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 case that really happened and I was, you know, this is a classic joke, why not put my own personal spin on it and modern? and continues the joke, like a minute and 30 seconds of people saying all he did was hit women and I did it on purpose first on the show to say, hey, just so you know, this is the guy of humor that I like to tell and If it's not for you, you can turn off the television right now.

Hello everyone. Today I had the opportunity to welcome and speak with one of the most prominent current comedians in the world, a 28-year-old young man, Matt Re, who exploded in comedy. scene in recent years after having spent his time in the trenches, he has been working as a comedian in small clubs and such. He started when he was 15, so he spent his 10 years before becoming really popular. You've been the subject of a relatively dedicated ccil campaign in recent weeks, so we had the opportunity to discuss that, to discuss your witty, quick, brave and appropriate response to that

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to talk about that sort of thing in more detail and also to detail 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 world at large so welcome to the conversation so I've been planning this opening, which I don't Normally I don't do it because I like to do things spontaneously, but I have to do it right, so you have to help me clarify it, okay, now you're a comedian and you have Canell for a joke about domestic assault and then in In response to that, instead of apologizing like a good guy, you put up a joke advertising site about special needs helmets to protect people who are offended by you and now, to get out of it, you're coming on my podcast.

I never planned. I expected it to make things worse. I hope we can drive sales to that very real helmet website. Yeah, anyway, congratulations on that. I thought the joke was funny, risqué, and fun, and I thought your response was spot on. One of the things I've noticed is that people who are harassed by sensory-zero minded people almost always back down and apologize and then my sense of that is that a mob is after them first for whatever hypothetical sin they've committed and then they apologize. and a second mob comes after them exactly for that and then they diminish their own character with the false apology and embolden these idiotic accusers and then why did you decide when and when this exploded around you and I mean, in a way, it's a tempest in a teapot, but when this exploded around you, why did you decide to take the strategy you did? deeper than that nor should it be for anyone.

I am things that my imagination awakens and that make me happy. Back-up reliefs in my head that make my life happier and all I do is share those thoughts with other people in the hope that it will make their life. It's easier, well, I've been watching what you do on your specials and you're continually interacting with the audience, which, correct me if I'm wrong, I mean a lot of the comedians I've talked to. They spend a lot of time preparing their sets and practicing, but you're doing it, it seems to be something much more like spontaneous wit and that's a dangerous thing because you could easily not be funny, oh, high risk, high reward, yeah.

Yeah, well, and it's also because you're doing that, you don't have much time to think about exactly what you're going to say. I mean, if something sounds funny to you, you have to try it and if your head is full of sensor-related thoughts, you're not going to be funny in about 15 seconds, so you have to let the intrusive thought be funny and the first thing you do is you have to do is what comes if you are a naturally fun person. What comes to mind should be the most fun for you most of the time. It has to be the first.

Yes, you know this if you are writing a multiple choice exam. By the way, if you guess what your intuition is about the correct answer, you are more likely to be wrong with the second guess, yes, that immediate answer, yes, that immediate answer tends to be better, yes, well, and it's kind of strange because that comic thing inside you provides you with the intuition for jokes, it has to be in fast repetition times, everything absolutely has to be in a fast relationship with the audience, yes, timing is absolutely all you want say, the most important thing at exactly the right time, and then what do you do? or maybe I don't know if you thought about it, what do you think it is?

First of all, how broad do you think this rebellion is against what you said? How many people do you think are behind this and why do you think? has become so important that it is probably a few dozen thousand, which sounds like a lot until you remember that there are 8 billion people in the world, yes, and I would say that 90% of the small majority that is upset with me, she doesn't go to comedy shows. anyway or they wouldn't vibe with me as a person anyway, which is fine, they probably aren't that fun. I watched a couple of them today on YouTube.

I imagine, oh my gosh, yeah, I mean, they're the kind of people that you just want what do you want for them do you want for them do you want them to spend spend eternity in a hell made up of nothing but people like them talking to them so Twitter yeah , yes, exactly like that, but that's the question is whether you enjoy what I do or not you don't even have to know that 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 you that I admit to the world true if you just stay away from me if you do something as simple as turn around, there is an entire planet behind you for you to explore and live the rest of your life.

You'll never have to think about me. You don't have to talk. about me I don't like scre heavy metal music, guess how often I think or talk about it. 0% of the time you just walk away from the situation. I don't see any harm in trying to make people laugh. general intention, yes, well, I also don't want to not understand exactly from a purely logical perspective what exactly the people who complain because and maybe it's that they have no sense of humor or and and that's It's very likely that they're doing something what we can talk about, which is to get some kind of benefit from their complaints, some virtue signaling.

I really see that with men in particular, well I know I really care a lot about women, yeah. I saw a Tik Tok video that said, "I have a wife" and this seemed very disrespectful to me. I said, "Okay, you cheat on any guy, yeah, foreplay, yeah, what do you want to get more out of your wife?", like relax, you're already married, she's already. He respects you, what are you doing? Yeah, well, I used to see when I had demonstrations around me that they used to be more common than now, which is good, the worst people I've ever seen at those demonstrations weren't the Herodian women who were screeching like fish wives, but the men who were hypothetically there to support them, man, I'm telling you, I couldn't even look at some of those guys without a blinder going up my spine.

