C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 , 2019
justice advocacy as illegitimate
outpourings of mob rule.
Being canceled happens when
there is a mismatch between the
thing someone said or did and the
ethical expectations of their audi-
ence. Those who face conse-
quences for their pasts do have an
alternative to silence and repen-
tance: They can cater to the fans
waiting to champion the canceled
as one of their own.
There is a whole cottage indus-
try devoted to people who are
upset by the idea of others being
outraged. Content can be market-
ed to this population, and many
mainstream institutions partici-
pate. Netflix has a vast category
devoted to “politically-incorrect
stand-up,” including Chappelle
and Ali Wong. The notion of
cancel culture itself has become
joke fodder in recent specials
from Aziz Ansari and Bill Burr.
Now celebrities, cable news
commentators and fans are talk-
ing about Gillis being a victim of
this system. Fans posted that they
hoped comedian Joe Rogan
would interview Gillis on his
wildly popular and divisive pod-
cast. Hours after Gillis lost his
SNL gig, prominent comics such
as Norm Macdonald publicly
reached out to offer support.
Gillis hasn’t indicated what
he’s going to do next. But he now
suddenly has a name with nation-
al recognition, which means he
may have a new audience that
could be very different from the
one he would have reached on
SNL. If he wants to pursue it.
[email protected]
[email protected]Step 6: The second career
options
Canceling can cost opportuni-
ties; that’s what it’s designed to
do. Roseanne Barr lost her show
over her racist tweets. Kevin Hart
lost his lifelong dream job, host-
ing the Oscars, over old ho-
mophobic tweets (though, finan-
cially, he is doing more than fine).
Louis C.K. lost his manager and
got iced out of Hollywood after he
admitted to sexual misconduct.
(While he is still touring and
performing, it is without the pres-
tige and cultural cachet he once
had.)
Invoking cancel culture has
been weaponized by its potential
targets: Some celebrities, opinion
journalists for national outlets
and political figures have taken to
minimizing it as a way to paint
accountability, scrutiny or socialon Monday that Gillis was fired.
“We were not aware of his prior
remarks that have surfaced over
the past few days,” t he statement
said. “The language he used is
offensive, hurtful and unaccept-
able. We are sorry that we did not
see these clips earlier, and that
our vetting process was not up to
our standard.”
Gillis released a statement of
his own: “It feels ridiculous for
comedians to be making serious
public statements but here we
are. I’m a comedian who was
funny enough to get SNL. That
can’t be taken away. Of course I
wanted an opportunity to prove
myself at S NL, but I understand it
would be too much of a distrac-
tion. I respect the decision they
made. I’m honestly grateful for
the opportunity. I was always a
mad tv guy anyway.”al format — so are these expres-
sions of opinion or jokes? Given
the content, does the distinction
even matter? Is the comedian’s
intention relevant? Should a per-
son who clearly felt it okay to say
such things in any context be
afforded a massive platform like
SNL? Does giving that platform
serve as a tacit endorsement of
the language or, at the very least,
that such language isn’t disquali-
fying? Is “it’s just a joke” an
appropriate defense or a lazy one?Step 4: The content
This debate soon became fod-
der for endless stories about the
broader cultural wars.
Fueling this commentary bo-
nanza? Among other things:
clicks. Stories claiming that “left-
wing mobs” are attacking people
online have become a mainstay of
conservative publications, for in-
stance. And stories about the rac-
ist pasts of minor public figures
also have an enormous potential
audience online.
Gillis initially responded to the
increased attention by tweeting:
“I’m a comedian who pushes
boundaries. I sometimes miss.”
He added: “I’m happy to apolo-
gize to anyone who’s actually
been offended by anything I’ve
said. My i ntention is never to hurt
anyone but I am trying to be the
best comedian I can be and some-
times that requires risks.”Step 5: The consequences
The content machines ran at
full speed for an entire weekend
until SNL producer Lorne Mi-
chaels said through a spokesmanthis public vetting, especially be-
cause there are plenty of recent
examples of what happens when
you don’t purge your archive.
Trevor Noah had to answer for his
old tweets when he first got the
“Daily Show” hosting gig, and
Melissa Villaseñor caught similar
criticism about tweets posted
years before she was hired by SNL
in 2016.
