Stay Free - Russel Brand - Here’s the News: Dave Chappelle BACKLASH! THIS Is Why The Media Are ATTACKING Him

Comedian Dave Chappelle's new stand-up special, I Think I m Gonna Die, is out now, and Russell Brand is here to talk about it. In this episode, Russell talks about how he first met Jim Carrey, and how he ended up working with him in the late 80s and early 90s. He also talks about the moment he realized that he was in love with the late, great Andy Kaufman, and what it was like working on a movie with one of the greatest actors of all time. And Russell shares the story of how he got to meet the man who would go on to become one of his biggest inspirations, and the moment that changed his life forever. Stay free with Russell Brand and the rest of the Awakenings Waking Wonders crew! To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/awakeningwonderingwonders. We'll be delivering a new episode every single day, 7 days a week, 7 different ways to get 10% off your first purchase of an Awakening Waking Wonders product. Get 10% all year long when you enter the offer code: AWakeningsWonderingWonders when you purchase your first-day shipping offer starts at $99.99. and receive 10% discount when you sign up for the offer ends on January 1st! Want to sponsor the show? Subscribe to Awakening Wonders? Subscribe here? Learn more about your ad choices? Become a supporter of AWakeness Waning Wonderings: bit.ly/awakenesswonderings? Get 5 stars and get 5% off the first month of your first month for a year of ad-free membership starting at $49.99/month, plus free shipping throughout the entire year, plus a discount on the second year, free shipping when you become a patron gets you an ad discount starts next month, and get 20% off for two months, and a FREE VIP membership when you buy a year-wide offer starts in the first year of the service starts, only 3 months get $99, and two months get 4 months get VIP access to the service, and you get 7 months get a discount, and also get 5 months get FREE of the ad discount, only two months of VIP access, and 2 months get full access to VIP access?

00:00:00.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.

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00:00:23.000 Once a week we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr, Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and many more.

00:00:31.000 Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:00:34.000 Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.

00:00:40.000 Stay free and enjoy the episode.

00:00:42.000 Hello there you awakening wonders, thanks for joining us on our voyage to truth and

00:00:54.000 A voyage that surely involves comedy, awakening, bliss, joy, ecstasy, amusement, coming together in transcendent states that sometimes require a genius like Dave Chappelle or Ricky Gervais to bring about curious states by evoking thoughts and notions and scenarios and characters that Many people wouldn't observe, spot or consider pondering.

00:01:15.000 Dave Chappelle's special is obviously incredibly popular and maybe marks a transitional moment in the culture wars.

00:01:21.000 Certainly what it does mark is that when it comes to it, if something is profitable, people will back it.

00:01:26.000 This is going to be an interesting thing that plays out over the next 12 months, I would imagine.

00:01:30.000 How can you still deploy the rhetoric of wokeism while acknowledging that there are growing markets for people that are critical of some of the ideals within it?

00:01:39.000 One of the things I think is particularly interesting is while Dave Chappelle clearly makes jokes in the special about trans folk or disabled people, he's obviously joking.

00:01:48.000 And also, significantly, there's a point in his stand-up special where he talks admiringly And none of the news outlets that are critiquing him mention that because I believe to include that nuance would dilute their own arguments.

00:02:06.000 In short, they enjoy their own outrage.

00:02:09.000 They're high on the smell of their own gaseous outrage. 0.90

00:02:13.000 They don't want to go, well actually Dave Chappelle's probably joking about that.

00:02:16.000 So let's have a look at some moments from Dave Chappelle's special and talk about the way that the mainstream media likes to use deliberately denuanced attacks on cultural artifacts in order to stoke tensions and conflict.

00:02:30.000 And the only thing that got me out of that space was a comedian friend of mine, the late great Norm Macdonald.

00:02:37.000 That's right.

00:02:38.000 Shout out to Norm.

00:02:41.000 And what Norm did, which I'll never forget, is he knew that I was the biggest Jim Carrey fan in the world.

00:02:46.000 Now, I'm not going to go all into it, but Jim Carrey is talented in a way that you can't practice or rehearse.

00:02:52.000 What a God-given talent.

00:02:53.000 I was fascinated with him.

00:02:55.000 And Norm knew that.

00:02:56.000 And he called me up, and he goes, Dave, um, he says, I'm doing a movie with Jim Carrey.

00:03:02.000 Do you want to meet him? 0.99

00:03:03.000 And I said, fuck, yes, I do. 0.99

00:03:06.000 And it was the first time I could remember since my father died being excited. 0.99

00:03:11.000 And the movie was called Man on the Moon.

00:03:14.000 I didn't know any of this.

00:03:16.000 And in this movie, Jim Carrey was playing another comedian I admired, the late, great Andy Kaufman.

00:03:22.000 Yes, and Jim Carrey was so immersed in that role that from the moment he woke up to the time he went to bed at night, he would live his life as Andy Kaufman.

