Comedian stand-up comic Sarah Silverman joins Jemele to discuss the current crisis in comedy, and why it s time for a new kind of comedy: political comedy. She's joined by Amy Poehler, Maya Angelou, and Amy's husband, Matt Walsh, to discuss what's happening in the world of political comedy and what it means for the future of comedy. And why comedy can't survive in an intolerant environment like the one we're living in now. It's time to laugh at ourselves, because if we can't be funny, then who is going to tell us how to be funny? And we have to be willing to take a self-effacing self-deprecating self-debriefing self-referencing self-affirmative self-judging self-defense self-defeating self-intimacy self-denial self-deception self-sabotage self-inductive self-doubt self-self-deceitself self-deliberate self-enlightenment self-coaching self-discussation self-criticism self-compassion self-relevance self-improvement self-comedy self-promoting self-exercise self-care self-expression self-awareness self-compliment self-apologetic self-celebrity self-gratitude self-service self-acceptance and so much more and much, much more! In this episode, we talk to a bunch of famous people who have made their lives making their living making people like you and me laugh. and have made a living making us laugh at themselves. We talk about how comedy can no longer survive in a world where it s no longer funny, it s not funny, and that comedy can t survive in the real world, and it s now time to start laughing at ourselves in real life, and how we need to be more funny, not less funny. And that we can t be funny without being funny, no matter what we can be funny in the public sphere in this episode of Comedians Who Have It All, by Jemele and Amy, by Rachel Maddow, by Alex Castellani, by the way, by way of Rachel, by chance, by virtue virtue virtue and by virtue and not by virtue, by fact, by not being funny at all, by being funny in any way, at all by not having it all the time
00:00:25.000Dave Chappelle realizing that cancel culture is bad.
00:00:28.000And you're saying to yourself, wait a second, none of those people are even remotely on the political right.
00:00:32.000I mean, Louis C.K. is mostly famous for shouting about Sarah Palin's private zone, and Sarah Silverman is mostly famous for shouting about how Donald Trump is the worst orange man who ever was orange and also a man.
00:00:54.000Everybody in comedy world is scared of this.
00:00:56.000Aziz Ansari has a whole bit about cancel culture in his newest special.
00:01:00.000And ultimately, I just felt terrible that this person felt this way.
00:01:05.000This made not just me, but other people, be more thoughtful, and that's a good thing.
00:01:11.000Like literally every comedian is now obligated to first apologize for all the bad things they've done, and then deride cancel culture, which they should, because cancel culture is the death of comedy.
00:01:19.000See, comedians have to exist on the edge.
00:01:24.000A lot of comedy lies in saying a truth that everybody finds deeply uncomfortable, or in saying something shocking.
00:01:30.000So much of comedy is shock comedy, where the shock itself is what drives the humor, or saying something that nobody thought you would say because it just was something that you couldn't say, that when you get rid of those aspects of comedy, not much is left.
00:01:41.000And this is why you have seen so many on the political left attempting to overtly redefine comedy.
00:01:45.000You see this in the reviews of Hannah Gadsby.
00:01:47.000Hannah Gadsby's entire comedy routine is saying deeply unfunny things over and over and over, while telling a sad-sack story about her life to the rave reviews of the reviewing community.
00:02:23.000She simply has transformed the role of the comedian into a sort of social voice.
00:02:27.000By the way, nobody highlights the crisis in comedy like my friend Matt Walsh.
00:02:31.000He's done a few videos going through the routines of these SJW so-called comedians, and I won't spoil it for you, but let me say he is just one million times funnier.
00:02:39.000His new one on Hannah Gadsby just came out yesterday.
00:02:42.000You should check that out over on his YouTube channel and watch his suffering.
00:02:46.000It used to be that comedians did both.
00:02:47.000Comedians did social commentary and they also did comedy, but the comedy came first.
00:02:51.000Now, the comedy has gone completely out the window because you might offend somebody.
00:02:53.000And here's the thing about most comedy, most comedy does offend somebody.
00:02:57.000Conservatives for a long time have talked about the fact that most of the comedies made in the 1970s, the Mel Brooks comedies for example, none of those could be made today.
00:03:18.000Well, in this episode, we talk with a bunch of extraordinarily famous comedians that people have made their living making people like you and me laugh.
00:03:26.000There's a lot of humor in the episode.
00:03:28.000But what the episode is really about is Americans from all areas of America's political life recognizing that comedy simply cannot survive an intolerant environment.
00:03:36.000I mean, if we can't laugh at ourselves, then who exactly is going to be able to tell a joke?