There is almost nothing worse than a man trying to deworm. he joins a group of women pretending to be more on their side than the women actually are when his real motivation is to use that, what was that? Sad. The evolutionary psychologist who works at Concordia called it the stealth fire, uh, routine, yeah, yeah. exactly right and that's actually an evolutionary biology phrase. I'm going to tell you a funny story that goes along with this is hilarious and very revealing, so primatologists who studied orangutans discovered a long time ago that there are two variant male types of orangutans.

Okay, so orangutans tend to hang around in trees, they're arboreal, but the men, the males that become dominant in the given territory, they get as big as a football and they have these big thick pads around the back. face that are circular. They grow so big that they can't climb trees anymore and the females come to them, but then there are other males around that primatologists thought were adolescents for a long time because they look like adolescent males and they're hanging around. trees, but they turn out to be many of them fully mature men whose development as a linebacker is impeded by the fact that they're not at the top of the pecking order, so their strategy is to sneak rape Jesus, right?

It doesn't take much imagination to translate that to the you know, the feminist man who is so on the side of women that you know he can be the friend who can lure a poor girl into bed when she's at her lowest point, so it's almost like their own insecurity and lack of virility, virility is probably not the best word to use, but it slows down their own evolution, well, it, ena, requires them to take a different path to mating success that they can't use. Domin, yeah, yeah, right, right, very pathetic, yeah, yeah, so why did you decide to come on my podcast?

I'm a big fan, I think you hear yourself and I've never met you. I will be sincerely honest. I have never thoroughly researched everything you have done, but I find you to be a very kind man, very well spoken and someone who stands up for his morals and the realism of today's society and I think that is incredibly rare and I appreciate you very much oh well, thank you . I wasn't looking for compliments, but I appreciate the fact that they came out well. I'm also curious partly because I think it's fair to say that your main fan base is women.

I mean, I'm not sure about that, but it's like that, it's okay and you almost always interact with women in the crowd. No, not at all, it's totally luck of the draw, no

matt

er what happens. I mean, women are the ones who scream the most. They will probably be the most disruptive, so that will attract more inflexible people. Work like that that I didn't necessarily intend to do, but generally no, it's just something that's a particular feature of your shows because I think, yeah, right, because. Well, I've created my own crowdsourcing monster in a way that a friend of mine put this into perspective for me if I became popular by crowdsourcing, which was a very specific strategy.

I only publish my Cuervo about this because I don't feel like burning material that comics build for a minimum of a year, two, three years, a program of hours, right? I would feel like a total piece if I let you pay money to come see the Exactly the same material as just SOL for free online, so group work or is a unique circumstance that really shouldn't be duplicated in any other show what to do because you won't know the same person who has gone through the same circumstance. the same story to tell, so this is something unique that you can share and it doesn't burn any of your material, that's why you've been making the specials on YouTube from the collective work, yes, exactly, right, because you can make them permanent and you said which doesn't interfere with the novelty of a prepared program, so you also do prepared material.

Yes, I have two full specials on YouTube that are complete. I've only seen the crowd work well. Oh, you saw the Red Flags one, so I did that special specifically because I was getting popular for doing Red Flag collective work only on Tik Tok and it got so bad to the point where I was in the middle of working on the material and the people were yelling like red flags or just yelling like flip flops or whatever mom is yelling their own red flags without any context, so I thought, "Okay, I'm going to do a special on the biggest Red Flag City there is." Miami at Miami Improv and then that's like the final statement that closes the chapter on my work with the red flag audience.

Now I don't do it anymore. I think the special is like 50 minutes and I just do full Crow work for 50 minutes with the people from Miami and it was a lot of fun. I was happy to close the chapter, although okay, why did you close it and why were you happy to close it? Because it ruins the show when people shout that they wanted to go. Okay, I know you like what I do, so now you have the final product. I made this specifically for you. Now let me grow to do the kind of comedy that I want to do and I'm still growing. learning I'm 28, most of the comics that are the best today probably just started at the age I am now, so I mean I have a lot of learning and growing to do okay, okay, how long have you been around? doing comedy professionally for 12 and a half years so since you were 16 15 yeah 15 15 you were funny before that yeah yeah I was always like Class Clown, making friends with my family and laughing.

I didn't know comedy was a career or even a job. and until I was 14 and I found out who Dane Cook and Dave Chappelle were and those guys were at the pinnacle of comedy at the time, so I learned that I studied them, fell in love with this art form and started. I did open mics when I was 15 after school on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and it all snowballed and no one in my familythat I couldn't, but at least I had to stand my ground and in doing that, I went through the challenge there like everyone in that show made me a confident man on stage and I'm very grateful for that.

I can't imagine I would have had that experience anywhere else, so I did a few seasons on the show and the show was fun. I enjoyed my experience there, but I had a very specific role to play every joke I said had to be about me being a white man on the show if I ever just said yes at any point. I try to get out of this, people will say: what are you doing? I'm like, Oh, I thought I was going to make a clever joke and they're like, no, no, no, no, do what you're supposed to do and even though I enjoyed it and I had built a bit of a name for myself.

I thought this isn't what an interesting set of constraints, right? I mean, it's a very strict set of constraints and one of the, um, one of the facts that emerges from the creativity literature is that you tend to get creative responses when people are severely constrained. The best example I know of is that there is a form of Japanese poetry known as Haiku that has very strict rules. Well the nerds at MIT set up a website decades ago that was dedicated to ha coup that could only be about lunch and meetup spam and there are like 50,000 hello 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 do that, that's useless and restrictive to begin with, but then restricting it even further, yeah, well, it forces some sort of ingenuity, like that which I imagine being restricted to 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 misunderstanding this, I think that's probably why group work works better for me because I'm very limited like I've been. to speak I have to respond to what they tell me with a funny response in association with what they're talking about I don't have much choice it has to be now and it has to be what they You're saying okay, so you said you were a shy kid and obviously In a way, the last thing you'd expect a shy kid to do is do stand-up comedy online in front of live audiences and then record that specifically.

