By now, you've seen Talking Funny, HBO's inspired onetime special on standup comedy that aired in April. If not, lie.
For one hour, four giants of contemporary comedy -- Jerry Seinfeld, Ricky Gervais, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K. -- delved into the process and pains of comedy as an art form. It's an un-moderated foray into the facets of "funny" -- profanity on stage, the necessity of audience, that funny kid who peed on someone's leg in the gym shower. Genius.
At one point, Gervais asks what everyone's "thing" -- their hook -- is on stage. "Chris has got black," Gervais says to laughs. "He's rich, he's educated. He's hardly Kunta Kinte." C.K. offers a serious take, noting that Rock often repeats the premise of his jokes because its a more complicated idea -- "women can't go down in lifestyle" -- and he wants the audience to be on the same page. "One of my favorite bits [of Rock's] is "When white people are just rich they're just rich forever and ever. Even their kids are rich. But when a black guy gets rich, it's countdown to when he's poor again,'" he says. To which Rock replies, "This guy is the blackest white guy I know."
Watch it:
It's a revealing observation. Rock and Gervais then divide the group into those who say the N-word on stage and those who don't. Seinfeld and Gervais fall into the latter, Rock and Louis C.K. fall squarely into the former. Indeed, Rock once based an entire bit on the word in the 1990s, which he has since retired.
There's much to unpack in that demarcation alone. But, in considering the larger point, what is it that makes Louis C.K. the "blackest" white comedian on stage? Today, "colorblindness" prevails as the predominant compass by which Americans navigate race relations, real observations -- real relationships -- between black and white America disappear through the our collective "post-racial" prism. As a result, prejudices remain real, just hidden in plain sight. As Tim Wise would put it, we're all wedded to "Minnesota nice," in his book White Like Me.
Louis C.K. is willing to take that niceness and smack people across the face with it. Here, around minute 2:15, he explains to Jay Leno why "if you're black, and you get to complain more":
Comedy is as much about observation as it is about empathy, as Gervais notes. The "blackness" of Louis C.K. is wrapped in his ability to see the problem of "post-racial" America and empathize with those who, essentially, are the butt of that joke.
At one point in Talking Funny, Seinfeld tells Rock that his "black porn vs. white porn" bit is one he thinks about "once a month" because "it was the first time that I realized that black people live in a different world than white people," he said. "I didn't really know that until I heard that bit." C.K., however, has based a career on the difference. With that, more Louis C.K. He loves being white:
