8 ms·

So comedy cannot be offensive anymore? When did that happen?

slackfan 4y ago
A while ago. Going against the party line of the week -- you are liable to get cancelled. See: Dave Chapelle being called a white supremacist nazi transphobe for his set.
- anoonmoose 4y ago
  Chapelle is rolling in Netflix money and won a Grammy last night. By what metric is he "cancelled" other than "some people called him bad names"?
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
    Don't you know? You are supposed to be on your knees in front of Chapelle worshiping him. Criticism flows down hill.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    I can't help but think that his prior fame and clout as a comedian, alongside his existing wealth, is what enabled him to get his recent bits produced and published. He was already well known and well liked enough to overcome the controversy. I don't think his success indicates any comedian can do the same and be free of cancellation, or that it should be taken as evidence that cancellation isn't a real thing for comedians.
    - anoonmoose 4y ago
      > taken as evidence that cancellation isn't a real thing for comedians Sounds like trying to prove a negative. If people want to convince me that cancellation is a real thing for comedians, I'd want to see...examples of comedians who actually got cancelled. CK and Chappelle ain't it.
      - BitwiseFool 4y ago
        >"I'd want to see...examples of comedians who actually got cancelled" I have an inkling of how this would go. I'd do a quick google search and offer up a handful of names. The counter argument would probably be along the lines of 'that wasn't really cancellation, it was actually...' and then we'd go back and forth debating the meaning of words. The point I was specifically trying to make was that because Chapelle defied expectations and was successful, that does not mean cancellation isn't a real thing that can happen to other comedians.
        anoonmoose 4y ago
        This is a pretty lazy, hand-waving, "I'm right so there's no need for discussion" response, imo.
  - slackfan 4y ago
    So, what you're telling me, is that millionaires get to make transphobic jokes all they want, because they are immune to cancellation because of their bank account. Fun.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      That is basically what happens, yes. If you've got enough money you can even demand transphobic legislation.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      >because of their bank account. He won a grammy. I don't know what more you can want. It seems like cancelled has come to mean "everyone doesn't immediately fellate me"
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      No one is stopping you from making transphobic jokes it you want to. You're not entitled to have anyone listen to you, or like you, or give you any money for it, but you can totally do it.
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  Getting cancelled means you win a Grammy. Getting cancelled means you sell out Madison Square Garden. Getting cancelled is being called names. Boohoo.
  - slackfan 4y ago
    Being successful despite people calling you some vile shit because of who you are and what you believe absolves the people calling you vile shit from any responsibility. Yes, indeed.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      So if I understand you correctly, what you're really pissed off about is that no one will pay you money to make transphobic statements?
      - slackfan 4y ago
        Question - is any viewpoint you don't agree with mean that whoever wrote it must be pissed off? Frankly, I don't give a crap about Chapelle, he has more money than I ever will for better or for worse, he exists and has his fans and detractors, that's absolutely fine by me. He was a useful example though that seems to rustle peoples' jimmies though.
        anoonmoose 4y ago
        What do you think he was "a useful example" of? Context would imply you think he's an example of a comedian who was cancelled for being offensive...but most of the replies (mine included) seem to be saying "but he wasn't actually cancelled", which really calls into question whether or not that makes him "a useful example"...
        slackfan 4y ago
        He was cancelled for about two weeks before his money got him through it. Seems like a relevant example to me. Also to this day people call a black man white supremacist so...
- shrubble 4y ago
  So Dave Chapelle is now officially a 'Black White Supremacist'?
  - slackfan 4y ago
    Any Black person who doesn't toe the party line is a White Supremacist.
anoonmoose 4y ago
Comedy is still allowed to be offensive, so the changeover you suggest never happened. Louis CK just sold out MSG and Dave Chapelle just won a Grammy.
- dcow 4y ago
  Not on Twitch, apparently.
jasonlotito 4y ago
