Rife For Cancellation | Matt Rife | EP 401

It's a modern twist on an old joke. You know what I mean? It was a real circumstance that happened, an exaggerated instance that really happened. And I went, you know, this is a classic joke. Why not give my own personal modern twist on it and move on? The joke's like a minute, 30 seconds. People were like, "All he did was bash women," and I purposely did it first in the show to go, "Hey, just so you know, this is the kind of humor I like to tell, and if it's not for you, you are so more than welcome to turn off the TV right now."

[Music]

Hello everyone! I had the opportunity today to welcome and speak with one of the world's most outstanding current comedians, a young guy, 28 years old, Matt Re. He’s exploded onto the comedy scene in the last few years after having put his time in the trenches. He's been working as a comedian in small clubs and so forth. He started when he was 15, so he put in his 10 years before really becoming popular. He's been the subject of a relatively dedicated cancel campaign in recent weeks, and so we had a chance to discuss that.

To discuss his witty, fast, brave, and appropriate response to that cancellation. To talk about that sort of thing in more detail, and also to detail out the structure of his new tour, and his plans for the future, and why he's doing what he's doing, and what the role of comedy is in the broader world. So welcome to the conversation.

All right, so I've been planning this opening, which I don't usually do because I like to do things spontaneously, but I have to get this one right, okay? So you got to help me get this straight, okay? Okay, so now you're a comedian, and you got canceled for a domestic assault joke, and then in response to that, instead of apologizing like a good boy, you put up a joke ad site about special needs helmets to protect the people who were offended by you. And now to get yourself out of trouble, you're going to come on my podcast?

I never planned that! I was hoping it would make things way worse. I'm hoping we can drive sales to that very real website about the helmets. Yes, anyways, congratulations on that! I thought the joke was funny, risky, and funny, and I thought your response was dead on.

Like, one of the things I've noticed is that people who are harassed by sensorial-minded nullwits almost always back down and apologize. My sense of that is that a mob comes after them first for whatever hypothetical sin they've committed, and then they apologize, and a second mob comes after them for that.

Exactly! And then they lessen their own character by the false apology, and they embolden these idiot accusers. So why did you decide, when this blew up around you, and I mean in some ways, it's a tempest in a teapot, but when this blew up around you, why did you decide to take the strategy that you took? Why weren't you like racked with guilt and apologetic?

Because it's just comedy! I'm just doing what's funny to me. It's never any deeper than that, nor should it be for anybody. I'm saying things that my imagination drums up that makes me happy. These are endorsements in my head that make my life happier, and all I do is share those thoughts with other people in hopes that it makes their life easier.

Well, I've been watching what you do on your specials, and you're continually interacting with the audience. Correct me if I've got this wrong, I mean, a lot of the comedians that I've spoken to spend a lot of time preparing their sets and practicing, but you're doing it—it seems to be something that's much more akin to spontaneous wit. And that's a dangerous thing to do because you could easily be not funny.

Oh, high risk, high reward! Yeah, and it's also that because you're doing that, you don't have a lot of time to exactly think through what you're going to say, right? I mean if something strikes you as amusing, you pretty much have to go for it, and if your head's full of censorship-related thoughts, you're going to be not funny in about 15 seconds.

So you have to let the intrusive thoughts win in comedy. You have to what comes—if you're a naturally funny person, the first thing that comes to your mind should be the funniest thing to you most of the time. It commes, and it has to be the first thing, yeah.

You know, if you're writing a multiple-choice test, by the way, if you second guess your intuition about the right answer, you're more likely to be wrong with the second guess.

Yeah, that immediate response!

Yeah, that immediate response tends to be better. Well, and it's a weird thing because that thing that's comical inside you, that's providing you with the intuition for the jokes, it has to be in quick—timing is everything! Absolutely!

It has to be in quick relationship with the audience, yeah. Timing is absolutely everything! You want to say the most pointed thing at exactly the right time. So what do you think? Or maybe—I don’t know if you’ve thought about it. What do you think is—oh, first of all, how broadscale do you think this rebellion against what you said actually is?

How many people do you think are behind it and why do you think it’s become such a big deal?

It's probably a few dozen thousand, which sounds like a lot until you remember there's 8 billion people in the world. And I would say 90% of the small majority that is upset with me doesn’t go to comedy shows anyway or wouldn't vibe with me as a person anyway, which is fine; they're probably not that funny.

I watched a couple of them today on YouTube. I can imagine, oh my God! Yeah, I mean, they're the sort of people that you just want to—what do you want for them? You want them to spend eternity in hell composed of nothing but people like them talking to them.

So Twitter!

Yeah, exactly that, right. But that's the thing, it’s like whether you enjoy what I do or not, you don't even have to know it exists. If I'm your problem—if you and I are face to face and you have a problem with my comedy that I tell—that I admit to the world, right? If you just remove yourself from me, if you do something as simple as just turn around, there is an entire planet behind you for you to go explore and live the rest of your life. You don't ever have to think about me. You don’t have to talk about me.

I don’t like heavy metal music? Guess how often I think about it or talk about it? 0% of the time! You just remove yourself from the situation. I see no harm in trying to make people laugh as a general intention.

Yeah, well I also don’t want—don't understand exactly from a purely logical perspective what the people who are complaining exactly expect from you because, and maybe it is that they have no sense of humor, and that's highly likely, or that they're doing something we can talk about, which is gaining some kind of benefit from their complaints, some virtue signaling.

I really see that with the men in particular.

Well, I know—I really care a lot, women, yeah! I saw one TikTok video who was like, "I have a wife, and I found this extremely disrespectful." I was like, “Okay, you cuck, whatever, dude!” Yeah, think foreplay! What do you want? To get more clout outside of your wife? Chill out! You’re already married; she already respects you! What do you want?

Yeah, well I used to see, when I had demonstrations around me—which used to be more common than they are now, which is just as well—the worst people I ever saw at those demonstrations weren't the herodian women who were screeching like fishwives, but the men that were hypothetically there to support them. Man, I tell you, I couldn't even look at some of those guys without having a shudder run up my spine.

There's almost nothing worse than a man who tries to worm himself in with a group of women by pretending to be more on their side than the women actually are, when their actual motivation is to use that. What was that? Gad Saad, the evolutionary psychologist who works at Concordia, he called that the sneaky f*ck routine.

Yeah, exactly!

Well, and that's actually a phrase from evolutionary biology. I'll tell you a funny story that goes along with that. This is hilarious and, in a way, so telling. So primatologists who study orangutans figured out a long time ago that there are two variant male types of orangutans, okay?

So there's like orangutans tend to hang around in trees—they're arboreal—but the males who become dominant in a given territory get so large, sort of like a linebacker in football, and they have these big fat pads around their face that are circular. They get so large they can't really go in trees anymore, and the females come to them. But then there are other males in the vicinity, for who the primatologists thought were adolescents for a very long time because they look like adolescent males, and they hang around in the trees, but they turn out to be many of them fully mature males whose development into the linebacker is forestalled by the fact that they're not at the top of the pecking order.

Right, and so their strategy is sneaky rape!

Jesus!

Right, right! So it doesn't take much of an imagination to map that onto the feminist male who's so on the side of women that he gets to be the friend who can entice some poor girl into bed when she’s at her lowest point.

So it's almost like their own insecurity and lack of manhood—manhood probably isn't the best word to use—but it stunts their own evolution, right?

Well, it requires that they take a different pathway to mating success. They can't use dominance!

Yeah, yeah, right, right! So pathetic!

Yeah, yeah! So why did you decide to come on my podcast?

I'm a huge fan, man! I find you—listen, you and I have never met. I'll be truthfully honest, I haven't done extensive research into everything you've done, but I find you to be a very kind man and very well-spoken, and someone who stands on their morals and the realism of society today. I think that is incredibly rare, and I just highly appreciate you!

Oh, well thank you! I wasn't fishing for compliments, but I do appreciate the fact that they emerged!

Well, I'm curious partly too because I think it's fair to say that your primary fan base is women. I mean, I'm not certain of that, but is it the case?

Okay, and is it almost always women that you interact with in the crowd?

No, not at all. It's totally luck of the draw, whatever happens. I mean, women yell out the most for sure. Like, they'll heckle the most, so that will draw more adamant crowd work like that I didn't necessarily intend on doing.

But overall, no, it's just—

Is that something that's particularly characteristic of your shows? Because I would think—

Yeah, right, because that's—

Okay, well, I've kind of created my own crowd work monster in a way. A friend of mine put this in perspective for me. If I got popular from doing crowd work, which was a very specific strategy, a lot of it—I only post my crowd work because I don't feel like burning through material. Comics build for minimum a year, two, three years in a full show, right?

I would feel like a total piece of sh*t if I let you pay money to come see the exact same material you just saw for free online. So crowd work being a very unique circumstance that really isn’t to be duplicated at any other show that you do because you're not going to meet the same person who's in the same circumstance, has the same story to tell, right?

So this is a very unique thing that you could share, and it doesn't burn through any of your material at all. So that's why you've been making the specials on YouTube out of crowd work?

Yeah, exactly!

Right, right! Because you can make them permanent, and you said it doesn't interfere with the novelty of a prepared show. So you do prepared material as well?

Yeah, I have two full specials on YouTube that are fully stand-up and crowd work.

Okay, oh, you watched the red flags? So I specifically did that special because I was getting popular for doing red flag crowd work just on TikTok, and it got so bad to the point where I'd be in the middle of working on material and people would be yelling out like, "Do red flags!" or just yelling out like, "Flip flops!" or "Mama!" I was yelling out their own red flags without any context at all!

So I was like, fine, I'm going to do one special at the biggest red flag city there is: Miami, at the Miami Improv! And then that's like the final statement, closing the chapter on my red flag crowd work. Now I don't do it anymore! Now I think the special is like 50 minutes long of me just doing full crowd work for the people in Miami, and it was a lot of fun. I was happy to close the chapter though.

Okay, why did you close it, and why were you happy to close it?

Because it does ruin the show when people yell out. I wanted to go, okay, I know you like this thing I do, so here’s that! Now you have that final product. I did this specifically for you guys, now let me grow to do the kind of comedy I want to do, and I'm still growing, and I'm still learning. I'm 28 years old! Most comics that are at the top of their game today probably just started at the age I'm at right now, so I have a lot of learning and growth to do.

Right, right! How long have you been doing comedy professionally?

12 and a half years.

So since you were 16?

15!

15? Were you funny before that?

Yeah, yeah! I was always like class clown, making my friends and family laugh. I didn't know comedy was a career or even a job until I was about 14, and I kind of discovered who like Dane Cook and Dave Chappelle were. And those guys were at the pinnacle of comedy at that time, so I just learned, I studied them, fell in love with the art form, and I started doing open mics when I was 15 after school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and everything just kind of snowballed.

Nobody in my family has ever been to college, so there was no pressure to do anything after high school. Everyone in my hometown kind of does the exact same thing—they just work at—

Like how big is your hometown?

About 1,200 people.

Oh, yeah! Yeah, one stoplight that could have easily been a four-way stop. Never traffic there at all!

Yeah, yeah! But that's a mark of achievement to have at least one!

Yeah! I came from a little town in Northern Alberta. It had about 2,500 people, and it was a big deal when we got our first stoplight—which was like utterly unnecessary. They just got a Dollar General on the outskirts of town and everyone's like, "We got a new grocery store!" Like they were loving it. Very simple town.

Yeah! I can remember too that when the Kentucky Fried Chicken came to town, that was also a big deal!

When you got a KFC! That’s so funny!

In hindsight, it's one of those places growing up, you go, "Oh, this is so boring! Can't wait to get out of here!" But looking back, I had such a wonderful childhood. Even going back now, I went back maybe a couple of months ago because I had some shows not far from there and had to drive past it for tour like two months ago. I stopped through there—nothing had changed, and I thought that was beautiful!

I live in LA now and I tour constantly, but people get so wrapped up in what they think the rest of the world is actually talking about or actually cares about when it’s not true at all. I saw kids riding their bikes and running around, playing outside. When I'm driving through town, I go, I haven't seen that in years!

People weren't on their phones. Even people at the gas station when we stopped in—the workers in there were talking, hanging out, nobody was just on their phone scrolling. We become so detached from the rest of the world when we live in certain environments!

So how long have you lived in LA?

It'll be 11 years in January!

Oh, okay! Yeah, after I graduated high school early at 17 and I moved out and just couch surfed for the first year, year and a half.

Okay, so what did you do in LA?

Okay, so first of all, you said you started doing open mics when you were about 15, where?

The Columbus Funny Bone in Columbus, Ohio. I went on the comedy club's website when I kind of figured out open mics were the thing to start with. I don’t remember how I found that out—I remember going to their website, finding out it's 21 and up, as most comedy clubs are due to liquor licenses.

The owner's email was on there, and like a naive kid, I just emailed the owner. I was like, "Hey, this is my name. This is how old I am. I know I'm supposed to be 21 and up, but if I have like a parent or guardian with me, could I come in to try the open mic?"

Any rational businessman would say, "No, I’m not going to risk my liquor license for some kid to come in here and tell jokes! What could possibly come out of that?" But for some odd reason, he said yes, and it allowed me an opportunity to go and practice and enjoy this new thing that I was just doing for fun.

I had no idea anything like this could ever happen to me. It was just something I was doing for fun to make my grandpa laugh.

Did you make your grandpa laugh?

Oh my God! He was my number one fan! I miss him every single day!

Oh, yes! So did you have a good time in Columbus doing this?

I did! But it’s most like most Midwestern towns—there's a ceiling, you know? And if you have bigger dreams, you have to escape! You have to go see what else is out there!

So tell me how your career progressed from Columbus. How many shows did you do at the club? What was the arc of your career?

So I started when I was 15, and then I got a manager at a comedy club in Atlanta, over Twitter, believe it or not!

Well, Twitter was good for something!

I know! Make or break you! Like the one time Twitter has been good for something! Exactly!

Well, it's good for getting canceled actually, if you want to get canceled! Twitter's the best for that!

Yeah, Jesus! That is its primary use! What else is there? It's just negativity. It's the worst app. People who thrive on Twitter rarely do well in life. It’s so bad! But this was when Twitter was kind of brand new, so what would happen was comics that I was a fan of would come through the state of Ohio—whether Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Cincinnati, or Columbus.

And this was a time where Twitter was so new, you could access anybody! Like this was a time when Ashton Kutcher was like the only person to have a million followers on there. Like at most, celebrities had maybe 10,000 followers on there. You could tweet to somebody, and they would see it, and they would respond!

So I would tweet to favorite comics of mine when they were coming through the state of Ohio. I’d be like, “Hey, I'm a big fan! I'm a kid! Can I do a guest spot on your show?” Some would say no, some would thankfully say yes!

So who gave you an early opportunity?

DL Hughley actually gave me my first ever guest spot, which was so funny because when I was 15 years old, my extent of my DL Hughley knowledge was just so plain; where he played a bad attendant is his smallest credit to date.

I had no realization that he was one of the Kings of Comedy, like one of the greatest to ever do it and go one of the most famous tours of all time. But he was so kind to me; he gave me my first guest spot!

My second guest spot was Finesse Mitchell, and then it was Ralphie May—like a brother of mine. He’s one that really helped me out in my younger years. But through Twitter, there was this comedy club owner in Atlanta who knew DL for a very long time, and he saw DL Hughley and I just going back and forth joking with each other on Twitter.

He reached out, and my mom and I drove down from Ohio to Atlanta—it’s like a 9-hour drive—to come perform at his club for a weekend. We went there, we hit it off really well, he explained to me the things he wanted to do for my career, and I didn't know any better! So I was like, “Yeah, however you want to help.” And my mom was also like, “Yeah, whatever keeps him off drugs, I guess!”

So did that work? Did it keep you off drugs?

Until like my early 20s, yeah, I would say that’s probably a better time to start!

Fantastic job!

Yeah, I'm from Ohio; I’m lucky I didn't brush my teeth with fentanyl growing up. It was bad!

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So he finds me on Twitter, we go down there, we meet, we hit it off, and he offers me to come down there the summer between my junior and senior year of high school!

And I go down there, and I live on a comic’s couch for three months. My entire summer break, I go down there, and I'm doing nine to 11 shows a week! I'm going to the malls, I'm passing out free tickets, I'm hanging posters up to promote shows!

I'm going into the comedy club at 3 PM to like practice my set while he throws tennis balls at me and honks horns and jingles anything he can do to distract me!

That was part of the training regimen.

Exactly! And I think to this day, I think it helps me keep my composure in the pocket. Like, I’m not thrown for a loop when somebody yells something.

That typical exposure therapy from a psychological perspective!

Right, exactly!

Oh, that's cool! So what—how did he know to do that, do you think?

That's smart!

I'm not sure. He's a fantastic guy. His name is Gary Abdo. He’s very prominent in the comedy community. He's helped out a lot of people starting out their career. He was very prominent in Chappelle's early years. He was like a late teenager with Earthquake.

So he’s probably seen people thrown by hecklers and so forth, and by trouble. You can't get knocked out of your groove! Well, his comedy club down there was called the Uptown Comedy Corner, and it was notoriously known as like one of the harshest comedy clubs in the country.

It's a tough environment. Like they either loved you or they would boo you off stage! So for me to go in there as a kid—yes, you have the novelty of like he's a kid, give him a chance—but only so far!

Yeah, so you got to get them in the first couple of minutes; otherwise they’re not going to sit there and watch you do five or ten minutes. They just—they don’t have that patience in them.

So I go down there and I get trained in like one of the harshest environments possible. And in doing that, I meet more comics who are coming through the club. I would pretty much open for like anybody that came through the club down there. I met a lot of comics who lived out of L.A.

So then when I went back to high school for my senior year, I knew I didn't want to go to college. I knew comedy was what I wanted to do, so I flew out to Los Angeles and I took the CHESPE—the California High School Proficiency Exam—which in certain states is kind of like college where you have to have a certain amount of credits to graduate high school.

The CHESPE is essentially a test you can take at any time that basically tests you out of high school.

Oh, really?

Oh, that's a great option! Fantastic!

So I flew out there, took the test, and came back. I had to wait like two weeks for my results, but I had a good feeling about it! So I was just going to school for two weeks and just like sleeping throughout class. I wouldn't do any of the work; I wouldn't take any of the tests!

How old were you at that point?

I had just turned 17! Maybe I had just turned 17—I was maybe still—I don’t know, that was after you came back from L.A.!

Yes, right! I came back from taking the test, waiting for the results, got the results back at like the first week of January. Moved out to my friend Eric Griffin's couch two weeks after that, so I was about—like four or five months early from graduating high school!

Moved out there, lived on his couch for the first couple of months, then my manager at the time, his son graduated film school. He moved out to Los Angeles; I stayed on his couch for the next year. I was just going to comedy clubs every single night!

I would go and just hang out—some of them wouldn’t even let me hang out inside until finally people would vouch for me. People wouldn't show up on the lineup, and somebody was like, “Well, he's here, alright!”

So you're hanging around enough to get your opportunity!

Exactly! But funny enough, sometimes I would get the opportunity to go on stage and I literally couldn't step foot in the comedy club until they were like announcing and “Matt Re!” And then I would have to run through into the comedy club, go on stage, and leave immediately after because I wasn't 21!

So they still had to abide by like their own rules in a very loophole way! And in doing that, I just kind of stayed consistent in the scene. I was getting more and more prominent stage time!

I started to book smaller and smaller, turning into larger TV appearances, which was some Disney stuff that led to a bunch of MTV stuff.

And then after I left all my MTV stuff, I just became really dedicated to stand-up and transferring over to acting and producing and developing and all that kind of stuff!

So what did you do for MTV?

My first thing I did on there was Wild 'N Out. I did four seasons of that! I was like the youngest cast member; it was right after Pete Davidson left there to go to SNL. They needed a white guy, and I happened to fit like that exact role!

I went on there, learned so much. So that's a very strange diversity hire!

Oh, of course! We're short of white guys, yeah! Let’s call Matt Re, never mind!

No, no, that’s not a likely diversity hire! But this could not have been a better learning experience! Because I was a very insecure, shy kid, and I was going on the show with comics—this was the revamp of Wild 'N Out! This was after Kevin Hart, DC Young Fly, Chico Bean!

They are all killers on stage! And I had to compete with that, and I knew I couldn't, but at least I had to hold my ground! And in doing that, I just went through the gauntlet over there!

