Category: News

While promoting his new Hulu series, Dopesick, Michael Keaton stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday night where, naturally, the conversation shifted towards his competing presence in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and whatever the DC Extended Universe is calling itself these days. Next year, Keaton will reprise his role as the Vulture in Morbius, and then later, he’ll suit up as Batman for the first time in 30 years in The Flash solo movie.

As for how Keaton straddles working in both film universes despite knowing very little about the lore, the answer is simple: He just stands there and nods. Keaton hilariously revealed to Kimmel that often the filmmakers will have to “brief” him on what’s happening with his characters, and after a while, they can tell he has no idea what’s going on by the look on his face. And Keaton readily admits it.

“I have no f*cking clue,” he told Kimmel. “I have no idea who’s who or why or where I even am.”

However, during the exchange, Keaton revealed an interesting tidbit. He’s shooting some “Vulture stuff tomorrow,” but naturally, even Keaton knows not to give away any specifics. Is it a last minute addition to Morbius or possibly Spider-Man: No Way Home? He doesn’t say, and honestly, probably doesn’t even know.

In the meantime, Kimmel is still trying to break his way into the MCU as Kraven the Hunter, and if Keaton isn’t going to be in No Way Home, then the late night host is defintely going to make a cameo. Or just edit himself into the latest trailer like he did below.

(Via Jimmy Kimmel Live)

A couple days ago, Ed Sheeran teased that he had some sort of Pokémon Go collaboration coming up, but since all he shared was a graphic featuring his name and the game’s logo, it wasn’t clear what this partnership would involve. Now, though, more details have been revealed.

A post on the Pokémon Go website shared yesterday offers a rundown of everything that’s going on during the Sheeran event. From November 22 at 11 a.m. PT to November 30 at 1 p.m. PT, a “special Ed Sheeran performance” will be available through the app and songs will include “Perfect,” “Bad Habits,” “Overpass Graffiti,” “Thinking Out Loud,” “First Times,” and “Shivers.”

During that same time span, playing off of Sheeran’s love of Squirtle and Water-type starter Pokémon in general, Totodile, Mudkip, Piplup, and Oshawott will appear “somewhat frequently” in the wild. Furthermore, two rarer encounters will also be available: Froakie and a Squirtle wearing sunglasses (presumably in reference to the Squirtle Squad from the Pokémon anime, who debuted in the episode “Here Comes The Squirtle Squad” that aired in the US in 1998). This special variety of Squirtle was previously available in the game during the summer of 2018.

There will be a few other goodies beyond that as well, like an in-game = sweatshirt, so get all the details here.

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Sometimes the best new R&B can be hard to find, but there are plenty of great rhythm-and-blues tunes to get into if you have the time to sift through the hundreds of newly released songs every week. So that R&B heads can focus on listening to what they really love in its true form, we’ll be offering a digest of the best new R&B songs that fans of the genre should hear every Friday.

This week is highlighted by Silk Sonic’s long-awaited album, An Evening With Silk Sonic. It delivers nine songs with help from Thundercat, Bootsy Collins, James Fauntleroy, and more. Elsewhere, Beyonce returns with “Be Alive,” her first single in over a year, and India Shawn lays off a beautiful project with Before We Go.

Silk Sonic — An Evening With Silk Sonic

Months after Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak announced their duo Silk Sonic and left the door open with their chart-topping single, their long-awaited album finally arrived. An Evening With SIlk Sonic packs nine songs and a beautiful display of showmanship into an album that also presents contributions from Bootsy Collins, Thundercat, James Fauntleroy, and D’Mile. “After Last Night” and “Fly As Me” are personal highlights from the project.

Beyonce — “Be Alive”

More than a year after she released her last single, “Black Parade,” Beyonce is back with another motivational track for the world. She arrives with “Be Alive,” a spirited and riotous track that finds itself on the soundtrack of the upcoming film, King Richard. Beyonce deeply desires to overcome life’s battles, just like the young characters in the movie who play a young Venus and Serena Williams.

India Shawn — Before We Go

Last year, India Shawn delivered impressive records like “Movin’ On” and “Not Too Deep” to the world, both of which increased excitement for a future project. That body of work has finally arrived with Before We Go. It’s a brief effort carried by seven songs and features from Unknown Mortal Orchestra, 6lack, and Anderson .Paak. “Don’t Play With My Heart” and “Superfine” are my favorites on this one.

