Diversity & Comics Responds to Jim Jefferies Hit-Piece!
Diversity & Comics (D&C) recently did a segment for Jim Jefferies’ Comedy Central show during San Diego Comic-Con and it has wildly backfired.
The segment debuted two days ago on Comedy Central’s YouTube pag eand has garnered close to 80,000 views at the time of this printing. However, the video as a negative ratio with only 2,400 likes and 7,000 down votes.
Straight from the beginning of the video you can already tell how awful it’s going to be because Jefferies describes the success of Black Panther, “Plus, thousands of African American kids packed movie theaters to finally see a superhero who looks like them.” This was a much criticized talking point that a number of journalists ran with. It completely discounts wildly successful comic book movies like Blade and Men in Black. Not to mention Storm is featured prominently in the first X-Men film. And we also had a whole season of Luke Cage and a significant portion of Black Lightning. That’s not to mention that one of the most successful animated shows of the early 2000s was Justice League Unlimited which starred what many might argue is the best Green Lantern in John Stewart. So, just from the opening sentence Jefferies’ video is already trying to spin a narrative.
From there the video just gets worse as Jefferies describes Richard Meyer as a super villain because he is opposed to having characters’ fundamental traits altered to fit an agenda based on identity politics. In order to show just how evil Meyer is Jefferies brings in a bunch of cosplayers and a guy named Doug in a not-so-funny reference to Deadpool 2. He then twists Meyer’s clear portrayal of his criticisms to an overall attack on “diversity.” Jefferies even says “Richard Meyer believes diversity is ruining the comic book industry.” However, Meyer clearly states in Jefferies’ own highly edited video, that the industry is weirdly dying because “politics, specifically identity politics, being shoved into everything.”
To make matters worse for Jefferies when he actually shows his elite cosplayer team some of his own ideas to change the characters from their fundamental traits, they aren’t having it especially when it comes to Batman.
Meyer responded to the video with his own and showed off how a number of his enemies reacted including Darryl Ayo, Mags Visaggio, and others.
Ayo specifically tells Jefferies, “Thanks for nothing.” While Visaggio tells Jefferies, “What was that? Your little piece made Meyer look like nothing more than a ridiculous clown — and did nothing to confront him on the year-long deliberate campaign of harassment against me and others he has tacitly encouraged through his videos.”
D&C points out that appearing on the show was to build his brand and that he believes “most people know this stuff is fake” when describing Comedy Central’s highly edited videos which became popularized by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.
https://youtu.be/s_ReaGF5BFg
D&C also responded to a Polygon article addressing the Jefferies video:
“Regarding the Jim Jefferies video, I’d describe it as an egregiously edited hit-piece that has hilariously back-fired. My enemies are gnashing their teeth over it and even his own fans realize it is a viciously inept hatchet job.Regarding his pearl-clutching over the 4th grade swear-words I used once in a single video 9 months ago, I’m arching an eyebrow (higher than his) at the ten years of misogynistic rape jokes that he built his stand-up career on.I could tell he had an abiding interest in diversity since one person out of his ten-person crew wasn’t white.”
Read this Next
