BONUS Marc and Kliph Nesteroff at the New York Public Library
Thank you.
Marc:all right hey everybody uh welcome folks uh this is my friend cliff um i want to tell a story about how i know cliff because i think it's funny uh cliff has written three amazing books i don't know if you've read them the comedians drunks thieves scoundrels and the history of american comedy is one of the if not the only greatest book on the history of comedy in this country a great book he wrote we had a little real estate problem the unheralded story of native americans and comedy
Marc:And this is the new book, Outrageous.
Marc:But when I met Cliff, it was, what did you say?
Marc:How long ago?
Marc:2010?
Marc:2010 is when this story takes place.
Marc:So he used to write a column for the WFMU Beware of the Blog.
Marc:It was classic showbiz.
Marc:And he wrote these articles, these pieces about classic comedy.
Marc:He wrote this amazing piece about Shecky Green and how fucking insane he was.
Marc:But other things.
Marc:It was a nice piece, and Cliff really had a sense of the weird darkness that comedy comes out of in the entire history of comedy.
Marc:I just thought that this was such an amazing thing about Shecky, about his genius, about his manic depression, about his chaotic behavior, and it inspired me to call Shecky Green, or to reach out...
Marc:because I wanted to interview Shecky, so I try to track down Shecky Green.
Marc:I've never met Cliff before.
Marc:I try to track him down, and I find this single-page website, which is always a good indicator that it's run by the guy.
Marc:So...
Marc:And there's sort of like an info at SheckyGreen.com email.
Marc:So I'm like, hi, my name's Mark.
Marc:I do a thing called a podcast.
Marc:It's like a radio show.
Marc:I'm really interested in having Shecky on.
Marc:And like within a day, I get an email back, Mr. Green is willing to talk to you.
Marc:And you know it's him writing that.
Marc:You can call this number and maybe set this up.
Marc:So I call a number.
Marc:I don't know who I'm calling, but it's like, hello?
Marc:And I'm like, oh shit, it's Shecky Green.
Marc:And I say, yeah, I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:I wrote you the email and I just wanted you to do this podcast like a radio show.
Marc:I would just come out there to Vegas and interview.
Marc:He's like, I'm not doing any more interviews.
Marc:And I'm like, what do you mean?
Marc:He's like, that guy, who the hell wrote that thing?
Marc:And I'd never talked to this guy before, but I knew he was talking about Cliff.
Marc:And I'm like, I think I know what you're talking about.
Marc:He didn't say anything about the charities or any of the good things I did.
Marc:Who the hell wrote that thing?
Marc:I'm not doing any more interviews.
Marc:And I'm like, all right, well, I think I know who you're talking about.
Marc:I was like, well, that's it.
Marc:I'm not talking to anybody.
Marc:And I'm like, then I look at the WFMU blog, and I find a contact for Cliff, who I've never met.
Marc:And I said, hey, Cliff, I love your writing.
Marc:I'm looking to interview Shecky Green.
Marc:I just got off the phone with him, and he's very upset.
Marc:He's mad about an interview, a piece, and I'm pretty sure it was yours, and he just wants to know where you got that information and why you didn't ask him about the charities.
Marc:So basically I said, where'd you get that information?
Marc:I wrote that to Cliff, and right away Cliff gets back to me and he says, he told me.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:That's absolutely right.
Guest:Because Shecky Green had left an angry message on my answering machine after I had published this article on the WFMU blog on the internet.
Guest:And he said, Mr. Nesteroff, I read that article you wrote in the paper.
Guest:I'm very upset with you.
Guest:Could you call me back, please?
Guest:So I phoned him back.
Guest:I said, hey, Shecky, what's up?
Guest:He goes, you wrote that article about me in the paper?
Guest:I go, no, on the internet.
Guest:He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, computer, right?
Guest:I go, yeah, on the computer.
Guest:He goes, those stories you told about me and Buddy Hackett were terrible.
Guest:Where did you get that shit?
Guest:I go, Shecky, you told me.
Guest:He goes, I told you that?
Guest:I go, yes, yes.
Guest:He goes, well, next time you interview somebody, maybe you should record it.
Guest:I said, Shecky, I recorded the whole thing.
Guest:I just transcribed your words verbatim.
Guest:He goes, oh, verbatim.
Guest:So anyways...
Marc:That's how Mark and I got to know each other.
Marc:And that's the kind of intense focus you have on the history of comedy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But now let's talk about this book because I don't want to make this overtly political.
Marc:And I know that people congregate at these type of events to find some hope.
Marc:And I appreciate your desire for that.
Marc:Now, this book is kind of amazing because I think we have had conversations on my podcast about what the incentive was.
Marc:Him and I, we've had discussions about these people that are like, you can't say anything anymore.
Marc:And we've always come to the reality that you can say whatever you want if you're willing to shoulder the consequences.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:This is not a constitutional issue most of these performers are talking about.
Marc:But what I was kind of fascinated to find out, because I don't know history, I'm kind of speculative and I know things, but you really contextualize a very long history of different types of, before cultural wars were called culture wars, and there was real anger on behalf of communities in the 1800s around entertainers.
Marc:I did not know any of that stuff about pre-Vaudeville,
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:With the Irish community in this city.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That really it starts with a fairly democratic imperative of immigrant class people wanting to sort of have a place in America as Americans and not wanting to be characterized as ethnic stereotypes in performances.
Marc:And that was going on in the 1800s.
Guest:Yeah, in the early days of vaudeville in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, ethnic characterizations and stereotypes were a predominant form of comedy on the vaudeville stage.
Guest:You had Irish stereotypes, you know, leprechaun-type shit.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You had Italian stereotypes, organ grinder-type shit.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You had blackface acts.
Guest:You had Dutch acts.
Guest:Dutch?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:A lot of the stuff was sort of... What were those?
Marc:Because I'm kind of curious...
Marc:What was the hilarious Dutch stereotype?
Guest:Well, they were mostly moored in malapropisms, sort of like Borat, the confused immigrant that would flip the words.
Marc:Of course, the confused Dutchman.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So it was all that kind of stuff.
Guest:And once immigrants started to become a little more assimilated or started to have American-born children,
Guest:a number of protest campaigns erupted to eliminate these depictions from the stage.
Guest:And I'm talking very early on, the 1890s, an Irish group called the Clan Niguel organized.
Guest:I think they were probably inspired a little bit by the Molly Maguires because they were very, very militant.
Guest:I don't think they were connected to the Molly Maguires or the IRA in Ireland or anything like that.