Gillis’s comments were from
last September. Someone had al-
ready deleted past episodes of
“Matt and Shane’s S ecret Podcast”
from its YouTube page, but there
was still an active subreddit with
a lot of content. Other writers dug
around to see whether those first
clips that went viral were isolated
or part of a pattern, and they
unearthed other racist, as well as
homophobic and sexist, lan-
guage.Step 3: The debate
Stand-up comedy, just like oth-
er art forms, has traditionally
enjoyed an unspoken pact with
the audience: Comedians can say
pretty much whatever they want,
and people in the crowd can feel
however they want about the
jokes. In live comedy, the power
dynamics tend to favor the co-
median who has the stage, spot-
light and microphone. If a couple
of people in the audience are
deeply offended, the comic may
never know about it.
But the Internet changed this
relationship. The audience can do
more than heckle a live perform-
ance; they can talk back, at
length, and get a lot of people to
listen.
This shift has prompted a huge
debate among comedians and
anybody with opinions about
comedy. And Gillis’s firing
brought back many of those ques-
tions:
Where are the lines of decency?
Is there room for forgiveness for
old, hurtful bits? Gillis didn’t say
that stuff in a stand-up set but on
a podcast — a more conversation-cancel culture.
Step 1: The context
Canceling someone refers to
shaming a public figure for al-
leged wrongdoing and advocat-
ing for them to lose access to their
platform. It is a group effort, and
it usually plays out these days on
social media — although similar
boycott campaigns predate Twit-
ter hashtags.
Cancel culture can refer to
wildly different things, depend-
ing on whom you ask. Some peo-
ple denounce it, pointing to in-
stances of mob behavior and on-
line infighting, or to situations
where a career is jeopardized
because of a bad tweet someone
made as a teen.
But it also can be used to
describe how traditionally under-
represented and oppressed
groups harness the Internet and
social media to hold powerful
people accountable when institu-
tions won’t. That’s been the case
with the #MeToo movement, the
wave of many, credible accusa-
tions of sexual misconduct
against powerful figures in vari-
ous industries following the New
York Times’ reporting on Harvey
Weinstein.
Step 2: The news
Gillis, relatively unknown to a
national audience, got a huge
career break last week when the
news of his SNL hire was re-
leased. The announcement also
included fellow comedians Chloe
Fineman and the show’s f irst East
Asian cast member, Bowen Yang,
a milestone that was widely cel-
ebrated. Then freelance comedy
journalist Seth Simons tweeted a
2018 podcast clip of Gillis using
racial slurs against Chinese peo-
ple and making racist references
to Chinatown.
Sometimes people who sud-
denly get a big job or become
famous quickly try to get ahead of
CANCEL FROM C1
Among the items that deal
with unborn wonders, we learn
about gems such as the Who’s
Lifehouse album (“a science-fic-
tion rock opera that would ex-
pand the potential of audience
participation to dizzying new
heights”), C.S. Lewis’s fragment
of “The Dark To wer,” Harlan
Ellison’s infamous anthology
“The Last Dangerous Visions”
and Weezer’s “Songs From the
Black Hole.”
Ultimately, this book recalls
the darker, pioneering, more
transgressive work done by RE/
Search Publications in land-
marks such as “Incredibly
Strange Films,” “Modern Primi-
tives,” “Angry Women” and oth-
ers. And while “Lost Transmis-
sions” would like to sketch out a
cultural counternarrative as com-
plex and rich as Greil Marcus’s
“Lipstick Traces,” it never quite
attains that meteoric escape ve-
locity. Nevertheless, the collec-
tion will broaden your horizons
and turn you on to wonders
bubbling under the mass-market
commodified pleasures to which
we all too often limit ourselves.
[email protected]Paul Di Filippo’s most recent novel
is “The Deadly Kiss-Off.”Boskovich sets the tone with a
conversational style that enwraps
solid scholarship. The other con-
tributors follow suit, with lively
essayists such as Grady Hendrix
(“It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s Apoc-
alypse”), Annalee Newitz (“X-Ray
Spex, Poly Styrene, and Punk
Rock Science Fiction”) and Ekat-
erina Sedia (“The Fashion Futur-
ism of Elizabeth Hawes and Rudi
Gernreich”) bringing humor and
erudition to bear.by Nick Mamatas) outsell those
of J.R.R. Tolkien. Some of the
essays do a better job of project-
ing the canonical potentials than
others, but all succeed admirably
in conveying what makes each
topic worthy of our attention. All
the contributors exhibit enthusi-
asm, knowledge and concision.
