The Levity Comedy Club de Hamilton has canceled the two shows of this weekend of Danger Cats, based in Alberta, but the controversial comedy company will act another place in the city.
The Brendan Group Member (Uncle Hack) Blacquier said the comedy club launched the shows after the January 31 article of CBC Hamilton, which pointed out the history of racist jokes and appearances of the company in White Nationalist podcasts.
“The good news is that our good friend Jason Rouse, the jester of hell, has aligned a new place for us,” said Blacquier in a video published online on Sunday, and added that the company will act at Endzone Bar and Grill in Hamilton’s East of Hamilton ends this Friday. The company has reserved actions in other Canadian cities in the coming weeks.
Rouse is a surprising Hamilton comic that now lives in Los Angeles, and has two of his own programs reserved in Levity in August, according to his website.
In the video, Blacquier made jokes at the expense of trans people and individuals with HIV, saying: “We are very inclusive when it comes to comedy. We make fun of all. Let’s include everyone.” The other Danger Cats artists are Brett Forte and Sam Walker.
CBC Hamilton contacted Blacquier by email to comment on the cancellation of lightness. He responded without text, sending only one image of the face of a smiling person covered with what it seems to be blood.
Levity Booker and Patrick Coppolino manager did not respond to CBC Hamilton applications to explain why he reserved and then canceled the two shows.
CBC Hamilton left a message on Tuesday for the owner of Endzone Grant Koropatnicki, but did not receive an answer per hour of publication.
At the end of last week, social media users asked Levity to cancel the programs.
Caitlin Craven, executive director of the Hamilton Center for Civic Inclusion, said several people worried about shows caught attention to the comedy company.
“Any institution or place at this time really needs to think about the way these harmful ideas extend,” he said in an interview last week. “Part of the biggest problem is that we definitely see many ideas of Alt-Right and white supremacists formed in the language of being a joke.”
Several local comics published in support of Coppolino and Levity.
“Pat Coppolino has always taken the torch for comedy as an art form and raised all comics as artists,” Andrew Duncan Cormack wrote on Facebook. “If you are not a fan of something, do not support him, but keep your opinions of yours and do not ruin it to the world.”
Other canceled places shows last year
Other places of comedy in Canada have launched Danger Cats Shows after a public protest.
Last March, one in New Westminster, BC, canceled After the group promoted shirts that represent the serial killer Robert Pickton holding a bacon strip, under the words “pickton pharms”. Pickton was known for attacking sex trade workers and vulnerable women in the center of Vancouver in the Eastside. Many of his victims were indigenous.
The company’s jokes have also attacked indigenous Jews and children who died in residential schools. The Danger Cats members have appeared in Podcasts and in photos with members of Diagolon, an extreme right group appointed in a report by the 2022 Commons Chamber as an example of “ideologically motivated violent extremism.”
Blacquier’s social media publications are directed to numerous marginalized groups and refer to cat danger programs such as “desensibility training.”
In an interview not related to Danger Cats, comedian Kliph Nesteroff spoke with CBC previously about the idea that people are too sensitive today.
Nesteroff is also the author of Scandalous: a history of the show and the cultural wars.
In an interview at CBC Radio’s ShockHe said his research found that society in fact allows much more freedom of expression than in the past.
“Compare the fact that I can walk through the city and see Boob everywhere where I go to the controversy of Janet Jackson’s nipple of 2004,” he gave as an example of evolving social norms. “Unlike the idea that you can no longer say anything, you can say more things today [except] In the field of intolerance, or the perceptions of intolerance, where there are some new taboos. “
Nesteroff added that complaints about censorship and canceled culture often lose the fact that both parties, for example, a comedian and public members who protest a comedian, are practicing freedom of expression.
He also pointed out that the advent of social networks seems that more people complain about comics and their jokes.
People are more aware of the opinions of other people than in the past, he said: “Create this feeling that people are too sensitive.”
