Comedians Are (Stupid) People, Too
In times like these we often turn to comedians. Please stop.
My seven year old loves a YouTube kids’ show that is all about educating kids about science and history. (Yup, my kid is the best.) The name of the show is Dr. Binocs. The star of the show, Dr. Binocs, is a pair of binoculars that has somehow come to life in the form of a blue cloud-like thing. Dr. Binocs lives with a talking cat named Kitty. And Dr. Binocs uses his mustache for his hands.
No, a cat didn’t just run across my keyboard. All of that is true.
Recently, my daughter and I watched the latest episode. The title was “How Mike the Chicken Survived Without a Head.”
I swear, once again, that what I typed is true and not A.I. Here’s the episode:
Long story short, a farmer cut his chicken’s head off, but apparently, when the farmer cut off the chicken’s (Mike’s) head, he left enough of Mike’s brain to allow the chicken to stay alive. Dr. Binocs taught us that the way a chicken’s anatomy works, there was enough brain left that the chicken could still walk and peck (using his neck). The farmer figured out that he could keep the chicken alive by using an eye dropper to insert water and food into Mike’s neck hole. The farmer also used the dropper to suck the extra mucus out of Mike’s windpipe. Mike lived for a year and half, making money for the farmer touring the sideshow circuit. Mike’s adventures were even covered in Life Magazine.
Mike was literally a chicken with his head cut off, gathering crowds to watch him in various sideshows.
The only difference between Mike and the Rogansphere of white male comedian podcasters is that Mike never thought to interview President Truman.
I am thinking a lot about the space stand-up comedians take up in this current era of the United States of America. As you all know, I’m back on the road doing stand-up for the first time in years with my Who’s With Me? tour. (A few tickets are still available for tonight’s show in Seattle. Lots of tickets available for my shows in South and North Carolina July 11 and 12 respectively.) You would think that I wouldn’t have anything negative to say about my chosen profession. But I have a lot of negative things to say. Not so much about the profession itself, but about how it is covered in the mainstream media who are bothsides-ing themselves into a black hole of irrelevance.
Check out this headline from The New York Times:
Trust me. Andrew Schulz might not be. Actually, Andrew Schulz definitely isn’t. Not even close. Not even if we just recategorized it as “America’s Foremost Comedic Political Journalist.” John Oliver and Last Week Tonight still exist. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show still exists. Ex-comedic actor and writer-turned-news-podcaster Sam Seder and his show Majority Report still exist. Stand-up comedian Francesca Fiorentini and her show The Bitchuation Room exist, and Francesca is here on Substack. But what Andrew has on his side is a successful podcast and the imprimatur of uber podcast bro Joe Rogan.
I’m not going to go through the endless reasons why Andrew Schulz is absolutely 100% not a political voice worth listening to, no matter what side of the aisle you are on. (Ok. Maybe he is worth it if you left the aisles and decamped to the sewers with MAGA.) I will just elucidate a few reasons that Andrew Schulz is only worth your time if you are wasting time. We all love a good time-waster.
Last year, Andrew Schulz had two Black British podcasters on his podcast Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant. On the podcast the two Black British podcasters made comments about how, when you date a Black woman, she helps you become more stylish. Like you get more regular haircuts. You grow a beard. Schultz retorted with "They grow their beard because they need a cushion when they get slapped.”
Can you smell the political commentary? It smells like misogynoir–a special blend that mixes misogyny and racism. Maybe his podcast should be called Andrew Schulz is Fragrant.
I don’t have to tell you that Andrew Schulz is white, do I? The two podcasters ended up apologizing. Schulz did not because OF COURSE.
Months after this interview, rapper Kendrick Lamar released “Wacced Out Murals,” a song on his latest album GNX. In the song, there’s a lyric that goes, "Don't let no white comedian talk about no Black woman. That's law." Even though he wasn’t named directly, Andrew couldn’t resist being in a “battle” with the hottest musician in the world. So in response, Andrew said that he had a plan if he ever ran into Kendrick in real life and Kendrick was without his security team.