00:03:33.000 I didn't know that. 0.69

00:03:34.000 When they said cut, this nigga was still. 1.00

00:03:38.000 Andy Kaufman. 0.82

00:03:40.000 So much so that everybody on the crew called him Andy.

00:03:44.000 I didn't know any of that.

00:03:45.000 I just went there to meet him, and when he walked into the room where we were supposed to meet, I screamed, Jim Carrey!

00:03:50.000 And everyone said, no!

00:03:55.000 Call him Andy.

00:03:56.000 And I didn't understand.

00:03:59.000 And then he came over, and he was acting weird.

00:04:00.000 I didn't know he was acting like Andy Kaufman.

00:04:02.000 Just like, hey, how you doing?

00:04:03.000 And I was like, hello.

00:04:08.000 Andy?

00:04:11.000 Now, in hindsight, how fucking lucky am I that I got to see one of the greatest artists of my time immersed in one of his most challenging processes ever. 0.72

00:04:22.000 Very lucky to have seen that. 0.69

00:04:25.000 But as it was happening, I was very disappointed.

00:04:32.000 Because I wanted to meet Jim Carrey, and I had to pretend this nigga was Andy Kaufman. 1.00

00:04:39.000 All afternoon.

00:04:42.000 And he was clearly Jim Carrey.

00:04:43.000 I could look at him and I could see he was Jim Carrey.

00:04:47.000 Anyway, I say all that to say, that's how trans people make me feel. 1.00

00:04:52.000 Even that taken at face value, it's plain that what Dave Chappelle is doing is playing with the

00:05:07.000 outrage of previous comments around trans people and trans issues.

00:05:12.000 It's obvious that it's a kind of mirth-oriented endeavour.

00:05:17.000 It's comedy, after all.

00:05:18.000 And I sometimes feel that the new Puritanism that's at play in our culture is deliberately trying to extract aspects of our nature that are rather beautiful.

00:05:25.000 The ability to playfully ridicule.

00:05:28.000 The ability to joke.

00:05:29.000 The areas that are seemingly most under attack include humour, sexuality in an extraordinary way.

00:05:35.000 And I think that's about shutting down natural impulses, making people feel constantly concerned, twitchy, paranoid, uncertain.

00:05:44.000 And figures like Dave Chappelle, who meddles in and directs, rather artfully obviously, Chaos and uncertainty and ambiguity are under attack precisely because they're willing to walk into these areas.

00:05:58.000 As I said to you, elsewhere in the same special, Dave Chappelle talks admiringly of trans people and what it takes to be a man and what it takes to be a dreamer and how you don't need to be able to understand somebody in order to be able to respect them.

00:06:10.000 In any honest critique of that show, you would have to say, he does also say this so plainly he's got a quite evolved perspective, but they don't want evolved perspectives.

00:06:20.000 What they want is a kind of state of stasis and nervousness and anxiety.

00:06:25.000 There's a kind of relish behind attacking other people.

00:06:29.000 As a person that's been subject to public attacks myself, what I recognise is The nuance is stripped away.

00:06:35.000 Anything that doesn't make a situation look as bad as possible is extracted, diluted, denied, removed, eliminated, as if what's being offered is objective analysis from a group that have no skin in the game, when in all actuality what you have is participants in a cultural endeavour offering a very particular perspective on a subject in order to achieve a particular result.

00:06:57.000 In the case of Dave Chappelle, that result is just ongoing tension, conflict, Creating disorientation around where people are supposed to stand with their social roles.

00:07:06.000 I feel that most people from across the political spectrum are generally speaking, if they're living lives where they're free from agitation and oppression, broadly kind and polite to other people.

00:07:16.000 I think it's very rare that you see people hyped up into states of hatred.

00:07:19.000 Indeed, I think it requires a degree But if your cultural environment is one of uncertainty, censorship, doubt, denial, removal of nuance, removal of humor, it, I think, increases the problems that these legacy media outlets are claiming to address.

00:07:36.000 He's plainly joking when he says, I love Punching Down.

00:07:38.000 All of the stand-up around disabled people is ironic and layered and nuanced and sophisticated. 1.00

00:07:44.000 And this nuance and sophistication is going to be necessary if we're going to continue to navigate territory like this.

00:07:51.000 Do you think that one side's going to win and one side's going to lose?

00:07:54.000 You're going to eliminate all people that are traditional, eliminate all people that are conservative, or eliminate all people that are progressive?

00:08:01.000 Of course not!

00:08:01.000 It's more or less a kind of, I don't know, it may not be 50-50, I don't know, because one thing I've learned is professional metropolitan biases are loud voices but potentially small demographics.

