The Flaming Lips performed a sold out show at the ornate, restored King's Theatre in Brooklyn Thursday night, a tremendous former Loew's palace that now hosts everything from rock concerts to ballets. It's a glorious venue to step into, even more overwhelming than Manhattan's storied Beacon Theater in its breadth and glamor.

Kings Theatre. Brooklyn NY

The Flaming Lips, for their part, offered a phantasmagoria of lights, images, props and confetti in support of a tour that celebrates the 20th anniversary of their popular album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. (Actually the album came out in 2002; the pandemic has pushed back a lot of anniversaries.)

Attack of the Pink Robots

Did I say "popular"? The most well-worn track on the album, "Do You Realize?" has just under 80 million streams on Spotify. That number is the dream of many an artist, but a drop in the bucket for today's most popular acts. Neo-psychedelic latecomer Tame Impala has topped a billion with "The Less I Know the Better" and drawn 100-500 million listens numerous times. Even the Lips' sort-of-iconic "Race For the Prize", from their 1999 album The Soft Bulletin, has drawn under 25 million streams. Another Australian neo-psych band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, which bears comparison to the Lips in a number of ways, has beaten that number several times. All of which is to say that for their 20 or so studio albums (depending on what you count), numerous EP's, compilations and collaborations, the Flaming Lips remain something of a niche band. 

Perhaps they could also be called an acquired taste. There is nothing difficult to like about the Flaming Lips' music; what may need to be acquired is an attachment to their culture. How to describe that? Pictures, of course, are worth a lot of verbiage, and you can see from the ones here that "excess" is part of their DNA. Consider the fact that nearly every song was accompanied by at least several types of visual cues competing for one's attention, including -

1. Constantly moving, multicolored background patterns

2. Laser lights in complex, layered beams trained on the audience

3. Bright white flashing lights

4. Inflatable props of various types

5. The lyrics flashed word by word on the backdrop screen

6. Fog, confetti, rubber balls and other additional props

7. A bubble enclosing the lead singer 

Sensory overload is a key component of a Flaming Lips concert

The music, presumably the main point of the show, is similarly layered and consuming, bathing the large auditorium in sound that ranges from a keyboard-emphasized booming bass to the extreme highs of polyphonic synthesizers, with guitars and vocal harmonies filling out the middle. Two drummers (presumably Matt Kirksey and Nicholas Ley, though no musicians were introduced) provided rhythm in most songs, neither of them shy about making a lot of noise.

The voice of Wayne Coyne, the lead singer and personality of the group, soars above the mix with high and sometimes scratchy intensity, a kind of cross between Jon Anderson and Neil Young. To those who know the songs, who have caught enough of a whiff of Lips culture to know what to expect, he is the child at the heart of the Flaming Lips world, the glue that makes the slime gel. He is also the only original member of the band, though Steven Drozd, who plays guitar and other instruments, has been with them for more than 30 years.

His inter-song banter also accounts for a good deal of the band's character. He can be effusive, gentle, funny and gratuitously foul-mouthed, as if trying to cover all emotional bases at once. You have to be a certain kind of person, I think, to enjoy the monologues, and I plead guilty to not being that kind of person, exactly. One of Coyne's primary forms of audience interaction is to instruct the audience to "Scream" and "Keep screaming!". The impression that he was asking people to pretend they were more excited than they really were never quite left, even after he explained, a couple of hours into the show, that his purpose was to lift up any audience members who might be out of sorts. It did not strike me as a very effective bit of pop psychology and therefore rang a bit hollow. 

Which is not to say the fans weren't excited or screaming enough anyway - the audience was clearly in Coyne's hand, even after he apparently bonked someone waving one of his props around. (I wasn't close enough to see exactly what happened, but it was serious enough that they stopped the song and issued profuse apologies.) He tends to thank the audience multiple times after every song, but the streams of "thankyou thankyou thankyou thankyou..." became predictable and left me wondering if Coyne is uncomfortable with more spontaneous engagement. On the other hand, a few monologues, including one about searching for a lost toy airplane in a warehouse, were entertaining and didn't seem all that rehearsed. But when he started waxing philosophical the ideas came off as a collage of new age platitudes.

This is what I feel to some extent about their lyrics, too. They sometimes captivate you with surprising turns, but they also sport a mix of optimistic naïveté that conjures up Rod McKuen, and puerile space fantasies that conjure up too many post-psychedelic bands to name. Probably their best set of lyrics is the whimsical and humorous "She Don't Use Jelly", one of their few radio hits, while "Do You Realize?", from the Yoshimi album, demonstrates just how shameless their clichés can run:

            Do you realize

            you have the most beautiful face?

            Do you realize

            we're floating in space?

            Do you realize

            that happiness makes you cry?

            Do you realize

            that everyone you know will someday die?

The band projects the lyrics to every song in real-time

The song ends with another cliché about "the world spinning 'round" (re-used from Paul McCartney's "The Fool on the Hill", which at least is not a gallery of clichés).

