D.L. Hughley: Unapologetic (2007)

Starring: D.L. Hughley
Grade: D-

D.L. Hughley can be pretty hit-or-miss for me. Going along with that, Unapologetic was a big miss. Though his delivery and energy on stage is infectious, there’s not a single thing I would take from this special and repeat it because it had me laughing that hard.

Summary

Hughley covers topics about Washington D.C. and politicians, all things Mexican, the “N” word, Don Imus, kids today being soft (a topic that is covered a lot by comedians and he offers nothing new to it), teachers getting caught having sex with students, fighting with parents, natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina especially), and the basics of marriage, women and relationships. A lot of the time, he will throw in some really cheap jokes because he knows it will get cheers, like comparing politicians to criminals. It was a punchline so obvious, I started to finish the joke myself. That was at the beginning of the special too. He tries to mix religion and politics into certain jokes by stating his opinion on certain controversial topics, but it was more said to illicit cheers rather than to get genuine laughs. He continues this trend by throwing in random facts and statistics to prove a point. Then, he’ll say a joke afterwards or do some unfunny impression about the situation and expect a fucking standing ovation for it. A lot of the time, he’ll just say “Fuck y’all” to the crowd, saying that they “know it’s true”, or “know it’s funny”.

You’re right. Some of it is true, but it’s not really funny.

This process continues for the rest of the special.

My Thoughts:

I had low expectations, and even those weren’t met. I’m not sure why D.L. Hughley felt like this was the special worth taping.

Hughley had some funny topics but didn’t delve into the more interesting one’s enough. He was so fixated on the tough topics, showing how much he knows about them, and what he thinks about the matter that he forgot how to make it funny. He sacrifices it to get a cheer from the female part of the crowd about abortion or say some obvious point about kids going outside less than they use to and how our parents used to discipline us. What comedian hasn’t talked about this? He says nothing new. He also doesn’t see the clear potential in some of the topics he covers. The “pretty women getting away with things compared to ugly women” was a funny topic, but he touches it for a minute and transitions to a bunch of other one-note jokes like the discussion about women’s’ obsession with Costco or male-enhancement drugs. Towards the end, he tries to save the special by messing with certain crowd members but none of that was funny either. Not a lot of the crowd members that were called on were really into it and most of them gave Hughley some dogshit responses to work with. He tries to make it funny, but he just embarrasses them.

He embarrasses himself too because that was the end of his show.

He goes backstage to applause, but he comes back out a minute later to say that he appreciates the crowd, and they can fuck off if they can’t take a joke. I really appreciated that last message from Hughley, but the quote felt misdirected because none of this special really felt like we should be saying, “You should apologize for that!”. If Daniel Tosh or Anthony Jeselnik said something like that, it would make sense because of the dark humor, but I didn’t think it was necessary to make that a big moment for a D.L. Hughley special. Regardless, I was okay with it. It just felt a little bit unnecessary.

D.L. Hughley: Unapologetic was pretty tame for its name. Despite a great crowd, and great energy on stage, Hughley crosses topics too quickly to gain any traction with jokes that deserve it and generally misses the mark on a lot of punchlines by dragging them out with awful impressions. He’s a likable guy, but this is not a likable special.