00:04:16.000And the idea... And the idea that doctors are just your slaves who you can, you know, marry without their consent and then make half-doctor, half-regular people babies with.
00:04:25.000Okay, well then what happens to the babies?
00:04:58.000So we will cancel Kevin Hart on the Oscars.
00:05:00.000He just won't be on the Oscars anymore if you find a joke that he made a long time ago about not wanting his son to be gay.
00:05:06.000If you are a comedian who made a joke years and years ago, where you dressed up as Carl Malone, as Jimmy Kimmel did, then you will be forced to go on a leave of absence because the thing that was completely inoffensive when you did it has now become offensive.
00:05:18.000The lines are shifting, the lines are moving, and comedians feel like nothing is safe.
00:05:23.000They are looking back at their old work and realizing that that can get them canceled.
00:05:26.000The purpose of cancel culture is to destroy a sense of humor.
00:05:29.000A society without a sense of humor is also a society that can't look at itself and recognize human flaw.
00:05:34.000A society without a sense of humor is a society seeking utopia.
00:05:37.000The Soviet Union was not famous for having a sense of humor because anytime you seek utopia, you first have to get rid of the basic human understanding that people are flawed.
00:05:45.000Because if we recognize people are flawed, utopia is impossible.
00:05:47.000So if you want to make utopia possible, first, wipe away any vestige of humility, of self-effacement.
00:05:53.000Wipe away any expectation that people are going to make fun of you.
00:05:56.000And instead, put in place an arrogant assessment of the world in which no one is entitled to laugh at you.
00:06:03.000And if anybody does laugh at you, that's because the system needs change.
00:06:06.000Well, in this episode, we're going to talk with a bunch of comedians about precisely these topics.
00:06:10.000I think you're really going to enjoy it.
00:06:53.000In minutes, you work out how much coverage you need.
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00:07:20.000Shopping around for life insurance can be pretty stressful and annoying.
00:07:57.000And he's one of the creators of Insecure over on HBO.
00:07:59.000You can hear him on the podcast, Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air, where he combines humor and the issues of the week, encompassing sports, politics, entertainment, and culture.
00:08:09.000I mean, we were so glad that he decided to cross the aisle and have the conversation with him.
00:08:13.000I warned him, like, several times that he would receive blowback from his own side, simply for being in the same room with me, because that is the way that it works.
00:08:20.000Whenever somebody from the left comes into the studio, I warn them, Tell anyone you are here, because you're just going to get crap from people.
00:08:31.000From episode 55, listen to Larry and me discuss how comedy has become politically one-sided, how no one made jokes about Obama for eight long years, and how, nowadays, comedians are going more for claps than for laughs.
00:08:41.000So, I want to talk about the comedy side now.
00:09:35.000But if you look at Late Night, what you're seeing is Jimmy Kimmel, who I have, I will say I have used the term woke pope to describe him, that he is the pope of woke.
00:10:32.000I talked about this very recently, the Obama part.
00:10:34.000And I felt that, first of all, white comedians, especially comedians, definitely on the left, were afraid of making the wrong joke about Obama.
00:10:41.000And when they did make jokes about Obama, they were flattering jokes.
00:10:45.000You know, like nobody really made real observational jokes about Obama.
00:10:50.000That's why the impressions of Obama weren't that good, because nobody was making really good observations about him, you know.
00:10:55.000And someone said, well, what about the angry translator?
00:10:57.000He said, that is an observation on black culture, not really about Obama.
00:11:06.000It was funny, but I mean... Yeah, but people were so precious with him, and I wish there was more of that, you know, because to me, that's part of a comedian's job.
00:11:13.000Now, the other part of it, I believe we're in a cycle.
00:11:16.000A lot of these things go in cycles, and I think what's popular now is that.
00:11:20.000It's kind of maybe the Jon Stewart effect, because Jon was just very good at that.
00:11:25.000But remember, when Jon did it, nobody was doing that.
00:11:27.000You know, we did it on my show, The Nightly Show, going with that approach, and John Oliver certainly in his show.
00:11:33.000But, you know, I think these things go in cycles in the marketplace, and I feel, you know, when you feel like you're on the outside of it, how come I can't be in on the joke?
00:11:41.000But I don't think all of it is like that.
00:11:42.000I think Saturday Night Live really tries its best to be fair in that way, you know, as much as they can, and they've gotten criticized for some of that, you know.
00:11:51.000And by fair, I mean really trying to poke holes at both sides, you know.
00:11:56.000Um, but I think a lot of it is driven by the marketplace and what seems to be popular and that sort of thing.
