Todd Phillips: I Quit Making Comedies Because Far Left Woke Cancel Culture Made Comedy Unfunny, and So I Made the Joker Movie, and Now Far Left Woke Cancel Culture is Coming After That, Too

The far left continues denying that they're #cancelling everything in order to give them enough time to #cancel everything.

While David French and National Review cheer them on.

A week ago Todd Phillips noted that the far left had become the old feared far right of the 1980s in explaining why his Joker movie is now the target of a #cancellation campaign:

"I think it's because outrage is a commodity, I think it’s something that has been a commodity for a while,” he added. "What's outstanding to me in this discourse in this movie is how easily the far-left can sound like the far-right when it suits their agenda. It’s really been eye-opening for me."

Now he goes a little further, saying he got out of actual comedy due to #WokePuritanScolds.

In a Vanity Fair feature about Joaquin Phoenix, Phillips explains why he moved from broad comedy to a gritty, realistic story of a deranged killer:

Phillips had found it increasingly difficult, he says, to make comedies in the new "woke" Hollywood, and his brand of irreverent bro humor has lost favor.

"Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture," he says. "There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore--I'll tell you why, because all the f**king funny guys are like, 'F**k this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.' It's hard to argue with 30 million people on Twitter. You just can’t do it, right? So you just go, I'm out.' I'm out, and you know what? With all my comedies--I think that what comedies in general all have in common--is they're irreverent. So I go, 'How do I do something irreverent, but fuck comedy? Oh I know, let’s take the comic book movie universe and turn it on its head with this'’ And so that's really where that came from."

Despite the fact that a significant number of top comics have said cancel culture (or political correctness) creates a problem for comedy, there is a coterie of progressives in the media who appear desperate to dissuade you of the notion that cancel culture is worth worrying about. Naturally, those people are coming down hard on Todd Phillips. From Esquire:

Complaints about "woke culture" are coming fast right now, and they're generally lodged by people who are furious you’re not laughing at their jokes. The world's Todd Phillipses can't do what they used to do, or else they'd be cancelled, because, as they argue, we’re living in "cancel culture." Never mind that we haven’t defined what cancellation actually looks like, we haven’t lost anybody to it either. How are we living in "cancel culture" if everyone's still here?

This is a kind of sibling to the pro-Antifa argument, i.e. how bad can they be if no one is dead? Actually, they can be really bad. They can be assaulting people, setting fires, doing extensive property damage, and generally behaving like the Joker's minions in public. The fact that no one has been killed by them yet doesn't mean we should blithely ignore a group organized to commit political street violence.

Below is proof that #Woke anti-culture destroys comedy.

Meet Lily Singh. She was given the old 1:30 am "comedy" slot on NBC because she is non-white and bisexual.

You might wonder, "And funny?"

No, she's not funny. She's aggressively unfunny.

Being funny isn't a prerequisite for being a comedian any longer; just checking the right racial and sexual-orientation boxes.

This clip is Lily Singh showing her Best Of to the public.

And her "best of" consists of terrible jokes and just saying over and over again that she's not white and not straight.

She's not a man, she's not white, and she's not straight.

Aren't you laughing yet? Why aren't you laughing yet, bigot?!

posted by Ace of Spades at 08:23 PM

| Access Comments