Aziz Ansari's 'Master of None' on Netflix

new Netflix special is great, set is very smartly put together and def the best handling of the "comedian navigating strange new woke culture" type material that people have been trafficking in recently (Chappelle, uh, Louis CK I guess...)

It sounds like a brutal proposition on paper

true of most standup

Also opens and closes w the Velvets, a touch that works v well

I liked this too. He's way more likeable than Chappelle or Louis (even before the creepy perv stuff came to light), plus seems genuinely reflective and empathetic.

yeah my wife went in all prepared to hate it (I guess she'd read some negative things beforehand) but her reaction turned out to be v much the opposite to what she expected. I think his genuine contrition and self-criticism go a long way, and are also interesting to see worked out on-stage. And it's funny!

agree. i was always a lukewarm fan at best but he did a good job with this.

might his best thing yet...? I've liked his other stuff ok, incl the series in the thread title, but with reservations. I didn't really have any reservations with this, it seemed like a leap forward.

heh just remembered that i saw him close out a big comedy festival tour like 5 years ago... preceded by Chris Hardwick and Louis CK

ew

looking forward to this as some fairly reactionary people I know seem to have liked it. It helps that his infraction was pretty grey area; hard to imagine Louis CK being able to rebound in the same way. I'm not saying he never could, but it would take some monumental effort on his part and he doesn't seem to have bothered even starting.

yeah the big difference is that its apparent that Aziz *made an effort* (part of which is this special) - Louis basically dgaf

the weird thing about Louis in that sense is that just from a standup comedy purist POV - like, what makes for great/interesting performances - Louis doesn't realize what a goldmine this is as a performer, what a rich vein it is to mine. you wanna hold up standup as this venue for examining the unspoken and going deep into the truth maaaaaaan and then yr given this golden opportunity to do that (by virtue of your own massive, public errors, tbf) and you *don't take it*?! Instead you just run away from it? That's crazy.

partic when your whole usp is that you're a shabby fuckup who's nevertheless trying to figure it out

feel like this finally came back to bite lck at the exact moment that he'd finished successfully convincing himself he actually wasn't a shabby fuckup and was in fact god's gift to humanity. bad timing

xp. i think it's fairly clear he has no intention of really examining that stuff in public, i also am not sure that he could pull of having such a show and it being successful

"i habitually masturbated in front of women unprompted for decades" is a hard thing to bring the audience along with you for i would guess

one thing that was jarring was a) how many MJ fans there still were in the audience and b) the offhand realization that both of the biggest American pop culture icons of the 80s - MJ and Cosby - which were huge parts of my childhood, were also huge sexual predators hiding in plain sight.

""i habitually masturbated in front of women unprompted for decades" is a hard thing to bring the audience along with you for i would guess"

it is, but, it's not like he denies it happened or people dont' know about it. So fucking own it and find some way to recover.

we have a rich history of forgiving all kinds of monsters tbh

we generally forgive by just pretending it didn't happen though

I liked the Danish gf bit. The way it was shot was kind of annoying.

And I didn't like the intro and outro with Pale Blue Eyes. Too much crying clown mood setting.

feel like this finally came back to bite lck at the exact moment that he'd finished successfully convincing himself he actually wasn't a shabby fuckup and was in fact god's gift to humanity. bad timing

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Thursday, July 11, 2019 4:13 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is it exactly. Or, it must be. His stand up career was built off of his "brutal honesty" and self-deprecation and if he wasn't so (recently) full of himself he would have probably approached this the way he'd approached most of the material that made him so popular in the first place.

yes but it all came with this sheen of "you can't be that bad, you say smart things and you're obviously very self-aware" which I think is how he came off likeable? and obviously that's pretty well shattered now

the exact moment that he'd finished successfully convincing himself he actually wasn't a shabby fuckup and was in fact god's gift to humanity.

Disagree. I think CK's flaw as a comic from the very beginning (OK, not from the VERY beginning, but once he started doing the shabby fuckup bits) was that he was ALWAYS hedging it with this kind of "aren't people like me rotten (but not actually me, deep down I'm good, love me)" shtick.

Oh I somehow typed that without reading frogbs's post so really I'm mostly just 2nding frogbs

also remember Louis had just premiered a new feature film at the time he finally got briefly shamed off the stage, about how hot teenage girls want to fuck old bald auteurs and we shouldn't suppress that healthy growth and curiosity by spreading bad gossip about the old bald auteurs being creeps, but it's much better if the old bald auteurs want to fuck women half their age instead of 1/3

so he'd reached a pretty strong new level of galaxy brain at the time he announced he was going to go away and think about things

NARRATOR: ... he did not think about things

on factchecking myself it turns out that Rose Byrne has somehow managed to become 40 in the last 25 years? so is in fact safely within CK's half-plus-seven zone

Chloe Grace Moretz is still one-third of a Malkovich though

CK’s standup and talk show interviews kind of had a flawed sinning preacher sensibility when he got “real” and also like a preacher he had a cult who believed in his truth and the truth aspect coupled with his self-acknowledged fallibility (a fallibility he was very meta and aware of) sold it more, though primarily I guess his schtick worked bc he was often extremely funny.

"it turns out that Rose Byrne has somehow managed to become 40 in the last 25 years" . she did that by aging one year since she was 15.

That still leaves 24 unaccounted for. Something fishy definitely going on there.

A year every year, I meant.

Back to Ansari's special: it's excellent. is this the same stuff he took on the road last year? presumably. weirdly I saw no reports of the show he did here in SF, and a lot of people were aghast he was going out on the road though it obviously sold well; and a lot of heat generated that he was going half-MAGA and railing on the woke. which, of course, he is; but also, he's kinda right. I feel for that guy who answered all his questions about the swastika pizza.

the woke can def benefit from having a sense of humor about themselves

aziz ansari was kind of "the woke" until that article

yes he addresses all of this in his set.

aziz ansari scared straight

CK’s standup and talk show interviews kind of had a flawed sinning preacher sensibility when he got “real” and also like a preacher he had a cult who believed in his truth and the truth aspect coupled with his self-acknowledged fallibility (a fallibility he was very meta and aware of) sold it more, though primarily I guess his schtick worked bc he was often extremely funny.

right and one thing I noticed was that he was starting to get less funny, both Louie & his standup sets began to feel like those NBA seasons where Shaq would skip training camp and play himself into shape over the season. like...his last Netflix special had this 10-minute routine about Magic Mike that had no actual jokes in it. that last season of Louie wasn't funny at all. it was almost as if that was the whole point. like Prince in the 90's where he was like, "oh I'll do an instrumental sax album" or whatever

Aziz did a special that was just him repeating an R Kelly show he went to

for the last segment iirc

NYT review of special said he did not address the scandal at all on last year's tour

Ansari totally talks about the R. Kelly thing from his past special in this one. It's pretty funny.

I forgot how bad that last Louis CK special was too. I don't remember laughing once.

NYT in inaccurate reporting shockah

No, I remember hearing about shows he did here over the past year, where he apparently did not address it at all (certainly not in depth)

he clearly addressed it on the tour because he does so in the film that was shot while on tour

or is the argument here that the special was somehow not part of the tour? I am confused

I wouldn't really say he addresses it "in depth" here either, but he does address it and use it as a jumping-off point to a broader conversation that is very well thought out and delivered

I meant that maybe that stuff was only part of the special (not the tour), but idk, I think the date he played here was one of his very first shows back (and it was on a Sunday night, no publicity, announced day-of via the club's mailing list).

Critic said he saw him on tour last year; he did not address it. So this material had been created later.

show filmed is probably from a later part of the tour then