Thursday, July 5, 2012

Stating the obvious: it's demographics you fucktard

Dave Chappelle taken by Travis Jensen
I'm inspired to actually write something today! Yeah!!!

Dave Chappelle is one of my favorite comics. Like seriously, I loved his show, but also understood why enough was enough for him. I've not even folded and watched the "lost" episodes.

Imagine how thrilled I was when I got an email from The Independent on Monday saying that he'd announced two shows for Tuesday night in San Francisco!???

I was thrilled. I also knew the shows would sell out ridiculously fast, so at 2pm I was ready to go. Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd...at 2pm other fans and ticket scalpers had gobbled up a big chunk of tickets. What's good about the Ticketfly site is they don't make it too hard to try again AND they encourage you to try again because those carts might empty. That's so much better than Ticketmaster where every single time you want to try again, you also have to reenter a captcha to get through.  It's just hell.  Anyway, sure enough around 20 minutes after 2pm, my luck turned and I got a ticket. I was in!!!

I'll do a quick review: he rocks!  Okay, not enough detail? In all seriousness, his set was totally unscripted. He's a bad closer and said so himself, so it was a few extra minutes watching someone who is a comic genius just flow. For me, it was worth it because you can pay to go to a comedy show with people who are way more prepared but aren't half as good.

The only bad point of the show, which had nothing to do with Chappelle, was some brilliant drunk f$%ker who stopped when he walked past me to point out that I was black, "wow, there is a black person in the audience!" He did this as if I'd not noticed that I was one out of a crowd of people who were mostly anything but black.

I love people who point out the obvious, BTW.
For me, that's a demographic and economic divide. Most black people that I know, including working and educated blacks like myself, are not online at 2pm in the afternoon. I am by nature of what I do. Also, even if we're plugged in we're not that good about checking emails regularly. I know a lot of people who check email once or twice a day. It's still not really that cool to be an Internet geek if you're black. That's changing fast though, and I'm in VERY good company.

I check my email when the number changes. I work with a few tabs open and I can see when I get a new message. Unless I'm busy with work or, let me be honest, even if I'm busy with work, I'll stop for a moment to check the message.

Another point is if you're not a working professional you probably can't just drop $55 plus fees to head to a last minute show. Plus, once the scalpers got their hands on tickets I heard they were going for $200 plus. I really wonder how well they did considering they had just 24 hours to sell those tickets?

So to the dumb guy who pointed out my race, um, yeah and...?

It was nice to be able to do one of these and just tell him to move on.

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