Factually! with Adam Conover - Comedy Censorship Used to be WORSE with Kliph Nesteroff

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

For as long as there's been comedy, there have been people lamenting that "you can't do comedy anymore". This sentiment feels more prevalent than ever, but is it actual censorship or a shift in our culture? Adam talks with Kliph Nesteroff, a historian of comedy and author of Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, about the history of censorship in comedy, and how the idea of audiences being "too sensitive" is propaganda pushed by the very same people who censored comedians in years past. Find Kliph's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to FACTually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me again. You know, there's this tiresome trend in comedy in which comics, especially famous older comics, the kind of folks I used to really admire, are getting paid millions to do big specials on the largest platforms that exist. And during these specials, they complain about being silenced and censored. It is frankly boring, but it's also part of a grand American tradition because for as long as comedy has been around, people have claimed that you can't do comedy anymore, that you can't say what you want to say. Here's the weird thing though. A couple of decades ago, you would get arrested and thrown in prison for saying the wrong thing on stage, whereas today you just get yelled at at the internet and maybe you don't get hired for

another job. The fact is that American society is today far more permissive about every type of speech than we were just a few decades ago. And the strange truth is that the idea that American culture is more censorious, that people are stopping us from saying what we want to say, is actually propaganda that is being pushed out by the same forces that were censoring us just a few decades ago. It is a bizarre social transition that has taken place, and it's hard to appreciate

unless you actually dive into the history of comedy and popular entertainment more broadly. And guess what? That is what we're going to do on the show today. My guest today is an amazing historian of comedy and pop culture. His name is Cliff Nesterov, and I know you're going to love this interview. But before we get to it, I just want to remind you that you can support this show on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash adamkhan. Over five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad-free, no censorship at all. And you can join our community book club.

We got a lot of other great events as well. And if you want to see me do comedy on stage and exercising my free speech rights, well, you can see me coming up in New York, Chicago, Boston, Nashville, Atlanta. I'm all over the country. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. I'd love to see you there. And now let's get to this interview with comedy historian Cliff Nesteroff. Cliff, thank you so much for being on the show. Oh my God. You're so much louder when they say the show started. Yeah. I like, I really, I really amp it up. You

know, I was, I, before, before we started rolling, I was just like, Hey, some people call it amping up. I call it yelling, but it's nice to be here. It's nice to have you. It's your second time on the show. Yeah. Last time we had you on to talk about your book, we had a little real estate problem, which is an incredible book about the history of Native American comedians, right? In the U.S. and in Canada, I believe. Yeah, it's an exploration. That book was an exploration of, you know, I was frustrated with the publisher, the way they presented it. You know, they advertised it as he tells the untold story of how indigenous people influenced comedy.

But that's not the premise of the book. The premise of the book is how come indigenous people haven't influenced comedy? It's an exploration of what... Have been written out of the history, have been ignored. Well, indigenous people in general are excluded from North American popular culture. And so that book is more an exploration of why and a exploration of how we are coming out of that haze now with things like Reservation Dogs and Taika Waititi and other sort of indigenous representatives and the Scorsese film and

all that. Yeah, Lily Gladstone. Yeah, these are big moments in modern history that didn't really happen before. It used to just all be racist stereotypes and total marginalization. So that's what that second book, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, was about. I thought that was an incredible book. You have a new book out called Outrageous, which is about the culture wars and about this idea that comedians can't say anything anymore, that you'll be penalized, that you'll be... It's about the history of what

we now call cancel culture throughout comedy. Am I right? Or throughout history. Yeah. Censorship, controversy, and how these types of things are often orchestrated for a political purpose to demonize somebody's political adversary. So these days it's like, you know, it's college students, it's millennials, it's liberals, it's the Democrat-controlled city. You know, there's all these sort of boogeymen. And traditionally in my lifetime in American history, I've seen that play out more when it has to do with foreign policy, the demonization of another country or a leader or we have to invade this country because they're a threat. But now the political orchestration is that the threat is here, that it's domestic, it's this mayor, it's this politician, it's this college, and it's all orchestrated for a political purpose. So this book, in an entertaining way, tries to peel back that curtain a bit and demonstrate that most of what you hear is horseshit and that the sky is not necessarily falling, even if there are terrible

things happening in the world. As far as comedy and show business is concerned, we literally have more freedom of expression today, not less. If you look at the totality of the 20th century and all the taboos that have existed for generations, really up until this point. Yeah. I love this argument, especially because as a comedian, there are so many comedians constantly making specials about how they're not allowed to say anything or about how, you know, here's, I'm going to say all the things that they don't want you to say. Uh,

but it's, it's a little bit of a tale as old as time. Is it not like this, this sort of like constant, uh, claim that one cannot say things. Well, in the past,

you couldn't say things. If you look at the first 70 years of the 20th century, which is most of the 20th century, political commentary, if it was about a specific policy, was taboo. Criticism of foreign policy was taboo. Criticism of religion was taboo. On a comedy stage, on a stand-up comedy stage. Yeah, expressing sexuality was taboo. Swearing could get you arrested. If you compare what you can and cannot say today on podcasts and satellite radio to the tradition of AM and FM radio, if you compare what you can say on cable and streaming services today compared to the tradition of network television, ABC, CBS, NBC, you still can't say the word fuck on ABC, CBS, NBC. Nobody cares, but you still can't say the word fuck on abc cbs nbc nobody cares yeah but you still can't do that um so there's this incredible amount of uh to be harsh you call it repression to be more gentle just plain old censorship which existed in comedy and in show business for most of the 20th century i

mean as recently as the late 1980s two live live crew, it's not comedy, but they were prosecuted, persecuted for obscenity. Today, we have wet ass pussy. Nobody cares. It's not obscene. You know, it used to be, there used to be a taboo. I mean, as recently as 1981 in Miami Beach, and it was very controversial at the time, it was illegal for a woman to wear a thong bikini on the beach. And there was news footage of women in bikinis being arrested for essentially what was considered indecent exposure now you have side boob now you have uh side ass i don't know what you call it

when you see somebody's ass cheeks it's like a fashion it's a common side ass yeah yeah yeah all all of the ass except as long as you got a little string in there somewhere. I mean, it's a wonderful time to be alive. Look at Ice Spice. Ice Spice's ass is visible at all times. I don't know who Ice Spice is. You don't... I'm sorry. You don't know who Ice Spice is?

