Episode 1278 - "Canceled Comedy" w/ Kliph Nesteroff and David Bianculli
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:What's happening, everybody?
Marc:How is it going?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:I hope you're well.
Marc:I hope everything in your life is okay.
Marc:I hope you're self-aware.
Marc:I hope you're a caring person.
Marc:I hope that you're doing things, a few things anyways, to help.
Marc:I know we all...
Marc:have our problems and we all drain the people around us occasionally and we all make mistakes but i hope in general you're taking care of yourself and you do some nice things for other people that's that's my message today
Marc:I guess this is the kind of show we do occasionally where I've got something on my mind.
Marc:The culture has something on its mind.
Marc:There are things happening.
Marc:They coincide and we figure out a way to discuss them a little bit.
Marc:I've had a problem for a while and this is going back a year or two.
Marc:Even more, maybe once comedians started complaining that they couldn't say things, that there was a there they were being stifled or they were being told not to not to speak freely or they were afraid to say things or they were going to get in trouble if they said things.
Marc:And just this this this idea that there was censorship.
Marc:on a day-to-day basis in a comedy club or just that they were somehow being shut down, the comics.
Marc:And it always sort of annoyed me.
Marc:And then it kind of evolved into this weird kind of anti-progressive, anti-woke comedy that just plays into this whole attitude that you can't say anything anymore anymore.
Marc:You're going to get canceled.
Marc:You're going to get in trouble.
Marc:Your career is going to be over.
Marc:You can't say anything anymore.
Marc:Now, look, I've dealt with this shit.
Marc:I've been doing comedy a long time, and I was not a good boy.
Marc:The reason I got into comedy was to be provocative.
Marc:The reason I got into comedy was to be challenging.
Marc:The reason I got into comedy was to speak truth or just to fucking start shit.
Marc:That was the legacy I wanted.
Marc:That was the...
Marc:History of comedy I wanted to be part of.
Marc:My heroes were people that said the dark stuff, that said the angry stuff, that said the stuff that made people uncomfortable.
Marc:That was what I wanted to do.
Marc:Push the envelope, man.
Marc:Be on the edge.
Marc:Be edgy.
Marc:And I and I was and I arguably it's one of the reasons I I probably didn't make it until I evolved somewhat until I grew the fuck up until I understood more of where I was coming from and who I was and what my responsibilities were as a comic and as a human among other humans.
Marc:I used to do bits, dubious bits.
Marc:They're out there.
Marc:Some of them are.
Marc:Some of them are recorded.
Marc:Some of them were never recorded.
Marc:And I don't disown any of that stuff.
Marc:I listen to a lot of that stuff now, and it's certainly me, but it's an angrier me.
Marc:It's a less sophisticated me.
Marc:It's a more insensitive me.
Marc:It was a tone and a part of me that was shallow emotionally.
Marc:But look, man, I did the jokes.
Marc:I used the retarded word.
Marc:I explored the word retard.
Marc:I did a lot of work around that.
Marc:And I knew it was hot and I knew there was a lot of juice to it.
Marc:I didn't quite understand why at that time, why we couldn't still use the word.
Marc:And I tried to create a whole thesis.
Marc:about that word sort of making an argument that we should be able to use it in the way that we used to use it and i knew that it was challenging and i knew it made people uncomfortable i didn't quite know why until i got a letter from a woman who had a mentally disabled child who said it's not about it's not the the concern is is more about the insensitivity to to someone like her
Marc:I mean, that child might not quite grasp what's happening.
Marc:Many of them can when you use that word.
Marc:But she said it's not how we see them.
Marc:It's not the word that we use because they're human beings.
Marc:The connotations of that word and how it's used as a slang, as a representative of something terrible, something stupid, something almost inhuman, has a profound effect on the people that love mentally challenged people, let alone the mentally challenged people.
Marc:And for some reason, I understood that.
Marc:How many people in an audience are you going to speak to that, you know, your idea in your head being a selfish little fuck?
Marc:You're like, they're not in here.
Marc:They don't come to the shows, but their brothers do, their sisters do, their parents do, their uncles, their cousins.
Marc:It hurts them.
Marc:And that landed.
Marc:And I stopped saying the word and I realized it was not defensible, even if it was an exciting bit to do, because there's plenty of people that are like, fuck, yeah, we should be able to say retarded.
Marc:What kind of world can you say retarded in this one, this world, the world of people among people?
Marc:I've used the word tranny.
Marc:I used to use the word tranny.
Marc:I used the phrase chick with a dick.
Marc:That material is out there.
Marc:I used to do a bit about a man wanting to become a woman and stopping in the middle and being half and half.
Marc:And I said, it's like they want to make themselves a mythological creature.
Marc:And I thought that was sort of flattering and exciting and poetic.
Marc:Until someone said, look, I'm that person.
Marc:And it's demeaning.
Marc:This is a hard struggle that I'm living with.
Marc:in this body and that doesn't help it's it's it's diminishing and i still felt like but i thought it was beautiful it's not so i stopped i realized this this is condescending it's diminishing and it hurts people in the world of people we're people among people just trying and
Marc:There's been other stuff too.
Marc:I've used the word cunt.
Marc:I've used the word, I mean, pussy.
Marc:Occasionally I still use that one.
Marc:But look, the point is at some point I had to ask myself, why?
Marc:Why do I do these?
Marc:Why is this where the juice is?
Marc:The feeling of saying something that is going to offend or be challenging is a buzz.
Marc:It's like it jacks you up.
Marc:It's exciting.
Marc:And then you break it down.
Marc:It's exciting to be rallied around and make people laugh at something that's incorrect, wrong.
Marc:impolite hurtful it frees it up and it enables people who are probably might be polite or respectful and and might not use those words to sort of you know kind of get a little juice get a little relief get a little laugh you know be like yeah yeah yeah except for the one person that's crying or the one person or two people that their brother is mentally disabled or the one person that can't live in their body anymore or the five people doesn't matter how many why do it
Marc:For me, it was to provoke.
Marc:I wanted to be provocative.
Marc:I wanted to provoke.
Marc:Provoke what?
Marc:I didn't think it through.
Marc:I just knew it made people uncomfortable.
Marc:And it got those horrible, dark laughs and was probably misunderstood by many.
Marc:And seen as a portal to permission to feel contempt for the vulnerable.
Marc:So I stopped doing that stuff because I began to understand the nature of it.
Marc:My need or desire to provoke was compulsive.
Marc:It was a power trip.
Marc:It was a buzz.
Marc:I wasn't revealing hypocrisy.
Marc:I wasn't speaking truth to power.
Marc:But sadly, all this fight against wokeness, this anti-woke comedy, my big problem now is it drives a wedge in the cultural dialogue and in the comedy community.
Marc:It's got a lot of it has sort of a rallying cry to it.
Marc:A lot of it is very easily turned out.
Marc:by the right-wing propagandists.
Marc:This serves the movement towards an anti-democratic fascistic system that is fighting to conquer here.
Marc:And I don't know if these comics know that or if they care, but what they're doing is fundamentally pissing on the less fortunate, the vulnerable, the marginalized, the minorities.
Marc:Free speech!
Marc:is an american right sure and you can't say whatever the fuck you want you can no one's ever said you can't you just have to shoulder what comes back at you you have to shoulder the responsibility of what you reap after you've sown your garbage but this idea that you can't say anything anymore this victim position this grievance
Marc:about this impediment to your free speech is nothing new.
Marc:I saw a bunch of tweets running by my feed.
Marc:I'll read them to you.
Marc:Or what they were.
Marc:There was an interview with comedian George Goebel in 1957, quote, Now don't get me wrong, I think it's wonderful to live in a country where big, powerful networks have to pay attention to the little guy's likes and dislikes.
Marc:That's enlightened democracy.
Marc:But a TV comic nowadays needs the soul of a seismograph to know where the next rumble of public wrath is coming from.
Marc:We have to be verbal tightrope walkers.
Marc:1957.
Marc:64 years ago, worried that telling jokes...
