Could have done without the comedians. The flippant use of the N-word (something Glenn and John abhor)was totally unnecessary. And, the idea that the January 6th morons would have been treated differently if they had been black is completely idiotic, especially in light of the fact that BLM supporters waged war on our major cities for months with impunity.
This is a big improvement over the first comedy club presentation that included several comedians all vying for attention and laughs. I appreciate Glenn and John getting the ball rolling without interruption along with their attempt to politely call Sherrod and the other comedian out about statements made that were not backed up with facts.
The comedians were more emotionally reactive than introspective which leads me to think that if there is another comedy club gathering there could be someone available to act as facillitator between the comedians and Glenn and John's subject matter. In an ideal world such a person might be Wayne Brady or similar type due to his comic sensibilities, intelligence, and understanding of nuance and facts. It would compel the comedians to seriously address the issues at hand and perhaps think about the possibility of including some of what they learned into their act.
As a native New Yorker (no longer living there), I would certainly come up from the mid-atlantic area to attend the next one.
Thank you Glenn for all that you do because trying to get black folks and white liberals to honestly analyze victim narratives and disengage in pity parties is a tough mountain to climb, and yet the two of you have advanced the bar higher than most.
I just listened to the full episode while out on a ride, and I have to agree with John. The first part with you and J was evidence-based; the second part was about anecdotes and wise-cracking. Unfortunately, when John tried to engage the comedians in a more serious fact-based discussion, all he got was a red herring (e.g., John: "What about poor whites in Fishtown?" Comedian: "I asked my (middle-class) white friends in NYC and they never had any trouble with the police!"). With that being said, I will never not listen to an episode of TGS (that would be sacrilegious!) and I look forward to seeing how the comedy-show format develops. Unrelated: have you thought about some TGS merch ("Glenn and John: the black guys at TGS") with a drawing of your and John's face? I have dreams of wearing a TGS hoodie to my next faculty meeting, just to stir the pot ;p
No didn’t like this at all. Calling audience members “bitch” .. and the over the top foul mouths is just indicative of the absolute disrespect for decency. Comedian or not..know the forum and your audience. Their experiences and perception is their reality and nothing will change it ...clearly..
AND NOOOO .. white women walking in the hood is not safe regardless of date in history .. women can’t even walk down stairs from their work in New York.. or men for that matter..
One’s experience becomes the banter for all and pretty soon it’s the reality of the entire community. They make sure it stays their reality by self fulling the narrative with disrespect towards police, running from the police, “not paying the peeing on the street ticket” and then having a warrant” and they were all in there for “the same reasons.” Why can’t they talk about going to court so you don’t get a warrant and following the law... nope “all the people who were in the jail were black” and “we were arrested” for the same thing. Which essentially makes our narrative fact.
In your Q & A John mentioned how it would be nice to have comedians who are not leftists. You may have hear of Ryan Long (and his comedy partner, whose name escapes me). He's a Canadian comedian who lives in NYC and does weekly YT videos. One of his best videos is about how woke and racists share many beliefs. I think he would make a great addition to the Comedy Cellar panel.
I was at this event. I definitely agree the format doesn’t work well like this. The comedians deflected any real discussion of the issues with a combination of fallacies and outdated racial humor. Fried chicken jokes? Dunking on and sleeping with white guys girlfriends? This type of lazy humor was hardly funny in the 90s, let alone today. I think it’s a crutch by a lot of comedians today because it dares the audience to withhold laughter and go against the comedians underlying message that explicit racism against blacks is prevalent everywhere and basically the same as it was in the 60s. I felt more like an ideological hostage than a willing participant once the comedians hopped on stage.
John seems to think that not paying attention to the comments here is some kind of badge of honor. It's actually disrespectful to those who listen to or read the posts and take the time to share their thoughts.
I'm not a fan of this initiative. Trying to have a serious discussion about race in a comedy club in NYC/Greenwich Village (A capitol of woke) with comedians that have learned long ago that foul language and playing to their audience's biases assures laughs and making them uncomfortable means not being invited back.
There may be a venue where comedy can help facilitate serious discussions on race, but the Comedy Cellar is not it.
