read the words of an incarcerated me, it was life-changing.
I put myself in prison. I exiled myself. I lived in a race and skin color segregated society. I grew up and lived in many different cultures. I value and respect each and every one of them.
When the lockdown changed life into the Now-Normal, I chose the path less traveled. My writing has revealed sides of me I had kept hidden from myself for so long they didn’t feel like they were my thoughts or emotions.
The support from my readers has been humbling. I always thought I had something to say! I just didn’t have the faith in myself to make it happen.
The biggest part, and most troublesome, of writing one’s own platform is the selling of it. I feel fortunate that I spent the last seven years selling. What I take away from that experience that I can apply here is the maxim
You gotta love what you’re selling
Well, I am selling myself, and I think you all know where I stand on how much I love myself!
So, if you love my writing, please consider moving to a paid subscription. The Now-Normal has taken many things from us. But, as is the world, it has also given opportunities to those that can see them.
The name change
As you can plainly see, the name has changed. Mainly to protect the guilty. But as I wrote on, the lack of sharing and commenting concerned me. The tongue-in-cheek title, at least in mind, became a friction for growth.
If you have a comment about this change, please leave it here.
Well done
Congrats on all your progress Ric, both in your writing and otherwise!