Guest:similar aggressive tactics.
Guest:They would write letters to Hammerstein's theater and say, you know, you've got two non-Irishmen on your show and they're doing Irish dialect and we find it insulting and you need to cut it out of the show.
Guest:And Hammerstein would reply, well, people enjoy it and it's my theater and fuck off, I'm not changing a thing.
Guest:And they said, well, if you don't, things will happen.
Guest:And he said, well, tough.
Guest:And then things happened.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:The Clan Niguel would show up.
Guest:They would blow whistles during the act so it was drowned out.
Guest:They would throw things at the stage.
Guest:They would beat up comedians.
Guest:They would send death threats, say, we're going to cut you if you don't cut this out.
Guest:And then later, when silent movies started up, the Clan Niguel still existed.
Guest:And when theaters showed silent movies that had Irish stereotypes, there was an Irish stereotype movie called The Callahans and the Murphys, which was sort of like a Hatfield and the McCoys type film.
Guest:They would storm the theater and throw black paint onto the movie screen and ruin the screen unless they pulled these movies.
Guest:So that was very early on, and it did lead to the erosion of Irish stereotypes from the stage.
Guest:Eventually, theater owners were like, okay, we're really...
Guest:paying the price here.
Marc:No more leprechauns.
Guest:Yeah, so they cut out the leprechauns.
Guest:This inspired other social protest movements with other minority groups.
Guest:Italian Americans organized and fought against Italian stereotypes on the stage.
Guest:African Americans organized.
Guest:Native Americans organized.
Guest:And it led to
Guest:conflict, tension.
Guest:There were editorials in newspapers that were supportive and that were condemning.
Guest:Some editorials would say, well, if we buckle to these Irish protest groups, what's next?
Guest:Black people won't let us do blackface?
Guest:Think of the consequences.
Guest:How are we going to be funny after that?
Guest:There's an editorial I quote from in the book that's from 1904 that says that most comedy is based on the exaggeration of our differences.
Guest:If we remove that from the stage, then say goodbye to comedy.
Marc:But that's hilarious because the exaggeration of our differences just meaning that why can't white people make fun of these other people?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:That's the exaggeration of differences.
Marc:We don't have a stereotype, so why can't we just mock?
Guest:Yeah, they often did argue in those papers that these groups need to lighten up and get a sense of humor.
Marc:But don't take off the blackface.
Guest:Don't lighten up that much.
Marc:Not that much, yeah.
Marc:But what was interesting to me in the sort of evolution of these type of culture wars, culture war is a modern term, but it seems to me that what was going on then in vaudeville and just pre-vaudeville is similar to
Marc:what we see now with marginalized groups fighting for a place in the culture that is respectful.
Marc:But bookended in between this is that, because it seems to me that the Irish, the Italian, the African American, the Jews fighting for this were really looking for their place in America.
Marc:But shortly after that,
Marc:it becomes a religious incentive.
Marc:When communism becomes a thing in Russia, it shifts from being proactive in terms of marginalized groups fighting for their place in the country into just people claiming decency or claiming that things are anti-religious.
Guest:Well, civil rights early on was considered a communist conspiracy.
Guest:So there was this idea that if you were fighting for racial equality, you must be a dirty commie.
Guest:Because the CPUSA in the 30s, they were the only major political party in America that was talking about that.
Guest:Now, they may have been talking about it to exploit it for a specific reason rather than altruistic reasons.
Guest:but they still were the only party that was even mentioning Jim Crow or lynching epidemics.
Guest:And so that was attractive to a lot of people who were not communists, who were interested in civil rights.
Guest:So eventually, it just became a very convenient way to demonize anybody that was in favor of civil rights or racial equality.
Guest:And so in the 1950s, the late 50s, and especially the early 1960s, organizations like the John Birch Society would deride Dr. Martin Luther King.
Guest:They'd say, well, he's probably a Soviet agent.
Guest:If we pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it's going to lead to a communist dictatorship, a Soviet-style tyranny in the United States.
Guest:It was a convenient way to demonize anybody who was in favor of racial equality.
Marc:But how does this affect show business?
Guest:Well, throughout that period, you had groups like the John Birch Society who would use that tactic to demonize anything that kind of went against their belief system.
Guest:So in those days, the John Birch Society actually protested Bob Newhart.
Guest:That radical.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That guy needs to be stopped immediately.
Guest:Put the phone down, Bob.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Bob Newhart, some people know, was doing monologues about American history, a phone call with Abraham Lincoln and whatever.
Guest:In those days, it was taboo to do comedy about American history.
Guest:It was considered sacred.
Guest:There were letters written to the editor complaining about an episode of Sergeant Bilko with Phil Silvers.
Guest:Another radical.
Guest:Because they parodied Washington crossing the Delaware.
Guest:This was considered the equivalent of being sacrilegious.
Marc:But before that, you know, when Amos and Andy was the most popular show on radio, I mean, it took, I mean, how many years did it take for them, for the NAACP and for the black community to really shut that down?
Guest:Well, Amos and Andy was on the air for 30 years.
Guest:30 years!
Guest:But it was different from the first season to the last season.
Guest:Just like any show that's on the air for 30 years, whether it's SNL or The Simpsons, it looks different, feels different in different eras.
Guest:So when it started, it was based on the minstrel conceit.
Guest:In fact, the name Amos...
Guest:back in the 1800s was associated with slave tales, sort of like the Uncle Remus conceit.
Guest:Sambo is a famous name people know is associated with that era.
Guest:So was Amos.
Guest:So when Amos and Andy premiered, a lot of people knew that.
Guest:And the theme song that Amos and Andy used when it premiered on radio was the theme music from D.W.
Guest:Griffith's A Birth of a Nation.
Guest:So it had all these sort of signifiers that there was this sort of racist conceit, this blackface conceit.
Guest:And for those that don't know, it starred two white guys doing what they considered black dialect, performing a two-man act as Amos and Andy.
Guest:And it was protested one year after the show went national.
Guest:And the reason it became the number one comedy in America was not necessarily because everybody loved blackface dialect.
Guest:But because of the format of the show, it aired five days a week, 15 minutes a day, with a cliffhanger at the end of each episode.
Guest:And it conditioned people to tune in the next day.
Guest:They wanted to know what was happening.
Guest:And it was sort of like an early idea behind binge watching.
Guest:You leave people wanting to know.
Guest:So that's what made it popular.
Guest:People had to keep tuning in to find out what happened in the story.
Guest:But the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the famous black newspapers of the era,
Guest:organized a protest against it.
