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OH LOOKIT ME IMMA EDGY COMIC I’M GONNA OOOOHFEHND AND GET MYSELF CANSULLED!
Look, clowns, until one of you walks out on that stage and spends 90 minutes not only insulting everyone in the audience on every fundamental level from family to religion to sex to ideology, forcing them to take a hard, deep look at their ugliest and most reprehensible, repulsive, contemptible tendencies, recognize those tendencies within themselves, and be moved to make themselves better all while laughing at the jokes that are on them AND paying you for it?
Shut up with the “ooh I’m gonna be offensive” crap.
The most offensive thing about you is that you think you’re offensive to anyone. OH LOOK AT ME I’M GONNA REPEAT CARLIN’S SEVEN DIRTY WORDS AND GET A FACEBOOK BAN FOR 3 DAYS THEN COME BACK AND DEDICATE MY NEXT FIVE TOURS AND THREE SPECIALS TO TALKING ABOUT HOW I’VE BEEN CANCELED AT $300 A TICKET SRO!
Y’all out there swearing up and down how much you love George Carlin and Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor and all these other folks who went out and did that, but nearly none of you who are blowing this horn even give a plausible appearance of trying to. Far more of you who are doing it right are vastly more likely to never one time mention yourself as being offensive or edgy or controversial. You’re gonna go out there and do your material and let it speak for itself, because if it needs you to explain to people ahead of time that they’re supposed to be offended by it, it’s not worth performing.
You don’t even mean you’re gonna be offensive. You mean you’re gonna troll for whiny entitled egomaniacs who want to complain and draw attention to themselves as victims over every petty little imaginary grievance, often as an intentional and explicit way to gaslight and distract from the very real evils of bigotry and hate they’re guilty of themselves on an ongoing basis and always will be, and you’re gonna do it because you know in the end it keeps your name in people’s heads.
You mean you’re gonna lay on some easy tropes appealing to your perception of the ideological cant of your core audience whose primary appreciation of your work will not be that it’s funny per se but only the far more base, venal, and banal appreciation of confirming and validating their biases, which they and you will both mistake for really believing you’re funny.
You’re not “offensive.”
You’re high on your own flatulence. And yes, I very much am looking straight at some folks I used to seriously respect, like Chappelle and Louis CK and so forth, to say nothing of these rinky-dink kids working bowling alleys thinking their edgy because they say “fuck” and punch down.
You’re not offensive. You’re a hack. Sit down and let someone with actual talent have some stage time.