There is an important nuance to mention about this song and other Flaming Lips lyrics - they tend to write about death from the optimistic point of view that it "won't defeat us", or something along those lines. In more sophisticated hands some deep insights can emerge from this idea (for instance, in Laura Nyro's "And When I Die" or Hugh Prestwood's song "Bristlecone Pine") but the Lips' lyrics leave us mostly in the realm of kitsch, dead or alive, on earth or beyond.

I have to acknowledge, though, that the kitsch seems a bit calculated, and I'd surmise that the aura of childlike innocence is one of the things that appeal to Flaming Lips fans. That might be true of Rod McKuen's poetry too, but in that case it seems like a pseudo-art product for those not prepared for the challenges of serious poetry. What's going on here feels different; more like a consciously naïve point of view that is not yet clouded by the complexities of the adult world. That, in any case, is the best case I can make for it.

But I still found the projection of the lyrics distracting, both because words draw attention away from everything else and because I had the distinct feeling that I would prefer not to know what they were saying. I generally assign lyrics a relatively low degree of importance in rock music anyway; when they are particularly original, poetic or thought-provoking they definitely add to the value of the song, but when they are not the music can stand well enough on its own, so long as the lyrics are not outright objectionable. I don't find their lyrics objectionable, just not worthy of making constant demands on my attention.

Were it not for the ear-candy appeal of their music it is hard to believe Coyne's lyrics would be taken seriously. (I call them his because he does lead vocal duties; on the albums all songs are credited to the entire band.) But ear candy it is, in a way that has been compared to the Beach Boys, not without justice, but also reminds one of the melodic and Mellotron-rich sound of the Moody Blues, or the synth-heavy sonic spread of Yes, with rich vocal harmonies too. Because the mix is so complex it is not always easy to hear the what guitar is doing, and I missed, to some extent, the guitar-forward songs of those prog-rock bands, as well as the Lips' own guitar-heavy sound prior to The Soft Bulletin. They seem to be in roughly the sonic mode of Genesis these days. But they are so diverse and unpredictable over the course of their career that any category or comparison risks being outdated by the next album.

Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips

The first few Flaming Lips albums, recorded for an indie label in the late 1980's, have more than a bit of the punk rock aesthetic, though with a twist here and there that tends to undermine the "post-punk" label. (In this they resemble another Aussie band that ended up in neo-psychedelic territory, The Church.) Their transition to a more noticeably neo-psych or neo-prog sound came after they moved to Warner Bros. in 1991. If the first couple of tracks on the 1992 album Hit to Death in the Future Head leave the impression that nothing much had changed, the rest of the album cannot be mistaken for post-punk except in the chronological sense. The following year Steve Drozd took up duties as drummer, initially, but he plays just about every instrument they use, and sings as well. By the time they recorded The Soft Bulletin in 1999 their mature sound had taken shape; the album brought them awards and critical acclaim, after which Yoshimi cemented their reputation. (For a thorough review of Flaming Lips recordings through 2010 please see this Trouser Press page.)

In spite of this rough summary, they have never been tied to a single type of sound, nor do they disdain almost any kind of experimentation. From time to time they put out more typical, hard-edged rock, only to go on to record long, ambient instrumentals. They have also offered albums of cover material: with or without collaborators, they have recorded complete cover sets of many of the milestones of psychedelic and progressive rock, including Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, In the Court of the Crimson King, Dark Side of the Moon and the first album by The Stone Roses. (Not all of these have been issued as regular commercial releases.) Many other covers and a Christmas album have dropped in one form or another. At this concert they covered "Borderline" - no, not the popular Tame Impala song, as one might have expected for neo-psych creds, but Madonna's hit single.

To say the Flaming Lips are intoxicating in concert is an understatement. Overwhelmed by thundering bass notes, orchestral synths and flashing lights, even sustaining a mild headache, I was nevertheless gripped by the music from the start, and stood for most of the nearly 3-hour concert as they battled pink robots (playing the entire album) and then went on to perform a series of songs, including most of their more popular ones, all of which held their own as concert pieces.

This was somewhat surprising, as most of their recent studio recordings emphasize Coyne's more plaintive tones and the ambience of the synth-driven sound. This led to the impression that a concert might be a kind of lightweight affair. It was anything but - least of all, I suppose, to the mass of standing-room ticketholders at the front of the stage, who swayed and jumped to the music and Coyne's stage antics. I've seen some contemporary bands who are more to my taste on disk (or online) than the Flaming Lips, but are considerably less impressive in concert. Excess, it seems, works pretty well as a wall of sound, even if I could have lost some of the inflatables, lived with fewer lights, and done without projected lyrics. I came away wanting to go back to some of the songs to see if I might have missed something when I listened to the album.

It is worth mentioning that the Lips are known to use a certain amount of pre-recorded material during their concerts. It is simply impossible to duplicate on stage everything that is done in recording studios these days. In fact, long before these days - for example, in the 1970's 10cc performed "I'm Not in Love" and other material live with the help of pre-recorded tracks, because the effects achieved in the studio would have required at least an entire chorus. There's no deception here (it's not lip-synching); even in the classical music world the reliance on electronics and tape loops makes it an academic exercise to say whether the effects were previously recorded and played back or "played" on stage by triggering a programmed sound effect.

