Is that always appropriate or possible, though?
For example, it’s funny when Mel Brooks tells Jewish jokes, but it would be decidedly unfunny if a Nazi war criminal did the same routine regardless of how good his delivery was.
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Of course it’s not 100%.
Then again, what if you love the comedian and then found out he was a Nazi. Eh in this case you may still decide to no longer partake in his act.
But I mean we see this time and again. Cosby is probably a monster, but he was also a comedic icon who influenced generations of comics and was particularly an inspiration for many black comics.
I can’t say I would pay money to go see Cosby right now, but I would probably still listen to one of his classic routines.
Than you have people like Barry Bonds or Pete Rose who tarnished their careers, but at the same time were living legends at one point.
I wonder if (no, I’m pretty sure it is) being able to get past troublesome aspects of art is a function of privilege - but maybe there’s a difference if it’s someone like, say, Asimov, whose books don’t really have anything to do with his personal behavior towards women. If it’s someone like Cosby whose humour was so tied up in his own personality, I don’t see how you can separate that.
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If I found out Mel Brooks was secretly a Nazi war criminal then it would definitely be a helluva lot more difficult to appreciate all his riffs on Jewish culture.
What if he was a comedian you found funny, didn’t do Jew jokes, and then you found out he was a Nazi?
Or a wife beater?
Or a homophobe?
Or an alcoholic?
I bet one or more of those would be a deal breaker, and one or more of those wouldn’t be. Where you draw the line may be different where another person draws it.
I always knew Scott Adams had some weird stuff going on, but Christ some of this shit is dark.
Yeah, I gave up on Scott Adams somewhere around God’s Debris and checking out his blog.
I like Enders Game but find Orson Scott Card to be one of the biggest dick holes out there.
Still, I will probably never buy another book from him again.
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Thankfully most of those guys never had a blog where they could post to the world in unedited forms. Nobody to say “Yeah, lets not put that one out there.” on occasion.
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It does seem sometimes as though society in a broad sense is like a young 20-something who is just figuring out that his/her parents are normal human beings with flaws. A sort of reactive, lashing out against fallen idols.
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That’s kind of the thing - does the flaw recontextualize the art? Scott Adams being an MRA doesn’t reaaaalllly change Dilbert or offer a new lens. If he had been the author of say, Kathy, then maybe it would.
That’s kind of how the thing about the Cosby spanish fly joke works too - that joke, by itself, is now super weird, but he still has a lot of other bits that will stand up.
The internet just makes this way easier I think. I wonder if years from now it’ll stop again now that we just assume everyone has flaws.
It is a big change and part of the post-modernist world we live in though, there are no more heroes to some degree.
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