The Press Box - 'Damage Control': To Ban or Not to Ban Logan Paul and Donald Trump: That Is the Question (Ep. 410)

Episode Date: January 5, 2018

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and K. Austin Collins consider what YouTube should do about Logan Paul (1:00), what Twitter should do about Donald Trump (12:00), and what the rest of us should make of Dave Chappelle’s new, controversial Netflix specials (19:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Cameron Collins. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. Today we are talking about Dave Chappelle's latest controversial stand-up comedy specials,

and then we're going to unpack the hopeless, left-wing mission to get Donald Trump banned from Twitter. But first, we're talking about Logan Paul, the YouTube star who horrified his fans and his critics on New Year's Eve, when he broadcast his discovery of a human corpse in a forest. Um, I really hate to say this. I think there's someone hanging right there.

Let's talk about a new name, a new face, a young face, a bright face, a bro face. I would say a very punchable face. Logan Paul. Logan Paul is a YouTube star. He recently was in Japan filming a video where he visits a so-called suicide forest near Mount Fuji. It's this haunted forest that is famous for the fact

that it is a, it is to put it, bluntly a suicide destination. Right. So Logan Paul and his little crew, his production crew of friends go and they visit this forest and they stumble upon a fresh human corpse hanging from a tree.

And they film it. I'm not even fucking kidding. Do you see it? I'm not This isn't a joke, guys! That's a fucking person. Dude, I shudgy told you.

I think you're fucking right. Logan Paul, for his sort of comedic, broish YouTube channel films this corpse, and he doesn't just film the corpse, but he films himself interacting with the corpse.

Yelling at the corpse, gawking at the corpse, cracking jokes about the corpse, and then later he returns to the parking lot near Mount Fuji, and he describes this discovery, this morbid discovery as the craziest shit that has ever happened to him and this

sort of unprecedented feat in the history of YouTube. He's clearly excited to produce a segment where he finds and shows on YouTube this dead person that he's found. It's extremely tacky. Right. Logan Paul's stardom is a very, very millennial phenomenon. If you're over the age of 30, I feel like we got to break it down. We got to break down who Logan Paul is. The reaction amongst people our age has definitely been who the fuck is Logan Paul. And I respect that. I admire that.

But you know, Logan Paul is a guy who's been profiled by magazines. This is a guy who's like on this track to be what in the 21st century. I guess we're thinking of as a new burgeoning form of celebrity, a YouTube star. I think a lot of people are pretending not to know who he is, to be honest. You know, because like everyone who's mourning the death of. Vine, who's acting like they don't know who Logan Paul is, is full of shit. But I'm wondering how this is in any way out of context or different than anything else he does, with the exception of the fact that there happens to be a dead body in it. This is sort of what he does. This is

sort of why people look at his YouTube channel for these kinds of reactions to things happening in the world. It's extremely grotesque. It's extremely tacky. We can talk about whether or not YouTube should ban such a thing. But there's this sense of clutching my pearls and shock at this, that's a little, feels a little dishonest to me among some people. Even as this seems to be an extreme, this is not outside of the wheelhouse of ways that Logan Paul in my mind would react to seeing a dead body in a forest. It really is par for the course for me. He has 15 million subscribers. Right. He's one of the biggest, you know, he's originally a Vine guy, him and his brother, Jake Paul. They're originally Vine stars. Vine is obviously dead now. A lot of those

Vine Stars migrated from Vine to YouTube. The model of Logan Paul stardom is sort of like this post jackass. It's PG-13, but it's otherwise Logan Paul and his friends sort of stunning and expensive cars and being jockey and being white and rapping ironically. Right. But so when you say that like it's not unexpected, it's sort of just in the sense that what Logan Paul does is stunts. What Logan Paul does is shock.

it's PG-13. It's a bit Nickelodeon-adjacent in a way in terms of the disposition. Logan Paul talks about positivity a lot. He says, you know, it's all about positivity, bro. Like, just imagine that voice. It's all about positivity, bro. That's Logan Paul. And so that's the thing that does make it a bit unexpected that one day,

specifically on New Year's Eve, 2017, you look at Logan Paul's video and you're taking that, it's all positivity, bro, attitude to a forest where there's an actual dead person. And it's basically these two totally incompatible contexts and tones colliding together catastrophically. This is the biggest thing that Logan Paul has done to date. There's been a lot of backlash. He's apologized. This is clearly something that's gone way too far.

