Bruce Dowbiggin
Gervais, Chappelle: Laughing In The Face Of Cancel Culture
The passing of comedian Tommy Smothers over the holidays almost went unreported. But in 1968, the prime-time TV show featuring Smothers and his brother Dick was considered the essence of counter-culture resistance against Viet Nam, racial intolerance and the drug scene. Folk singer Joan Baez used the show to pay tribute to her husband David who was going to jail for avoiding the draft.
Its creative staff featured (among others) David Steinberg, Steve Martin, Bob Einstein, Rob Reiner and Lorenzo Music in sketches that defined the insubordination of the younger generation. One of its producers was a Canadian, Alan Blye. In one cheeky running gag Pat Paulsen ended up running for president. So when CBS cancelled the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1969 to placate sponsors and the White House it produced a furor. Cries of “censorship” reverberated from the hip Left. “Never again would censors attack free speech” they wailed.

LOS ANGELES – MARCH 30: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. A CBS comedy / variety television show. Premiere episode broadcast March 30, 1988. Pictured from left is Tom Smothers, Dick Smothers. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)
Fast forward to the dawn of 2024. Two controversial comedians launched new podcasts on Netflix in the teeth of a howling mob of Woke critics who want them banned for heresy or apostasy. But Ricky Gervais and Dave Chapelle are not being threatened with cancellation by Trumpian reactionaries. No, it’s the current generation of smug progressives who want them silenced. Permanently. For breaking the code.
This is typical pushback from the scolds: “Gervais’s jokes, which mock illegal immigrants, homeless people, trans people and more, are the sort of opinions that, far from getting you cancelled, are likely to be vote winners at the ballot box,” Nervous Nick Hilton wrote in the leftwing UK The Independent. Says humourless trade paper Variety: “Ricky Gervais’ New Netflix Special Tries So Hard to Be Edgy and Offensive — but It’s Just a Total Bore.” Take that.

Chappelle has been raked for “punching down” on the Left’s pet causes. For all the threats Gervais and Chappelle have received over alleged LGBTQ-2 slurs in the past, they have never backed down from the comedic art of in-your-face political commentary. And their new products Armageddon (Gervais) and The Dreamer (Chappelle) are no exception.
Sample: Chappelle tells an extended story about meeting his idol Jim Carrey on the set of Andy Kaufman biopic Man On The Moon. The problem was that Carrey stayed in character as Kaufman even between scenes. Chappelle is advised to call him Andy, not Jim. But an exuberant Chapelle forgets and still calls him Jim.
The crew is mortified. Chappelle is puzzled, talking to what is clearly Jim Carrey but calling him Andy. It was a strange experience says Chappelle. Dramatic pause. “Sort of like how I feel talking to a trans person.” The crowd explodes in guilty laughter, knowing that it would kill their own careers to ever voice such “sedition” in everyday conversation.
Gervais is equally aggressive. In one bit he talks about the mob who want to pull down statues of people who might have been involved in the slave trade 200 years ago. “But they built that beautiful hospital over there,” says Gervais. “Okay, you can leave that. But pull down the statue and throw it in the canal.” Pause. “But he built that canal.” Ricky-as-rioter: “Okay, you can leave that. But pull down the statue.” Etc.
Both men reflect on their bête noir reputations. Chappelle pokes fun at his tour with Chris Rock in the months after Rock was slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars. Then Chappelle himself is assaulted onstage in L.A. by a homeless man allegedly incensed over Chappelle’s jokes about gays. He references his security man now perched just offstage. And describes Puffy coming to his rescue.
Gervais does a symposium about words-as-weapons in the radical left and its effect on audiences. He pleads for divorcing the comedian from the comedy, urging his audience to laugh freely again. Hearing the uproarious laughter for forbidden words and concepts in London (Gervais) and Washington D.C. (Chappelle) was like attending a secret society, a Resistance to the tyranny of radical scolds. And a glimmer that the worst could be over.
For those with memories that go back even further than The Smothers Brothers, these extemporaneous challenges over free speech recall 1960s comic Lenny Bruce, who was hounded till his death for controversial material on sex and politics. In his later years Bruce, who was an unrepentant liberal, would forgo jokes and routines just to read trial transcripts from his cases to a stunned crowd.