Zyah Belle — Who’s Listening Anyway

The last time we heard from Zyah Belle was not too long ago as she connected with Tempest for “Say My Name.” Now, Belle is back with a new project in hand. Who’s Listening Anyway is out now and it’s a project she admits came after a rough time in her career. “I felt defeated,” she wrote on Instagram. “Too old. Let down by people who said they’d help but didn’t. I doubted my artistry. And ultimately I redefined my definition of success. I pushed through because I honestly can’t see my life without music.” Well, it ultimately paid off with Who’s Listening Anyway. “Sugawater” is my personal favorite here.

Nija — “On Call”

Grammy-winning songwriter Nija is on a roll right now. She returned with her latest single, “On Call,” and it’s a track that finds her admitting to her slightly-toxic ways. Nija tells a lover that she won’t commit to love with them, she’ll leave them “on-call” for quick moments of intimacy, something they’ll have to deal with for the foreseeable future. The track also follows her pair of 2021 singles, “Ease My Mind (Come Over)” and “Finesse.”

Ye Ali — Dangerous

Last year, Ye Ali brought us to the Private Suit for the third time. This year, he’s heading down a more Dangerous route. The singer-songwriter is back with a batch of ten songs that’s sure to spark some bedroom magic between you and that special someone. Seriously, it’s quite the steamy body of work with “Smoke & Small Talk” and “P & P” being two of the project’s strongest songs.

Johan Lenox — “You Up?” Feat. Ant Clemons

The name Johan Lenox is one you should know. He’s responsible for helping produce a number of records by Travis Scott, Big Sean, Ty Dolla Sign, Snoh Aalegra, and more. He’s also got a strong catalog of solo records that he looks to add to and improve with his latest drop “You Up?” with Ant Clemons. “The song has me trying to woo a potential lover with reminders that the planet is dying and this may be our last shot,” Lenox said about the song in a press release.

Parisalexa — Overdrive

A little over a year after sharing 2 Real, Parisalexa returns with another project, that being Finishline. It’s a bit briefer as it arrives with just six songs, but the singer’s strong vocals and impactful pen are both intact on the EP. “Lucky” and “Overdrive” provide impressive moments on the project that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

Amber Mark — “Softly”

Amber Mark will be one of the first notable artists to release a project in 2022 as her official debut, Three Dimensions Deep is locked in for a January 28 release. With more than 2 months to go before it arrives, Mark returns with “Softly,” an island-driven track that finds her requesting a tender and gentle love from her companion.

Mack Keane & ESTA — “Open Up”

The Soulection crew delivers another sharp single to the world, this time by the way of Mack Keane & ESTA. The duo joins forces for the ethereal and levitating track, “Open Up.” It’s the inaugural single from Keane, whose effortless falsetto shines on the track, and it’s ESTA’s second track of the year as he recently joined Jayla Darden on “Exhausted My Options” with Sango.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Picture Sylvester Stallone in the winter of his life — still handsome, still barrel-chested, but now with a gray, Hemingway-esque beard framing his perfectly square, granite jaw. He is staring at a video screen while impulsively squeezing an exercise hand grip. But he is not the jovially cold-blooded Sly of cinematic legend. This Sly is in a philosophical mood. Whereas he was once tormented by redneck cops in First Blood, he is now troubled by life’s most profound existential questions.

“It’s like laying on your deathbed going, ‘Why I didn’t I just say I love everyone?’” he says. “‘Why didn’t I just get along? Why didn’t I make amends?’”

The punchline of this scenario is that Stallone’s soul searching occurs while watching one of the most enjoyably dumb blockbusters of the 1980s, Rocky IV. Written and directed by Sly at the height of his fame in 1985, Rocky IV grossed $300 million and endures as a Cold War memento and cheesy pop-culture quote machine. While it’s hardly a paragon of high art cinema, high art cinema is rarely as fun as saying (extremely Ivan Drago voice) “I muhst braaak you.”

The incongruity between Sly’s intense introspection and the movie he’s contemplating couldn’t be starker. But for Stallone, Rocky IV apparently signifies some unfinished business. Prevented from working on his next film by the pandemic, the restless 75-year-old turned in 2020 to his fifth directorial effort with the intention of reshaping the Rocky franchise’s slickest and most excessive installment as the work of an older, wiser and more patient filmmaker. He set about re-editing the film, subbing in 38 minutes of previously unreleased footage. Released on streaming platforms last week as Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago, Stallone’s professed goal was to inject his comic-book boxing movie with a little more real-life, flesh-and-blood humanity.

