Society/Culture Is Comedy Dead?

[Spirit Level]

Comics like Jimmy Carr and Jim Jeffries (early on before he got too political) are my favourite.

**** you PC social justice warror f*cks, If I want to laugh at jokes about disabled people I should be able to

 

[Scotland]

Except for Kingswood Country. That will never grow old as we grow old.


On iPhone using BigFooty.com mobile app

Pickle me grandmother, a Kingswood Country reference on SRP!

Now, bugger off wog. You're dripping purple Valiant oil all over me driveway.

 

[Bomberboyokay]

Comics like Jimmy Carr and Jim Jeffries (early on before he got too political) are my favourite.

**** you PC social justice warror f*cks, If I want to laugh at jokes about disabled people I should be able to

Went off Jimmy Carr when his tax evasion was found out. Not as funny when you realise he's playing himself not a character.

 

[Scotland]

Chapelle didn’t stop being funny, as such, but his trans jokes are pretty lazy. They go for the cheap laugh and he gets them. Someone with a more critical eye, though, can spot the laziness. I still think his show overall was good, the first show that kicked off the controversy was actually very good and didn’t deserve the flak it got. But he’s doubled down and got a little lazy.

Gervais is similar. You say they didn’t stop being funny, but a lot of the comedians complaining about PC are older and richer, two things that make people more resistant to change. There’s not much funny about things staying the same. Someone like Seinfeld just comes across as dated. Someone like Gervais tries harder to shock as if shocking is automatically funny.

Patton Oswalt talked about some of this when asked about any jokes he regrets. He said he confused laziness with edginess and went for the cheap laugh.

I agree critics have a narrow band of what’s good, I just don’t think it’s driven by what’s ‘in’ or some social agenda. I think it’s people mistaking snobbery for something else.

I thought Chappelle's trans stuff was funny, but even if it was lazy it was only one part of a whole set.

Humanity had me in stitches. Gervais is a smug w***er but this also isn't new. On several occasions he has explained his jokes because people are desperate to make any joke about a trans person 'transphobic'. As he said, a joke about Bill Cosby isn't automatically racist. You need to unpack what the jokes actually are. The Caitlyn Jenner stuff is pretty funny IMO. Definitely laboured the point a bit but people getting upset because he "dead named" her really is silly. Bruce Jenner literally existed as a man for 65 years and won Olympic gold in Montreal. If you can't make fun of people who pretend that isn't the case then what can you make fun of?

I don't know if you mean Seinfield the man or the show but latter finished 20 years ago so the content is dated on that basis. I still find it hilarious and I think if it was made today it would be just as funny as it's adaptive observational comedy.

 

[JackOutback]

I thought Chappelle's trans stuff was funny, but even if it was lazy it was only one part of a whole set.

Humanity had me in stitches. Gervais is a smug w***er but this also isn't new. On several occasions he has explained his jokes because people are desperate to make any joke about a trans person 'transphobic'. As he said, a joke about Bill Cosby isn't automatically racist. You need to unpack what the jokes actually are. The Caitlyn Jenner stuff is pretty funny IMO. Definitely laboured the point a bit but people getting upset because he "dead named" her really is silly. Bruce Jenner literally existed as a man for 65 years and won Olympic gold in Montreal. If you can't make fun of people who pretend that isn't the case then what can you make fun of?

I don't know if you mean Seinfield the man or the show but latter finished 20 years ago so the content is dated on that basis. I still find it hilarious and I think if it was made today it would be just as funny as it's adaptive observational comedy.

‘Dead naming’ is a stupid term. I quite enjoyed his bit about how trans acceptance took off because it’s got a white man out front. That’s interesting; just banging on about the ‘alphabet people’ less so (though his description of trans people being the one in the car that annoys everyone else is also canny; a lot of gay and bisexual people don’t like having the trans wagon hitched to their cause).

I didn’t much rate Humanity but I don’t think Gervais’s stand-up work is as solid as his TV stuff. He’s not a natural stand-up.

I was referring to Seinfeld the comic. He’s another who says he won’t play colleges because they are ‘too PC’. But it might just be that his gay French stereotype bit isn’t really funny anymore. The show is still fantastic.