00:08:13.000 But nevertheless, the obvious answer is we're going to have to become tolerant of one another, tolerant of people that live differently, even if that living differently means conservative, or traditional, or taking time with one another to understand that at the deepest possible level, a level that can indeed be attained by using the sophisticated type of thinking and analysis deployed expertly by a genius like Dave Chappelle, that we actually can find common ground with one another.

00:08:39.000 Who do you think has a better, more open-hearted perspective on cultural issues?

00:08:43.000 Oppression, personal change, personal transition, corruption, bias, prejudice, bigotry?

00:08:49.000 Dave Chappelle or a legacy media hack that's plainly there to generate and amplify hatred?

00:08:56.000 It's pretty obvious, isn't it?

00:08:57.000 But what's required is more of this kind of comedy.

00:09:00.000 More exploration around the complexity around sexuality, power dynamics, different emergent cultural groups.

00:09:06.000 For hundreds of thousands of years we've lived in tribal groups that wouldn't have known very much about the cultures and customs of other For hundreds and thousands of years, we've known that members of communities have different ways of identifying that don't fit within narrow biological parameters, and it hasn't been cause for outrage or aggression or condemnation.

00:09:24.000 There's no question that there's prejudice and bigotry across society, but by continually highlighting a particular type of prejudice and bigotry, you once again veil and marginalize a greater set of inequalities that are practiced at the economic and class level.

00:09:38.000 And rhetoric like Dave Chappelle's again offers us the kind of jellignite to reimagine the kind of territories that we live within, and also gives us all a degree of interpersonal and social freedom to engage in discussions and conversations with one another in good faith.

00:09:52.000 So I would say that comedy and good humour like this is a necessary tool, and the censorship of it, And indeed, were it not for the financial success of Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais and the success of their shows, they would be cancelled and shut down.

00:10:05.000 Netflix would cancel it, but they've looked at, oh, people like this stuff.

00:10:08.000 You know, when you get Dave Chappelle on Rotten Tomatoes, 3% critic score, 97% audience score, they start to notice in the end, oh, OK, we're going to have to let this pass.

00:10:17.000 We're going to have to let this succeed.

00:10:19.000 And what we're getting now is a culture that's Fracturing all over the place.

00:10:22.000 There are whole new demographics.

00:10:24.000 There are new emergent market forces.

00:10:25.000 There are new independent media forces, whether it's Oliver Antony or Sound of Freedom.

00:10:30.000 It's clear that new markets are appearing and beyond markets, because I don't think it is just economics, and I hope it gets beyond economics, because what needs to be served is complexity and nuance itself.

00:10:39.000 The fact that we can live alongside one another if people are Republican or conservative or liberal or progressive or leftist.

00:10:47.000 It doesn't actually matter that much, particularly not once you recognize this key idea.

00:10:53.000 It doesn't benefit any of us to aggregate power centrally to the degree where whole nations are being subjugated by globalist ideology.

00:11:02.000 I think that the culture war is utilised in order to generate conflict and division to distract us from issues that are more significant.

00:11:10.000 And when I say more significant, I don't mean that identity issues or the struggles of oppressed people across the world are not important.

00:11:15.000 Of course they are.

00:11:16.000 What I'm saying is, is the people that are using these arguments don't care about them.

00:11:20.000 And they care even less about developing movements that could generate actual change, that could prevent Congress being so beset with corruption, that you can't do anything to stop people investing in stocks and shares of companies and organisations that they regulate.

00:11:35.000 There's no possibility of developing meaningful cultural change as long as we're all at war with one another under the most bogus of pretenses.

00:11:43.000 In this case, the pretense being that Dave Chappelle is a malign and malignant force.

00:11:47.000 I don't think anyone who watches that special could come away thinking anything other than, oh no, he has respect for trans people and he's making jokes.

00:11:53.000 He's simultaneously joking about the culture, the reaction to previous specials, Ludicrousness of the situation that Jim Carrey was in, playing with the idea of identity itself.

00:12:06.000 He makes loads of jokes about race.

00:12:07.000 He's clearly interested in creating conversation and a dynamic set of circumstances.

00:12:12.000 And that's what good comedians are able to expertly do.

00:12:15.000 And if you watch that special, that's what you'll see happen.

00:12:18.000 What you won't see happen is the generation of division and hatred.

00:12:21.000 Where you will see the generation of division and hatred is in the legacy media outlets that are claiming to be policing, curtailing, controlling it.

00:12:29.000 We're here to help you.

00:12:30.000 No.

00:12:30.000 What you're here to do is to amplify the message of the powerful, disempower ordinary people, primarily by turning them against one another, and not highlighting the many, many thousands of issues around which we could be galvanized, mobilized, and united.

00:12:46.000 But that's just what I think.

00:12:47.000 If you can, stay free.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - January 14, 2024

Here’s the News: Dave Chappelle BACKLASH! THIS Is Why The Media Are ATTACKING Him

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