00:12:02.000As well as, that's what, you know, someone like Colbert, that's what he wants to do and that's what he wants to talk about as well.
00:12:44.000You know, and sort of sympathetic laughter as opposed to the laughter of recognition of a reality, which is usually the best kind of comedy in my observant opinion.
00:12:53.000It's tough to say, Ben, because many times these kind of critiques are resisting something as well, you know, because sometimes these critiques are people want something to be like what they've seen already, you know.
00:13:06.000And many times when you're doing something new, people don't like it because it's different and it doesn't conform to rules that they like.
00:13:28.000I'm happy for her that she's earning wealth and fame, all that's fine.
00:13:31.000But the redefinition by critics of comedy itself, in order to meet somebody who they agree with politically, I find troubling, simply because it used to be that you would watch something that was either funny or it was not funny.
00:13:41.000Like, I can acknowledge that Jon Stewart, who I disagree with politically, is a deeply funny human being.
00:14:23.000The other night, my wife and I made the mistake of watching Airplane again.
00:14:27.000And Airplane is a very funny movie, but it's a time-bound movie.
00:14:30.000Like, you watch it now, and you can watch it sort of in the privacy of your own home, looking around to make sure that nobody else is watching you.
00:14:43.000And we did a joke on there with this observation 20 years ago, where Thurgood, the head of the projects, he finds one of Richard Pryor's old albums.
00:15:03.000Because I've always been worried about that.
00:15:05.000But I realized in some ways there's nothing I can do about it.
00:15:07.000Look, I ran into this in the early 90s.
00:15:09.000I told you a little bit about this on the phone where, you know, another comic kind of shut me down not airing something because didn't agree with what I was saying, you know.
00:15:19.000And to me that was like, how is she making assault on speech?
00:15:55.000Well, if you've been a fan of my show for a while, it's likely you've heard of Louder with Crowder and their ridiculous inferior crap mug.
00:16:01.000Leftist tear stumblers are by far the superior beverage vessel, as has been established by multiple scientifically verified studies.
00:16:07.000That show's host, Steven Crowder, started doing stand-up comedy at just 17.
00:16:11.000He spent three years at Fox News before hitting his stride with his own YouTube channel.
00:16:16.000His early videos found an audience, which brought about the popular internet comedy show Louder with Crowder, and the incredible meme changed my mind.
00:16:22.000If you haven't seen Change My Mind, Steven sits down with folks of differing political persuasions to have a civil discourse on the latest trending issues.
00:16:30.000So I've been friends with Steven Crowder for a very, very long time.
00:16:33.000In fact, the first time that Steven Crowder came over to my condo, he put me in a chokehold and nearly knocked me out.
00:16:38.000One of the things that I despise about Steven, one of the highlights of my life was actually watching him waterboarded during one of his live shows.
00:16:45.000I just sat there drinking and watching the man being waterboarded.
00:16:48.000Crowder is fearless, he is utterly insane, and he somehow showed up wearing essentially underwear to our interview, which was deeply uncomfortable.
00:16:57.000Stephen did make that unfortunate decision when he joined me in episode 19.
00:17:00.000You can see that if you want your eyeballs burned out the back of your head.
00:17:03.000But that aside, we had an interesting discussion on where comedians should drive a line, if President Trump is a comedian or just kind of rude, and how Stephen grades the impact of the president on his younger conservative fans.
00:17:13.000So let's talk about the fact that you do a lot of really controversial comedies.
00:17:33.000Owen Benjamin has been taken to task for using the N-word in one of his comedy routines.
00:17:37.000Where do you think it's appropriate to draw lines as a comedian?
00:17:39.000Do you think there should be any lines as a comedian?
00:17:42.000Obviously, there are certain things that you won't do, even though you're the guy who paints Muhammad with menstrual blood as Bob Ross on camera.
00:17:48.000Where do you decide where those lines are, and when is it appropriate to cross them?
00:18:16.000Now, I have limitations as to what I'm comfortable doing, and everyone will have their own line.
00:18:20.000As a society, I'm very uncomfortable with saying, this is, these are the list of appropriate words, these are the list of inappropriate words, like we were just talking about before, uh, on DMX.
00:18:29.000You know, I was listening to his music, the N-word, MF-er, B-word, talking about killing people, and the, do we have to bleep me?
00:20:38.000But one thing that I do think is interesting about Donald Trump, because obviously you weren't a big fan of his, and in a lot of ways still aren't, and I was not at all during the primaries, and in a lot of ways I'm still not.
00:20:46.000I think we're seeing a transition with President Trump that you've seen with a lot of young conservatives who we reach.
