Mar 212018
 

It’s no great revelation that a lot of comics make important observations on society. Where a lot of comics fall down is when they go distinctly political… say “Republicans/Democrats are great/the Devil” and the comic promptly loses half the audience, and any wisdom the comic may have to impart is also lost. (Yes, I recognize the irony… if I had never made any explicitly political posts hereabouts, my income would doubtless be much higher.) But if you make the same point *without* direct reference to political affiliation – or indeed even to politics – you may go much farther.

Take, for example, Brad Williams. In the hour-long stand-up set in the YouTube video below he covers the usual stand-up stuff (including Naughty Bits With Anlgo-Saxon Terminology, so NSFW). But he ends with a story about how his father raised him that is *really* interesting. It is of course impossible to tell if the story is accurate, or invented out of whole cloth, or somewhere in between, but it seems to be to be a *fantastic* allegory about how things *should* be and too rarely actually are. You can view it as a great yarn about society, about politics, or about a father and a son, or even as simply a funny story… but you should at least view it.

The video *should* be cued up at the right point, but if not the relevant bit starts at 47:35.

 

 Posted by at 5:32 pm