Last week John seemed less than enthusiastic about how this went, but I thought it went well and John came across fine. I sensed his exasperation at one point when he was rapid-fire interrupted, but the format is such that there will be some rough edges. I also liked that the comedians quite frequently spoke seriously rather than merely shoehorning their act into the format.
Okay, one of the underlying ideas of this experiment is that comedians say things that would otherwise go unspoken. I thought the two Kareems bit was such a moment. One of the punchlines was that people reacted to Kareem being shot at school with, "Well, somebody needed to shoot Kareem." Two things jumped out at me, and perhaps Glenn and John could discuss them in the future.
1. Does that same attitude apply to the gang shootings? I've often wondered about that. Many, many years ago, there was a town with a "bully" who terrorized the citizens. (For the record, all involved in this incident were white.) Eventually the townspeople confronted the man. He wound up shot to death. No one would say anything, and that was the end of the story. With the gang shootings, there is a lot of collateral damage, but if you put that aside, does the community react to the shootings with, "Somebody needed to shoot Kareem"?
2. Why does "somebody needed to shoot Kareem" turn into "Kareem was the greatest person in the world" when a cop shoots Kareem? (The Grand Rapids shooting a few months back is an apt example of that, and it looks like the current situation in Ohio may be, as well.)
I wrote this on another comment page but will just quickly repeat that I think it would be fun if you guys talked about the history of Black comedy (film, TV, live performance, etc.) and used that as a launching point to talk about contemporary issues. It would suit the venue, comedians love talking about comedy history, and with John's expertise it would be so incredibly informative and fun.
Some people have a tendency to universalize for their identity group their personal lived experience. For instance if a Black man (descendant of slaves, or 'foundational') has frequent run-ins with the cops as he grows up in an urban part of USA, he can over time start believing that all other Black men in the country experience the same, even if this may not necessarily true for other Black men (say immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean) growing up in the same neighbourhood.
There is no single homogenous Black experience. Yet activist groups like Black Lives Matter premise their actions on this assumption. It is true, as Prof. Loury pointed out, that many perpetrators of violent crime happen to be Black and that police, who are not unaware of this fact, frequently use more force than necessary when dealing with any Black person they encounter. But this does not mean that all Black people have a fear of being randomly gunned down by White police every time they step out of their homes.
While Black people can and should speak candidly on their own personal experiences with the police, they should also be cognizant of the fact that not all Blacks have scary police stories to tell.
I was present at the Comedy Cellar for the event and definitely enjoyed it overall. I do have to say that I did find the mixture of serious panel discussion and comedy to be slightly incongruous, especially when Sherrod would try to dismiss some of Glenn's serious points by making a wisecrack. I think Jon Laster took the discussion a little more seriously.
Personally, I didn't mind that the comedians were left of center on the issue of race and policing (or at least left of my own views on the matter) as I believe that having opposing viewpoints actually makes for a livelier conversation. I do wonder though if trying to mix comedy with serious discussion is necessarily the optimal format for these sorts of live events. It is possible that in the future these events are held at the Comedy Cellar but don't necessarily have to involve comedians? Or is that frowned upon given the venue? Personally, I went there to hear Glenn and John pontificate upon the important social issues of the day. I didn't necessarily go there for stand-up comedy in this particular instance for whatever it's worth.
All that being said, it was a blast to see Glenn and John in person and I can't complain too much. I felt like I was in the presence of true rock stars. Is it wishful thinking on my part to imagine The Black Guys on tour one of these days?
As an aside, I should point out my personal view on the matter which is that I'm skeptical of poverty being a significant causal factor for things such as crime. Mainland China has had pretty low per capita homicide rates despite being relatively poor for much of the past 30-40 years. Even more relevant, from what I've seen the correlation between SES and outcomes such as crime or academic achievement has been relatively insignificant in the East Asian cultural sphere compared to the correlation in other regions or contexts. There hasn't been that much difference in terms of per capita violent crime or academic achievement in recent decades between China and wealthier places in East Asia such as Japan, South Korea or Taiwan or Singapore in Southeast Asia. In fact, in some instances mainland China has outperformed the other wealthier places on these metrics.