Guest:They wrote several editorials saying, we're past this point now.
Guest:Blackface belongs in the past.
Guest:We don't need two white guys delivering what they consider to be black dialect.
Guest:This is an insult and it shouldn't be on the air now that radio is becoming more and more a national pastime in every single living room, that this is harmful.
Guest:And so there was literally thousands of letters written in support of this campaign.
Guest:One letter which I quote from, which is from 1931, a black reader of the Pittsburgh Courier said that I consider Amos and Andy to be just as bad as the KKK.
Guest:Another wrote that ever since Amos and Andy became popular everywhere he goes, white people call him Amos or they call him Andy the same way they would call black people boy, turned into a slur.
Guest:So there was great concern, and they submitted a petition with close to one million signatures to the FCC, at the time it was called the FRC, Federal Radio Commission, demanding that they remove it from the air.
Guest:But in those days, black radio listeners did not have much purchasing power.
Guest:So the threat of a boycott of the sponsor did not have the same clout as if it were to come from white listeners.
Guest:So their considerations were ignored,
Guest:and nothing changed.
Guest:The show stayed on the air.
Guest:The boycott campaign, which lasted, not a boycott campaign, but a protest campaign, lasted for two years, but it didn't really change things.
Guest:The show stayed on the air.
Guest:Eventually, it became more streamlined, became a half-hour sitcom.
Guest:Charles Carell and Freeman Gosden, the guys who started it and created it, did hire some black actors for the radio show and an Asian actor.
Guest:That was sort of like their concession, but they kept starring in it, doing this blackface dialect.
Guest:But as radio became more popular and more comedy shows came to the air and there was more competition, it became less and less popular.
Guest:It was still on the air.
Guest:It's sort of like The Simpsons today.
Guest:Because the culture changed.
Marc:There was just more options.
Marc:But I think it's a very interesting point you make about corporate interests and purchasing power and how...
Marc:what we see now with Christian nationalism and right-wing politics is this idea that it's a moral basis, but it's always put in place to protect business, that the culture wars in themselves are designed as a distraction.
Marc:Because another example of that, which I can't get out of my head, was when the LGBTQ community was protesting Netflix because of Chappelle's special,
Marc:And ultimately what happened is Netflix didn't buckle and they didn't take it off the air because I think in their mind, not unlike these other, like the black community's purchasing power, they realized there weren't enough voices to really stifle or choose.
Guest:That, plus Netflix doesn't have commercials.
Guest:So I think if that had aired on network television, it'd be very, very different because you have somebody to target who's the sponsor.
Marc:But it also makes me understand how that business doesn't really give a shit about politics.
Marc:No.
Marc:What would it take for Netflix to become Reichflix?
Marc:What would have to happen?
Guest:Not much, as long as... Compare what happens in network television in the 1950s with what happens in the late 1960s, sort of the pre-civil rights movement and post-civil rights movement.
Guest:In the 50s,
Guest:Network sponsors, ABC, CBS, NBC, if racists in the South complained about something and they had the purchasing power, they would change things or eliminate things in the script so as not to offend bigoted Southerners.
Guest:After the Civil Rights Movement,
Guest:they did the opposite.
Guest:If things were considered offensive or odious to civil rights groups, they would change things and ignore the bigots.
Guest:So there was a power change, and corporations generally buckled to whoever has the most power at the time.
Guest:So if it's an evangelical organization that has the most power, they're gonna koto to their demands.
Guest:If it's a civil rights organization that has the most power, they'll koto to their demands.
Guest:So if you look at the 50s, television,
Guest:you weren't allowed to mention bigotry.
Guest:Rod Serling tried to write several dramas, one about Emmett Till, and the sponsor changed it.
Guest:They said it can't take place in the South, it has to take place in the North, and it can't be about lynching, the guy has to steal from a cash register.
Guest:You know, they just completely distorted the whole thing.
Guest:Out of fear of losing... The sponsor didn't want a boycott campaign from bigots in the South who were happy that Emmett Till was murdered.
Marc:It seems insane and insensitive and wrong, but it still sort of happens.
Guest:Yeah, that's how corporations make their decisions.
Guest:It has nothing to do with ethics.
God damn it.
Guest:Got any funny stories?
Guest:You can talk more about Shecky Green.
Marc:But let's talk a minute about, like, not specifically anti-Semitism, but the impact, because, I mean, a big culture war, if we're going to frame it like that, you know, in terms of entertainment, was the McCarthy hearings, the Red Scare, and how that translated to, you know, what ultimately became the idea of a Jewish-run media.
Marc:Is that, do you cover that?
Guest:Well, in the 30s, Eddie Cantor got in trouble because he was probably the most well-known member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
Guest:And he was campaigning for Jewish refugees before anybody else in America very early on, 1933, 34, 35.
Guest:He hosted rallies around Los Angeles.
Guest:Let's help these Jewish refugees.
Guest:His radio show was sponsored by Texaco.
Guest:And they had internal memos where we said, we cannot let people think that Cantor has any political thoughts.
Guest:We need to scale this back.
Guest:And Eddie Cantor wasn't saying these things on his radio show.
Guest:It was in his private life, but it was well known.
Guest:And there was an incident where after a broadcast on CBS radio in front of the studio audience, they were off the air, and Eddie Cantor went directly to the studio audience and pleaded for unity to fight against Hitler.
Guest:Two people in the audience stood up and yelled, we don't want to hear any propaganda against Hitler.
Guest:Bert Gordon, a comedian who was on the Eddie Cantor show, he was known as the Mad Russian.
Guest:He had a catchphrase.
Guest:How do you do?
Guest:That was his big catchphrase.
Marc:Hilarious.
Marc:But the Russians didn't get mad about that, right?
Marc:They were just happy to be represented somehow.
Guest:As these Nazi sympathizers were walking out of the show, Bert Gordon, the Mad Russian, punched them, knocked them out, and it became a big scandal, a big news story.
Guest:Anyways, the Eddie Cantor show was canceled by Texaco not long thereafter.
Guest:Six months later, the chairman of Texaco resigned in shame when it was exposed that he'd been secretly selling oil to the Nazis and was a Hitler sympathizer.
Guest:Was he one of the guys that stood up?
Guest:Maybe.
Marc:None of this anti-Hitler propaganda.
Marc:Something you hear today.
Marc:Sadly.
Marc:So, as this moves forward, in terms of controversy, I think an interesting turning point in the book is where
Marc:You get these ex-John Birchers.