No, comedy can still be offensive. Anyone suggesting comedians can't be offensive is lying. Comedians routinely punch down, and routinely sell out shows. The believe that comedian's can't be offensive is a shtick they are using to market their shows to an audience. It's all advertising and marketing, and the gullible eat it up because it feeds into their bias.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/do-you-want-cancel-culture-to-exist https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/do-you-want-cancel-cult...
  - silvester23 4y ago
    I only read the first two sections of that article but they already contain such strange assertions that I don't think it's worth it to bother with the rest: > I think “a culture where social norms are enforced with repeated and vociferous public shaming” is the most useful way to define the term. That might be the most useful way for the author to make their point, but as far as I am aware, for most people being cancelled definitely entails some sort of deplatforming, e.g. some BigCo not wanting to be associated with your name. If you keep doing what you're doing while being insulted on Twitter, that's not being cancelled, that's just ... well, Twitter. > What I find more interesting is that this argument requires the very thing that it laments. That is, in order to make this argument, you need to have figures like Louis CK who escape/survive the consequences of public shaming, but simultaneously to assert that this is a bad thing. In no way does the tweet embedded at the top of the article imply that it's a bad thing that Louis CK is playing MSG. It's saying that if we define being cancelled not in the way the author of the article did but the way I outlined above, someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG. From there it makes the pretty big leap to say that cancel culture in general is not real. I'm not even that invested in the whole debate but this article seems completely misguided or in bad faith.
    - slothtrop 4y ago
      > for most people being cancelled definitely entails some sort of deplatforming, e.g. some BigCo not wanting to be associated with your name. Who's counting? It's trivial to find examples of people who've lost their jobs for innocuous reasons. See: David Shor. It's bad faith to pretend this doesn't happen. Usually for proponents or those denying the phenomenon exists the goalpost shifts to effectively shrugging it off as minor. Speech that begets consequences isn't strictly limited to bigotry, as we are told. > someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG. He couldn't, until he could. It's not necessarily the case that public shunning lasts forever. Disingenuous to construe what happened to that man as something entirely different to what "cancellation" colloquially refers to.
chii 4y ago
Since when the platform you are performing the comedy on is funded via advertising!
sixQuarks 4y ago
[flagged]
- brookst 4y ago
  Should platforms be able to decide for themselves, or should people be forced to work on content they find offensive?
  - hellojesus 4y ago
    This is disingenuous. The parent didn't argue that Twitch violated any laws or shouldn't be allowed to moderate their private property. The user is observing that the current religious environment will lead to a bifurcation in society. I would argue it already has to a large extent, but I'm not sure it's actually a problem. This has allowed new companies to arbitrage the moral standards. Free market life.
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    Nobody is forced to work on anything. If you choose to work for a public platform, that should not automatically grant you authority to dictate what goes on it based on your own sensibilities.
    - brookst 4y ago
      What? Are saying that the management at a public platform has an obligation to ignore what their employees want? That doesn’t sound great for retention. Or culture in general.
      - sixQuarks 4y ago
        uhhh, yes. Are you serious? That's not how companies work. A company is not there to cater to all the whims of employees, if it were, all profits would simply go to employee salaries.
        brookst 4y ago
swarnie 4y ago
[flagged]
oceanplexian 4y ago
IRL Comedy shows are still deeply offensive and hilarious. If you tried to make a stink like people do on platforms like Twitch you would probably get kicked out by the bouncer.
bmelton 4y ago
Comedians got together and made a documentary about the modern American society's intolerance to things that might offend in 2015, so I'd wager if we're trying to carbon date it it's at least sometime before that. It seems to have accelerated since then though * Can We Take a Joke? - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4324916/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4324916/