Marc:was getting too risky.
Marc:Arthur Godfrey hammered it home pretty explicitly in 1962.
Marc:Quote, now you can't kid anyone anymore.
Marc:Negro and Italian jokes are out.
Marc:It's sad.
Marc:Unquote.
Marc:Go back 14 years earlier, Red Skelton was saying the same thing in 1948.
Marc:Quote, people worry about everything these days.
Marc:I'd like to be able to say something like, he's so Scotch, he won't chew bubble gum because he can't stand losing the bubbles when they pop.
Marc:But if I did, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Scotsmen would be on my neck.
Marc:Unquote.
Marc:Scotsman.
Marc:Here's a syndicated article from 1958 with the headline, quote, Danny Thomas believes audiences are too thin skinned.
Marc:People who complain about dialect bits cause more bigotry than they prevent.
Marc:After all, everybody in this country belongs to some kind of minority group, unquote.
Marc:Hey, look, we're all minorities of some kind, right, people?
Marc:We can make fun of whoever we want.
Marc:We're all minorities here.
Marc:And if you think it's a modern concept to push back on this type of thinking, check out this editorial from Variety in 1945 titled Thoughtless Funny Men.
Marc:I quote again.
Marc:Comedians persist in being among the worst offenders against racial minorities.
Marc:This is not because comedians are biased, but because so many are thoughtless of consequences.
Marc:Anything for a giggle, unquote.
Marc:1945.
Marc:So where did these tweets come from?
Marc:Where did I get all this information?
Marc:I didn't do this research.
Marc:All these headlines and articles and editorials.
Marc:I'll tell you where.
Marc:Came from Cliff Nesteroff.
Marc:Cliff is a comedy historian.
Marc:He's been called the human encyclopedia of comedy.
Marc:He's been on this show three times before because I enjoy talking about comedy with him.
Marc:He's been curating those historical accounts on his Twitter feed at Classic Showbiz for the past month or so.
Marc:Cliff is the author of The Comedians, Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy.
Marc:And his latest book is We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy.
Marc:And he's here today.
Marc:to address the history of the grievance of not being able to say what we want to say when we want to say it because of all these sensitive people who are so easily triggered.
Marc:Come on, can't they take a joke?
Marc:The history of that.
Marc:This is me talking to Cliff Nesterov.
Guest:I was so convinced that the pandemic, the comedy wouldn't come back.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Because it was so popular before the pandemic that I was like, oh, this will be the bottom out is when it,
Marc:pandemic and then people won't and it seems to be the opposite like it's back in full force because people are hungry to also it's a it's a fairly easy and accessible you know live event i mean it's not that expensive if you're going to a club i mean you know to go to the fucking comedy store that's a cheap night out dude and it's real deal shit it's always a good time yeah and it's live and and it's like
Guest:Everybody has a good time there.
Guest:All the crowd has a good time.
Guest:All three shows.
Guest:It's just like... Isn't it amazing when it had that down period like in the early 2000s?
Guest:It almost looked like it was going to end.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:It's been through that a couple of times.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's amazing.
Guest:Again, that's sort of the theme of this thing.
Guest:The cyclical nature of comedy.
Marc:Well, that was what was interesting to me about seeing your tweets.
Marc:My producer, Brendan, brought it to my attention that you were kind of reeling off this stuff.
Marc:Is that in light of...
Marc:what is happening you know my criticism has been all along that uh you know no one's telling you you can't say anything uh you know but if you do say something and there are repercussions you'll be have to be able to shoulder that but but more than that it's that i don't know whether these i don't know if they're comics or activists or this whole idea of like you know anti-woke comedy or the fight for
Marc:Freedom of speech that, you know, what a lot of this material, a lot of these comics are what's happening is they're being turned out by right right wing propaganda that whether they're willingly doing that, they fit so snugly into the message of what is the current right wing sort of bordering on fascistic.
Guest:momentum in the country that it's it's disconcerting and i don't know that a lot of them know that and i don't think the fight is real whatever they're fighting yeah in the 70s the only real provocateur was like a andy kaufman or a tony clifton where he didn't care if he got laughs the point was a reaction a provoking
Guest:And now there seems to be a genre of provocateurs where it's like the purpose is to provoke.
Guest:Then people do get provoked.
Guest:And then they're aghast that you would be provoked by their provocation.
Guest:And I find that bizarre.
Guest:I also don't understand the motivation of why you would get into comedy for reasons other than to get laughs.
Marc:Well, I don't know what's happened, but I think it is the power of political propaganda, whether they know it or not.
Marc:Definitely.
Marc:You now have this huge swath of the comedy landscape that they don't have to answer to regular show business.
Marc:They've all built their worlds.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:So it's like there really is this, not only does cancel culture not really exist, but there are guys out there doing what you would normally be, what they think canceled for, that they are unaffected by any repercussions because they have their audience.
Marc:You know, like someone like Joey Diaz, who I like, you know, when he gets like a pushback for anything, he's like, go fuck yourself.
Marc:You know, my people aren't, they don't give a shit.
Marc:What are you going to do?
Marc:Yeah, and that's true.
Marc:Like you can say what you want.
Marc:But I think what was interesting about what you were saying just culturally, like, you know, what is happening now is not unlike other things in the past, other events of this type of panic, but what's different now is the way that information is disseminated and also the tribalization of the comedy community and also the right-wing community.
Marc:So the underside of this country has always been racist and kind of, you know, shitty and wrong-minded, right?
Marc:So, you know, when, you know, new...
Marc:immigrants and new minorities pushed back, they buckled, ultimately, and the language evolves.
Guest:Well, social media, obviously, is the big factor that didn't exist before.
Guest:That's obvious.
Guest:We all know that.
Guest:But the concerns are always the same.
Guest:Whenever there's a new wave of
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you look at the roots of stand-up comedy, it's generally the post-Civil War period.
Guest:That's when vaudeville comes up.
Guest:1870s, 1880s, 1890s.
Guest:What's happening at the same time?
Guest:Formerly enslaved are now freedmen.
Guest:Indigenous people are being rounded up and put on reservations.
Guest:There's a new wave of Italian immigration, Irish immigration, and...
Guest:and Jewish immigration.
Guest:And they're all being demonized.
Guest:The Irish, you know, all the stereotypes that are associated with these groups, they start then, essentially, in the United States.
Guest:They're untrustworthy, they're criminals, you know, they're, you know, all the things that are used to demonize each new wave of
Marc:So this is happening post-Civil War.
Guest:I mean, you could go back even further if you wanted to.
Guest:Blackface minstrelery becomes popular in 1830.
Guest:The phrase Jim Crow, as we know, is a reference to segregation.
Guest:But that name was the name of a comedian.
Guest:The first popular blackface comedian, his character, was Jim Crow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he used all the familiar stereotypes of watermelon and chicken.
Guest:And it created a blackface minstrel craze.
Guest:That was the first showbiz craze in America in the 1830s and 1840s.
Guest:There was a blackface comedy team called Mr. Tams and Mr. Bones.
Guest:They had a routine.
Guest:It was like a two-man Abbott and Costello thing.
Guest:White guys.
Guest:Yeah, doing blackface.
Guest:Hey, Mr. Tams.
Guest:What's that, Mr. Bones?
Guest:Do you know why the chicken crossed the road?
Guest:Why, no, I don't.
Guest:Why did the chicken cross the road?
Guest:To get to the other side.
Guest:That riddle that we tell our children is one of the original blackface routines.
Guest:That's why chicken is referenced in it.
Guest:Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist, in the year 1848 became perhaps the first major celebrity to condemn blackface.
Guest:He referred to blackface comedians as the filthy scum of white society.
Guest:In the year 1848, before the Civil War.
Guest:So there's people objecting to blackface comedians before the Civil War.
Guest:After the Civil War, Reconstruction is occurring and there's this pushback against Reconstruction.
Guest:Black people are marginalized.
Guest:Newly arrived immigrants are marginalized.
Guest:Irish, Italian, and Jewish.
