But, for the sake of typing on the internet, here's all this:

The Black friends that insisted with all their heart I watch Che's first season have all been really, really lukewarm on the new season while I was still pretty into it. And pretty much as a chorus, it's been because they felt he was too sensitive about being canceled. I tried to point to how many of the actual skits (ie. pretty much all of them) are begging to be canceled, even from the very beginning with the timely abortion clinic bit, and how a lot of the comedy of the new season is building off this idea of being painfully unfunny to an SNL audience, but...


Then I also think about having similar conversations w/r/t the new Kendrick album and last Chappelle special specifically before he ruined my reaction to it with his own follow up jokes or whatever you'd like to call 'em...


Are we/me actually becoming less reliable because we/me have been conditioned to want Black entertainment to be dangerous? Does the danger feel less abstract sometimes because of Twitter and 24 hour news cycles?


I think the idea that comedy is being gutted by "cancel culture" is farcical because I'm laughing as much as I ever have at people being funny for pay, but I do get why these guys specifically feel a weight. (Sidebar: Even if you're a madman like Bill Burr, as long as you don't Louis C.K. your female friends I think it's harder to worry about white grievances while, as most comedy shows, playing to white audiences - this might also be really stupid).

I often leave the bar at night thinking back on my favorite jokes among friends and wondering how long it would've taken a stranger with a camera phone out to ruin my life if they felt it'd build their clout. And I'm just telling jokes to kill time between one shift and the next with people doing the same.


Anyway, went on a slight tangent, but...I was really struck by this conversation I had tonight with those dudes who essentially forced Damn Michael Che Season 1 on me, and loved it enough they not only watched it once on their own then once again with me then scattershot over the year at multiple little hangs when we needed background comedy...only for me to get to this new season right away, love it, and then hear a pretty mediocre response from the same guys as they slowly approached it.

Maybe that doesn't even have to do with the idea of cancellation, but my gut reaction has been that this is the first time in Black comedy where the comedians are addressing fear of their takes as much as or more than the takes themselves.

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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
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