Dave Chappelle's "The Closer," Edgy Comedians, and Cancel Culture

Lately, everyone's mad (or at least riled up) about Dave Chappelle's "The Closer" on Netflix. I made two videos about it. The first one is about edgy comedy in general, and a few things we need to consider when transgressive comedy is in the news.

The second one is about the transgressive comedy special of the hour, Dave Chappelle's "The Closer" on Netflix, where he really tried to get cancelled by taking aim at trans folk. (ps: he's not cancelled). There's been a big discussion and a lot of points of view expressed on the issue of Chappelle's special, and the issues in Chappelle's special.

I hope you like them!

In all this, I think it's important to make sure that we're listening to what actual trans people are saying rather than getting carried away with what is being said about them. I am dismayed to find there are a lot of articles talking about Chappelle, about Netflix, about the media furor, and about the Netflix employees who walked out in protest of the special, but I'm down on page two and three and four of the google search results, and still finding a very disappointing lack of articles reporting trans folks' take on Chappelle's comments.

Here are some articles featuring the voices of trans people, talking about Chappelle's special. Please make sure the subjects of the conversation have their voices heard.

CNN asked four trans comedians what they thought of Chappelle's special.

CBC has a video which includes a black trans artist on the panel, who makes some good points.

Comedian Dahlia Belle has a response in the Guardian that's blistering.

A very good perspective from the Independent: 

Back in 2005, there was a very specific incident that had made Chappelle realise his comedy might be harmful. In a sketch he considered to be ironic, he was dressed in blackface and dancing, when he heard the loud echo of a white man’s laughter reverberate across the set. To Chappelle, this was evidence that his satire wasn’t working: regardless of his intention, some people felt he was giving them the green light to laugh at an oppressed minority. Over 15 years later, The Closer confirms that Chappelle is no closer to remedying his original problem. After all, he is still drawing out mean-spirited laughs from a crowd – the difference is that the laughs are now at the expense of another marginalised group.

This Vox article includes vital statistics about the frequency of violence and abuse against trans people, including domestic violence, workplace harassment, hate crimes, homelessness, and suicide.

This LA Times article quotes several transgender people who worked with or for Netflix, including Terra Field, the Netflix employee who was fired (and re-hired) for speaking out against Netflix.

This report quotes trans activist Drian Juarez.

Readers, if you have another trans voice who's weighed in on this topic, please link it in the comments.

More facts about violence against transgender and nonbinary people. If you can watch a Chappelle special full of trans jokes, don't look away from this.

Something For those Unvaccinated Culture Warriors (Satire)

Well, some people write earnest pleas when they are upset, sad or annoyed about something. I make jokes. 

As we watch Covid 19 take a second pass at the USA, extracting catastrophic hospitalization and death counts almost exclusively from unvaccinated americans, and that is somehow still not reason enough to convince people to get a free needle, it struck me that perhaps the problem here is that getting the vaccine basically means admitting your over-earnest libt**d coworker was right, and if anybody knows anything about a culture war, it's that you can never back away from a position once you've taken it.

But if you think about it, the anti-mask, anti-vaxx side of this culture war is getting a really raw deal: sure, the people on Fox News and the Truth About Demon Biden Facebook group call you brave, but the cost -- increased risk of flippin' death is just unreasonably steep just for scoring a few points and pissing off the libs.

So I've come up with a way to own the libs without backing away from the culture war a single inch!

Let's get on this! If a little re-brand is what it takes...

Listen. I get how weird, hard, and unpleasant this culture war is. I understand what's at stake. I actually really strongly don't think mockery is our way out of this, and those thoughts might show up on this blog sooner or later, because if we don't find a way out of this, we're screwed. But until then, if you're in the mood for a little black humor, I hope you like this. And whether you're in the mood for a little black humor or not, go get vaccinated if you haven't already! Take care of the people around you. That's the very least we can do.

Deo Geu-rae-ee-tuh Get-chu-bee Project and KoreanGov

OK. So over on Twitter, there's this great tweeter called koreangov, who writes hilarious 140 character send-ups of Korean promotions and news. S/He was also the first person I know of who mentioned the ifriendly website that caught so much flack a couple weeks ago. It's like Dokdo Is Ours, but more condensed.

Now, Koreangov has started a blog as well, where you can enjoy his style of satire, stretched out into longer passages. I particularly enjoyed the "new driving test" post. The blog has had a good start so far, and has the advantage of an already-built-in audience.

Moreover, my hat is off to Koreangov's amazing skill at writing English as if it were a Korean trying to write English. We've exchanged a few e-mails, and I can assure you it's a ruse, and s/he writes English perfectly fluently, but s/he is just hilarious.