I dedicated myself to working with the public because I can't really imagine a situation. You know, maybe if you took someone up on stage and said, "Sing naked," that would be the equivalent of inducing self-awareness. So how did you get to the point where what did you do? You have to do it so that your shyness no longer makes you feel self-conscious on stage, and how do you orient yourself toward the audience so that you don't become self-conscious when you're on stage now? Now you will be self-aware. CU conscious, we're acting no, not at all, not at all, so I'm curious how you can keep yourself from focusing on whether you're being funny or not, for example, when you interact with the audience, it's pure confidence.

Whether it's real or fake confidence, I think when I was younger I developed fake confidence. I was bullied a lot in high school, not like I was pushed into lockers, but to the point where I wasn't in anyone's group, you know? He was a PL 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, you have two options in a moment when someone makes a joke. At the cost of that, you can laugh and play with it and move on or you can feel embarrassed and everyone sees your shame, which is even more embarrassing, yeah right, that just invites through your abuse, yeah, so I think growing up I developed this sense of false confidence.

Where did I go Hey, if I make fun of myself too and get in on your guys' joke, it won't hurt or people won't notice, think it doesn't bother me because obviously I'm going to challenge your assumption. that that was fake, because the thing about being funny is that if you're fake you're not funny and if you're not funny and you're being harassed, you're just going to get harassed worse, so obviously it seems like you were like you could come up with witty and funny responses, but purely a defense mechanism. I think it wasn't from the point of saying oh, I hope I get a good joke here.

I think it was, I have to deflect what they're saying something bad with me saying something funny, right, but that's the way it is, so I would say that's a good defense that's actually very sophisticated because I'm talking about one of the things that people ago, boys do this particularly in a relatively hard job. Working class jobs are that they throw sharp barbs at each other to see if you're the kind of person who gets irritated and loses control and can't be trusted in a crisis or you're the kind of person who can roll. with a joke and maybe even say something funny, so I wouldn't say the ability to do that is fake.

I would say that it is a sophisticated form, it is more sophisticated of defense than physical aggression. I mean, physical aggression can be helpful, but that's not a more sophisticated way to stop a stinging comment than to turn it into something funny and return it. Oh well, thanks, yes. I mean, it was a totally subconscious skill set. I had no idea until now. now apparently what he was doing is a thank you and B. I think it starts at that moment and then the more you get up, the more you realize that you're funny, eventually you realize that you're funny.

Chris Rock talks about this all the time when he speaks. 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 telling your joke correctly when the audience perceives it the way you want them to perceive it correctly. so no, you don't exactly experience moments of global doubt, it's exactly localized so I think after a while, I mean, after doing comedy for 12 years and having had outrageous laugh shows and standing ovations, you know you're capable about being funny and putting on a good show, so I think confidence is combined with controlling an audience when you're on stage with a microphone, people are there to look at you and listen to you, they also expect you to do that too. funny, except for a troll, so they're on your side, they could be on your side, yeah, and then once people see how you can handle that kind of power, you can be funny and you can shut someone up.

I think people are more likely to do it. sit down and go, okay, let me see what he does well, they'll give you more of the benefit of the doubt, exactly, yeah, well, and it's also hard to respond to a crowd like that because you have to be funny. Well, and this is, I guess you've somehow gotten yourself into trouble. You have to be funny. You have to be funny, but you can't be too mean. You can't hit a fly with a mallet. Your response has to be proportionate, I mean, you up the ante a little bit, that's my assumption, you up the ante a little bit when someone says something clever, but you don't go out with the long knives and chop someone up, of course, TRUE?

I'll use them again because, firstly, you can hurt someone publicly by doing something that's not good if it's not necessary, and secondly, you could easily turn the audience against you. Well, this is also why I think it's so unfair that comedians in particular face this kind of absurd

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pressure because the line that a good comic walks is so thin that you have to play into the mess. to be funny, right, the things you say, this is one of the things I used to actually do. like in the case of Sarah Silverman, she would say you could see it, you could see it, she was listening to someone and some absolutely horrible thought would come to her mind and then she would have the guts to expose it even if it was as rude and unacceptable beyond belief.

I think comedy comes down purely to intention when people bully you, like when high schoolers make fun of something about you that has a totally different intention, even though they're making a joke, their intention is for you to go. feel a certain way, that's what differentiates it from stand-up comedy. Everything I say on stage is said with nothing more than the intention of making people laugh and I understand that it won't make everyone else laugh. Some people are completely cured. differently when it comes to certain topics, I understand and accept that I'm not for you, but yes, but being touchy about it, even if you've been hurt, being touchy about it, first of all, is a sign that you're still you have something real. work to be done and secondly, making yourself susceptible to it and then protecting yourself from any exposure to it is not the way to heal, quite the opposite, you know that if you have had a traumatic experience in your life it is best not to unduly protect yourself . of situations that might cause that to arise again, but voluntarily exposing yourself to situations where that is probably the case and therefore it may be understandable that people have been hurt, but it is counterproductive even with respect to your own recovery Oh Absolute you.

