Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) Page 5
Author: No, no, no. I think it’s hard to say in absolutes.
Noam: I had a thing yesterday where somebody complained to me about Ann Coulter, because Ann Coulter made some really horrible remarks about the kids and Trump, and I actually emailed Ann. I told her what I thought about the remarks. That was private between us.
Author: Did she get back to you?
Noam: No, she didn’t get back to me but she might or might not, but she saw it. But they’re like, ‘You’re not going to let Ann Coulter in now are you?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, I’m going to let Ann Coulter in.’ This kind of thing … There’s this expectation now.
Author: Who asked you if you would let her in now?
Noam: A guy who works for me. And there’s an expectation that she’s crossed the line, ‘You agree? She crossed the line? She’s done right? You’re not going to have her in anymore?’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m not going to cut someone off because they said something stupid or something I find offensive.’ It’s just … It never ends, it never ends, and the standard will constantly shift.
Author: And partly in your mind there, when you’re talking about a hostage video and stuff, and you’re talking about giving people the benefit of the doubt sometimes or allowing people to backtrack, or giving forgiveness, is it partly because at one point you feel it might happen to you?
Noam: Yes.
Author: Because I think that sometimes. This could happen to me. Someone’s going to find something that I wrote or tweeted or texted to a woman ten years ago or something and it’ll come out.
Noam: I mean, I’m not … I don’t have a constant fear of it, but yeah, it’s something that concerns me, only because if somebody’s upset with me for whatever reason, let’s say they didn’t get spots, it’s not beyond them to put a tape recorder … put an app that records on their phone and try to lead me down the path to saying something that they can then take out of context. And I’ll never be able to wipe the slime off of myself. Even if I survive, it’s there forever, and your great-grandkids will see it when they want to search their family tree.
Author: So you’re quite careful about what you say in the Olive Tree now then?
Noam: Not as careful as I should be … It’s hard, you get carried away.
Author: Well I mean, that’s why it’s oppressive, because you have to constantly live in this fear that someone’s going to film you doing something or record you saying something, and it’s not a good way to live. So you said that you had Milo in there? I heard that podcast that you both did, Sherrod’s Race Wars one, and I guess that’s why he came down to the Olive Tree is it? To sort of say hello or something?
Noam: Yeah, well, I was upset about Milo coming in, not because of his views, but because he had been very cruel to Leslie Jones. She was very hurt by it, and she’s a member of the family, and I felt that … Now, I wouldn’t throw him out if he had come in on his own, but I didn’t think it was right that Sherrod invited him back.
Author: Oh, did Sherrod invite him to the Olive Tree?
Noam: Yeah, and I actually left as soon as he came in. I didn’t want to be seen. That’s just a personal thing about Leslie. I think it’s ridiculous that anybody would care if Milo eats in their restaurant, wherever it is, but this is different, it is a personal friendship and it was personal to her, and I have to worry about having my friend’s back in a sense.
Author: How did people react to him being in there?
Noam: Nobody really seemed to notice. He came with his husband, a nice-looking black man, and it passed.
Author: Did you comp Milo?
Noam: No.
CHAPTER 177
Judy Gold: That kind of material sometimes gets … You know, if I mention the Holocaust … It’s getting worse and worse. It’s really bad. And it’s upsetting.
Author: Do you change some of the jokes that you’re going to do?
Judy: No, never.
Author: Have you ever been telling jokes at the Cellar and people heckled?
Judy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know what, I think more in the old days. Now, you fuck with a comic, you’re out of there. That’s the other thing I love about that club.
Author: What sort of stuff did people complain about? Did anyone complain … I know that you didn’t talk about being gay, onstage, for quite a while. I think you started talking about it in the Nineties?
Judy: Right, the mid-Nineties. I sort of came out as a gay parent. Once I had kids and I had all this material and I was like, ‘Come on, I’ve got to talk about my family in my act.’ I was gay, but I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed as a gay comedian, I didn’t really have anything to say about it in my routine. And here I am, I’m a mother, and what does it tell my kids if I say, ‘Listen, I’m not going to talk about this onstage’? It’s like there’s something wrong with that. But any comic who starts a family, their material changes. Their point of view changes. What they talk about changes. And what they think about changes. And the way they see the world. Their point of view changes. You see it from another person’s eyes.
CHAPTER 176
Wil Sylvince is onstage,
Wil: Everybody was like, how do you feel about what Donald Trump said about Haiti? But I was mad when he said that shit about the Mexicans. What? Do you think when he said that shit about Mexicans, I was like, oh, but he feels different about Haitians? He’s going to let us stay? Right? No, you go out too motherfucker.