This has turned into a very big thing. And I think that he is genuinely embarrassed and chagrined by this. But to your point about him being 21st century jackass in a way, this would seem to be a logical extreme of a thing that he and many other YouTubers do. I mean, and not just YouTubers, do you remember all the controversy over the young woman who took a selfie at Auschwitz? I don't want to downplay this. There's a lot of genuine anger, shock. This was bad. This was more than just tacky.

This is awful. This is no veneration for death. This is Western tourism gone wrong. this is someone with a camera and the suicide force. What do you think you're going to see when you enter something called a suicide force and you have a camera? This is a very, this is a bad thing that happened. I think a lot of this anger, though, is also just an anger at millennials broadly, millennial culture, millennial uses of technology.

And that's the part of it that I kind of am more interested in because that's the part that's a little bit murkier. Like, I don't think I really have any questions as to whether or not he's an asshole for this. That's pretty clear to me and everyone involved as an asshole. But then I also think there's a lot of hand-wringing about how young people are interacting with sacred spaces or things via technologies that we associate with young people, selfies, YouTube stardom, etc. And a lot of the anger at this from people who otherwise do not give a fuck is at that, it seems to me. Right? I mean, it seems like this is an excuse to like millennials are the death of everything, including veneration for death in the suicide force. Everything is being pinned on this kid.

I keep trying to construct the counterfactual in my head where instead what happens in this video is Logan Paul goes to the suicide forest under his pretext that's in the early part of the video where he says he's going because they're ghosts there and he just wants to go to a spooky ghost forest. Right. He clearly knows the context. So we're in Tokyo, Japan, right? I figured this was the perfect time to do it because if you look to my right, Logang, I give you the Aoki Gahara. Oh. No, don't make fun of it, friend. This is a big deal.

Why? Because this forest is also known as the Sea of Trees, also known as the Japanese suicide forest. Americans, like Western world, we call this the suicide forest. He knows the content, but I'm imagining the counterfactual where he goes there and he's not at all expecting to find a suicide victim. And he doesn't. And I just have a hard time believing, like understanding what that segment is.

would even be. Like, I have a hard time believing that Logan Paul didn't go there with the hope of finding something. Because otherwise, what do you have? You just have a 20-minute video segment where you're walking around the woods talking to yourself. It wouldn't have made a good Logan Paul video. It also would not have made a good Western tourist experience. Logan Paul is not the only one who goes into that forest expecting to find a dead body.

Right. Whether or not you have a kind of lack of veneration for it that he and his team did, that is the essence of going there for many people. I'm not really trying to blame this one kid for like, like for a thing that I think is broadly gross. You know, like this is your chance to be mad at someone being a tourist of the suicide forest. This is a very easy way to be mad at everyone who does that. See, the first dumb white dude to be, to be disrespectful in the suicide forest, he just happened to have a camera.

I don't know. I just, I have mixed feelings about this. I disagree a bit about this. I think the backlash for the most part isn't about the footage and the fact that he filmed it. the backlash to me seems to be more so response to the tone in which Logan Paul and his friends engage with the corpse. Because at the very beginning when he realizes he sees a man hanging from a tree, he shouts and that's the most sort of not, that's the most sort of appropriate reaction he has is, oh my God, is that what I think it is. Right. Right.

It's after that point in the video, then Logan Paul transitions into. to, oh wait, I'm on camera mode. I don't feel very good. Yeah, I don't feel good. Well, you never stand next to with that guy? No. I just go to do it. He starts chiding his friends.

He sort of retreats into the role of quasi-TV host. Yes. And I think those bits of the video where he, I think, steps out of the appropriate response to something like that and instead becomes a personality again, YouTube personality again, is what strikes people is gross. Sure, it's gross. And then also the fact that, again, this wasn't, like, if this were a live discovery,

if this had happened in a context where even if the reasons for being there had been not great, you could sort of look at it and think, okay, well, their reactions are weird, but also we're looking at this in the moment, and it's just an unfortunate situation. Maybe there'll be some news write-ups about it, but, you know, it is what it is. But Logan Paul produced the video. He produced this video. He very specifically promoted it as, this is a crazy thing that happened to me. And so you have that post-millennial narcissistic.

