Chris Rock Echoes Donald Glover, Says Cancel Culture is Making Culture Boring.
It wasn’t that long ago that Donald Glover said TV and films were boring because people are afraid of getting canceled. While people argued whether he was talking about “cancel culture” or just networks and studios canceling projects, there’s no mistaking what Chris Rock meant when he echoed the sentiment.
According to The New York Post, the legendary comic and for some reason star of the new Saw film went on The Breakfast Club and explained how cultural forces making everyone afraid to take risks is not a great way to get good entertainment.
“And when everyone gets safe and nobody tries anything, things get boring,” he told the New York station’s Angela Yee and DJ Envy.
“I see a lot of unfunny comedians, I see unfunny TV shows, I see unfunny awards shows, I see unfunny movies — because everybody’s scared to make a move,” he said.
“And that’s not a place to be … Now you got a place where people are scared to talk,” he said, saying it was bizarre, “especially in America.”
If you think about the most acclaimed recent series, they were all labeled “problematic” by someone. Think about Breaking Bad or Mad Men or even Rick and Morty; these are shows about bad men behaving badly and you root for them. You hated Walter White’s bitch of a wife because you wanted to see him be Scarface and she keeps getting in his way.
Okay, people seemed to like Ted Lasso which is an incredibly twee series about a very wholesome American coach who gets hired by a Premier League owner looking to tank her team to get back at her ex-husband. But people liked Veep a lot more and that’s about how our government is run by selfish idiots.
Rock went on to say that telling people what they can and can’t joke about is disrespectful to audiences, who are the ultimate arbiters of what’s acceptable for a comic. If they don’t like it, they won’t laugh. That’s a good point, at a certain point you’re not just shaming a comic for a joke or a show for the plot, you’re shaming the people who like that joke or plot, as well.