Everyone at that show turned me into a man with confidence on stage, and I’m so grateful for that! I can't imagine I would have gotten that experience anywhere else! So I did a few seasons on the show, and the show was fun; I enjoyed my experience on there!

But I had a very niche role to play. Every joke I said had to be about me being a white guy on the show! If I ever tried to stray away—any time I tried to step out of it, people would be like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, oh, I thought I was going to do like a clever joke!

And they're like, “No, no, no, no! Do the thing you're here to do!” Although I enjoyed it and I built a little bit of a name for myself, I was like, this isn’t what—

That's an interesting set of constraints. Right? I mean, it’s very tight set of constraints.

And one of the facts that emerges from the literature on creativity is that you tend to get creative responses when people are constrained very severely.

Best example I know of that is so, there's a Japanese poetry form known as Haiku, which has very strict rules! Well, MIT nerds set up a website decades ago now that was devoted to Haiku that could only be about the lunch meat spam!

And there's like 50,000 Haikus! There are literally 50,000 Haikus online in the online Haiku spam archive, and they're hilarious! But partly they’re hilarious because, well, it's bad enough that you have to just do Haikus—that’s like pointless! And constraining to begin with!

But then to restrict it even further—so specific!

Well, yeah, well it forces a kind of wit! And so I can imagine that having the constraint of only being able to make jokes about being the white guy must have also been one of the things that sharpened your wit.

I think so too, and I think—unless I'm misconstruing this—I think that's probably why crowd work works the best for me. Because I'm very constrained!

Like I have to talk about—I have to answer what they’re saying to me with a funny response in association with what they’re talking about! I don't have vast options; it has to be now and it has to do with what they’re saying!

Okay, so you said that you were a shy kid, and obviously the last thing in some ways that you would expect a shy kid to be doing is to be doing online stand-up comedy in front of live audiences and then taping that!

That's specifically devoted to crowd work! Because I can't actually imagine a situation, you know, maybe if you threw someone on stage and said, like, "Sing naked!"

That would be about the equivalent of inducing self-consciousness! So how did you get to the point where—what did you have to do so that your shyness was no longer making you self-conscious on stage? And how is it that you orient yourself towards the audience so you don't become self-conscious when you're now?

Now you'll become self-conscious because we're deing—no, not at all! Not at all! So, I'm curious about how you keep yourself from not focusing on whether or not you're being funny, for example, when you're interacting with the audience.

It's purely confidence! Whether it's real or fake confidence, I think when I was younger, I did develop a fake confidence, right? I was bullied a lot in high school—not like getting shoved into lockers, but to the point where I wasn’t in anybody's group, you know?

I was the class clown; I was the butt of a lot of people's jokes, which didn’t hurt at least! I tell myself—but I think that’s where you learn. You learn to deflect, right? You have two options in a moment when somebody makes a joke expense. You can either laugh along and play into it and go with it, or you can be embarrassed, and everybody sees you’re embarrassed.

That just invites abuse! So I think growing up, I developed this sense of false confidence where I went, “Hey, if I also make fun of myself and I get in on your guys’ joke, it won’t hurt or people can’t tell; it doesn’t bother me.”

Because obviously—so I'm going to challenge your supposition that that was false. Well, because the thing about being funny is that if you're false, you're not funny! And if you're not funny and you're being bullied, you're just going to get bullied worse!

So you were obviously it seems like you were able to generate responses that were witty and that were funny but purely a defense mechanism.

I think it wasn't for the point of like, “Oh, I hope I get a good joke off here.” I think it was, I have to deflect what them saying a mean thing with me saying a funny thing.

Right, but that is a very sophisticated defense! Because, I mean, one of the things that people do—guys do this particularly, and like relatively rough working jobs—working-class jobs is they’ll throw pointed barbs at others to see, you know, are you the sort of person who gets irritated and flies off the handle and can’t be trusted in a crisis, or are you the sort of person that can roll with a joke and maybe even say something funny?

So I wouldn't say that the ability to do that is false! I would say that's a sophisticated—a more sophisticated form of defense than physical aggression. I mean, physical aggression can be useful, but that's a—is there a more sophisticated way of parrying like a pointed remark than to turn it into something that's funny and toss it back?

Oh, well, thank you! Yeah, I mean, it was a totally subconscious skill set; I had no idea until right now apparently what I was even doing! So, thank you! And B, I think it starts then, and then the longer you do stand-up, you realize you're funny! Eventually, you do realize you're funny.

Chris Rock talks about this all the time when he talks about when comedians can’t tell a joke on stage and it doesn’t work—after a certain point, you know you're funny, you're just not saying your joke correctly where the audience perceives it the way you want them to!

So you don't experience moments of global doubt.

Exactly! It's localized! Exactly!

So I think after a while, I mean, after doing comedy for 12 years and having had shows of uproar laughter and standing ovations, you know you're capable of being funny and putting on a good show!

Right, right! So I think that confidence is paired with the control of an audience. When you're on stage with a microphone, people are there to watch and listen to you!

They're also hoping you'll be funny unless it's the odd troll!

So they're on your side!

Yes! And then once people see how you can handle that kind of power, that you can be funny, that you can shut somebody down, I think people are more apt to take the seat and just go, “Okay, let me just see what he does.”

Right, right! They're going to give you more of the benefit of the doubt, yeah!

Well, and it's tricky too, responding to a crowd like that too because you have to be funny!

Well, and this is I suppose in some ways why you’ve gotten into trouble. You have to be funny, but you can't be too mean!

Right! You can't hit a fly with a sledgehammer; your response has to be proportionate!

I mean, you up the ante a little bit when someone says something smart, but you don’t come out with the long knives and hack someone to bits!

Of course! Right? You know that could actually hurt someone publicly by doing that, which is not good if it's not necessary, and second, you could easily turn the audience against you!

Well, this is also again why I think it’s so unfair that comedians in particular face this kind of absurd cancellation pressure because the line that a good comic is walking on is so damn thin! You have to be playing with disaster in order to be funny!

Right? The things you say—this is one of the things I used to really like about Sarah Silverman—she would say, you could see it, you could see it! She’d be listening to someone, and some absolutely horrible thought would come into her mind, and then she’d have the guts to lay it out even though it was like rude and unacceptable beyond belief.

I think comedy is purely down to intent! When people are bullying you—like when high schoolers are making fun of something about you—that’s a totally different intent! Even though they are making a joke, their intention is that you're going to feel a certain kind of way.

That is what differentiates it from stand-up comedy. Every single thing I say on stage is said with nothing but the intention to make people laugh! And I understand it's not going to make everybody else laugh! Some people heal totally differently when it comes to certain topics; I get that and I accept that! I’m not for you!

But getting touchy about that—even if you've been hurt—getting touchy about that, first of all, that's a sign that you still have some real work to do! And second, getting touchy about that and then shielding yourself from any exposure to that is not the way to being cured! Quite the contrary!

