Bad Chappelle Bits

And another good/best take from when this all was bubbling up three years ago:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/dave-chappelle-netflix-special-controversy-trans-lgbtq-1235028904/

― he’s an adventurer (derogatory) (flamboyant goon tie included)

yeah i'd definitely say jaclyn moore's take is best take

Norm definitely used transgenderism for jokes (see his norm MacDonald live with Stephen Merchant episode), but unlike the linked Chapelle bit above, there was no political or moral statement overtly attached to his joke. There was always a shield of credible deniability because whenever transgenderism was a subject, it in the service of a “joke”, rather than being the object of a joke. Unlike Chapelle/Ricky/etc where its just a monologue/rant with an intended humorous tinge which never ends up actually being humorous because its primarily a vitriolic rant.

― H.P

i would like to point out that norm mcdonald is literally dead. i mean yeah, he told transphobic jokes. a lot of people told transphobic jokes. you know who told a lot of transphobic jokes? jon stewart. the daily show, wow, they had a _shit-ton_ of transphobic jokes out there. and jon, you know, he's a professional colleague of chappelle, he's someone who clearly has a good deal of respect for chappelle, and when all of this came out he did defend chappelle. i mean he _changed his mind_, though. the best i can tell, he got to a point where he realized "oh wait all of this transphobia stuff i did was kind of bullshit and bigoted and wrong". like most people have figured out that dunking on trans people is pretty openly bigoted and hateful, by this point. either they don't do it, or else they embrace being openly bigoted and hateful. chappelle's done the latter. using a corpse to support your beliefs, whatever those beliefs are, is poor praxis (i should know, i've done that in the past and it was a bad idea).

I didn't realise he was doing the exact same caitlin jenner bit as south park - they know no one wants to defend her so I guess it's part of the joke to try to force people into that position?

― Left

see for me there's a clear distinction. caitlyn jenner is a terrible human being on many, many levels. she's also very definitely a woman. her awfulness and her womanhood are in no way correlated. basically all the other trans people i know hate caitlyn jenner, but none of us think of her as anything but a woman.

is there a good stand up comedian who persistently challenges the idea that seems to have sprung up that the form and the vocation is vital and important and the truth society must view in itself

well i mean look at the kinds of people who become stand-up comedians. "stand-up comedian" is one of the top professions for severely traumatized people who hate themselves. i mean that was ricky gervais' whole schtick, right? the cringe comedy thing? louis c.k.? you do the thing where you get on stage and say "i'm an awful, loathsome person", and you're really successful at that until people realize that this is an ideal pretext for saying and doing awful, loathsome things, and their whole career is now about exploiting other people's sympathy for them and the continued awful, loathsome things they say. "sympathy for ricky gervais" isn't exactly a patch on "sympathy for the devil". hannah arendt to thread.

if someone is doing a job as punishing and shitty as stand-up comedian, one has to be doing it for a reason, right? and for a lot of comedians that reason is this notion that the work they're doing is _important_ and _provocative_, you know, it's an attempt to compensate for one's own pitifully low sense of self-worth. i mean i'm not saying anything particularly insightful or novel here. pretty much the entire history of stand-up comedy bears this out.

anyway that's why queer standup is more interesting to me, it's some weird fucked-up form of therapy, it's people who have been taught to hate themselves learning to not hate themselves. is it funny? not always. is it "the truth society must view in itself"? not really. is it loathsome the way ricky gervais is? not at all.

Doug Stanhope has a bit on nationalism and immigrants that gets passed around - it's beyond offensive in a lot of ways (his physical portrayal of immigrants) but they aren't the actual target (white people whining about immigrants) so it feels different from the caution-tape-reading-cancelled comics now. It's actually effective comedy in that mold of making you uncomfortable.

OTOH I watched ten minutes of Fern Brady talking about her Scottish accent and short boyfriend and I'd really rather have more of that than any truth telling in 2023.

Bob Newhart's one sided phone conversations were the only good comedy

"stand-up comedian" is one of the top professions for severely traumatized people who hate themselves.

Nailed it.

and that's okay

xxpost my dad loved those, I grew to appreciate those with him.

