October 8, 2021

"'If this is what being canceled is like, I love it,' the 48-year-old said in response to a standing ovation...."

"'Fuck Twitter. Fuck NBC News, ABC News, all these stupid ass networks. I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to you. This is real life.'"

That quotes this, from his Netflix special, The Closer: " I don’t hate gay people I respect the shit out of you. Not all of you... I’m not that fond of these newer gays — too sensitive, too brittle. I miss the old-school gays … the Stonewall gays. They didn’t take shit from anybody...."

To be "brittle" is to be "Hard but liable to break easily." That's the definition from the OED, which gives this example from 2005, from the Globe & Mail (Toronto): " A ‘promatorium’ is a building where the dead body of your loved one will be frozen, submerged in liquid nitrogen until brittle and then shattered."

I thought that was a joke at the expense of people who think freezing the body after death may lead to some future resurrection — "cryonics." But it's actually a method for intentionally turning a dead body into a powder.

In any case, as a living person, you don't want to be brittle. You may think it's good to be hard, but you're vulnerable to shattering. 

ADDED: Stevie Wonder spoke out: “What we need to cancel is hate. What we need to cancel is fear because we have to have love, and we should never cancel that. I want us to cancel the idea of feeling that we don’t want anyone to laugh because if we don’t laugh, we cry. And I don’t believe that was God’s intention — ever.”

40 comments:

Wilbur said...

It's Easy To Be Hard.

I thought that was a Laura Nyro song, but it's from the musical Hair.

Heartless Aztec said...

The "Out, Loud and Proud" Stonewall generation of Gays were a hoot. Fun - in a non sexual way - to be around. Tough and very non brittle. I won't compare them to anyone or any other group. Good observation by Dave. Funny too. Hey!? Whatever happened to funny? Is Dave the last comic still standing?

Tank said...

If you are performing at the Hollywood Bowl and are on Netflix, you have not been canceled.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

I suspect Chappelle does Not care for the brittle gays who harass others non stop.

David Begley said...

Fuck yeah! Chappelle is my kind of guy.

tim maguire said...

I like his framing on the old school gays vs. the new gays (who aren't necessarily even gay). I've been thinking about this recently--the alphabet soup of activist groups who never tire of adding new letters to the already absurd and unwieldy acronym. It started 50 years ago as LGB, then we added a T for no reason anyone can articulate. The T's are different people with different issues and at first virtually no LGBT groups had any T's anyway (they didn't have a lot of B's either as the B's tend not to be activist.)

Anyway, this new approach of giving every new identity it's own letter reduces the whole thing to a meaningless joke. It was bad enough when the letters got added to the end, but now the 2S's want pride of place and come first. Let's get real for a moment. All the hard work was done by the G's (and, to a lesser extent, the L's). They're the ones who fought in the streets, cracked skulls and got their own skulls cracked for it (the Stonewall gays, as Chapelle put it). The rest of these people are just bandwagon jumpers. They declared themselves a movement and used bullying tactics against their own side to get their letters added to somebody else's process without doing the hard work that the people who came before them did.

And now political correctness demands that the people who made all this possible don't even get to go first? The fake Indigenous label "two-spirit" comes first!? At some point, the Ls and the G's need to tell everyone else to fuck off and get their movement, stop trying to leach off of them.

tim in vermont said...

Trumbo is an interesting movie about how to deal with cancel culture when it was more properly called "blacklisting."

Twitter is more left than the most left leaning Congressional District in the country. You can't call them 'liberals' because the root of that word is 'freedom.' The people who should despise Twitter's blacklisting fetish the most are artists, but even artists have gatekeepers, and those who get through the gate do so by being propagandists.

Chris said...

Well, he certainly can afford to be canceled.

Ryan said...

It is clear what needs to happen now.

Cancel Hollywood Bowl! Cancel Snoop Dogg! Cancel Nas, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Stevie Wonder, Lizzo and Jon Hamm!

This is too good... ha ha. Love it.

Plus Chapelle gives zero fucks.

Temujin said...

I had hernia surgery a week ago, and among the things I'm trying to avoid are sneezing, coughing, and laughing. So...I've had a week of "That's not funny" on purpose and I can tell you- life without humor is not good. I would hate to be a regressive.