Marc:I didn't realize because I don't, and I think maybe I'm speaking for other people, but I had no idea about the connections between the Koch brothers and their father being one of the founders of the John Birch Society.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:and this thread of bircherism that runs through the think tanks of today that actually, when you say culture war, that phrase was sort of invented in relation to modern right-wing propagandizing.
Marc:Right?
Guest:Yeah, there's this incredible lineage and family tree to this kind of stuff.
Guest:And if you read John Birch Society propaganda from the late 50s and 60s, and it used to be made fun of all the time by Mad Magazine, one of George Carlin's first solo routines ridicules the John Birch Society, Bob Dylan had a famous song ridiculing them.
Guest:They were a laughingstock.
Guest:And if you read their materials, it's funny.
Guest:Like, it's a camp classic.
Guest:It's not meant to be funny.
Guest:But there's a booklet that the John Birch Society distributed in the mid-60s called Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles.
Guest:And it's got a drawing of the Fab Four on the cover.
Guest:And the...
Guest:The pamphlet earnestly argues that the Beatles were sent here by Soviet Russia to destabilize American youth to make them weak-kneed and prime for a communist takeover.
Guest:Like it seriously argued this.
Guest:But the John Birch Society was co-founded by the Koch brothers' father, Fred Koch, and a guy named Robert Welch, who was the guy responsible for junior mints.
Guest:So if you eat junior mints, that's the anti-civil rights mint.
Guest:But their game plan, which was to deride the civil rights movement, claimed that the civil rights movement of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 65 would lead to tyranny, has this lineage that followed.
Guest:And Charles Koch, one of the famous Koch brothers, ran a John Birch Society bookstore for three years until his father died and he inherited his wealth and changed the name to Koch Industries.
Guest:It had been called like Winkler Koch Industries before that.
Guest:And so he retained their political philosophy.
Guest:The only thing he disagreed with, Charles Koch, about the John Birch Society, was that they endorsed the Vietnam War, and he was opposed.
Guest:But he operated this bookstore when they were distributing books like Communism, Hypnotism, and The Beatles, and other things that argued that Martin Luther King was a communist agent that had to be stopped.
Marc:And when did this become... How does this evolve into...
Marc:Because I always associated the attack on rock and roll, this would be pre-Beatles, as being religious organizations, but it wasn't just religious organizations.
Guest:Well, there was always this sort of bigoted influence with Southern Baptists and a lot of evangelical culture and a lot of the
Guest:things that people hated about rock and roll is that a lot of the big musicians were black.
Guest:Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and white kids loved them.
Guest:And if you attended a rock concert, you often saw white kids and black kids dancing together, and this was considered a big no-no.
Guest:So people from the pulpit would claim that rock and roll was the devil's music, but it was sort of code that it meant quote-unquote race mixing was the phrase that they always used at the time.
Marc:And Elvis was like the sort of the combination of all forces.
Guest:Elvis was considered like a white black guy, which was terrible.
Guest:There was a thing called the White Citizens Council that sprung up throughout the South.
Guest:They were like Klansmen, but they wore suits.
Guest:And they were sort of like the representatives, in my opinion, of think tanks today, like the Heritage Foundation.
Guest:You have a guy in a bow tie.
Marc:And that was the Koch brothers, right?
Marc:Or was it...
Guest:They have connections with it.
Guest:But the Heritage Foundation, you'll still see today on talk shows, somebody will be introduced.
Guest:So-and-so is a senior fellow at the Heritage.
Guest:Oh, senior fellow.
Guest:That sounds smart.
Guest:What the fuck is a senior fellow?
Guest:Nobody explains what that means.
Marc:It's the head racist.
Guest:Yeah, a guy in a bow tie.
Guest:Invoking the founding fathers, saying liberty and freedom over and over and over to sort of give you the veneer of respectability when he's advocating for the repeal of all civil rights laws, all affirmative action laws, all women's rights laws.
Guest:It's an illusion.
Guest:of scholarship.
Guest:And so the White Citizens Council in the 50s was like that.
Guest:Their nickname was the Uptown Klan because they wore suits.
Guest:But they would picket Nat King Cole with racist leaflets at his concerts out front that said, Nat King Cole is coming for your white daughter and things like that.
Guest:And at a gig in Birmingham, and Nat King Cole was apolitical.
Guest:He wasn't a civil rights advocate.
Guest:Four members of the Birmingham White Citizens Council stormed the stage and tore Nat King Cole from his piano and beat the shit out of him in front of the whole concert, broke his ribs, broke a cheekbone, and he was hospitalized.
Guest:And he said, I don't understand it.
Guest:I'm not political.
Guest:Why would they come after me?
Guest:And the civil rights movement, while he was still ailing, criticized Nat King Cole.
Guest:They said, that's the problem.
Guest:Even though you're not active in the movement, they still hate you, you know?
Marc:So get on board.
Guest:Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Marc:So all this pushback, it's all the same forces, really.
Marc:It's anti-communist, and then the religious faction is a decency thing.
Marc:But then when you get into Lenny Bruce and the actual...
Marc:where those arguments, when the controversy is really on the law books as opposed to where we're at now, which is people who say they can't say anything because of cancel culture or whatever reason, or offending a particular marginalized group.
Marc:But there was a time, and they've sort of co-opted this as a beacon for them.
Marc:But with Lenny, these were obscenity laws that had to be dealt with and re-thunk.
Marc:in relation to what the First Amendment means.
Marc:But that has nothing to do with what's going on now, but it was a reality.
Guest:Yeah, I find it insulting to Lenny Bruce when people say you can't say anything anymore because he literally was arrested, and several other comedians were.
Guest:Mae West, I talk about in the book.
Guest:That radical.
Guest:She spent 10 days in jail because she did a play called Sex.
Guest:What year was that?
Guest:In 1928, I think, 27, 28.
Guest:It was called Sex, and it was successful.
Guest:It ran for six months until it was finally raided by the New York Vice Squad because of political pressure.
Guest:They said, why are you letting this stand, even though it was very popular?
Guest:They didn't just arrest Mae West.
Guest:They arrested the entire cast and everybody there who was involved, the stage manager, the lighting director, the ticket taker, and they were all facing jail time.
Guest:Ultimately, Mae West was convicted of obscenity, usually the charge was staging an obscene show, and she spent 10 days in a prison workhouse.
Guest:Lenny Bruce in 1962 in liberal Hollywood was arrested for using the word schmuck.
Marc:He was arrested by a bunch of schmucks.
Guest:Yeah, by a bunch of schmucks.