Guest:In those days, to be an actor was considered very disreputable.
Guest:Show business was disreputable.
Guest:If you were a member of bourgeois society, it was shameful if your daughter dated an actor.
Guest:So marginalized people- No, they're not wrong.
Guest:We'll marginalize people who are restricted from other places, law, medicine, whatever, found a home in show business.
Guest:At the same time, that's where the stereotypes are flourishing, anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Jewish stereotypes.
Guest:It was usually the children of these immigrants who became the voices, the activists who said, cut this shit out.
Guest:Quit insulting me.
Guest:Quit insulting our parents.
Guest:This stuff is harmful.
Guest:It's wrong.
Guest:It's not true.
Marc:Was part of their argument is that we're Americans?
Marc:Well, part of the argument was that you're insulting me.
Marc:Right, I get that.
Marc:But was there the sense of, like, because there is... I wonder when that started to happen, where the immigrants started to own their citizenship in a way... Well, it was related to other social movements.
Guest:So, like, the Molly Maguires were very militant in...
Guest:labor activism and radical, like would detonate bombs.
Guest:There was an organization called the Klan Miguel who were protesting comedians and show business.
Guest:They weren't as violent as the Molly Maguires or the IRA, but they sort of had a similar conceit.
Guest:And they would petition vaudeville theaters where comedians were doing Irish stereotypes.
Guest:And they would say, please tell your performers this is not acceptable.
Guest:Cut out the Irish stereotypes.
Guest:And the vaudeville theater would be like, lighten up, get a sense of humor.
Guest:We're not changing anything.
Guest:And so this organization is like a Gaelic phrase, clan to Gael.
Guest:they would storm the theaters.
Guest:They would stink bomb the theaters.
Guest:They would pelt comedians with rotten eggs.
Guest:So that old cliche of pelting a performer with rotten eggs, it comes from oppressed immigrant groups objecting to comedians insulting them.
Marc:And the reason why is because it was diminishing...
Marc:Their reputations, their communities, their ability to live a free life in a way that if you're locked into these stereotypes and everyone makes these assumptions about you, it stifles your voice.
Guest:When you dehumanize people, it justifies any kind of behavior towards them.
Guest:You can put people in jail.
Guest:You can kill them.
Guest:They're less than human.
Marc:And stereotyping is a form of dehumanizing.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And so this happened through every wave of immigration.
Guest:The next wave, Italian immigrants started to object to sort of the organ grinder stereotype on the stage.
Guest:Same thing, threatening vaudeville theaters.
Guest:And I posted a clipping I found, an editorial written in a Kansas newspaper from 1903.
Guest:And the editorial writer said, I can't believe, I'm paraphrasing, I can't believe these vaudeville theaters would buckle to this Klan-Nagel Irish party.
Guest:protest what's next if we buckle to to these irish protesters what's going to stop african americans from objecting to blackface where does it stop uh and in the article and i quote the guy says if you if we buckle to the clan negale if we buckle to african americans say goodbye to comedy
Guest:Yes.
Guest:The year 1903.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Comedy is forecasted as soon to die because we're placating the objections of marginalized groups.
Marc:And the interesting thing is the only thing that brought life
Marc:to stand-up in its evolution was a proactive and embracing of these different voices.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And we still have that legacy today.
Guest:The roots of American stand-up comedy are Jewish American, African American,
Guest:And to a slightly lesser extent, Italian and Irish American.
Guest:George Carlin's Irish American.
Guest:Willie Tomlin's Irish American.
Guest:Richard Pryor's African American.
Guest:The list of Jewish Americans is huge, right?
Guest:So that legacy remains with us today.
Guest:And it was established in those years, the 1870s, the 1880s, the 1890s, an extremely violent period.
Guest:in American history where people involved in labor strikes are literally being shot, killed.
Guest:The Ku Klux Klan is on the rise at that same time.
Guest:And so these sort of prejudices were seen as a justification for the behavior of the Ku Klux Klan and whatnot.
Guest:So this went on and on and on.
Guest:And some vaudeville theaters took it upon themselves.
Marc:So even then, the
Marc:They were seen as justifications for the behavior or in the very least, you know, ignorant of the, you know, repercussions of enabling these things.
Guest:It was part of a greater dehumanization process, you know.
Guest:And in 1912, Hammerstein's Theater, which was a major vaudeville flagship...
Guest:banned Jewish stereotypes from the stage preemptively.
Guest:They thought, oh, we're going to get, that's going to be the next wave.
Guest:So we'll ban Jewish dialect.
Guest:You know, fake noses was a thing back then.
Marc:Unless the Jew was stereotyping himself.
Guest:Well, even that was controversial.
Guest:show way back in the 50s Myron Cohen who used to always do sort of Jewish stuff on the Ed Sullivan show there were organizations of rabbis that organized and said this is defamatory because it did play sometimes anti-semites like that type of comedy sure so it was like what message are you sending we could laugh about this amongst ourselves you put it on the Ed Sullivan show and then suddenly gives license to anti-semites it's sort of like a similar debate in hip-hop about the n-word it's like what
Marc:Example doesn't give white kids.
Marc:That's a little trickier, though, isn't it?
Marc:Because for me, just from personally, I know that when there is a rise in anti-Semitism, I'm going to get Jewier on stage.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Because I think it's time to embrace the voice, to show your strength.
Marc:Like I think that, you know, interesting that there was pushback by rabbis because at that time, you know, the idea was how do we get Jews to pass?
Marc:How do we create a Jewish middle class?
Marc:How do we fit into the fabric of this?
Marc:That was back when they still couldn't get into country clubs or Ivy League colleges.
Guest:There was a very similar conceit with black performers who did blackface.
Guest:That was a thing.
Guest:It's almost like inconceivable today, but it was so common in show business to do blackface, black performers just adapted the shtick of blackface.
Guest:They would exaggerate the mouth, put on the white gloves, speak in dialect.
Guest:It was a way to sort of assimilate into the showbiz culture.
Guest:But those internal debates are always going on and always did go on.
Guest:And in 1922, the Schubert
Guest:Another major vaudeville chain banned blackface and it looked in the early 20s like blackface would be gone from show business and then silent movies picked it up and started advertising the same stereotypes that had been phased out.
Guest:in vaudeville and so it had a second wave and there's all these waves different periods of time especially when racism fascism lynching when those things are on the rise that's when there's a greater pushback against the stereotypes in show business always always so in the post-war period after world war ii that's when blackface is basically eliminated from film and television was just starting up and the idea was
Guest:All these black soldiers had sacrificed overseas fighting fascism, supposedly in the name of democracy.
Guest:They come back, and black men in uniform are being lynched at an incredible rate all throughout the South.
Guest:It was considered, how dare you act like you're a hero, you're not a hero—
Guest:There was all kinds of lynchings, 1946, 47, 48, 49.
Guest:So out of respect, the movies do not use blackface after around 1945.
Guest:Very few exceptions.
Marc:What we're dealing with now and what I find...
Marc:Historically interesting, you know, obviously this is and this is like, you know, ominous and horrible and, you know, it's very specific.
Marc:But once you get into, you know, television and once you start talking about I saw some of the clips you posted about these these popular acts, you know, who have national followings.
Marc:Who, you know, feel threatened in the 50s and 60s by, you know, minority pushback against stereotypes, against, you know, characterizations, against, you know, vocalizations, all different, you know, elements of comedy.
Marc:And they they literally feel like entitled to those things because it's part of their act.
Marc:And that, you know, the blame, the onus is on the people that can't take a joke.
Marc:And these are destructive sort of stereotypes.
Marc:Now, again, I want to make it clear because, look, I think you should say whatever you want.
Marc:Do whatever the fuck you want to.
Marc:You can.
Marc:You just know that, you know, depending what it is, you're going to be surrounded with people, like minded people.
Marc:And if that's your tribe, enjoy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the truth is, is that if we want to move forward, because I believe that once you get into real stand-up, once you get into the Lennies and the Morts and the Shelleys, is that you have an evolution of cultural language.
