Come Back to Disney, Jimmy Gunn, Jimmy Gunn

James Gunn

2,451 words

For those of us on the Right who are conspiracy-minded, the Trump administration has been the gift that keeps on giving. Of course, the political conspiracies are fun to read about: Pizzagate, the Deep State, Russian collusion, the Steele dossier, illegal wiretapping, fake news. There’s no end to it. These are all elements of 2010s political ephemera which at first glance seem about as meaningful as hanging chads and swift boats were in the previous decade. But with President Trump being such a wildcard, who knows? Maybe there is something to these modern conspiracies. Maybe Pizzagate is real. Perhaps Seth Rich really was taken out for knowing too much? Considering how venal and arrogant our establishment elites have become, I wouldn’t put it past them for orchestrating all of this evil stuff behind the curtains.

But there’s another conspiracy that gets less play these days, but throbs intensely on sites like Neon Revolt and is fueled by an indefatigable army of anonymous shitposters on places like 4chan and 8chan. Here it is, more or less: A cabal of Jewish pedophiles is running Hollywood and maybe the world. Behind the scenes, actors and directors are required to debase themselves sexually to loathsome Jewish moguls in order to make or preserve their careers. Behind the scenes, beloved actors are closeted sex-addicts, have horrendous drug habits, collect kiddie porn, and the like. Everything in this modern Babylon is behind the scenes, and if anyone speaks out about it, they run the risk of getting whacked. Remember how some B-list celebrity committed suicide or died under dubious circumstances recently? Yeah, well, some anonymous shitlord on the chans who’s on the inside assures us that it wasn’t so dubious, and in a few days he will drop something big. Movie producer Harvey Weinstein is the biggest fish that’s been yanked out of this fetid pond recently, but there are others. Believe me, there are others.

Of course, I don’t know how much of this is true. I’m sure some of it is. But how much of it is actually orchestrated by a hedonistic cult of degenerate, Satan-worshipping child molesters and how much is made up by attention-deprived, out-of-work screenwriters with fertile imaginations, I have no idea. If you have a couple hours to spare, check out Neon Revolt and see for yourselves.

Recently, however, this war between the chans and Hollywood got real, and the chans scored a notable victory. A-list Hollywood director James Gunn of Guardians of the Galaxy fame got fired by Disney because independent Alt Lite journalist Mike Cernovich unearthed some tweets from ten years ago in which Gunn made odious jokes about rape and pedophilia. Then the chans went at it and revealed other unwholesome tidbits, including how Gunn shares lewd videos from convicted pedophiles and the like. This, by the way, is the same James Gunn who a month or so ago applauded Roseanne Barr’s firing on his now-deleted Twitter account because of one supposedly racist tweet from Roseanne. Since then, lines have been drawn between Left and Right over whether Gunn deserves his fate and whether Disney deserves to lose millions as a result of his fall. The reporting of this event on the Right has been so strong that I have little to add to it. James Kirkpatrick at VDARE offers the best take, in my opinion.

As with the Michael Richards affair from a few years back, the current series of events provides the opportunity to explore the nature of comedy and the tribalism which encapsulates it. All comedy is about reversal: expecting one thing and getting another. Typically, the thing you expect will be less controversial than what you end up with. The more controversial the punch line, the edgier the comedy. But with all comedy, there are no-go zones, and often these no-go zones are determined by whatever tribe to which the joke-teller and his audience belong. In some cases, the tribe in question is the human race. The kitschy career of William Shatner certainly gives us a lot to laugh about, but when asked by Comedy Central in 2006 if any jokes were off limits for his upcoming roast, he said, yeah, don’t make fun of how my wife drowned in our swimming pool.

To make fun of anything like the accidental drowning of an innocent person puts you outside the human race, since such an event is always tragic and could happen to anyone. Key and Peele, in their typical cerebral style, make a similar point in their “Insult Comic” sketch. In it, a stereotypical insult comedian squirms onstage as he is forced to make fun of a disabled audience member who is horribly disfigured and must speak through a voice box. So, for Key and Peele, making fun of a person who can’t be made fun of – and failing miserably – is, in itself, funny.