Guest:And so it's just an insult to say you can't say anything anymore when all of those obscenity laws, which held for so long, were overturned.
Guest:Between 1964 and 1973, that was the key period when most obscenity laws were challenged and overturned.
Guest:Although some arrests still occurred afterwards, but the police would no longer charge you with staging an obscene show.
Guest:They would come up with...
Guest:in the case of Richard Pryor, a charge like disorderly conduct.
Guest:One of the cliches you hear today is, oh, you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today.
Guest:You couldn't make Blazing Saddles today because of racial slurs.
Guest:But in 1974, Blazing Saddles is released to theaters.
Guest:It's a movie that's co-written by Richard Pryor.
Guest:It came out in January 74.
Guest:It was still playing in theaters,
Guest:When Richard Pryor was performing in Virginia that summer, 1974, when he got off stage, he was arrested for disorderly conduct because he swore on stage.
Guest:1974.
Guest:That's pretty late in the game.
Guest:Most people don't know that story.
Guest:These comedians made that ultimate sacrifice, and I think we insult them every time we say, oh, you can't say anything anymore because there are slurs that are taboo today that weren't 20 years ago.
Marc:Yeah, but also they...
Marc:they've co-opted this position of grievance around this freedom of speech business.
Marc:But when you talk about Pryor, or you talk about Lenny Bruce, even with the arrests for obscenity in actual, the idea that they broke the law is that Lenny and Richard Pryor, the reason they were doing what they were doing and what free speech meant to them, the objective was inclusivity.
Marc:that the objective of Lenny Bruce with all the slurs of all the different... Well, that was always the great defense of Lenny Bruce.
Guest:When people like Steve Allen, who loved Lenny Bruce, would defend him, they say, well, he's not being dirty for the sake of dirty.
Guest:He's using these words to further a point.
Guest:He's not merely trying to be provocative.
Guest:And today there's a whole genre of provocateur comedy where a guy will go up on stage, he'll say a word that he knows is going to get an ooh and an ah, says the word or the statement, it gets the ooh and the ah, and then the comic is like, what, what, what, what?
Guest:And he goes, you designed it to get that reaction.
Marc:And now you're feigning this outrage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Ooh, am I going to get canceled now?
Marc:But it's a false premise.
Marc:It's a hackneyed idea.
Marc:And what they're actually doing is co-opting this idea that they're free speech warriors, but they're actually fighting for the ability and the, not the right, but the space of
Marc:to further marginalize people with words.
Guest:Well, one thing I want everybody to remember, and it's never mentioned in editorials, social media, it's totally perverted the way it's characterized, is that a bigot on stage, and I don't mean a comedian, but like a bigoted speaker at a college arguing that black people aren't as intelligent as white people or whatever,
Guest:Okay, they're exercising their right to free expression to be a bigot.
Guest:But when people object, when they protest that guy, they're not censoring that guy.
Guest:They're practicing free expression to express their opposition to bigotry.
Guest:That's free expression too.
Guest:And it's always mischaracterized in recent history as a willy-nilly naysayer, too sensitive censorship.
Marc:But it's characterized that way in the bubble that they exist in.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There's no real collective anymore.
Guest:But it's two forms of free speech pressing against each other.
Guest:And if you're going to defend only the bigot and not the anti-bigot, like, who the fuck are you?
Guest:What's wrong with you?
Marc:I'll tell you who they are.
Marc:It's half the country.
Yeah.
Marc:But that's also sort of a problem that I have with the idea that part of the point of this book is that this has always existed, that there was always this tension for whatever reason, whether it be proactive or repressive.
Marc:But I think now, because there are certainly more than three channels, not everyone's on the same page.
Marc:People live in very alternate information realities.
Marc:And now another part of the issue is that information and news at some point, once the Fairness Doctrine was taken away, has become entertainment.
Marc:And I think a rational person can see that there's a big grift going on and that most of these guys are showboats and they're not really delivering anything but bullshit.
Marc:So it becomes really hard to assess whether things are really the same or aren't very much worse.
Guest:Well, the whole think tank infrastructure and a lot of these foundations, and I talk about them in the book.
Marc:I love that part of the book with Paul Wyrick.
Guest:Paul Wyrick.
Guest:And a lot of them have roots in the John Birch Society, the Bradley Foundation.
Guest:Remember these names, because once you are aware of them, you'll hear them all the time.
Guest:They're always on social media, so and so from the Bradley Foundation, funded by the Bradley Foundation.
Guest:What's the Bradley Foundation?
Guest:They started as an electronics firm in Wisconsin.
Guest:They funded the John Birch Society by advertising in their newsletters in the late 1950s when they were called Alan Bradley.
Guest:They have co-opted the phrase free speech.
Guest:They claim to fund free speech while sponsoring legislation that criminalizes protests.
Guest:They're not free speech.
Guest:They're anti-speech.
Guest:But the Bradley Foundation, the DeVos Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, they all have literally billions of dollars at their disposal.
Guest:And they will fund a conservative group on a campus that's independent of the campus.
Guest:That campus will then invite a provocative speaker that's funded by those foundations.
Guest:a protest erupts in response to the speaker.
Guest:The school is then sued by lawyers funded by that foundation.
Guest:They film the protest, put it out into the ecosystem, and say, see, this school is opposed to free speech, and the media channels that are amplifying it are funded by those same think tanks and foundations.
Guest:And people don't realize it.
Guest:that it all stems from a handful of small groups that are very well organized, very well orchestrated, and are responsible for some of the great lunacy of the past several decades.
Marc:And now what you're feeling is of 400 liberals going like, fuck, we gotta...
Marc:We really got to get organized at some point.
Marc:I think we... Is there any way we can... I don't know if we can push back on this or what.
Marc:We end up arguing about Israel for three hours.
Guest:We're never going to...
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, and this is totally relative to the premise of the book, which is entertainment, because the people you're talking about are the same people that characterized entertainers and tried to sort of harness the power and maintain power in their base by using entertainers as scapegoats.
Guest:I mean, like I mentioned, the John Birch Society went after Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, the Beatles...
Guest:many other things, All in the Family, Norman Lear, and all these years later, their lineage claims to be the champions of free speech.
Guest:They're not.
Guest:They never have been.
Marc:Well, that's the interesting...
Marc:that you really explore in the book that I'm fascinated with, and it's hard for me to pull it all together, is that a lot of the culture war points, the dividing points that become arguments among the right and the left, are designed to do that.
Marc:And then you have comics of a certain ilk who will just take those talking points and run with them because they think it's a real issue.