How can I make this dead guy about me? Sure. I think all of that is the swarm of things. That, again, it has a lot to do with how people think of millennials in general, right? Especially the narcissism angle on that. I think he becomes a very easy. way to condemn a behavior that is mostly distinct because he performed it on camera. Like, I think it's disgusting.

It made me really angry, but it made me angry at everyone whose instinct is to do the same, but who didn't. My bigger question about YouTube stardom in general is it just seems like this is inevitable, not just for Logan Paul. It seems inevitable for YouTube stars in general, because this is, these are people who have these huge platforms, right? They may not feel huge. a lot of mainstream adult culture.

But YouTube as a company, right? Like YouTube, the Google property has basically, they've put out press statements and said, oh, you know, we don't condone this. We've nominally censured this person's account. But otherwise YouTube doesn't really seem to have any coherent strategy or interest in meaningfully and substantially discouraging people

like Logan Paul from making decisions like this. Listen, 20 years ago, Logan Paul would have had an MTV show. If he were Gen X, he would be on MTV. And the difference between then and now is that MTV would have acted as his handlers, and YouTube in the present is not going to do that. So Logan Paul isn't the only celebrity misusing his social media platform toward morbid ends this week. For the third or fourth time since he took office, Donald Trump is threatening to obliterate North Korea with a nuclear strike. the pettiest thing to do on Twitter ever,

a place that is already so petty. This week, as in previous weeks, Trump has issued his threat from his own Twitter account. Quote, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un just stated that the nuclear button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and food-starred regime please inform him that I, too, have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his.

And my button, capital B, works. Jesus! Listen, I am tired of logging on Twitter and feeling like my life is about to end because of this man. So tell me how you're feeling and tell me what we need to make of this, what we need to do about this. So here's a big difference between me and Cam is that when Donald Trump tweets, I feel nothing. I feel dead inside. I feel cold. I feel none of the anxiety that otherwise seems very popular for people to feel online.

You must have a great therapist. I don't know to say. This is one of many behaviors that. Donald Trump engages in on Twitter that people find hostile, wild, unprecedented, dangerous, volatile, unthinkable. There's basically this recurring case among media figures on Twitter that Twitter has a duty to ban Donald Trump. So first, I'm going to ask you, Cam.

Yes. Do you think Trump should be banned from Twitter? I'm not asking you, do you think Trump is bad? I'm asking you, do you think that there is a good formal case for Twitter to ban Donald Trump? A formal case. Reading up on this, reading up on Twitter's policies, trying to parse Twitter's policies like I'm a damn Supreme Court justice parsing the due process clause or something. I have to say, it does not seem to me that there's really a case for banning Trump. I mean, the thing that seems to get pointed out a lot is that Twitter prohibits specific threats of violence and that this kind of bullshit would seem not to be it.

Even though it's the kind of bullshit that puts people's lives in danger, it would seem to be beyond the purview of what Twitter finds, you know, prohibited. On the other hand, I don't think that matters because I think that if Twitter wants to ban Trump, they just could. I don't want to treat Twitter's laws like their laws. I think that if Twitter really wanted to ban anyone, couldn't they just ban anyone? you're going to go to if Twitter bans you. Who can you go to? Who cares? Right. As Twitter's handling of the Nazis on Twitter has shown, it's that everything about Twitter's enforcement of its terms and services is totally arbitrary. The only thing you can do is at Jack. Right. At Jack. And along a Twitter thread that makes my life worse, but it's not really going to

do anything. And, you know, I mixed feelings about this. I really had to figure out what I'm mad at when Trump tweets something like this. Certainly I'm mad at the possibility of nuclear apocalypse. It's not a particularly comfortable thought for me. But then I wonder, I mean, I put it in context and I'm like, you know, conducting politics via Twitter is not something that Trump invented. He's only the most, like Logan Paul, the most extreme, tacky, dare I say, dangerous version of it.

But conducting politics via Twitter, I don't know, I think about the Arab Spring. I think about Black Lives Matter. Like, that's a thing that's important. And he's a very bastardized, bad, powerful form of that. So I just, I've been, I'm just wrestling with my own feelings about that because I think that trying to get him banned from Twitter is really useless. I wish that he would not tweet things like this. But that means that I'm really mad at him, not mad at the fact that he's on Twitter.

Like, he's the thing that would need to change in this equation to me, not Twitter. I have a hard time imagining what people think would happen, right? It's like, do you really think that, would you really wipe your brow and be like, whew, and think that everything's going to be fine with North Korea if only Twitter ban Trump? Like, you think all of a sudden American foreign policy becomes less volatile with Trump's still president, but he doesn't have Twitter now. That just seems like a weird, a weird but glaring misdiagnosis of what the problem in American

political life is right now. Absolutely. I completely agree with you that, like, it's a nice idea. But it's not as if Trump is not going to find some other tacky way to be on his fuck shit. So I don't know. It's like, in a way, I am sort of grateful to Twitter for giving me a sense of how he conducts politics. In a way that only exposés and leaks from Bannon and other people give me, this is a guy who's shooting straight into like, straight into the culture, a very clear sense. He just tweeted it out of what he is like behind doors of how he thinks.

I find that valuable. But yes, the stakes are very high in terms of like him possibly triggering war. think that's what he can actually do via Twitter. Maybe that's another thing that we should be questioning. The first step in all of this is for all of us to admit that if we get Trump off of Twitter, that's not going to fix American foreign policy. He's still your president. That's, you know, that's, he's still your president. It's not going to fix his wild immigration agenda. It's not going to undo the travel ban. And we should all just admit to ourselves that really, we would just like to see Twitter own Trump. We would like to see Trump. We would like to see Trump. Trump get owned by getting banned from Twitter because it would be hilarious.

Because then at least you're not affixing these stakes that otherwise, Trump gets banned from Twitter and we tell ourselves that, oh, Trump getting banned from Twitter is important because it'll avoid a nuclear apocalypse. It's like, okay, Trump gets banned from Twitter. The next day, what happens? Oh, you're still staring at your phone. You're just as neurotic as you always were. Trump's not on here anymore, but nothing's really changed.

And then instead, what you've done is you've spent several months. dedicating yourself for hundreds of thousands of Twitter threads to this sort of ill-advised and pointless political cause and now you're demoralized because it didn't really accomplish anything other than you felt good for maybe 30 minutes that Trump got on by being banned from Twitter. Right. Now you're demoralized because you're getting the same news

from your New York Times push alert about the thing he said in person or that he said in a meeting the same shit. That he blurted out, right. Right. In a random public space and a Panera somewhere. Right, right. which to my mind, I don't know, maybe this is wrong,

which to my mind has more force as a thing that a politician would do. But I don't know, this is all, we're all kind of early in like what exactly Twitter means in terms of political speech, political utterances and what kind of power they have, which is the thing I do want us to keep our minds on. But that is sort of what I'm relying on political media to do. Help me figure out the extent to which banning Trump on Twitter would actually matter. Well, we got another three years. years to figure that out.

Oh, thanks. We're going to talk about Dave Chappelle, whose two new stand-up comedy specials, equanimity and the bird revelation, dropped on Netflix on New Year's Eve. My problem has never been with transgender people. My problem has always been with the dialogue about transgender people.

I just feel like these things should not be discussed in front of the blacks. It's fucking insulting all this talk about how these people feel inside. Since when is America giving a fuck how any of us feel inside? And I

cannot shake this awful suspicion that the only reason everybody is talking about transgender is because white men want to do it. That's right. I just said that. You never asked itself why it was easier for Bruce Jenner to change his gender

than it was for Cassius Clay to change his fucking name. So these two latest stand-up comedy specials from Dave Chappelle are, I'd like to think there's sort of of a piece with the stand-up comedy specials that Chappelle released for Netflix

last year, the age of spin and deep in the heart of Texas, which sort of provoked something that I never thought I would see in my lifetime, which is a Dave Chappelle backlash. Cam, you want to explain why we've arrived at a Dave Chappelle backlash?

