Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) Read online

  CHAPTER 194

  The author interviews Liza Treyger,

  Author: So one thing we talked about when I spoke to you outside the Village Underground last year, and this was before the Louis CK New York Times story came out, so we talked about … You went and did Horace and Pete, and you said you’d been in the Cellar one night, you were talking about smoking, I don’t know what you would call it in America exactly, but marijuana, cannabis, and Louis said not to do it because it would rot your brain, but because that stuff hadn’t come out at all you didn’t mention any of that other stuff, but the other week on the YKWD podcast you said this really interesting thing, which was when you were offered that part it did cross your mind that Louis CK might end up wanking in front of you.

  Liza Treyger: Yeah, of course.

  Author: That’s amazing though. So, like, I guess I’d never heard a woman, a female comedian, say that. I’d never heard anyone say they were worried about that.

  Liza: I don’t know if I was worried. It was a thing that was known about him. Everyone knew and that’s what all my friends asked me when I was like, ‘Holy shit, I’m going to be working with Louis.’ Every single person said, ‘What are you going to do if he takes his dick out?’ Every single person. People didn’t ask, ‘Oh, what’s the part? What’s the show? Where’s it airing? Who are you working with?’ The first thing anyone said was, ‘What are you going to do if he takes his dick out?’

  CHAPTER 193

  Louis does his second spot back at the Cellar. He’s not on the advertised line-up, but Noam’s added a note to the reservations email which is sent to customers,

  Swim At Your Own Risk: We never know who is going to pop in. If an unannounced appearance is not your cup of tea, you are free to leave (unobtrusively please) no questions asked, your check on the house.

  Noam’s also put a sign on the front door,

  Swim at your own risk, we never know who is going to pop in.

  The author asks Noam about the new policy,

  Noam: No one’s going to be a captive audience. Anyone who wants to leave can leave and they don’t have to pay, and anyone who stays will learn something about Louis in terms of how he wants to handle it, and they can draw their own conclusions about this famous man based on what he does or doesn’t say.

  CHAPTER 192

  Weeks earlier, Noam speaks to Louis on the phone. The author asks about the call,

  Noam: I contacted him through a friend of a friend to say I wanted to speak to him.

  Author: On the phone?

  Noam: On the phone yeah.

  Author: How was it?

  Noam: It was fine, he was nice.

  Author: Did he apologise?

  Noam: No. What he said was, ‘Noam, I love you,’ and this is almost a direct quote, ‘And if it’s not good for you or the club that I perform there anymore just tell me, I won’t come in anymore and I will still love you just as much as I love you now.’ That’s what he said.

  Author: How do you know that’s a direct quote? Did you write it down?

  Noam: Well it’s pretty memorable. It’s only a couple of days ago and it’s a pretty memorable phrase coming from Louis CK. He and I have never really had many conversations ever, so … And that’s not exactly verbatim, but it’s almost verbatim, it’s definitely the … Where he said, ‘And I’ll still love you just the same.’ You know, he used the word love and he offered not to come anymore if it was better for me, and he made it clear that if I asked him not to come it would not change the way he felt about me personally, he wouldn’t be angry.

  Author: How did you react?

  Noam: I said, ‘Look, I would hope that you speak to the people around you who are closest to you and you trust most, and gather all the advice that you can about what’s the best way to do this. And once the best option becomes clear that’s the way you should do it, but I’m not going to tell you not to perform anymore. I just want to make sure it’s done in the best way.’ I said, ‘This is from your point of view Louis, this is not about the world or anything like that, it’s like, you want to come back, so from your own point of view you want to do it in the best way that you can.’

  Author: Did you talk about the sign?

  Noam: No, no, I thought of that afterwards.

  Author: Right. So now your goal is to get the message through to his friends to get them to advise him.

  Noam: Yeah, I hope it’s the people that … This is the thing, nobody who I know who cares about him, and I speak to people who are close to him, think that, ‘No, no, it’s fine.’ Everybody believes he’d be better off handling it slightly different, so you would hope that his friends would tell him so, but the thing is, when you’re that famous and that revered, it’s hard for people to talk to you like that, it’s hard for them.

  Author: Even comedians who are his friends?

  Noam: Yeah, even with those people. I believe so. So, you know, when I prepared myself to speak to him I made a decision. I said, look, I’m just going to speak to him like he’s anybody, because I want to be able to, you know, have my piece. I told him what I felt. I’m going through a lot because of this guy. A lot.

  CHAPTER 191

  Before that, Mike Yard introduces Ted Alexandro. Ted used to open for Louis. Ted walks onto the Cellar stage. People clap,

  Ted: But what’s with this PC culture? It’s suffocating right? Do you want to live in a world where a man can’t politely ask a colleague if he can take off all his clothes and masturbate to completion? Is that where we are as a culture?

