Aziz Ansari on Aaron Rodgers: 'Can We Cut Him a Break?'

I liked Aziz Ansari’s stand-up special back in 2019. It felt both a little reactionary — he was taking aim at performative wokeness while also trying to navigate allegations against him for sexual misconduct — but ultimately, Ansari provided a thoughtful and sincere apology, even if it did feel focus-tested.

There are a lot of people who have written him off because of his sexual misconduct, which is fair. I do, however, think that his stand-up special was insightful if not ahead of its time in mocking performative behavior. His latest Netflix stand-up special, “Nightclub Comedian” — a half-hour set taped at the Comedy Club last December — continues with some of those themes, at least with respect to the algorithmically generated behavior of those on both extremes.

I was thinking about that earlier this week when I saw right-wing Twitter go apesh** because Joe Biden called an idiotic reporter a “dumb son of a bitch.” Have they completely forgotten the four years we spent with Trump? Their response was not proportionate to Biden’s goof. But then I remembered how those of us on the left would often treat Trump’s f**k ups, no matter how big or small, with the same level of outrage. Sometimes, the outrage was warranted — the man was impeached twice — but sometimes it might have been over the top. When you treat the inability to quickly walk down a ramp with the same level of intensity as blackmailing a foreign government, you lose some credibility. Even if I were inclined to hear conservatives’ criticisms of Biden — I am not — they lost credibility by suggesting an off-the-cuff comment whispered under his breath was a function of dementia. GTFO.

The point is, there’s too much goddamn outrage, and the algorithms love outrage, and so the cycle perpetuates itself until the only people left standing are Google, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter.

This is not a new idea — and the West Elm Caleb saga has further illustrated how social media platforms financially benefit from destroying people’s lives whether those lives deserve to be destroyed or not — but I am glad that Ansari, who is now a flip-phone guy, is addressing it. Specifically, he did so with regard to Aaron Rodgers and the QB’s position on vaccines.

“People go in on people who don’t want the vaccine. Who’s that guy — a football player? Aaron Rodgers? What do you think about that guy? f**k him! People hate that guy. He’s a f**king idiot!” Ansari mocks, before adding, “It’s like, calm down. He’s a football player. He read some articles. He got skeptical. He did some research. Are you stunned he came to the wrong conclusion? Did you really think he was gonna crack the case?”

“This poor guy! It’s like we’re all in high school making fun of the quarterback for doing bad on the science test. ‘You’re a dummy, Aaron, you’re a dummy. You don’t know anything. You’re a dum-dum. This guy makes a living getting hit in the head. Can we cut him a break?”

“I guess he did lie,” Ansari added before doing an impression of Rodgers, “‘My doctors gave me some powders from Jamba Juice.’”

On the other hand, Ansari concluded, “I don’t think he’s an idiot, though, OK? I don’t think him, Nicki Minaj, any of these people are idiots. I’m not here to say that. I just think they’re trapped in a different algorithm than you are. If you’re calling them idiots, you’re trapped in another algorithm.”

Maybe? I mean, yes: We are trapped in different algorithms, but one algorithm favors misinformation. The Joe Rogan algorithm tells you to do the thing that will most benefit your happiness rather than the health and well-being of the collective. It’s very Ayn Randian. I’m sure it’s a very easy algorithm to fall into because it reinforces and validates selfish behavior, which is all I hear when I listen to Joe Rogan. “I am going to take the position that is most beneficial to me no matter how much contorting I need to do.” It’s also very profitable.

As a writer, a content creator, a… whatever… I think a lot about what it says about society, generally, that one of the quickest ways to make money is to churn out anti-science/anti-intellectual work. https://t.co/YZVWiEKYa0

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) January 27, 2022

Ansari’s line of thinking, however, is condescending to Aaron Rodgers. Can we blame Rodgers’ positions on being hit in the head repeatedly? I mean, maybe? But how different is that than conservatives suggesting that Biden’s “dumb son of a bitch” gaffe was the result of “dementia”? That’s not dementia! He was saying what a lot of us were thinking; he just didn’t know his mic was on. Rodgers is choosing a position for selfish reasons, and he is only listening to information that reinforces his decision, and he is willfully disseminating the same information for his benefit. That’s not the product of a few too many concussions. That’s the product of a man who selectively chooses information that supports a position he held before he started his “research.” This is not Aaron Rodgers doing bad at a math test. It’s Aaron Rodgers failing a math test and trying to convince the rest of the world that his answers are right because he wants a good grade even if he doesn’t deserve one.

Verdict: The outrage here is commensurate.