Will Cancel Culture Get the Last Laugh?
There was once upon a time when we as Americans could laugh at our differences.
For the past several years, I’ve noticed that the only people who can have a controversial opinion and not get canceled are comedians. Comedy has a way of softening the blow of a harsh fact. A seasoned comedian can insult people in the audience and remain untouched by the Cancel Culture community. That’s because a good laugh is hard to come by these days. Laughter makes the horse pill go down like a cup of hot coffee on a cool autumn morning.
One comedian braved the elements and hit every taboo liberal topic he could think of in Netflix’s “The Closer.”
“In our country, you can kill a negro, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings. And this is precisely the disparity I wish to discuss.” Dave Chappelle was alluding to the famous hip-hop artist “DaBaby,” who shot and killed a man in broad daylight inside a Walmart in North Carolina. But as Chappelle put it, “nothing bad happened to his career” as the audience burst into slaphappy laughter. “Do you see where I’m going with this?” Chappelle asked. DaBaby made remarks that have been claimed “homophobic” by the LGBTQ community and has since been officially canceled. Just weeks before his remarks on stage, he was the number one streaming artist in the country.
In his most recent Netflix stand-up comedy, Chappelle pushed the envelope again to even more laughter from the crowd: “[DaBaby] pushed the button. He pushed the button, didn’t he? Punched the LGBTQ community right in the AIDS.” Enter the Cancel Culture. There’s no way he’s getting away with saying that. Tickled ears give comedians the right to criticize whomever they wish. If you make them laugh, they won’t come for you. The Cancel Culture Police (CCP) will either leave you alone or get sophisticated on how to attack you.
Dave Chappelle is clever enough to make their jobs harder to cancel him. He knows how to make a soufflé of slave narratives, race, politics, and comedy to mince his words: “You guys are confusing your emotions. You think I hate gay people and what you’re really seeing is that I’m jealous of gay people. I’m not the only [black] person that feels this way. We blacks, we look at the gay community and we go, ‘Look how well that movement is going. Look how well you are doing!’ And we’ve been trapped in this predicament for hundreds of years. ‘How the #@!! are you making that kind of progress?’” Chappelle ended this comedy sketch with what he calls the solution to slavery by using more homosexual rhetoric. “I can’t help but feel like if slaves had baby oil and booty shorts, we might have been free a hundred years sooner.”
I hope you didn’t think the CCP wouldn’t come for Dave Chappelle like they do any other human being they disagree with, especially after he said, “Gender is a fact. Every human being in this room, every human being on earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on earth. That is a fact.” The Netflix special has sparked backlash including from GLAAD and the National Black Justice Coalition.
Laughter is good for the soul. There was once upon a time when we as Americans could laugh at our differences and keep on moving. “The Jeffersons” spun off of “All in the Family” in 1975 and ran until 1985. Every imaginable taboo topic was aired in these two shows and America kept laughing about our racial and gender differences. Comedy has always been the forerunner to crisis. We laugh to keep from crying in America. Let’s see who gets the last laugh.
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