You know, like if it’s bad, better! If you've had a traumatic experience in your life, not to protect yourself unduly from situations that might bring that back up, but to voluntarily expose yourself to situations where that's likely to be the case!

And so it's—it might be understandable in that people have been hurt, but it's counterproductive even with regard to their own recovery!

Oh, absolutely! You know partly what comedy does too; it has this psychological function is that it does provide an in—sort of like—it’s sort of like horror movie in some ways! You know it's a weird thing that people will go voluntarily watch a horror movie because you might ask, "Why would you pay to be scared?" But you're not, you're paying for the experience of the mastery of your fear, right?

Well, and then in comedy, you see the same sort of thing happening! The comedians are always toying with the forbidden, and the reason for that, in part, the reason the audience participates is because, well, we often have to deal with the forbidden, and often some of the things we forbid aren't things that we should be avoiding or forbidding!

So, Russell Peters, he's a good example. When he does his huge stadium shows, it's so interesting to watch them because he tells racist jokes nonstop! You can feel that there’s a palpable demand in the audience from the ethnic group that he hasn’t yet skewed to be skewed so that they can show that they can take a joke! That they're in on the joke!

Right, right! And so the comedians, they have that function of putting forward what you would say are unpalatable truths, right, in a place where everyone’s there to do that voluntarily!

That's part of the game! How far can we push things? And then to get all upset about that and to try to cancel someone in consequence—I saw this one guy on YouTube who was complaining about you. You know, he said, first of all, “Oh, maybe you’ll recognize him,” he said that, you know, you built your career as an ally of women—that was basically his point!

Now that you’ve betrayed them, you’ve betrayed them with your jokes about domestic abuse! And he was playing this, you know, I’m the friend of women sort of game. Yeah, but he's violating that contract too, which is that everyone’s there in a comedy club to play with disaster!

And, you know, you’re essentially supposed to go along with that! Yeah, I just don’t understand how the environment isn’t taken into consideration! Like that is—the environment is the context!

Think of comedy like a store! Like a restaurant front, right? You go in there—the food’s not for you—you can leave! You didn’t have to stop in here! It’s such comedy is such a niche field!

It's not—I wouldn’t consider stand-up comedy a mainstream art form! I wouldn’t! It’s not film, it’s not television, it’s not music, it’s not as globally celebrated in every household! You know?

So I think it just blows my mind that people can't just let it be! If it’s not for you, it’s not for you!

Well, I see what's happening! I think like even this guy that criticized you in the manner that I just described, I found what he had to say and him for that matter contempt; I thought it was pathetic!

But this is something social media does is that his video—even though I don't think it redounds to his credit—has given him more exposure likely than anything he will ever do in his life!

Right? So one of the problems is this is a huge problem on the social media side is that we’ve put undue access to status in the hands of people who will misuse accusations to garner attention, you know?

And you might say, well, why would people want that kind of negative attention? And the answer to that is, well, high school shooters will shoot up a high school for attention and they’ll shoot themselves afterwards!

Which seems to be run kind of contrary to their desire for attention, but what that just shows is how much people want attention!

And the problem, one of the massive problems with social media is that it provides people who are willing to do something like savage your reputation with more attention than they could ever accrue given their own status and abilities!

And so what to do about that, I have no idea! Although apologizing is a bad idea!

Yeah, absolutely not! I’ll never apologize for a joke ever! I just find the prioritization of human beings to be so f***ed! You’re on this Earth for 80 years, let's call it on average whatever it was—what’s the average? 83, something like—80!

Funny years! After that, they’re not so funny!

I disagree! I think after 80, you get to be funnier! You get to excuse—You can f*** wherever you want after 90!

I think if you’re on this Earth for such a limited amount of time, how insane is it to sit behind your phone and computer and complain about something you don't like when you have a world at your hands of all the things you do like? What an absolute waste of energy, time, and emotion!

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[Music]

So what, why do you think—you think you were inclined when this tempest in a teapot emerged to make arguably even a worse joke because I think, which I’m very—I’m very pleased about, by the way! I thought that was actually a masterstroke because you topped what you were being accused of by picking on an even lower status group!

Which I thought was—I disagree!

Okay, go ahead—I disagree! When people think that joke was intended to make fun of special needs people, that is—that's—no, no I'm definitely not making that assumption! But that was the risk of the misinterpretation!

Of course inevitably what happened! I go! But it was a risk; it was a daring and risky move, and I also thought it was hilarious! But the thing is that is often not what happens!

I mean, I've seen celebrity after celebrity who are cornered by a small minority of their audience! Right? Apologize abjectly!

And so did you—first of all, did you have any guilt about the domestic violence joke, which by the way I also thought was very funny because it's a completely made-up story!

Like it's—I went to one diner and a girl had like a little bruise under her eye and it was like a conversational joke that happened at our table, and I went, “This, this is crazy! How do you describe this humor?”

Is there a definition or a label for the kind of humor that you just say? The worst possible scenario is funny because it's ridiculous because you know it's not true!

Because you know it's not the right thing—that is what makes it funny!

What is that—what is that level? What is that style of comedy?

Kind of irony! It's a kind of irony!

It's not fully sarcasm; it's not totally satire!

No, no, but it's a wildly common sense of humor! A lot of people share that together, and that is who I want!

Yeah, well that’s part of ridicule, I would say! Like, you know the exaggeration of something. It's also, you know, if you take—okay, so you took this scenario that you saw at a restaurant, blew it up into something beyond what it was!

See, it's another form of exposure there too because obviously domestic violence is a terrible thing, and there's nothing funny about someone with a black eye except under very restricted circumstances!

But being able to see, one of the things that you do when you set up a terrible scenario and then you make a joke about it is first of all, you signal to the audience that you understand that this was a terrible scenario!

And then you signal that even though you know it was a terrible scenario, there's part of you that can rise above it and transcend it, right?

And to make light of it! And I don't think there is anything really more admirable in human beings than their ability to make light of a tragedy!

And light doesn’t mean to minimize its importance— it means to transform something that's truly negative into something that's manageable and comical!

One of the things I've seen with people who've undergone very deeply traumatic experiences is that, you know, they've recovered from their absolute catastrophe when they can start making a joke about it!

And my daughter, for example, had a very rough childhood in adolescence. She was very, very ill, and she can tell the worst parts of her experiences in a manner that's like—it'll bring tears of laughter to your eyes! It's screamingly funny! Partly, CU, it's so—partly 'cause it’s so awful! You just can't believe it, right?

But partly because in recounting it and sharing it, you also signal that it can be talked about; it can be faced, and it can be transcended and gotten by!

And that's what you're doing in real time on a comedy stage! It's like, yeah, we share this snake pit of hell that we all live in from time to time, but that doesn’t mean that we have to dive in and wallow in it! We can make light of it!

And that's what great comedians do continually! And so I thought that's what you did with the domestic violence joke!

And you added some nice kitchen-related misogyny to that very rapidly, which was a good touch!