I know partly what comedy does and it also has this psychological function: it provides a kind of horror movie in a way, you know, it's a strange thing that people voluntarily go to see a horror movie because you might ask. like why would you pay to be afraid but you're not, you're paying for the experience of mastering your fear, and you've got it right, and then in comedy you see the same thing happening: comedians are always playing. with the Forbidden and the reason for that, part of the reason the audience participates is because often we have to deal with the Forbidden and often some of the things that we prohibit are not things that we should avoid or ban, so, um Russell Peters, he a good example, Peter when he does his shows in the huge stadium, it's very interesting to watch because he tells racist jokes non-stop and you can feel that there is a palpable demand in the audience of the ethnic group that still has not strung. be skewered so they can show that they can take a joke, that they're in on the joke, and such and such comedians have the job of presenting what you would say unpleasant truths right in a place where everyone is there. doing that voluntarily that's part of the game how far we can take things and then try to cancel someone accordingly.

I saw this guy on YouTube complaining about you. You know, he said first of all, oh maybe. maybe you recognize him, he said you know you built your career as an ally to women, that was basically his point now that you betrayed him, you betrayed them with your domestic abuse jokes and that's why he was playing this. I know I'm kind of a girl's friend game, but he's also violating that contract, which is that everyone's there at a To Play With Disaster comedy club and you know you're basically supposed to accept that, yeah, just no. I do. understand how the environment is not taken into consideration that's how the environment is the context think of comedy as a store like the front of a restaurant you just walk in there the food is not for you you can leave you didn't have to stop there Here's such Comedy, it's such a specific 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 so globally celebrated in every home, you know, so I think that I. It amazes me that people can't leave it like that if it's not for you it's not for you I see what's going on I think even this guy criticized you in the way I just described I found what I had to say and actually disdain. I thought he was pathetic, but this is something social media does. It's that your video. While I don't think it's to his credit, it has given him more exposure than anything else he does. in your life, so one of the problems is that this is a big problem on the social media side and that is that we have put undoing access to the state in the hands of people who will misuse accusations to attract attention from Garner, you know, and you might say well.

Why would people want that kind of negative attention? And the answer is: well, high school shooters shoot up a high school to get attention and then shoot themselves, which seems to go against their desire for attention, but what? What it just shows is how many people want attention and the problem, one of the big problems with social media, is that it gives people who are willing to do something like Save Your Reputation a lot more attention than they could get given their own. status and skills. So what to do about it. I have no idea, although apologizing is a bad idea, yes, absolutely not.

I will never apologize for a joke. I just think the prioritization of human beings is like that, so you're going to be on this Earth for 80 years. call it average whatever that is what is the average 83 something like 80 fun years 80 after that are not so fun I don't agree I think after 80 you become funnier you can apologize you can wherever you want after 90 I think if you're on this Earth for such a long timelimited, how crazy is it to sit behind your phone and computer and complain about something you don't like when you have a world in your hands of all the things you like, what an absolute waste of energy, time and emotion starting a business can be. difficult, especially knowing how to manage your online store thanks to Shopify, it's easier than ever Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch of your online store. from the stage to the stage where we just reached one million orders.

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er how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and run your business to the next level. a $1 per month trial at shopify.com jbp go to shopify.com jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're at, that's shopify.com jvp so why do you think you felt inclined when when this Tempest in a Teapot came up to possibly make an even worse joke because I think I'm very happy with the way I thought that was actually a masterstroke because you overcame what you were accused of by choosing an even lower status group. , which I thought was I don't agree, okay, go ahead, I don't agree when people think that joke was meant to make fun of people with special needs, ie. no, no, no, I'm definitely not making that assumption, but that was the risk of misinterpretation, of course, inevitably, what happened, I go, but it was a risk, it was a bold and risky move and I also thought that was.

It's funny, but now, but the thing is, that's often not what happens. I mean, I've seen celebrity after celebrity get cornered by a small minority of their audience. Violence joke that, by the way, I also found very funny because it is a completely invented story. I went to a restaurant and a girl had a small bruise under her eye and it was like a conversational joke that happened at our table. and I said: this is crazy, how do you describe this buzzing? Is there a definition or label for the type of humor where you just say the worst possible scenario?

It's funny because it's ridiculous because you know it's not true because you know it's not true. what you want to say you know it's not right that's what makes it funny what is it how is that how what is that level what is that style of comedy type of irony is a kind of iron irony it's not completely sarcasm it's not completely Satire no, no, but it is a tremendously common sense of humor, since many people share it and that is what I want, yes, well, that is part of the ridiculous. I would say that you know the hype of something, you also know if Okay, so you took this scenario that you saw in a restaurant and expanded it into something beyond what it was.

Look, it's also another form of exposure there 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 you do when you set up a terrible scenario and then When you make a joke about it, it's first of all signaling to the audience that you understand that this was a terrible scenario, and then you're indicating that even though you know it was a terrible scenario, there's a part of you that can get over it and transcend it and take it to heart. the light, and I don't think there is anything more admirable in human beings than their ability to make light of a tragedy and light does not mean minimizing its importance, it means transforming something that is truly negative into something manageable and IAL.

One of the things I've seen with people who have gone through very deeply traumatic experiences is that you know they've recovered from their absolute catastrophe when they can start making jokes about it and my daughter, for example, had a very tough childhood when she was teenager, she was very, very sick and can tell the worst parts of her experiences in a way that makes you cry with laughter, it's tremendously funny, partly because it's partly CU, it's so horrible you can't quite believe it, but partly because by telling it and sharing it you also indicate that it can be talked about.