Can't wait to watch Chappelle's newest show. Just can't do it until I'm able to full body laugh.

The great thing about Chappelle is that he has always run down his own path- in his humor and his observations. It's why he stands out. And he's clearly never cared what the masses had to say about how he lives his life or does his work. He is his own man. We need more of that.

Fernandinande said...

If you are performing at the Hollywood Bowl and are on Netflix, you have not been canceled.

Chappelle got publicity, not cancelled.

I watched most of "Closer", and much of it seemed to be crafted around a "myself and the gay/trans person were friends or friendly", like the classic "I have a black friend".

He was really quite mild when he could've been making jokes about fake vaginas which smell like colons.

tim in vermont said...

It is kind of weird that Netflix hasn't recommended Chappelle to me. I watch comedy specials.

MadisonMan said...

I do like the word brittle as an apt descriptor for some of today's gays -- and some of today's straights as well.

Howard said...

Chappelle cannot be cancelled because has made himself anti-fragile. He's giving the brittle woke snowflakes a generous dose of tough love. In return, the vapid hysterical twitter sturm und drang are boosting his ratings into low Earth orbit.

Win-win

rhhardin said...

A war against hate.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

“Fuck Twitter! This is real life” should be the motto of modern journalism. NBC cited three random Twitter posts to “support” their article headline about Chappelle “being criticized” which is as lame as the old journal-crutch “some say” when the writer needs a sock-puppet to give voice to their opinion in an ostensibly “news” article. Twitter has contributed to more lazy journalism than even our ubiquitous FBI leakers. “Fuck Twitter” is an organizing principal I can get behind. Social Media are antisocial spreaders of hate and fear. This the perfect coda from Stevie Wonder. He gets it.

This is a great Friday feel-good story!

Ann Althouse said...

Chappelle has the extra power of knowing he is loved.

Iman said...

Anything that serves to mitigate - even if only temporarily - the grim future being fashioned by the lunatics should be welcomed.

wendybar said...

Stevie Wonder NOW claims he wants to cancel hate. Maybe HE should have cancelled HIS hate when Trump was president. NOW that he got his way, he is all about love. Just another lying, hating progressive who loves only when it suits him. Go kneel again on both knees for your buddy Kaepernick who divided the country with his kneeling for the flag.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

The genius “Titania” account on Twitter is the exception to the rule that Twitter is a sewer. “She” is stunningly prescient in her absurdity and like Chappelle proves that The Woke are the most unintentionally funny people around while being humorless scolds. What a bottomless mine for comedy material if you are unafraid and witty.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Chappelle is loved because he is funny and he says things that we are all thinking and know to be true. or at least funny - which is banned unless you're pushing the "correct" humor.
The correct humor is scrubbed of any mocking towards "the party(D)" or "The Party's(D)" constituents. Pre-packaged humor, safe for democrat party loyalists and hiveminders - so they not never feel offended by paid hacks who work for "the Party(D)" controlled Cobert-Kimmell-SNL, NBC, ABC, CBS twitter-google.


Joe Smith said...

He didn't say 'Fuck Twitter.'

He actually said, 'Let's go Twitter.'

Common misconception...

Joe Smith said...

I will never understand anybody who has his kind of money bending to anybody for any reason.

He did the right thing.

Once you've got $50M in the bank, you're untouchable.

tcrosse said...

It used to be that gays had the funniest and most vicious gay jokes.

tommyesq said...

America has hit a point where the most rational and reasonable viewpoints are coming from Chapelle, Bill Burr, Russell Brand, and Joe Rogan, while our "elites" slobber all over themselves to lie to and mislead the public.

Drago said...

Howard: "Chappelle cannot be cancelled because has made himself anti-fragile. He's giving the brittle woke snowflakes a generous dose of tough love. In return, the vapid hysterical twitter sturm und drang are boosting his ratings into low Earth orbit."

That means Chappelle is beating Jeff Bezos/"Sue Origin" too........

mikee said...

The frozen, crushed body would only be a powder until it was warmed up to room temperature, at which point it would be a goo. My personal experience with freezing bananas in liquid nitrogen for class demonstrations leads me to believe this. I used to pound a nail into a board with my frozen banana for a class demonstration, often shattering the banans, and later had to clean up the gooey mess. So, yuck to that method of dead body disposal, unless it is followed up with cremation, rapidly.