Comics will often skirt as close as possible to their no-go zone without crossing into it. Or, if they do, it’s either only briefly or done in such a clever manner that he gets away with it. This reveals something important: that the comic wants to change the placement of that no-go zone, and so bombards it with jokes which in effect weaken it and force its proponents to either defend it or retreat. Lenny Bruce made a career out of this sort of thing. He was a foul-mouthed drug addict and wanted to live in a world in which foul mouths and drug abuse were completely normal. Edgy humor is often an attempt to normalize tomorrow what is forbidden today.

Things can get really funny or really offensive when that edginess becomes tribal, that is, when one tribe makes fun of another. When the long-toed tribe is here and the short-toed tribe is over there, then short-toe jokes will probably be well-received, even if they’re mean-spirited, because there is no one around to get offended. But when people of different tribes occupy the same space, then you never know whom you’re going to offend with tribal humor. It reminds me of how a young Eddie Murphy used to viciously mock homosexuals (whom he would deride as “faggots”) but would jokingly make sure there weren’t any homosexuals in the audience before doing so.

Fast-forwarding to Michael Richards and James Gunn, both of these men made use of inter-tribal humor which was not terribly funny to in-group members and unforgivably offensive to out-group members. That was their sin, and their careers have been destroyed as a result of it. But because they are two sides of the same coin – similar humor, opposing tribes – they become interesting. Their humor inadvertently reveals not only the nature of their tribes and their respective no-go zones, but why their tribes oppose each other to begin with.

In 2006, Richards was doing his standup routine when he referred to a pair of black hecklers as “niggers” and said, “Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.”

From a Rightist perspective, dissident or otherwise, such a rant is tasteless, violent, and mean. There is little use in dredging up the uglier aspects of an obsolete system of oppression, even if it did serve a vital purpose. But some of the humor is still forgivable because there were times, sadly, when such violent oppression of blacks was necessary. People on the Dissident Right are well aware of the reality of race and the disproportionate criminality of blacks, and so Richards’ jibes do have a ring of truth to them, even if they were crudely rendered. Although I am sorry that Richards had his comedy career ruined over this one rant, the violent nature of his words makes me loath to defend him.

Compare Richards’ rant to the following offensive joke:

A black fourth-grader is sad one day and says to his mom, “Mom, I don’t understand it, but I feel different from the other boys.”

“How so?” asks Mom.

“Well, my private parts are bigger, and I am sexually attracted to my teachers,” responds the boy.

“Don’t be sad about that,” says Mom. “What you’re feeling is perfectly natural.”

“Why is it natural?”

The mother then smiles and pats the boy on the head and says, “Because you’re seventeen years old.”

This joke resorts to the same kind of white-on-black tribal humor that Richards’ did. But it’s clever and it points out some real problems that we face in today’s multiracial society: that blacks on the whole are not terribly bright, they have a hard time controlling their sexual urges, and they’ve become a burden on our education system. They deserve to be laughed at for this.

Of course, the Left would find both jokes unforgivable because, through their edginess, these jokes attempt to normalize race-realism. And as we all know, race-realism is verboten on the Left. Upon closer inspection we can see why. Using a crude white-black axis, we can divide what we call “the Left” in this instance into three parts: blacks, whites who don’t believe in race-realism, and whites who do. The first group wishes above all else to expand political and cultural influence for themselves. Laughing at themselves for their very real racial flaws only distracts from this end, and therefore must be shunned or punished. The second group either denies that black people have these flaws to begin with or infantilizes black in order to blame whites for these flaws. Thus they become offended by the cruelty of the humor. And the third group simply wants to destroy the Right in the culture wars, and so will anathematize anything that energizes Right-wing people, regardless of what the truth is.

Three reasons, none of them good in my opinion.

