![]() ![]() If Bill Burr made this exact same joke, this wouldn’t be a blip on anyone’s radar, because we know he makes regressive jokes, punching down at groups that don’t deserve to be punched down at.Īnd you know what? That’s fine, because he has an audience that enjoys that humor, and this is America.īut this was Stephen Colbert, a guy who (let’s be honest) essentially runs a liberal therapy session masquerading as a late night talk show. I know male performers who have been judged negatively simply because they play leads in musicals for community theatre in their spare time.Īnd Stephen Colbert, a progressive comedian, just gave those assumptions legitimacy. It is not that I fear any repercussions per se, but I know I’ll get some weird looks and judgment when I tell them I can sing every word of ‘1776’ by heart, and I might be treated differently as a result.Īnd look, I’m happy that’s the least of my problems. I’ll be honest here I’m still, in 2023, careful about who I reveal my Broadway fandom to at the workplace and socially around people I don’t know well. Stephen Colbert, of all people, gave legitimacy to a caveman argument about masculinity, and Broadway theatre, for that matter, an argument that we theatre fans have been fighting against for 20+ years. ![]() That’s the aspect that REALLY rubs me the wrong way. This is an attitude I expect from backward comedians like Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle, not Stephen Colbert. The joke pretty explicitly implies that Jacobs is not masculine, and the songs by his character are not masculine. I hope Colbert realizes that he set back the movement to detoxify masculinity, at least a little bit. And Colbert went through with it anyways, because (I’m guessing), he just wanted to dunk on the Proud Boys to applause. But intent is irrelevant in this scenario, because this was a scripted monologue that undoubtedly went through layers of review before making it to taping. We won’t deny the intent we know Colbert is an ally of musical theatre causes. He was trying to humiliate the Proud Boys in the most entertaining way possible (honestly, the Proud Boys are so beneath dignity that they are probably impossible to humiliate, but that’s for another day). Why? Colbert was making a joke: a joke at the expense of a group that deserves nothing but ridicule from every comedian and normal human being on planet earth. Should the theatre community be outraged at this? Well, I can’t tell someone what their feelings should be, especially Jacobs, but looking at this as neutrally as possible, I would say disappointment is the more appropriate reaction instead of outrage. Then I stopped to digest the jokes and the context, and thought to myself “Oh man this was a mistake.”Ĭolbert should have known better, because we expect better from him. So when the clip came out, from Stephen Colbert no less, a proud liberal and advocate/fan of theatre and Broadway, it really made me stop and wonder what was he trying to do. Let’s start off by saying that I was really annoyed by Stephen Colbert’s joke at the expense of Adam Jacobs for one basic reason I don’t like anyone, for any reason, associating a Broadway actor with those cretins who call themselves the Proud Boys. ![]()
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