This is going to be as viral as when I didn't know who the Wiggles were. You don't know who Ice Spice is? She's shaking her ass in the jelly? I know who the Spice Girls are, and I know who the Wuzzles are. Is that the same? There was an episode a couple months ago where I. I know who the Spice Girls are and I know who the Wuzzles are. Is that the same? There was an episode a couple months ago where I didn't know who the Wiggles were and I was

roundly roasted and mocked by our guest and now I'm paying it forward to you. Are they the offspring of the Wuzzles? Remember the Wuzzles? They're like half animal, half Wuzzle? The Wiggles are apparently an Australian children's act that is one of the largest acts in the world. Ice act that is one of the largest acts in the world.

Ice Spice is one of the breakout musicians of the world. She's a very nice girl from the Bronx. Has Nardwuar interviewed her? Has Nardwuar interviewed her? This is how I learn who's who. This is how I learn who's who. You are Canadian. Yeah.

Well, if Nardwuar interviews them and then I learn who they are and I learn everything about everything they've ever done. I would love to see Nardal interview uh ice spice um but the point i was making i was simply trying to agree with you claire because her ass is as visible at all times and uh she's just she's always she's in one of her biggest songs she's shaking her ass in the deli and she and she does that is that what it's called is that what it's called it's called deli yeah and it's about and in brackets shaking your ass in yeah it's about uh how it despite all the chanel that she has she's still shaking ass in the deli a bit of an updated jenny from the block except for about ass shaking um yeah yeah chanel that's just how she rhymes chanel with deli if she adds an i at the end this is we. We've gone pretty far afield, but I'm a big I-Spice fan.

I'm just surprised as a student of popular culture. No, I like the Wuzzles. I-Spice even has hair kind of like this character on your shirt. Oh, I thought you were pointing at my chest hair for a second. No. So wait, let's get back to- Did you know there was a candy in the 90s when the spice girls blew up in the late 90s there was all this merchandise there was spice girls merch

there was a candy they used to sell in 7-eleven and it was i don't know which spice girl but she was like holding a lollipop on the image on the cover baby spice almost certainly and it was called fantasy blow it was like gum it was bubble gum so don't was like gum. It was bubble gum. So don't tell me you can't say anything anymore. Yeah, so what do you credit to this idea, this meme that's out there that you can't say? Well, there are new taboos today, but there's less taboos now than there was in the past. So this creates a convenient illusion that you can't say anything anymore, especially if people repeat that phrase. Really, the modern taboos have to do with bigotry or thingsity, basically anything that people perceive as a defamation of a people, that is our number one contemporary taboo. And that type of thing has been taboo in certain circles for generations.

Blackface became taboo in the post-war period. It became taboo. I mean, before that, it was absolutely endemic. It was one of the most popular forms of American entertainment. It was, and there were still people who objected even then. The advent of the internet, I think, creates an illusion that people are more irrational, more sensitive, and more hostile because that's what we see all the time on social media. Yeah.

You get the Twitter mob after you. Before social media existed, and this is what a lot of my research is based on, when people hated a comedian or were disgusted with a TV show or were offended by something they saw in a movie, there was no social media to go to. So what did people do? They usually wrote a letter. They wrote a letter to the editor. It was published in newspapers, magazines, TV Guide. And the key word there is editor. So if 500 people were upset about something that was in a Norman Lear sitcom and 500 letters were written to the local newspaper or the TV Guide, they didn't publish all 500 complaints. Yeah.

The editor would edit and select one complaint, two complaint. Now there's no editor. Now you get all 500 complaints published instantaneously. Right. And I believe this creates an illusion that people are more sensitive, oversensitive, can't take a joke. But if you look at the past, you know, when the Smothers Brothers had David Steinberg do a mock sermon on his show. He wasn't even saying anything particularly critical about religion. He was just doing a parody of a sermon. Yes.

And that was considered sacrilegious and sponsors were being boycotted and people were objecting and the Smothers Brothers ultimately were removed from the air. People were pretty sensitive about that back then. And now you can shit on the Bible literally probably, and it's not controversial. So it's like for every new taboo, there's all these other taboos that have long since been shattered. The weird thing to me is that network television still holds on to,

um, the censorship restrictions that existed when television was invented and first became an entity in the late 1940s. And they based their censorship restrictions on those that had been imposed on network radio in the late 20s and early 30s. And those had been based on the restrictions that had been imposed on the vaudeville stage at the start of the 20th century. So to this day, a lot of the things that you cannot say or do specifically on CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox, the four networks, goes back to the vaudeville days.

Certainly when it comes to cussing and swearing. And if you look at the history of stand-up comedy in the 20th century, there are many instances of comedians being arrested for the language they used on stage. Lenny Bruce famously. Yes. But there were many others. A woman named Belle Barth, a guy named B.S. Pulley, a very obscure guy named George Hoppy Hopkins, who was sort of a lounge act who did stand-up comedy in motor inns.

He was arrested in Anaheim, I think in 1966, because he used the word fuck on stage. But the police were not the ones who initially arrested him. He was a comic on stage. People talk about how it's the death of comedy, you know, Will Smith, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, somebody charged the stage at the Hall of the Bull. In Anaheim, when George Hoppy Hopkins was performing

in Anaheim, 1966, and he used the word fuck, there was a citizen's arrest. Somebody came out of the audience and held onto him until the police could arrive and arrest him for obscenity. There's a big difference between, you know, one crazy guy,

homeless guy, charges at Dave Chappelle with a knife and then, you know, his friends beat the shit out of the guy. I remember that. Stomp the guy, almost kill him. Yeah. And oh, it's a scary time to be a comedian. Is it when you got 15 friends who will curb stomp the one crazy guy here's another twist

on the concept when the chris rock will smith incident happened there was a lot of it's always people outside of comedy like in the press that are always like ah what does this say is it the death of comedy yeah this is gonna happen to start a precedent. Blah, blah, blah, blah. People equated Chris Rock being assaulted with censorship. Will Smith is censoring what the comedian is saying. What people didn't point out is that, was that on ABC, the broadcast, I think, ABC? Will Smith, we get the West Coast feed feed so we get the delay yeah will smith screams at the stage uh keep her name out of your fucking mouth yeah keep her name out of your fucking mouth they

bleeped the word fuck twice i watched it live so the censorship that occurred there really was will smith saying the f word twice nobody pointed that out they're like what does it say they're censoring comedian like the f word is what got censored out. They're like, what does it say? They're censoring comedian. Like the F word is what got censored twice. Chris Rock didn't get censored. He got assaulted, which is much worse probably. But it's also very funny that,

you know, they're there with the seven second delay or however long the delay is. Right. They got the person listening there for the fuck to hit the button, but they didn't have anybody going, Hey, should we maybe use a second, second,

second, seven second delay to remove the assaults happening on stage? Well, you don't want to do that. I mean, it was incredible TV. It was incredible. None of us could believe what we were seeing and played it back several times, slowed it down, you know. No, you don't want to censor that. You know, they have trouble getting viewers as it is.