00:20:51.000I think he was a guy who gave to Democrats for most of his life.
00:20:58.000I think he was whatever he needed to get his latest structure with his name emblazoned across it erected.
00:21:03.000And I think what you're seeing now, though, is he's come in, he thought the left would play ball a little bit, and they've been so vicious, which we've known them to be, they've attacked his family personally.
00:21:27.000But how do we deal with the fact that he's, You're not toxic in the same way to young people.
00:21:32.000So young people watch your show because they know you're a comedy guy.
00:21:35.000They're willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when you say something that's offensive because, as you say, you know what's offensive, you know what's not.
00:21:41.000And if you're being offensive, it's generally being deliberately offensive for comedic purposes.
00:21:45.000President Trump just sort of says things and he's very toxic for young people.
00:22:29.000If you would ask me, I think we would both agree on this, culturally, definitely he's opened the door for conservatives to not be so ashamed of what they are, even though he's not one of them.
00:22:39.000But I don't think Marco Rubio would have done this.
00:22:41.000I don't think even Senator Ted Cruz, I don't think Chris Christie obviously would have gone after the media in the same way that Donald Trump has.
00:22:49.000So I think even though, this thing is squeaking, is this being caught up on your, is it okay?
00:23:06.000So I think that's what's important about President Donald Trump.
00:23:08.000I think even though people may not like him, I think a lot of young people are happy to see the burdens, the shackles of political correctness kind of be thrown off, and he has helped pave the way for that.
00:23:18.000We heard from Joe Rogan just a couple of weeks ago in our Best of the Intellectual Dark Web series.
00:23:22.000I was also just on Joe's show to discuss my brand new book.
00:23:27.000We're bringing him back for our discussion on Roseanne Barr and the enormous implosion of her show in the midst of being a smash success after a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett.
00:23:35.000Joe, himself a comedian, has been doing stand-up since the late 80s, still regularly doing shows out here in LA before the pandemic.
00:24:02.000Doesn't matter, they're still not going to let her back on TV because repentance is not available unless you fully embrace all of the woke culture.
00:24:09.000In episode 4, Joe and I talk about how people can survive making jokes for a living in a cancel culture environment, and what happens when the mob chooses a victim.
00:24:17.000What do you make of the Roseanne Fodson?
00:24:25.000Do you think that ABC was right to dump her show after her bizarre tweet about Valerie Jarrett?
00:24:30.000Well, what's interesting is just saying that she was going to be on my podcast, she said it, and then I got all these tweets that were saying, boycott Joe Rogan, the UFC should fire me for having this racist on my podcast.
00:24:42.000No, I'm gonna have a conversation with one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time.
00:24:46.000A person who I deeply respect, who I think is mentally ill.
00:24:50.000She is on a host of different medications.
00:25:24.000She's essentially, at least, Functionally mentally ill, you know, but it's also why she's such a brilliant comedian and she's always been what you would call a shister, you know, if people don't remember like when she used to when she sung the national anthem and grabbed her crotch and spit on the ground and everybody went crazy.
00:25:45.000You know, and I think people wanted to turn her into this lovable mother.
00:25:50.000There's this, like, thing that people do when life gets weird, which is, like, where it's at right now, where they want to look back to the past, where things just made sense.
00:26:00.000Can't we just bring back the Roseanne of old?
00:26:08.000And that's what they're trying to do, and they don't realize, like, She's tweeting crazy shit about someone looking like they're from Planet of the Apes, which, by the way, she said she didn't even know that that woman was black.
00:26:19.000And she's just telling this to me on the phone.
00:26:40.000I mean, you're going to always have people, you're going to have more people upset with you and there's more righteous indignation, I think, than I've ever seen in comedy.
00:26:48.000I've had more people furious at me for what are clearly jokes than ever at any other time in my career.
00:26:55.000Because you make something that's clearly a joke and then somebody writes down the transcript of the joke and now you have to explain the joke.
00:27:01.000That immediately kills it because as soon as you explain a joke, it's no longer a joke.
00:27:04.000So if you make a joke that's politically incorrect and then they write it down, and everybody who heard you at the time knows that you were making a joke, if they write it down and then you have to explain it, we've automatically exited the realm of jokes and so now you're trying to explain the statement as true or decent, and that's not the point of the joke in the first place.
00:27:22.000And you miss the context, you miss the way it was delivered, you miss the tone, you miss everything.
00:27:28.000But what they're doing is they're just trying to find targets.
00:27:32.000And I think that's one of the things that's happening with Roseanne, that's one of the things that's happening whenever anybody screws up in the media.
00:27:39.000You just get these people that they want a target.