Given that some type of correlation between SES and life outcomes is normally observed in many contexts, the fact that this correlation seems to be weakened among a particular ethnic group strikes me as a non-trivial empirical observation that deserves some explanation for anyone serious about the particular issue of crime.
John and Glenn humiliated these comedians, both of whom (I except the laconic Nimesh) relied on anecdotes, hypotheticals, and in the case of Sherrod Small, insipient gay jokes.
As Seth B points out below, two independent conversations took place. This is in many ways a microcosm for the way these issues play out at large. John and Glenn make cogent arguments. The comedians, meanwhile, are way cooler, and their cocky mic control resonates with a different audience.
Please do continue the comedy club experiment. Indeed, if I were nearby, I would love to attend. But please find guests who, while holding opposing views, are worthy of your company on the stage.
Oof. That might as well have been billed as Glenn and John live at a Park Slope birthday party.
Were the comedians even present during the first part of the show? When they took the stage, they engaged with nothing that John or Glenn had said in their long prelude to what was, I thought, supposed to be the main event. I didn't expect them to agree - but in that case, I had hoped they'd at least engage. Pushback, whether in a bantering spirit or in a more serious tone would have been welcome, but there wasn't even any of that.
This just felt like two independent conversations - first a Glenn and John primer, followed by... something akin to an NPR broadcast, only slightly funnier. The "looking over the shoulder" phenomenon of which John spoke was in evidence throughout.
I do wish Glenn or John (or an audience member) had asked Jon Laster *why* the police - black policemen, as he noted - had once put guns to his head. I also wish the comedians had asked John and Glenn about *their* experiences being harrased by the police for no reason, since that's an experience that they seem certain that almost all black people share. For all I know, John and Glenn do have such stories. Or maybe they don't. But why not ask when that topic was being discussed?
Sorry to grouch. Even though I think this one didn't work, I do really like the idea behind these Glenn Show / comedy club crossovers.
Could have done without the comedians. The flippant use of the N-word (something Glenn and John abhor)was totally unnecessary. And, the idea that the January 6th morons would have been treated differently if they had been black is completely idiotic, especially in light of the fact that BLM supporters waged war on our major cities for months with impunity.
The Zimmermann suit was thrown out earlier this year: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/594737-george-zimmerman-lawsuit-against-trayvon-martin-parents-dismissed/.
This is a big improvement over the first comedy club presentation that included several comedians all vying for attention and laughs. I appreciate Glenn and John getting the ball rolling without interruption along with their attempt to politely call Sherrod and the other comedian out about statements made that were not backed up with facts.
The comedians were more emotionally reactive than introspective which leads me to think that if there is another comedy club gathering there could be someone available to act as facillitator between the comedians and Glenn and John's subject matter. In an ideal world such a person might be Wayne Brady or similar type due to his comic sensibilities, intelligence, and understanding of nuance and facts. It would compel the comedians to seriously address the issues at hand and perhaps think about the possibility of including some of what they learned into their act.
As a native New Yorker (no longer living there), I would certainly come up from the mid-atlantic area to attend the next one.
Thank you Glenn for all that you do because trying to get black folks and white liberals to honestly analyze victim narratives and disengage in pity parties is a tough mountain to climb, and yet the two of you have advanced the bar higher than most.
I just listened to the full episode while out on a ride, and I have to agree with John. The first part with you and J was evidence-based; the second part was about anecdotes and wise-cracking. Unfortunately, when John tried to engage the comedians in a more serious fact-based discussion, all he got was a red herring (e.g., John: "What about poor whites in Fishtown?" Comedian: "I asked my (middle-class) white friends in NYC and they never had any trouble with the police!"). With that being said, I will never not listen to an episode of TGS (that would be sacrilegious!) and I look forward to seeing how the comedy-show format develops. Unrelated: have you thought about some TGS merch ("Glenn and John: the black guys at TGS") with a drawing of your and John's face? I have dreams of wearing a TGS hoodie to my next faculty meeting, just to stir the pot ;p
I was disappointed that we heard so little from Nimesh.
