Review: Hacks Explores the Comedy of Cancel Culture

An aging comedian wrestles with woke campus culture in the new season of the Max series.

The Max series Hacks hilariously examines gender and aging in show business, alongside the pitfalls of cancel culture.

In the show's first episode, the young comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) finds herself toxically unemployable after the internet commentariat deems one of her well-intentioned tweets homophobic. Desperate, she takes a job writing for Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a legendary (read: old) Vegas comedienne who is obscenely wealthy but creatively bored. The characters clash—uberwoke Ava bristles against Deborah's personally insulting comedy style while Deborah laments that nobody can take a joke anymore—but they eventually become friends.

In the recently concluded third season, Deborah's insensitive past stand-up sets go viral and threaten to derail her prospects of hosting a network talk show. Ava is sympathetic to her friend but unwilling to defend racist or ableist jokes. Deborah is angry that male comedians did the exact same type of material with no repercussions, but she eventually accedes to Ava's viewpoint and sits listening as college students castigate her for the harm her jokes allegedly caused. The jokes are older than the students claiming harm.

Comments

[Rev Arthur L kuckland (5-30-24 banana republic day)]

Thanks for the warning. I will steer clear of this trash

[mad.casual]

+1 It would be nice if the reviews weren't similarly terrible. The sentence "The Max series Hacks hilariously examines gender and aging in show business, alongside the pitfalls of cancel culture." isn't even superficially credible.

[BYODB]

I think I watched a few episodes of this when it first came out and felt it was trying to 'teach' older people how to be and warn the younger people at the same time, and it failed in both respects.

Rather like how old Jewish men don't write great lines for teen characters, young woke men aren't so great at writing old women.

Either way, HBO fully relies on gross language and nudity and has for a while. Their writers are intellectually bankrupt and out of ideas.

[B G]

I've watched the whole run of it, and was surprised from the beginning that it's quite a bit less "woke scolding" than I'd expected. Or at least it shows a version of the world in which woke scolding doesn't win out over reality, except in the minds of the millennial "true believers". And there's a fair amount of showing what kind of trash behavior the "shot callers" are still allowed in "the industry" and how thoughtlessly many of them revert to it.

Also, there's a shower scene in the first ep of season 3, and it turns out Hannah has some nice boobies 😉

[Rick James]

In the show’s first episode, the young comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) finds herself toxically unemployable after the internet commentariat deems one of her well-intentioned tweets homophobic.

This premise reads like the previously woke (or at least woke-adjacent) writer’s room realized they weren’t the cool kids any more and are now doing the hackneyed “hello my fellow kids” routine.

I’m imagining the overweight, pink-haired 70 year old childless cat lady with facial piercings waxing philosophical to the neighbor kid about “being there” in the 2020s.