What the sort of discomfort with Dave Chappelle's newest material since last spring has been? My sense of other people's anger is that Dave Chappelle over the course of these four specials has very adamantly shown that he is not as attuned to the 21st century as he was to the 20th seems to be a disappointment grounded in the fact that he was once our best, smartest, most on it, critic, particularly for black people, but also for, you know, for a lot of non-black people, right? But, like, particularly for black people, particularly working in a black comic tradition, this is a guy who seemed to have a lot of the right answers about race in particular. I don't think he's always had the right answers about things like gender and sexuality.

but there seems to be a sense with which we would expect him to be better than he currently is at parsing these things because what he is so good at is, like any great comedian, right? He's really good at taking our piece of positions about these things, turning them on their head, making them grotesque, and making us reevaluate how we feel about these things. It seems that he has not really done a lot of soul-searching about how he feels about, for example, trans people, victims of sexual misconduct. You know, he has loose. He k-humor now.

It's very modern. It's very topical as his comedy always is. But I think people are disappointed that he is not really doing anything to turn these things on their heads. He's just reiterating would seem to be bad prejudices. In a broad sense, that seems to be what I'm getting from people. Is that fair? That is fair. And in fact, so these latest specials are weird, right?

They follow the original specials from last spring. Right. Where he starts really going hard on jokes about transgender people. Right. Those jokes alienated a lot of people. Yes. So in these newest specials, especially in equanimity, which is the longer special, I would say by far the better special of the latest batch, he refers back to those routines.

And he does some bits that are about people not reacting well to his huge. humor about transgender people, and he uses basically those bits of set up for new material about transgender people that is, it's not, I would say it's slightly smarter, but still horrendously, it's insensitive, but insensitive is such a blah word. It's really incurious. If I were to be brutally honest, the only reason I ever been mad at the transgender community is because I was at a club in L.A. and dance with one of these. These niggas were six songs straight. And then the lights came up and I saw them knuckles.

I said, oh, no! And everybody was laughing at me. Hi, World Star. He seems very incurious about transgender people, even when he sort of, Chappelle pads up these jokes by saying, look, I don't mean to imply violence against people. If you come to my show and you think my jokes are a call for you to commit violence against transgender people, don't fucking come to my show again. Right. He tries to do that. That's his way of sort of explicitly meeting those criticisms of his last material halfway.

Right. It's not just weird because, oh, this is a comedian on stage making hackish jokes about transgender people. It really is the particular thing that Dave Chappelle is otherwise this guy that you look at and think he is basically a cultural critic by way of stand-up comedy. He is sharp. And so it's weird to watch such a sharp guy. be so dumb. It is, and I think it's a fair pushback. You know, as much as I, you know, as much as I'm Mr.

You know, why do you think artists are going to be morally correct in the first place? There is an extent to which for, a great extent to which for Chappelle, it's like, it's not that he's wrong about these things. It's that he's not really being the comic that we know that he is about these things, that he's not being smart about taking these things and, doing the critique that he does, right? It's like he's so smart about something like race for the most part. But

these are issues, and he knows this because this is why he's still telling jokes about them. Like, Caitlin Jenner, it's like, this is a chance for you to do the Chappelle thing, which is where you take this and make all of us reevaluate it, right? Make all of us think about the language that we use, about the violence that we do or don't imply.

Like he has a quote in the, in the Bird Revelation, one of the specials, where he says to other comics in the audience, you have a responsibility to speak recklessly, Otherwise, my kids might know what reckless talk sounds like, which is just from him a cop out, right? Like, it is nothing but that. Even as I'm, even as I, there's a part of me that sees the value in what he's describing.

That is not a defense against him being so grotesque in this case, I don't think. When we say that Dave Chappelle is smart about race, what I would mean by that is that he has such a, you know, he can make light of some really. morbid stuff in the history of American race relations. But he clearly has this very real and rehearsed and studied sense of pain and dispossession and alienation.

And you get that in his comedy about race. It's personal. And so it's not just that. It's not just smart versus not smart. It's empathetic versus sociopathic. His sense of transgender people and a lot of his humor about gender, I'd say, over the years, not just the specialty specials.

