 I think this is going to be the last Daniel Sloss show I'm able to review. I don't have a lot of traditions on this here YouTube channel. I have tried to start a couple of them over the years, most notably the annual reflection, but they just don't stick, because life eventually inevitably gets in the way. But so far I have kept one. Every time Comedian Daniel Sloss has come to do a residency of sold-out shows at the SoHo Playhouse in New York, I have gone, had a great time, and reviewed it. It happened with both X and Socio in 2019, then again in 2020 with Hubris, and I'm sure it would have happened last year had it not been what it was, but it was. So it's taken until the tail end of 2022 for us to be here again. But we made it, him, me, us. And I sure was curious to see how someone as professionally introspective as Sloss would unpack the COVID times. I'm still curious. Hello by the way, and welcome to the weekly review. You can call me not a father. And today I am talking about Daniel Sloss's newest special, which will presumably come to streaming platforms at some point in the future. Can't. I say presumably because I don't really know for sure. The performance I saw of Socio, X's predecessor, which was then being performed under the title now, was practiced for a then-upcoming taping that I can only assume happened more than two years ago, but I don't know what happened to it. Other than the mostly empty IMDb page, my review of the show is the top hit on Google. And I'm pretty sure that Hubris is over and done with in part because it was still in progress when he finished his New York run in March of 2020, so it was likely never finished, but mostly because Kant kind of makes it irrelevant. And I mean that in a few different ways. Hubris was most shocking for its revelation that the man who ended thousands of relationships with Jigsaw had finally found love. Who'da thunk, right? But it's been a few years now and that love has kept getting deeper. His girlfriend is now his fiancee and baby mama, which would make it a little weird to go back to the New Love narrative he was spinning in early 2020. He's a dad now. He's got a new most important person in his life to talk about, and that's who he's going to talk about. But even more fundamentally, Kant repeats some of Hubris's ideas and does so without acknowledging the repetition. He's using new words, but they're for old ideas about how oppressed people are ultimately responsible for explaining their oppression to those who are ignorant rather than hateful. I spoke about this plenty in my Hubris discussion and since that is out there on the internet, I'm going to let that stand because frankly I still agree with basically everything I said. The only thing I will add is that I think the big picture discussion has changed a bit over the last two and a half years and especially over the last year in a way that favors Schloss's argument. Plenty of folks still understandably have no interest in turning their trauma into teachable moments, but I think it's pretty clear that let me Google that for you stopped being a viable retort when Nazis learned SEO. Doing your own research is how we ended up with the current American shit show, as it were. Speaking of American shit shows, I had thought that the title might refer to COVID like all of a sudden we found ourselves in a world where we can't do the things we used to do, but I was wrong mostly. He doesn't talk about COVID at all, but also he has like 20 minutes of material on the beauty and horror of a different kind of American shit show, which is reality television. And while he minds that for comic gold, it sure did sound like the musings of someone who was locked inside for a while without anything to do, but think about how Temptation Island is basically the modern day Coliseum. It is a pretty solid argument though. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that Daniel Schloss isn't really thinking about COVID anymore. He's thinking about comedy. He's an introspective comedian who is looking at all the other comedians saying that it's a dangerous time to do comedy and look at all the things comedians can't talk about anymore because everyone's a dang snowflake. And he's scratching his head because he's looking at the wrong list of controversial subjects. He has turned into beloved bits over the years with minimal backlash and can't really square that with the whining. Clearly something else is going on and that something else is the fact that most of his vocal contemporaries kind of suck at their jobs. He says, and I agree that no subject is inherently off-limits, but just because you're trying to be funny doesn't mean you can treat things lightly. Comedians don't get a pass just because they call something comedy. They get a pass when they can actually tell a good joke. After seeing Hanna Gadsby's perfectly fine new show Body of Work earlier this year, I started writing a review that was going to be called, Hanna Gadsby is still funnier than Dave Chappelle. Unfortunately, I didn't get it out in time to beat the feeling that I just didn't have anything worthwhile to say. I know that that video would have gotten a lot of angry clicks and engagement and whatever, but I am so