This is what my friend Bryan said when I shared a link this morning about Dave Chappelle bringing Elon Musk onto the stage with him recently in San Francisco. I had not heard that expression before and I like fishing. I grew up fishing. Hell, Bryan and I fished king mackerel off the coast of Miami this past May. Shame on me for not knowing that phrase. No longer.
Whether I want to or not, it seems I have to be more vigilant about the morals and ethics of the people I choose to entertain me. In the old days, the pre-Internet days, this wasn’t as much of a problem. First off, I was younger and my main focus was girls and choosing which lawns my friends and should drive across, and secondly, without the Internet, there was no way for me to know what Pauly Shore’s political viewpoints were or what Denise Richards thought about climate change. They quite possibly had thoughts on these topics, but without platforms like Twitter and TikTok I didn’t have to know what they were.
That was then and this is now. Now we do know, for better or for worse, what anyone’s stance is on any given subject. Chappelle not only brought Musk up on stage with him, but only a few weeks prior was a guest on The Joe Rogan Show, where he defended Musk against the woke culture since acquiring Twitter for $44 billion dollars.
So maybe it’s time to cut bait with Chappelle. I don’t know yet. In recent years he’s bragged at least a few times about how he’s the GOAT in comedy, which is fine. The grandstanding doesn’t bother me. Bragging about being the best is a time-honored tradition in hip hop, and Dave has a long history of loving and featuring hip hop artists on his shows (he paid tribute to the late Phife Dawg in his 2017 Netflix special, Equanimity).
But bringing the richest man up on stage — a guy who has proven himself to be a conman and grifter (I encourage you to read the Musk eye-opening biography ‘Ludicrous’) — is disappointing, and feels like a shallow attempt to get attention and make headlines.