That seems to come more so from a place of supreme distance. But now we're at the point where we're for Netflix specials deep and he's being defensive. You know, it's not that he's not grown. It's more that he's not doing anything to question his own presuppositions in the way that I feel like if these things were more personal for him, if he cared more, he would. You know, like I think that to your point that it's not just about smart versus not smart. It's about doing the work versus not doing the work. And this is just stuff he's not willing to do the work on. But it's painful because in every other case, he's so thoughtful.

Even when he's not right, he's provocative in a way that I find useful. Even when I don't agree with his comedy, I've been able to do something with it. I've been able to wrestle with it. This is not stuff I'm going to wrestle with this transgender jokes because they're just coming out of his ass. Right. I mean, speaking of doing the work, when I was watching equanimity, I could not stop thinking of Bernie Mac. The late Bernie Mac, love Bernie Mac. Bernie Mac is like an old school Chicago comic.

And the first time I ever saw Bernie Mac was back when the Kings of Comedy special with him, D.L. Hughley and Steve Harvey. And Bernie Mac has some raunchy material in that. And he has like a notoriously homophobic joke about a child. Yes. And it's sort of that for a long time was Bernie Mac's sort of very unwoke, very insensitive first time I saw that Kings of Comedy sketch. I liked it a lot, or his stand-up in Kings of Comedy.

I liked it a lot, but I also just got this sense of physical violence. Yes. Coupled with homophobia, and it's just uncomfortable. Not uncommon in comedy, I have to say. It's a gay man. That's a feeling I feel a lot, to be honest. But the thing that strikes me is remarkable about Bernie Mac is that he spent the last decade of his life,

his last decade of his comedy career, to me seemingly walking that back. Yes. Like he gets his show on Fox and that's a bit more. It's weird because the material in Kings of Comedy is sort of related to the premise of the Bernie Mac show. But in that show, he plays a much more understanding figure who is actually grappling with, he's sort of doing the Archie Bunker thing, right? He's grappling with some of his more reactionary impulses. And that last material of Bernie Mac's career is him arriving at this place where he kind of realizes that he doesn't have to be. be so crude and insensitive to people. And Dave Chappelle is walking in reverse. Yes. It's an active

lack of self-investigation. And in fact, a sort of entrenchment at this point. And I'm just curious why I'm trying to, I want to speculate about why Chappelle is committed to this road, of all the roads, right? Because Dave Chappelle is somebody who he dramatically left Chappelle's show. Yes. He fled to South Africa. He came back, talked to Oprah. All these things happened. He's left on a high note. His polling was through the roof. Dave Chappelle at one point was the most beloved American. Yes. And it's of all of the routes and of all of the ways that Dave Chappelle come back and go, I'm surprised that Dave Chappelle has picked the most defensive route, the bitterest route. And I just, help me understand why, why? Listen, I, I'm inclined to say that

there's an easy explanation for that, which is the same explanation for the reason that anyone is stubborn. It's because they are. You know, to be honest, I have no access to his inner life. I think he's just being stubborn about this. And this is why I'm kind of inclined to say, okay, then go be stubborn. And I will find another comedian who can not make me feel so bad in comedy that is not worth me feeling bad. There's another part of this, which seems like it's less relevant to people, but it's not less relevant to me. the jokes aren't funny. These jokes are not, you know, there's a, it's hard to describe what I want comedy to do to me,

but there is this extent to which even if I or some part of my identity is the butt of the joke, the best comedy makes me laugh anyway. The best comedy puts that into relief in a way where even if it's initially uncomfortable humor, there's a part of me that sees that it's not attacking me per se. And I do not feel that way about his comedy right now. And his further entrenchment is only, you know, in addition to not thinking it's especially funny. I just, it's not doing the thing that comedy, that his comedy can and should be doing with issues like this. Are we overdue for a radical, unfavorable reevaluation of Chappelle's show?

There are roots for a lot of the stuff that people don't like in Chappelle's material now. Yes. Go back to that. Everyone is being re-evaluated. Why should he be? any different. Right. And, you know, re-evaluate, maybe that's too strong, but maybe this helps us put everything in context and maybe, you know, like them or not anyway. I think that's up to you as a consumer. Right. Dave Chappelle has to grow up, but Dave Chappelle fans also have to grow up. Got to move on.

That's on us. All right, that does it for us this week. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Cameron Collins. We'll see you all again soon on Damage Control.