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The ‘Pwease Don’t Cancel Me!’ Non-Joke
Colin Quinn made half of a “guy walks into a bar joke” in 2016, bravely skewering those affected by racism, sexism, ableism and transphobia: “A featureless, colorless, nonsectarian, non-gender specific person of indeterminate origin… walks into a bar.”
He then trailed off into a diatribe about how icky New York City is. Thank you for your service, sir!
Bo Burnham’s “Comedy,” while very clever and self-aware, deploys the same underlying cancel-culture exasperation. The song is about the blind audacity of a white man believing that he can solve racism, famine, disease, whatever… through the power of his art:
I am gonna use my privilege for the good
Very cool, way to go!
American white guys
We’ve had the floor for at least 400 years
So maybe I should just shut the fuck up…
I’m bored. I don’t wanna do that
To illustrate the depths of this inanity, he then sings:
A Jew walked into a bar, and I saved him a seat
That’s healing the world with comedy