"ever landed a big plane like this before? it's easy, you just disengage the automatic pilot. it's the lever all the way to the right...err, not all the way to the right. you already pulled it? Oh...well...I don't know how to tell you this, you just emptied the washroom. Hold on, I'm getting an emergency call. Yeah Pan Am, what is it? Yeah, that was 209 from Miami, he's a new boy. it won't happen again, I guarantee it."

Comedians love one sided conversations

lol

yall gotta let call me by your name go, me and the devil broke up 3 years ago. yall acting like children of divorce https://t.co/HVOfhTVaky

— ✟ (@LilNasX) January 3, 2024

the thing that really bothers me about what Dave is doing is that he's not even being a "dangerous truth teller", he's literally just making things up. like the stinger on his last special "The Closer" was about his trans comedian friend who committed suicide, and at one point he strongly implies that her suicide might've had something to do with being bullied on Twitter after she came out in support of Chappelle. which I think fits in very snugly with what he's trying to do, suggesting that "cancel culture" or whatever is actually hurting them more than little ol' Dave Chappelle ever could. just one small problem though, she actually never was bullied on Twitter, in fact someone wrote an article saying he literally couldn't find a single negative word about this person related to her support of Chappelle. imo that adds a whole new dimension to the shittiness, like we all know comedians bend the truth here and there, but that's another level. when he tells these stories about trans people being rude and unreasonable to him I now just suspect that he's literally making the whole thing up.

Cultural conservatives are such brave iconoclasts and must be indulged loudly and with money and attention, every accusation a confession as per

this was one comedy thing i thought was funny i saw passed around on social media, i like this guy's vibe and it's relatively gentle comedy but i dunno made laugh, i don't need to be made uncomfortable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqSo1hgssQM

lil nas x / the devil was my favorite ship, i know that ship has sailed but i get why a lot of people are still writing fanfic

Whiney come back i yearn to pick the brain of a current fan, please don't make me consider reading a transcription

what % of this current set is misogynistic iyo? (in the broader sense of being hateful to both women and anyone evincing "inappropriately" "feminine" characteristics) because i remember being kind of surprised by that aspect of 8:46, how he only seemed to really dig his claws into candace owen and some other chick, out of all the many murdering shitheels and apologists to choose from, as though calling women cunts with stanky pussies is his comfort comedy (pussies within cunts: an infinite recursion). and of the transphobic content, does he ever attack trans men or is it all just womanhating?

Mitch Hedberg, Steven Wright, Demetri Martin: almost never mean, frequently funny. Perhaps overly dependent on absurdist wordplay. Taylor Tomlinson, Katherine Ryan, Eliza Schlesinger, Kristin Schall, Natasha Leggero: rarely mean, frequently funny, perhaps overly dependent on "men and women are different lol."

Mulaney is consistently funny

Doug Stanhope has a bit on nationalism and immigrants that gets passed around - it's beyond offensive in a lot of ways (his physical portrayal of immigrants) but they aren't the actual target (white people whining about immigrants) so it feels different from the caution-tape-reading-cancelled comics now. It's actually effective comedy in that mold of making you uncomfortable.

― papal hotwife (milo z)

a couple of years ago i was thinking about the angry white men doing comedy in the '90s and how boy most of them haven't aged well and i said well, most of them were copying george carlin, i've never seen one of his specials, i only know bits of his. i'll watch one of his specials and see what it's like

the one that was best-rated on RYM was this set from 2000 called "you are all diseased". and i put it on and the first thing he starts talking about is airport security. in new york city. in 2000. and i'm thinking "oh, christ, this one is not going to have aged well".

but then i watch it and he goes past the standard complaints about what a nuisance having his bags checked is to him, an older cishet white man. he starts talking about, you know, this is fucking bullshit, this is security theater. this does nothing. this exists to make white people safe. and how do they do this? they do this by going after people who aren't privileged. i mean you ever see how muslims get treated when they try to fly? yeah. that's "airport security" for you. bunch of fucking hypocritical, racist bullshit.

i mean i'm paraphrasing but that was what i got out of his routine.

i feel like that routine actually aged pretty fucking well.

Taylor Tomlinson, Katherine Ryan, Eliza Schlesinger, Kristin Schall, Natasha Leggero: rarely mean, frequently funny, perhaps overly dependent on "men and women are different lol."