Marc:To me, it's like, you can't say chink anymore.
Marc:You can't say Chinaman.
Marc:You can't say Yellow Man.
Marc:You can't say, why is it so difficult to let go of tranny and all these?
Marc:Language evolves.
Marc:Respect is afforded to those that that fought for it and deserve it.
Marc:And comedy moves on.
Marc:Figure it out.
Marc:But what do you make of these earlier iterations of this defense of hurtful.
Marc:comedy in order to maintain an act?
Marc:Because it seems to me to be selfish, childish, and just really about the money and not wanting to change.
Guest:Well, very rarely when a comedian becomes defensive in the wake of something like that, very rarely does the comedian belong to the group that's objecting.
Guest:So their perspective is not the same as the
Marc:uh subjugated group or the group that takes offense or what have you and and they and oddly you know their ability to joke about it does not imply empathy like you know because it can present itself like that like you know i get it but they don't get it they don't they because the empathy required to understand what it would feel like to actually be an oppressed group as opposed to just go you know is like different okay
Guest:I mean, it is natural to be defensive when somebody attacks you.
Guest:No matter who you are, you're going to be automatically sort of reflexive without thinking of why this person- What are you talking about?
Guest:So I have an example in my new book about Will Rogers.
Guest:Everybody knows the name Will Rogers, and if they know anything about him, it's this catchphrase, never met a man I didn't like.
Guest:Right.
Guest:museums and and hospitals named after will rogers in 1934 at the height of his fame he was hosting a show called the shell chateau which was sponsored by shell gasoline and he was introducing a song and he used the n-word he said that's a real n-word he didn't say n-word but he said that's a real n-word spiritual yeah and he said it three more times yeah this created what year 1934 uh-huh
Guest:As soon as it happened, the switchboard lit up.
Guest:Even in 1934, you could not say the N-word on national radio.
Guest:You could not.
Guest:It was already a known taboo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he says the N-word three times, and Shell Oil is suddenly subjected to a mass boycott by black organizations that organized in Will Rogers' movies.
Guest:He was a Fox movie star at the time, just like Shirley Temple.
Guest:His movies were pulled from theaters in Harlem in protest.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Shell Oil, the sponsor, said, OK, Will Rogers, you've got to go back on the air this Sunday and apologize.
Guest:Say you misspoke.
Guest:You didn't mean any offense when you said the N-word.
Guest:Will Rogers goes back on the air, does not apologize.
Guest:He goes, you people who are jumping on me are too quick to attack.
Guest:I meant no ill will when I use the N-word.
Guest:And I'm not a racist.
Guest:I can't be a racist because I was raised by darkies.
Guest:Shell Oil goes, what are you doing?
Guest:No.
Guest:You're doing that.
Guest:You're making things much worse.
Guest:And so the boycott was expanded to boycott all Shell Oil gasoline products and to pull all Fox films from theaters.
Guest:But this was only picked up by the black press, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender.
Guest:The black press talked about it.
Guest:And there were all these editorials for a month.
Guest:The white press didn't touch it.
Guest:And so –
Guest:Shell Oil was able to let this pass without doing anything.
Guest:And Will Rogers didn't apologize any further.
Guest:And he died in a horrific plane crash a year later and everybody forgot about it.
Guest:But in those days when African-Americans had so little power in the body politic, their concerns were easily ignored.
Guest:That's not the case anymore.
Guest:So that's sort of with anybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So this is sort of like a big shift where there's a larger voice now for oppressed people, for marginalized people, whereas previously it was easy to ignore them.
Marc:But what you're basically exploring with all these examples that people can find on your Twitter feed, Classic Showbiz, at Classic Showbiz.
Marc:is that exactly what is happening now was not unusual.
Marc:You're talking about 1934 where there was a grassroots attempt to boycott Shell Oil until somebody paid or apologized for being disrespectful.
Marc:And that individual could not see...
Marc:His disrespect.
Marc:He did not understand what was disrespectful because he had become accustomed or used to or grew up with these racially provocative terms that may not have meant anything to him.
Marc:But all he had to do was understand, engage in just even a modicum of empathy.
Marc:To be respectful of a group of people, you know, trying to assimilate and have their place in the world.
Marc:I mean, that seems to be ultimately the legacy of this thing is that, you know, language evolves and people, you know, if you fight this fight, will have their place in the world.
Marc:That's all seems what people want, right?
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:But the corporate element is sort of interesting too, that that was always the way it is because this is where it's never about the constitutional idea or guarantee of free speech.
Marc:That's not what this is about.
Marc:Free speech is different than a business saying, you know, we're not going to support this.
Guest:Well, there's only two, in my opinion, only real...
Guest:really two forces that can censor.
Guest:Corporations and the government.
Guest:Government has the law.
Guest:Corporations have the channels of communication.
Guest:A college student can't pay their tuition, let alone censor you.
Guest:They can object to you, but people protesting Netflix is not censorship.
Guest:I'm amazed how blind people are to the fact that
Guest:Dave Chappelle is practicing free speech.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And people protesting Netflix are practicing free speech.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They are not the opposite.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, they're practicing the same technique.
Guest:But there's this conceit right now that protest is censorship.
Guest:Today, Martin Luther King would be cancel culture.
Guest:It's not the case.
Guest:Protest is free speech.
Guest:It's not censorship.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But see, the thing is, is that that's willful ignorance or totally, you know, right wing propaganda.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And it's having an effect.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:People need to understand.
Guest:You have more free speech today in comedy and everywhere than ever before.
Guest:In the 20th century, comedians frequently were arrested and sentenced to jail for the content of their act.
Guest:I challenge anybody to present to me an example.
Guest:I'm happy to be wrong if I'm wrong.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Lenny Bruce, frequently arrested.
Guest:Even after the obscenity laws were largely overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in the late 60s, early 70s, George Carlin arrested in 1972, Milwaukee Summerfest.
Guest:Sometimes you hear people say, well, you couldn't do blazing saddles today.
Guest:Blazing Saddles, co-written by Richard Pryor, comes out in 1974, the same year, August 74, Richard Pryor is arrested in Richmond, Virginia, charged with disorderly conduct for using the same words in his act that you can go see in a movie theater in Blazing Saddles.
Guest:That's not that long ago.
Guest:And I feel like it's an insult and disrespectful to the comedians who came before and literally sacrificed their freedom for our freedom to speak freely today to say that you can't say anything anymore.
Guest:Bullshit.
Guest:You can say whatever you want.
Guest:And it's because these other comedians literally went to jail.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And what it's really about is they want to be able to say you there was there.
Marc:One of the reasons.
Marc:Why there was laws and weirdness and Puritan ideas is that there is a risk to speaking your mind.
Marc:You can do it, but you have to be willing to shoulder whatever comes.
Marc:I mean, it's a dangerous game in some respects, but like you're saying, the courage to speak your mind about whatever is not any different than the courage to protest the repercussions of that.
Guest:I don't see why any comedian would change their approach in the sense that all stand-up is a risk.
Guest:When you try out new material, it might work.
Guest:It might not work.
Guest:It doesn't have to be anything that's risky.
Guest:You just don't know for sure.
Guest:You follow your comic instincts and you assume that people will agree that this is funny.
Guest:And if they don't, you adjust your act.
Guest:You try and build it.
Guest:Hopefully it becomes funny.
Guest:If it doesn't, you throw it out.
Guest:That's how you build an act.
Guest:That's how you've always built an act.
Guest:That's not different now.
Guest:And I kind of feel like it's the same thing.
Guest:If you're a comedian who's too afraid to speak,
Guest:Then why are you doing stand?
Marc:But but outside of that, there is a trend now.
Marc:There is a movement of people, you know, some comics, some good comics, some not so good comics that feel like this provocative, anti woke, anti progressive, you know, fuck everybody disposition is really the cutting edge of comedy where it's it's it's.
Marc:It's becoming hack, number one.
Marc:And number two, it really is about the political agenda now.