The light show was probably the most complex I have seen since the 2003 reunion tour of the 1970's prog-rock group Nektar. (I had seen them several times before that too.) That band, who consider their lighting designer (Mick Brockett) a member, similarly performed in front of an ever-changing backdrop of visual effects that included filmed sequences, patterns and even live footage of the band from previous shows. It was all handled in real-time by Brockett, with a self-designed system of projectors and foot-controls. (In a shocking coincidence, as I'm preparing to post this they are playing a concert in Long Island celebrating the 50th Anniversary of their 1973 album Remember the Future; it will lack the presence of guitar genius Roye Albrighton, who died in 2016, but includes Brockett and 2 other original members.) I would be surprised if the Flaming Lips did not count them as an influence, both musically and visually. Though the projected art is different, the concept is very similar, and it would not be hard to imagine either of them covering the other's music.

One of the moving images that form the backdrop to the Flaming Lips' concerts

It seemed only logical, in fact all but mandatory, to close with their most thrilling number, "Race For the Prize", since playing it earlier might have risked that whatever followed would be anti-climactic. I'd be equally surprised to find Kate Bush doing "Running Up That Hill" in the middle of a show. (Though I'd also be surprised to find her doing a show at all.) Apparently Coyne & co. had the same thought, and there was little need to say they were done when the song ended. Just in case, though, Wayne had informed the audience early on that they would be playing "until about 11:30, when they kick us out". The song ended at 11:28 p.m.

Race For the Prize (clip) - The Flaming Lips - Kings Theater 6/8/2023

As I think back on the concert I can't help musing a bit on the significance of sensory excess in our culture. From Disney World to the Bicentennial Fireworks, we seem to love it for its own sake. It's related to what Kant called "the sublime", not because it is aesthetically great, which it usually isn't, but because it overwhelms the senses while being comprehensible to the mind. From the grossly overbuilt cars of the 1950's to the gaudiness of some wedding halls, excess seems to please us when it helps us express ourselves without inhibition. The magnificent interior of the Kings Theatre itself - one of five palatial theatres built by Loews in 1929 (the same year as the Beacon) - is perhaps an expression of the ebullience of the "roaring twenties". All of them opened on the eve of the Great Depression, yet as businesses folded left and right and the vaudeville shows the theatres were partly designed for went out of style, somehow they survived, to eventually host the sensory excesses of Cinerama, Imax and Avatar.

Excess has resulted in a world where the climate and environment are perhaps irreparably damaged, which strongly suggests we need to control it better in the future. But if it serves some deeply human emotional need - as testified by so many aspects of our culture, including every new blockbuster CGI-created 3D-spectacled superhero film - it is probably here to stay in one form or another.

In which case, the form it takes in Flaming Lips concerts is probably one of the most positive and sustainable. So, having just watched a documentary on the music for (increasingly excessive) James Bond films, it's irresistible to end my comments on the Flaming Lips by saying that as far as excess goes, nobody does it better.

            *** All photographs and video © 2023 by Anton Alterman ***

Sundays at the Theater With Steve: A Reflection on Stephen Sondheim

 

Now there is no hat. Where there was a hat. And life is not the same.

My reaction to the death of Stephen Sondheim was not exactly rational, even as emotional things go. It was easy to find connections with him in my life, but hard to say why any of them would have brought me close to tears. The most obvious ones I came up with are too indirect to have much emotional impact, so I kept exploring.

One is that he studied composition with Milton Babbitt. An odd fact for someone who is generally considered one of the greatest geniuses of the Broadway musical; Babbitt was a strictly atonal composer, one whose stringent formalism was a model for composers when I was a composition student at Northwestern. I studied there with David Noon, who was a student of Mario Davidovsky, who also studied with Babbitt. So there you go, only four degrees of separation: Alterman - Noon - Davidovsky - Babbitt - Sondheim.

Another has to do with Sondheim's musical Saturday Night. Written in 1954, it was to be his first musical, lyrics and score. But it was cancelled due to the death of a producer. In 1997, more than 40 years later, Saturday Night was finally produced by the Bridewell Theatre Company in London. The story has to do with young men growing up in Brooklyn, and for the promotional artwork the designers chose a photograph of three boys sitting on a pier with the Manhattan Bridge in the background. That photograph, Boys on Pier, Manhattan Bridge, was taken by my uncle, Harold Roth, in 1948. I now own the rights to Roth's work and the prints he left behind when he died in 2001.

Here is one of the original prints next to the sheet music booklet for Saturday Night:

The same cover design was used for the original cast CD, fliers and posters.

None of this really gets at why Sondheim's death seems so personal to me. Nor does the following, though it is a bit closer: My mother died early this year, age 91; she was found on the floor of her home in Delray Beach, Florida, where she lived alone. Sondheim, age 91, was found on the floor of his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he lived alone. The cause of my mother's death is unknown, but it came as she appeared to be getting over a bout of COVID. The cause of Sondheim's death has not been announced, but he died just as news of the new Omicron variant of COVID was reaching the public. It occurrs to me that if someone has devoted his life to musical theater, then at age 89 watched Broadway shut down and revivals of his work get postponed for 2 years due to COVID, hung in through all that, and just as everything was opening up again, news of a variant that could send us back to square one reached him, he might not survive the emotional shock of that. I don't know if this was true or if he even heard the news, but he was said to have been in good health before his death.

