I’m Rich Biatch

A somewhat incoherent tldr opinion piece on stand-up and PC culture.

He is, Dave Chappelle is rich and black and male and all of those things are fine.

Let’s skip the whiny articles about how he’s a victim blamer, how he’s washed up in his 40’s, how he can’t empathize with marginalized groups and how he doesn’t understand the working class, oh, right, he doesn’t talk about that and neither does any of those news portals, because obviously, the fight for justice doesn’t begin in the streets, it begins in disconnected upper-class whites who channel their guilt into defending marginalized communities. Which on its own merits could be a good thing, but doesn’t really do much but polarize an already polarized society.

Tough stuff.

Let’s skip all that and jump to an anecdote that the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek likes to tell. He asked a Native-American whether he gets offended when someone calls him ‘Indian’ and he answered no. He gets offended by ‘Native-American’ because at least when someone calls him Indian it tells of the stupidity of the first white settlers.

Before we move on let’s mention another point that Mr. Zizek likes to make. Before the Yugoslav war in 1991 it was a common thing for every country of the federation to have a stereotype that people would joke about. Bosnians were stupid, Montenegrins were lazy, Slovenians were cheap etc. After the war, or even during it, all of those jokes suddenly felt more offensive and people generally avoided them.

Did the jokes cause the war? Of course they did, as much as Dave Chappele’s jokes cause racial and gender issues. The underlying reasons for the problems of marginalization are, from a Marxist perspective (oh no here he goes) economical and political. Not being able to joke about the symptoms of a deeply flawed system won’t fix a single itsy bitsy thing. It only tells you how deeply we misunderstand the issues we’re facing.

Chappelle jokes about feeling like a Chinese person inside of a black man to parallel the trans issue. It’s a rough joke that easily offends. Nationality and gender are not the same thing, they don’t establish themselves in the same way so the parallel is flawed. But wouldn’t you as an educated, woke person immediately identify that as a joke rather than an attack? Why should you assume malice behind the provocation? Is it perhaps because you want it to be malevolent and because saying that will bring you more clicks? It’s all about the clicks in the end, isn’t it?

In Louis C.K’s last stand-up which only has audio and can be found on YouTube, C.K. says he identifies as a location. The joke has all the intention of being provocative and oversimplifying a complex issue and is similar to Chappele’s joke in many ways. It’s farm from being one of C.K’s best I give you that, but do you think the intention was to offend the LGBT community and seed hatred? Only if you yourself implant it with those things. C.K’s an intelligent man with a lot of downfalls for which there are no real excuses. But is he malevolent? Is he really harmful (I mean his jokes not his masturbatory habits) to society?

George Carlin openly talked against the system, against white men, but he also openly joked about gays, trans, crazy women and racially marginalized people. But Carlin is dead so he didn’t live to see the SJW’s write witty criticism about his persona (although it’s only a matter of time before someone desecrates his legacy, as soon as it proves to attract clicks that is).

Let’s go a step deeper into the abyss of this discourse. How do you imagine climbing the Hollywood ladder looks like? I assume there’s a lot of work, a lot of ‘yes’ saying to things you disagree with, a lot of hobnobbing and plenty of asslicking. Your wish is to be rich and famous and that is, well, it’s not noble in any sense. It’s an ego-trip carried by your talent as an artist and your talent as an asslicker. And when one day Louis C.K. calls you on the phone and wants to jerk off to your voice, well, you either listen to it or you don’t, it depends on how committed of a potential star you are. I would do it, but sure I’m a man and I apparently never felt the pressure of a power-figure by default.

The truth is, I would allow it. I would feel terrible for doing it but people, and now I really am going down the rabbit hole, suck dick to keep their kids fed (indirectly I hope) so you telling me that on your path for glory listening to an old Mexican jerk off over the phone destroyed your carrier, only tells me that you are disconnected from reality.