It's a modern twist on an old joke! You know what I mean? It was it was a real circumstance that happened—an exaggerated instance that really happened!

And I went, you know, this is a classic joke! Why not give my own personal modern twist on it and move on? The joke's like a minute, 30 seconds!

Of people were like, "All he did was bash women" and I go, did you—did you get to the cum? There's so much cum in the middle of the show! Then we talk about airplanes and ghosts and monsters! It's it was such a minute thing that I go, hey, just—and I purposely did it first in the show to go, hey, just so you know, this is the kind of humor I like to tell!

And if it's not for you, you are so more than welcome to turn off the TV right now!

I don't want you to fall in love with me, and then get—and then paint a wrong perspective of who you think I am!

And then halfway through the show, he goes, "Oh, he ruined it!" I'd rather tell you up front! Like, hey, we're going to do some dark humor! This is how I personally—Jimmy Carr does that too! He often starts out with like the worst thing he can possibly say just to establish the boundaries!

Why not?!

Yeah! I find it wildly important to make light of dark situations! I feel like you have two options to deal with the situation! You can either, when it comes to a certain topic, you can either let it take up a negative space in your mind and energy, to where if the word or topic even gets said around you, you get so triggered and uncomfortable it ruins your day or—and the day of everyone around you—yes—or you can find a way to laugh about it!

Find a way to heal that way! Next time somebody brings it up, maybe you have something positive to say about your experience or how you’ve come to deal with it that can then lead to other people healing through the same way!

When my grandpa passed away, my friends knew—my friends bombarded me with dead grandfather jokes. They knew that was going to help me laugh and get through that, and it was the toughest moment of my entire life! And to this—that's also a testament in many ways to your character!

Because your friends knew that even under those dire circumstances, that they could still poke and prod at you, and that you might be able to manage the situation with something approximating a sense of humor.

Precisely! When I used to lecture at Harvard for a long time on Auschwitz, and that's about as dark a topic as you can possibly manage!

And I had a voice in the back of my mind constantly! It was dead serious lectures, right? And the voice said continually, “If you were truly a master of this topic, you could deal with it with a light touch.”

And I thought, “Oh my god, really? Really? I'm going to talk about how prison guards took delight in torturing people at Auschwitz?”

And I'm going to do that with a light touch? And I realized after thinking about that for a very long time, like decades really, that you aren't a master of something until you can deal with it with a light touch!

No matter how dark a subject that it is! And like obviously the darker the subject, the more mastery you have to have in order to make light of it, clearly!

Right? Without going sideways!

But I still do think it's a sign of mastery! And that's why people enjoy the laughter so much, right?

Because it is a signal of mastery over tragedy and what's forbidden and what's dark!

And to interfere with that—that means that the woke types who are interfering with that are actually doing a disservice to the very morality that they claim to stand for!

Because what you're doing if you're a comic is actually helping people, not hurting them! And you can tell you're helping them because they laugh!

Oh, of course! And it doesn't need to be for the masses; if you reach even just a few people, you're doing the right thing.

I like I said at the beginning of the podcast, everything I do is just to make—

Okay, so I'm curious about that because, well, obviously the people who apologize for offending someone with their art or their comedy must have doubts about their own intent, right?

So someone comes along and jabs them and says, maybe you're just a mean son of a b*tch, and they go, well, you know, maybe I should be more careful!

Maybe they're feeling a bit depressed, whatever they do, step back and doubt themselves. So, you know, and you could say that there are two reasons that someone called for their misbehavior might doubt themselves!

One would be that they're narcissistic, and the other would be that they're actually confident in their intent!

Okay, now you've indicated a number of times while we’ve talked that you are confident in your intent!

Yeah!

Okay, so if I was like a persistent skeptic, I would say, well, you clearly offended 12,000 people, that was the number you came up with! Why are you so confident in your intent that your belief in your own goodness in relationship to comedy trumps the fact that like 12,000 people are telling you that you said something offensive?

Because if 12,000 people are sending that, I would say a 100,000 people are saying they loved it! And they’ve been through domestic violence situations, and they found the joke very funny!

That they are actually able to deal with that situation in a comedic light! Right? And I commend that bravery!

I can only imagine what it takes to get through something like that! But if I can help in any way, even if it was on accident, I feel great!

Okay, okay! So part of what you used for calibration was the fact that as far as you could tell—honestly looking at it, first of all—that you were just trying to be funny!

And that that joke didn't differ from a thousand other jokes that you've told!

But also that a marked majority of people agreed with that! They laughed! If God laughs in the club, where—well, that’s kind of how you know, right?

People actually laughed at that bit for the past five months in probably, oh God, 200 cities! I did that joke and opened with it and crushed every time which is why I kept it for the special!

That’s how you gauge a reaction! Look, some jokes won’t be funny! I’m currently building a new show right now. I’m constantly—I'm doing so many new jokes right now. Some of them will stay, some of them won't stay!

You have to gauge! You have to try to figure out what works and what doesn't!

You have to listen!

Yeah, okay, so that’s a good—well that’s good too because one of the things—Freud regarded jokes as a route to the unconscious—like a royal road to the unconscious!

Well, the reason for that is that you don’t—you don’t get to decide whether you’re going to laugh if it's a genuine laugh!

If someone says something that's funny, you'll laugh even if you're embarrassed about laughing afterwards, right?

So the funniest jokes are actually the ones where you laugh despite yourself!

Of course!

But what that shows is that when you tell a good joke, you're striking someone very rapidly and very hard in a part of their being that can't be faked!

So there's something dreadfully honest about comedy! Because you can't—no one laughs at a joke with a real laugh—and you can tell if it's a real laugh—unless the joke is actually funny!

And so what that also means is while you're telling these jokes and collecting the responses, so you had this domestic violence joke, and you might say, well that's risky!

But that's not the right question! The right question is, is it actually funny? And another question is, can you rely on the fact that it's funny as an indicator of its moral worth? And I think you can!

Right? I think that if you tell a joke to repeated audiences and you get a good-humored laugh out of that, like a genuine laugh, then that's an indication that you've actually struck the target in the right place!

And the people who are complaining about that have more faith in their ideological judgment than they do in the spontaneous reaction of a multitude of people!

Yes, right! But it’s entirely—what I love about comedy is it’s entirely subjective! And the point is that it makes somebody laugh!

Right! If it does make one person laugh, it is definitively funny! Just not to the masses, which is totally fine!

Obviously, the objective of having a stand-up comedy career is to appeal to as many as you possibly can, but your comedic intentions is, if I get a laugh, technically the joke is funny!

Now it’s up to me to listen and gauge the audience where I go, hmm—do I leave it as is and I appeal to this one person, which is technically still not wrong?

The joke is still funny! Or do I do more work on this joke to properly articulate why I think this is funny and why you should laugh at it, to try to get everybody else on board?

Okay, so when you're screening jokes for continued inclusion, you could imagine a joke that—imagine it's like this: with pieces of music, there'll be pieces of music that are very, very popular that spread very rapidly but that have no legs!