No didn’t like this at all. Calling audience members “bitch” .. and the over the top foul mouths is just indicative of the absolute disrespect for decency. Comedian or not..know the forum and your audience. Their experiences and perception is their reality and nothing will change it ...clearly..
AND NOOOO .. white women walking in the hood is not safe regardless of date in history .. women can’t even walk down stairs from their work in New York.. or men for that matter..
One’s experience becomes the banter for all and pretty soon it’s the reality of the entire community. They make sure it stays their reality by self fulling the narrative with disrespect towards police, running from the police, “not paying the peeing on the street ticket” and then having a warrant” and they were all in there for “the same reasons.” Why can’t they talk about going to court so you don’t get a warrant and following the law... nope “all the people who were in the jail were black” and “we were arrested” for the same thing. Which essentially makes our narrative fact.
In your Q & A John mentioned how it would be nice to have comedians who are not leftists. You may have hear of Ryan Long (and his comedy partner, whose name escapes me). He's a Canadian comedian who lives in NYC and does weekly YT videos. One of his best videos is about how woke and racists share many beliefs. I think he would make a great addition to the Comedy Cellar panel.
I was at this event. I definitely agree the format doesn’t work well like this. The comedians deflected any real discussion of the issues with a combination of fallacies and outdated racial humor. Fried chicken jokes? Dunking on and sleeping with white guys girlfriends? This type of lazy humor was hardly funny in the 90s, let alone today. I think it’s a crutch by a lot of comedians today because it dares the audience to withhold laughter and go against the comedians underlying message that explicit racism against blacks is prevalent everywhere and basically the same as it was in the 60s. I felt more like an ideological hostage than a willing participant once the comedians hopped on stage.
John seems to think that not paying attention to the comments here is some kind of badge of honor. It's actually disrespectful to those who listen to or read the posts and take the time to share their thoughts.
I'm not a fan of this initiative. Trying to have a serious discussion about race in a comedy club in NYC/Greenwich Village (A capitol of woke) with comedians that have learned long ago that foul language and playing to their audience's biases assures laughs and making them uncomfortable means not being invited back.
There may be a venue where comedy can help facilitate serious discussions on race, but the Comedy Cellar is not it.
Last week John seemed less than enthusiastic about how this went, but I thought it went well and John came across fine. I sensed his exasperation at one point when he was rapid-fire interrupted, but the format is such that there will be some rough edges. I also liked that the comedians quite frequently spoke seriously rather than merely shoehorning their act into the format.
Okay, one of the underlying ideas of this experiment is that comedians say things that would otherwise go unspoken. I thought the two Kareems bit was such a moment. One of the punchlines was that people reacted to Kareem being shot at school with, "Well, somebody needed to shoot Kareem." Two things jumped out at me, and perhaps Glenn and John could discuss them in the future.
1. Does that same attitude apply to the gang shootings? I've often wondered about that. Many, many years ago, there was a town with a "bully" who terrorized the citizens. (For the record, all involved in this incident were white.) Eventually the townspeople confronted the man. He wound up shot to death. No one would say anything, and that was the end of the story. With the gang shootings, there is a lot of collateral damage, but if you put that aside, does the community react to the shootings with, "Somebody needed to shoot Kareem"?
2. Why does "somebody needed to shoot Kareem" turn into "Kareem was the greatest person in the world" when a cop shoots Kareem? (The Grand Rapids shooting a few months back is an apt example of that, and it looks like the current situation in Ohio may be, as well.)
I wrote this on another comment page but will just quickly repeat that I think it would be fun if you guys talked about the history of Black comedy (film, TV, live performance, etc.) and used that as a launching point to talk about contemporary issues. It would suit the venue, comedians love talking about comedy history, and with John's expertise it would be so incredibly informative and fun.
A great session!
Some people have a tendency to universalize for their identity group their personal lived experience. For instance if a Black man (descendant of slaves, or 'foundational') has frequent run-ins with the cops as he grows up in an urban part of USA, he can over time start believing that all other Black men in the country experience the same, even if this may not necessarily true for other Black men (say immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean) growing up in the same neighbourhood.
