Mo’Nique’s much anticipated Netflix special, “My Name is Mo’Nique,” is bad.
As in not good.
Double plus ungood.
Terrible.
A profane therapy session without the funny introspection that comes from projectile vomiting your pain. An aimless screed that masquerades as humor. A comedy special foreshadowed by the legitimate social issues of pay equity, colorism, fatphobia and Jim Crow Hollywood. And it fell short of any sense of being a validation of her protests.
But you know what? Mo’Nique ain’t alone.
Marlon Wayans’ “God Loves Me” was awful.
Chris Rock’s “Selective Outrage” was pitiful.
And Dave Chappelle now does a sort of unfunny Black libertarian schtick that hews embarrassingly close to the homophobia of right-wing nutcases.
Why?
Why are these iconic Black Gen X comedians not funny in 2023?
Easy.
They don’t have anything relevant to say anymore. And that scares them more than anything else in the world.
First, realize that when performers, comedians or otherwise go on stage, they don’t worry about boos or applause. Vets understand that neither response can be trusted to tell them whether their art is good.
Stans applaud anything, and the haters boo everything. That comes with the territory. Their fear isn’t derived from an exterior source but from within each of their creative souls. No matter how many cars or homes they have, or the size of their bank account, every performer, particularly comedians, fears that if they have nothing to say, they won’t be on that stage.
And they should be fearful.
Comedians and all creatives live and die by how well they observe the world. As an audience, we expect they’ll use their unique alchemy of the absurd and ridiculous to present an end result that’s funny and full of sub-context we never saw coming.
It’s entertaining. It’s hard to do. And it’s their greatest weapon, their internal voice. And yet what happens when it’s a struggle to find that voice? All artists, including your favorite artists, inevitably decline down a narrative arc that is both tragic in its execution and as predictable as watching the sun rise over the horizon each morning.
That brings us to what is clear in the Black comedy world, but Black folks don’t want to admit. The sun has set on the Black Gen X comedian era, as these Black Gen X comedians no longer have something to say. It’s sad to watch because of the 30 years of great Black comedy that gotten us to this point.
The Black Gen X comedy scene hit right during the Bill Clinton era of the 1990s, just as hip-hop moved from niche music to a global phenomenon. Black Gen X comedians perfectly represented hip-hop and the attitude of Black Gen Xers.
The children of the movements in the 1960s and 1970s, Black Gen Xers were the beneficiaries of a new open world that created complications and problems. Integrated schools, busing, segregated schools, Reaganomics, the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic, affirmative action, the suburbs, pop culture, Black music and white music are all represented by the average De La Soul joint.
That was Black Gen X in a nutshell.
And when it came to comedy, they were the children of parents who played Redd Foxx, Slappy White, Franklin Ajaye and Richard Pryor albums, and corny shit like Bob Newhart that just happened to be on the shelf, so you played it, too.
A true golden era for both Black comedy and hip-hop, it was a perfect time for young Black Gen X comedians to mine that rich world, and mine it they did. When HBO was Black Twitter before Black Twitter, “Def Comedy Jam” was our communal comedic church. Finally, all of the neo-Chitlin-Circuit-chocolate-day-that-ends-in-y comedy shows across the country had culminated in a show where we could be seen and heard in our uncompromising way.
The observational comedy of Rock, Chappelle, Mac, Harvey, Mo’Nique and Wayans was so ubiquitous in our lives that we say Rock, Chappelle, Mac, Harvey, Mo’Nique and Wayans by one name. We spark up memories of their iconic routines, either on “Def” or via their shows that came off an appearance.
They were tapped into the Black zeitgeist. The humor hit without explanations because it was beyond the on-the-nose “Don’t you hate it when white people do” fake white people accent post-Pryor bullshit, but instead, all up in the epidermis of our Black hip-hop experience.
They understood us.
Flash forward to 30 years later. What has changed?
Well… a lot.
Many of the Black Gen X comedians struggle to recapture that piece of the Blackness of today that made them seem relevant in the past. Does money and fame remove you from the humanity that struggling up-and-coming comedians see as you’re protected via your tinted windows and security crew? Or maybe ego makes you think you’re being deep, but you’re not? Or maybe old people get old and, ya know, out of touch?
Who knows?
What we do know is that Black Gen X comedians have mined the ore of their creative observations. No matter how many times they yell on-stage I don’t give a damn because I’m rich, always understand that they do give a damn. And while they may not care if you boo or applaud, that fame is still the elixir that motivates them. And leaving that stage represents a creative death they’re desperate to avoid.
But the journey continues, and Black Gen X comedians are at the end of a second act, close to the abyss they desperately want to avoid falling into. And in that desperation, devoid of new ideas, they raise their fist and yell at the societal clouds above them.
Cancel culture! Selective outrage! PC culture! Comedy is dead!
With lazy observation and gilded punchlines, Black Gen X comedians rail against a society with the nerve to evolve. It’s the final gasp of the dying era. Again, that desperation should create its own set of new observations. But many Black Gen X comedians bump up against something hard to overcome: their limitations in talent and intelligence.
Instead, they pull from the weeds of misogyny, homophobia, misogynoir and other lazy tropes. Those tropes were there in the 1990s, to be sure, and laughed at by an audience that wasn’t as educated as a 2023 audience.
So the last retreat leans into self-braggadocio or the devotion of their stans. Each will respond to criticism by noting that their favorites are geniuses or “GOATs,” speaking so-called “truths” that are nothing more than hoary shit cakes with chocolate icing.
No.
We’re in the elder care phase of the Black Gen X comedy generation, and like a one-legged Willie Mays coming up for his last at-bat or a Michael Jordan in a Wizards uniform, we’ll watch our comedic heroes die slow deaths on the biggest stages as each joke requires them to laugh at their own jokes first in a desperate attempt to signal to their audience to laugh with them.
But the death throes of Black Gen X comedy is not the death of Black comedy. Far from it.
Like all things, Black comedy will renew itself with a new generation with new observations. And they’ll be smart enough to do comedy for today’s society without relying upon the rotten low-hanging fruit many Black Gen X comedians are now resorting to.
At long last, it’s time for the Black Gen X comedians to heed the words of “Def Jam” legend Russell Simmons, who used to end each “Def Comedy Jam” show with these words.
“God bless, and good night.”
The show is over for Black Gen X comedians. It’s time they get off the stage and let a new generation of Black Gen Z comedians take over the mic. They might have something relevant to say and the smarts to say it.