00:29:20.000But if I see something that's ridiculous and I make fun of it and people get mad at me for that, that's on you.
00:29:28.000From episode 8, one of our first guests was my friend Adam Carolla.
00:29:31.000Adam got his start on a sketch comedy series called The Man Show, which he co-hosted with Jimmy Kimmel.
00:29:36.000It was later succeeded by none other than Joe Rogan for a season.
00:29:39.000Now, Adam is the host of The Adam Carolla Show, the number one daily downloaded podcast in the world, and the author of the new book, I'm Your Emotional Support Animal, navigating our all-woke, no-joke culture, out today anywhere you purchase books.
00:29:51.000Since being on the Sunday Special, he also partnered up with our friend Dennis Prager on the documentary No Safe Spaces, where they travel the country and expose what is happening to free speech in America today, particularly on college campuses.
00:30:03.000One of the wonderful things about Adam is that Adam is not I would say he's supremely conservative.
00:30:07.000He just has values that say that basically everybody should leave each other alone.
00:30:11.000And as a comedian, I feel like that should be your central value.
00:30:14.000Leave each other alone and make jokes about anybody.
00:30:16.000The fact that Adam has become controversial for those very non-controversial opinions shows how crazy things have gone.
00:30:21.000Listen to Adam and me discuss the power of not apologizing for a joke, how you can beat the woke mob, and the dishonest argument we're seeing in woke culture that if you don't share somebody's political viewpoint, you have some sort of deep, dark character flaw.
00:30:57.000Gets to a certain point and then the long knives just come out if you make the wrong jokes unless you are properly woke or you're Amy Schumer and you're just going to make a bunch of feminist jokes or something.
00:32:31.000And their answer would be, oh, you found trouble.
00:32:33.000And I'd go, yeah, but I'm really, I'm kind of a mellow guy, and I just, I'm sorry if I stepped on your foot or something in the kitchen, but I don't.
00:33:30.000And I'm also just, at a certain point, you will be who you are.
00:33:37.000Like, no, Howard Stern can say whatever he wants whenever he wants, and no one ever demands that Howard Stern apologize, because Howard Stern is Howard Stern.
00:33:45.000Or it's my Snoop Dogg can smoke weed wherever he wants.
00:33:50.000So if I went into like an AIDS hospice, I couldn't spark up.
00:33:55.000Snoop Dogg could fire up a hookah pipe in the middle of an AIDS hospice and they'd be like, that's no, that's fine.
00:34:02.000Like he literally can smoke pot wherever he wants because he's Snoop Dogg.
00:34:07.000So once you establish yourself as I'm the person who says things that offend people, they sort of leave you alone.
00:34:15.000It's also a weird world where you can't speak logically to people.
00:34:19.000Like, I've had a million... Like, some of the stuff I get thrown back in my face is like, uh, look, if something happens to me and my wife, I'd like a mom and a dad, a male and a female, to raise my kids, because we both offer very different things.
00:34:35.000But, that being said, I will take the lesbian couple or the gay couple who's doing a little better, who has a better minivan that's a little newer and a little safer, who lives in a better part of town with a better school system, I will take them over the heterosexual couple if they're marginally better.
00:34:55.000If everything is exactly the same, This is weird world we live in.
00:35:46.000But also, I said that being said, I know plenty of women that are funnier than every guy I went to high school with, but if you're just going to ask me, I'll go with men.
00:36:49.000All things are the same, I would take this.
00:36:51.000But if the other couple, then they go, well, that's a flawed premise because you can't make everything the same.
00:36:56.000And I'm like, just make them have the same job, live in the same neighborhood.
00:37:02.000I don't know, some may think one guy likes Jeopardy, the other likes Desperate Housewives or something, but just make everything the same, would you?
00:37:14.000When they say to me, so you would take this couple that raises rabies-infested raccoons in their camper, in their double wide, over David Gama.
00:37:42.000I do think that they're looking for a world in which they need an answer.
00:37:47.000And the answer is always going to be that it's their political viewpoint or you have a character flaw.
00:37:52.000And so if you do not repeat their political viewpoint, then it must be that you have a character flaw.
00:37:57.000And that character flaw means that secretly, even though you've already said this stuff, secretly you do believe that the rabies-infested double-eyed with the heterosexual couple is better than David Geffen because your secret motivation is that you like gay people worse than you like straight people.
00:38:10.000You like straight people more than you like gay people.
00:38:12.000And so even if you say all things being equal, deep down in your heart, you know secretly that what this is really coming from is animus for gay people.