“I would make love to him, and there's nothing he could do about it."
Yup. That’s the New York Times’ candidate for “foremost political journalist.”
Andrew Schulz giving Trump some of his trademarked and foremost political journalism, Lastly, there is this nugget from the New York Times article proposing that Andrew is America’s journalistic political voice. Interviewer David Marchese asks Andrew why he uses the r-word in his act. Here’s his answer:
“Now, if a parent ever said, ‘That word hurts me, and I want you to not say it,’ I’m never going to say it in front of them. I don’t want to hurt you. That’s not my goal. But if they’re like, ‘I don’t want you to ever say it again in your life,’ that’s not going to happen.”
Yup! Andrew is defending his use of the r-word, which is so interesting when, right before this, in the same interview, he says he doesn’t use the n-word or the k-word (the Jewish slur). I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that a large part of his audience is Black, and he lives and works in New York City where antisemitism doesn’t go over that well.
Again, this is in the New York Times article opining that Andrew may be “America’s foremost political journalist.” As young people say, “We’re cooked.”
Theo Von is a stupid person pretending to be an even stupider person. Theo Von is a person who, by his own admission, is not very smart and pretends to be even less smart for his comedy act. There’s nothing wrong with that. The history of comedy in America is (Matt) rife with comedians taking on the character of the stupid or simple-minded person. It is Costello of Abbott & Costello. It is Jerry Lewis. It is Gracie Allen of Burns and Allen.
Even comedians who are doing more complex characters often rely on either a childlike innocence or the naiveté of someone who takes everything at face value. I’m thinking about Andy Kaufman, Maria Bamford, early Bobcat Goldthwait, Goldie Hawn, many of Jim Carrey’s most well-known characters, Robin Williams on Mork & Mindy, Steven Wright, Brian Regan, and Nate Bargatze. As an audience, we are often laughing at the fact that this person just doesn’t get it. And they seem to repeatedly not get it.
These comedians have thrived alongside the other types of comedians, including – and for our purposes, most notably – the comedian who “really gets it,” a.k.a. the political comedian, a.k.a. the “truth-teller.” I’m putting that last designation in quotes because you can be in this category of “truth-teller” and spend your whole career perpetually spewing nonsense, lies, and doggrel, e.g. Bill Maher.
The “truth-tellers” are comics like Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Wanda Sykes, Will Durst, Bill Hicks, Marc Maron, Chris Rock, Margaret Cho, Lewis Black, Trevor Noah, Hasan Minhaj, Josh Johnson, and hopefully me on a good day. To be clear, truth-tellers don’t always tell jokes about getting to the truth (however they themselves define it). First of all, it would be impossible to always tell the truth and make a living telling jokes. Secondly, we all believe different things to be true. That’s why I call these kinds of comedians “agenda comedians.” They want you to walk out thinking–or at least thinking about–what they think about the state of the world. This is how I can agree with Dave Chappelle 82% of the time, and then I can really not agree with him the remaining 18% of the time. Like really, really not agree.
Of course, there are more than these two types of stand-up comedians. There’s the joke-teller (Mitch Hedburg and Norm McDonald), the dirty joke-teller (Ali Wong and Amy Schumer), the observationist (Sheng Wang and Jerry Seinfeld), the prop comic (Carrot Top), the music act (Flight of the Conchords), the physical comedian (Jim Belushi and Jack Black), the absurdist (Andy Kaufman and Maria Bamford), the insult comic (Don Rickles and, actually, Andrew Schulz fits here nicely), and others.
This is not to say that comedians can’t have more than one move in their act. I would squarely put Richard Pryor in the “agenda comedian” box, but obviously he could tell dirty jokes with the best of them. And every comedian, myself included, pretends they “just don’t get it” in order to get some laughs. Hopefully it also goes without saying that playing the role of dumb person in your stand-up comedy act doesn’t mean that’s who you are. Famously, Jerry Lewis made his classic comedy film The Nutty Professor because he was tired of people thinking that he was just an over-the-top goofball. He wanted them to know that he was also a rampant misogynist and asshole.
Often people think they are paying a comedian a kind of compliment when they put them in the “truth-teller” category, but it can really be a disservice to the comedian. Take, for example, Ellen Degeneres. After Ellen Degeneres came out the closet on her sitcom, there was a want from the media–and even from her fans–for her to be more of a truth-telling, agenda comedian. They wanted her to be a lesbian Lenny Bruce. But this doesn’t really work for Ellen. Ellen is a pretty archetypical “just doesn’t get it” comedian. Her best jokes are based on her onstage character not understanding basic things or pulling apart basic ideas until we, the audience, don’t understand them. I honestly think the best thing Ellen may have ever done onstage during the height of all her swirling “controversy” was to address it through interpretive dance. It was her way of saying, “I refuse to become a ‘truth-teller’ the way that you want me to be.” I often wonder if that push/pull is in some way a part of why she was so hard to work with. Amy Schumer is another comedian who, for a while, was heralded as a truth-teller for (white) women but was really, at her heart, a dirty joke-teller for (straight white) women.
And this brings us back to Theo Von, another Rogansphere comic. Theo Von is doing a 21st-century-version of “the dumb southerner.” It is a role famously played by actor and ubiquitous ‘80s commercial pitchman, Jim Varney, in his character Ernest P. Worrell.
While there are many other comedy archetypes of “dumb southerner” I could pull from (The Dukes of Hazzard’s Roscoe P. Coltrane, stand-up comic Larry the Cable Guy, Don Knotts as Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show), Ernest is really the best comp for Theo Von. They even look alike. But I can’t imagine a scenario where the character of Ernest interviewed President Ronald Reagan and expected us all to take him seriously.
Yet Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, and their dad Joe Rogan have all interviewed politicians–or really played footsie with politicians–and the media has acted like we should take them seriously. None of them broke any news. None of them asked hard questions. None of them held the politicians' feet to the fire. It was just the regular dish sesh that they do with comedians. Swap out the usual comedians for Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Bernie Sanders, or Pete Buttigieg. The reason that they don’t hold politicians’ feet to the fire is simple. They aren’t smart enough to do that. They don’t do any significant show-prep. They aren’t even holding notes to refer to. It is just like a bunch of dudes bro-ing out. The only person with anything to gain is the politician for hopefully looking like they can bro-out with the best of them. The hope is that it translates to votes or at least better vibes for the politician. And then the media buys into the grift.
“I felt like it was supposed to be America first, like, we’re focusing on, like, ‘What are we doing to get things back into America,’ right? To like, increase like the purpose of being an American, to refill our hearts with blood and ... make us feel something again here, and make us be excited about being an American. ” –Theo Von
Let’s be honest. This is not the take of a person who even follows the news regularly. This is your normie democrat friend who hated Cuomo two years ago and then voted for Cuomo this week. This is your Republican friend who voted for Trump, but doesn’t know who his own congress person is and heard from a “good source” that Kamala “isn’t really Black.” None of those things are arrestable offenses, but they should at least keep you out of the position of being a podcast kingmaker of any kind.
Before you say, “Hey Kamau, I think you’re being too hard on the kid.”
Theo Von is 45 years old.
And this is Theo Von having dinner with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. As you can see, they are having fun, and Theo isn’t screaming at them, calling them a pair of grifting demons with no moral cores. In fact, he looks like he’s happy that he cleaned his plate because they bought him ice cream just like they promised.
I would feel sorry for these Rogansphere podcast bros for trying to swim in the deep end of the pool if the media wasn’t tossing them pool noodles, putting floaties on them, and calling them all the next Michael Phelps.
But wait! There’s more of them! Dave Smith, who Joe Rogan and the Rogansphere categorize as a political comedian, describes himself as a political commentator and as —AHEM!— a libertarian.