Marc:Because everything you're saying implies to me that, as we established earlier, there is no lack of freedom of speech.
Marc:If anything, you can say more than you ever could before.
Marc:There is no one censoring anybody.
Marc:There's people reacting, and there may be corporate repercussions if protests happen.
Marc:But that all revolves around this freedom of speech of of of activism, of protest in response to whatever anybody says, moving through, you know, boycotts and whatever that that's always happened.
Marc:But but the point is, is that there is now a trend both politically to stifle the speech of marginalized people to enforce and maintain the sort of white entitled paradigm of power.
Marc:And that, you know, it is antithetical to cultural progress, but it's on purpose.
Marc:So if those comics who are doing it are just doing it for the juice or for the attention or for they think they're really doing something comedically, I think the real problem now is that they may not realize that they're being used for a political movement and to enforce a type of politics that is anti-democratic.
Marc:It's ridiculous.
Guest:The reality is, though, throughout history, it's not even a left right thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, sometimes a right wing force might be in favor of censorship.
Guest:They'll always deny it, but they'll be in favor of censorship.
Guest:Vice versa.
Guest:Maybe left wing is in favor of censorship.
Guest:Always deny it.
Guest:People kind of want to suppress whatever they disagree with.
Guest:It's not it doesn't have to be a political thing.
Guest:This tug of war.
Guest:My point is it's not even a political point.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is that this tug of war has been going on for the duration of comedy.
Guest:There's always a battle between free speech and censorship.
Guest:There's always a struggle between oppressed groups and the oppressor.
Guest:And they're always jockeying for power.
Guest:And it's cyclical.
Guest:And it goes back and forth all the time.
Guest:Red Skelton in 1948 complained, you can't joke about anything anymore without people getting upset.
Guest:Danny Thomas complained in 1958, you can't joke anymore without people getting upset.
Guest:1968, again and again and again and again.
Guest:And it keeps happening.
Guest:And it's not going to conclude.
Guest:But this sort of intensified culture, this propaganda chamber that we're trapped in with social media, with cable news, that is more heightened than ever before.
Guest:But when you instill fear in people, you can get them to believe any old bullshit.
Guest:It's how we get into wars.
Guest:And so this is sort of
Guest:like a war but it's a cultural war as opposed to let's invade rack war but it's still a disinformation campaign it's still something of a conspiracy theory the idea that you can't say anything anymore oh they're coming for you oh they're gonna cancel you no they're not the only place in comedy where i can see
Guest:Firm censorship consistently is on network television, ABC, CBS, NBC.
Guest:Nobody complains about it.
Guest:You get booked on The Tonight Show and Michael Cox says, you can't say cunt, you can't say cocksucker.
Guest:Every comedian goes, okay, I'll take him out because you want to do The Tonight Show.
Guest:Nobody goes, ah, you're canceling me, PC police.
Guest:When there is censorship in front of their noses, they seem oblivious to it.
Marc:But that's still, that's corporate censorship.
Marc:And the pushback on that is what?
Guest:Yeah, there's no pushback on it.
Guest:I mean, it's a combination of corporate censorship and the FCC, which is government censorship.
Guest:Those are your forces of censorship are the government and corporations, not individuals or college students or minorities.
Marc:But the bottom line is, even with all this push and pull for right or left or for whatever reason over the arc of history of entertainment, where we sit now is really in the most diverse population ever.
Marc:with the ability to say whatever the hell you want, with the possibility of everyone to have their own voice in the mix to some degree.
Marc:So progress, cultural progress and progressive ideas and diversity won out.
Marc:So what we're seeing now is a pushback against the idea of democracy and diversity.
Marc:In the sense that, like, what do they want to return to?
Marc:What is the freedom of being able to pinpoint and push buttons of marginalized groups in the name of what?
Guest:Yeah, I don't understand the motivation of needing to provoke rather than to make laugh.
Guest:And anybody can provoke.
Guest:You don't have to be funny to provoke, but you kind of have to be funny to succeed at stand-up, hopefully.
Guest:This is the weird thing.
Guest:You know, the whole idea that comedians are philosophers or this or that.
Guest:Most people aren't funny on planet Earth.
Guest:If you're born with that natural inclination to make people laugh, that is like a superhero skill.
Guest:And in my opinion, that's good enough.
Guest:Mitch Hedberg isn't a shitty comedian because he's not trying to provoke you.
Guest:Rodney, you know, he's not a bad comedian because he's not grinding his stand-up act to a halt to get super serious for 15 minutes.
Guest:You know, like...
Guest:Comedy, the fact that you can make people laugh should be the most important thing.
Guest:The fact that you can provoke or make people think, that's fine, but also anybody who isn't funny can also do that.
Marc:Yeah, but the weird thing is that these guys who were really the ones who did that, that this has become the new paradigm for this certain contingent.
Marc:of quote-unquote comedy fans, which I argue they're looking for leaders.
Marc:But the type of comics we were talking about that were provocative were the minority.
Marc:There was always maybe two or three of them that had any effect or impact at any given point in time during the history of comedy.
Marc:The rest of them were the clowns and the buffoons and the one-liner guys and the guys who had shtick.
Marc:But the guys that set out to provoke and be the philosophers, you can count them on two hands.
Guest:The irony is that the provocateur today would not be allowed to provoke if not for those minorities paving the way.
Guest:And Lenny Bruce attacking religion.
Guest:You could get in big trouble for attacking the White House, the president, religion, talking about sex.
Guest:You couldn't talk about masturbation.
Guest:There were so many taboos throughout the course of 20th century stand-up.
Guest:It's unbelievable.
Guest:And these are all things we can freely talk about on the stage today.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what is their beef?
Marc:The thing is, is that they really want to own a victim disposition.
Marc:They want to believe that their grievances are deep and real.
Marc:And that is the foundation to their anger.
Marc:It's just a fucking grievance driven culture on both sides, really.
Marc:So, like, you know, when the fuck we get past that?
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:What a bunch of babies.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And I'm really just here to provide the historical examples and context.
Marc:Did I put you in a situation where I expected you not to?
Marc:No, not at all.
Guest:I mean, all you have to do is look a photo of me and you can tell what my political position is.
Guest:But I'm just here to provide the evidence and contradict the lie that this has never happened before and that you can't say anything.
Guest:False, false, false.
Guest:and uh what's the new book guess what it's about this the new book is coming out in 2023 okay um so i got two books out right now the first one the comedians drunks thieves scoundrels great history of american comedy still available hardcover paperback are you ever going to release a a revised with some of the stuff that you didn't put in the original
Guest:You know what I would like to do is I have all the transcripts of my interviews with elderly comedians, most of which are people who have since passed away.
Guest:And I would like to do like a sick in the head presents and just have all these transcripts with Will Jordan, Jack Carter, Shecky Green, just like unfiltered, giving their stories eventually.
Guest:And then I have a book that's currently in print, hardcover and audible called We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, The Unheralded Stories of Native Americans and Comedy.
Guest:You're
Guest:Previous guest, Sterling Harjo's featured in that book and Reservation Dogs is a big component of that.
Guest:It's about representation and racism and marginalization, all the things that we're talking about today.
Guest:And then the new book, all this research that I have at my fingertips that I've been posting online the past week is all there because that's what I'm researching right now for my next book.
Guest:Abrams Press should be releasing it in spring 2023.
Guest:Great to talk to you, Cliff.
Guest:You too, Mark.
Guest:Thank you.
Thank you.
Marc:That was Cliff.
Marc:Great guy, smart guy.
Marc:The books are great.
Marc:Always like talking to him.
Marc:But here we go.
Marc:There was something that Cliff said toward the end of that talk that's important.
Marc:Throughout history, censorship comes from two places, the government and corporations.
Marc:People can protest corporations to encourage censorship.
Marc:Ultimately, it's the corporation's decision.
Marc:But a lot of times, corporations and the government have decided to censor or stifle art because of their own self-interests.
Marc:And I wanted to talk to someone about a very specific case of what's happening.