― CthulhuLululemon (Ye Mad Puffin)

i don't know much about most of these people but my girlfriend is a big fan of taylor tomlinson so i watched one of her specials. i don't think she's actually queer, but she's one of the people i was thinking of when i talked about stand-up as some weird fucked-up form of therapy. i mean don't get me wrong being cishet is totally valid but i think it's almost a shame that she's _not_ queer. with all the trauma she's got, it's like she's got all the worst bits of being queer without the hot gay sex.

at his best there is a kind of timeless punk rock quality to george carlin's later stuff. it can be invigorating like listening to a Crass record. he was such a good writer too. so much writing in one of his specials.

Sure. Ismo can be charming too, in small doses.

Regardless of what you think of eacg of those individuals (they may not be to everyone's taste) it does appear that one can survive as a standup comic without resorting to anti-trans shit or misogyny or racism in order to be "challenging."

Weird.

I don't even LIKE comedy (that is, I don't go out of my way to seek it out, and I rarely laugh at it), but I can easily think of a dozen professionals who seem to be able do it without making "hurting the vulnerable" the centerpiece of their work.

milo otm fern brady is great

last night i watched george carlin’s first HBO special (1978!!) and was kind of surprised that it was ALL observational comedy, given his later political stuff. it was all so fucking good though. only one or two slightly below par moments in an hour and 15 minutes. and all the observations were basically about how much in common we all have in this hopelessly vain human comedy

Tomlinson is getting a late night show after Colbert, good for her, it seems like the right venue for her.

imagining Bob Newhart performing Asylum rn

the only George Carlin bit I'm familiar with is the one they listen to with Joe Mande on Hollywood Handbook

lol xpost

That Hollywood Handbook episode where Joe Mande presents a George Carlin special as his own set was funny as hell.

on the one hand I kinda get why comedians are fucked up, it's the one job where you basically are given like 2 minutes to impress people before they turn on you and humiliate you. but it's also a profession that, y'know, you aren't required to be a part of either.

the best kinds of comedians are the ones who can thrive on adversity and turn it into a win. that involves, idk, laughing at yourself and owning failure. the best comedians were great at that, particularly Pryor.

now feels like most major comedians want to be covered by an invisible force-field when they perform and then call everyone else snowflakes

he got off of on the misanthropy on his last specials. more than most people i can think of. carlin.

speaking of pryor, i can't remember who i was listening to online who was talking about how pryor would go into a club and just be really bad. like relentlessly bad. working on stuff. bombing over and over. but that it could be a breathtaking thing to see. because he had no fear, i guess.

(also people would be expecting the guy from t.v./movies and he would work one bit forever even when it wasn't working. and bum people out. which is kinda funny.)

the thing that really bothers me about what Dave is doing is that he's not even being a "dangerous truth teller", he's literally just making things up. like the stinger on his last special "The Closer" was about his trans comedian friend who committed suicide, and at one point he strongly implies that her suicide might've had something to do with being bullied on Twitter after she came out in support of Chappelle. which I think fits in very snugly with what he's trying to do, suggesting that "cancel culture" or whatever is actually hurting them more than little ol' Dave Chappelle ever could. just one small problem though, she actually never was bullied on Twitter, in fact someone wrote an article saying he literally couldn't find a single negative word about this person related to her support of Chappelle. imo that adds a whole new dimension to the shittiness, like we all know comedians bend the truth here and there, but that's another level. when he tells these stories about trans people being rude and unreasonable to him I now just suspect that he's literally making the whole thing up.

