Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Deon Cole: Cole Hearted’ on Netflix, Where The Comedian Challenges What’s Funny-ish

In his first hour-long Netflix original comedy special, Deon Cole: Cole Hearted, the comedian builds on the foundation he laid down two years ago in his half-hour as part of the Netflix collection The Standups.

DEON COLE, COLE HEARTED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s punny, but Cole’s self-titular wordplay straight up puts Paula Abdul in my head, warning me to look into his eyes, to see if, uh oh, he’s been telling lies.

A Chicago guy, Cole first grabbed screen time on the big screen as the customer Dante in the Barbershop movies. But he didn’t really break through until a stand-up performance on Conan earned him a permanent seat in that late-night show’s writers’ room. Since then, you’ve grown accustomed to his comic relief on another TBS series, Angie Tribeca, as well as the ABC sitcom, black-ish, where his character made the jump along with Zoey to her Freeform spin-off, grown-ish. He previously released an hour stand-up special on Comedy Central before taking his talents to Netflix.

This hour, recorded in June in North Carolina, lets you know right from the start that Cole is a black man addressing a mostly black audience. His opening gambit asks: “White people. Is there anything you hate about black people? Go.” After a moment of silence, he continues: “Nothing. Nothing? Nothing at all? Black people cool as hell, huh? Ain’t nothing wrong with black people at all? Y’all want to say nothing? Huh? OK. That’s cool. Watch this. Black people.” The audience laughs hysterically. Ten minutes later, Cole singles out the a single white man sitting front row center, and attempts to catch him up on a previous bit. “When you hear the expression ‘Won’t He do it?’ from black people, what we talking about, we talking about God, OK? So next time you hear that, you’ll know we’re talking about God, all right? So next time you hear a black person go, ‘Won’t He do it?’ you go, ‘Yes, He will.'”

The rest of the hour is not like that. At all.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Cole has described his comedy hours in the past to making an album, in that you’ll get a variety of vibes throughout the performance. If anyone of his generation, Cole may bear similarities to a comedian/actor such as Mike Epps. But all of his frank talk about sex, coming just a week after Nikki Glaser’s new Netflix hour (with whom Cole was grouped in The Standups collection), reminds you just how differently the sexes can view the same sex act.

Memorable Jokes: As Cole has done in past performances, he breaks out his joke book about 20 minutes in, under the premise of: “Hopefully they work, and if they do, cool. If they don’t, then I’ll never see y’all ever again.” It’s misleading the audience into thinking he’s testing material just for his taping, despite what you may believe after hearing his not-so-hot take on Arby’s.

But that’s followed up by a pre-meditated showstopper, predicated on Cole’s use of the word “dyke.” All designed so Cole, 47, can add his name to the increasingly long list of stand-up comedians paid handsomely by Netflix to tell us how worried they are that comedians can no longer get paid to say whatever they want in 2019.

In his own words:

“I did that joke on purpose just to see what kind of audience this is. You know, sometimes these audiences, man, they be so lame. That’s how America is now when it come to comedy. Everybody so timid with everything. So timid and shit. It’s like you can’t handle dialogue. I don’t remember how America got so soft. Everything is fucking horrible right now because of your lame-ass tolerism. Music suck. Movies suck. Comedy is the last raw form of expression, and if you take that away, everything’s fucking gone to shit. Because of what you can’t handle. That shit is fucked up. And then you try to shun away people who think differently than you. I’m not one of them comedians who gonna sit up here and spoon feed you all the bullshit you want to hear and shit. I’m not. You gotta respect the way another motherfucker think. The more people we have that think differently, the more opportunity we have for change.”

Sex and Skin: No skin, but he’s got sex on his brain, describing oftentimes graphically current R&B lyrics, good and bad threesomes, sex with fat women, and his own tips for dealing with bad oral sex.

Our Take: Almost like a hidden track in Cole’s new album, he drops knowledge on you about how social media “makes you feel miserable” and urges you not to look there for validation or love, but rather to love yourself. The affirmations continue in this vein, telling his audience not to get stuck in relationships, whether they’re friends or lovers, who weigh you down. Remembering that you only have so many summers left in your life. And not to define success by trying to be like everyone else, but by doing something nobody else does. It’s as if he snuck a power ballad in betwixt overproduced singles.

Our Call: STREAM IT. I mean, my take on Cole’s new hour is rather mixed. But as Cole makes the case himself, I gotta respect his choices. “The more people we have that think differently, the more opportunity we have for change.”

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Deon Cole: Cole Hearted on Netflix