Right? They’re the sort of earworm that you listen to once or twice. Catchy!

Yeah, yeah! When you're selecting jokes, I'm wondering what are your criteria? Can't just be that it makes the most people laugh!

Like I could imagine there are jokes that have a delayed response, and the faster people in the audience catch it!

Absolutely!

Okay, so can you tell, how do you determine which jokes you keep? Like, what kind of response are you looking for?

The most amount of laughter is the best possible outcome! However—and I don't know how to break this down psychologically—but there's something about comedians that like an “oo” response.

He said the thing not supposed to say!

Yeah, and it is funny—not laugh-out-loud funny—but “Oh my God, he said it!” funny!

Well, that’s yeah—that's separate from shock value though! Like you're pointing out, it's like I can't believe he had the goal to say that!

That's like the gesture in the king's court fundamentally, right? Is that you’ve brought to light something that everyone knows or suspects, and pointed to it!

Right, right! And that is funny! That you get an “ahh” response!

Yeah, and it's funny! But—that joke about domestic—you saw if you saw the joke for the—I don't know if you saw the whole special or the clip of it, but you saw a laughter reaction, right?

Oh yeah, no, I thought that was funny!

Yes, nobody in the audience had a problem whatsoever! If you watch later in the special, I do a school shooting joke that gets a massive “whoa” response! And you didn't get canceled for that!

Nobody's talking about that! People only care about the things that offend them specifically!

They don’t care about me hurting somebody else’s feelings potentially!

It's very selfish! I find it entirely selfish!

You're going to let me make fun of other things and make jokes and make light of certain other dark topics, but the thing that affects you personally is the only thing you're upset about! Very, yeah, yeah!

Well, you got to ask yourself too if I—the people that I saw complaining about you, I saw absolutely no evidence in the way they were talking about your joke that they actually were hurt or offended!

Whatever they said was—and I've seen this about people complaining on Twitter in particular or in public—they almost always claim offense on the behalf of hypothetical other people!

Yeah, who somehow they're acting as allies for or spokespeople for, which is a little bit on the condescending side to begin with!

If they're offended, you know? If a group of women against domestic abuse had conjured up a petition against you, you know, and it was composed of a 100,000 sufferers, well that might be more evidence than some dimwitted TikToker who decided that they were going to be the spokespersons for these hypothetically offended women who feel chained up in the kitchen!

And it’s also as simple as just being an easy target! Like I'm—

A lot of people just want to not like me, so you give them any inkling of that, they go, “Boom! Here’s the thing I can attach myself to!”

Well, it isn’t only—I think that they don’t want to like you! It’s that you blew up very relatively quickly!

Like, I mean, I know it’s my fault; I would have loved a progressive rise in my career! I didn’t know TikTok was going to do this!

Right, right!

Well, you did put in the work! Yes. You know, it didn't happen overnight! You said you were in the trenches for what, five years before you had anything approximating real success?

How long do you think—real success?

I would say in stand-up, real success is probably nine years!

Okay, okay! So we can't say that you blew up like this, but it wasn't sudden!

No! It had a very long developmental curve, right?

But that's typical! That's typical of success, right? It even if it doubles—say it doubles every 18 months—if it starts at zero, it takes a long time for that doubling to start to actually show!

Okay, but what that also meant was—and this is another problem with social media—is that you had accrued a lot of status capital, right?

So your status capital would be directly associated with how many people know you essentially and appreciate what you do!

And what that means is that hangers-on can now leverage that for their own purposes!

And the quickest and easiest way to do that is to complain about you publicly in a way that looks like it's compassionate, right?

Because there’s zero effort on behalf of the person who does that!

And what they’re doing then is stealing some of your accrued social capital!

And what's really appalling about that as far as I’m concerned is that they're doing that for their own narcissistic ends—which is why they make public statements on TikTok, let’s say, in the hope that they’ll go viral!

And then they also do that, well, complaining, claiming that compassion rather than narcissism is their fundamental motivation!

Right? It’s ugly!

It's purely clout chasing at its definition! To attach yourself to what somebody else has going on for your own selfish gain is so pathetic!

You don't have anything else to offer! TikTok is a massive platform of a lot of artistic creators!

You can't do any of it without me!

Right, right, right!

Without stealing from you! Because that's essentially what it is! And completely lying about who you think somebody is!

You don't know who somebody is based on a joke they said! Sarcasm exists for a reason!

I didn’t mean the thing I said! I said it because it’s funny and not what I actually feel on the inside!

So, who makes up the bulk of your audience in your live shows? Is it men or women?

It is women! But I would say it's massively changed over the past, I'd say, five or six months!

When my TikTok status really started to get popular—it was like at the top of last year, it was wildly predominantly female.

I would say my shows from October of last year till about March of this year were like 90% women!

Any idea why?

It's anybody’s guess! You could say it’s my face! You could say it’s my humor! I couldn’t—I don’t know!

What do you think?

Well, you play—I watched your crowd work, I mean you're good at—you’re good at playing with the women who poke at you!

Yes! You roasted! That was a very specific trend. A lot of women hopped on to, like, a woman would heckle, would yell something out, and that's obviously annoying, so you roasted with a mean response comedically!

Yeah! And this caught on! People were really into that!

Like people were coming to shows, women were coming to shows requesting to be roasted! Now obviously I don't mean anything I say—I mean shut up and stop yelling out at shows!

But I'm articulating it in a way that, you know, I'm just making some jokes at your expense!

It's caught on so heavily; I think there might be—I don't know if it's a fetish or of some kind!

Maybe it's because you dared to do it, you know? That's possible!

Maybe there’s an appreciation for—well that's what happens with Russell Peters when he's making ethnic jokes! Do you know Russell, by the way?

Do I know him? Yeah!

I don't know him well, but we spoke on my podcast! He's a great guy! I've known him for years!

Russell's great! Great! And he’s been unbelievably successful, and he dares to make jokes to everyone!

Yeah!

Is that right? Of course!

Well, that doesn’t surprise me. And that, by the way, what you just said is wildly important! if you're going to make jokes at a group's expense, you have to be open to making jokes about everybody!

Otherwise, it does feel targeted!

Well, and he makes jokes about his own ethnic group more than anyone else's and they're very pointed and targeted just like I make fun of myself probably more than anybody else does!

That's what baffles me is when people can't laugh at themselves!

Nothing makes me laugh harder than when someone's like making good! That’s one of the things I really liked about British humor is that the Brits love it!

It's the best! I went over there, I think it was June of this year, May or June; this year feels three years long!

Sometime early, late spring or early summer this year, we had a bunch of shows out there! I fell in love with it! I would love a reason to move to London for like a year!

To just do comedy out there?

The audience—they have a Comedy Unleashed group there.

Well, because the comics in the UK have really come under assault, and a lot of them have been canceled! And so there’s a group in London who now—the who’s this? Andrew Doyle!