I suppose this focus on morbidity is not what anyone wants to hear, but with the emotions regarding my mother's death still raw it was hard to keep my brain quiet when I heard the news, particularly right after a Thanksgiving that would be the first one she missed and the last one Sondheim enjoyed.

Sondheim grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where my parents moved (from Brooklyn) when I was ten years old. We lived in a tenement on West 83rd Street; he lived in the San Remo, one of the most famous buildings in a neighborhood full of famous buildings (the Belnord, the Apthorp, and of course the Dakota) where an arm's length list of famous actors and musicians have resided. To me and my friends, the San Remo was just the most distinctive piece of skyline you could see from Central Park. Too bad he did not have a happy childhood there; I suppose mine was a bit better, if poorer.

But let me finally say what I think is going on with my Sondheim connections. Of all his musicals I have only ever seen Gypsy and a film version of West Side Story, to both of which he only wrote the lyrics. I narrowly missed seeing a production of Into the Woods before the pandemic, but I own the soundtracks to a A Little Night Music and Sunday in the Park With George. None of that explains how I felt at hearing of his death. 

No, it can only be one thing: Judy Collins' recording of his most famous song, "Send in the Clowns". Why? Because I loved the song from the first time I heard it? There are lots of songs I love, and lots of people love that one but may not feel it in quite the same way, even if they are songwriters like me. I think it represented for me a kind of paradigm of how to be a songwriter, a model that I could mentally turn around and examine to remind myself how it's done. 

Strangely enough, in interviews Sondheim said that he kind of tossed off the song. He said he needed to find something with short phrases for Glynis Johns (the original Desirée in A Little Night Music) because she couldn't sustain notes; that he had the idea that questions would make naturally short phrases, and to use the stage metaphor because, fictionally, she was an actress. And then bing bang boom it all came together in two days. Including the fact that it would have to be in two different meters (9/8 and 12/8).

That's great - when you're a genius it all seems simple. And even when you're not, songs do sometimes seem to pull themselves out of thin air and you have little to do but take notes. But it's more than the fact that the song is inspired, which goes without saying. The first thing that struck me about it was the line, "Sure of my lines" - you have a sad song in a major key, then it sort of tumbles into minor in the bridge, which heightens the tension, and then, as the bitterness of the situation becomes clear, descends almost chromatically through the line "Making my entrance again with my usual flair". Finally, dropping the sarcasm that guards the rawness of her emotions and letting herself admit the self-doubt that underlies the whole scene, she sings "Sure of my lines", and the tonality descends into near chaos as the singer traverses a diminished fourth, an awkward melodic interval that emphasizes the interiority of the emotion, and the troubled backward glance at that false sense of security.

If you are not a musician you surely have no idea what I just said, but the point is that a seemingly insignificant musical touch just nails the emotional content, creating a mystical moment in which the singer suddenly lays it all bare and you share her sense of despair. That is the stuff of genius.

Then there is the way the lyrics seem to alternate between a controlling theatrical metaphor, which is brilliantly deployed again and again, and a second metaphor about clowns, until they somehow magically seem to come together at the end of the third verse: "Don't bother, they're here". Now, in fact, as Sondheim explained, it is all one metaphor, the clowns being sent in to cover when a performance is not going well. The star is reviewing her mistakes, or failures, and asking for the clowns to be sent in to distract the audience from them. But I think the clowns work on another level, which I realized when Sondheim said it could have been "send in the fools" instead - that is, the "clowns" metaphor captures the growing feeling of foolishness, particularly about the actress's illusion that with her well-honed skills she could bend reality and undo the error she made when she rejected her lover so many years ago.

Now let's look at the melody itself. It seems to have just three basic elements, which makes their contributions easy to isolate, and to see how they relate to the meaning of the song. One is the jump from the 3rd to the 4h note of the first two lines of each verse: isn't--->it rich, are we--->a pair. This motion is completed by a fall of an octave at the end of the verse: you in<----midair. (Note that there are a number of ways in which Fredrik, the previously rejected suitor, could be thought of as being "in midair" - between two women, two stages of his life, his sexual and emotional desires, etc.) The leap ending in a fall perfectly captures both the spirit of the drama and the literal meaning of the first verse, "me here at last on the ground, you in midair".

That line, though, has more of an implication of a dance performance than drama, as does "one who keeps tearing around, one who can't move", while "losing my timing this late in my career" could indicate a performance of almost any sort. So the setting of those lines actually provides the third element, a rolling melody that is somewhat reminiscent of circus or carousel music, but is also very close to a waltz, a dance which literally employs lilting, up-and-down and sweeping motions. So what the whole thing amounts to is a leap into the air, a giddy ride followed by a fall: exactly what the fictional actress is experiencing as she confidently ventures a proposal to her ex-lover, sure that it will be warmly received ("I thought that you'd want what I want") and then suddenly finds herself falling without a parachute when he rejects her offer.