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Tail end of the '00s and early '10s was about the time we had a new wave of "words you can't say" (how many words do we obliquely refer to with "x-word" constructions now? At least three or four fairly-common ones, right? There was really just the one, before that) and other changes like male-as-neuter pronouns going from taught as correct in school (through all of the 90s, at least, and probably a bit beyond) to "may get you scolded" (2010) to "will probably get you scolded" (2015). We've been sensitized to so many more words than in, say, the year 2000, that even for one who doesn't have a dog in this fight, watching early '00s media (let alone earlier) can be distracting because it's hard not to notice the now-red-flag words or topics that are thrown around casually—especially in standup, or on comedy TV shows. It's been a pretty fast shift, and I'd put the start at the tail end of the '00s or early '10s. I mean, hell, just look at where mainstream Democrats stood on gay rights in the early '00s, for that matter. We've gone from, "gay marriage? I dunno, that might be a tad too far" to "we must protect trans rights" in a remarkably short span. I dunno, maybe the OG civil rights era had a similar feel of The Discourse shifting a ton in only a decade or two—I wasn't there for it. It's probably also worth noting that this shift looks rather more total from a very-online perspective than it does IRL, which is probably a source of some of the ongoing friction. Online, it's done, the shift has happened, you're a cave-man if you're lagging behind on it at all—offline, much less so.
xwkd 4y ago
Comedy cannot be offensive to trans people on Twitch, specifically! Here's the part where I rhetorically taunt with my weaponization of the virtue of free enterprise: "You have a right to free speech, but I have a right to decide what I allow on my platform!" Yeah, I don't entirely believe that either. I see the weasel here and so do you. So I have a right to disregard the value of free speech. But is that really what we want?
- klyrs 4y ago
  Platforms aren't there for your free speech, nor should they be. They're there for their own free speech, and freedom of association. Every platform bans content that is perfectly legal: spam, porn, gore, etc. Platforms like gab and parler ban "woke" content. Hell, even libraries pick and choose which books to buy, which books to put in the shelves, which books to put on display. Yes, this is really what we want, if we want a useable internet. Without the freedom to curate, platforms would inundated with so much spam, you'd never see the content you want. Don't like it? Feel free to make your own platform that allows absolutely everything up to the line of legality! Just remember, nobody owes you financial success or a large user-base.
  - xwkd 4y ago
    I agree with you completely. This is the way that it should be. I will also say, then, that I feel like we’re all a bunch of huge pussies. Sounding more like my dad every day. Great. Curation and censorship are strange cousins, don’t you think? It seems like it’s only censorship if it’s done with big furnaces and a gun barrel by a man with tiny glasses and creased pants. Governments censor. Corporations curate. Right? I’m not sure if I even want to dignify the following state of affairs by calling it an open secret, but the US is governed by corporations. I won’t insult you by expounding on this line of reasoning. You see what I’m getting at.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      I mean, my dad would call you a pussy for playing video games, much less watching somebody else play them on twitch, and my mom would keep her mouth shut lest the verbal abuse be turned on her. I think we should strive to be better than our parents, and think for ourselves. And, yeah, we've let corporations take control again. But let's be clear, I'm much more concerned about the likes of Halliburton than twitch. Some in government have expressed some interest in breaking up big tech and undermine big oil, so it's not a perfect equivalence, thankfully. I'm with Ken White[1] on "cancel culture." Sometimes, it goes too far. But by and large, "cancel culture" is better framed as "speech that is critical of other speech." And, yeah, the people at the helm of big platforms have bigger thumbs than the rest of us. But nobody stopped anti-woke Musk from taking over Twitter, did they? [1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-shame-and https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...
seydor 4y ago
~12 years ago. RIP satire
noelsusman 4y ago
I've been hearing this for at least 30 years, and yet Dave Chapelle won a Grammy literally last night despite being quite controversial on this very topic. It's also a bit nonsensical to whine about people getting offended by comedy while simultaneously saying comedy should be allowed to be offensive. If you do offensive comedy then some people are going to get offended by it. If they didn't then it wouldn't be offensive!
ridgered4 4y ago
Well, AI comedy can't anyway. I guess there's a niche left for the humans after all. There was a tongue in cheek post on here a couple weeks ago where a user suggested in the future we'll prove we're human by peppering racial sluts into all of our communications.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
InitialLastName 4y ago
Lenny Bruce got arrested multiple times for telling offensive jokes in the 1960s. I don't see any comedians getting arrested lately (for their comedy, that is).

