This is rarely laugh out loud funny but I recommend you watch it. It's not much of a commitment, not even half an hour. But it's loaded with truth.
You might have read about the comments re Aaron Rodgers. And they're pretty good, but I'm not sure I like Ansari's perspective that we just all have to get along. I think this is to appease those who might be on the other side of the political spectrum, he doesn't want to alienate them, lose another part of his audience after the dating fiasco.
I don't want to rehash the details, but my ultimate question is whether it really hurt Ansari's career. Turns out most people angry about general .offenses are not hard core fans anyway, and in truth you have to do something really offensive to turn off your hard core fans, hell, even Bill Cosby is on the road. Not that their offenses are similar, one can question if Ansari even committed an offense, but that's in the rearview mirror. And what we've got today is a comedian who lives in London coming back to New York to lay down some truth at the Comedy Cellar.
It takes a lot of strength to live in the spotlight. Especially when you're accused of bad behavior. Which is one of the reasons Ansari lives so far away. But he's definitely an American, unlike Madonna he doesn't have an English accent, and he's performing...
Just like any other comedian in a nightclub.
Being at the club is different. Comedy clubs are usually small, the waitstaff is hustling drinks, which may be part of a minimum, there's constant background noise but everybody there is there because they want to. They want to laugh. They're on the side of the comedian until he or she turns them off. You get the benefit of the doubt, but not for long.
And Ansari's performance is a surprise. That's one of the reasons you go to the elite metropolitan comedy clubs, you don't know who will drop in. Hell, we all now know that to make it most comedians work multiple clubs a night, so the odds are somewhat high, just like if you go to a gig in L.A. of an act with a special guest on the record, there's a good chance the guest will take the stage.
So, the audience is pumped.
But Ansari starts off slow. Just like you would in a club.
And he works his way to Rodgers and Covid and makes the point that this guy is a FOOTBALL PLAYER, not someone held up as an intellectual in either the high school or college hierarchy. The media makes them gods, but we knew them when. And at this point how much punishment has Aaron Rodgers's body taken, how many hits to the head?
But the reason you really want to watch this special on Netflix is because Ansari opines on musicians, who are so busy with their side hustles that music is a secondary enterprise, if they're practicing it at all. How it's all about the money in America. Everybody has got a side business, and this side hustle oftentimes turns into the main hustle.
And Ansari is one of us. A bit nerdy. Not a fashion icon. He's speaking from our perspective, you know, the educated not famous cadre.
Why is it that only cartoons and comedians can speak the truth?
Musicians used to be famous for this, before they became fearful it would hurt their brand. You don't want to turn off any potential customer, because if you do it will be harder to sell stuff, harder to make a deal with the Fortune 500.
And today's comedians tend not to go to the heart of the matter. They find their niche and go deeper into it. Whereas here Ansari is observing the world just like we would. I mean what exactly is going on? It's incomprehensible. And Ansari even references the quick news cycle. And the fact that we're addicted to irrelevant news online. This is something I realize since I've subscribed to Apple News+. Forget the drivel at the end of webpages, that's just a way to make some bread from the brain dead. But I'm paying for Apple News+, and essentially every story has a clickbait headline. To the point where you stop clicking at all. But if you don't click are you out of the loop?
The secondary has become primary. We all know it, but Ansari uses his platform to say it.
It had an impact on me.
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