This is my perhaps over-analyzed take on the common observation that Sondheim was able to use songs to move his dramas forward. Before him, songs in musicals were often a pause in the dramatic action, a kind of break for the audience. He made them part of the drama, a way of deepening the personalities of the characters. In fact, "Send in the Clowns" is partially re-worked as the show's closer, now conveying a completely different feeling in which the characters have been reconciled to their own foolishness and accept one another and themselves.

I could probably go on a bit longer, but it comes down to this: Sondheim put everything you need to know about songwriting into a 4-minute song. Almost everything: the line "Don't you love farce" is awkward, forcing singers to breathe between the last two words or risk the suggestion that she is professing an affection for derrieres. (Barbara Streisand seems to pause for a drink between them.) All this shows is that an errant brushstroke in a Rembrandt is worth talking about more than the same mistake in a million other works of art.

I don't know if I've really said what I wanted to say about Sondheim and how his death affected me, or why. Perhaps, ultimately, it comes down to respect: the idea that someone could take a form of entertainment that sometimes seems one step from kitsch, and make it into something that seems one step beyond opera. Some modern operas have serious subject matter and the highest level of musical creativity, but no one saw that coming in the Broadway musical until Sondheim did it.

I think I've run out of words - highly unusual for me. Fortunately, Sondheim saves the day:

    Somebody crowd me with love.
    Somebody force me to care.
    Somebody let me come through,
    I'll always be there,
    As frightened as you,
    To help us survive,
    Being alive.
    Being alive.
    Being alive!

It does sound like he wrote them this year. They're from Company, 1970 
- and 2021. Maybe now I will finally get to see one of his musicals.

Dave Chappelle and "The Closer" (II): Terrestrial Demographics

 

I set out to write some comments on Dave Chappelle's "The Closer" focusing on his two jokes about "Space Jews". Originally I thought I would send it as an Op-Ed to the Times; as usual with such thoughts, the piece got too long, so I cut a lot of the material below. Then I changed my mind and decided to post it to The Parrot's Lamppost, so this post is partly the material I cut from the previous one, and partly some additional thoughts.

Meanwhile Chappelle has responded to his transgender critics, or rather, to the perceived judgment that he is being held to account for what he said about them in "The Closer". He is not backing down on anything and clearly still trying to drum up support - in this case, with a story about a special he did in a cornfield which is now meeting resistance in the distribution channel. "So am I cancelled or not?" he asks before casually tossing the microphone over his shoulder.

"Cancelling", that effluence of unregulated social media, stands in an awkward gap between free speech and bullying. I have nothing to do with it, and like Chappelle my main reaction is that Twitter is not a real place. But that doesn't mean we all have to sit down, shut up and laugh at whatever Chappelle takes to be amusing. Anyway, after The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, Vox and so many others have weighed in, what are the chances that a squawking parrot can "cancel" Dave? We'll probably have less impact than intellectually feeble adulatory rants like this. Be that as it may, your bird will sing, be the impact what it may.

It is a notable fact, of Chappelle's own making, that of the thousands of possible subjects for comedy, he has chosen things like the claims of the transgender, gay rights and women's movements, as well as Jews, Asians and other vulnerable populations. Nobody forced this on him, so it is a bit disingenuous when he gets the criticism that might be expected, and pushes back as if he is the one who has been injured. "I'm the only one who can't go to the office", he says. Well - is the point that there are trans comedians making jokes about black folks, and they can "go to the office"? If so, that's wrong, of course; but since he chose his subjects and got paid $20 million per special to talk about them it's not like he was in a corner or something. I have to say that I admire both Netflix for not caving in to criticism and removing the shows, and the communities for not backing down in light of Chappelle's defensive gestures.

By chance I happened on a NY Times Magazine article from a year ago - the title in print was "The Last Laugh", by Dan Brooks, but online it is called "How President Trump Ruined Political  Comedy". It contains some telling analysis on conservative comedy, including this:

...any statement that gets too much blowback can become someone else's failure to take a joke.

            This approach lets irony serve as a stalking horse for ideas that decency prevents the ironist from advancing seriously.

Referring to conservative comedians Steven Crowder, Jesse Watters and Milo Yiannopoulos, Brooks says,

All three men construct jokes that operate in a gray area between tweaking political correctness and simply repeating the prejudices it forbids.

In his estimation, "ambiguous irony has allowed both political comedians and pundits to say what cannot be said."

Much of that could be applied with equal accuracy to the recent comedy of Dave Chappelle. No one will accuse him of being a conservative, but the thrust of "The Closer" and some of his other recent work has an eerie similarity to the methods of conservative "blowback" that Brooks put his finger on. Chappelle wants us to sit back and relax as he throws "forbidden" barbs at various communities, and then demands the space to say "but it's comedy, give me a break!" when people object. If that doesn't do it, he insists that we listen more closely to see that his jokes are not really aimed at these various marginalized groups. And if we are still not willing to follow him down that path he insists we don't have a grip on reality ("gender is a fact" he states informatively) or reminds us that white activists are always willing to jump across the racial barricades when push comes to shove. It's a lot of moves to defend jokes that, prima facie, seem offensive.