Marc:Two extremely popular comedians with a television show being watched by 30 million people who were fired and their careers put on hold because people in power didn't like what they were saying.
Marc:Yes, in America, there was a comedy team that was pushed off by a corporation broadcasting network pressured by the government.
Marc:But look, I might want to mention someone else I know personally, someone I love, someone I worked with, someone I started with, someone I've known for years who also took a hit from real power.
Marc:From real power.
Marc:Janine Garofalo.
Marc:It's hard to remember, but this is true.
Marc:It was highly unusual to take the public position after 9-11 that we should not go to war.
Marc:Janine was one of the most outspoken entertainers against the Iraq war in 2002 and in 2003, and it absolutely hurt her career.
Marc:I was cast in a pilot.
Marc:I can't even remember what network.
Marc:I got cast.
Marc:We had scripts.
Marc:We had plane tickets to go to Vancouver to shoot the pilot.
Marc:It was me, Odenkirk.
Marc:Janine was the star.
Marc:I think Rainn Wilson was in it.
Marc:There was a lot.
Marc:Beautiful cast.
Marc:And the day before we were to leave for Vancouver, it got shut down because they thought Janine Garofalo was too controversial.
Marc:The part had nothing to do with controversy.
Marc:It was a fairly lighthearted comedy about a production team for a segment on a news show.
Marc:And it got canned.
Marc:Now, look, Janine didn't stop working, of course, but her career definitely took a hit.
Marc:And it was because she was out there speaking her mind about a war that many people felt was illegal and immoral, and she was punished for it.
Marc:That is real stifling of free speech for speaking.
Marc:Her mind.
Marc:As an activist, as a comic, as a performer, about what she saw.
Marc:as an immoral and illegal war.
Marc:And about 45 years before that, there was another very high profile case of comedians using anti-war sentiment, along with a lot of other countercultural comedy and opposition to authority.
Marc:And it led to a major television corporation putting the lid on their very popular show, like huge comedy.
Marc:And one of the best people to talk about this is David Bianculli.
Marc:He's the TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and he's a professor of television studies at Rowan University in New Jersey.
Marc:David is also the author of the book Dangerously Funny, the uncensored story of the Smothers Brothers comedy hour.
Marc:And I talked to him about it last week.
Marc:We talked to Cliff Nesteroff, the historian, the comedy historian, show business historian, and, you know, he was really kind of
Marc:going through the history of the idea of cancel, the history of the idea, how many times during the course of history has a comedian said, I can't make fun of anything anymore.
Marc:And it's been since the beginning of entertainment time.
Marc:In relation to the culture, the comic stands alone and at some point goes, everyone's getting too touchy.
Marc:1905, 1940, whatever.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I'm sure there was a court gesture somewhere in England, too.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:The second one, he said they killed the last guy, so I'm not going to...
Marc:I better not say what the last guy said.
Marc:His head's on a pike out there.
Marc:But see, the point being at the end of that, Cliff was emphatic about the point that no one has ever been censored outside of the corporate environment.
Marc:No one has ever been stopped on a constitutional level.
Marc:No one has ever been told they can't talk.
Marc:by anything other than a TV network or a corporate entity that shuts them down.
Guest:Yeah, no, I think that's true.
Guest:And the times when they do it, it sort of is like an ebb and flow.
Guest:And CBS, after firing the Smothers Brothers in the 60s,
Guest:brought them back in the late 80s, early 90s, and encouraged them to be bad boys.
Marc:Yeah, but see, that's like, you know, isn't it?
Guest:And they didn't want to, you know.
Marc:Right, but isn't that almost like, you know, it's almost like McMurphy coming back on the ward, you know.
Yeah.
Marc:You know, if Chief didn't kill him, that would have been the Smothers Brothers in the 80s.
Marc:But you know what I'm saying?
Marc:I mean, it's like, you know, okay, well, everything's good now that it doesn't matter.
Marc:Why don't you two old guys go out there and try to make some hay or something?
Guest:Yeah, and what they did at the time, I mean, they were Saturday Night Live before Saturday Night Live.
Marc:Explain that to me.
Marc:What are we talking, 68?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:67 to 69.
Marc:Okay, so it's 1967, 1969.
Marc:They take the slot that Bonanza once held, correct?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Well, they were opposite Bonanza.
Guest:Bonanza, major, it was the number one show on television.
Guest:Every show that everybody threw up against it just died.
Guest:And the Gary Moore show was a variety show that died so badly that CBS had to throw up something right away.
Guest:The only thing it could do that fast was another variety show.
Guest:So they went to the Smothers Brothers.
Marc:And the Smothers Brothers at that time were a stage act?
Guest:Stage act, a comedy duo, making fun of folk songs and folk singers.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:So very no politics whatsoever.
Guest:Just the idea was, you know, these earnest, if you think of the folk singers of the 60s, they were very woke.
Guest:Back then.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, and they would they would they would sing a three minute song that was a translation from some indigenous people.
Guest:And they would give a 20 minute story to set up this three minute song.
Guest:Well, Tom Smothers and Dickie Smothers made fun of all that.
Guest:They could sing and play guitar and bass, but they also were comics.
Marc:So they were they were doing a satirical parody of the earnestness of folk singers at the time.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And so they had this nice little act worked out that was in coffee houses and nightclubs.
Guest:And so they had a good eight, nine minutes of material to open each show already solid.
Guest:I mean, it was perfect.
Guest:So they got the show, but they had had on CBS a couple of seasons before a really horrible sitcom.
Guest:They didn't write.
Guest:They didn't like it.
Guest:They took all of the strengths of the Smothers Brothers and eradicated them.
Guest:And just it was another one of those dumb shows.
Guest:You know, the 60s were full of of genies and talking horses and Martians.
Guest:And so in this one, Tommy was an angel who came back to to look over his brother.
Guest:So not only did they cancel their own show that time, it was popular and the Smothers Brothers didn't want to keep it going, but they didn't want to come back.
Guest:And so Tommy said, I'll only come back and do this variety show that you so desperately want from us if you give us creative control.
Guest:And CBS said, sure, this is going to be 13 weeks.
Guest:What do we care?
Guest:We need something on.
Guest:Did they follow through with that?
Guest:No.
Guest:Well, they did for a while, more and more.
Guest:I mean, at first, they were these clean cut young guys in suits singing about folk songs.
Guest:But after a few weeks, when a new generation came to the Smothers Brothers.
Guest:We're talking 30 million people are watching this.
Marc:yeah it's super bowl numbers now so so now like you know and the assumption is that that the age range once it became clear what they were sort of getting at and the way that the culture was shifting at that time was that these were young people yeah and there was no reason for young people to watch television until somebody like the smothers brothers came along and if they did it in a non-exclusionary way like they would have
Guest:showbiz veterans.
Guest:Like, they had Betty Davis on and Mickey Rooney on the same show as The Who.
Marc:Well, I think that was interesting.
Marc:That was a great thing about that time was that, you know, the shows that did that, you know, Cavett, even Carson,
Marc:You know, they I mean, show business was show business.
Marc:I mean, that's the weird thing about the arc of it all is that, you know, no matter what this particular time frame, you still had all of those people from the studio system still kind of kicking around on television and, you know, in bit parts and movies.
Marc:So but but it was still it was still that thing that I always liked about show business that you got these young people, you got this new music, you got all this stuff.
Marc:But it's a big tent, man.
Marc:And it's show business.
Guest:And and the tent was open.
Guest:I liken it to TV news where there used to be like one truth and one solid set of facts.
Guest:And then there would be three different news networks that would do three different newscasts.
Guest:Hey, man, it was the same basic thing.
Marc:I talk about that all the time that, you know, the sort of integrity of the cultural bond of America when there were three networks and PBS was was a lot more cohesive, even if it wasn't all the information.
Marc:We were all kind of on the same page, give or take.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And and the Smothers Brothers, when they started getting censored by CBS, that was such a new thing that Tommy ran to The New York Times and basically told on them.
Marc:Well, let's see.
Marc:Let's back up.