  Ted talks about President Trump,

  Ted: Donald Trump said when you’re famous you can grab them by the pussy and nothing will happen. Louis’s version of that joke is when you’re famous you can ask them if you can jerk off in front of them and clearly nothing will happen. Oh god, but there’s people, right … Oh, but he’s lost … He’s lost … He’s lost everything. It’s not fair that men should lose everything in a flash, and by everything I mean hardly anything, and in a flash I mean a decade later.

  Ted emails Noam to say he’s putting the set on YouTube. Noam replies,

  Don’t worry about me. I don’t expect anyone to hold their tongue.

  CHAPTER 190

  Before that, Noam receives tweets from @DanaAndJulia. The tweets say he’s been trying to poke holes in their story and it’s painful. They describe what happened with a headliner who masturbated in front of them in a hotel room and what happened afterwards. Noam replies that he never tried to poke holes, he just wanted to learn about it, and he did try to reach out to them privately, but this isn’t for Twitter, so can they email or call him? He says he’s expected to take measures so he feels a responsibility to find out everything he can. Please call. They don’t reply or call. He stops looking on Twitter. He deactivates his account. His stomach acid’s going all the time. It’s very upsetting, this horrible hatred,

  Noam Dworman is a fucking sociopath

  He has no clue that this will be the downfall of a NYC staple

  supporting rape culture

  the club was possibly a toxic environment

  Just another asshole giving abusers a platform

  Fire bomb the comedy cellar

  His father Manny would be embarrassed

  CHAPTER 189

  Noam’s father is dead.

  Author: Talking about Louis’s return, you talked to other people about that, did you ever think about what your dad would have thought of that?

  Noam: Yeah, I felt he would have done exactly the same thing. I asked Ava and she said, ‘Absolutely.’

  Author: Really? Where did you ask Ava?

  Noam: That I remember. It was here. She was over at the house during the summer.

  Author: Sitting around the island in the kitchen?

  Noam: No, in the backyard.

 
Author: And were you sitting at a chair or something?

  Noam: Yeah, just at that table you can see. I asked her what she thought. She was supportive and I said, ‘You know, Ava, I think my father would have been proud of this and would have done exactly the same thing,’ and she said, ‘Absolutely, no question about it.’

  CHAPTER 188

  Noam’s written about around the world. He tells the New York Times,

  I think we’ll be better off as a society if we stop looking to the bottlenecks of distribution — Twitter, Netflix, Facebook or comedy clubs — to filter the world for us.

  He tells the Hollywood Reporter,

  Listen, we are really a free-expression outfit, so let me digress and say that I’ve heard and seen comedians who work for me engage in real vile anti-Semitism, and I’ve never thought I would book them less or even said boo to them. I always felt this is their business. I don’t have to like them, and people should not take me allowing them to perform as my approval of their character or the things they’ve done in their lives.

  He tells the BBC,

  I was worried about the reaction, you know. We’re living in a time now of a kind of call-out culture where if you do or say the wrong thing people look to get even with you, so I was very worried. I am worried.

  He records four podcasts about Louis.

  Author: Why did you not just say no comment?

  Noam: Because I thought that would have made me look bad, that I was being cowardly about it and, I don’t know, I think people would have been more angry to see me not even ready to take responsibility for it.

  CHAPTER 187

  Before that, Noam wakes up at home. There’s a text on his phone,

  Louie is here and he’s going on

  It’s from Val, a Cellar manager. She sent it last night. There are no follow-up texts. Noam asks Liz, the Cellar’s general manager, to send the video. He sits in his pyjamas and watches. Louis doesn’t talk about what he did. He doesn’t talk about his time off. He tells a joke about a rape whistle. Noam tells Liz to delete the video at the Cellar.

  Noam: As soon as I saw it, I said, ‘Oh shit, this is not going to be good.’

  CHAPTER 186

  The night before, Louis does his first set back at the Cellar. As he walks onstage the crowd cheers and claps. The cheering continues as he puts his notes on the piano. It continues as he scratches his head. It continues as he takes the mic out of the stand.

  Louis: Thank you.

  The cheering continues as he takes off his glasses.

  Louis: I know there’s some people out there going, ‘No, no, no.’

  People laugh.

  Louis: That’s okay, I get it, that’s how I feel a lot of the times, when I wake up and I look in the mirror and I’m like, ‘No, no mister, I don’t think so.’

  People laugh.

  Louis: It’s very nice to be here, I took some time off because I just thought, you know, ‘I just want to relax a little.’ I had been working really hard and I thought it would be good to take some time off. It’s a beautiful summer. It’s been a beautiful summer. August is hot. I’m just trying to … this is, this is … I’m a little scared, it’s a little scary.

  A man in the crowd: We’re glad you’re back.

  Louis: Thank you, I appreciate that, it’s nice to be back.

  People clap.

  Louis: I’m really glad to be back too, at the same time I’m scared, so it’s like, I’d rather … I don’t know … I’d rather be in Auschwitz right now in a weird way, but not … I mean Auschwitz now, not in the forties. I mean now, when there’s a Starbucks.

  He tells jokes.

  Some people laugh.

  Some don’t.