Marc:And that by talking about it, they're being provocative when actually they're just dupes for right-wing propaganda and easily appropriated by right-wing politics.
Guest:Yeah, they've been manipulated.
Guest:They've been manipulated.
Guest:I have a little bit of sympathy for it because any of us are vulnerable to being manipulated.
Guest:Not me, man!
Guest:I mean, the...
Guest:In the old days, when people complained, they wrote a letter to the editor.
Guest:And when the Smothers Brothers controversy happened in the late 1960s, and David Steinberg did these sermons, these mock sermons, and people said it was ridiculing religion, how dare you put this on TV, CBS received hundreds, if not thousands, of angry letters.
Guest:And as I mentioned in the introduction, some of them contained razor blades.
Guest:and so many christians with so little to do but today you know the key word uh back then is editor letters to the editor sure so if those letters those angry complaints got published in a newspaper or tv guide they published maybe one maybe two even if they received hundreds of letters today
Guest:There's no editors.
Guest:Social media, they're all published instantaneously.
Guest:It creates this illusion that people are now suddenly humorless, that they're more sensitive than in the past, but people had similar sensitivities in the past.
Guest:It's just people on the two opposing sides of politics get upset for different reasons.
Guest:Those of us on the left tend to get upset the most about
Guest:bigotry, really, and that's what most of the, if you call it censorship, left-wing censorship is.
Guest:It's trying to suppress racism, racial slurs, gender slurs, and we're characterized as anti-speech instead of anti-racist as a result.
Marc:Well, that's where the language really plays a big part, because we're going to
Marc:run out of time here, but we'll take some questions in a second, but that they've perfected this propaganda because they are very organized and it's been going on a long time, that the idea of wokeism, generally speaking, what does that even mean?
Marc:It's this amazing umbrella term for everything the right has been pushing back or repressing.
Guest:Yeah, whatever you don't like.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And it just takes over everything and makes it a single object-focused ideology, which doesn't even mean anything.
Marc:And now that's the big word.
Marc:And what saddens me is there were guys, one woman, Roseanne, there were...
Marc:You know, who were, you know, pretty amazing comic talents who have sort of, you know, fallen for this idea that they're being, you know, muscled to not be able to express themselves.
Marc:Now, obviously there is a sensitivity, but I tend to believe that these type of reactions around being triggered and around, you know, and then again, I'm not on a college campus or in a...
Marc:in a work environment where it's volatile.
Marc:But eventually, once people have said their piece and it's out in the culture and it's known, it'll contract and they'll find a place.
Marc:But the problem now is that...
Marc:Tolerance is not necessary in a totally polarized culture.
Marc:Without tolerance, without the idea with the majority, if the majority decides something in a democracy, then the people in the minority have to suck it up.
Marc:they may be against it initially and be like, you know, fuck that.
Marc:But after a few years, they're like, nah, I guess it's all right.
Marc:But now, that doesn't even exist.
Marc:So intolerance, without tolerance, democracy can't really function.
Marc:And I just see this as a two-sided thing, that it's not only tribal, but there's an entire point of view that refuses to budge on any sort of inclusivity or tolerance for what the majority might want.
Marc:And that's why we're headed towards, here comes the hope,
Marc:a very real fascism.
Marc:And I don't know what the position is for progressive comedy and progressive art in entertainment.
Marc:It exists, but is it toothless?
Marc:I don't know why I'm asking you this.
Marc:This is just something I think about every waking minute of my life.
Marc:This means, well, why don't we just take some questions?
Marc:Do you got an answer to that?
Marc:You just want to hit these?
Guest:No, we'll hit these questions.
Guest:But I did want to just say that, you know, freedom's a good thing.
Guest:Liberty's a good thing.
Guest:But when somebody uses the phrase freedom and liberty every single time they appear on TV, be skeptical of that motherfucker.
Marc:Not necessarily, also in this book, there's some great Zappa stuff.
Marc:I don't know if you're really aware just how prescient that guy was about what's happening here, because you do go into those Senate hearings.
Marc:Yeah, PMRC.
Marc:Yeah, and it's really all in here, and it's almost hard to talk about in this short of time, because Cliff's ability as a historian and as a thorough nerd for show business
Marc:is to make it very engaging and also sort of create this story and make these connections that are ultimately surprising.
Marc:I know there's four people in this room through this entire conversation that sat there going like, yep.
Marc:But there's only four.
Marc:And most of us don't know this stuff.
Marc:And you put it together in a beautiful way.
Marc:It's a beautiful book.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Oh, this one just says, when's the Jew going to shut up?
Marc:You're not supposed to give me the weird ones.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:When do you think the public will get tired of this wave of faux-edgy comics whose sole appeal is that they are punching down an anti-woke?
Marc:Oh, I can answer that.
Marc:again speaking to the issue of complete polarization is that you know there was a time where where they would eventually have a hard time getting work or as cliff noted eventually the culture would move on but i feel that because of the polarization because of the bubbles that they will find their market yeah and and because of social media platforms be able to fill rooms with people that will pay to see them for as long as this this
Marc:polarization exists.
Guest:Well, people like to hear their point of view reinforced, so that just, you know... So never!
Marc:And unfortunately, you just have to choose not to listen to it and hope they don't stifle other voices entirely.
Marc:Again, a lot of hope.
Marc:Can you talk about the history of comedians choosing to stir outrage to get rich and famous and how even Matt Reif is now symbolic of that?
Marc:Well, first of all, don't jump the gun on Matt Reif.
Marc:If you don't know who he is, he's the new it boy of shitty comedy.
Marc:And...
Marc:And, you know, he's taken a big chance in his career right now to shit on the mostly female audience that he accumulated through social media to sort of, you know, kiss up to these pseudo-edgelords.
Marc:And, you know, personally, I don't think it's going to go well for him.
Marc:And ultimately, my producer, Brendan McDonald, the genius, made a good point in saying that he thinks that Matt Reifus is actually mobilizing a new generation of comics to push back against what that stands for in much the way that Dane Cook did at a different time to once again be creative and bring a new energy and voice to what that doesn't represent.
Marc:So maybe within show business, there is hope.
Guest:I read an interesting interview several years ago when Matt Reif was maybe five or six years in.
Guest:His mother took him to see Dane Cook when he was six years old.
Guest:I'm not joking.
Guest:And he said, I want to do that.
Guest:So he's a victim now.
Marc:He has a righteous grievance.
Marc:But it's comparable.
Marc:It's the same kind of thing.