Fortunately for us, this re-editing process was captured with an iPhone camera held by Stallone’s friend and collaborator John Herzfeld, who turned the footage into a weirdly engrossing “making of” documentary currently available on YouTube. I’m dubious on whether Rocky vs. Drago actually improves on the original Rocky IV. (More on that later.) But the “making of” documentary, which I’ve watched several times this week, has definitely changed my perception of the movie as well as Stallone. It’s ultimately more compelling than either version of Rocky IV.

Starting with the original Rocky in 1976, Stallone wrote and/or directed many of his highest-grossing films himself. And the ones he didn’t direct were no doubt guided by him to a significant degree. But he’s rarely talked about as an auteur or even as a genre specialist whose peers in his prime in the ’70s and ’80s would have been far more lauded filmmakers like John Carpenter, James Cameron, and John McTiernan. In his own mind, however, Rocky IV is the product of a highly personal point of view, as evidenced by Stallone obsessing over it decades after the fact. In the documentary, we see him break down seemingly minor aspects of the movie like Orson Welles describing each frame of Citizen Kane.

And yet Stallone somehow never comes off as pretentious, even when he casually drops a reference to the 20th century Romanian-French absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco. (Surely, some enterprising critic will now liken the iconoclastic one-man army Rambo to the loner protagonist of Rhinoceros.) Instead, Sly is clearly working out something in his own life — specifically, his feelings about aging and mortality — by working over Rocky IV.

“Imagine getting a shot to re-edit your life,” he muses. “That’s the beauty of film.”

Back when Rocky IV was the third highest-grossing movie of 1985 — it was bested only by Back To The Future and Stallone’s own Rambo: First Blood Part II — it was savaged by critics as jingoistic hogwash, the very worst of Reagan era, anti-Russian propaganda. In the movie, Stallone once again plays Rocky Balboa, the lovable underdog from the streets of Philadelphia who becomes heavyweight champion of the world. Reconciled with one-time rival and now BFF Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), Rocky tries to talk his pal out of an exhibition match against a fearsome foe from the USSR, a walking stick of steroid butter named Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren).

Is it a spoiler at this point to divulge that Drago kills Creed in the ring? (If it is, apologies, but you’ve had literal decades to see Rocky IV before now.) At any rate, Rocky IV from then on is a revenge picture. The rest of the film is a collection of training montages set to C-list arena rock songs and flashbacks to other Rocky movies, culminating in one long, epic concluding match between Rocky and Drago that takes up nearly one-third of the film’s scant 91-minute running time. If you can’t guess who wins that fight, then you must be a commie bastard.

That was the logic in 1985, anyway. While Stallone proved with both Rocky IV and First Blood Part II that audiences craved action movies with heavy patriotic overtones completely devoid of nuance, the era’s professional cinephile class recoiled. “The Rocky series is finally losing its legs,” wrote Roger Ebert. “Rocky IV is a last gasp, a film so predictable that viewing it is like watching one of those old sitcoms where the characters never change and the same situations turn up again and again.”

Ebert was wrong about “the last gasp” part — Stallone won a Golden Globe for playing Rocky in Creed nearly 30 years after that review was written — but you sense watching the “making of” documentary that Stallone in a way agrees with Ebert. As he re-works the film, he continually expresses frustration at his brasher, younger self over not respecting the audience enough to simply let moments land without constantly bulldozing them with flashy editing and overripe melodrama. Stallone is surprisingly open throughout the movie about not being able to forgive his own aggressiveness back in the mid-’80s, when he was almost half as old as he is now.

“Why does wisdom come late?” he asks the camera rhetorically. This time, he lets the moment land.

Here’s the odd thing if you decide (as I did) to watch the “making of” documentary before Rocky vs. Drago: I had assumed that those 38 extra minutes were added to turn Rocky IV into a much longer and more reflective film, a sort of transformation of a B-movie into a raw, cathartic, dumbed-down version of John Cassavetes. But the new edit is only two minutes longer than the original! Sly basically took out half of the old film and replaced with a new half. The result is a movie that’s still dumb, just a different kind of dumb.