Listen, do I want to let people jerk off in front of me so I can have a decent living, no. Is it wrong? Yes. Does it happen all the time across the globe? Yes. Should Louie suffer the consequences? Absolutely, but let’s not pretend like it’s the worst thing on the planet right now. Dave Chappelle calls it a weak spirit, and I can only agree. I’m not saying things are bad and you need to man up, I’m saying that if you want things to get better, make a better society and perhaps your comedians won’t have anything to joke about then (dystopian YA novel material right there). Reality is rough for a vast majority of people and it isn’t easy to empathize with people you never saw. One day your boss tells you to work 12 hours and pays you in marbles the next day some black guy tells you you’re privileged. Bitch what? Nah. One day you fondle your higher-up’s stinky balls to pay rent, the next day some Hollywood star complains about the same issues only the financial outcome of both those instances of ball-fondling is vastly different. I fondle them for scraps, you fondle them for gold, so whad up?

THE SWITCHEROO

Vulnerable parts of society such as trans people are easy prey for comedians. Or so the mantra goes throughout a myriad of woke news articles. It’s true though, and it has become a trend I see in many comedians nowadays. However, what is the reason behind this? Is it just that comedian titans such as C.K. and Chappelle have nobody else to target? Has their comedic genius run dry through years of wealth, have they become ignorant to the plight of the common man? Well, C.K. was never much of a radical to begin with. His down-to-earth style was profound on its own merit, you could read it through Marxists goggles but you can do that with everything. Chappelle was always more open on issues of race and poverty but even he never dwelt too much on social issues as perhaps Carlin did.
So why then this sudden fascination with PC?

Because of the criticism. They expect criticism for the things they’ll say and then they criticize the expected outcome in their subsequent specials, or Chappelle does, C.K. doesn’t have any ongoing specials as of late. Whoever gets caught in this crossfire is collateral damage. It’s fun to upset those that are easily upset, fun, simple and effective.

My point is, the jokes are not malevolent. They don’t have the intention to offend but to provoke which are wildly different standpoints. If you can’t understand that then you probably don’t know enough about Chappelle, C.K., Carlin or stand-up comedy in general. You can’t dissect a joke and push it through a politically correct meat-grinder and expect that every aspect of it doesn’t offend anyone except for white people and still makes someone laugh.
At the same time, while I defend the jokes and the comedian’s right to tell them I have to say with a heavy heart that… good god are those topics boring. They are cheap jokes, they provide the illusion of fighting censorship and they cause easy laughs to the masses.

I don’t need my comedians to be woke. I don’t need them to defend marginalized groups on every step, I don’t need them to fight for worker-rights and battle imperialism and the patriarchy at every step.
I can appreciate it, but I don’t need it from everyone all the time. I’m fed up with that topic and of course, being white, male and hetero means that I have the privilege of being fed up with it unlike people who have to live it everyday. It’s hypocritical, I agree, but it is also tiring and most of all ‘tunneling’.

I feel like it’s become so big (which is good) that I’m missing something else going on (which is not good). Every movie, show, stand-up that I watch nowadays feels like a lecture and not a good one either.

It feels like someone discovered that if you don’t hit people you’ll get a dollar for telling it to others. So they compete for the most dramatic, convoluted and unnecessarily gay way to tell you this, not because it matters to them, but because they’ll get a dollar for it. As there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, it feels like there’s no ethical way to consume the Hollywood PC message. Which again tells me that the Hollywood PC message isn’t a message at all, but a commodity. Something we buy, consume, and later work for so we can do it again. Solves nothing, changes nothing, makes money.

The same goes for Chappelle’s specials. Subjectively speaking I enjoy them. I don’t have to cope with those issues so that may be part of why I enjoy it. I like Carlin a lot, which is obvious at this point. I think he hit a number of home-runs regarding many important topics (important to me and to the world) which I rarely hear from other comedians. I think that Chappelle’s last few specials are not a criticism of PC culture but actually a part of it which bores me indefinitely. But alas, I don’t get to pick what Chappelle talks about in his specials I only get to pick which specials I’ll watch. And so does everyone else.

Phew, that’s all folks. Oh and one last thing. Completely and utterly disconnected from this topic and completely and utterly connected to ‘clicks’:

Check out my new novel Lazor’s Awful Empire now on Amazon for a little money.