CMXXIV

The Court Jester's Graying Crown

Watching a comedian get older is a weirdly intimate experience. There are no stunt doubles to hide behind, no frantic cutting to smooth it over. Cem Yılmaz looks different here. The undisputed king of Turkish comedy, the man who more or less built modern Turkish blockbuster humor with *G.O.R.A.*, is now fifty-two and squaring up with time on a bare stage. Released right as 2025 gave way to 2026, his new Netflix hour *CMXXIV* plays like a rant with a low, rueful hum underneath. He hits the expected targets—digital burnout, cancel culture, the gulf between generations—but what really sits beneath it is a man noticing the world moving faster than he can comfortably follow.



It isn't only in the material. It's in how he carries himself. Yılmaz once bounced across a stage with twitchy, relentless energy. Here, he moves with more weight. He leans. He stops. He lets silence hang. (I kept thinking of George Carlin in his later years, when the comedy stopped chasing laughs quite so hard and started going for recognition instead.) Yılmaz's rhythm has slowed into something sharper and more deliberate. When he goes after Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ's "Only Allah can judge me" tattoo, the joke lands as a precise little stab. But he doesn't stop at mocking the tattoo itself. He performs the vanity around it, the tiring spectacle of it. Watch his shoulders after the punchline. They cave a little, like even his body is worn out by the nonsense.



One bit in particular has basically swallowed the conversation around the special. He starts talking about his dating life. "I'm dating someone who is 38 years old," he says, baiting the audience. "They say 'he found a young one.' 38, man, about to die!". The joke set off a small internet firestorm. Pop singer İrem Derici publicly defended it, while Yılmaz's ex-girlfriend responded with a strange social media post about female frogs playing dead to evade males. Ignore the tabloid static for a second and look at his face when he says the line. There is a real flash of vulnerability in it. He is making fun of age, sure, but he is also admitting that *he* feels the clock. I don't think he's fully settled with that. Maybe he's just prodding the wound because provoking is still the instinct he trusts most.



Whether that works for you probably comes down to patience. A few stretches do sag. The second half especially stumbles when he starts unpacking how his own jokes work, which flattens the rhythm almost immediately. He doesn't need the extra explanation. The room is already on his side. Still, *CMXXIV* ends up as a compelling record of an artist feeling out the edges of his own legacy. It's uneven, but it breathes. I came away thinking less about which jokes killed and more about the soft melancholy underneath them, the feeling that makes the laughter necessary at all.