The Bluestocking, vol 204

The stickiest of the icky.

Happy Friday!

Not much to report except that I’m still terrible at driving. I thought I would be terrible at driving in a charming, anecdote-generating way, but no, I just freak out whenever I encounter something new, like a traffic light. If I get through this without killing someone’s cat, it’ll be a miracle.

Helen

---

There Is A Reason That Famous People are Often Screwed Up (Guardian)

“Fame” takes that internal camera we call the “self” and puts it on a massive selfie stick, so when you are in public a percentage of your brain is always occupied by observing yourself in the third person. And eventually you don’t know how to reel that camera back in, even when you’re at home with your partner and kids. You start to believe that you are an entity. You learn to like yourself as much as you are liked, which means, when the trolls come trolling, you tend to hate yourself as much as you are hated. There is a reason why famous people are often screwed up: it’s not that wankers become famous, it’s that fame makes you a wanker.

I profiled Tim Minchin in 2014 (dear lord I’m old) as he was shrugging off the “comedian” label with Matilda and other projects. The headline was “the satirist who ran out of upwards to punch”, which is an interesting phrase to revisit in light of the discussion of “punching up” in Dave Chappelle’s latest special, The Closer. (See below.)

Anyway, Minchin is now back to touring, and this is a smart and honest reflection on the attraction of fame, and its cost.

---

Dave Chappelle’s Rorschach Test (The Atlantic)

Part of the reason The Closer has received such negative reviews in liberal outlets is that Chappelle directs much of his anger toward the liberal consensus about what’s offensive. (The Guardian’s two-star review calls his performance a “tangle of shit-stirring, accusation and special pleading.”) He spends most of the show in an implicit dialogue with an audience outside the room—with the cultural critics who called him out over the trans jokes in his previous special, Sticks and Stones, and with Twitter, despite his claim that it’s “not a real place.” By the end, he is asking the audience in the room, and at home, to consider who the real bully is: “transphobic comedian Dave Chappelle” or the activists who mercilessly dragged a trans woman on Twitter for defending him. Reading the mainstream coverage of The Closer, you might think that question has been settled; Netflix’s internal data presumably suggest otherwise. On Rotten Tomatoes, the show has an approval rating of 43 percent from critics … and 97 percent from the audience.

Over the weekend it became clear that no one was going to write the piece I wanted to read on The Closer, i.e. yes, it’s offensive, but no, it’s not killing people. So I wrote it.

Just for the newsletter, here’s a section I wrote and then junked from the piece, about Chappelle’s Show:

Let’s rewind a little, to the early 2000s, a simpler time before social media when white English women (me) could watch late-night American comedy shows illicitly on the internet, but had no one to talk to about them. Chappelle became famous with a late-night program on Comedy Central, a mix of sketches and stand-up called Chappelle’s Show. Many of its most memorable sketches dealt with race in America: the blind, black KKK wizard; the “racial draft”; the “true Hollywood stories” of writer Charlie Murphy, which often centered on the rare 1980s experience of being black, famous and wealthy. 

In the KKK sketch, Chapelle’s unwittingly black character says things like: “The message of my books is very simple: n*****s, Jews, homo-sexuals, Mexican, A-rabs, and all different sorts of chinks stink, and I hate ‘em!” There’s one hell of an awkward moment when he takes off his wizard hood at a meeting of enthusiastic racists. (As Chappelle’s white co-writer said, they had no idea until just before transmission that this sketch would be so controversial: “The next episode we had a white woman singing black thoughts. She said crack was invented and distributed to intentionally destroy the black community; AIDS was too. Every episode had something insane.”) In the racial draft sketch, mixed-race Americans get conscripted into being black, Asian or white, based on stereotypes. As Tiger Woods is ruled to be definitively black, the commentators observe that “he’s been discriminated against in his time, he’s had death threats, he dates a white woman . . . sounds like a black guy to me.” Tiger is overjoyed, telling the crowd: “So long fried rice, hello fried chicken!” Then he loses all his endorsements.

Even at the time, Chappelle’s Show was criticised the way that most satire is criticised—for reproducing offensive language, tropes and stereotypes under the guise of mocking them. Were people laughing at the deluded racists of the KKK, or were they laughing because someone got to say Mexicans were dirty on television? After Chappelle abruptly left the show—and a reported $50 million deal—he went quiet, and there was talk of him having had a breakdown, or a religious experience (he’s a Muslim convert). The story that has since emerged is that he saw a white audience member laughing at a taping, too loud and too long, over a sketch called “Black Pixies”. Was he just reinforcing stereotypes, he wondered—just punching down? He walked away, went to South Africa, and then settled in a small town in Ohio with a population of fewer than 5,000. (For a sense of his motivations, read this 2013 profile by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, a masterpiece of writing around a subject just as deft as Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.”)

Amid all the ink spilled over Chappelle since his comeback, no one has really majored on how incredibly sexist Chappelle’s Show was. One of Eddie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories features Prince, who became famous at a time when, Charlie says, “what was wild was that the guy who looked most like a bitch was getting all the women.” When Charlie fights with Rick James, all that prevents serious injury is the two men making up by sharing “the stickiest of the icky” and James summoning a nearby woman: “Bitch, come over here and have sex with Charlie Murphy.” Later, Rick James says: “Bitches! Come over here and show Charlie Murphy your titties!” The bitches do. Then he cackles: “The milk’s gone bad!”