As for Chapelle, more power to him. I'm glad to see him back from drug rehab, and back from having his show literally cancelled off TV (contract disputes, as I understand it, not content). He's still funny.

Narr said...

Hey, no hatin' on my man Stevie!

I'll have to watch now.

Ceciliahere said...

I thought Stevie Wonder moved to Ghana.

Yancey Ward said...

Tank wins the internet for the day. Someone with a Netflix show and is performing in front of Hollywood elites is definitely not cancelled in any sense at all.

Tom said...

Two of the most needed comedians at the moment are Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle. While they’re very funny, they also share some deep observations about our world - especially how the busy bodies interact with the rest of us. In a less funny (but not unfunny) way, Jordan Peterson is discussing many of the same things. At their core, these three seem to detest victim-hood and authoritarianism.

We don’t listen to most philosophers today. But, frankly, the three I’ve named are thinking more clearly than most philosophers. It’s amazing we’ve been reduced to garnering our philosophical thinking from Netflix, videos passed around on Facebook, and a blog that pokes fun at men in shorts and all mocks all manner of garnering.

Yancey Ward said...

You would have to dehydrate either the body first, or the cold dust (can be done easily in the latter case under vaccuum before the dust warms).

Skippy Tisdale said...

"Dave Chappelle Gets Standing Ovation Amid Netflix Special Controversy: 'If This Is What Being Canceled Is, I Love It'/After being called out for transphobic jokes in 'The Closer'"

The war on women has finally been won. By men in drag.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

tcrosse,

It used to be that gays had the funniest and most vicious gay jokes.

True. Like <A HREF="https://www.amazon.com/Out-Loud-Laughing-Collection-Lesbian/dp/0385476183>this book</A>.

Re: Freezing bodies, and speaking of jokes, Larry Niven brings this up in some of his books. The idea is that a lot of people had themselves frozen at one time or another, either because they were terminally ill, or insane, or just bored with life. Then the "organ donor problem" sets in -- transplants are very easy, but there isn't a lot of, er, "stuff" (as Niven's "organleggers" style it) about, so people start thinking of clearing out the cryogenic vaults and recycling their occupants into parts.

Anyway, there are comic terms used for these liquid-nitrogen-frozen people. "Corpsicle" is one. "Homo snapiens" is another. Ouch.

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

I can't support these people. I don't mean Chappelle, but Hollywood in general. The audience. Too many of them are too stupid to understand that their own actions have supported this zeitgeist, and now they are giving advice on how to overcome it? They have very little understanding of the real world that normal people live in, and thus are the last people whose advice should carry weight on political issues.

Skippy Tisdale said...

"LGBT"

Back in the 1990s, I was the president of Honeywell's Gay Pride council. Back then the acronym was GLBT, but apparently at some point, it was decided -- ladies first.

rhhardin said...

Chapelle doesn't strike me as funny but remember that Trump himself is basically Don Rickles and knows it.

tom said...

Which goes to show that the freak out over cancel culture has always been overblown.

Bill Peschel said...

"Which goes to show that the freak out over cancel culture has always been overblown."

At least until you get cancelled.

I know of a guy who sells books on Amazon. He was threatened with getting thrown off the service (and Amazon keeping his money) unless he took down a book that threatened them.

"Mein Kampf"? "The Protocols of Zion"?

Nope. You can still buy them on Amazon.

It was "The Manipulated Man," a book that criticized feminism. Amazon still won't explain why they ordered it pulled.

Cancellation works against people who can't fight back.

What we're seeing now is a contest in the Comfy Class. How powerful are you?

If you're a journalist, can you get someone in trouble? If you're an "activist," can you get a professor fired?

Can they cancel Chapelle? Let's watch and find out.

Lurker21 said...

Do we really need the word "edgelord?" The fact that it moves so quickly from trolls (and quasi-trolls) sitting in their underwear making snarky comments online to brilliant comedians suggests that it's going to become an all-purpose insult directed at people who say provocative things that one disagrees with. Have you noticed that in the liberal/progressive media the label "culture warrior" is only applied to those on the right? As if there weren't any on the other side?