https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=55fRDt2V8IQ
You have to be funny, 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, that’s my presumption, 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. Right, because that’ll turn them again. Because first of all, you can 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. Because she would say, you can see it, you can 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 rude and unacceptable beyond belief. I think comedy is purely down to intent. When people are bullying you, 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 gonna 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 it’s 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 might be understandable in that people have been hurt, but it’s counterproductive even with regard to their own recovery. Oh, absolutely. And you know, partly what comedy does too, it has this psychological function, is that it does provide, it’s sort of like a 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, like, why would you pay to be scared? But you’re not. You’re paying for the experience of the mastery of your fear, right? And you have to, well, and then in comedy, you see the same sort of thing happening is 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. Peters, when he does his huge stadium shows, it’s so interesting to watch them because he tells racist jokes nonstop. And you can feel that there’s a palpable demand in the audience from the ethnic group that he hasn’t yet skewered to be skewered 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 would you say, 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 bitchy about that and to try to cancel someone in consequence, I saw this one guy on YouTube who’s complaining about you. You know, he said first of all, maybe you’ll recognize him. He said that you built your career as an ally of women. That was basically his point now that you’ve betrayed him, you’ve betrayed them with your jokes about domestic abuse. And so he was playing this, I’m the friend of women sort of game. But he’s violating that contract too, which is that everybody’s there in a comedy club to play with disaster. And you’re essentially supposed to go along with that. 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, contemptible. 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 way 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 fucked. You’re on this earth for 80 years, let’s call it, on average, whatever, what’s the average, 83, something like that. 80 funny years. 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 shit 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. So, why do you think you were inclined when this Tempest in a Tea Party emerged to make arguably even a worse joke, because I think, which I’m very pleased about, by the way. I thought that was actually a master stroke because you topped what you were being accused of by picking on an even lower status group, which I thought was a- I disagree. Okay, go ahead. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]