The most significant changes involve downplaying the USA vs. USSR gamesmanship that animated the original but is now politically incorrect. For instance, those scene-setting boxing gloves adorned by American and Soviet flags that open Rocky IV with a literal bang are gone from Rocky vs. Drago. What we get instead are more scenes that are meant to deepen the relationship between Rocky and Apollo, and (more strikingly) humanize Drago. In Rocky vs. Drago, he’s not the mere grunting Amazon of Rocky IV, but rather a muscle-bound innocent who rebels in small ways against his exploitive, political-minded handlers.

Frankly, I’m not sure any of this amounts to “improving” the film. Rocky IV is high-calorie comfort food that isn’t necessarily helped by replacing the sugar with Sweet & Low. Stallone’s most lamentable decision is to cut out all the scenes with Paulie’s robot, which grounds the movie inextricably in the time period in a way that the auteur must have found embarrassing but many fans no doubt find charming. (Who will fetch Paulie’s beers now?!)

What changed how I looked at Rocky IV wasn’t Rocky vs. Drago but watching Sly Stallone edit Rocky vs. Drago in the “making of” doc. After hearing him talk about the film, I’m inclined to view Rocky IV not as an allegory about the rivalry between Americans and Russians, but rather a meditation on Stallone’s own celebrity. As Rocky, he plays a pampered superstar who’s in constant danger of losing what once made him vital. All of the Rocky movies are about recovering that lost version of himself, the guy with the “eye of the tiger,” the Sly Stallone who dug down deep and wrote the first (and best) Rocky film.

In Rocky IV, he battles a towering behemoth with a funny accent who I’m now inclined to view as a stand-in for Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian upstart who was just starting to challenge Sly as the world’s top action star in 1985. Though by the time of Rocky vs. Drago, Stallone’s enemy now seems to be his younger self. If the subtext of this Rocky movie is different, it’s that Stallone is now trying to drag his younger self not backward to his primal youth but forward to a more enlightened present. As he says in the documentary, “I’ve evolved, but the movie hasn’t evolved.”

Like Rocky IV, Sly remains a work in progress.

For his first movie since Best Picture-winner The Shape of Water, director Guillermo del Toro enlisted an all-star cast to visit Nightmare Alley. Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name, the thriller stars Bradley Cooper as an “ambitious carny” (I’m sold already!) who “hooks up with a female psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett) who is even more dangerous than he is.” The rest of the ensemble cast includes Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, David Strathairn, and Willem Dafoe, who was born to be in a movie about carnies.

Del Toro told Vanity Fair that he was drawn to a carnival setting because “the carnival is almost like a microcosm of the world. Everybody’s there to swindle everybody. But at the same time in the carnival, the [workers] know they need each other. In the city, much less so.” He also said that he made sure to avoid “the clichés associated with the genre. I’m not going to do an artifact. I’m not going to do the Venetian blinds, and voiceover, and detectives walking with fedoras in wet streets. I wanted to do the universe of the novel, which is a little gritty, but also strangely magical. It has a very strange, mystical allure — and mythical. I was very attracted to that possibility.”

The Nightmare Alley trailer (watch above) looks pretty great, even if it won’t sell as many dildos as The Shape of Water. Nightmare Alley comes out on December 17.

Anytime a show pulls off as delightfully bawdy, indulgently violent, dizzyingly ridiculous a first season as Hulu’s The Great did, one naturally worries: Will the sequel be as good? Will more Pomeranians be tossed off balconies? Will more huzzahs be shouted? Will Nicholas Hoult once again unironically utter the wrong pronunciation of “touche”?

The answer to all is, thankfully, yes. (Well, except for the Pomeranians. All dogs are safe this time around.)

Season two of creator Tony McNamara’s not-entirely-accurate historical comedy picks up four months after a now heavily pregnant Catherine’s (Elle Fanning) attempted coup. Her husband Peter (Nicholas Hoult) has fortified a wing of the palace where chosen members of his court snack on fennel seed mousse and examine each other’s genitals while she plots to smoke him out with Molotov cocktails and ruthless wit.

The stand-off doesn’t last long — though it does take an exciting turn when Peter is forced to flee the palace and dine on river rats while under siege — but those hoping that Catherine, now firmly in power with both the military and church on her side, might finally relieve the former monarch of his head will be disappointed. Her vision of a new Russia is one built on ideals and progress, not bloodshed. Of course, that opens the door for Peter and his closest allies to launch their own stealthier version of political warfare from inside the castle walls, a tension-filled tug-of-war that seriously cramps Catherine’s plans to remake the country in her more liberal image.