Now, click here and here and here for some of the tweets that got James Gunn in trouble. These pedophilia jokes are so disgusting I don’t want to sully this article or Counter-Currents in general with repeating them. What makes them disgusting, at least to someone on the Right, is how Gunn made children the butt of the humor in the same way that the previous two jokes made fun of blacks. Some of his jokes even seemed to celebrate pedophilia. This is a distinction that David Cole misses in his defense of Gunn. Cole seems to believe that Gunn’s greatest sin was not telling funny rape or pedophilia jokes. Therefore, since being unfunny is not the same as being immoral, Gunn deserves to keep his job at Disney. As evidence, Cole offers an example of Norm MacDonald telling a Bill Cosby rape joke and no examples of a funny pedo joke. Cole’s logic asks us why we go after James Gunn when guys like Norm MacDonald get a pass.

This is because, in his routine, MacDonald makes Cosby and his penchant for slipping mickies the butt of the joke. In the joke, the Cos leads an unsuspecting woman to his hotel room, where he offers her some water. She then asks why the water is purple. Ha Ha. As for funny pedo jokes, Vox Day says they don’t exist. But they do. I remember on a Comedy Central roast a few years back, a comic (perhaps Jeff Ross) insulted another comic (perhaps Patton Oswalt) by saying he was the kind of person who would order a table for one at Chuck E. Cheese’s. Ha Ha. As with the first joke, the perv goes splat. Remember the bit about tribes? These jokes assign non-pedos/rapists to one tribe and pedos/rapists to another and then let them have it. This kind of thing may not be to your taste, but they are hardly worth being excoriated over.

James Gunn’s jokes, however, do not do this. James Gunn’s jokes instead place him and anyone who would find his tweets funny in the same tribe as the pedophiles. That’s what the Right finds so outrageous about them. And it’s not fake outrage, either. Where the jokes from the Right had at least some truth behind them, there is no similar truth behind Gunn’s.

Unless you feel that children deserve to be raped.

Unless you have no concern for humanity’s future.

These are not truths at all unless you are a complete nihilist or wish to normalize the sexualization of children in the way that Lenny Bruce helped normalize profanity. It was because of this double-whammy that Disney correctly decided to fire Gunn. Because the Left and its proxies in the center (such as Cole and Ben Shapiro) have gone to bat for Gunn in this affair, it reveals that they find nihilism and the sexualization of children acceptable. You’re not part of Gunn’s tribe if you don’t.

A thought experiment to prove my point: Suppose Gunn had tweeted jokes celebrating murder or sadism. Would the same cast of characters still be clamoring on his behalf? Suppose James Gunn, with his razor-sharp wit, had joked about raping Jews in concentration camps or black-American slaves in cotton fields, would the same bevy of enlightened individuals still be demanding that he continue earning eight figures at Disney? Let’s take it even further. Suppose Gunn had cracked wise about how much fun it would be to rape Jewish children or black children or – better yet – retarded Jewish and black children, would these same people continue to stick up for him as an upstanding purveyor of children’s entertainment?

I think not.

David Cole can refer to the Gunn firing as a “witch hunt” or “speech suppression” all he wants. Ben Shapiro can talk about “bad precedents” and “outrage mobs” all he wants. The cast of Guardians of the Galaxy can swear up and down about what a great guy Gunn is. But the truth is, we all have a line. We all have that no-go zone, and it is the placement of that no-go zone which determines where a person’s moral center lies and the nature of the tribe to which he belongs. Jokes can be tasteless and offensive coming from both the Left and Right. Offensive jokes from the Right, especially the ones dealing with race, may be cruel, but tend to be rooted in truth because race-realism is rooted in truth. That other tribe over there really does have short toes, you know. That’s why jokes about them are so funny. But the most offensive jokes coming from people on the Left these days exhibit the kind of nihilism and depravity than can and do ruin civilizations. And when we object, the rest of their tribe rushes to protect them like water swirling down a drain.

Spencer J. Quinn is a frequent contributor to Counter-Currents and the author of the novel White Like You.