00:38:20.000Because having spoken with more people on the left than anybody that I know in my lifetime, it seems to me that when people are being intellectually dishonest that way, and you see it with Cathy Newman and Jordan Peterson, for example, where Jordan Peterson is talking about earnings and Cathy Newman is suddenly just recasting everything that he's saying, she knows what he's saying.
00:38:39.000It's just that she doesn't believe that that's really his motivation in saying it.
00:38:42.000It's them attempting to read your heart, I think.
00:38:45.000So if you're comfortable, It goes back to what you were saying earlier.
00:38:48.000If you're comfortable in who you are, it's hard for them to come back at you because they want to say that you're homophobic or you're racist or something.
00:38:53.000You say, well, I'm not that, and they don't have any place to go from there.
00:38:56.000For them, that's the only place that they can go.
00:39:00.000Dennis Miller has been in the entertainment business for almost four decades.
00:39:03.000He spent six of those years as Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update correspondent before exiting in 1991.
00:39:09.000Vulture.com, in fact, rated Dennis as the best Weekend Update anchor of all time.
00:39:13.000That's the only thing Vulture has done right.
00:39:14.000And Comedy Central rated him 21 in the list of greatest stand-up comedians of all time.
00:39:19.000He's a five-time Emmy Award winner for his live talk show, Dennis Miller Live, which had a nine-year run on HBO, had an eight-year run with his nationally syndicated talk radio program, and he hosted CNBC's Dennis Miller, a topical interview talk show, as well.
00:39:46.000I may be the only person in America who actually understands what Dennis is talking about, and I will say that I get a perverse kick out of trying to make Dennis laugh on the show by also making extraordinarily arcane references.
00:39:56.000He's got me beat on that front nearly every time.
00:39:59.00047. We discussed how comedy should always be first and foremost about getting the laugh, how that isn't what we've been seeing, how the late-night show hosts stack up, and Dennis shares the story of when he laughed the hardest he ever has in his entire life.
00:40:11.000I look at AOC in the same way that I look at some of the comedians that I see working today, and that is enthusiasm over skill.
00:40:27.000That there's a real draw toward the enthusiastic and the authentic as opposed to the craft, like actually working through things?
00:40:35.000Well, the craft, I think, is—listen, there's some guys who are beautiful technicians, and they literally would do syllable counts and peel it back.
00:40:43.000But the main directive, obviously, with comedy has always been getting laughs.
00:40:48.000Now, you can go out and do it in a myriad of ways.
00:40:53.000You know, intellectual comedians, you see some guys and you think, wow, that's so smart.
00:40:57.000But for the most part, it's all about the prime directive of getting laughs.
00:41:01.000I've noticed the change is more tectonic in that it's turned everybody's comedy act almost into an impersonator act.
00:41:10.000Like impressionists used to do, they'd go, what if Jack Nicholson was working at the Burger King?
00:41:16.000And I was always bridal, I had that, I lacked that gene where I could go with that, where I'd say, time out, he's one of the highest paid actors in the world.
00:41:23.000Why is he working at a fast food place?
00:41:38.000It's sort of a short-circuited, the primal thing that it's an involuntary gesture where somebody says something funny, and you don't have to intellectualize it.
00:41:46.000You just find yourself... And that's the cool part of it.
00:41:53.000And so that's a big change for comedy.
00:41:55.000The term that I've heard used about this is clapter, that people are not actually laughing anymore, they're just, they're clapping and this is the Hannah Gadsby version of comedy where you have think pieces now about why for thousands of years we've actually been getting the entire concept of comedy wrong.
00:42:08.000It's not that we're supposed to laugh at things, it's supposed to, if we laugh at things it's actually bad.
00:42:12.000We're supposed to think about things and then the thinking is the humor.
00:42:16.000It seems to me that we are reshifting the entire nature of humanity around what a bunch of very politically driven people want it to be because, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when Jay Leno was on television and trying to be funny and now you've got people on TV in late night who I don't even know if they're trying to be funny anymore.
00:42:32.000I mean, legitimately, I think that Fallon may be the only late night host who's even making an occasional attempt to be funny.
00:42:37.000I don't know what your opinion is of the I think Jimmy's a great entertainer and I like that about him.
00:42:44.000I think that you have to understand if you want to, at some point you would lose those jobs if you, look how good Jimmy is at it, Jimmy Fallon.
00:42:54.000I've been on Jimmy Kimmel, he was nice to me, so I don't have an axe to grind there.
00:42:58.000I disagree with him on many things, but he's also great at it in his own way.
00:43:15.000There is an individual's choice at some point to keep a great job.