You can cope and you can be Transcendent and get ahead and that's what you're doing in real time on a comedy set. It's like, we share this snake pit of hell that we all live in from time to time, but not that. That doesn't mean we have to dip and wallow in it, we can make light of it and that's what great comedians continually do, so I thought that's what you did with the domestic violence joke and added some related misogyny to it. with the kitchen very quickly. which was good, it's a modern twist on an old joke, you know what I mean, it was a real circumstance that happened.

Sorry, it was an exaggerated example that actually happened and I was like, you know, this is, this is a classic. joke, why not give it my own modern twist and move on? The prank lasted about a minute and 30 seconds and people said all he did was hit women for an hour. Halfway through the show we then talk about airplanes and ghosts and monsters, it's like it was such a small thing that I said "Hey" and I did it on purpose first in the show to say "Hey", just so you know, this is the kind of humor I like to tell and if it's not for you you are more than welcome to turn off the television right now.

I don't want you to fall in love with me and then get and then paint the wrong perspective of who you think I am. am and then halfway through the show he says oh, he ruined it. I prefer to tell you from the beginning like Hey, let's do some dark humor because that's how I personally Jimmy Carr does it too. The worst thing you can say is just set the boundaries, why not? Yes. I think it seems tremendously important to clarify dark situations. I feel like you have two options to deal with the situation. You can do it when it comes to a certain topic.

You can let it take up negative space in your mind and energy to the point that if the word or topic is said around you, you become so irritated and uncomfortable that it ruins your day and the day of everyone you meet. surround, yes, or you can find a way. to laugh about it, find a way to heal that way the next time someone brings it up, maybe you have something positive to say about your experience or how you've dealt with it, which can then lead to other people healing. In the same way, when my grandfather passed away, my friends knew that my friends bombarded me with jokes about dead grandfather, they knew that would help me laugh and get over it and it was the hardest time of my entire life and, to see, that's also a Test your character in many ways because your friends knew that even in those terrible circumstances they could still prick you and that you could handle the situation with something resembling a sense of humor, precisely when I was lecturing.

I was at Harvard for a long time about Owitz and that's the darkest topic you can handle and I had a voice in the back of my mind constantly, they were very serious lectures, right? and The Voice kept saying if you were really a teacher. about this topic you could treat it with a light touch and I thought, oh my God, I really like it. I'm going to talk about how the prison guards delighted in torturing people at Owitz and I'll do it with a light touch. And after thinking about it for a long time, like decades, I realized that you're not a master at something until you can approach it with a light touch, no matter how dark the subject, and obviously the darker the subject. .

The more Mastery you have to have to make it clear clearly without deviating, but I still think it's a sign of Mastery and that's why people enjoy laughter so much, because it's a sign of Mastery that often ends. tragedy and what is forbidden and what is dark and interfering with that means that the woke guys who are interfering with that are actually doing a disservice to the morality that they claim to uphold because what you're doing if you're actually a comedian It's helping people, not hurting them, and you can tell you're helping them because they laugh.

Oh, of course, and it doesn't have to be for the masses, if you reach even a few people, you're doing the right thing. I like it. I said at the beginning of the podcast that everything I do is just to be good, so I'm curious about that because obviously people who apologize for offending someone with their art or their comedy must have doubts about their own intentions, so that someone is coming. and he hits them and says maybe you're just a son of a bitch and they go fine, you know, maybe I should be more careful, maybe they're feeling a little down, whatever he does, he steps back and doubts himself. so that you know and can.

Let's say there are two reasons why someone called out for his bad behavior might doubt himself, one would be that he is a narcissist and the other would be that he truly trusts his intention. Well, you've already indicated it several times while we. I've talked about you being confident in your intent, yeah okay, so if I were a persistent skeptic I'd say you clearly offended 12,000 people, that was the number you came up with, why are you so confident in your intent? what your belief? in your own goodness in relation to comedy trumps the fact that 12,000 people tell you you said something offensive because if 12,000 people send that, I'd say 100,000 people say they loved it and that 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, and I commend that bravery.

I can only imagine what it takes to overcome something like this, but if I can help in any way, even if it was by accident, I feel great, so part of what you used for calibration was the fact that, so you could honestly tell, looking at it in the first place, you were just trying to be funny and that joke didn't work. It's no different than a thousand other jokes you've told, but also that a marked majority of people agreed that it got laughs at the club, where, well, that's how you meet the right people for the past five months. probably, oh God, 200 cities.

I made that joke and opened with it and crushed it every time, so I saved it for the special. This is how you measure a reaction. Look, some jokes won't be funny. I'm currently building a new program right now. I am constantly. I'm making so many new jokes right now. Some of them will stay. Some of them won't stay. You have to G, find out and what you have to listen to, yeah. Well, that's good too because one of the things that Freud considered jokes as a root of the unconscious, as part of the royal road to the unconscious, well, the reason for this is that you don't.

I can't decide if you're going to laugh, if it's a genuine laugh, if someone says something funny you'll laugh even if you're embarrassed to laugh afterwards, so the funniest jokes are actually the ones where you laugh in spite of yourself. . Yeah, sure, sure, sure, but what that shows is that when you tell a good joke you're hitting someone very quickly and very hard in a part of their being that can't be faked, so there's something terribly honest about the joke. comedy because you can Nobody laughs at a joke with a real laugh and you can tell if it's a real laugh unless the joke is really funny, and what that also means is that as you tell these jokes and collect the responses, you have this situation domestic. joke about violence and you might say, well, that's risky, but that's not the right question.