A while ago. Going against the party line of the week -- you are liable to get cancelled. See: Dave Chapelle being called a white supremacist nazi transphobe for his set.

anoonmoose 4y ago
Chapelle is rolling in Netflix money and won a Grammy last night. By what metric is he "cancelled" other than "some people called him bad names"?
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  Don't you know? You are supposed to be on your knees in front of Chapelle worshiping him. Criticism flows down hill.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I can't help but think that his prior fame and clout as a comedian, alongside his existing wealth, is what enabled him to get his recent bits produced and published. He was already well known and well liked enough to overcome the controversy. I don't think his success indicates any comedian can do the same and be free of cancellation, or that it should be taken as evidence that cancellation isn't a real thing for comedians.
  - anoonmoose 4y ago
    > taken as evidence that cancellation isn't a real thing for comedians Sounds like trying to prove a negative. If people want to convince me that cancellation is a real thing for comedians, I'd want to see...examples of comedians who actually got cancelled. CK and Chappelle ain't it.
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      >"I'd want to see...examples of comedians who actually got cancelled" I have an inkling of how this would go. I'd do a quick google search and offer up a handful of names. The counter argument would probably be along the lines of 'that wasn't really cancellation, it was actually...' and then we'd go back and forth debating the meaning of words. The point I was specifically trying to make was that because Chapelle defied expectations and was successful, that does not mean cancellation isn't a real thing that can happen to other comedians.
      - anoonmoose 4y ago
        This is a pretty lazy, hand-waving, "I'm right so there's no need for discussion" response, imo.
- slackfan 4y ago
  So, what you're telling me, is that millionaires get to make transphobic jokes all they want, because they are immune to cancellation because of their bank account. Fun.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    That is basically what happens, yes. If you've got enough money you can even demand transphobic legislation.
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    >because of their bank account. He won a grammy. I don't know what more you can want. It seems like cancelled has come to mean "everyone doesn't immediately fellate me"
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    No one is stopping you from making transphobic jokes it you want to. You're not entitled to have anyone listen to you, or like you, or give you any money for it, but you can totally do it.
jasonlotito 4y ago
Getting cancelled means you win a Grammy. Getting cancelled means you sell out Madison Square Garden. Getting cancelled is being called names. Boohoo.
- slackfan 4y ago
  Being successful despite people calling you some vile shit because of who you are and what you believe absolves the people calling you vile shit from any responsibility. Yes, indeed.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    So if I understand you correctly, what you're really pissed off about is that no one will pay you money to make transphobic statements?
    - slackfan 4y ago
      Question - is any viewpoint you don't agree with mean that whoever wrote it must be pissed off? Frankly, I don't give a crap about Chapelle, he has more money than I ever will for better or for worse, he exists and has his fans and detractors, that's absolutely fine by me. He was a useful example though that seems to rustle peoples' jimmies though.
      - anoonmoose 4y ago
        What do you think he was "a useful example" of? Context would imply you think he's an example of a comedian who was cancelled for being offensive...but most of the replies (mine included) seem to be saying "but he wasn't actually cancelled", which really calls into question whether or not that makes him "a useful example"...
        slackfan 4y ago
        He was cancelled for about two weeks before his money got him through it. Seems like a relevant example to me. Also to this day people call a black man white supremacist so...
shrubble 4y ago
So Dave Chapelle is now officially a 'Black White Supremacist'?
- slackfan 4y ago
  Any Black person who doesn't toe the party line is a White Supremacist.

anoonmoose 4y ago

Comedy is still allowed to be offensive, so the changeover you suggest never happened. Louis CK just sold out MSG and Dave Chapelle just won a Grammy.

dcow 4y ago
Not on Twitch, apparently.

jasonlotito 4y ago

No, comedy can still be offensive. Anyone suggesting comedians can't be offensive is lying. Comedians routinely punch down, and routinely sell out shows. The believe that comedian's can't be offensive is a shtick they are using to market their shows to an audience. It's all advertising and marketing, and the gullible eat it up because it feeds into their bias.