CHAPTER 175
There’s another Cellar debate. It’s about free speech on college campuses. The moderator is Kmele Foster. The panellists are Jonathan Haidt, Suzanne Nossel, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Sullivan. Andrew makes an opening speech, which Noam records and puts on the Cellar’s YouTube page,
Andrew: I want to try and draw back a little bit and look at this from the perspective of where I come from academically, which is in political thought. And I think that part of the crisis that we are dealing with is a conflict between two visions of the world. And the vision of the world that is in the ascendant is one that has always been the norm in human society throughout history. And that is that fundamentally you are a member of a group. And that groups compete for power. And that in fact everything in our society is really a function of these power structures. And these power structures used to be defined in classic Marxism as classes. Economic classes. Currently they are more often defined in terms of identity, things you can’t help that you are, or things that you’re proud of that you just happen to be. Your race. Your gender. Your sexual orientation. Your gender identity. And the view is, and you can feel it not just on campus but everywhere, that our society is basically a function of the oppression of some groups by other groups, and that therefore the most important thing to figure out is who is oppressing whom, and the most important thing to do is to resist the powerful or the more powerful and to defend and protect those with less power. And the power is a kind of invisible thing, because it’s not purely class, although class is mixed up with it. It is about how one feels about oneself and how one feels about other people. And so the most powerful group, and you can hear this in the rhetoric every day, are white, straight, cisgendered men. They are the ultimate oppressive force, and you can go down, and there’s a hierarchy, and we could have all sorts of complicated ideas about who’s where in the hierarchy, but essentially that’s what our society is, it’s a constant fight between these groups of people. And in fact because as a society we’re becoming more and more diverse, the intensity of that fight is growing. We are and will be the first white majority country to become a non-white majority country in the history of humankind. These are very powerful psychic effects. And in those circumstances, and especially with incredibly divisive and polarising political parties, we’re beginning to see our entire society and culture governed by which group you’re in, and your ability to represent that group, or to betray that group. And the notion that these
groups have fixed interests and certain ways of thinking that distinguish them from one another. This essentially draws its roots in Marx, but also in the critical theory schools which are now taught as simply the truth in most universities. So we’re concerned if there are too many white people on a panel. We’re concerned if there are too many men. We’re concerned if there are too many straight people. And speech affects power. So because this is so amorphous, if you say something that makes an oppressed group feel more oppressed you’re not just speaking, you’re actually harming those people. Speech is not simply a way in which you are discussing things. It has immediate impact. It has harm. It commits harm against groups. It is a power play, and there is only power in this view of the world. All rhetoric is simply about defending your power or about seizing power for yourself. We are a tribal species. This comes very naturally to us. The history of humankind is really in many ways a story of these struggles between these groups. But there was an experiment in human history, beginning sometime in the seventeenth century, of which this country is the ultimate product, which says that no, no, no, no, no, this is not what we are. We are actually individuals. We have our own selves and we construct our societies to defend ourselves as individuals not as groups. That we therefore recognise, for example, freedom of religion as a fundamental right, because no group can tell you what to believe about the universe. We represent and defend private property, because private property is a way in which the individual is protected from the group and the mob. And we believe that when we’re trying to figure out the truth in a society, the way we do that is argument, we use reason. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re white, black, pink, purple. Whether you’re gay, straight, trans, bi, queer, asexual, you know, the rest of the alphabet. What matters is simply the cogency of your arguments. That’s all. Have you made a good argument? Have you persuaded someone or have you not? And power is really less important than truth. And when you become a citizen of this republic you’re as equal as anybody else, and your opinion is worth something regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman, or black or white. In fact, those things are kind of left behind when we become simply citizens. I became a citizen recently of this country, and I wasn’t …
The audience claps.
Andrew: Thank you. It took a long time but I got there in the end. And I didn’t become a gay citizen. I didn’t become a white citizen. I didn’t become a Catholic citizen. I didn’t become an English-American. I just became a citizen. And my voice has no more power and no more validity than the strength and cogency of my arguments. Now, those two ideas are in direct conflict, and the forces of the group over the individual are immensely powerful right now as society goes through enormous demographic change. And what matters, it seems to me, is that in that process individuals both in the minority and oppressed groups, or in the oppressor groups, are allowed their own conscience, allowed their own voice, and are treated no better and no worse than anyone else. And that’s the conflict. Are you to be treated as simply the member of a group? Is your activity on a campus or in the wider world really a function of power? Or are you an individual capable of making up your own mind, sometimes bucking your own group, saying what you think, and having that being taken seriously on its own terms without being called to account for being a gay person or a straight person or a white person or a black person or all the other characteristics that accumulate onto us. That’s what’s at stake here. The silencing of individuals. The intimidation of individuals by those groups. The loss of imagination and understanding of our society as really one of equals and individuals rather than groups. And power. That’s really what’s at stake. And that’s why this is not just a crisis for the campus. It is a crisis for the general culture. It’s a crisis whereby you can find people on the Right and the Left slowly being purged from positions of influence or from positions or platforms that they otherwise might have, because they’re violating the group norm, because they’re saying something the group doesn’t like, or because they’re acting as if they have a right to say something when in fact because they are white and male, or because they are black and female, or whatever, they don’t have a right to say what they think in that particular circumstance. Those two visions are at war right now. You can see it everywhere. You can feel it. You can feel the air and the oxygen in most of journalism and culture becoming … having a little less oxygen. People being more likely to be called racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in fact, that being the main argument that people use in rebutting other people’s arguments. And that is what I think we need to resist, and that is what I think we’re in danger of completely surrendering to.
