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(Thread) Just read this good sharp essay by @jessesingal from last year on the over-the-top reaction to Dave Chappelle's special "Sticks and Stones." https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/when-we-argue-about-dave-chappelle
He touches on lots of different debates on which there's lots of room for reasonable people to disagree but the overall point about how and why this stuff is bad for comedy is clearly right. As is the class analysis of journalism at the end. And this bit is particularly well-put:
It should be read in conjunction with @buffsoldier_96's excellent essay on Chappelle, which also gets into the other half of the equation of why the comedy wars are bad for comedy--ideologically driven anti-woke comedy is insufferable. https://areomagazine.com/2019/11/13/dave-chappelle-and-comedy/
And of course Michael's comment in "Against the Web" about how we can and should walk and chew bubblegum on this whole range of topics is correct and important.
My emphasis in my own book, especially after the initial comedy chapter, is on how the whole cluster of left pathologies that "canceling comedians" stands in for are worth combating because they alienate so many of the people we need to persuade. https://redemmas.org/titles/34877-canceling-comedians-while-the-world-burns--a-critique-of-the-contemporary-left
In other words, it needs to be combated precisely *because* other issues are more important and this stuff makes it harder to build a movement of the vast majority of society to tackle those much bigger problems.
That said, I am enough of a standup fan to be somewhat interested in the narrow topic of the culture war about comedy for its own sake, and Singal and Leonard are both essential reading there.
I quote Leonard extensively in the comedy chapter of the book and if Singal had written his a few months earlier I would have referenced that too.