Overthrowing a bloodthirsty tyrant with mommy issues is all fun and games and decapitated heads and dead lovers until one realizes that actually running a country is infinitely more difficult than pretending to laugh at your idiotic husband’s vapid jokes.

What’s worse? Catherine had a deadline looming over her planned overhaul – one year until the parasite she’s hosting in her womb, a thing she calls “the baby,” bursts free and challenges her right to the throne. It’s that threat of impending motherhood that pushes Fanning to deliver one of the best comedic performances we’ve seen on screen all year.

As a newly crowned Catherine the Great, she flits between an anxiety-riddled woman with conflicting feelings of apathy and affection for the thing growing inside her, and a visionary leader fighting against the stifling traditionalism of her court. She’s vicious ambition and the euphoric dream of a Russian utopia, all wrapped within the restricting corset of womanhood. Her advisors – friends like Orlo (Sacha Dhawan) and General Velementov (Douglas Hodge) quietly ruminate on how they could do a better job of stewarding the country while questioning the hormonal mood swings that accompany her “condition.” Her husband, a pesky cockroach with a penchant for throwing lavish parties and entertaining people with his doltish charisma, might soon find a way to ingratiate himself back to power. Her dreams of a more welcoming, educated, open-minded society are dying before they’ve even come to fruition and there’s a restless desperation behind Fanning’s quieter moments on screen that underscores that. Catherine’s never had more power, and her situation has never been more perilous.

But look, it’s not all doom and gloom and the odd stabbing death or two. McNamara’s script is filled with the same ridiculous humor and cutting commentary that made the show’s first season so damn fun to watch. The joy comes in realizing that both Catherine and Peter are two sides of the same monstrous, privileged coin. Hoult has the most fun playing that on-screen, taking Peter on a journey of self-realization that may end with the monarch bettering himself, but then again, probably not. He dons outrageous costumes with childlike glee, he see-saws between punishingly cruel outbursts and pitiful bouts of loneliness. More than ever, we come to understand how terrible his childhood was and how that trauma manifests in some of his worst personality traits. Similarly, unchecked authority is slowly starting to corrupt the best of Catherine. She’s always been vain, so sure of her own destiny that she destabilized a country to see it fulfilled, but that arrogance was masked by her good intentions, her grand plans for equality and freedom of religion and civility at court. Now that she’s actually implementing her vision and discovering all of the unexpected ways it clashes with the ingrained culture of her cadre of nobles, she’s less enlightened revolutionary, more patronizing despot.

A surprise appearance by Gillian Anderson midway through the season shakes up the sedimented status quo a bit as do the bigger roles for Catherine’s female cohort – Phoebe Fox’s Marial and Belinda Bromilow’s Aunt Elizabeth chew every scene they’re in, leaving us wanting for more. But this is Fanning’s show, and she delivers the best line readings, shouldering the responsibility of presenting Catherine as both admirably ambitious and disturbingly out-of-her-depth, with ease.

One could argue the second shot of vodka always goes down smoother. The same can be said for season two of The Great.

Young Dolph’s tragic death yesterday was not only a loss for the music community, but also for his hometown of Memphis. FOX13 Memphis noted yesterday, “Young Dolph is well known for handing out turkeys around Thanksgiving in Memphis through the Memphis Athletic Ministries charity, speaking to school children, and donating money to his former high school Hamilton High School.” Furthermore, his annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway was apparently supposed to take place yesterday afternoon at 2 p.m., FOX13’s Joey Sulipeck reported.

Dolph’s turkey giveaways in previous years took place at Memphis Athletic Ministries, the website for which notes it “exists to coach, grow, and lead the youth of Memphis by helping them discover their identity in Christ and their purpose in the community.”

During his 2018 giveaway, Dolph told Memphis’ ABC24, “This is the holidays. There’s more to it than just giving away turkeys. I’m here to flood the area and the city with positive vibes.” He added, “Ain’t nothing like family. When you come to Memphis, you get the family vibe. All of my partners, friends, they’re from my neighborhood. Everyone here is for the support, and it’s really just about capturing the positive vibe around the holidays.”

Jermia Jerdine, a beneficiary of the event, also noted, “He just able to give back to others. That really means something to this community. One thing he strives to do is to give back and be a blessing to others.”

In 2019, ABC24 noted that that year’s turkey giveaway was the rapper’s fifth.