Anything would be. I was definitely in the camp of this is good TV. There's lot of folks who are like this is the worst thing ever happened to the oscars i was like hey we're all talking about it the next day finally a monoculture moment that everybody can enjoy again yeah it was like the oscar streaker and when they write an updated history of the oscars there'll be a prominent moment you want the weird offbeat moments you don't want anybody to get hurt or assaulted and frankly i don't want to see a guy streak across the stage that much either but i mean that is iconic will smith's very own soy bomb you know remember soy bomb you don't remember soy bomb

i'm stumping you with soy bomb i have no idea what this is the guy uh bob dylan was on stage at either the oscar i think probably probably the Grammys, and he was performing. Bomb or bum? Soy bomb. B-O-M-B. B-O-M-B. And a guy goes and joins the performance and I believe is nude and is holding a sign that says Soy Bomb. He was a performance

artist who was... Was he sort of like the guy who held up John 314 at all the sporting events? Sort of like that. The soy bomb was it was soy I am. He was bombing. He was bombing with I am. Yeah.

I remember seeing the movie I Cuba in the subtitles. I want to say this is the early 2000s. See, in the early 2000s, I was doing standup at the time, but I was also like grumpy and like opposed to modern popular culture. So like when Survivor became a thing, when culture so like when survivor became a thing when america's next top model became a thing when the apprentice became a thing when reality tv became a thing yeah i hated it i didn't want anything to do with it i didn't watch any of it ironically now 20 years later all those shows are vintage they're like time capsules like you watch uh what's the one with Brett Michaels, Rock of Love?

Rock of Love, yes. And I love it, but I love it because it's partially a vintage look at what America was. All the slang people used is now archaic and gone. So I hated things. I hate shitty things in the moment, but I love shitty things once they're in the past. So I love shitty TV shows from the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and now the early 2000s. I like watching reruns of cops because America doesn't look like that anymore. The vehicles are different. The computers are

different. The behavior is different. Everything is different. So I find that fascinating. So no, I don't remember Soy Bomb, but I'm sure I would enjoy it now because I probably ignored it. The fun part is Bob Dylan singing his unintelligible song and looking over the guy going, who the fuck is this? But not stopping doing the song. It's a good YouTube clip. But why is it, do you think, that if comedians were being

arrested, Lenny Bruce and etc., and not just being arrested but really having to shape all of their material around the idea that like the audience is going, if I tell a joke the audience doesn't like, they are going to walk up on stage and handcuff me and call the police. Right. And comedians at the time, I'm sure there were some complaints. Lenny Bruce certainly complained, but it was just the reality that they dealt with.

Now in an era of unprecedented, you can say whatever you want. There's a lot of whining among comedians. I mean, it's still the reality. You know, if you get hired to do a corporate gig as a standup comic, you're still signing a contract that tells you what you can and cannot do. It also tells you how much time you have to do and how you can't go over a certain amount of time, especially at corporate gigs. They say, you know, don't make fun of the boss. Don't talk about politics, you know, and because they're giving you a big paycheck, comedians don't yell freedom of speech. They just sign and they do it. Same with the tonight show. You know, if you're going to do a late night show, you work with a segment producer who sees you at the comedy store. They want you on the show,

but they don't want you to do that bit. They want you to do this bit. You got to change the word shit to crap. And comedians, again, they don't usually go, freedom of speech. How dare you? They go, yeah, that would be great. I can't wait to do Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. So I think repetition has a huge effect on what people think in American culture. And so social media is nothing but a vehicle of repetition. We hear the same thing over and over and over. Eventually we start to believe it. And it's not just

comedians. Everybody hears it over and over and over. Oh, people are too sensitive. You can't joke about anything anymore. You can't say anything. And now, you know, if you do any interview, if you're a comic being interviewed, that's going to be one of the questions. Oh, so this cancel culture thing, like it's like a stock question. I know it's, it's irritating. I need to use every community has to come up with their own. Like when I, when I, here's my response to this, when I was started doing standup in the late nineties and I quit in 2006, right before social media, either the best time to quit or the worst time to quit. I'm not sure which, but, um, there were all these hack or stock questions you'd get asked by journalists. Were you always a funny kid?

Were you the class clown? Where do you get your ideas from? Do you ever get heckled? Oh, how do you, how do you deal with being, it was always the same questions, always boring. And now you can tack on the new one. Oh, you can't say anything anymore. Hey, this cancel culture stuff. It's just what, uh, and, and really that conversation initially was largely directed by non comedians

and people outside of comedy, but it's been repeated so much now that it has affected comedians themselves. So when somebody like Joe Coy bombs, people are like, ah, people are too sensitive. It goes, no,

he bombed the same way that comedians have been bombing for years. Any comic watch could watch that and say, that's just a bomb. That's just a regular old, if you do, he was not quite right. You know, it was his,

he didn't come out with quite the right energy. I've like, I've done it, but I've bombed it exactly that way. Yes. Awards shows and the white house correspondence dinner. Usually, uh,

the comedian, even when they do well, they get trashed after the fact. Yeah. Um, right. It's so hard to find people to do those jobs, but nobody,

when Letterman did Uma Oprah, you know, he didn't say, you know, freedom of speech, people are too sensitive. He turned it into a running self-deprecation for the next two years on his show, sort of like Mad Magazine used to claim to be written by the usual gang of idiots or that reading Mad Magazine would make you stupid. You look at the Mad Magazine, it's like the most brilliant comedy writers and artists that are creating it. So it was turned into comedy. Now it almost has turned into like a political grievance

more than comedy. Yeah. But anyways, it's not to say that there aren't new taboos and that there aren't things that might upset people, but it's far less than it was in the past. Yeah, it seems less playful, you know? This is a great clip from Anthony Jeselnik that went around about a month ago, uh, all over social media. Yeah. He talks about,

you know, your goal is to get away with it. Your goal is to make the audience laugh. You say something fucked up, but everybody laughs. They can't get that mad at you. And that's a way of being playful with the audience's expectations and with what you can and can't say, Hey, I, That's a way of being playful with the audience's expectations and with what you can and can't say. Hey, I went up to a line where the audience got nervous, but I made them laugh anyway. That shows my skill and we're all having a good time. A lot of people are brilliant at that. Yeah, Bill Burr is good at that.

Gilbert Gottfried is good at that. Versus folks who are saying, you know, my intent is to piss you off. And now that you are pissed off, I'm angry at you. And we're sort of like, uh, you know, on the battlements against each other rather than, you know, it being like a, a playful bit of show. Yeah. I mean, it really depends on the comic and the natural funniness of the person to begin with. When you start doing standup, you learn right away where you stand in terms of funniness. You have an inkling that you're funny because people laugh when you talk outside of comedy. So you attempt to do stand-up. You learn right away, okay, this person is way funnier than I am and I'll never be as funny as that person. This person's not that funny. I'm funnier than

they are. You learn where you stand. And so for some comedians, if it's not natural to get laughs or it's not particularly easy, then sometimes any reaction will do. So a reaction is better than silence. You're having some sort of effect. So to make the audience groan or ooh or ah becomes a substitute uh for the laughter this is especially true when you're new you know some comedians when they're new they'll discover something that gets a laugh that they themselves don't really like but it works yeah so they stick with and they keep doing it bobcat goldthwait and emo phillips in the 80s they both both affected a strange voice. Yeah. It's not necessary for the material because the material on its own is funny. But I'm sure when they started,

they discovered that they got a greater reaction when they did that voice as opposed to when they did not. So they stuck with it, perhaps for way too long. But comedians do that. You find what works early on you stick with it so the comedian finds something that gets a reaction and they're not getting the laughs they might lean into it i do see that with younger comics at the comedy store and some older comics who just don't have it i won't mention any names but we all know comedians that are professionals

they do it and they're really not that great but if you just keep doing it long enough you can figure out the magic tricks behind it of how to get a reaction yeah um how to open with something how to close with something you have confidence you have stage presence you're just missing that it factor of being truly hilarious but you know you learn how to tell something that sounds enough like a joke that it'll get enough of a laugh that the show keeps going, even though it was not actually that funny. That's a confidence in cadence. Most stand-up is that. Even comedians that are truly funny will all employ certain devices and iniquities.

Iniquities? Not a word. But what's the example? I'm trying to think of a callback, a callback itself. Isn't funny. It's a gimmick, but strong comedians use callbacks. We comedians use callbacks because it's an effective device. The audience is always impressed. Oh, I remember he said that at the start. Um, another device. And I don't think comedians even think this intentionally, it just happens. If you say something, if you go on a long rant without pausing, do it for a full 60 seconds, when you stop, the audience applauds.

Always happens. Yep. You could be funny, you could be unfunny, it doesn't matter. You stop, the applause comes. So there's certain gimmicks. It's useful when you need to drink water. Comedians drink a lot more water today than they used to. And that's the problem with comedy.

Yeah, there's a lot of Richard Pryor specials. He doesn't take a single sip of water. Now everybody has two bottles there. It's like a prop, you know. Yeah, that's the difference between old comedy and modern comedy. Old comedy, it was just a stool on the stage and a microphone. Now, stool, stage, two bottles of water. Well, I think a lot of this extremely tiresome debate, you know, you'll see whenever one of

these comments comes out of the new special, you'll see people have the same debate over and over again about, you know, what you can and can't say. Oh, that's just the audience doesn't like that kind of joke, right? The audience's tastes have changed, right? And so when you talk about some of these shifts where, you know, our new taboo is, you Right. And so when you talk about, uh, some of these shifts where, you know, our new taboo is, you know, defaming a group of people, right. Um, that, uh, you know, sometimes I look at an audience having that reaction. I say, no, the audience just doesn't like the joke anymore. You know, the audience just believe that that's not true about trans people or black people or whatever you want to say. You know, that's,

that's an old joke. Like we, we have changed as a population and are simply not having a reaction um uh but you know how do you uh compare that to you know the the censoriousness of the past right like is it the same type of thing as that guy doing the citizen's arrest of, uh, of, uh, the comic you mentioned, or is it, is it actually different? Well, it depends on the situation, the, uh, the, the example that we're using, you know, nobody ever wants to admit that they're a censor or practicing censorship. So when right wing people, whether it's politicians, legislators, uh, network, when they, uh, censor something, whether it's drag queens or whatever, or 1619 project, they'll say, it's not censorship. We just want to protect the children.

There's a justification there. Left-wing people, there's a very similar thing. It's not censorship. We just want, this is bigotry and we don't want it there. Both technically are censorship. Just depends on your point of view, whether you feel it is justifiable or not. In theory, the suppression of bigotry sounds perfectly logical to me. Why would you not want to suppress bigotry? But because of the First Amendment and the dogma that we have about only two amendments, the First and the Second Amendment, those are the amendments that people scream about the other amendments. Most people probably don't, wouldn't be able to name what they are. Um, it, it is censorship to, to suppress, uh, blackface technically is censorship, but most people are not advocating for a more blackface, you know, maybe the prime minister of Canada and that's it, you know, right. Something minister of Canada and that's it. You know, it's something where like Netflix literally pulled off a bunch of old episodes of television, like in the wake of George Floyd's murder.

And they 30 rock was pulled from a few streaming services, a few episodes, an episode of the, of the new Bob and David show. It is censorship. I don't think you could argue that it is not censorship. People do argue that it isn't censorship because they feel that it's good. But I think it is still censorship. But I sympathize with the notion of suppressing bigotry more than I sympathize with the idea of suppressing anti-bigotry. And you see both exercised in American culture. A textbook or a book that teaches about racist history gets

suppressed, gets censored. Anti-bigotry is being censored. Likewise, blackface or something that is considered transphobic or homophobic gets suppressed. It's also censorship. They're both censorship. But depending on what your ideology is, you're going to sympathize with one more than the other. And the one that you sympathize with publicly, you'll probably deny that it's censorship. What about the, you know, when the audience has a mass reaction about something, right? Like so often when you're talking about the biggest comedians who do the specials about like, oh, I'm not allowed to say this anymore, but I'm going to do it anyway. I think it's talking about the reaction. I think it's a convenient way to absolve yourself of all blame for bombing. All comics,

they always would say when I was starting to stand up, there's no bad audiences. You can't blame the audience. I always blame the audience. I also, when I bombed, I don't know how comics do this. A comic who bombs, who just powers through as if they're not bombing. That's what a professional is supposed to do. I could never do that. If I did one joke that fell flat, I threw out my whole act and the whole thing was about how the joke didn't work

and I was chastising the audience, you know, and it became funny because I was angry and indignant and angry comics are always- I did a lot of open mics with guys like you. You did? Yeah. I mean, it's a bad habit at the beginning to be like it always worked for me for some reason i could always save my bombing by addressing the fact

that i was bombing yeah addressing the fact that i was bombing became funny yes but um so the idea that it's the audience's fault they're the ones that are too sensitive whereas it's the audience's fault. They're the ones that are too sensitive, whereas it's not the structure of what you've put together that's failing. Because every comedian knows as you're developing, you try something, it doesn't work. You think it's funny when you try it, when you first approach the stage, it doesn't work. You try it again, it doesn't work. Then you start to rearrange the words a little bit. Maybe if I said it like this, maybe if I added that, and then slowly but surely, there's a good chance it might start to work. So that's what you do when the audience gives you that kind of resistance, you adjust. You don't say, well,

no, this is the absolute. Now there's the other end of it where you might be doing a routine that is always killed. And then all of a sudden it stops working. And that could have something to do with different perspectives or different generations or an audience adjustment more often has to do with the comedian getting tired of the material and it just stops working when did you start i started in about uh well i've been doing comedy since 2002 i started doing stand-up as one really needs to do it in probably 2009 in new york city okay uh 2010 something like that i started doing it very, you know, regularly, hitting it hard.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I can't even imagine if I had not quit stand-up. I quit in 2006. I have great memories.

It's fun to watch people you start with continue on and have success, you know. And it's also sad to see people you start out with die. You know, a lot of the comics that I've worked are dead it's crazy yeah same um but the late 90s was sort of had one foot in the past one foot in the future i was doing stand-up when dane cook blew up and became a sensation he was really the first comic to sort of court social media he was matt rife before matt rife was matt rife you Matt Rife, you know. I don't know what my point is,

but just looking back on that era, Zach Galifianakis was part of our stand-up scene in Vancouver in those days. He had done a show

for VH1 that failed. He wasn't a movie star yet and he came up to Vancouver to film a terrible TV show with Jason Priestley. And Jason Priestley used to come to our stand-up shows

on Wednesday nights because he knew Zach. And Alan Cumming, the actor, used to come to our stand-up shows on Wednesday nights because he knew Zach. And Alan Cumming, the actor, used to come to our shows on Wednesday nights in Vancouver. We had a cool

sort of alternative comedy scene in Vancouver in those days that was really, I don't know, all the comics were great. This guy, Graham Clark, who's still in Vancouver,

hilarious, wonderful comedian. Phil Hanley, who's a comedy seller comic, he started, I remember his first set, he started there. Zach, doing open mics with him every week, four or five nights a week for three years. It was just a glorious time. And I wonder sometimes, I had a couple lines in my act,

I wonder what the reaction would be to them today. I wonder if my perspective would be different. You know, this argument, this idea that you can say whatever you want and that it's just whining. I wonder if I kept doing stand-up, if I would still believe that. Oh, yeah. I mean... Or if I would have joined the indignant crowd because I had two different lines, two different acts. I had an insult act and a normal act.

And there's words in those acts that are taboo today. Yeah. One joke in particular. So I don't know, like if that joke would be totally taboo today, you certainly couldn't do it on the tonight show. Well, it's funny how our, uh, you know, our own reactions to jokes change. I remember that, uh, you know, Sarah Silverman used to do, you know, her whole act was saying the worst thing possible as sweetly as possible. And she did a joke where she used a slur for Asian people, but she used it in a clever context. Right. And then the Asian anti-defamation league, I forget the name of the actual group, but it was a guy named Guy Aoki. I remember. Yeah. She went on Bill Maher and they had a debate about it. And she was so firm in her position that she put it in her movie that came out,esus is magic she

had a whole segment yeah about this back and forth i think she like sang a song to gaya yoki and all this sort of thing and i watched this as probably a you know 22 year old comedy fan or whatever in my early 20s and i was on her side i was like no this is comedy and she there was no racist intent in this joke this is a joke about racism, all the things I would have said. Right. And then like 15 years later, I went back and like looked at a, the transcript of Bill Maher,

the Bill Maher interview and be the actual joke. And I was like, Oh, I'm on guy Aoki side, like everything that he's saying in the interview. Right. Where he's like, actually,

you know, you have to look at the broader context here and the way this word has been used for a long time. And it's not, you know, like you have to think about the impact on the audience and da, da, da, da. And I was like, and I think she also now feels the same way about it. I think though sometimes spokespeople are not the greatest spokespeople.

So that guy, Guy Aoki, was a humorless dude. I remember him complaining about all kinds of different Aoki, was a humorless dude. I remember him complaining about all kinds of different things and he was super humorless. And so even if you agree with him, you don't really want him to be the spokesperson. And I see that all the time in our culture today in politics. I mute people I agree with. I'm like, okay, enough. I get it. I agree, but shut the fuck up. And so sometimes Yeah. And so there's, sometimes the spokespeople are not going to be very good at getting people on their side

simply because of the demeanor or the articulation. You know, that guy, I remember that Bill Maher debate and that slur was taboo, certainly in my universe. I don't know any comedian in Vancouver that ever would have used the phrase on stage.

It was just, uh, it was too much. It was like the N word almost had that kind of impact. Um, but he, he just, he did.

He was not the type of person that I would want as my spokesperson either, especially not as somebody involved in comedy. It just was so serious, you know? And, um, so sometimes the delivery has to be, I don't mean comedy delivery. I mean, just the delivery of your message has to be packaged in a certain way,

in a totally unrelated manner. Timothy Leary, you know, I, I'm a big LSD advocate. I think it's great. I think, uh, you know, in the right set and setting, nothing could be better. And I think Timothy Leary ultimately is responsible for the criminalization of LSD. He was not very articulate. He thought he was, but he was boring. He was bland. He was drab. He droned on. He was not a great performer. Whereas in the hands of somebody else who may be a more adept communicator, it wouldn't have been as alarming. So messaging is important when you're making an argument. Let's get into the history a little bit more.

When you say that so much of the time, these culture war dust-ups about pop culture are fake. They're put in place by powers that are trying to propagandize. What do you mean by that? Well, again, it depends on the example that we're looking at. A good example today is the idea of the college campus, that there's this crisis in free speech. For a generation, Charles Koch of the Koch brothers, I can't really say Koch brothers anymore because they're all dead except for one guy. So he's the Koch brother. They have looked to the college and university campus as what they call a great investment.

And they want to groom a generation of scholars that will propagate that sort of Koch brothers ideology that there should be no regulations, this and that. That has been a long game for them since the 1980s. So ultimately, they look for opportunities. How do we remove people that are our adversaries from positions of power and replace them with the people that we train. So the idea that the head of Harvard has been bounced, this is seen as an opportunity. And so there's a reason it becomes part of the political debate. And when you hear like this hysteria that college campuses are anti-speech and that conservatives are the new free speech champions. There's a reason that you hear it repeated all the time.

A lot of these media outlets are funded by the same think tanks that advocate Koch brothers philosophy. You have the Bradley Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the DeVos Foundation, the Scaife Foundation. They're all billionaire funded. They fund hundreds of different websites, radio hosts, social media accounts. It sounds conspiratorial, but it's out in the open. There's no secrecy to it. You could read Dark Money by Jane Meyer. It's a great bestselling book. You could read Shadow Network by Ann Nelson, another great book on the same stuff. A really obscure book that deserved more attention called Free Speech and Coke Money, which is all about funding this

campaign to demonize college campuses and to bit by bit knock down sort of the liberal establishment that stands in the way of this sort of Koch brothers philosophy. So that is actually well documented. It's out there, but people don't really care. They read and they believe what they hear repeated. Because they're funded by billionaires, they can afford to continually be repeating the same thing over and over and over. they can afford to continually be repeating the same thing over and over and over. Ben Shapiro did not become famous because people think he's the most talented person. It's because he got the billionaire oil frackers, the Wilkes brothers, to give him startup money.

So there's unlimited resources to keep pumping it out there. He's just one of hundreds of different examples of that. And there's a real irony, just returning to the campus thing, where the complaint for a decade has been, oh, there's no free speech on college campuses because we've got all these left-wing students who are bullying the conservative speakers out. And then suddenly the shoe's on the other foot and they're kicking out the heads of the universities for allowing the wrong kind of speech on the campus. One thing that I forgot to point out is that a lot of the speakers, the conservative speakers, if we can call them that, or the bigoted speakers who have been subjected to protests on college campuses. Yeah, bigoted is more important than conservative is the more operative word. They tend to be invited not by the campus, but by private conservative groups that set up on campus. And those private conservative groups, like TPUSA, are funded by the same elements, the Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation, DeVos Foundation.

And they distribute how-to books, film people when they're arguing with you. You can use it on social media to demonize liberal people. Here's a list of speakers you could invite, and it might be the author of The Bell Curve. It might be Ann Coulter. This is what you do when the protest erupts, an anticipated protest. You invite a speaker to express bigotry. Well, you can assume that people are going to object and protest. So it's not a matter of free speech and exchange of free ideas, but an orchestration of intentionally bringing somebody that's going to incite the crowd, document that incitement, use it as evidence that the school

is opposed to free speech, then threaten their public funding if they don't expel those who protest it. This is the great irony. The bigoted speaker is used as the example of free speech, but the protester objecting to bigotry is used as an example of censorship rather than another expression of free speech, which it is. So rather than free speech versus censorship, what you really have is free speech versus free speech batting against each other. Once again, the bigot versus the anti-bigot. And unfortunately in our society, because of the repetition of the internet, people who are opposed to bigotry are being framed as being opposed to free speech. And people who express bigotry, instead of being framed as being opposed to whatever, this demographic or this minority

group are being framed as the heroes of free speech. And this is an incredible distortion that seems obvious to me, but when all the propaganda is being repeated nonstop, people fall for it. Yeah. And that cycle is used to bring even more attention to the views of the person who was supposedly kicked off that like the, uh, it be in almost every case has become enough of a media firestorm. Well, it's not even just that, but then they also become a person worth funding. So they'll get an influx of cash from the Heritage Foundation. Talking Points USA, again, it's not an egalitarian effort. It is a well-funded effort. These people like Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro, do you really think they're talented?

people like Charlie Kirk or Ben Shapiro, do you really think they're talented? Do they have some sort of thing to offer that other people don't? That talks very quickly. I mean, they're not funny people. They don't create things, but they are a good investment because they will push that point of view. And that goes way, way back. The Heritage Foundation, I talk a bit about in the book how in the early 1990s, they paid the Rush Limbaugh show a million dollars a year, something like that. This is from the Jane Meyer book, Dark Money, to push their talking points integrated into his commentary as if it were his own thoughts. Yeah. So that's even more common today. And if you see somebody like a Jordan Peterson who, you know, if you look at him 20 years ago, he believes in global warming. You look at him now, he doesn't. What happened? What changed? Could it be that suddenly he's funded by the Heritage Foundation? Could it be that the funding he receives from these foundations has something to do with the change in position? Is this something that also happened to start? This is the present moment. Is this like a pattern that has happened throughout the 20th century?

Well, not really. I mean, in the post-war period, most of what they called think tanks were liberal think tanks. The Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation. The reason those think tanks, despite having the names of industry uh the reason they were liberal think tanks is because uh they were trying to distance themselves from bad pr when henry ford

died it was well known that he was an anti-semite who had promoted hitler and the ford motor company and henry ford's son decided that they would rebrand the Ford Foundation as a purveyor of liberal causes to sort of circumvent the disreputable history. Same thing with the Carnegie endowments. Carnegie was considered this corrupt titan of industry who got all these sweetheart deals and contracts and raised the palms of politicians in the late 19th century, then started all these endowments to fund libraries and different things. And you still saw those names in the 80s on PBS, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, funded by the Ford Foundation. So in the post-war period, the liberal establishment was far more dominant than the conservative establishment.

And things like the John Birch Society and the Barry Goldwater campaign and their resistance to the civil rights movement really discredited them by the late 60s when everybody, when I say everybody, the majority of the population was on the side of civil rights and looked at Martin Luther King as this iconic hero, as opposed to a communist dupe, which is what the conservatives wing was, uh, saying in the 1950s. So anyways, there was a guy named Paul Weyrich who was a lecturer on the John Birch society, a speaking circuit. And he would, you know, accuse Eleanor Roosevelt of being a communist stooge, accuse the United Nations of being a communist front, accuse the civil rights movement of

leading America down the road towards tyranny, of the Voting Rights Act of 65 and the Civil Rights Act of 64 were going to remove American freedoms, you know, it was a threat to freedom and liberty. This is the type of thing that this John Birch society, uh, lecturer Paul Weirich was, uh, was saying in the early 1960s. And he would speak for GOP women's groups in Wisconsin and they would complain to the head of the GOP. Why are you sending us these extremist, uh, speakers? This guy says that Eisenhower is a communist dude, you know, he's a, he's a good Republican, you know? So this was this guy, Paul Weyrich, in the 60s. And the John Birch Society, for people that don't know, it was the far-right organization of its day. But it was widely ridiculed because they believed the Beatles were a communist conspiracy.

Everybody made fun of them. They were made fun of in Mad Magazine, one of George Carlin's very first stand-up routines. You can see him do it on the Merv Griffin Show in black and white in 65. He was making fun of the John Birch Society. Bob Dylan wrote a famous song making fun of the John Birch Society. So this guy, Paul Weirich, knew that the John Birch Society had become a laughingstock. They were supposed to be a far-right, anti-communist, anti-civil rights organization. They did get a lot of traction. They endorsed Barry Goldwater for president. A lot of people feel that they cost him the election because it helped portray Goldwater as an extremist. distanced himself from it and rebranded himself in 1973 with funding from the Coors beer dynasty and the aforementioned scafe foundation. One of these billionaire foundations that still funds things like a TP USA today, they founded something called the heritage foundation.

The heritage foundation is still one of the most prominent think tanks in America. That's probably the think tank. Most people would name if they could think of one. Yes. And they basically were the John Birch Society, but without saying those words. They were still opposed to the civil rights movement. things that the Heritage Foundation got involved in in 1974 was a notorious censorship case in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in which black history was being purged from the textbooks. There was a group of reactionary parents that objected that a textbook taught about the civil rights movement and it quoted the lyrics to We Shall Overcome. They considered this communist propaganda and there was this big to-do in Kanawha County

and it became a big cultural moment. It was covered by the press and 60 Minutes showed up. The Ku Klux Klan got involved. Now, the Ku Klux Klan was defending the parents who wanted to purge black history from the textbooks. Where did their legal counsel come from when they wanted to challenge these things in the courts? The Heritage Foundation, the first thing they ever did

was provide the lawyers free of charge to defend the parents who wanted to remove Black history from the textbooks in Kanawha County, West Virginia. You're right, it does still sound familiar. So when you see the objection that the Heritage Foundation has to things like the 1619 Project, it's essentially identical. Paul Weyrich was the founder of the Heritage Foundation. He later became the founder of the Moral Majority and recruited a preacher named Jerry Falwell, one of the most pro-censorship organizations you could name.

He also helped facilitate the Christian Coalition. He drafted Pat Robertson into politics. He also founded something called the Council for National Policy, which still exists. And in 2016, it was members of the CNP that were advising Donald Trump's transition team. that were advising Donald Trump's transition team. So there's this incredible legacy lineage that goes back to the 1960s, a long game strategy that was not effective

at manipulating people in the 60s. Some people, but not most people. Today, it's far more sophisticated. It's far more well-funded and far more effective. And to me, it's far more obvious, but it doesn't get talked about much. Members of the Heritage Foundation get invited on panels on MSNBC, CNN, Fox. They'll say so-and-so is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

And then they let the person speak. They don't explain what the Heritage Foundation is, what its history is, what a senior fellow means. It's normalized. It's a mainstream organization now. Or that's how it's seen by people. Yeah. Yeah. And it has extremist roots and it's been an anti-black organization from the very beginning, although Clarence Thomas is associated with it and his wife is still associated with the

John Birch Society. But even in the 60s, the John Birch society would recruit like one black guy one jewish guy one woman to have a woman say the women's rights movement is evil yeah to have the one black dude say the civil rights movement is a communist conspiracy to have the one jewish guy say that john birch society is not a anti-semitic organization even though the co-founder was a holocaust holocaust denier i'm gonna have i'm gonna hazard a guess that a lot of these organizations that were founded by censors and founded on censoriousness are now the same ones saying uh free speech is in threat as under threat uh etc what was the same argument in the early 60s the preacher before jerry falwell that was

most prominent in a reactionary was Billy James Hargis, who was another guy that was parodied in Mad Magazine. And I think Don Imus had a character on his radio show that was like a reactionary preacher that was based on... Billy James Hargis wrote a book that was called... What the fuck was it called? It was called The Real Threat, The Far Left, or something like that. was called. It was called the real threat, the far left or something like that. And it did make that argument that they're the ones that are trying to censor conservatives. They claim to be

in favor of free speech, but they want to suppress us. And again, it came back to the idea that people were trying to suppress bigotry. They were trying to suppress nonsense that was deriding the civil rights movement as this commie conspiracy and that the Voting Rights Act would lead to a tyrannical dictatorship. So a lot of the talking points then as now are the same. The big difference is they weren't effective back then and they are effective now. So Richard Pryor is the co-screenwriter of blazing saddles it comes out in january 1974 it's a hit movie plays throughout the year that same year that summer richard pryor is doing stand-up comedy in virginia yes after his stand-up act is done a concert he did great the local police issued a

warrant for his arrest they tried to arrest him in his dressing room they couldn't find him they contacted his manager his manager sent him to the police station the next morning. He had to get fingerprinted, he was booked, he was charged with disorderly conduct because at that point, most obscenity laws had been overturned as unconstitutional. So if a policeman arrested you for obscenity, the chances are the charges would get thrown out. So they came up with different charges. When somebody was a stripper or if they swore on stage, they would get charged with disorderly conduct. So Richard Pryor was arrested in 74 for disorderly conduct for saying the same words that were in the movie Blazing Saddles. So when people say you couldn't make

Blazing Saddles today, well, you know what? You also won't get arrested for saying those words on the stand-up you could barely make it at that time yeah which mel brooks has argued yeah it was just like they just sneaked it through that it was and it was barely exhibited or or whatever though i'm sure it fit i'm sure it faced plenty of censorship just across the country if they were arresting richard prior in virginia they were maybe not showing that movie uh that widely no i think there was a different standard there was a different standard. There was different standards for what was permissible in movies

as opposed to network television. You look at how censored network TV was in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. But movies, you could get away with a lot in the 70s. But it took a lot of sacrifice because a lot of people got arrested along the way. Deep Throat, I think, came out in 72 or 73. And so that was a result of the Supreme Court overturning obscenity laws. Suddenly there was a flood of pornographic theaters and pornographic bookstores all over America. But the lead up to that included movies that were not pornography, like Candy, which is a movie written by Terry Southern with a soundtrack by the Birds. Vixen, which is a Russ Meyer movie from 1969.

The Magic Christian, which is another Terry Southern screenplay. Trying to think of the others. These were not pornographic movies. Russ Meyer was maybe a little bit soft core, but when these movies were playing in 1969, local vice squads, wherever the city may have been, would raid the theater,

confiscate the film print, arrest the projectionist, arrest the manager, arrest the person selling tickets, and threaten them with severe jail time. Now, this was horrific because projectionists had no say in what was being projected. The Wow. post Naked Lunch, post Tropic of Cancer, post Lady Chatterley's Lover, post Lenny Bruce, which were the early 60s censorship cases, and Howell, Allen Ginsberg in the late 50s. Each step of the way, each one of these court cases freed things up a little bit more,

a little bit more, a little bit more, until by the late 60s, it became obviously unjust that people who were just selling tickets were facing jail time. So ultimately, all these censorship laws and obscenity laws were challenged and overturned. And that period from 64 to 74 is the most interesting if you want to study freedom of speech in America and the difference between today and before those cases, what you couldn't say then. The taboos were far greater then because you could go to jail for saying something that was taboo. Today, if you say something that is perceived as transphobic, you might feel the weight of the world on you on social media,