Marc:So the Smothers Brothers put together a show and you in the book.
Marc:you basically posit the idea that this was SNL in a way.
Marc:Of its time, 67 through 69, the kind of chances that were being taken, the type of sketches that were being done, and the talent that was involved, specifically in the writer room, was at par with the greatest of all time, with Sid Caesar even, and with SNL.
Marc:Who was in that writer room?
Guest:OK, the writers room, it was Mason Williams who went on to do classical gas.
Guest:It was Rob Reiner was there in the third year.
Guest:Steve Martin was there.
Guest:Thomas Smothers, of course, Bob Einstein and a few other people.
Guest:And Tommy, you know.
Guest:The more he pushed, the more he wanted young people involved.
Guest:So the writers got younger.
Guest:The performers got younger.
Guest:He broke so many musical groups.
Guest:The Who made their American TV debut on the Smothers Brothers.
Marc:But they were addressing the tensions in the country around civil rights and around the Vietnam War.
Guest:One great censored sketch that CBS pulled entirely was a musical performance to open the fall 68 season with Harry Belafonte.
Guest:And he was singing a number of Calypso tunes.
Guest:They changed the lyrics.
Guest:It was Don't Stop the Carnival.
Guest:And it was about the carnival atmosphere.
Guest:not of Mardi Gras, but of the Democratic National Convention and the police brutality in the protests outside.
Guest:They filmed Harry Belafonte singing this song with the backdrop of the news and the police, you know, pushing around all the protesters.
Guest:And it was a great segment.
Guest:And CBS cut it entirely and replaced it with a five minute Richard Nixon for president campaign.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And that was and Tommy and didn't know anything about that.
Guest:Not until it happened.
Guest:And he was so furious.
Marc:And that was the first that was the first case of it.
Guest:No, the first case would the first one was more innocuous with Elaine May doing a sketch, a sketch about them being movie censors.
Guest:and censoring things.
Guest:But CBS was upset because nobody knew what censors were until then.
Guest:So that sketch was censored.
Guest:And then they started mentioning it on air.
Guest:They sang songs about the censors.
Guest:It got bigger and bigger.
Guest:And then Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ, who was the president at the time for the first couple of seasons,
Guest:He got upset at some of the dumb little things that they did in their sketches, making fun of him.
Guest:So he calls Bill Paley, the chairman of CBS, and asks them to knock it off.
Marc:So the president of the United States calls the CEO.
Marc:The chairman of CBS.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Corporation.
Marc:And Paley and Paley does.
Marc:I mean, these are like that.
Marc:That's a hell of a phone call.
Marc:It sounds it sounds silly when you say it.
Marc:Well, I know.
Marc:I mean, no, but it's not silly because, like, you know, look, man, I mean, we just lived through, you know, we had a wrestling heel for president who was a fascist for four years who could not stop bitching about, you know, Saturday Night Live or pro football or whatever.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But but and there were there were consequences to that as well.
Marc:But, you know, in it in Johnson's time, I mean, this was all done, you know, behind closed doors.
Marc:Take care of this.
Marc:So Paley did what?
Guest:But this has actual happy ending.
Guest:First thing that he did was that he says, there's got to be something we can do because we didn't expect this show to be a hit.
Guest:It's a hit.
Guest:What can we do to reward Tommy and Dickie and still tell them to lay off LBJ for a while?
Guest:And the producers said they've been wanting to get Pete Seeger on the air.
Guest:And he's been nationally blacklisted for 17 years, ever since he was listed as a as a communist in red channels.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that goes back to McCarthyism and everything else.
Guest:And and Bill Paley says, well, I can do that.
Guest:So have him on.
Guest:So they have him on.
Guest:And Pete Seeger, first TV appearance on network television in 17 years, sings a series of anti-war songs through the generations and ending with an original song that he wrote called Ways Deep in the Big Muddy, which basically makes fun of Vietnam and President Johnson.
Guest:And CBS sees this.
Guest:They tape it.
Guest:They cut it out.
Guest:They don't let it on.
Guest:Tommy's furious, goes back to the Times, screams and moans.
Guest:And then the beginning of 68, Walter Cronkite, the respected news anchor of CBS, goes to Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, comes back, does a special saying, I don't think we can win this war.
Guest:Best thing we can do is get out with honor.
Guest:CBS realizes that the tide has turned, allows the Smothers Brothers to bring back Pete Seeger, and he sings waist deep in the Big Muddy.
Guest:It gives me chills every time I see it.
Guest:Such dignity.
Guest:The man waited 17 years to say what he wanted to say the way he wanted to say it, and he did it.
Guest:And the postscript, Mark, is that when the Smothers Brothers were about to be fired by CBS,
Guest:They read on their last show a letter they'd gotten from LBJ after he had decided not to run in 68.
Guest:Tommy had written him a letter thanking him for that and saying that it was like he'd done it with dignity on the air.
Guest:And Johnson wrote this letter about how important satire was and comics were and that made leaders never get so big that they can't laugh at themselves and
Guest:And have the nation, you know, be comforted by that laughter.
Guest:Pretty amazing.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But I mean, you know, but that's in light of the fact that behind closed doors, he wanted those guys stifled.
Marc:And also in light of the fact that he was leaving.
Marc:So, I mean, it's no...
Guest:Yeah, well, how many politicians are you watching today who are more brave when they're not going for re-election?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:I mean, I get that.
Marc:But ultimately, so this Mother's Brothers is a hugely successful show.
Marc:So even though Johnson's on his way out, they're still on the air.
Marc:And then how does it unfold?
Marc:Because it seems like...
Marc:In the big picture, if Tommy was left to continue to follow his vision in any real way, he would have been a huge producer.
Marc:It seems like he had a tremendous sensibility around this stuff.
Guest:Yeah, he was he was a great talent scout and a great producer, and they actually had plans.
Guest:for a new summer series and another spinoff series.
Guest:And CBS had approved it and approved the fourth season of the Smothers Brothers and then just yanked it all.
Guest:And it was a breach of contract.
Guest:And Tommy sued them and eventually won.
Marc:Why'd they yank it, though?
Marc:I mean, like, so, you know, we talked about, you know, maybe three or four specific censorship events.
Marc:But how many were there?
Marc:Like, what was the environment of the show?
Marc:What was the fight that Tommy was?
Guest:There were more and more each year.
Guest:And if you can imagine, Tommy was like a rebellious teenager and CBS was like conservative parents.
Guest:And the more the more rules that the parents set down, the more the rebel wanted to push against them.
Guest:So they were doing things back and forth.
Guest:Tommy was sending scripts in with the word fuck in them just to fuck with the censors.
Guest:And so they would take those out and leave in some of the other things.
Guest:The one that finally was the last straw for CBS was the second of two David Steinberg comic sermonettes.
Guest:David Steinberg's father was a rabbi, and he used to be in Second City.
Guest:David Steinberg, not his rabbi father.
Guest:And he would have the audience call out names from the Bible, and he would do these...
Guest:ad lib little sermons and he did one on jonah and it got more negative mail than anything had ever gotten in the history of broadcasting what was the angle uh it was just a very funny it it's so benign but it's the fact that he was making fun
Guest:with religion not of religion but uh you know there wasn't anything bad about it i show it to my class these days in college and and they just say what in the world was offensive about that but uh they said can't have steinberg on anymore but if you do have him on he can't do another sermon soon as he could tom invited david steinberg back on and
Guest:And there was no sermon in the script, but David Steinberg was an ad libber.
Guest:And so when they were taping the show, he said, hey, how'd you like to do another one of those sermons?
Guest:And they just did one.
Guest:And CBS Freaked said it was in violation of their contract ad.
Guest:And pulled them and they went to trial.
Guest:And when they finally got to trial in 73, it was in the same federal courthouse at the same time as Daniel Ellsberg was was with his trial for the Pentagon Papers.
Marc:Interesting.
Guest:And they both won.
Guest:They both won.
Marc:So ultimately.
Marc:Tommy's fight was against censorship.