Apart from the "Space Jews" routines, "The Closer" includes obvious, raunchy bathroom and bedroom humor, a critique of racial myopia in the women's movement and a true story about his supportive relationship with a trans woman who was an aspiring stand-up comedian. The most common word in the show is either "bitches" or "niggas" (which I shall reproduce in this form only insofar as I am quoting Chappelle). Both words lose their shock value by repetition.

Actually I'm not sure if any shock value still remained in the "n-word" after Richard Pryor famously introduced, and later abandoned, the use of it in his routines. Lenny Bruce once repeatedly ran through a long list of ethnic insult words with the goal of something like what psychologists call "semantic satiation" - where words temporarily lose meaning due to repetition. Here the words seem in line with a delivery style derived from ghetto talk and hip hop culture. In his Ohio show on 6/6/20 he also says "I use the word 'bitch' all the time because it's black." That seems to be another version of "it's all in the delivery", and Chappelle lacks nothing in terms of delivery. He gets plenty of women laughing at what he says about "bitches", and I'm not going to get on a pulpit and say they shouldn't, it's demeaning, etc. So I'll focus on other aspects of his humor.

Chappelle minces no words about racism; he delivered a lengthy monologue on the George Floyd murder at that 6/6/20 show, and he was clearly not looking for laughs or even applause, he was saying how it affected him and how he appreciated the protests. But he is not always heavy, and delivers some self-deprecating humor as well. He actually opens "The Closer" with a routine on COVID-19 in which he describes getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as "the most nigga-ish thing I've done in a long time". But anyone who follows him knows that such self-deprecation comes wrapped in a lot of context. So for contrast we have one of the funniest lines in "Sticks and Stones", where Chappelle relates an interaction with a television producer who told him he cannot say "fag---" on tv. He asked why not, when he says "nigga" all the time? "Because you're not one of them," she tells him. "That's true," he replies, "but I'm not a nigga either!" Zap!

But notice something: here we forgive the way he skirts the logic that is really behind the producer's remark, because the sentiment seems genuine. What the producer meant is that we reserve to each ethnic or national group the right to use common insults about themselves, but rarely give such license to others. Jews can call one another "Yids" or joke about our schnozzolas, but it's a rare situation where someone else can do it with impunity. So Chappelle doesn't really have a license to talk about "fag---s", but he can go ahead and mock Martin Luther King's speech patterns and use the n-word as he pleases. His response to the producer is brilliant but slightly off-target; and we let it go because we want it to be right.

But when he discusses other communities things get dicier. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine may deserve some ribbing, but, "I'll have what the homeless people are having"? There's a sense of "the homeless get screwed" there, but it comes with a very rough edge, a distancing that suggests he is really better than them. Another joke reifies Trump's reference to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus": referring to news media coverage of attacks on Asians by black people he says that he failed to get sick from COVID because the same thing was happening inside his body. Is Trump the target here? If so that's pretty subtle for stand-up, where the impact has to be immediate if you want a laugh. Maybe Chappelle was just satirizing the trope about black-Asian antipathy. He's not above using just about anyone as the butt of a joke (the Amish take it on the chin pretty squarely in one of his routines) but it is usually possible to read it as a humorously hyperbolic reaction to some existing prejudice rather than an exercise in prejudice itself.

As I said above, though, that ambiguity can be a dangerous tool, should it fall into the wrong hands. You might say that the entire support for the limb Chappelle is out on is our willingness to treat him as everyone's friend, underneath it all, whether that assumption is earned or not. It takes a lot of courage to walk that line, putting your audience in that position and hoping they give you the benefit of the doubt. With the "Space Jews" jokes he definitely crossed the line for me: clever, not particularly funny, and no underlying truth to them either. I wonder how Asians took the COVID joke. If that moral ambiguity fails too often it's not a good sign.

Another one of his routines has a laugh at the expense of both trans women and veterans, a bit of crude bathroom humor that involves a reference to the kind of wound that male veterans might find least amusing. So you might say to yourself: "No one could be that heartless about a wounded veteran, so it must be rooted in empathy." Well, someone very prominent in American politics made some of the most repulsive comments ever aired in public about veterans and still got elected, so we can't just assume that everyone on a stage cares much about veterans, or everyone listening to them either.

Yet another routine involves Chappelle's alleged sexual abuse by a preacher: "Don't feel bad for me - I liked it", he says, and then attempts to make the preacher sound like the loser in the transaction. I don't know if Chappelle was really a victim of such abuse, but even if he was, and this way of dealing with it works for him, I wonder if other victims wouldn't feel more like it was a fresh assault. A longer discussion of pedophilia in "Sticks and Stones" was better prepared and somewhat less graphic, but this quickie gets crammed into the act as if he needed to make up time. Child sexual abuse is one of the few subjects where the demand for trigger warnings is arguably justified. Since trigger warnings in stand-up comedy are all but guaranteed to ruin the jokes, maybe the standard should be that if you can't ease into it, don't do it at all?