00:43:19.000Now, listen, you can say you should make your statement, you should speak your mind.
00:43:23.000If you're a 45-year-old Jimmy Fallon—he seems like a delightful guy, the times I've met him over the years, good kid, makes me laugh offstage, deadly funny—he's got the catbird seed.
00:43:34.000He hosts what Johnny Carson used to do.
00:43:36.000They didn't even make him leave from New York.
00:44:01.000Jimmy could not go out there now and espouse anything on that side.
00:44:05.000I think at that point, with Deion Sanders, whenever he does NFL football, somebody won't stretch out for a pass, they'll short-arm it so they don't get lit up, and Deion Sanders goes, business decision!
00:44:19.000And that's the purest thing, at some point you have to understand the hierarchy would whack you if you went out every night and did okay.
00:44:28.000But, I mean, and this is where I feel like, contrary to your own perception of yourself, I think that there probably is a growing market for somebody like you actually saying things that are both funny and somewhat conservative, simply because if you look at Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy, like, I remember when he used to do the sports thing on Kevin and Bean on 106.7 out here and was, you know, a funny guy.
00:44:48.000And when he was doing his show with Adam Carolla on Comedy Central and the humor came first and now he's the Pope of late night, right?
00:44:53.000He gets up there and he's going to rail about Obamacare and cry on TV about Obamacare.
00:44:59.000And I just think to myself, well, isn't like, where's the other side of this equation?
00:45:03.000Where are the, every funny comedian seems to be Being read out, and if you're moderate, that's not enough.
00:45:08.000You have to at least make overtures toward being politically woke if you're going to survive in this.
00:45:14.000Even guys I like, like I think John Mulaney is really funny.
00:45:16.000I think Mulaney, he will have to at some point in his show just dump on a certain portion of the country so that he can get his woke cred in order so that he can go about doing his normal business.
00:45:27.000I mean, isn't that leaving half the country out of the equation?
00:45:30.000He has to check that box for a cloaking mechanism.
00:45:31.000If he doesn't, everything else in his act will be shot through the prism of Is he not woken up?
00:45:37.000So yeah, is it easier to strew it throughout so you look woke for an hour and you're doing some type of jokes?
00:45:43.000Or is it better just in the middle like a sorbet, you cleanse your palate with just come out with a thing and hold a picture of Trump with horns and a trident?
00:45:52.000It's odd to me how it's demanded that you establish that.
00:45:54.000But in the middle you've laid... it's odd to me how it's demanded that you establish that.
00:47:08.000And the guy describes it, and Sam says, yeah, sounds good.
00:47:11.000Hey, listen, around three o'clock, after hearing that story, around three o'clock tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to be doing some yard work, and if there's anybody else in the crowd who wants to drive by and put a Because I'm dead!
00:48:11.000Sam had a good heart, but he was more malevolent.
00:48:14.000I don't think either of those guys could work now, and that's a weird place to be in.
00:48:18.000That's what I was going to ask you next, is about the modern standards.
00:48:21.000You know, it seems to me that we've actually returned to a sort of puritanism about comedy, where if the only jokes that you're allowed to make are basically sex jokes, all the other jokes are out the window because they rely on stereotypes or they rely on observations about reality that could be offensive to somebody.
00:48:37.000Sex is inherently funny, so you can make a sex joke and get away with it, or you can just shock somebody by cursing or saying something incredibly lewd or vulgar.
00:48:43.000But it seems like that's It's either that or probing social commentary, meaning just leftist social commentary you can watch on Maddow.
00:48:52.000So, is there a future for comedy in this world?
00:48:57.000You know, there always is, but I can't foresee it.
00:49:00.000Something's going to happen in this country that's going to uncap this pressure.
00:50:03.000But it's not going to be a minor thing.
00:50:05.000Something's going to come out of this perpetually uptight attitude that's going to make everybody shake their head and think, oh, we've gone too far.
00:50:14.000Greg Gutfeld is a New York Times bestselling author, libertarian political satirist, and humorist.
00:50:19.000He is the host of The Greg Gutfeld Show and co-host of The Five, and hosted the legendary cult TV phenomenon, Red Eye, on Fox News.
00:50:25.000Prior to joining Fox, Greg was editor for several magazines, and was one of the first contributors to the Huffington Post, writing sarcastic pieces poking fun at anything and everything, which is what eventually got him on Fox News.
00:50:36.000He tells me about how it all went down.
00:50:38.000In the full episode, you should check out that story.
00:50:40.000Greg is absolutely hilarious, shockingly self-effacing, and he and I go a long way back because, of course, he really got his start thanks to Andrew Breitbart.
00:50:48.000From episode 15, listen to Greg and me discuss how social media is bleeding into real life and making the culture worse, how we have decultivated the individual mind into a mob, and Greg's thoughts on if the culture can make for cross-isle discussions in the country.
00:51:13.000But by the same token, it's hard to balance that with, you know, let's not destroy people just because we can.
00:51:19.000And the fact is that we now live in this.
00:51:22.000I mean, I remember, you know, it was probably three weeks ago now where that actor-director Mark Duplass just tweeted out something nice about me and suddenly he was deleting it and apologizing in this malice fashion.
00:51:37.000And suddenly James Gunn loses his job.
00:51:38.000And I thought to myself, like, if this stuff doesn't stop, then, like, the internet is bleeding into real life.
00:51:44.000The social media are bleeding into regular life.
00:51:47.000I used to think, and it's a depressing thought when you spend your life in politics and doing political commentary, trying to inform people.
00:51:53.000I used to think that the future of the country lay in the informed 40%.
00:51:56.000There are 40% of the American public who are into politics and very informed and following the news.
00:52:01.000I'm starting to think that it might be the opposite.
00:52:03.000That maybe the future of the country lies in the 60% that absolutely watches nothing that any of us do.
00:52:07.000And all they do is, like, go to baseball games, and they watch a little TV at night, and they mainly spend time, like, doing other things.
00:53:30.000And, you know, once he's done his time and done his repentance, it seems to me that he should be able to, like, he didn't actually rape anybody.
00:53:36.000He did some really bad stuff, but that's not rape.
00:53:38.000And I think that we also have no gradations, right?
00:53:40.000Even for me saying that he did bad stuff, but it's not rape, I'll get destroyed for that because all of these things are rape.
00:54:34.000And one of the things that struck me is when you're talking about the Rwandan genocide, basically the government said, your neighbors are now your enemies.
00:54:40.000And in three months, 800,000 people are slaughtered.
00:54:46.000And it occurs to you, the development of the individual mind, the idea that you are an individual and not just a member of a collective body that is designed to go hit this other collective body.
00:54:55.000That's actually relatively rare in human history and it only exists in certain places at certain times.
00:55:00.000And it feels like we're now in reverse cultivation.
00:55:03.000Like we spent literally millennia trying to get to the point where we thought of ourselves as individuals with independent thoughts and motives and who could stand up to the mob.
00:55:12.000And when I look at the world now, I think that we have this weird idea that all bad people The Nazis were basically monsters who were not actual human beings, who were just bad, who did bad things.
00:55:22.000They weren't human beings who did monstrous things.
00:55:24.000They were monsters who weren't human in any way.
00:55:25.000And so when you look at it, that's a very self-flattering point of view.
00:56:36.000The famous, yeah, where she flew to South Africa before making an AIDS joke, or after making an AIDS joke, in which the joke was about, like, AIDS, Do you think there's any hope that there's going to be any cross-isle discussion, you know, any time in the near future?
00:56:50.000Yeah, yeah, yeah, it wasn't like a negative, it was, she was making a political point.
00:56:53.000Right. That liberals would have loved.
00:56:55.000Anybody would have, you know, and she got totally, by the time she landed, she was over.
00:56:58.000Do you think there's any hope that there's gonna be any cross-isle discussion, you know, any time in the near future?
00:57:03.000Because it just looks, I mean, there's some people, but it just, it feels uglier and uglier.
00:57:59.000There's a few though that I found on my show that I'm like really, like I had a few last week, you know, and I would say that they're non-liberal like Joe DeVito and Joe Mackey and Chris Freed.
00:58:09.000These are all young guys that, you know it's funny, I don't like even labeling them because I don't want to hurt them.
00:58:18.000I know a bunch of major Hollywood folks who listen to the show, watch this kind of thing, and I'll legitimately say to them, you cannot let people know that you ever watch any of this stuff.
00:58:28.000I have a buddy who is super hip in the music world, probably one of the hippest people who was more excited about the podcast when you did with me and will be excited about this.
00:58:54.000I mean, the list of people who have actually been to the offices who we will not take pictures of because we'll say to them, like, this was Duplass's mistake.
00:59:05.000But, you know, I think that hopefully there will be a rational middle that, not even in terms of political viewpoint, but just a rational middle where people can actually have these discussions again that will be very helpful.
00:59:15.000If you've enjoyed hearing from our past guests in this collection, be sure to check out their full episodes and hear more of The Conversations.
00:59:21.000Links to those are in the description below.
00:59:23.000Also, be sure to leave us a comment about who you'd like to see me talk with next season.