― frogbs

i mean it's the standard MO for transphobes. we see it all the time. y'all ever seen The Copypasta? we have. we see it all the time, any time we ever say anything ever. it doesn't say that we _should_ kill ourselves. it says that we _will_ kill ourselves, inexorably, inevitably. we're told this over and over and over again.

and then whenever one of us does - which happens, a lot - the same people who either send us the copypasta directly or consider it to be _well_ within the limits of "discourse" point and laugh and blame us. and say "ohhhh i thought being trans was supposed to be sooooo great, i thought you were getting to finally be your true self, don't look so great to me, lol"

basically people bully us and abuse us, the same people who have been bullying and abuse us all our lives, and then when we suffer, they blame us for the things they did to us. does this bug you? does this bug you? i'm not touching you.

like i said, i agree with jaclyn moore on this. chappelle being a transphobe isn't even the issue. it's that netflix keeps promoting his transphobia, some people keep making excuses for transphobia, and it doesn't matter whether or not _they're_ personally transphobic or not. it's actions and results. the people who are responsible for the results don't get the actions.

dave chappelle going after candace owens? that's not a coincidence. there are double standards. candace owens, as a woman, she gets held more responsible for shit than men do. a lot of trans women can tell you about it. i can. i've experienced it. when women make mistakes, they're held to a higher standard, they're vilified more, they're attacked more _personally_, than men ever are. than i ever was, when i presented male.

and i mean, i'm sure chappelle goes through the same shit. it does seem to me like black people get held to a higher standard than white people, that when they do bad things somehow it all gets made about their race. even when people defend them, it's saying stuff like "90% of chappelle's audience is black", i mean, what the hell is that? sure yeah let's just make some fucking essentialized link between race and transphobia, _that's_ not fucked up at all. even though i'm fucking white and there's a lot of shit as a result i don't see, i don't _have_ to see, i still see shit like that all the time. it fucking burns me up.

yeah to some extent chappelle is being made a scapegoat. he's being made a scapegoat for a system that perpetrates injustice, for a system that pits marginalized groups against each other, a system that he is also personally a victim of. abuse is a cycle. it's not something where you put Victims on one side and Abusers on the other side. chappelle is both. should he be held responsible for espousing hatred and bigotry? yes, he should. absolutely. you know who i think is _more_ responsible? the people who are actively promoting that hatred and bigotry for _their_ own profit. they're not the ones on tv saying this stuff, though. they're just a _carrier_, and just being a _carrier_ means that they're not held responsible. bullshit.

anyway yeah I Have Opinions

Tomlinson is getting a late night show after Colbert, good for her, it seems like the right venue for her.

she's hosting the revival of @midnight

is there a good stand up comedian who persistently challenges the idea that seems to have sprung up that the form and the vocation is vital and important and the truth society must view in itself

if someone is good at their job of saying silly things on a stage, and other people are saying stupid and hateful things on other stages, the first person's job does not automatically change to being required to debunk the person who is bad at their job

it would certainly be strange if anyone had suggested that!

There’s the Hot Pockets guy, I don’t think he thinks he’s, like a philosopher with his lantern looking for one honest man

ive no idea where you're going there sic tbh i thought the question reasonably clear

i guess burr leans towards "we aint important gtfoh" the odd time?

xps since when are these people bad at their jobs? this industry has always loved bigots and sex pests and rewarding them for being those things. those things are how you get ahead. it's the people who challenge those things who are bad at their jobs, they make way less money and tend to get blackballed

I just can’t categorise that Chapelle clip above as comedy. It’s just a “got chya” clickbaity pat on the back for himself and all those who share his beliefs. It seems so far removed from comedy because if there is a joke in there, it’s so weak and entirely second (or third, fourth, fifth, however low you can go) to making a political point.

Anyways, here’s how you can make a joke about a touchy subject
1. Be a part of that subject
2. Be actually funny

I love Aaron Chen, he’s got a 40 min special on YouTube well worth watching if you like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0mIPtaRGvI

deems if you meant "is there a single good stand-up comedian who just says funny things" then the answer is no, there are lots

The thing that I found most valuable about Gadsby’s Nanette was when they broke down the mechanics of a joke, paraphrased: “you are trying to say something that makes the audience uncomfortable enough to elicit laughter, because that’s what laughter is, a response to discomfort.” It makes total sense to me that a comedian like Chappelle might be failing to distinguish between “this is making people laugh” and “this is just making people uncomfortable”. Either way I wish he’d make different, actually funny, jokes. I’ve often said that comedians should be afforded a lower standard of accountability when it comes to the expiry date on their material— jokes that were funny ten years ago might be found to be just straight up insulting (or even hateful) in present day; it’s good to keep in mind that the line comedians have to dance around, for their job, will change and their jokes become less-funny over time. Unless you’re a genius (Dangerfield, Rivers).