I know what you’re thinking. But no, he’s not a teenager! He’s a 42-year-old man. Dave spent a lot of time advocating for Trump on various podcasts and stages. Dave was a one-issue voter. He voted for Trump because Trump said he wasn’t going to start any new wars.
First of all, I’ve been on Rogan’s podcast twice (never again), but if I’m ever referred to as a Rogan regular, please take me now, Lord!
Secondly, how can you define yourself as a political commentator and fall for a grift as grift-y as Trump’s grift? You’re not a political commentator. You're Trump’s towel boy.
Then there’s the dad of the Rogansphere, Joe Rogan, himself. Recently, on his podcast, Joe had this epiphany:
“The Trump administration, if they’re running and they said, ‘We’re going to go to Home Depot and we’re going to arrest all the people at Home Depot. We’re going to go to construction sites, and we’re going to just like, tackle people at construction sites…’ I don’t think anybody would’ve signed up for that.”
You are forgiven if you aren’t fluent in bro-ese. What Joe is trying to say is–and it pains me to think someone could really believe this–that no one who voted for Trump had any idea that he was going to enact mass deportations.
Heavy fucking sigh.
Exhibit one of 47,081,559,348,215,617.
It is a great time to remind you that Joe Rogan lives in Texas. Rogan literally has ZERO excuse to not know that one of the pillars of Trump’s campaign was mass deportations.
Many a commentator (social media and news media) seemed to be offended that Kamala Harris never sat down with Joe for a Frost/Nixon-esque conversation. Maybe you think she should have, too. But I know that if she had that conversation, she would have 100% lost some dignity in the process. Maybe that’s what it takes for America to elect a Black and Indian woman to be the president. Maybe it takes a woman of color kowtowing to a white man who wouldn’t be able to read, understand, and keep up with the emails she gets before 9am. And I’m including the emails from Doug.
It has been said that Joe Rogan is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person. I think it is deeper than that. I think that the person who thinks that Joe Rogan is smart is a person who has no interest in being smart and would rather have their own heads cut off so someone could just drop the information into their neck. Joe Rogan is a farmer making a living pimping his headless chickens of followers and podcast bros.
Whenever I post social media criticism and mockery about these podcast bros and their second thoughts about Trump, some of my followers (who are comedy fans) come to the bros’ defense. They talk about how we should welcome back the folks who have changed their minds on Trump. I do have that policy, generally. But how quickly and how enthusiastically I welcome you back is in an inverse proportion to what you personally did to get Trump there in the first place. Were you a passenger on the Trump Train or a conductor? Or worse? Were you a wannabe dictator’s useful fool?
Wait… did I just discover a new type of comedian?
“How did Mike the Headless Chicken die?” you ask. One night the farmer forgot to suck the mucus out of his neck, and Mike drowned in his own spittle. I hope Joe Rogan doesn’t forget to suck the mucus out of his guys’ necks... or even his own neck. Whatever I think about them, that would be sad.
You’re With Me
The “Who’s With Me?” Stand-Up Tour is Headed to the Carolinas
I’m coming to Charleston on July 11th and Durham on July 12th. It’s going to be funny. It’s going to be cathartic. It might even get petty because that’s my new year’s resolution, and as you can see from this post it’s going well so far.
Celebrate Black Music Month With the Greatest Rock Band of All Time
It is hard to say Living Colour is my favortie band, because FIshbone exists, but Living Colour is certainly my first favorite band. Living Colour had the honor of doing NPR’s Tiny Desk concert. I was lucky enough to be invited. (I even introduced them, but that’s not in the video.) Although during the end credits you can here me scream, “LIVING COLOUR IS THE GREATEST BAND IN ALL THE LAND!”
In Conversation with Padma Lakshmi
Bay Area people, get your tickets now because this thing is GOING to sell out, and you’ll be sad. I’m talking with my friend Padma about food, activism, comedy, and her new book Padma’s All American.
City Arts & Lectures
Monday, November 17th at 7:30pm
Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco
This is why I no longer take the Times. I switched to the Guardian. No normalizing Trump.
Amazing article!