The right question is whether it's really funny, and another question is: can you trust the fact that it's funny as an indicator of its moral worth? And I think you may be right. Think that if you tell a joke to repeat audiences and you get a good-natured laugh as if it were a genuine laugh, then that's an indication that you've really hit the mark in the right place and the people who complain about it have more faith in your ideological judgment than in the spontaneous reaction of a crowd of people, yes, of course, but that's what I love about comedy: it's completely subjective and the point is that it makes someone laugh, but if it makes someone laugh person, it's like that. definitely funny, but not for the masses, which is totally fine, obviously the goal of having an ex-up comedy career is to appeal to as many as possible, but your comedic intentions are if I laugh, technically, the joke It's fun now.

It's up to me to listen and gauge the audience where I'm going. Do I leave it as is and appeal to this person who is technically still not wrong? The joke is still funny or I work harder on this joke to adequately articulate why. I think this is funny and why you should laugh at it to try to get everyone else to agree, so when you're vetting jokes for continued inclusion, you might imagine a joke that imagines it being like this withpieces musicals. There will be pieces of music that are very, very popular, that spread very quickly but that have no legs.

They're the kind of music you listen to once or twice, catchy, yeah, yeah, when, when you're selecting, when you're selecting. jokes I wonder what your criteria are it can't just be that it makes the most people laugh as you might imagine, there are jokes that have a delayed response and the quickest people in the audience pick it up as absolutely fine, so can you? you say how you determine what jokes you keep, what kind of response you're looking for, the most laughs is the best possible outcome, however, I don't know how, I don't know how to break this down psychologically, but there's something about comedians who like and oo answer, he said what he's supposed to say and it's funny, he doesn't laugh out loud, funny, but oh my god, he said it funny, well that's it, yeah, that's separate from the shock value, though how are you? pointing out, it's like I can't believe I'm aiming to say that's the gesture in the king's court, fundamentally correct is that you've brought to light something that everyone knows or suspects and you've pointed it out correctly and it's funny that you do. you get.

An old answer like that, but it would also be very personal because that joke about domestic violence that you saw if you saw the joke in the I don't know if you saw the whole special or the clip but you saw a laughing reaction oh yeah, no one thought it was funny. Yeah, no one in the audience had any problems if you look later in the special. I do a school shooting. joke that gets a massive response from who and you didn't get canell because no one talks about it, that people only care about things that specifically offend them, they don't care that I hurt someone else's feelings, it's potentially very selfish.

I find it completely selfish. You're going to let me make fun of other things and make jokes and make light of other dark topics, but what affects you personally is the only thing that bothers you, it's very yes, yes, well, you have to ask. you too, yes I, the people I saw complaining about you, saw absolutely no evidence in the way they talked about your joke that they were actually hurt or offended, whatever they were saying, and I've seen this about people complaining on Twitter in particular or in public, they almost always declare themselves offended on behalf of other hypothetical people, yes, who are somehow acting as allies or spokespersons, which, to begin with, is a little condescending, if you ask me , it's like you're offended, yeah, you know, if a women's group against domestic abuse had conjured up a petition against you, you know, and it was made up of 100,000 victims, well, that might be more evidence than some fool who decided that they were going to be the spokespersons for these hypothetically offended victims or for the women who feel chained in the kitchen and it's also as simple as being an easy target like if it were me, a lot of people just don't want to like you, so you give them any con the idea that they go boom, here's what I can join right, well, yeah, well, it's not just that I think they don't want to like me, but you blew up very relatively quickly, I mean, know my fault.

I would have loved a progressive promotion in my career. I didn't know Tik Tok was going to do this right, but you tried hard, yeah, you know, it didn't happen, it didn't exactly happen overnight, you said that Can you tell that you were in the trenches for five years before you had something that would come close to real success? How long do you think I would really be His real success? I would say that in stand-up a real success probably nine years nine years okay, okay, then we can I'm not saying that you exploded like that, but it wasn't sudden, no, it had a very long development curve and then, of course, but that It's typical, it's typical of success, right, even if it doubles, let's say it doubles every 18 months if you start at zero.

It takes a long time for that duplication to start showing up well, but what that also means is that, and this is another problem with social media, is that you've built up a lot of Capital status, so your Capital status would be directly associated with how much people essentially know you and appreciate what you do and what that means is that Hangers On can now take advantage of that for their own purposes and the quickest and easiest way to do that is to complain about you publicly in a way that seem compassionate, because there is no effort on the part of the person doing that and what they are doing is stealing some of their gross equity and what is really appalling as far as I am concerned is that they are doing it on their own. narcissistic purposes, that's why they make public statements on Tik Tok, let's say in the hope that they go viral and then they also do well by complaining, claiming that compassion instead of narcissism is their fundamental motivation, very ugly, it's pure influence to pursue it.

In your definition, attaching yourself to what is happening for your own selfish gain is so pathetic that you have nothing more to offer. Tik Tok is a massive platform of many artistic creators, it can't, it's everything from people. dancing with philosophers like there's so many things you can do there, you can do anything without me, without me, without stealing from you because that's essentially what it is and completely lying about who, who, who, you think, someone's right, you don't know who. Someone based it on a joke, said yes, ex sarcasm exists for a reason. I didn't mean what I said.