The bite-size chapters make this
a book that’s easy to dip into
whenever the reader has a spare
moment.words, unappreciated and over-
looked.
This variant of the might-have-
been game does not focus pre-
cisely on seminal things that
never happened, but on worth-
while things that did happen but
engendered less-than-optimal
consequences. In f act, the majori-
ty of the entries are along these
lines and ultimately overpower
the instances that look at formal-
ly unreified works. But in the end,
the parallel themes prove satisfy-
ingly complementary.
The intelligently curated selec-
tion of topics mixes some pretty
well-known icons — artist Jack
Kirby, writer Angela Carter, musi-
cian David Bowie — with some
out-of-left-field wonders: manga
creator Ts utomu Nihei, Afro-
futurist writer Henry Dumas, TV
show “Space Island One.” Any
reader’s ratio of familiar to un-
known topics will vary, of course.
But as someone who’s been im-
mersed in fantastika for five
decades, I’d have to say that
Boskovich scores pretty high on
the worthily esoteric scale.
There’s plenty here to intrigue
and enlighten even the most
jaded reader/viewer/listener/
game-player.
Each essay is meant to summa-
rize the virtues and history of its
subject and also place it in good
historical context. On another
level, the table of contents is
meant to limn a kind of counter-
canon, an alternate history of
fantastika where, say, “Star Wars”
is the minor hobbyist project of
the guy who created “THX 1138”
and the transgressive novels of
Kathy Acker (extolled with zestBY PAUL DI FILIPPOPlaying the game of “what
might have been” can be either a
pleasant or melancholy exercise.
Oftentimes this speculative prac-
tice can be a stimulating intellec-
tual diversion. What would have
happened if the pre-Columbian
Chinese expeditions to the New
World had established a beach-
head? What if Napoleon had not
tried to invade Russia? Such
historical speculations concern-
ing forgotten turning points pro-
vide cerebral thrills and wistful
musings on children unborn,
deeds undone, cities unbuilt.
But what of the art that went
unfinished or unnoticed? That’s
the central concern of “Lost
Transmissions: The Secret His-
tory of Science Fiction and Fanta-
sy,” a collection of essays by
various hands, with half the text
contributed by editor Desirina
Boskovich and a graceful fore-
word by Jeff VanderMeer. “This
book conjures up not just a sense
of wonder,” VanderMeer writes,
“but also gives readers the sweet
regrets of might-have-beens.” Ad-
ditionally, the compilation is lav-
ishly illustrated and arrayed by
master designer Jacob Covey.
“Lost Transmissions” focuses
on all things fantastical, broaden-
ing its remit to include literature,
film, television, architecture, art,
design, music, fashion and fan-
dom. But it’s n ot solely concerned
with a catalogue of phantoms. As
Boskovich says in her introduc-
tion, the book will consider “the
work of artists who, for whatever
reason, did not receive their due.”
Meritorious cult figures, in other
The
Reliable
SourceHelena Andrews-Dyer and Emily Heil
have moved on to new assignments at
The Post. A search is underway for a
new Reliable Source columnist. The
column will return.BOOK WORLD
In ‘Lost Transmissions,’ essays take intriguing dive into what might have been
LOST
TRANSMISSIONS
The Secret
History of
Science Fiction
and Fantasy
Written and
edited by
Desirina
Boskovich
Abrams. 304 pp.
$29.99COPYRIGHT 1976 BY H.R. GIGER/COURTESY OF H.R. GIGER MUSEUM
Director Alejandro Jodorowsky hired Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger to create the look and feel of his
movie adaptation of “Dune.” “Dune” is the subject of an essay in “Lost Transmissions.”Cancel culture forces a reckoning with past tweets, jokes
ASTRID STAWIARZ/GETTY IMAGES FOR SIRIUSXM
Cancel culture is designed to affect the careers of celebrities accused of wrongdoing. Actress Roseanne Barr lost her show over her racist
tweets. Comedian Louis C.K. lost his manager and got iced out of Hollywood after he admitted to sexual misconduct.FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGESLABOR
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