Chappelle insists he is not a misogynist; in fact, he is a "feminist", if that means believing women should have equal rights. Good; welcome to the mid-20^th century, at least. "Equal rights" is extremely vague, though; depending on where and who you are it can mean anything from equal pay and employment opportunity to the right to work at all. He has stated clearly enough (in "Sticks and Stones") that he is pro-choice; the routine involves a sort of giveback to men, but it is a funny quip and he's probably not holding us to it. He directs some barbs at the women's movement, mainly for what he takes to be its whiteness. But as for women, once again there is that ambiguity in some of his jokes that lets him say things with a note attached: "Of course I don't mean to offend anyone personally by calling them a 'cunt'; it's comedy, after all." Actually in his 6/6/20 show it seems that he does want to offend someone that way. I don't know what attraction this holds for him. You get more bang for your buck calling someone an "ignorant cretin" or "pathetic jerk" or hundreds of other nice putdowns than with the commonplace, non-specific "cunt", which seems to say little more than that "I hate women like that".

He also has nothing against gay people, he just envies the progress they have made, by comparison with people of color. He is upset that DaBaby was taken to task when he "made a very egregious mistake" with repeated, vile remarks about gays and people with AIDS. Chappelle's delivery often starts with a factual back story that shades into pure setup, so it is not really clear whether characterizing DaBaby's remarks as a "mistake" is something he sincerely believes or just part of the setup for the next gag. "Can't do that... can't do that," he says - is this "can't" as in shouldn't, or as in there will be consequences for your career? (See what I mean about ambiguity?) Regardless, it was certainly not a "mistake", it was intentional homophobic bigotry. Does Chappelle believe it was wrong, or not? He doesn't really say.

The gag that follows is way off base too. This involves (spoiler alert) an ironic reference to the fact that DaBaby's career didn't suffer after he shot and killed a man, but it did when he made homophobic remarks: "In our country you can shoot and kill a nigga, but you better not hurt a gay person's feelings!" Chappelle's effort to focus on the contrast between racism and homophobia, or black liberation and gay liberation, shows once again how a funny quip can mask very faulty reasoning. DaBaby was not charged with a crime (other than carrying a concealed weapon), because he convinced the police that he fired in self-defense; he also posted on Instagram to the effect that he was protecting his family. So the incident hardly shows that nobody cares as much about killing a black person as they do about insulting gay people. What it shows is that his constitutional right to be held innocent unless proven guilty was respected; while his crude and explicit hate speech was rejected. (Just to be clear, I am not taking sides over the morality of the shooting; but the evidence available to the public was not sufficient to say "he got away with murder, so let's not let him play on this Dua Lipa single" or whatever.)

Chappelle clearly has nothing against transgender people, for some of his best friends are trans - or at least Daphne Dorman was, until she was driven to suicide after trans advocates dragged her for defending him. That may be on the trans community, but he seems to think that because she indulged his humor transgender activists ought to take a lesson from her. That's really up to them, and I can see how some of his jokes might set them off. One that could trigger the transphobia alarm is the statement that so-called TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) see trans women the way black folks see white people in blackface. The joke seems to imply not only that trans women are not women in the true sense, but that their "impersonation" of women is offensive, because blackface is offensive. (Cf. the recent case of composer Bright Sheng and the Othello video.) By itself, the line pins the comparison on others. But then he claims to be "team TERF" and repeatedly admonishes his audience that "gender is a fact". That is a lot to swallow, even if there is room for discussion of how trans women are and are not like cis women. Moreover, to define yourself in terms of the exclusion of certain types of people is just bigotry; in this sense, TERFs stand with Trump and his coterie of Christian fundamentalists.

Stepping outside the theater for a minute, I'm not sure J.K. Rowling, whose conflicts with trans activists are the kickoff for Chappelle's routine, counts as a TERF at all, because "radical feminist" does not seem to describe her. Anyone can be a feminist in some lightweight sense, including Dave Chappelle, as he pointedly reminds us. A "radical feminist" is usually understood as one who takes one or more positions that is more antagonistic to traditional sex roles than merely arguing for women's equality - e.g., one who advocates female or lesbian separatism, wants to criminalize pornography, or finds women's oppression to be inherent in the nature of capitalism. I don't think Rowling or several other women who have been labelled "TERFs" are radical feminists. In fact, their belief that biology is in some sense destiny is a position that used to be taken by anti-feminists, with different implications. The ideas that trans women don't stand in the same relationship to the women's movement as cis women does not make someone a "radical feminist", or transphobic, for that matter; but to self-define as "trans-exclusionary" makes someone a bigot no matter what comes after it.

Chappelle's repeated comment that "gender is a fact" seems directed against the claim that gender is socially constructed. This is a rabbit hole he probably should not go down, because arguments grounded on the claim that "race is a fact" are almost always attempts to justify racism in one form or another. Of course, just as "biology is destiny" has suddenly been stood on its head by some feminists, so has this: whereas it was once considered scientifically false and racist to assert that there are basic biological differences between races (because "there's only one race - the human race"), both the scientific facts and their social implications have been reconsidered, with some in the scientific and intellectual community (including critical race theorists) embracing the reality of race in the context of a struggle against racism. Which aspects of race or gender are socially constructed and which are genetically given? There are some obvious facts and falsehoods, and a lot of gray areas. The appeal to common sense in the statement "gender is a fact" is dangerous in that it may be a way of pushing through some of the falsehoods under the guise of obvious truths. But what is surely not a fact of biology is that trans and cis women cannot be equal participants in the women's movement, or shouldn't use the same bathrooms. That is a socially constructed platform of feminists who only deserve the name "radical" for their narrowmindedness.