It makes total sense to me that a comedian like Chappelle might be failing to distinguish between “this is making people laugh” and “this is just making people uncomfortable”.

If you’re accusing me of “insulting Dave Chappelle”, I’ll take it; I’ve never found him funny.

That said I do think you’re right— he’s not generating comedy now so much as caping for what he thinks of as being “free speech”— “I should be allowed to gender people in the way that makes sense to me”. At least Carlin approached this stage of his career with good jokes

deems if you meant "is there a single good stand-up comedian who just says funny things" then the answer is no, there are lots

― bae (sic), Wednesday, 3 January 2024 23:41 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

mayne im imploring you to read what i actually wrote

xps re comedy = making audience uncomfortable, re "comedy must punch up", re "comedy must make the target laugh also" imo all of this is taking views of what any given comedy act can do, sure, but treating any of these personal preferences as imperatives is .... wrong, imo

for thread purposes ofc its irrelevant chappelles stuff isnt funny and most happily the reasons it isnt funny are at least linked to his focusing more on his own self indulgence than being funny

left a chara i think not liking comedy is fine but it cant be ones whole personality, we had a poster or two do that bit before and well they were awful

The thing that I found most valuable about Gadsby’s Nanette was when they broke down the mechanics of a joke, paraphrased: “you are trying to say something that makes the audience uncomfortable enough to elicit laughter, because that’s what laughter is, a response to discomfort.” It makes total sense to me that a comedian like Chappelle might be failing to distinguish between “this is making people laugh” and “this is just making people uncomfortable”. Either way I wish he’d make different, actually funny, jokes. I’ve often said that comedians should be afforded a lower standard of accountability when it comes to the expiry date on their material— jokes that were funny ten years ago might be found to be just straight up insulting (or even hateful) in present day; it’s good to keep in mind that the line comedians have to dance around, for their job, will change and their jokes become less-funny over time. Unless you’re a genius (Dangerfield, Rivers).

― he’s an adventurer (derogatory) (flamboyant goon tie included)

laughter isn't the _only_ response to discomfort, though! so is silence. dead fuckin' silence. god, the fucking silences were the worst. when someone stops yelling at you at all and just stops saying _anything_. that's when you don't know what comes next.

of course, that's not comedy, that's childhood trauma. stand-up comedy has nothing whatsoever to do with childhood trauma.

a lot of people don't necessarily have to try to make people uncomfortable around them. some people - including, as it happens, a lot of trans people - have the amazing ability to make people uncomfortable around them just by existing. but i mean, any member of a marginalized group can have that experience. it's not exclusive to trans people by any means. all it really requires is that one not conform to someone else's preconceived expectations.

a comedian who conforms to other people's preconceived expectations is unlikely to be a great comedian.

left a chara i think not liking comedy is fine but it cant be ones whole personality, we had a poster or two do that bit before and well they were awful

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

deems have you read any of left's posts? have you read their _username_? accusing left of making their entire personality about one thing is fine, but hating comedy isn't it.

fwiw from my perspective "hating capitalism and transphobia" is the _ideal_ personality.

Can we derail this thread to talk about Katt Williams instead? First of all, he's much, much funnier than Dave Chappelle, and second of all, he showed up for a three-hour interview with a flamethrower strapped to his back. And had some extremely insightful thoughts about the craft of comedy, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oRRZiRQxTs

left a chara i think not liking comedy is fine but it cant be ones whole personality, we had a poster or two do that bit before and well they were awful

I don't know who you're referring to there, the main "I hate comedy" person on ILX was Lex, who I hope you're not calling awful. Anyway I've increasingly come to agree with him, though it's really comedians I hate rather than comedy per se.

Hating all comedy is a fine and reasonable position to take, but posting it on comedy threads is pointlessly antagonistic.

that may have been a fairer summation, even if i think doing so every now and again as a confirmation is probably fine

i was ofc speaking generally

Gary Gulman, another non-mean comedian (although he can be pretty mean to himself).

Gulman is one of the funniest guys I've ever seen. We caught him again back in November and he absolutely killed it.

Hating all comedy is a fine and reasonable position to take

... hold up one sec here.