It reminds me of this book I once randomly picked up:


It's a hilariously ridiculous book that obviously never passed through the hands of a single native speaker on its torturous journey from being written, obviously, in Korean first, and then translated into English with the help of a Korean-English dictionary and a grammar class. But only one or two grammar classes.

Go ahead and read it: it's right exactly on the line between clumsy, hilarious, frustrating, and sad.
Here are some examples of the train-wrecky text:




So why am I writing about this?

Because old favorite comedy blog Dokdo Is Ours just rolled out a really funny idea: The Great Gatsby Project, where contributors can take a page out of the NORMAL book "The Great Gatsby" and translate it into "This was obviously written first in Korean, and then translated into English, and never edited or read by a Native speaker at any point in the process" It's called Deo Geureat Kechupi Ploject.

I think this is a great idea which might have hilarious results, and I might contribute a few pages for fun. If any of you have regular proofreading, editing, or writing marking duties, this might be a fun way to blow off some of that frustration. So go check out the project proposal, and the new blog DIO started for the project, and maybe claim a page or two for your own.

For now...

About to head off for the weekend and Do Fun Stuff.

If you think I'm super-cool, (or just think the kind of people I hang out with are cool, which they are) and want to hang out with me in Seoul, this is just my notice for you to set aside your November 22nd evening...more details to come.

Until then, for your entertainment and edification...
some links

1. putting stuff in a microwave


2. Wanna know what it's like to surf the internet in China? See what gets through The Great Firewall Of China.

3. A little high-brow humor from a Korean skit... for those who don't think Koreans have a sense of humor. (sigh: this advanced comedy technique of running a middling gag deep, deep into the ground, reminds me of the old days, watching Saturday Night Live)

Man this guy's funny.

Jim Carrey back before he "made it"

Wizard People, Dear Readers. I laughed for about an hour straight last night.

A guy named Brad Neely, from Austin, has recorded a voice-over for the entire first Harry Potter movie. It is sometimes overwrought, sometimes a little crass, and mostly absolutely hilarious.

It's available on youtube, divided into chapters, here, from beginning to end.

This thing made me laugh out loud a lot. If you love Harry Potter, or if you love overwrought prose, or people talking in silly voices, or somebody taking the piss out of the silliness of Hollywood fantasy movies, this is SOOO worth seeing, and funnier than all but two or three of the comedy movies I've seen in the last five years.


The prose is wildly uneven, going from phrases like:

"yuckers" and "holy BALLS!"

"her voice is chilling, and like a piano made of frozen windex"

"snooozers. All the kids are too tired to listen."



to

"a disturbingly meaningful fog hangs cataracts all over Hogwarts."

"Gathered around the fire, four or five cognacs down, our threesome unwinds and works out the details. Neckties loosened, robes unbuckled, they are relaxing. Yes, they are wrong about Snake."

"Harry is like a demon long dead, with nothing else to lose. . . like a leopard, Harry used his voracious mouth as his catcher! He's got the snitch in his animal belly!. . . the crowd goes absolutely BAZONKERS! . . . Harry is spent! The crowd is destroying its throats, calling Harry's name. Harry feels right with himself he's down there, a new God, who has found his calling. He holds up the snitch, and bellows, "I am a beautiful animal! I am a destroyer of worlds! I am Harry f*cking Potter! And dear reader, the world, at last, was quiet." (the end of the Cribbage match)

"That crazy, sick-ass face is burning everything. He wants that stone bad. He wants to paddle Harry so hard. He starts telling Harry all sorts of fake sh*t like that Harry killed his own parents, and that Dumbledore eats babies."


Dude, just watch it (unless you don't like f*ck-words, as he calls them.) Here's one of my favourite parts, just to get you started.





And here's Chapter one.

from a comedy website. . .

from Dan Gurewich, a writer for Collegehumor.com, a website full of humor suitable for college students (bum jokes, supernintendo, videos of people doing AWESOME stuff, parodies, satires, pretty good update on the state of North American pop culture and internet memes), and links about human absurdity from around the world.

"I have an idea that will solve everything"

With the presidential elections looming just a horse pregnancy away, the candidates are ignoring the real problems and instead focusing on the same old divisive issues, from gun control to which Back to the Future film is the best (“3, and f*ck all of you.” –Mitt Romney, 9/21/07).