I said it because it's funny and it's not how I really feel inside, so who makes up the majority of your audience at your live shows, are they men or women, uh, are they women, but I would say it's changed enormously in last. I would say five or six months when my Tik Tok status really started to increase at the peak of last year was tremendous. predominantly female, I would say my shows from October last year to March this year were like 90% women, any idea why no one knows, you could say it's my face, you could say it's my humor, it's me, I couldn't, what do you think?

What do you think? Well, you play. I saw your audience work. I mean, you're good at, you're good at playing with women who push, yeah, they wanted to be roasted. That was a very specific trend. Women who many women would jump like a woman would Heckle would shout something and that's obviously annoying so you make fun of it with a bad response in a comical way, yes, and this was noticed, people really liked that, as if people came to shows that women attended. shows requesting to be roasted now, obviously, I don't want to say anything, I mean, I mean shut up and stop yelling at the shows, but I'm articulating it in a way that you know I'm just making some jokes at your expense. while I think there may be I don't know if it's a fetish or some kind of some kind I know maybe it's because you dared to do it you know it's possible maybe there's an appreciation for well that's what happens to Russell Peters when he's making ethnic jokes, by the way, do you know Russell?

I know it? Yes Yes. I don't know him well, but we talked about him on my podcast. He's a great guy. Yes. Russell is great and has had incredible success. He dares to make jokes every time. Yes. Yes, that's right, that doesn't surprise me and by the way, what you just said is tremendously important, if you're going to make jokes at the expense of a group, you have to be open to making jokes about everyone, otherwise it will be feels well directed. and he makes jokes about his own ethnic group more than others and they are very direct and directed just like I make fun of myself probably more than anyone, that's what baffles me is that when people can't laugh at itself, nothing does.

I laugh harder than when someone likes to do good, that's one of the things I really liked about the British, the BRs are so good, I love it, it's the best. I went there, I think it was June of this year, May or June. This year I feel like three years old. For a long time, in the early spring and early summer of this year, we had a ton of shows and I fell in love. I'd love to have a reason to move to London for a year to do comedy and the audience has a comedy.

The Unleashed group there because comics in the UK have really been attacked and a lot of them have been cancelled, so there's a group in London now who is who Andrew Doyle is. Andrew Doyle directs the comedy Unleashed and has that. The online character Tania McGrath who is a satire of a woke feminist and wrote a Titania McGrath book and yes she is the worst of the woke feminists anyway, he started this comedy group called Unleashed and I went to one of their shows so far in Actually, I read an article I wrote for my 2 year old grandson, who was trying on all kinds of things on his head pretending they were hats like old pieces of fish and stuff, and yeah, but anyway, yeah It's like that, when you go. in the UK again, Comedy Unleash is worth seeking out.

I definitely checked it out. I think the UK's funniest comedians are now associated with Comedy Unleashed and have these forums in London that are designed to be genuinely open speaking events. Joke about whatever damn thing you want and everyone who comes knows and appreciates it. I love it. Well, they make the shows a lot of fun too. Everyone goes and is on the same page. Let's have some fun. I would love to one day create a streaming platform like that where creators can go there and it's any kind of humor you want. Think of the same type of setup as a porn website.

You go in there, you click on 18 and you click on 18 and more. right, you know what you're getting into with this website, you go on there and you realize you're going to hear something rude, well, you should know damn well that if you went to a comedy show you'd think, I mean, listen. I've never had a problem at a live show. I've never had anyone stand up and be like that. It wasn't right to say it. Almost 13 years doing comedy. Not once are you obviously not pushing the limits enough. Jordan Peterson said it. First, I love my new hour that I'm working on now, Ed, year, it amazes me, people chose this thing to stick to and I just think okay, it's RNG, it'll come down to your credit. anyway, particularly because you didn't apologize, so from what I know, all that will happen is that this will bring a lot more attention to your work and people will be delighted by the fact that you didn't apologize for one of the things .

What I've noticed repeatedly because I've gone through repeated attempts to cancel myself is that it can be a pretty intense experience immediately after it happens and that's kind of unpleasant and destabilizing because we don't exactly know how far it will spread or what the consequences would be, but if we don't You did nothing wrong and you don't apologize or maybe you make light of it in some creative way, then the likelihood is that he will turn around and turn away. in your direction, if you can tolerate it, the weight is extremely high. I don't think part of the reason I bring this up is because I don't think the people who are about to get canceled understand this, you can imagine.

Historically, if an angry mob of your neighbors showed up at your door with pitchforks and flames and there were like 40 of them, it would probably be a good time to think that these people wouldn't have put in all that time and effort in all likelihood. I didn't do anything wrong, but now you can build a Twitter mob in no time, with no effort, no cost to you and probably some benefit, so your instinctive responses to being harassed are wrong, yeah, they're not. I can't translate it to the real world. I just walked through two very crowded airports and did nothing but take like 45 pictures, nothing but a positive response.

Away when you're on stage, yes, but what about in the real world? Not once, ever, has someone come up to me and said, Hey, I didn't like what you said because that kind of social is what I don't know. If you want to call it a mix of social awareness and responsibility, it doesn't translate to the real world. People know that it takes a lot of gold to do that. Walk up to someone and tell them you know what you said even if you don't. I do not know who they are. Imagine you see a street artist.