 

[Goosecat]

 

[Partridge]

Hannah Gadsby

I like how Shapiro says she may be the least funny person on planet Earth. I think he's understating it.

First time I've ever actually watched her "comedy". Her comedy is as funny as her expression is emotional.

 

[Bomberboyokay]

The 'political correctness' bogeyman

By Tom Tanuki | 1 December 2019, 12:00pm

Pick up a copy of last Saturday’s Weekend Australian (actually, don’t, you’ll regret it) and you’ll see Kate Hanley Corley on the front cover making a wide-eyed "shush" motion.

Who is being shushed? Kate. Because she’s a comedian. And political correctness has gone mad. Because of hysterical PC tyrants like me who cancel everything. She features in the leading article, called 'Is call-out culture killing comedy?'. It mentions me several times, saying I’m the 'social activist comedian' who led an 'online boycott campaign' against Kate for her cancelled 2019 Melbourne Fringe Festival act, Aisha the Aussie Geisha.

Others, very fairly, demanded that Melbourne Fringe stop hosting the act. But I boycotted nothing, and nor did I ask anyone else to. I merely pointed out how wildly cringe-inducing and racist Kate’s material was. Still, it’s important to understand that neither of these approaches constitute part of the inflated "call-out or cancel culture" bogeyman that right-wing columnists and shit comedians excitedly insist is coming for them.

Aisha the Aussie Geisha told a love story of an Aussie woman from the country who goes to Japan and dresses up like a geisha to win her man back, as an excuse to perform a series of "musical comedy" numbers (already things are looking grim, even without the racism). The people at the excellent online Asian-Australian magazine Liminal first noticed the act and shared it, pointing to its reliance on the belittlement of Asian cultures through puns and stereotyping.

I did the same after some investigation into Kate’s content. Liminal then published an open letter, signed by 70 prominent Asian, Asian-Australian and Indigenous creatives, demanding that Melbourne Fringe look to their own stated values of inclusivity and diversity and consider whether hosting Kate’s act contradicted those values. After about a day, Kate pulled her show.

All I’d done was share an extraordinary "musical comedy" video excerpt from the show called Hot Tub Geisha. Hot Tub Geisha is by far the single worst thing ever made by a human being. Kate flounces around in a kimono, hamming it up like the ghost of Mickey Rooney as though the past few decades never happened. She describes herself in it as a 'pin-up girl for Eastern mystery', which is The King and I tier hokey Orientalist cringe. It even has a line in it – “it’s not me who put the moan in Kimono” – which Kate thought was so good that she repeats it twice and puts it in subtitles.

It is really agonising viewing. Arms manufacturers produce chemical weapons which are more entertaining than Hot Tub Geisha.

The Weekend Australian article suggests that none of us had even seen the show we were screeching about. Kate agrees, complaining that 'people attacking it couldn’t have known about those layers of irony because they hadn’t seen it'.

See, we of the "woke" left are so ready to take offence at everything that we leap to our keyboards in outrage before we’ve even bothered to see the content we pretend to be offended by. This angle ignores the fact that we were unfortunate enough to have a lot of the show’s material available online. More than enough. Believe me, I’d rather have been left in the dark. However, Hot Tub Geisha has since vanished from Kate’s YouTube channel.

I was delighted to share Hot Tub Geisha because while it warranted questioning for its naff racist content, I also knew that nobody would defend Hot Tub Geisha on its artistic or comedic merits. It had none. We all left behind the parochial racism of bland characters like Ted Bullpitt on Kingswood Country in the 1980’s, just as we were also abandoning shit comedians like Kevin Bloody Wilson to berate the gays and the blacks in front of his dying crowd of RSL relics.

Those seem like two extreme examples now, but they weren’t once: they got on our TV screens and occupied our spotlight. Their gradual disappearance demonstrates changing standards over time in an Australia that has been pushed, by activism and the call for better representation, to cater to its diverse and multi-ethnic audience.

Kate describes the feeling of getting a few comments on her Facebook page about her bad comedy: 'it’s a tsunami of hate and it really opened my eyes to the power of the online mob'. I was part of the same Melbourne Fringe season, performing a run of shows with comedian Sean Bedlam for our part-time anti-racist action collective, part-time comedy group 'Yelling at Racist Dogs'.