It’s clear that having to consider multiple issues at once causes voter brain freeze (a fact that led Friedrich Nietzsche to famously deem politics “the Slurpee of the masses,” adding “and Blue Raspberry is always broken”). One candidate can’t satisfy everybody, and that’s why I’m proposing that we elect four presidents: The President of Abortions, The President of Guns, The President of Gays, and The President of Everything Else.

The President of Abortions will wield full power over America’s fetuses. When he says “Jump,” they’ll say “But we’re fetuses.” His responsibility will be to either uphold or overturn Roe v. Wade in his first week in office, then spend a 1,453-day “lame duck” period acting righteous about his choice at meetings and dinner parties.

The President of Guns’ first act in office will be to shoot the runner-up candidate in the back of the head at point-blank range with a Steyr Mannlicher M1894 semi-automatic rifle with 6.5mm ammunition. If liberal, the President will use this act as an example of preventable bloodshed, tighten gun control laws, and then put himself in jail. If conservative, the President will say he was aiming for an elk over there and thank the Founders for preserving his right to do so.

The President of Gays will have the largest shoe collection of any president since Taft, who bought a new pair every day simply because they would collapse under the weight of his legs. More importantly, he will determine whether or not the federal government will recognize gay marriages. If so, the burden will be on him to propose a solution for the fact that every time two men kiss, a wholesome Midwestern American family collapses into itself like a dying neutron star.

The President of Everything Else, unencumbered by these other vote-swinging policies, will be free to take informed, responsible action on more complex, less knee-jerk issues such as the war, healthcare, education, social security, and which Star Wars film is the best (“Attack of the Clones, and seriously, f*ck all of you.” –Mitt Romney, 10/8/07).

Four Beatles, four Pac-Man ghosts, four cow stomachs… four Presidents. If we want to rise above the talking points and oversimplifications, the path is clear: Hail to the Chiefs.



In case you think they're too political, here's another English lesson video from Japan, recently featured on Collegehumor.com -- wait it out. The last third is the funniest.

this makes me miss my mother AND my brother. Especially my brother.

yeah, it's late for mother's day, but it sure made me laugh.

I'm still working on the moral authority post. Decided to do my homework instead of just posting unfounded generalizations and assumptions.

love you all
love you mom
love you dan

watch it. it's funny. I'll put it up there with "To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With" by Bill Cosby as two of the best pictures of real sibling-hood out there.

A paragraph from Garrison Keillor

he just made his way into my good books, for 1. calling George W. Bush "the current occupant" and refusing him the respect of using his name (speaking of people who are never named, I've been thinking of starting to refer to George W. Bush as Voldemort).

2. Writing this.

"I gave up watching television 25 years ago because I liked it so much even though I couldn't remember what I had watched the day before and could see that if I went on as a viewer my life would become a blank. And now I refuse the iPod because it is an audio bubble that shuts you off from the world, which is where good ideas come from."

in revising a play I wrote, I came up with this line -- i don't know if it will fit into the script, but it made me happy when I turned this phrase in summarizing a scene to my (wonderful) girlfriend.

"If what you have isn't making you happy, having more of it probably won't, either."

If you're a youtube junkie like me, search "Flight of the Conchords" -- Tamie started me on these guys.



Sometimes, you round a corner in a market in Seoul, and stumble across something like this.



I love this city.


One more.

Hee haw.

I'm trying not to post too many clips and links, but I had to put this one on. Made me laugh out loud.

If you know who Sir Mixalot is. . .

Holy cow this is funny.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!

"Who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look, for Christ's sake! Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They're the same face! Doesn't anybody notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"

Now. . .
seen on the side of the bus:
Mun Geun Yeong, Korean TV and commercial star.

these pictures were side by side.






Now, for comparison. A North American model showing off HIS versatility:


except, one's a satire, and one's in earnest.


Pretty much, this is the only note dear Mun Geun Yeong plays. Last summer, she was LITERALLY on the side of every third bus and billboard, stumping different products. She earned the nickname "Korea's little sister" and she was the flavour of the month. She's a TV star, and while she still had her baby fat, was ridiculously cute (so much that she never bothered with things like versatility or talent). Pretty much, imagine seeing this every where you turn. (She had other commercials for other products, but the only thing that really changed were her clothes.





I hope she doesn't mind if I poke at her balloon. Maybe she can go cry on a pile of cash to feel better. Korea supersaturates their celebrities -- tv, movies, posters, commercials -- ubiquity seems to be the catchword of Korean celebrity agents. They don't seem to realize a little mystery adds staying power. A little of the old, "leave'em wanting more"

Anyway, thought for the day. Celebrity worship and star overexposure is annoying, in any culture.

P.S.: 100th post!

this is really funny too.