Like Gervais and Chappelle, he was obsessed about free speech and liberty. Unlike them, he was not rescued by Netflix.
Gervais and Chappelle stand in stark contrast to the podcast/ TV series Smartless, featuring comedians Will Arnott, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes. This is the Scientology of comedy. Drumming consensus. Started during Covid, Smartless features the trio talking glibly about their lives in the culture bubble and introducing a surprise guest to the other two. Needless to say Smartless stays on the approved side of Woke culture in its lengthy list of guests.

While the roster is choked by “safe” entertainment and news figures (Rachel Maddow, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmell, Jen Psaki, Bill Maher) you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone bending even slightly Right on the roster. Wayne Gretzky? Certainly no one is going to do a comic dissertation on why the people who lionized the Smothers Brothers now endorse swatting the homes of their enemies. Or palling it up with Hamas.
The episode with black comic Kevin Hart is especially revealing for the three progressive hosts. (The roster of Smartless guests is paler than a Vatican synod.) Using the Woke Ranking of Grievance, Hart is untouchable for this Hollywood crowd. Exotic and uncontrollable, he owns the set as Arnett, Bateman and Hayes try not to get caught off the reservation as he savages them for talking about peeing sitting down.

As the gay man on set Hayes is similarly protected from most cancellation sins. But Canadian Arnett and especially Bateman are like long tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs. As the conversation heads to the DMZ of comedy Bateman keeps saying, Oh, not you’re not going to get me canceled. His palpable fear of falling afoul of his censorship colleagues is as far from Chappelle and Gervais inviting censure as you can get and still call it comedy.
Speaking of which. Ricky has come up with a fabulous idea for the moribund Oscars broadcast. He thinks he and Chappelle should co-host. Make our day. As long as there’s a camera on the Smartness guys as their world is torn apart.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Hunting Poilievre Covers For Upcoming Demographic Collapse After Boomers
For those not familiar with hunting seasons in Canada it may come as a surprise that the nation has a year-round hunting season. That would be the targeting of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre by the massed army of Liberals, their bots and the richly endowed media pack. Forget he’s never held power. He’s to blame for the ills in Canadian society.
It has been a good hunt. After floor-crossing by dissident CPC, the Liberals are one seat from the majority that Canadian voters denied them in the spring. (They’ll likely get the majority soon.) MPs who a day earlier were at Conservative Xmas parties suddenly sang the praises of Carney. MPs in ridings targeted by the Chinese suddenly joined Team Elbow Up.
All the while the media corps landed blows from their perch. Robert Benzie: “I know that Premier [Danielle] Smith is very unhappy privately with Pierre Poilievre because she thinks that [MOU motion] is undermining this [pipeline] project.” The nadir of the media dog pile was formerly eminent scribe Robert Fife who sniped, “Conservatives persist with cute legislative tricks, while the government tries to run a country.” Run a country. That’s rich.
From his lips to Liberal brains, however. “.@CBCNews and @AlJazeeraWorld viewers consider themselves uniquely informed, says @ElectionsCan_E report. The two TV networks were named by self-described “informed” voters when asked where they got their news. “
It is, seemingly, a great time to be a Liberal. Or not. While Operation Poilievre was gathering steam for Xmas polling revealed that Liberals and Conservatives remain locked in a tie, and Canadians continue to express ambivalence about the country’s direction, mixed feelings about their leaders, and sharp divides by generation, region, and policy concern. These generational discrepancies continue to be buried.