Unlike Sebastian Stan as Tommy Lee, which makes perfect sense, I’ll admit to being skeptical when I heard that Lilly James was cast as Pamela Anderson in Hulu’s Pam and Tommy. “The English actress? From Downton Abbey and Cinderella?” But my doubt started to disappear when I saw the first photos from the series, and it’s gone for good now that the trailer is out. Lily James is Pamela Anderson.

In Pam and Tommy, Stan and James, who spent “anywhere from three to five hours [on] hair and makeup” every day, play the original Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox, whose sex tape is stolen by Seth Rogen’s greasy-haired Rand Gauthier. “In some ways, it’s very similar to I, Tonya with the surprise of it,” director Craig Gillespie said about the series. “There’s the victimization of the media and what happened with that tape that was such an affront to them, and how it really ultimately severely damaged their personal life and her career. There’s this situation with the public who snicker and go, ‘Oh, yeah, I know that story. They sold it.’ But people just don’t know the story.”

They don’t know the story (yet), but they do know James’ transformation into Pamela Anderson (with a voice like Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn) is incredible.

Pam and Tommy premieres on February 2, 2022.

Over the years—and the Donald Trump years in particular—Republicans have done and said a lot of bizarre things to excuse a fellow GOPer’s bad behavior. But Congressman Andy Biggs just upped the ante in a major way.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives gathered to vote on whether to formally censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) for tweeting out an anime video of him violently murdering fellow Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden—a video that saw Gosar’s own sister call him out as a “sociopath.” But on Wednesday, many of Gosar’s Republican colleagues came to his defense, including Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and fellow Arizonian Biggs, who seemed to maybe be making the argument that the video was not offensive because it was anime, and we should believe him because he lived in Japan? The real “oh, no he didn’t!” moment came when Biggs proceeded to make his argument… in Japanese.

“I’ve lived in Japan,” Biggs explained. “I’ve lived in Japan!,” he repeated again, with gusto. “For several years. I speak Japanese. I read and write Japanese. This is an anime. [Insert Japanese phrase that we won’t even attempt to spell.] Highly popular. Stylized. Intended to demonstrate the alienation people feel, particularly young people, in their cultures.”

What does any of this have to do with a 62-year-old conspiracy theorist with purported ties to the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers sharing a video in which he murders two of his co-workers? Your guess is as good as ours. How do you say “But I have a Japanese friend!” in Japanese?

(Via Acyn)

Dave Chappelle’s The Closer controversy shows no real signs of resolution. He continues to crack trans jokes onstage, weeks after his “final” Netflix comedy special included his declaration that he is “Team TERF,” meaning that he agrees with JK Rowling’s trans-exclusionary radical feminist position — a stance that spurred an employee walkout. Recently, Chappelle’s alma mater, Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Georgetown, pumped the brakes on renaming a theater after the comedian (after they already quietly cancelled a fundraiser for the same venue).

At the time of the brake pumping, Duke Ellington had responded to student “concerns” while declaring that they hoped to carefully consider these concerns, lest they squander “a missed opportunity for a teachable moment.” Well, Dave heard all about the disinviting, and he responded during his recent Indianapolis show. Essentially, he’s joking about it, and it’s coming off like the way that Vince Vaughn’s Swingers character got kicked out of a diner and then claimed, “I would never eat here anyway.”

Via IndyStar, Chappelle said, “They’re canceling stuff I didn’t even want to do.” More:

He made further light of the situation by saying his high school disinvited him from a planned fundraiser, lamenting that he “can’t even raise money for children.”

“They’re canceling stuff I didn’t even want to do.”

“If you think you’re mad at me — remember, I didn’t disinvite you from anything.

During this show, Chappelle also claimed that trans people aren’t really mad at him over The Closer. “If anyone says trans people are angry at me, they are wrong,” he asserted before continuing his trans jokes. “And if you see (a trans person), buy them a coffee or lipstick or whatever they want and tell them Dave Chappelle sent you.”

Previously, the Washington Post noted that Chappelle described the theater renaming as “the most significant honor of my life.” After Duke Ellington’s decision to postpone the renaming, Chappelle rep Carla Sims released a statement that indicated that Chappelle “supports the school and any effort to contribute to open conversations vs. cancellations.” His onstage declarations, however, aren’t as cooperative, and in fact, it sounds like he’s pushing back by now claiming that trans people aren’t mad at him. Whereas last week in Des Moines, Iowa, he told his live audience, “Boy, I went too far with The Closer. The trans always get mad, but this time I did it.”

(Via IndyStar & Washington Post)