At one point during the run, far-right idiot Avi Yemini incited his following of 350,000+ YouTube subscribers to flood our pages with fuzzy-headed patriotic boomer comments and to crash our show. I wish Kate could experience that so she’d know what a real online mob is. But Avi’s not "the left", so I suppose that doesn’t count as "cancel culture".

In the contrived anti-political correctness martyr world of right-wing columnists, acts like Kate’s somehow become fresh and counter-cultural, and we of the left howl for the cancellation of all humour so that society might bend to our rigid standards. Thus, an ‘online boycott campaign was being spearheaded’ by me, even though I said nothing about a boycott, and only joked about ‘cancelling’ Kate because I know that the right-wing think every condemnation is a ‘cancellation’.

Not only do right-wing columnists fail to discern the difference between my approach and Liminal’s open letter, but in fact, it benefits them to obfuscate that difference and lump us all in under the umbrella of ‘cancel culture’. So allow me to explain the difference.

I spend some of my time doing comedy and the rest taking part in anti-fascist activism. In part, I try to use plain speech and laughs to identify and reject racism in the hopes of building a popular consensus against it. It takes work because I battle uphill against a very well-funded right-wing apparatus that tries to convince everyone that I am a part of an "elite" for trying to point out when racist people are being a bit racist.

I try not to assist in the process of giving further evidence for their cultivated fantasies about activists like me – so I rarely if ever ask for governments or institutions to intervene in my anti-fascism. I won’t create petitions asking for racists’ visas to be banned, or demand that the government legislate against fascists, or even ask for Melbourne Fringe to stop Kate from killing everyone with her awful yellowface drivel.

My desired outcome is a culture where Australians intuitively and collectively reject racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic rubbish, en masse, in solidarity with a broader community who don’t necessarily look like them. We won’t need the State to intervene for us: we’ll do it ourselves.

But I’m white Australian, not Asian-Australian. I don’t personally stand to suffer, or to watch my family suffer, as direct targets of the re-platforming of Kingswood Country-era subpar mockery of Asians. I can stand in solidarity with them, but I’ll never experience racism in the way they do. This is why I acknowledge the importance of the open letter that Liminal Magazine released. They are trying to defend the integrity of spaces that say they welcome Asian-Australians, by taking institutions to task for what would otherwise be the hollow misuse of corporate language about "diversity". They asked Melbourne Fringe to take their commitments seriously.

These two approaches – let’s call them the "open letter" approach and the "dear God, Hot Tub Geisha is the worst thing I’ve ever seen" approach – are often positioned as opposing each other in a linear debate about the merits of "de-platforming" in left or progressive spaces. You’re either a hardline libertarian or willing to use all the bureaucratic tools at your disposal, and never the twain shall meet.

But in truth, we worked together towards a shared outcome here. Who’s to say that the response to the open letter would have been so decisive if people hadn’t seen the content of Kate’s show and laughed at how terrible it was? Who’s to say that Kate would have cancelled at all if all she received was mouthy folk like me poking fun at her bad comedy, instead of a firm open letter from people far better positioned than I to speak about racism against Asian-Australians?

"Anti-politically correct" media outlets, columnists and comedians miscategorise all social justice activism and discussion as a left-wing campaign to silence dissent. This is itself a deliberate, coordinated right-wing angle, meant to drown out criticism by portraying it all as totalitarian censorship.

But let’s be honest. The "victims" of this contrived phenomenon are its commercial beneficiaries. Dave Chappelle does million-dollar Netflix specials whining about how everyone "cancelled" his last million-dollar Netflix special. Meanwhile, Kate (who is really benefiting from being included in the same paragraph as Chappelle) opened her website for tickets to her new 2020 Melbourne International Comedy Festival show just four days before the publishing of the Weekend Australian article. What luck!

'After scandalising last year’s Fringe Festival, Kate Hanley Corley throws off her masks to be herself', says the breathless event description she herself wrote. Good luck with the show, Kate! It’s interesting to note how artists with no personal responsibility or creativity left in the tank compensate for their obsoletion by tapping into the lucrative value of "anti-political correctness".

Kate is fortunate that she was able to cancel Aisha the Aussie Geisha and then complain to the Weekend Australian about how mad political correctness has gone because now nobody gets to see how ordinary it was going to be.