True, they are playing the violin in the corner. They have settled their case with cash. True, you say you hate the violin. The violin drives you crazy. Maybe I'm not even good at playing the violin. What are you doing? Are you still walking well? No healthy, decent human being stops and goes. It's horrible to commit suicide. What are you doing out here? You're making my life miserable until I look in a different direction. It's crazy and most people know it. I can't do that, but obviously the Internet creates this. This is what I would believe is false trust and believing that they are safe behind this source of social media AR images and not facing any repercussions because of their profile photo. it's an anime character and it's all a private profile there are no consequences for saying what they say there are no consequences for making an accusation yes it's really bad yes, versus the real word, if you come see me I can have an intellectual conversation with you about why I don't agree with you, yes, or I could give it a good hit, that's also aconsequence that it is viable and that it does not burden anyone on the Internet, so it is easier for people to talk there compared to the real world where people really do not even bother them and I also had to imagine that most of these people who They talk on the internet and actively try to cancel people and they have no life, they're not in the real world, they're at home doing absolutely nothing.

You don't have to worry about that, yeah, and they definitely have the high school bully mean girl mentality, yeah, right, we're going to embarrass ourselves, we're going to have a wild reputation, we're going to exclude those. Go ahead and put a lot of energy into your life thinking about me and how much you don't like me, what a waste of your life, yeah, yeah, so now you also said that when you posted your response to the criticism you posted something, I think. By the way, that's tremendously funny and maybe you could explain it to this particular crowd, but you also told me in the gap between the two podcasts that that wasn't a calculated response and that you trusted your instinct for what was funny, so Explain what you did.

Very funny. You sound like a director. My parents came here. Tell them what you did right. Yes, state it exactly, but the director really loves it. This is perfect. So now I had to convince my parents not to yell at me. Basically, this happened. There was outrage over a joke that was very poorly perceived and that's okay. you're allowed to like or dislike a joke that's totally fine and in response to that I posted every time you get canceled or someone is upset about a joke you tell you're supposed to apologize people want you to back off and be embarrassed and recognize. what you've done wrong and I don't think I've done anything wrong at all so it really made me feel like the people who are offended by this were for lack of better words and to be quite blunt weak minded I posted a photo. of me on stage thought it was a good photo with a link at the bottom and the caption said: if I ever offended you with a joke I told you so here is a link to my official apology and the link description should have has been a dead giveaway, it said click to solve your problem and when you click on the link it redirects you to a store, an online store solves your problem, 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 store of helmets for special needs.

I thought this was very funny and again I instinctively misunderstood people. Once again, people get excited about what the joke really is. Everyone took it because I was making fun of people with special needs. No, I do not know. I have nothing to say about people who inappropriately mock people who claim to have special needs because of their emotional fragility. Exactly what I'm saying is that you need this way more than they do, yeah right, and the best part is that you clicked on it, you haven't. they could have special needs earplugs that they could use on comedy shows, you actually fill in all the words, the AI ​​generates what they want to hear, pretty soon, that's right, you'll be able to get an AI.

That's right, AI sensor, but that's what it is. Technically, what is your algorithm, it shows you what you want to see, it tells you what you want to hear. It was the night I was trending number one on Twitter, like the night before last, I think it was me. I texted my friend and said yes and he sent me a screenshot of himself. He wasn't even in the top 25. He says: "No one cares buddy. It's in your circle because it's your profile. Obviously you're going to hear about it, but it's not to the extent that people think, so yeah, I posted this erroneous apology and there couldn't have been gone better.

I was literally sitting in the passenger seat on a car ride with my friend and I thought that would be a fun thing to do, it didn't take me more than 45 seconds to think about doing it. he laughed out loud. I also thought most of the outrage was just happening on Twitter and Tik Tok. I think Instagram is a much more personal app, so the fact that people saw it and took it to others. platforms seemed crazy to me, but it also proved my point even more that people who don't even like my comedy or who have never heard of me, saw the outrage and my response and said, "Oh, that It's really funny, right, it actually gained me a lot of fans because in most of the world I would feel safe saying that most people are sick of this." People actually expect a comedian to be funny rather than politically correct.

Well, this is the problem. I think it's the misunderstanding of people who apologize when they are accused because their case is fine. Maybe you irritated some people by not apologizing, but first. After all, there are people you really don't care about irritating and they weren't really irritated to begin with, so it's all a lie anyway, nor were they fans in the first place, exactly, so when you apologize, in principle, you give them a signal. people you've bullied and cowed, but you've lost the opportunity to appeal to a much broader scope of people who you think would be wiser if you were trying to protect or develop your career, the people who see what you see.

I've done it and I'm like, well, that's pretty fun, so maybe I'll go see this guy I've never heard of. I'm sure you attracted like 10,000 fans for every person you turned off, yeah, analytically, I've gained more. more fans than I've lost on all platforms, the tips of everyone involved in this outrage have been nothing but beneficial because even if you didn't like it, the domestic violent prank that I got in trouble for is fair, even I think it's not It's the best joke. I've never written anything, it's not like that, it's probably the worst joke in the special and that's okay.

I do other things. I have many other jokes that are for other people. The answer is a perfect example of that, even if people do well. It's not funny, but that joke of his is that the limbs are so loud and so at odds with each other that once a group of people, whatever you want to call them, people love to talk left or right or whatever. I am a very apolitical person. I don't really use those terms, so they may not be used correctly here, but let's say the left is so outraged by something that the right instinctively says, you're being so ridiculous about this, if you hate this, I'm going to support this because I don't see anything wrong with that, so by doing that you completely balanced each other out, very well, very well, and you probably brought your work to the attention of a whole demographic that necessarily knew who you were, so many people commented that they didn't know. who this kid was I didn't really like him before but I like this joke he told either I or I dislike you so much that the enemy of my enemy is not my friend right, right, right