CHAPTER 174
Guy Branum writes an article for Vulture,
At the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, there’s a table where the comics sit. It’s where they joke, debate, goof off, and ridicule their friends. As depicted on the FX series Louie, it’s the most fun place to be with the smartest, coolest comics in America. Every club has one, but the Comedy Cellar is the best club, and the table Louis CK sat at was the best table, occupied by the likes of Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Marc Maron. That table is the most important force in comedy. There are rarely women at that table. There are never gay men or trans people.
I’m a cisgender man, thus not someone who has had to deal with sexual harassment of the sort Louis doled out to his colleagues. But I am a gay man, so I understand very well the kind of culture that harassment helps enforce, and which is perpetuated by that culture.
Here’s a New Yorker article from a few months ago about the table [he links to it]. It lists seventeen comedians, including, of course, Louis CK. Only three are women, they are confined to a single line of the article. None are gay men. The article defines the table as sanctified space, reserved only for the realest comics, and discusses their hostility to even minor changes to the table. The article describes how these comedy icons ‘defended the table against comedians who didn’t do stand-up at the Cellar, were hacks, or were dressed badly.’ People who weren’t like them didn’t get to be part of the club. I am not like them. Louis’s victims were not like them.
That boys’ club is the only real structure that exists in stand-up. The patronage and mentorship that good comics receive from more established male comics is how they get stage time, representation, and jobs. Improvisers and actors have schools and casting workshops to help them build skills and connections, but for a stand-up, you’re always just waiting for one of the guys — and it is always a guy — to pay attention and help you out. If you’re not part of their club, you learn that such mentorship rarely comes your way, and when it does, it often has a cost.
Sexual harassment is one of many tools heterosexual men use to remind other comics that our status is provisional. We’re not equals. We’re not colleagues. We’re flavors, we’re different, we’re people who should quietly accept whatever creepiness is presented to us. Mostly, these tools remind us that our status as real comics is provisional. We understand that if we question the rules of the table, if we say there aren’t enough women getting stage time, or that maybe they shouldn’t use that word, or even just that Kesha is more talented than Springsteen, we’ll be expelled.
Louis, of course, sexually harassed numerous comics. He was not expelled. When managers, club owners, and comics became aware that he was assaulting comics, they did not say, ‘Hey, let’s figure out what’s going on,’ or ‘He might be a threat to the other comics.’ They protected him. They made the problem go away. They kicked Megan Beth Koester out of the Montreal Just for Laughs festival.
That’s because Louis’s behavior didn’t hurt the system. It maintained the system. It alienated women from careers in comedy and allowed everyone to continue to live in a world where they could believe that the table, the Official Council of American Funny, was a place only straight men were worthy of reaching. Louis CK once said during a Daily Show appearance, ‘Comedians and femin
ists … are natural enemies.’ The table doesn’t have any space for comedians who are feminists.
I’m scared to write this, because I know the people who sit at the table will see it and say I’m not a real comic, and I don’t value real comedy. Writing this means I never get to sit at the table. At the beginning of my career when I was invited into some lesser comedy boys’ club, I did my best to play by their rules. I kept silent as they denigrated women, or explained to me how I wasn’t like the other gays. It never earned me real respect from anyone, least of all myself. My silence simply empowered a system to treat me and many other people like we were negligible and disposable.
In more recent years, I’ve questioned the established rules of comedy, particularly as they relate to discussion and participation by gay comics. Once I did a TV segment mocking the homophobia of a Comedy Central show. A famous, respected, politically liberal comic unbooked me from his show because he didn’t think comics should criticize other comics in public. He never considered that when the Comedy Central show in question was incessantly ridiculing homosexuality with no gay comics present, they were criticizing those comics. They were criticizing me.
So that’s why I’m writing this, so I no longer have the option of sitting at that table. We don’t need a female comic with provisional status at the table. We don’t need the table to find the trans comic who’s least offensive to them and kind of learn his name. It will still perpetuate a system that privileges and protects the perspective of straight cis men. The table is the problem. Burn the table down.