far past the point where that sort of thing interests me. People get mad enough about the mere existence of my Douglas review. I remember a few years ago one commenter said that I was one of his new favorite channels on some movie review before immediately turning around and telling me on the Douglas review that he was unsubscribing because I liked Hanna Gadsby. That guy is a loser. And Dave Chappelle is a bozo. Which is why Daniel Sloss gets a pass, because when he is comedically navigating a minefield, he actively helps the audience along the right path. He wants people to squirm. Sure. But he doesn't want anyone to get hurt. And that's why he put a trigger warning before X, because you shouldn't just spring a reminder of the worst thing that's ever happened to a person in the final act of a comedy show like that. And one of the most interesting little tidbits that Sloss gives here is the fact that far more people were bothered by the warning than by the actual content of the show. A grand total of eight people complained to him about what he said. 40 complained about the warning. It's pretty sad that, but perhaps the biggest critic of that trigger warning was Sloss's 17-year-old self, the one who first started working as a comedian eight hours a day in his mother's home office, because she said if he was going to do comedy, he had to treat it like a real job. That guy had a lot of opinions on a lot of things that 32-year-old Sloss has come to realize aren't great. And while that boy would have been happy with the man's success, the life that surrounds it sure hasn't turned out like he had expected. But that's a good thing. I've talked before about how much my teenage self with his angry t-shirts and demeanor that one college professor on blind kids would hate my current self and how I take that as a sign that I'm on the right track. He sucked. But I tend to say that without really reckoning with the fact that I was him, right? Yeah, I found a good path, but I wasn't there from the start. And trying to divorce myself from myself is disingenuous at best. I've grown and et cetera, but that piece of shit will always be a part of me and bubbles up to the surface far more often than I'd like to admit. I do all of us a disservice by speaking only in the past tense. And this is critical in thinking about one of the key ideas in Kant, empathy. If you can't even understand your younger self, if you deny them of all value, how the fuck are you going to understand anyone else? You don't have to like who you used to be. I'd venture to guess it's probably better if you don't, but you've got to understand them. Empathy is at the forefront of Sloss's mind these days, which is probably inevitable for anyone who isn't a literal psychopath after they've brought new life into the world or like watched someone else do it. Then again, I wouldn't know, which is why I say I may need to end the tradition because a whole lot of Kant was spent on material I couldn't connect to in any meaningful way. I actually have a lot of opinions about parenting in the abstract, but those are being saved for a video that has been started, but can't be finished until near the end of the year or possibly the beginning of next year. Maybe it'll be my first video of 2023. I think that would be appropriate new year, new me, and all that. We'll see. And it's not like I have to connect to it, but Daniel Sloss is a comedian who I always have connected to, not in like a parasocial sense of, oh, he's my friend despite not knowing I exist, or even the slightly less said, we would be friends if only life would put us in the same room together. The former is obviously false, and the latter is probably also false, but social hypotheticals don't interest me. I mean it in the sense that he talks about a lot of the things that I spend too much time thinking about from a perspective that is pretty similar to mine. We're both straight white men with generally progressive politics who are now in our early 30s, and listening to him work through serious ideas on stage has helped me do the same thing off, but now his focus has shifted in a dramatic and personally unrelatable way. Hearing him talk about how much he loves his child and all that resulted in a sort of prolonged detachment that I am used to having with most comedians, but not really when I'm listening to Sloss. And I know that it's only going to get more prolonged in the years to come as he openly admits that being a father has changed the sorts of things he wants to joke about, that there are lines he's no longer interested in crossing. And that's life, and that's okay as long as he's still funny. And he's still really fucking funny. 8.3 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, my cat, Cat Saracada, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliott Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I am the sword, Liam Knipe, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindy's, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. You like this video? Great. If not, oh well. If you want to see more, please subscribe. I have, like, actually multiple videos coming up, I think. I think I'm going to get back into it. We'll see. I've said that before. Bye.