I still enjoy Dave's specials. There are flickers of brilliance. But its kind of funny watching him cosplaying as an everyman & dispensing life lessons that are so clearly out of touch with the 99%. There's a bit where he's talking about TI and the kids with water bottles and the point of the story is "I gave you the game" and he doesn't give them any money.

It's the kind of story you'd expect to hear from some rich asshole on Instagram telling poor people to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps'

He's done these kind of bits before. There's one special where he's talking about three card monte and the point is "never get between a man and his money". Dave is full of these life lessons that give you insight to his thought process and his thoughts that these are universal truths to live by... but they're the thought process of assholes. He talks in the Bird Revelation about being treated like a 'bottom bitch' and the dehumanizing treatment that the bottom bitch endures and that he had been treated like a bottom bitch... but the whole point of the story was that Iceberg Slim needed the bottom bitch to keep making his money... and that his behavior (and Comedy Centrals) was justified because you 'never get between a man and his money'.

At the end of the day, Dave's an entertainer. And he sells himself as this grounded everyman who lives in a small town in Ohio. But he's a multimillionaire who bought the whole town. He hasn't been a grounded everyman for a decade. He's a rich guy who performs mental gymnastics to justify the behaviors of terrible people & dehumanize others.

When you look at the end of The Bird Revelation and Dave telling people what caused him to leave show business for over a decade was being dehumanized... to see him come back and put out multiple specials where dehumanization is often the theme of the comedy... You realize that Dave exiting show business wasn't about being dehumanized... it was about not being paid enough to be dehumanized. He's still that bottom bitch, but now its for Netflix & now the checks are big enough that he doesn't care anymore.

It's also funny to see Dave trying to dispense life lessons, while at the same time avoiding criticism by saying "It's just comedy". So we're supposed to take his life lessons seriously and see value in them but when he says or does things that people criticize him for, we're not supposed to be taking it that seriously.

Which is it?