Chappelle's contrast between the effectiveness of black liberation initiatives and those of movements he needles for being "white" when they need to be seems to me exaggerated. The civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter, among others, have certainly not lacked for achievements, while the biggest victory for women in the last 50 years may be about to evaporate, and gains for transgender people have been mostly at the local level here and there. What is true, though, is that what you might call the "arc of liberation" for a people whose history in this country began with chattel slavery is much longer and steeper than it is for any other social group; so even very significant gains may still leave them much further from true equality than others were before they even began to fight. But, as has been said before, liberation is not - certainly not always - a zero sum game. Women's and LGBTQ liberation in particular do not come at the expense of black liberation.

In any case, there are few if any strictly "white" liberation movements, even though there are inner tensions over the proper thrust of some movements and the role of people of color within them. Not to excuse the racial myopia they sometimes exhibit, but depicting them as expressions of white privilege is not constructive. Even a women's or LGBTQ movement that plays primarily by a white playbook will have benefits for women and gay/trans people of color; the point is to nudge them in the direction of more conscious appreciation of the specific issues of black and brown people. Would Chappelle welcome a really powerful women's or LGBTQ movement within the black community, one that could not be called on the carpet for white privilege? I'm really not sure, for I suspect such a movement might have little truck with his current brand of humor.

Chappelle is not just a comedian but an orator, and for all his dependence on old Anglo-Saxon words, quite a brilliant one. His 6/20/20 show had virtually no jokes, and it is hard to imagine a more intense speech on police violence. But I am not always persuaded that he uses this talent fairly. There is a theme to some of his remarks in which he assumes the role of the injured party, implying that we are obligated to grant him a license to say whatever he wants just because he is a comedian plying his trade. I will say one thing in favor of this, and it has to do with the comedic voice. There is a "voice" to every utterance, be it straight, sarcastic, pedantic, tongue-in-cheek or whatever. The comedic voice can often be taken to be prefaced by something like this: "Here is the natural reaction to this sort of thing, though I'm not saying it is right: ..." As I said in the previous post, you play to your audience's underlying assumptions in order to get a laugh, and it doesn't always mean justifying those assumptions. But Chappelle sometimes undermines his ability to use position as a defense. Sometimes, as with "Space Jews", his convoluted setup for the joke betrays his own interest in making a point, not the receptivity of the audience; while in other cases he turns to straight lecturing to tell us what he thinks ("gender is a fact").

In any case, comedy has a long history - Aristophanes, Chaucer, Twain, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, Jon Stewart - and raising painful issues for people facing various forms of injustice is hardly the only way to make a living at it. Certainly he doesn't always do this; but "The Closer" had a few too many instances of it.

I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of stand-up, and I would not be shocked if someone pointed to an example of a white comedian who made remarks no less offensive than Chappelle's and was never called on the carpet for it. But Andrew Dice Clay was excoriated for homophobia and more in Dice Rules, and Louis CK (along with numerous other white male celebrities) was not spared a #MeToo shaming, though it was not for making offensive jokes. (If only he had done it underneath the bed instead of on top he could have passed it off as serious performance art.) Chappelle seems bent on not merely questioning today's high expectations of sensitivity but at least occasionally flying in the face of them. It's as if he painted himself into a corner and is now mad at people for pointing out he's in it.

In a moment one has to acknowledge as touching, he refers to LGBTQ activists asking him not to "punch down" on them, and he similarly asks people not to "punch down" on him for pursuing his art. But you can't compare someone offended by a stand-up comedian who may have crossed a line and caused pain with a stand-up comedian offended by someone who doesn't appreciate the joke. The former is punching up, not down; the latter has a bully pulpit and a $20 million contract. It's just not a fair comparison.

Chappelle has a problem now, and as one of the top comedians in the world I assume he will find a way to get through it. He took a break earlier as he questioned whether he was happy with what he was doing on The Chappelle Show with regard to depictions of black characters, and for some reason decided his new direction would be taking the anti-discrimination struggles of others as a subject for comedy. But he did this at a time when their issues are being taken very seriously in the entertainment world, as is the movement to confront structural racism. You could say there was a problem of judgment there.

Well, you do have to take risks, right? Lenny Bruce took risks; Dick Gregory took risks; Andy Kaufman, Richard Pryor, Cheech and Chong and many others refused to be limited by convention. But they didn't take these risks at the expense of other vulnerable people. It would feel much better to have him in the ring punching up, down or sideways at the many actors on the world stage who truly deserve to be on the receiving end of his wit.

Chappelle says he will not do another special for a while, though in his Instagram post he complains that he has been trying unsuccessfully to distribute a special he recently did in a cornfield. Maybe he could use another timeout; he took a rather long one before, an opportunity for introspection. "The Closer" doesn't have to be anything more than a slightly fraught step on the way to finding his new voice.