The rest of us are fortunate that activists and artists are willing to push back against racist content in the arts space as in any other, even though they’re unfairly portrayed as the proponents of "cancel culture" for doing so, because they help keep those spaces safe for all Australians, no matter what they look like.

The 'political correctness' bogeyman

Pick up a copy of last Saturday’s Weekend Australian (actually, don’t, you’ll regret it) and you’ll see Kate Hanley Corley on the front cover making a wide-eyed "shush" motion.

independentaustralia.net

 

[Rettolalia]

The 'political correctness' bogeyman

The 'political correctness' bogeyman

Pick up a copy of last Saturday’s Weekend Australian (actually, don’t, you’ll regret it) and you’ll see Kate Hanley Corley on the front cover making a wide-eyed "shush" motion.

independentaustralia.net

With his completely non ironic use of terms like ‘boomer comments’, what an absolute flog this Tom Tanukai chap sounds like.

Is he like the Mike Stuchbery of Australian stand up?

 

[tandino]

Is he like the Mike Stuchbery of Australian stand up?

With 400 Twitter followers, doubtful.

 

[nylexbandit]

With 400 Twitter followers, doubtful.

I’m more interested in how a non Asian person has the last name Tanuki

 

[Bomberboyokay]

I’m more interested in how a non Asian person has the last name Tanuki

Are you the name police?

 

[nylexbandit]

Are you the name police?

Do I need to be?

 

[Rettolalia]

With 400 Twitter followers, doubtful.

Sounds like the absolute life of the party this bloke.

Tom Tanuki, Author at New Matilda

newmatilda.com

If the party is being thrown by Antifa.

Punching On With Patriots: How To Tackle Gavin McInnes And His Proud Boys’ Promise of Violence In Australia - New Matilda

Tom Tanuki is a real Australian ‘patriot’, someone who has stood on the front lines of protest to shout down the extreme right wing and their messages of hate and violence. With the imminent arrival in Australia of one of America’s most extreme racists, Tanuki is helping lead a new group that...

newmatilda.com

 

[Emptyorangeseat]

Whilst the left have destroyed the normal comedy, they have have actually replaced it with them selves!



The greatest minds and comic writers couldn’t come up with thisstuff

 

[Bomberboyokay]

Do I need to be?

No

 

[Emptyorangeseat]

No

Come on Bomberboy! You can’t make this stuff up! Those LWNJs are the new comedy!

cant wait to see what these loons have I store when trumps gets elected for a second term

 

[Rettolalia]

Come on Bomberboy! You can’t make this stuff up! Those LWNJs are the new comedy!

cant wait to see what these loons have I store when trumps gets elected for a second term

I suspect that’s when we may see elements of the left go full Weather/Antifa Underground.

THAT’S when the war may begin.

 

[Emptyorangeseat]

I suspect that’s when we may see elements of the left go full Weather/Antifa Underground.

THAT’S when the war may begin.

LWNJs go full ****** 2.0

 

[Rettolalia]

LWNJs go full ****** 2.0

Yep.

Will be fun to see how these morons manage once firearms become involved.

That will be comedy worth tuning in for.

 

[Jello_B]

The unfunny people have been around forever, but they were usually in clubs working on their act.

Now with so much video produced, the pool has been shallow. In Australia it is shallow, I think, because we don't have the population.

But look back at "classic" Australian comedy from years past. D-Generation has not aged well at all. Fast Forward and the like as well. Just dumb stuff given TV hours to fill space cheaply. Shaun Micallef wasn't always hilarious. The survivors from those days are in their 50's (60's?) and hitting their straps now.

"Women aren't funny!" - But neither were the men when they started out.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

Is detachable toe still funny?

 

[Rettolalia]

 

[Jafa]

Comics like Jimmy Carr and Jim Jeffries (early on before he got too political) are my favourite.

**** you PC social justice warror f*cks, If I want to laugh at jokes about disabled people I should be able to

I like Jimmy Carr - the guys edges like few else.

 

[Rettolalia]

 

[its free real estate]

Went off Jimmy Carr when his tax evasion was found out. Not as funny when you realise he's playing himself not a character.

Plus he looks like a doll.