  CHAPTER 185

  Hours earlier, Louis does his first stand-up set since the New York Times story was published last year. It’s at a club called Governor’s on Long Island.

  CHAPTER 184

  Author: So between the time of that story being published in the New York Times, his film getting pulled and all that stuff, you hadn’t spoken to him and then he showed up at your club one night?

  Noam: Right. Correct.

  Author: And then you said that you’d discussed … You said that you’d been thinking about this a lot in that time, between those two events, you knew it was going to cause you problems, and I think you said you’d talked to a lot of … I can’t remember how you described them, but clever people, about what to do. I just wondered who you’d been talking to about this?

  Noam: I can’t say because they’re going to get in trouble, but I spoke to some important liberal intellectuals and some important liberal figures in comedy, male and female.

  Author: Okay. So you talked to comedians and you also talked to commentators, as in people who write opinion pieces for major newspapers like the New York Times or whatever, or Wall Street Journal, something like that, but major newspapers, yes?

  Noam: Yes. Big names. Big names.

  Author: Big names, okay. And what feeling had you got back from that?

  Noam: Everybody felt that although I was in a very tough bind, that my arguments were correct. Everybody. Nobody was defending Louis based on what they felt they knew about what he had done or hadn’t done, but nobody felt that I was obligated or that it was something that we would like to see happening in the country, that employers were now obligated to take measures against people who have a story in the New York Times and the employer has no ability to research it, and it’s not involved in his work place, and it’s fifteen years ago, and the person has admitted it … The problem with Louis is he admitted to certain parts of it but he didn’t admit to the worst parts of it, you know.

  Author: Okay. So when you were talking to these people, this was you working up your own argument, poking holes in your own argument, trying to get your argument as strong as possible so you could figure out if you would have a leg to stand on when he did eventually come back?

  Noam: Correct.

  Author: So this was about whether you should allow him back in the club or not, which I think you’d kind of decided that you would allow him back, but you just wanted to have the moral argument set.

  Noam: Or somebody would convince me that I shouldn’t, which wouldn’t have been a bad outcome for me.

  Author: But nobody did?

  Noam: The only argument that they could come up with was expediency, you know, it’s just, like, easier for me if I don’t. But I didn’t feel I could do that. I wouldn’t have felt good about myself, especially with a guy who was figured into the place. I felt I owed him. I didn’t owe him loyalty of letting him play there, but I owed him loyalty not to ban him because I was a coward.

  CHAPTER 183

  Noam writes a new draft of his argument and emails it to a friend,

  We are all living in a hostage video. When James Gunn was recently fired as the director of Guardians of the Galaxy, even his defenders were careful to point out that his jokes were ‘indefensible’ [Noam links to a story on The Daily Beast]. They say it because they have to, I doubt they mean it. If Gunn’s jokes are indefensible, then the Comedy Cellar is indefensible. Every night, tasteless jokes are told, and the audience roars. I’d love to give examples, but I don’t want [to] clue the mob. Suffice it to say that virtually every comedian, even the very famous and beloved ones, have told more than a few Gunns. They’re jokes. Devices. Even as kids we heard dead baby and Helen Keller jokes and we instinctually knew the difference.

  But I understand Disney too. They’re in the kids business. They can’t have a guy telling pedophile jokes (although they were quite comfortable with Roald Dahl) [Noam links to a website about Roald Dahl and anti-Semitism]. They did the math and it was easy. Just like Netflix who apparently fired a man for using the n-word in a conversation about sensitive words — it’s just not worth the risk. Today you
probably can’t quote Pulp Fiction in a conversation about whether to show Pulp Fiction. It’s not deep principle, it’s self-preservation, and who can blame them? (Even priests routinely close ranks to protect their own, I imagine selfless acts of principle are pretty rare among CEOs.)

  People are learning to shut up, and it’s not just jokes, it’s opinions. Many of the best comedians are philosophical contrarians but are now afraid to be too honest (again I can’t give examples). A recent study found that fifty-eight per cent of Americans admitted to holding views they are afraid to share [he links to a Cato Institute study]. Based on experience, I think that number is probably closer to one hundred per cent. At the Cellar, at our back table and various podcasts, we host many journalists, academics, musicians, and other prominent people. Every journalist I’ve met has an opinion he can’t share at the office. Every academic has something they’ll say only when the mics are off. Everybody’s a phoney.

  It feels great to be outraged. Studies of drug addiction teach us about the ‘reward pathway’ of the brain. It’s activated by pleasurable experiences such as eating, sex, receiving praise. You can add righteous indignation to that list. If rats could feel it, they’d keep pressing that bar until they starved to death. We crave indignigasms (indignation + orgasm). To make matters worse, research has found that even as people have fewer things to be upset about, they are biologically programmed [to] redefine new ones into existence [he links to a story on Science Daily]. It’s as if we look at societal issues through a microscope and just keep doubling the magnification so we’ll always have something ugly to look at. And we always react to it the same way — oblivious to the extreme magnification.