Politically Incorrect Comedy Still Survives
At CNN, the biggest annual tradition is its several-hours-long New Year’s Eve celebration. It used to star prime-time news anchor Anderson Cooper and one of his bosom buddies, comedienne Kathy Griffin, whose schtick mainly involved saying and doing supposedly outrageous things in order to ruffle the feathers of the supposedly sober, serious, and easily embarrassed Anderson.
He mocked the idea that America electing its first black president (this was, remember, 2011) amounted to anything special. “Is it progress? No! It’s trivia.”
Then, in 2017, Kathy posted online that instantly notorious photo of herself holding what looked like the bloody severed head of Donald Trump, and was instantly and unceremoniously dumped not only from CNN but from her close friendship with Cooper. She was replaced by another Cooper chum, TV host Andy Cohen, who produces the Real Housewives programs and other garbage on the Bravo network.
CNN host Don Lemon also used to be a frequent face on the New Year’s show, until he, too, was fired last year; these days, Richard Quest, yet another CNN host, who should have been fired in 2008 after he was arrested in Central Park in the middle of the night with, as the New York Post put it at the time, “some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot,” continues to appear on the New Year’s program, often in preposterous costumes.
Aside from Kathy Griffin, who is the quintessential fag hag, all of the above-named individuals are openly gay, and watching the proceedings on New Year’s Eve always feels like walking into a gay bar packed with annoying drunken idiots who think they’re delightful and witty.
This year, however, CNN’s New Year bash was worth watching for one reason: the comedienne Whitney Cummings, who showed up at 10 PM Eastern time to promote her new stand-up special. Standing in the rain at Times Square alongside Andy and Anderson, she announced that she would be roasting the year 2024.
But first she tossed off a reference to Kathy Griffin (which amounted to a shot at Anderson), bragged that she was now playing 3,000-seat venues (“which is about the viewership of CNN these days”), and slammed Hollywood for politicizing entertainment and “trying to make you feel guilty about global warming.” Then came the material about 2024: “The Democrats couldn’t hold a primary because they were too busy holding a body up…. The pro-choice party didn’t give the voters one when it came to the presidential candidate…. Kamala was forced on us so hard you’d think she was patented by Pfizer.”
It was funny, it was politically incorrect, and it was brilliantly designed to make CNN executives start pouring themselves doubles. Yes, some viewers griped that Whitney was taking advantage of the new post-election feeling that wokeness is on its way out to tell jokes she wouldn’t have dared to tell a couple of years ago. Perhaps, but better late than never. Meanwhile folks on the left criticized her failure to go after Trump, a complaint she addressed later in a tweet and in a January 4 interview with podcaster Jimmy Dore, saying that doing Trump gags on CNN would amount to taking a “home-court advantage cheap shot.” Indeed.
After seeing a clip of Whitney’s CNN turn I watched her new special. It’s worth checking out. She does some graphic material about pregnancy (she recently had a baby) and then some stuff about transgender athletes, a topic on which she had a fresh, funny take, namely that the people complaining about trans athletes tend not to be football or basketball players but runners and swimmers — in short, “losers!”
She went on to argue (facetiously, of course) that “if you don’t support trans athletes, you’re not a patriot — how else do you think we’re going to beat China? With some white bitches from Connecticut? Are you insane?” She said that the people campaigning against trans athletes are mostly men, but they’re going about it the wrong way; women, she said, need to take the lead in this fight, and will definitively solve the problem of M-to-F runners and swimmers in a way that only women can. How? By “befriending them and then destroying them psychologically.”
Well, I thought it was amusing. Not hilarious, but amusing. For hilarious you’ve got to trade up to the likes of Doug Stanhope. My favorite of his stand-up specials may be Burning the Bridge to Nowhere (2011), in which, before an audience in Oslo, he began by saying that he was glad finally to be visiting Western Europe after the presidency of George W. Bush, because he knew that Western Europeans didn’t care for Bush and that this dislike often extended to Americans generally.
The Oslo audience cheered this apparent putdown of Bush. And for most American comics, that would’ve been the end of it. But then Doug, as is his wont, turned the whole thing around 180 degrees, saying that he understood that when Norwegians, in any case, put down Bush, they were doing so “ironically,” because, after all, Bush, whatever you thought of him, was at least put in office by the electorate, whereas Norway still had a royal family — which must mean that Norwegians were “a bunch of simpletons living out some Dungeons & Dragons fantasyland … with kings and princes. Do you have wizards and fairies too?”
To the credit of the audience — who were there because they were diehard Stanhope fans — they laughed even harder when he turned the whole bit against them.
Doug went on to complain about how flight attendants still remind you on airplanes that smoking is illegal. For heaven’s sake, he pointed out, it’s been illegal for twenty-five years. When you get on a Greyhound bus, do they inform you that “colored people can sit wherever they like”? And he sneered at people who film everything — such as comedy shows — with their phones: such idiots, he proclaimed, are “tourists of life.” What do they plan to do, film their entire lives and watch it later?
He mocked the idea that America electing its first black president (this was, remember, 2011) amounted to anything special. “Is it progress? No! It’s trivia” — just like boasting of the “first midget bullfighter.” And he rejected the claim by black people that he can’t understand racism because he’s white; on the contrary, he said, the real victims of bigotry are ugly people like himself, who have no recourse when they lose a job or a rental apartment to a pretty person: “There’s no unity among the ugly people!”
This, in turn, led to a routine about Susan Boyle that I won’t spoil for you. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t just gut-bustingly funny but also had a thought-provoking point to make. It was followed by perhaps the funniest single bit I’ve ever heard, about how sex is overrated. It, too, was both hilarious and wise, and I won’t spoil that one for you, either.
No, it’s time to move on to Doug’s new special, Discount Meat. It doesn’t disappoint. He dismisses crime dramas in which the perpetrator makes a murder look like a suicide. Forget that: “I’ve figured out how to make my suicide look like a murder — and then blame it on somebody I hate.” Relaxation tapes? He listens to them “at three times speed.”
And he claims that one of the secrets of his continued health, after decades of excessive, not to say record-breaking, alcohol use, is that he doesn’t go to doctors — although he did visit a doctor recently to see if going cold-turkey to do a “sober October” would harm him. After he told the doctor how much he drinks, “all the blood drained from her face.” She also said: “‘No, you can’t take Xanax with any amount of alcohol.” He reacts: “Who’s the comic and who’s the doctor here? I’m a 29-year case study in how that works perfectly together!”
No, he’s far from a great role model. That’s not his purpose. In fact it’s the opposite of his purpose. His purpose is to be the constantly inebriated layabout who, when three sheets to the wind, allows his mind to run free and somehow, miraculously, happens upon startlingly original premises that he follows, as a mouse follows a trail of cheese, all the way to their logical — and, usually, utterly tasteless — ends, where he finds comedy gold and rewards you, living in your safer and more civilized and more comfortable space, with the gift of uproarious laughter.
Not to mention with valid moral insights — which is quite an achievement, given that his comic persona is that of an utterly amoral degenerate.
Bottom line: Whitney Cummings is funny. Doug Stanhope is a comic genius. Both of their new specials are free. And neither is on Netflix.
READ MORE from Bruce Bawer:
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