As was the case in the spring, the Liberals are supported only by the Boomer generation that swallowed Elbows Up nostalgia like a fat man on a donut. The under 60s demo at every level shows the current Carney agenda is a loser for them. In the segment of house-rich Boomers the Libs lead 50-31 over CPC. But in every other category it’s “how can I get out of here faster?”
The 45-59 demo it’s 46-36 Conservatives; 30-44 it’s a whopping 48-31 CPC; 18-29 it’s 40-39 CPC. A healthy chunk of Liberal supporting from the collapse of NDP vote. Where they used to poll in the 20s, the highest demo shows 11 percent support. Otherwise Poilievere would be PM.
Meanwhile, research now finds that 54 percent of Canadians say the growing number of newcomers to the country threatens our traditional customs and values— an increase of sixteen points since 2020. Over the same period, the share of Canadians who say immigration strengthens our society fell thirteen points to 35%
In short, the Carney Circus of marrying Canada to China and the EU is a card trick that will be exposed shortly. But where do we see the Ottawa press corps attention to this impending demographic snow plow? As we wrote in March “It’s not hard to see the (under 60s) looking at the Mike Myers obsession with a long-gone Canada and saying let’s get out of here.
Recently former TVOntario host Steve Pakin attended two convocations. The first at the former Ryerson University, (switched to Toronto Metropolitan University in a fit of settler colonizer guilt.) The second at Queens University, traditionally one of the elite schools in the nation. Here’s what he saw.
“At the end of the (TMU) convocation, when Charles Falzon, on his final day as dean of TMU’s Creative School, asked students to stand and sing the national anthem, many refused. They remained seated. Then, when the singing began, it was abundantly noticeable that almost none of the students sang along. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know the words, which were projected on a big screen. The unhappy looks on their faces clearly indicated a different, more political, explanation.
“I asked some of the TMU staff about it after the ceremony was over, and they confirmed what I saw happens all the time at convocations. Then I texted the president of another Ontario university who agreed: this is a common phenomenon among this generation at post-secondary institutions.”
At Queens, where Canadian flags were almost non-existent, O Canada was sung, but the message of unrest was clear: “Convocation sends a message of social stability,” Queen’s principal Patrick Deane began in his speech. “It is a ceremony shaped in history. You should value your connection to the past, but question that inheritance. Focus on the kind of society you’d like to inhabit.”
You can bet Deane is not telling them to question climate change and trans rights. As Paikin observes, “if we fail to create a more perfect union, we shouldn’t be surprised when a vast swath of young people don’t sing our anthem the way so many of the rest of us do.” So why are the best and brightest so reluctant to see as future in becoming the new professional class that runs society?
In the Free Press River Page searched the source of their discontent. “If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the spectre of an artificial intelligence-assisted ‘white collar bloodbath’ has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point.

“Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.
“… they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes. More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.”
The tsunami over immigration has caused severe dislocations— as PM Steven Harper predicted in the 2015 election debate. He was shouted down by the dopey dauphin Justin Trudeau who opened the sluice gates to every kind of progressive nonsense. Which is now evident.
Like all people addicted, CDN Boomers don’t want the truth. They want performance theatre, T-shirts and hockey games. They blame Trump for their predicament, caught between grim realities. Will they take the 12 steps? Or will their kids have to tell them the facts as they escort them to the home?” We’re now seeing the likely answer to that question everywhere in Canadian society.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books
Bruce Dowbiggin
NFL Ice Bowls Turn Down The Thermostat on Climate Change Hysteria
Oh, the weather outside was frightful. But the football was so delightful. Week 15 of the NFL season was a cryogenic success of snow and sub-zero temperatures. Here were the temperatures at game time this weekend.
Chicago: -11 degrees C.
Cincinnati: -12 degrees F.
Kansas City: -8 degrees C.
New England: -2 C (with an 87 percent chance of snow).
Philadelphia: -2 degrees C.
New York -1 degree C.
Pittsburgh: -7 degrees C.
For fans of NFL football none of this seemed out of character with late-season football. There are legendary games played in arctic conditions. The windchill for the 1967 Dallas/ Green Bay NFC championship was -25 C.
Chargers at Bengals: Jan. 10, 1982 (-24 C, feels like -39 C).
Seahawks at Vikings in NFC wild-card matchup Jan 10, 2016. -21 C with wind chill -25C
Dolphins at Chiefs: Jan. 13, 2024 (-4 degrees, feels like -27 degrees)
As recently as last week’s Bills win over the Bengals games are often played with drifts of snow on the field and the mercury bottoming out. While Canada’s Grey Cup game is played at the end of November it’s still had some brutal weather history of its own.
The point of this meteorology meandering is that, according to our good King Charles III and many other doomsday cultists the concept of snow and cold was supposed to be a figment of the past by now. For almost half a century Michael Mann and the climate prophets of IPCC have been predicting the end of snow and the onset of warmist floods and burning forests. They gambled trillions of the public’s dollars on the certainty that the public would buy computer modelling and data-distortion predicting doom.
For decades it has worked. The careers of people like critic Mark Steyn have been ruined, heretics declared and fortunes dissipated by the trust-fund fanatics who bankroll wackadoodles like Stephen Guilbeault, the convicted felon who Trudeau made Minister of the Environment. No matter how absurd or devious the source, it was a gospel that the fiery inferno was coming next Tuesday. But the weather has remained stubbornly resistant to Elizabeth May’s catechism of climate.

Yet, some dedicated climate advocates and their followers are finally changing their tune in the face of their own observation of lying liars like Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. The share of Americans who say climate scientists understand very well whether climate change is occurring decreased from 37 percent in 2021 to 32 percent this year. A similar October study from the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute found that “belief in human-driven climate change declined overall” since 2017.
Reports the uber-liberal L.A. Times: “The unraveling of climate catastrophism got another jolt recently with the formal retraction of a high-profile 2024 study published in the journal Nature. That study — which had predicted a calamitous 62% decline in global economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions were not sufficiently reduced — was widely cited by transnational bodies and progressive political activists alike as justification for the pursuit of aggressive decarbonization.
But the authors withdrew the paper after peer reviewers discovered that flawed data had skewed the result. Without that data, the projected decline in output collapses to around 23%. Oops.”
Even stalwart media apologists for climate hysteria like the Times are starting to have doubts. Under the headline “The left’s climate panic is finally calming down” they describes “Erstwhile ardent climate-change evangelist Bill Gates published a remarkable blog post addressing climate leaders at the then-upcoming COP30 summit. Gates unloaded a blistering critique of what he called ‘the doomsday view of climate change,’ which he said is simply “wrong.”
Trump-besotted American Democrats seeking to soften their Woke image before the 2026 midterms are likewise carving out more moderate positions on climate “that could well deprive Republicans of a winning political issue with which to batter out-of-touch, climate-change-besotted Democrats. But for the sake of good governance, sound public policy and the prosperity of the median American citizen, it would be the best thing to happen in a decade.”
Sadly Canada under Mark Carney remains a staunch climate warrior. The removal of Guilbeault as federal Environmental Minister may have seemed a step toward sanity, but there is no hint that the billions of dollars from hidden money spigots will be closed down any time soon. The B.C. government’s acquiescence to the climate propaganda of Indigenous bands shows no sign of abating. Indeed, it is just ramping up in the land claims that threaten to make home ownership a thing of the past.

PM Mark Carney is a dedicated temperature fabulist going back to his days as governor of the Bank of England. His first fights in Canada were over taxing carbon and hobbling her energy industry. As we wrote in this November 2024 column, the certainty in which the Canadian Left revels is actually dividing, not uniting citizens.
So perhaps if enough citizens spend an afternoon shivering in the stands of a wintertime football game we might achieve a small piece of sanity and learn that that , while climate is always changing, it’s not worth the price we’ve paid this century.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his 2025 book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books.
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