There are often massive differences between audience and professional critic scores for various movies. And then sometimes the audience and the critics agree that this movie was great or that movie sucked. It enough to make reliance upon critics a dubious prospect. You just can’t tell if the professional telling you that Entertainment Product you were interested in was good/bad is worth listening to, especially if you don’t have a track record with that critic.
But sometimes you don’t need to know a specific critic to be able to make a determination of whether that thing they’re talking about is worth your time. Behold:
Buzzfeed: Dave Chappelle Doesn’t Need To Punch Down
The Atlantic: The Fear in Dave Chappelle’s New Special
And Vice: You Can Definitely Skip Dave Chappelle’s New Netflix Special ‘Sticks & Stones’
The Woke Media basically *hated* the new Dave Chappelle special on Netflix. Why? Because he correctly pointed out that in todays culture you don’t dare offend The Alphabet People. Because he correctly called out cancel culture. Because he continued the long tradition of making uncomfortable humor. Being this cheesed off at someone who, politically, is one of their own (he is an Obama worshipper) honestly comes across like religious fanatics yelling “heretic” at a co-religionist who disagrees on some small matter of doctrine.
The plethora of *negative* reviews is honestly quite useful. If they were this angry at someone who had fallen from the true faith, but who wasn’t very good, they’d likely just mumble some stuff about “it wasn’t very good.” This level of effort at steering people away, though, tells you they *know* it’s good and they don’t want people being exposed to heresy.
If you have an hour and a half (an hour for the special,a bit short of half an hour for an epilogue) and don;t mind being offended while laughing your butt off, and if you have Netflix, give “Sticks & Stones” a watch.
Note: I love the “he’s punching down” argument when it comes to making fun of the internet outrage mob. This amorphous vile entity is second only to the government in terms of power, and second to none in terms of striking speed and the ability to ruin lives at a distance for stuff that happened long prior to the term of the statute of limitations.