but you're not going to go to jail. You might lose a job. You might not be hired for a job in the future, but there's a big difference between that yes you could be enforced by the government you could be potentially blacklisted in uh certain ways and what what occurs to me is you know in at least in terms of what i do that uh in the comedy world that uh you know the the legacy of that time is like sort of part of the the memory of comedians right. Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor and all the, all those battles that were fought as being like, Hey, you know, people had to fight for our freedoms kind of right. Like everyone knows the legacy. I mean,

like a lot of comics now listen to Lenny Bruce go, I can't figure out why this is funny, but like, I can tell it was important. And the strange thing is that this new sort of false message of you can't say anything anymore is being compared to those older days. It's like, you know, making use of this deep narrative that we have of being censored and not being able to speak, but to sort of false purposes. By today's standards, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin would be considered woke because they were progressive thinkers of their day. And so I don't know what my point is. And again, I do like to emphasize because people like to take sides. It's not that there aren't modern taboos. There are. There are things that you can't really get away with saying without some sort of blowback or not being invited again to the party. I mean, when we're having these repetitive arguments over and over again about cancel culture and comedy and et cetera, you've taken a broad historical perspective.

Like, what do you hope that people would see differently when they're looking at them? Well, propaganda should be obvious. Unfortunately, it's not. I think we propagandize ourselves because we have a phone in our pocket that we're scrolling through over and over and over. My dad, when I was a child, he read the newspaper every week, but he only bought it on the weekend. So he read the newspaper once a week. He read horrific headlines about horrific things happening in the world. And then he threw it away. Today, we get those same horrific headlines, but we scroll through them over and over and over again. It has this insidious effect, this repetition, which makes us feel almost demobilized by the horrible things that are happening in the world. And I think maybe it creates a state of anxiety that we wouldn't necessarily have if we were just reading those headlines once a week.

Yeah. As opposed to all day, every day, all night, every night. And if we took a broader historical perspective about what's actually happened and how this stuff is situated. You would be able to see through the horseshit. The idea that you can't say anything anymore. The word anything. Yeah.

The idea that we're in any kind of worse censorious regime than we were a couple decades ago. You could make a very healthy argument that saying things about transgendered people today is far more taboo than it was in 1991. I don't think there's any way you could argue otherwise. Yeah, that's true. You know, same with the defamation of a disabled person or any number of words that maybe we grew up with, people of our age group that we didn't think of as slurs, which now are categorized as slurs. Those are certainly contemporary taboos. But those being taboo is a far cry from not being able to say anything anymore.

You can't say specific slurs anymore. Okay. I'll give you that. But compared to what you couldn't say as recently as the 1980s, putting bigotry aside, just in terms of expressions of sexuality, criticism of foreign policy, criticism of religion, swearing on stage, almost all of comedy falls into one of those categories now. Yes. You know? And all of it would have been taboo. Nikki Glaser, who I love,

would have been in prison doing hard time. Just for doing a pussy joke. Yes. 1962, Lenny Bruce got arrested in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard because he used the word schmuck on stage. Who even thought schmuck was a swear? Well, they didn't.

They wanted to arrest him and he didn't say anything that was arrestable. Ah, okay, got it. And when he came out into the parking lot, the sheriff's department made him roll up his sleeves. They were looking for track marks, which in those days you could get arrested for drug use if you had needle marks in your arm. They didn't find any track marks on his arm. So they just went through what they heard and the decided schmuck was a reason enough for him to be arrested and charged with obscenity.

I think comics today should count ourselves lucky by those. Yes, very much so. Yes, very much so. And to say that you can't joke about anything anymore is also sort of an insult to George Carlin, who got arrested in 1972 in Wisconsin for swearing, got fired in Las Vegas just for saying shit in 1969. Richard Pryor also got fired for saying shit in Las Vegas in 69, arrested for swearing on stage in 1974. Honey Bruce arrested throughout his career. Mae West arrested for doing a play called Sex, which was all innuendo. It wasn't even explicit or graphic. She was convicted of obscenity. She was sent to prison, did 10 days in a prison workhouse in New York, Mae West. So there's just all these examples. And then right through into the 80s, you had two live crew on trial for obscenity in Texas and in Florida. And people who sold two live crew records were standing trial for distributing obscene material. Andrew Dice Clay in 1990, I think, had to cancel a gig in Dallas, Texas because the DA said that if they proceeded with the show, he would be arrested for obscenity.

Ironically, they were objecting to Andrew Dice Clay's obscenity using words like shit, fuck, cunt, and not bigotry. Yeah, not any of the massive bigotry he's had. So today, the aversion to Andrew Dice Clay is for a different reason altogether. Yeah. So there are these shifts in the culture. The things that we get mad about are for different reasons. shifts in the culture the things that we get mad about are for different reasons i would argue that getting mad about bigotry is uh far more rational yeah and far more understandable

and i don't really see it as a horrible thing yeah or anti-speech i mean it's maybe a little bit wrong to expect society to not have any compunctions, any tensing up, any sensorious impulse at all. Well, especially if you consider yourself a fair-minded person to suddenly hear from people younger than you that something you're saying is totally objectionable. Of course, your initial reflex is going to be a defense. You're like, no, no, no, I'm a good person. I'm not, no, no, no, I didn't mean it that way. And so I understand that initial reaction, but we need to get past our reflex to hear what people are saying. And every case is different. Sometimes people have a very valid argument, very rational reason for why they object to something.

Yeah. And just as often, it might be irrational and totally illogical. But we need to really address it on a case-by-case basis. Joe Coy didn't bomb because people were too sensitive. He bombed because he didn't have enough time to prepare or he chose the wrong material or it was a bad night or we don't think he's funny. But it's not because of sensitivity necessarily, but there might be cases where somebody bombs because of the sensitivity of the audience. Every situation is different. Unfortunately, in the culture war, it's all about lumping things together and generalizing.

They're doing this. Now they want to do this. They're trying to take this away from us. They, they, they, they, a giant generalization. Rather than having a bit of flexibility and an ability to say, hey, you know what? This little bit of tensing up that people have is I'm okay with it because I'm on board with the program. And you know what? I'm not being arrested and et cetera. And it's not all a monolith. There are people who I agree with politically, and I hate their fucking guts. I can't stand them.

Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. Thank you once again to Cliff Nesteroff for coming on the show. You can pick up a copy of his book, Outrageous, at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. And just a reminder, when you buy books there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support this show directly, you can do so on Patreon. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name on this podcast and put it at the end of every one of my video monologues. This week, I want to thank April Nicole,

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Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next week on Factually. I don't know anything.