Marc:I forget this is going out on the internet now.
Marc:Now I'm going to have to deal with Dane calling me.
Marc:Hey, dude, I thought we were good.
Marc:Hey, look, we're all in the same business.
Marc:We're just trying to entertain people.
Marc:Okay, let's see.
Guest:What does it say?
Guest:What does it say?
Guest:What does it say?
Marc:Does the ability to generate a private income stream, e.g., via Patreon, give today's... Okay, let me... There's many commas in this question.
Marc:And it was written very deliberately.
Marc:Does the ability to generate a private income stream, e.g.
Marc:via Patreon, give today's conservative reactionaries more power than those in the past?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:It gives them not only just these conservative reactionaries, but comics and everybody.
Marc:And with conservative reactionaries, and this is just my speculative point of view, that if the algorithms are driving you down these rabbit holes, it seems like you can radicalize someone within 48 hours.
Marc:if they're diligently interested in what's being presented to them by their last search.
Marc:You agree?
Guest:Man, I'm so depressed.
Marc:I don't need to... Do either of you have a good Don Rickles story?
Guest:I have two barely stories that I'd like to share.
Marc:Which ones?
Marc:Barely?
Guest:Well, they're barely stories.
Guest:They're barely stories.
Guest:But I was booked to do a show with Don Rickles in Las Vegas.
Guest:They booked us for some festival.
Guest:The mayor of Vegas was going to moderate it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was supposed to be about comedians and the mafia.
Guest:And if you read Don Rickles' memoir, which he didn't write, it was ghostwritten, but if you read it, he doesn't mention the mob in relation to himself, only in relation to Frank Sinatra.
Guest:But as I wrote in my first book, the mob took over his career at one point.
Guest:Rickles' career.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anyways, we were supposed to do this show together, and Rickles was going to dish.
Guest:He was going to tell the reality.
Guest:And we signed the contracts, and then he died.
Guest:So I have, I don't know if it was the mob, but...
Marc:It was one of those amazing instances where the mob killed somebody of old age.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:They were very clever, you know, back then.
Guest:But then, after he died, they had a Don Rickles estate sale, and one of the listings was Don Rickles' book collection, and it was a picture of my book, The Comedians, being sold in the Don Rickles estate sale.
Guest:So I kind of like that, you know.
Guest:Anyways.
Marc:It's so funny to watch, because I go on these things where I just start watching, like, for some reason I was watching a lot of Don Rickles' segments on Carson and stuff, and also Rodney Dangerfield.
Marc:Yeah, the best.
Marc:Yeah, and there's no better story than to watch Sinatra or Rickles tell that story about their first meeting.
Marc:But also, like, the amazing thing about Rickles is just, you know, how much he didn't make sense at all.
Marc:That...
Marc:You know, he was known for this thing, but if you just go on YouTube and watch a lot of those little clips, he just starts saying things, and it's the timing.
Marc:You know, where, you know, he'd be like, what are you, what did that come with two pairs of pants and a hockey puck?
Marc:And you're like, what does that even mean?
Marc:But you're just sort of like, oh my God, that's hilarious.
Marc:But you're not supposed to think about it later.
Marc:You just live in the moment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But...
Marc:But also, I didn't realize just how much dead air there were on talk shows back in the day, because they went on forever.
Marc:I don't know if you noticed about Rickles, and I love Rickles, but the amazing thing about Rickles is he was a drowning man from the get-go.
Marc:He would sit in that chair next to Carson and just be flailing out of the gate.
Marc:And just sweating and saying things that made no sense with that amazing timing.
Marc:And every once in a while, you'd be like, oh my god, this doesn't make any sense.
Marc:And he's bombing, but you love it.
Guest:Some of the best Rickles stuff is not available that he did on Carson.
Guest:There's a week that
Guest:has been digitized.
Guest:Carson Entertainment has a massive archive of every Johnny Carson show that survives.
Guest:They don't digitize the ones with guest hosts, but they did digitize a week of shows guest hosted by Don Rickles.
Guest:And he doesn't do an opening monologue.
Guest:He just immediately goes out into the audience after they play the theme song and starts insulting the audience.
Guest:And he does it for 10 minutes, and he did it five nights in a row, and it's amazing.
Guest:It's like at his height, 73, 74, so hopefully one day the public can see it.
Guest:Didn't Judd just make a documentary about... Yes, he made a mini short film about the relationship between Bob Newhart and Don Rickles and their lifelong friendship, and it's really good.
Guest:It's really sweet.
Guest:It's 20 minutes long.
Guest:Michael Befiglio...
Guest:The co-director of the George Carlin documentary that Judd produced put it together, and you can see that on the New Yorker website.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's fun to watch those old guys.
Marc:You know what's also fun is to watch when Rodney Dangerfield does panel on Carson, and there's a couple where he, because Rodney would only do his jokes, and he never talked.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Do you know that one where he runs out of material, and there's still time left?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Carson's like, that's it, honey.
Marc:He's like, yeah, honey, that's it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:There seems to be a generational clash or feeling of opposition and competition between generations.
Marc:E.G.
Marc:A lot of E.Gs.
Marc:Boomer slash Gen X slash Millennial slash Gen Z. Is this a continuation of historical trends or something new?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's a... I mean, I can only answer that in a speculative way.
Marc:I don't know that it's... I think it seems to happen quicker, and as each generation comes, in some ways, the expectation and perhaps the quality starts to degenerate a little bit.
Guest:I think it is the same.
Guest:You see the phenomenon... But I'm an old guy now, so I say things like that.
Guest:These kids!
Guest:These kids!
Guest:You see that phenomenon with comedians themselves.
Guest:I have several examples in the book, sort of an arc of Mae West, Steve Allen, Billy Wilder.
Guest:They start out being the firebrands who are condemned for being... Mae West for being dirty.
Guest:Billy Wilder did a movie that was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency.
Guest:Steve Allen was targeted with death threats by the John Birch Society.
Guest:As they get older...
Guest:they start to turn.
Guest:And Steve Allen, who was one of the funniest, wittiest, great champions of comedy, became very conservative as he got older and started to condemn comedy.
Guest:And before he died, he wrote his last book.
Guest:It's called Vulgarians at the Gate, and it's a bit of a camp classic.
Guest:In the book, he condemns the David Spade sitcom Just Shoot Me...
Guest:and Dawson's Creek and says they're leading to the downfall of America.
Marc:And I think the point is here, these guys just have to die sooner.
Marc:We're singing with Bill Maher now.
