5:20:24
“It’s a new day and age. It’s a new day and age. It’s a day and age now where the truth is all you need to have. If you got some of the truth on your motherfucking side, you ain’t got nothing to worry about. But if you got a a lie, oh, lies is catching hell right now, today. In real life, now. Because there’s too many great detectives in the world right now. White detectives, Black detectives, Hispanic detectives, Indian detectives, Asian detectives. Just great detectives. I wish all the detectives could talk to one another…All you got to do is tell the truth. The truth is crazy enough, you ain’t got to make up no shit…World is crazy.”
-Katt Williams, Woke Foke, 2024
*Note: This is the era of great detectives. Citizen as detective. The whole world as one great corruption that must be cracked and revealed. Solved. What does this mean for the genre?! In “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” Deleuze writes that the primary element of the modern crime genre is about the power of falsehood, not the search for truth. It offers, he writes, “a process of restitution that allows a society, at the limits of cynicism, to hide what it wants to hide, reveal what it wants to reveal, deny all evidence, and champion the improbable… and so it is that these compensations have no other object than to perpetuate an equilibrium that represents a society in its entirety at the heights of its power of falsehood.” So we if do not search for truth in the modern, late-stage crime story, where do we search for it? Well, we are now finally searching for it where we should be searching for it: in real life. The detective genre concerns the exposure of darkness, and comedy does this too by lightening it. Creating an outlet for darkness through laughter. As Katt Williams points out in his new comedy special, if there is any real racial difference worth noting, it is the difference between who believes in and tolerates this world of lies and who does not. Williams: “I don’t just tell Black secrets. I tell White secrets too. They don’t lie to some of us, they lie to all of us.”
PS. Overall, Williams politics in Woke Foke are pretty lame, predictable, disjointed, and inconsistent. Comedians are very disappointing post-Covid. His 2024 interviews are much more insightful and valuable than his recent comedy specials. I am disappointed by the disparity between his Shannon Sharpe and Joe Rogan interviews, for example, and the material/political takes of Woke Foke. It is still so rare (if impossible) to hear anyone with big Netflix specials say anything smart, surprising, and truly anti-establishment. Where are the contemporary Gorge Carlins?
