His later stuff, for a long time, Tangerine, for example, which I didn’t laugh that much at, only made fun of white people, his wife, kids, police, and things that it was okay to laugh at. I’m bringing up two of his bits that he spoke hard truth to the world and that’s why it was funny until we got to a point that the world didn’t want to hear certain kind of hard truths, and no version of them were going to be funny.
You could say, ‘yeah great, this guy loved two Chris Rock bits that made black people look bad’ but that’s missing my point. ‘What did he say? Holy shit! That’s true! That’s funny as hell.’ All of his bits from that era were of that ilk. It had been years since anyone had done that. He wasn’t supposed to be talking like that and it wasn’t supposed to be that funny. The rawness of the groundbreaking piece ‘Nigga vs. This is the guy that stunned the world with the genius comedy special ‘Bring the Pain’. As was the smugness you would hear in the Comedy Store and Improv green rooms when Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globes and shat down on all their celeb friends for coming up to awards shows and giving lectures instead of just ‘thanking their agents and fucking off’.Įven Chris Rock, maybe the greatest stand-up of the last twenty years started to censor himself. Maybe for that reason, offstage the condemnation for a Bill Maher biting into the slightest tip of a red-pill is routinely off the charts. In their heart though these stand-ups know they’re taking a softer way home. By the way, those comics have the right to have those opinions, and their audiences have of course the right to laugh at those jokes. Yes, they’re talented as hell, but with the wind at their backs, they’re playing the same game state sponsored media has been playing in the same time period. They by and large have been pretending to be willing to push the buttons, to be telling the truth, giving the crowd exactly what they know they want to hear. They’ve been fake-brave and we’ve accepted it. At least not in the last five to ten years they haven’t been. Some of the most successful and respected and so called ‘edgy’ comics today are not brave in the slightest. It’s telling us things we’re not supposed to hear, didn’t want to hear, through humor.
It always spanks the elites and those that have their hands on the wheel and in the till. What does it take to piss off the powers that be nowadays in the ways that Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, George Carlin, Joan Rivers did in their day? Who is brave and bold today in that way in the world world of stand-up? Is it pushing the envelope to simply berate white women, even if it’s funny? Does that make a smart comic brave? Does crudely and in detail talking about sex as a woman comic make you someone that courageously walks the edge today? Is it as risky as some of the stuff Pryor and Paul Mooney or even Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock or Bill Hicks were doing as they were breaking through? The best stand-up is always counter-culture.
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