Cancel Culture explained
Remember when Sarah Silverman did #blackface? Everyone does now. And boy are they pissed.
This image has made it’s way through the twitterverse and now all the woke folk are livid. The retweet button nearly broke as the image made it’s rounds, escalating to the point that Sarah’s part in a new movie was canceled, Sarah told Bill Simmons on his podcast. She goes on to briefly rail cancel culture, "It's like, if you're not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone," Silverman said. "It's really, 'Look how righteous I am and now I'm going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness.'"
Some see Sarah Silverman as flip flopping. In 2015 she said in a Vanity Fair interview that we should be changing with the times, stop saying gay, and to listen to “the college aged. They’re almost always on the right side of history.” Well Sarah, the “college aged” have spoken. They don’t like you. You’re racist, according to them. You did black face in 2007 and there is no recovery from that. Sure others have done it, Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, Jimmy Kimmel making fun of basketball players, but hey, they’re next. Right now it’s you. And now that the mob you were marching with turned on you, you decide to tail against them. It’s a little late for that.
It’s not the first time this has happened.
James Gunn was fired by disney, not to work on the upcoming Guardians of the galaxy film. The action in question were various tweets, some posted nine years ago, all he had apologized for before the first Guardians of the Galaxy film started filming. Unllike Silverman’s offensive material, James gunn’s tweets just weren’t funny. They were shock material but that’s it. But that is besides any point i’d like to make. It wasn’t funny but should it warrant the criticism? I suppose, we should always be able to criticize. But to get him fired over tweets he’d already apologized for seems to me not petty but spiteful.
And that’s what it was. Spite. Previously it’d been many conservatives under the thumb of cancel culture. Many people have inundated brands that endorse conservative networks with complaints of racism. This often works too. Tucker Carlson lost something like 26 advertisers after he made comments on immigration. Two conservatives “flipped the script” and decided to use this against their enemies across the aisle. They posted a list of all James Guns’s tweets and made a call to action for people to email disney and get James fired.
Roseanne, Papa John, Jonathan Friedland, and Amy Powell, all received their share of cancel culture. It all follows a similar thread: say something controversial, people get upset, people get you fired. The problem is what is considered controversial. it’s obvious if Mr Roger killed a child today we would try and cancel him. But what about comments? Those can be interpreted and used out of context. What if what is controversial is true? Conversations based in intellect die this way.
This is Cancel Culture. Someone makes a remark, it doesn’t matter when it occurred, it could be a decade ago or yesterday, if they don’t like it, they try and get your employer, sponsors, or producers to end their relationship with you. Most of the instances of the woke scolding are trite, and maybe even disingenuous. Where would we be without Howard Stern fighting for freedom of speech on the radio? Or Frank Zappa? Records and music today would have to be censored to high hell. We’d be stuck with family friendly content, the edgiest stuff you’d find on media today would be Rhett and Link.
The biggest problem with cancel culture is it’s effect on content. What shows survive in todays climate? Soft, boring, and safe shows. No edge. It has those little rubber bits your grandparents used to put on countertops so you didn’t poke your eye out or something. Eddie Murphy’s standup special Delirious has no soft edges. It takes those rubber pieces off and says “fuck you.” And that was in the 80’s. Eddie Murphy is said to be returning to do a new special. We’ll see if the era of metoo and the cancel culture will affect his stand-up. I hope to hell not.
Ted M. Iverson