Marc:And in light of what you're saying to me, despite Lyndon Johnson's problems with them, they navigated that through the CEO, through Paley, because he was making too much money on the show.
Marc:And what then became the problem was this constant envelope pushing of Tommy's either through his own work or through the work of people on the show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I don't see that as a problem.
Guest:I'm guessing you don't see that as a problem.
Guest:Isn't that like their job?
Marc:Well, yeah, of course.
Marc:Their job is comics.
Marc:But I assume that they were, you know, losing affiliates because of the grassroots activity.
Marc:You assume correctly.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So then, you know, then all of a sudden, you know, CBS is like, well, this is a problem.
Marc:But nonetheless, I mean, Tommy never, never stopped fighting this fight because he believed in it.
Marc:And then ultimately he won in court.
Marc:But that was really a breach of contract.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Problem.
Guest:Yeah, he won in court, but he really did.
Guest:They sacrificed their careers for what they believed in.
Guest:And I love the Smothers Brothers and what they did, but they never got that career back.
Guest:They never got that platform.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when you think about it, nobody else has picked it up in Late Night Yes with Saturday Night Live on cable all over the place.
Guest:You do Jon Stewart, you do Jon Oliver, you do, you know, there's so many people, Bill Maher, who have done that sort of thing.
Guest:increasingly political or self-aware comedy, but nobody's doing it in prime time on broadcast network television.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And the interesting thing, like in really looking at that situation with Tommy and the Smothers Brothers is that they didn't free speech lost.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And it lost and lost because of network censorship.
Guest:No, I'm sad to say you're as a fabler, as a guy who writes fables, your morals are really depressing, but they're absolutely accurate.
Marc:And as you said, whatever the legacy of this is, well, I mean, but now there's this false sense.
Marc:There's this kind of bloviated professional wrestling talk radio idea of courage against this national plague of censorship.
Marc:And it's all bullshit.
Marc:There's no courage at all.
Marc:I mean, the people that have the real courage or ever had the real courage are the people that push back on the actual...
Marc:entities that that denied free speech, which were television networks and corporate media outlets.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Tom Smothers and the Smothers Brothers are all but forgotten today.
Guest:But in those three years, they were so important.
Guest:I mean, even the comics they had on, they had George Carlin on when he was just starting to get edgy.
Guest:They had Mort Sahl on and the
Guest:I just really don't think they've gotten enough credit for how much they tried to push the envelope.
Marc:Yeah, and they had – wasn't George Harrison on as well?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Well, that's one of my favorite stories because, you know, in terms of TV history, 64, the British invasion starts with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, one of the biggest things.
Guest:Four years later, the Beatles aren't touring anymore, and they come up with this idea of doing music videos –
Guest:So that they don't have to go anywhere and to give those to TV.
Guest:But there's no MTV back then.
Guest:And they don't give them to everybody.
Guest:They give them to one TV show per country as an exclusive.
Guest:And in the U.S., they didn't give it to Ed Sullivan.
Guest:They gave Hey Jude and Revolution to the Smothers Brothers.
Guest:And George Harrison came on as a surprise to sort of push it and support them.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:I remember that video, the Hey Jude one.
Marc:They're all sitting around with a bunch of other people, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And with the tambourines and just like it looked like a commune.
Guest:Yeah, it's completely different than what they looked like in 1964.
Guest:Well, that's for sure.
Guest:With their bowing at the same time.
Guest:And CBS would have put up with the Smothers Brothers had the Smothers Brothers not started to lose their audience as they got more vocal and paid more and more exclusive attention to
Guest:to the younger generation when they did that they lost they went from like 30 million viewers down to 20 down to 25 and then they got to a point where their loss was acceptable to cbs even though they were still doing so well that cbs had renewed them for a fourth season so even though you can think of the smothers brothers as one of the early examples of literal cancel culture they weren't canceled they were fired
Marc:Now, I heard that they're going to make this into a film.
Marc:How far along is that?
Marc:That seems like something that could educate the peoples.
Guest:Well, I don't know if it's going to happen or not.
Guest:I'm a worst case scenario guy.
Guest:So until it actually gets moving, I'm not sure.
Guest:But George Clooney had the rights to it for about 10 years with Smokehouse.
Guest:Just let that go.
Guest:Somebody else is just about to pick them up.
Guest:So it could happen.
Guest:I just hope that it does happen because it seems like their story is
Guest:is important and is entertaining.
Guest:Tommy on and off camera was a pretty funny guy.
Marc:Yeah, I guess it's really hard for people to imagine, you know, the sort of impact of what was happening in the country and with this particular fight.
Marc:I mean, it's full of, you know, big consequences and social importance.
Marc:And it was a very, very public and very newsworthy struggle that they were having there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's the challenge of being a teacher and of being a critic to try to put things into context to make people care about them when especially the older that it gets and the older that I get.
Marc:Yeah, you really got to hustle.
Marc:You really got to put a shtick together.
Guest:Well, thanks.
Guest:I love the fact that you're interested enough in this to talk to me.
Guest:And you've been doing the good fight for so long that I'm honored to just be here.
Marc:Well, I appreciate talking to you, David.
Marc:Thanks for doing it.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Thanks so much, Mark.
Marc:OK, so that was David Bianculli from Fresh Air, author of Dangerously Funny, the Uncentered Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
Marc:That happened.
Marc:And this was for political reasons.
Marc:Not lifestyle choice, not ethnicity.
Marc:which are being made into political reasons by a very ambitious, frightening, well propagandized right wing movement in this country.
Marc:The real stifling of comedy is when people in power decide that what the comedian is saying is dangerous and must be stopped.
Marc:Not because they're like, oh, I'm in trouble.
Marc:Oh, did I just say that?
Marc:I'm in so much trouble.
Marc:I'm being canceled.
Marc:There's no courage in that, playing the victim.
Marc:The Smothers Brothers were courageous.
Marc:Janine Garofalo was courageous.
Marc:Courage in comedy is when the comedian takes on those power structures, even when you know they can end your career.
Marc:But courage also comes in the form of knowing when the things you're saying can cause harm to people and evolving your comedy past it.
Marc:Look, I'll play you an example, okay?
Marc:This is a clip from someone who was on this show.
Marc:This is a guy who knows about being censored, all right?
Marc:I just talked to this guy last year.
Marc:There were boycott threats against this guy for a song he wrote.
Marc:There was a public rebuke by the president and vice president of the United States, and there was a pressure campaign against him led by a cross-section of special interests.
Marc:So I'll play this for you.
Marc:This is Ice-T talking about how he had to pull the song Cop Killer off his album.
Marc:But he also said that this was the lesson he learned from it.
Guest:Look, I learned a lesson from that.
Guest:And on another album, I addressed it.
Guest:I called it Freedom of Speech.
Guest:Watch what you say.
Marc:I love that fucking record, man.
Marc:I listen to that a lot.
Marc:The Iceberg Freedom of Speech record.
Marc:The one with Jello Biafra at the beginning.
Guest:And what that means is we, Mark, you got the right to say whatever you want.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But you have to be prepared for the ramifications.
Guest:Always.
Guest:If I come out and I said something that would be considered anti-gay, which I never say, but if I did, I got to be prepared for the gay movement to attack.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If I come out and say something anti-Semitic, I have to be prepared to be attacked.
Guest:So you have the right to say anything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But you also got to be prepared...
Guest:for the ram.
Guest:Like you can't go to your wife and say, yeah, maybe I just fucked your sister free speech.
Guest:You know what I'm saying?
Guest:So I had to learn that.
Guest:I had to learn that what I do say, I have the right to say it, but people also have the right to get angry and pissed.
Marc:So let's sit with that.
Marc:I'm not going to play guitar today.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:I want to remind people to go to podswag.com slash WTF to get our new merch, the holiday sweatshirt, the new Hawaiian shirt, and the bundle packages of some of our old favorites.
Marc:That's podswag.com slash WTF or go to WTFpod.com and click on the merch tab.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:Say whatever you want.
Marc:You just might have to take the hit.
you