Andrew Doyle runs Comedy Unleashed, and he has that online character Tania McGrath, who’s a satire of a woke feminist!

He wrote a book that’s about Tania McGrath; yeah!

She’s the worst of the woke feminists!

Anyways, he started this group called Comedy Unleashed!

And I went to one of just one of their shows so far in London! I actually read a piece that I wrote for my little 2-year-old grandson who was trying to sort of things on his head pretending they were hats!

Like old pieces of fish and so forth!

And yeah, but anyways, if you get a chance when you go to the UK again, they're very much worth looking up! Comedy Unleashed!

I'd definitely check that out! I think the funniest UK comedians are now associated with Comedy Unleashed!

And they have these fora in London that are designed to genuinely be open discourse events as you can make a joke about any damn thing you want, and everyone who comes there knows that and appreciates it!

Love that!

Well, they're very—makes the shows very funny too, as you—because everyone goes and they're on the same page!

Let’s just have some fun! I would love to do a streaming platform like that someday! Where creators can go on there, and it’s just whatever kind of humor you want!

Think the same kind of setup as like a porn website! You go on there, you click 18 and up, right? You know what you're getting into! Same with this website!

You go on there, you realize you're going to hear some crude sh*t!

Well, you should bloody well know that if you go to a comedy show you would think!

I mean, listen, I've never had a problem at a live show, ever! I have never once had anybody stand up and be like, “That was not okay to say!” Almost 13 years of doing comedy, not once!

You're obviously not pushing the envelope hard enough!

Jordan Peterson said it first!

I love my new hour that I’m working on right now—it’s so much edgier! It blows my mind!

People chose this one thing to attach themselves onto, and I just—I just think it's, well, it's going to redound to your credit anyways!

Particularly because you didn't apologize.

So all that's going to happen, as far as I can tell, is that this will bring a lot more attention to your work, and people will be thrilled about the fact that you didn’t apologize!

One of the things that I've noticed repeatedly, because I've gone through repeated attempts to cancel me, is that it can be quite an intense experience in the immediate aftermath of its occurrence!

And that's somewhat off-putting and destabilizing because you don't exactly know how far out it’s going to spread or what the consequences would be!

But if you didn't do anything wrong and you don't apologize, or maybe you make light of it in some creative way, then the probability that it will turn around and flip in your direction if you can tolerate the weight is extremely high!

I don’t think that part of the reason I'm bringing this up is because I don't think that people who are in the throws of being canceled understand this!

CU, you can imagine historically if an angry mob of your neighbors showed up on your doorstep with pitchforks and flames, and there was like 40 of them, it would probably be a good time to think, these people wouldn’t have gone to all that time and effort in all likelihood had I not done something wrong!

Right? But now you can whip up a Twitter mob in no time whatsoever at no effort, at no cost to yourself, and probably some benefit!

And so your instinctual responses to being mobbed are wrong!

Yeah, it doesn't translate to the real world! I just walked through two very packed airports and did nothing but take like 45 pictures!

Nothing but a positive response! You’ve had any negative responses?

You said you had no negative responses to anything you've ever said so far when you’re actually on stage?

Yeah, but what about out in the actual world? Not once!

Never once has somebody come up to me and said, "Hey, I didn't like the thing you said!"

CU, that kind of social—I don't know if you want to call it a mixture of social awareness and accountability doesn’t translate to the real world!

People know, takes a lot of gold to do that!

To come up to someone and say, “You know that thing you said even though you don’t know who they are?”

Imagine you see a street performer, right? They're playing violin on a street corner. They've got their case out with cash, right?

Say you f*** hate violin! It drives you nuts! Maybe he's not even good at playing violin!

And what do you do? You keep walking!

Right? No sane, decent human being stops and goes, “You're f***ing awful! Kill yourself! What are you doing out here? You're making my life miserable!”

Until I just look a different direction!

That's an insane thing to do and most people know not to do that, but obviously, the internet creates this—this what I would believe to be false confidence!

And in believing that they’re safe behind this imaginary source of social media that they don’t face any repercussions because their profile picture is an anime character!

And everything's a private profile!

There's no consequence saying what they say! There's no consequence for leveling an accusation!

Yeah, it's really bad!

Yeah, versus the real world! If you come up to me, I can have an intellectual conversation with you as to why I disagree with you!

Yes! Or I could smack the f*** out of you; that is also a consequence that is viable!

And that doesn't weigh on anybody on the internet, so it's easier for people to talk sh*t on there versus the real world, where people actually aren't even bothered!

And also, I had to figure most of these people who talk sh*t on the internet and actively try to cancel people and have no life, they're not out in the real world!

They're in their house doing absolutely nothing, so you don't have to worry about that!

Yeah! And they’ve got—they definitely have the mentality of mean girl high school bullies!

Yeah, right?

We're going to shame; we're reputation savage. We're going to exclude!

Those are all—go ahead! Put so much energy in your life into things! Thinking about me and how much you don’t like me!

What a waste of your life!

Yeah, yeah! So now you said too that when you posted your response to the criticisms, you posted something I think that’s wildly funny, by the way!

And so maybe you could explain that to this particular crowd, but you also told me in the intervening time between the two podcasts that that wasn’t a calculated response, that you relied on your instinct for what was funny!

So explain what you did!

So, so funny! You sound like a principal! My parents came here to tell them what you did!

Right, yeah, exactly! Lay it out, man! But the principal actually loves it! This is perfect.

So now I have to convince my parents not to whoop my ass!

Basically, this thing happened! There was an outrage over a joke that was wildly misperceived, and that's fine; you're allowed to like or not like a joke—totally okay!

And in response to that, I posted a photo of me on stage—thought it was a good photo—with a link at the bottom of it!

And the caption was saying, "If I've ever offended you with a joke I've told, here's a link to my official apology!"

And the link description should have been a dead giveaway! It said, "Click to solve your issue!"

And when you click on the link, it redirected you to a store!

Solve your issue! That's funny!

Very specific because it's a little ambiguous, of course!

And then you click on the link, and it redirects you to an online storefront for special needs helmets!

I thought this was very funny! And again, misconstrue people and instinctually!

Again, people get triggered by subject matter than what the joke actually is! Everybody took that as I was making fun of special needs people!

No! I don’t have anything to say about making fun of people claiming special needs for their emotional fragility, and appropriately, exactly!

I’m saying—and the best part is—is that you clicked on it, you f***ing idiot!

They could have special needs earplugs that they could wear to comedy shows where you actually couldn't hear all the words!

All of them!

It AI generates what they want to hear!

That'll happen soon enough—that’s right!

You’ll be able to—an AI—that’s AI sensor! But that’s what your—that’s technically what your algorithm is!

It shows you what you want to see! It tells you what you want to hear!

I was the night that I was like the number one trending thing on Twitter, like night before last, I think it was!

I texted my friend and I was like, “Yes!”

And he sent me a screenshot of his—I wasn't even top 25!

He goes, “This isn't—n