Marc:Again, I'm going to be fielding calls and probably some tweets that I'm not going to, that doesn't matter.
Marc:But something happens to some people when they get older.
Marc:I don't know what it is.
Marc:Even my father, who's mildly demented at this point, is saying things where I'm like, where did that come from?
Marc:He's like, I don't know.
Marc:So I don't know what it is.
Marc:Maybe a person can explain that to me.
Marc:But it does seem to happen to a lot of people.
Guest:It happens frequently.
Guest:And Mae West, the same thing.
Guest:She was the scourge of church groups and decency organizations.
Guest:By the 1970s, she said, movies are too dirty.
Guest:I don't like hearing swear words.
Guest:I don't like dirty jokes told in my presence.
Guest:Martha Ray, I have a quote from her in the book, she was a big comedy star in the 1930s and 40s, she goes, I hate comedy today, it's all dirty, and putting down the president, I can't stand any of these comedians, Eddie Murphy, David Letterman, Steve Martin, they're all disgusting to me.
Guest:And then she sued David Letterman, because Martha Ray, some people remember, in the 80s, she became a spokesperson for Polly Dent denture cream.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she would be on the commercial, and at the bottom of the screen, it would say, Martha Ray denture wearer.
Guest:And so David Letterman on late night did this monologue joke where he said, Paul, I saw the most terrifying commercial last night.
Guest:And Paul Schaefer's like, eh, yeah, what's that?
Guest:And Letterman goes, it said, Martha Ray condom user.
Guest:And so Martha Ray sued NBC and Late Night with David Letterman for defamation of character, and this is true, her legal counsel qualified and said, Martha Ray, in fact, is not a condom user.
Right?
Marc:It's true.
Marc:The thought that comes to my head is odd.
Marc:But if being an entertainer or being a comic or being a dirty comic in some respect, and I'm talking about myself, is some kind of fuck you to either the generation that came before you or to your parents, that I guess maybe eventually grow out of that.
Marc:And that might happen when you're 80.
Marc:And you realize like I'm not mad at them and they were right.
Guest:I mean, it's a really common cycle throughout the history of America.
Marc:But to speak to this more directly, I think there's always been generations, and I speak of it, you know, I feel like that there are generations of comedy.
Marc:You know, there are the old guys, and then there were the new guys in the 70s that are very defined on the cultural landscape.
Marc:And then there's the generation right before me, which was the comedy club boom generation.
Marc:And then there was, you know, my generation.
Marc:And you can sort of differentiate between them.
Marc:And I think that always...
Marc:Another book.
Marc:What's that book?
Marc:And you wrote about it too.
Marc:The amazing thing about the comedians is that what we don't realize is that at any given point in time where you know the ten comedians that are popular, there's literally a thousand that no one fucking knows about.
Marc:And I think it's the same generationally now that whether the platforms or whether it's TikTok or whatever, there are a lot more comics and a lot more visibility and you can get content out there that'll put you on the radar.
Marc:But in order to sustain a career in show business, you must be able to do the job.
Marc:And the nature of that job doesn't seem to really change that much.
Marc:But I do think that it is different.
Marc:And I think that ultimately what happens that is sad is that when I see these younger comics or comics a couple generations from me and they think they're doing something amazingly new, it's really not.
Marc:and they think they're inventing it, and I guess every generation does that, but I think there's hope in that.
Marc:It seems that true artists and true comics and people that really have something to say and are creative generally surface in a big way.
Marc:So I think that's optimistic, right?
Marc:Do you feel satisfied with this conversation, Cliff?
Marc:Hold on.
Marc:Oh, here we go.
Marc:And then we'll wrap it up because I know it's a library and people have to get home.
Marc:What advice would you have for an emerging comic voice?
Marc:Well, this could have been a little funnier.
Marc:Um...
Guest:All right, this is the last one.
Marc:Where does political comedy, specifically late night television,
Marc:fit into this conversation.
Marc:Carson was known for being apolitical.
Marc:Present day is near singly focused.
Marc:Well, some of them.
Marc:Well, that's interesting, because there was a time where they were very apolitical.
Marc:But I think that Trump sort of changed that in terms of really picking sides, except for Jimmy Fallon.
Marc:And I'm not taking any shots at him.
Marc:I think he's very fun, and it's a fun show to do.
Marc:But what do you think?
Marc:Who cares?
Marc:Good answer.
Marc:Well, look.
Marc:Where does it fit into the conversation?
Marc:I think this is... Well, it's interesting because it does fit in a little bit in terms of when you talked about Eddie Cantor and how this was not a person that was political and public.
Guest:No, for years and years, political comedy was taboo.
Guest:There was Will Rogers and there was Bob Hope, but it was very generalized.
Guest:They didn't talk about specific policies.
Guest:They didn't talk about legislation specifically.
Guest:It was in a general way.
Guest:And if you look at...
Guest:Bob Hope's jokes in the 30s and 40s, he would say something about the Democrats and get a laugh.
Guest:He would say something about the Republicans and get a laugh.
Guest:But the exact same joke, you could remove the word Democrat with Republican, and it's the same joke.
Guest:It wasn't about anything.
Guest:And one of the reasons was because for most of the 20th century, criticism of politics
Guest:outside of a news organization was forbidden.
Guest:You weren't allowed to do that in show business.
Guest:You would have been stopped.
Guest:You would have been censored.
Guest:Certainly not on Steve Allen's Tonight Show or Jack Parr's Tonight Show did they permit it until the early 60s when people like Dick Gregory started to change it a little bit.
Guest:Mort Sahl, of course, changed it a little bit.
Guest:ultimately, sponsors frowned upon that thing, because again, it felt like they were going to polarize or alienate possible purchasers of their products.
Marc:Well, I think all that's changed.
Marc:I mean, I think this question is, you know, he's talking about the history of it, which is in the book, but I mean, The Daily Show and political satire shows certainly, you know, open the door for hosts to have an opinion, and if they were funny, and to get that opinion out there, and certainly...
Marc:you know, help move, you know, the cultural ball in the right direction.
Marc:So I think that they're probably, you know, found freedom in that and are now taking the liberty to have opinions.
Marc:And I mean, I don't know whether it fits in or how it fits in, but, you know, I think if it's funny, it's funny.
Marc:And if it's, if it's, what am I trying to say?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Stop listening.
Marc:The, uh...
Marc:I only got through half the book.
Marc:I read the whole book.
Marc:Thanks a lot, folks.
Marc:You're great.
Marc:Thank you.
Guest:Be signing books over there.
Guest:Thank you.