slothtrop 4y ago
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/do-you-want-cancel-culture-to-exist https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/do-you-want-cancel-cult...
- silvester23 4y ago
  I only read the first two sections of that article but they already contain such strange assertions that I don't think it's worth it to bother with the rest: > I think “a culture where social norms are enforced with repeated and vociferous public shaming” is the most useful way to define the term. That might be the most useful way for the author to make their point, but as far as I am aware, for most people being cancelled definitely entails some sort of deplatforming, e.g. some BigCo not wanting to be associated with your name. If you keep doing what you're doing while being insulted on Twitter, that's not being cancelled, that's just ... well, Twitter. > What I find more interesting is that this argument requires the very thing that it laments. That is, in order to make this argument, you need to have figures like Louis CK who escape/survive the consequences of public shaming, but simultaneously to assert that this is a bad thing. In no way does the tweet embedded at the top of the article imply that it's a bad thing that Louis CK is playing MSG. It's saying that if we define being cancelled not in the way the author of the article did but the way I outlined above, someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG. From there it makes the pretty big leap to say that cancel culture in general is not real. I'm not even that invested in the whole debate but this article seems completely misguided or in bad faith.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    > for most people being cancelled definitely entails some sort of deplatforming, e.g. some BigCo not wanting to be associated with your name. Who's counting? It's trivial to find examples of people who've lost their jobs for innocuous reasons. See: David Shor. It's bad faith to pretend this doesn't happen. Usually for proponents or those denying the phenomenon exists the goalpost shifts to effectively shrugging it off as minor. Speech that begets consequences isn't strictly limited to bigotry, as we are told. > someone who is supposedly cancelled would not be playing MSG. He couldn't, until he could. It's not necessarily the case that public shunning lasts forever. Disingenuous to construe what happened to that man as something entirely different to what "cancellation" colloquially refers to.

chii 4y ago

Since when the platform you are performing the comedy on is funded via advertising!

sixQuarks 4y ago

[flagged]

brookst 4y ago
Should platforms be able to decide for themselves, or should people be forced to work on content they find offensive?
- hellojesus 4y ago
  This is disingenuous. The parent didn't argue that Twitch violated any laws or shouldn't be allowed to moderate their private property. The user is observing that the current religious environment will lead to a bifurcation in society. I would argue it already has to a large extent, but I'm not sure it's actually a problem. This has allowed new companies to arbitrage the moral standards. Free market life.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  Nobody is forced to work on anything. If you choose to work for a public platform, that should not automatically grant you authority to dictate what goes on it based on your own sensibilities.
  - brookst 4y ago
    What? Are saying that the management at a public platform has an obligation to ignore what their employees want? That doesn’t sound great for retention. Or culture in general.
    - sixQuarks 4y ago
      uhhh, yes. Are you serious? That's not how companies work. A company is not there to cater to all the whims of employees, if it were, all profits would simply go to employee salaries.
      - brookst 4y ago

swarnie 4y ago

[flagged]

oceanplexian 4y ago

IRL Comedy shows are still deeply offensive and hilarious. If you tried to make a stink like people do on platforms like Twitch you would probably get kicked out by the bouncer.

bmelton 4y ago

Comedians got together and made a documentary about the modern American society's intolerance to things that might offend in 2015, so I'd wager if we're trying to carbon date it it's at least sometime before that. It seems to have accelerated since then though * Can We Take a Joke? - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4324916/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4324916/