This is really funny. I don't know how to embed it, because it's from another page than youtube, but it made me laugh a lot.

OK im sick

that's why I'm posting so much today.

this is my favourite Korean tv commercial ever.



I have cracked up entire dance floors by doing this dance when this song comes on. For some reason, seeing a white dude make a Korean pop culture reference counts as a show-stopper her. I think it's my curly hair.

This is too much.

Here's a silly video that circulated all around the internet a few years ago -- about in 2004 or 2005. It makes me laugh.


numa numa song


On a COMPLETELEY unconnected note, here's a cute popsong that I heard constantly (when there's a hit song in Korea, it's TOTALLY ubiquitous -- it's almost dizzying how much you hear a song when it's number one in Korea, walking past storefronts, etc.) in 2006. Even my little seven year old students would sing along to it. The artist's name is Hyun Yeong. Yes, she is at least somewhat serious.


nuna wei ggum - the sister's dream



Here's another pair of videos that caught my attention for TOTALLY UNCONNECTED reasons. Especially the Choruses. If you wish, you can ignore the imagery and just listen to the music, or you can watch the videos and muse on the objectification of women and the vileness of beauty culture, both in the West AND in the East.

I know what you're thinking with all these videos by now: CEASE AND DESIST ALREADY, ROB!


"Do Something" by Britney Spears




(yes, I just put Britney Spears on my blog. But I'm making a point here, OK?

Now, "Gonna Getcha" by Korea's own number one Pop Tart, Lee Hyori. In this one especially, pay attention to the loving fixation on stuff, especially in the transitions between dance sequences -- car, phone, clothes, those amazing boots -- so many materials to obsess over, it's almost like stuff pornography.




Not to be nothing but disparaging (how do you like THAT triple negative!), here's my favourite Korean songwriter/singer. His name's Kim Kwang Seok, and like Jeff Buckley, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and almost every other artist I love except Tom Waits and Radiohead and Prince (and a few others), he died young. He committed suicide (purportedly) because he was depressed from hiding his closeted homosexuality in Korea's very conservative society. Before his tragic death, this guy was about as beloved as a pop star can be in a country--every Korean my age and up can tell you their favourite Kim Kwang Seok song, and how they felt when they heard the news that he died.

This dude has a gift for melody, an incredibly expressive voice, and a real grace that I love. It's a shame he died and let the plagiarists take over.


This one's called "Letter of a Private" it was made for the soundtrack of the movie "JSA" which is remembered as a high watermark in Korean filmmaking; it's a story about low level soldiers on either side of the demilitarized zone (the Joint Security Area, or JSA is where North and South stand closest to each other), who become unlikely friends. If you ask nicely, I'll do a post about my favourite Korean movies, and one I loathe.




I really like the next one's melody -- my man Kim is a real wizard with a melodic line. I think it and his expressiveness are his best strengths. The song's title translates as "Please Wait"




This is my favourite Kim Kwang Seok song, the one that I think shows everything I love about him. It's also the only Korean song I can even come close to singing in the noraebang (karaoke room). The title is something like "I used to love you". If you're only going to listen to one of these, choose this one.





He even warrants a tribute: here's a tribute to him, recorded by some other big Korean stars. It's another of his best songs, rendered. . . adequately and lovingly, by some other people.



And one more upbeat one.

Back in Korea Safely!

This was funny.



This one has a bad word in it, but when I sent it to my brother, he said "Yeah, I laughed because it was exactly your sense of humour." It's true. It's basically the video I'd make if I had the know-how and needed to make an ad for a fictional product.

Power Thirst


The cicadas are buzzing outside. That's right: I'm back in Korea. I borrowed my brother's car and buzzed all over the Pacific Northwest -- it was sick how much driving I did, from Red Deer Alberta, to Agassiz, to Portland, Oregon, back to Langley, up to Comox (Vancouver Island) ALL over Vancouver Island, to see Matt's older brother Joel's wedding:

this is where Joel had his wedding. Around the corner and down a trail is a heart-stoppingly beautiful waterfall, beside which he and his wife Emily exchanged vows. The country in Vancouver Island is just so beautiful, I don't even know what to say, except that I sure loved driving around it for three days.

And the Finlaysons are a wonderful family, and I know I'll always have a home there in Comox if I need it.




After that I drove back up to Abbotsford, then to Comox to see my sister Rebecca, and finally back to Red Deer. Altogether, I logged more than 65 hours driving around the Pacific Northwest. Sick. I think it put off my owning a car for another two years. Not until I own a cabin by a mountain lake.