Stew's work includes Passing Strange, for which he wrote lyrics and music, and for which he received the 2008 Tony award for "Best Book of a Musical." Stew is a two-time Obie winner, a four-time Tony nominee, and along with collaborator Heidi Rodewald, a member of two bands: The Negro Problem and Stew. Their work includes Post Minstrel Syndrome, Joys and Concerns, Guest Host, The Naked Dutch Painter, Something Deeper Than These Changes, and the cast album of Passing Strange (2008).
h/t: The Atheist Pirate King
Thanks for that, Macon. It's been a long time since I've had the word "sublime" come to mind.
ReplyDeleteFrom this video, I conclude that Stew is a deadpan comedian. Do you think that Stew has a white style of humour, or that Stew is borrowing/appropriating white humour to advance his career as a comedian?
ReplyDeleteGlad you liked it, runawayfred. That word works for me.
ReplyDeleteNo Restructure, I don't think so. As I wrote in the speculative post to which you linked (and as I think I've pointed out to you before, several times now),
Of course, some non-white comedians, and some non-white ordinary people, deliver deadpan humor too, and laugh it. Maybe that's even far more common than I realize, and deadpan humor isn't a particularly white thing at all.
haha, good stuff.
ReplyDelete[Restructure, thank you for acknowledging in your lengthy submitted comment that I may be making progress on this blog. I'm not going to publish that comment, though, with its tedious rehearsal of phrases and sentences that I wrote in comment sections here and elsewhere eight or ten months ago. You've written full posts about those decontextualized phrases and sentences on two other blogs of your own, and I've replied ad nauseam to them already, both in comment sections where those words and phrases originally appeared and in comment sections to your posts about them, sometimes to acknowledge the validity of your criticisms, and sometimes, as above, to correct your misreadings. Publishing your latest comment would call for a reply of my own in which I would do the same at tedious length again, and I see no reason to bog things down here like that, nor to spend my time like that.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I will publish this part of your comment:
I hope that you, a white antiracist, are not the reproducing the white views and white power relations that your antiracist blog is supposed to be criticizing. But at this point, in my continual effort to come to terms with your writings on race, I think you might be.
Of course I'm reproducing at times the white views and white power relations that my antiracist blog is supposed to be criticizing--I'm a white American, and one point of this blog is to encourage myself and other white Americans to learn how they inevitably do so, and to make a continual, informed effort to stop doing so to the extent that they can.
But as I said, thank you for allowing elsewhere in your submitted comment, albeit in your usual backhanded way, that I "appear to learn" in this regard, and thus that I may be unconsciously reproducing white views and white power relations less than I did eight or ten months ago.]
while Stew's lyrics are over the top (the yakuza flair while sending back sushi) i don't see this as a comic piece at all. and from the utter silence while he's singing it, i think the audience 'got' that if they were looking for a cathartic moment of laughter to let them off the White Privilege hook, this wasn't that.
ReplyDeletehis song is biting, angry and contemptuous of the idiocy of white privilege. and this is why i love it.