yamtaddle 4y ago
Tail end of the '00s and early '10s was about the time we had a new wave of "words you can't say" (how many words do we obliquely refer to with "x-word" constructions now? At least three or four fairly-common ones, right? There was really just the one, before that) and other changes like male-as-neuter pronouns going from taught as correct in school (through all of the 90s, at least, and probably a bit beyond) to "may get you scolded" (2010) to "will probably get you scolded" (2015). We've been sensitized to so many more words than in, say, the year 2000, that even for one who doesn't have a dog in this fight, watching early '00s media (let alone earlier) can be distracting because it's hard not to notice the now-red-flag words or topics that are thrown around casually—especially in standup, or on comedy TV shows. It's been a pretty fast shift, and I'd put the start at the tail end of the '00s or early '10s. I mean, hell, just look at where mainstream Democrats stood on gay rights in the early '00s, for that matter. We've gone from, "gay marriage? I dunno, that might be a tad too far" to "we must protect trans rights" in a remarkably short span. I dunno, maybe the OG civil rights era had a similar feel of The Discourse shifting a ton in only a decade or two—I wasn't there for it. It's probably also worth noting that this shift looks rather more total from a very-online perspective than it does IRL, which is probably a source of some of the ongoing friction. Online, it's done, the shift has happened, you're a cave-man if you're lagging behind on it at all—offline, much less so.

xwkd 4y ago

Comedy cannot be offensive to trans people on Twitch, specifically! Here's the part where I rhetorically taunt with my weaponization of the virtue of free enterprise: "You have a right to free speech, but I have a right to decide what I allow on my platform!" Yeah, I don't entirely believe that either. I see the weasel here and so do you. So I have a right to disregard the value of free speech. But is that really what we want?

klyrs 4y ago
Platforms aren't there for your free speech, nor should they be. They're there for their own free speech, and freedom of association. Every platform bans content that is perfectly legal: spam, porn, gore, etc. Platforms like gab and parler ban "woke" content. Hell, even libraries pick and choose which books to buy, which books to put in the shelves, which books to put on display. Yes, this is really what we want, if we want a useable internet. Without the freedom to curate, platforms would inundated with so much spam, you'd never see the content you want. Don't like it? Feel free to make your own platform that allows absolutely everything up to the line of legality! Just remember, nobody owes you financial success or a large user-base.
- xwkd 4y ago
  I agree with you completely. This is the way that it should be. I will also say, then, that I feel like we’re all a bunch of huge pussies. Sounding more like my dad every day. Great. Curation and censorship are strange cousins, don’t you think? It seems like it’s only censorship if it’s done with big furnaces and a gun barrel by a man with tiny glasses and creased pants. Governments censor. Corporations curate. Right? I’m not sure if I even want to dignify the following state of affairs by calling it an open secret, but the US is governed by corporations. I won’t insult you by expounding on this line of reasoning. You see what I’m getting at.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    I mean, my dad would call you a pussy for playing video games, much less watching somebody else play them on twitch, and my mom would keep her mouth shut lest the verbal abuse be turned on her. I think we should strive to be better than our parents, and think for ourselves. And, yeah, we've let corporations take control again. But let's be clear, I'm much more concerned about the likes of Halliburton than twitch. Some in government have expressed some interest in breaking up big tech and undermine big oil, so it's not a perfect equivalence, thankfully. I'm with Ken White[1] on "cancel culture." Sometimes, it goes too far. But by and large, "cancel culture" is better framed as "speech that is critical of other speech." And, yeah, the people at the helm of big platforms have bigger thumbs than the rest of us. But nobody stopped anti-woke Musk from taking over Twitter, did they? [1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-shame-and https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...

seydor 4y ago

~12 years ago. RIP satire

noelsusman 4y ago

I've been hearing this for at least 30 years, and yet Dave Chapelle won a Grammy literally last night despite being quite controversial on this very topic. It's also a bit nonsensical to whine about people getting offended by comedy while simultaneously saying comedy should be allowed to be offensive. If you do offensive comedy then some people are going to get offended by it. If they didn't then it wouldn't be offensive!

ridgered4 4y ago

Well, AI comedy can't anyway. I guess there's a niche left for the humans after all. There was a tongue in cheek post on here a couple weeks ago where a user suggested in the future we'll prove we're human by peppering racial sluts into all of our communications.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

InitialLastName 4y ago

Lenny Bruce got arrested multiple times for telling offensive jokes in the 1960s. I don't see any comedians getting arrested lately (for their comedy, that is).