There is no single homogenous Black experience. Yet activist groups like Black Lives Matter premise their actions on this assumption. It is true, as Prof. Loury pointed out, that many perpetrators of violent crime happen to be Black and that police, who are not unaware of this fact, frequently use more force than necessary when dealing with any Black person they encounter. But this does not mean that all Black people have a fear of being randomly gunned down by White police every time they step out of their homes.
While Black people can and should speak candidly on their own personal experiences with the police, they should also be cognizant of the fact that not all Blacks have scary police stories to tell.
I was present at the Comedy Cellar for the event and definitely enjoyed it overall. I do have to say that I did find the mixture of serious panel discussion and comedy to be slightly incongruous, especially when Sherrod would try to dismiss some of Glenn's serious points by making a wisecrack. I think Jon Laster took the discussion a little more seriously.
Personally, I didn't mind that the comedians were left of center on the issue of race and policing (or at least left of my own views on the matter) as I believe that having opposing viewpoints actually makes for a livelier conversation. I do wonder though if trying to mix comedy with serious discussion is necessarily the optimal format for these sorts of live events. It is possible that in the future these events are held at the Comedy Cellar but don't necessarily have to involve comedians? Or is that frowned upon given the venue? Personally, I went there to hear Glenn and John pontificate upon the important social issues of the day. I didn't necessarily go there for stand-up comedy in this particular instance for whatever it's worth.
All that being said, it was a blast to see Glenn and John in person and I can't complain too much. I felt like I was in the presence of true rock stars. Is it wishful thinking on my part to imagine The Black Guys on tour one of these days?
As an aside, I should point out my personal view on the matter which is that I'm skeptical of poverty being a significant causal factor for things such as crime. Mainland China has had pretty low per capita homicide rates despite being relatively poor for much of the past 30-40 years. Even more relevant, from what I've seen the correlation between SES and outcomes such as crime or academic achievement has been relatively insignificant in the East Asian cultural sphere compared to the correlation in other regions or contexts. There hasn't been that much difference in terms of per capita violent crime or academic achievement in recent decades between China and wealthier places in East Asia such as Japan, South Korea or Taiwan or Singapore in Southeast Asia. In fact, in some instances mainland China has outperformed the other wealthier places on these metrics.
Given that some type of correlation between SES and life outcomes is normally observed in many contexts, the fact that this correlation seems to be weakened among a particular ethnic group strikes me as a non-trivial empirical observation that deserves some explanation for anyone serious about the particular issue of crime.
John and Glenn humiliated these comedians, both of whom (I except the laconic Nimesh) relied on anecdotes, hypotheticals, and in the case of Sherrod Small, insipient gay jokes.
As Seth B points out below, two independent conversations took place. This is in many ways a microcosm for the way these issues play out at large. John and Glenn make cogent arguments. The comedians, meanwhile, are way cooler, and their cocky mic control resonates with a different audience.
Please do continue the comedy club experiment. Indeed, if I were nearby, I would love to attend. But please find guests who, while holding opposing views, are worthy of your company on the stage.
Oof. That might as well have been billed as Glenn and John live at a Park Slope birthday party.
Were the comedians even present during the first part of the show? When they took the stage, they engaged with nothing that John or Glenn had said in their long prelude to what was, I thought, supposed to be the main event. I didn't expect them to agree - but in that case, I had hoped they'd at least engage. Pushback, whether in a bantering spirit or in a more serious tone would have been welcome, but there wasn't even any of that.
This just felt like two independent conversations - first a Glenn and John primer, followed by... something akin to an NPR broadcast, only slightly funnier. The "looking over the shoulder" phenomenon of which John spoke was in evidence throughout.
I do wish Glenn or John (or an audience member) had asked Jon Laster *why* the police - black policemen, as he noted - had once put guns to his head. I also wish the comedians had asked John and Glenn about *their* experiences being harrased by the police for no reason, since that's an experience that they seem certain that almost all black people share. For all I know, John and Glenn do have such stories. Or maybe they don't. But why not ask when that topic was being discussed?
Sorry to grouch. Even though I think this one didn't work, I do really like the idea behind these Glenn Show / comedy club crossovers.