Chappelle’s Show was built on a deep seam of bro-dom; an assumption that women were fungible tokens like trainers, or watches—objects to be shown off, proof you’d made it. I cannot stress how little anyone cared about this. I didn’t care about it. This was the era of what Ariel Levy called “female chauvinist pigs”, where those of us young enough, attractive enough, and compliant enough to succeed in this economy did not question it. We played along to become honorary men. (Today, when white women are scolds and nags and Karens who call the manager, girls find new ways to apply an asterisk to themselves.) Sure, you couldn’t be Dave Chappelle—you were a woman, after all, and this was an era in which Vanity Fair could still seriously argue that “women aren’t funny”. In that piece, when Christopher Hitchens had to grapple with the argument-destroying existence of actual female comedians, he resorted to noting that “Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” For those of us who couldn’t be Dave Chappelle, we could at least be one of the guys—one of the people who laughed at silly, slutty women, rather than got grouped with them. 

But that was the 2000s, and this is the 2020s. I’m not surprised that Chappelle has whiplash from the change in attitudes, and from the inconsistency of his critics. When he was coming up, the biggest threat a black comic faced was the religious right—who were obsessed with the alleged harm caused by rap music and weed and wearing your pants too low. That zeal for cultural censorship has now been ceded to the left.

---

Jack Jones, trade union leader

Hard Labour (The Critic)

A huge bearded man is slumped in a heap, deeply unconscious, on the floor of the telephone booth. The receiver swings to and fro above his head. Passers-by in the hotel corridor can hear an exasperated voice pleading from the earpiece “Hello! Hello! Why have you stopped? Hello! Hello!” It is late at night at one of the dozens of trade union conferences which then peppered the late summer calendar. 

But behold, as Paul Routledge, Labour Editor of The Times goes hurrying past, he sees that the comatose figure is his old friend and rival from another national newspaper. Let us call him “John”. Seizing the telephone, he strives to imitate John’s voice and asks innocently “Where was I?”.

Peter Hitchens reflects on his time as an industrial correspondent in the 1970s. I particularly enjoyed the “Golden Bollock” Award, for the wrongest story, because when I started on Fleet Street in the early 2000s one of the older subs regularly used the phrase “dropped a bollock” for screwing up. His wise suggestion was that “if you drop a bollock, own up straight away.” A maxim I have always lived by.

---

Hard Labour (Eurozine)

Michel Odent has been a pioneer of natural birth since he founded the London-based Primal Health Research Centre in the 1980s. The French obstetrician argues that medical culture has conditioned us to regard birth as a problem, rather than a natural process. ‘The first question that is asked in medicine is, why is human birth so difficult?’ he says. ‘But instead, we should start from another question – why occasionally in the 21st century are there women who give birth easily and quickly without pharmacological assistance? That is – why can women give birth so easily? And if we start from this, we can better understand the basic needs.’

One of the most fundamental needs, Odent argues, is for a woman in labour to retreat from cognitive functions – and to be protected in doing so. ‘Giving birth is not a product of rational thinking – even today there are still women who can understand the solution that nature found, cutting herself off from her world, forgetting what she learned in books, forgetting her plans, behaving in a way that might be considered unacceptable in a civilised world – to scream and to swear, to find herself in postures that are mammalian or primitive.’

Not only do I find it pleasing to have two pieces with the same headline in this newsletter, but I’m including this because the discussion around the appropriate level of medical intervention in childbirth is so nuanced and personal. I have friends who had elective caesareans and loved them (“it’s like a spa break but you get a baby at the end”) and others who had unmedicated water births and loved them (“it’s like doing a really big poo and you just want to be left alone to get on with it”).

---

True Romance (GQ)

‘I don’t remember your face... And I definitely would have remembered his face,’ [Megan Fox] continues. ‘I just remember this tall, blond, ghostly creature and I looked up and I was like, “You smell like weed.” He looked down at me and he was like, “I am weed.” Then, I swear to God, he disappeared like a ninja in a smoke bomb.’ 

They both laugh about how they couldn’t see each other’s faces. Fox has a theory: ‘I think we weren’t allowed to see each other yet. We weren’t supposed to run into each other that night, so our souls, our spirit guides, were luring us away from each other, because you literally had no face, like that thing from Spirited Away. It is hard to see his face in general, but really he had no face that night.’ She turns to him. ‘Thank God, [because] what torture had I known you were there and I couldn’t get to you. It was better that I didn’t know.’

I AM WEED. Thank you GQ, for this perfect gift of a celebrity interview, full of lines like this: “Even our first kiss, she wouldn’t kiss me. We just put our lips right in front of each other and breathed each other’s breath and then she just left.” God bless these horny hot people, I’m sure this will end well.

---

Bluestocking recommends: the trailer for Get Back, which looks amazing, but is inexplicably framed like the Beatles are the protagonists of plucky underdog drama. WILL THEY MAKE IT TO THE ROOFTOP ON TIME?

---

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please keep it to yourself and say nothing about it on Twitter. See you next time.