There it was in my inbox, greeting me at lunchtime on the final day of February with the subject line of, “On Sale! Louis C.K. “Ridiculous Tour,” hovering over a giant photo of the comedian wearing his signature “well, shucks” grin.
The notice came from a Seattle venue best known for being the home of our local ballet and opera companies, a place that generally programs highbrow acts. When Patti LuPone came to the city in 2023 to headline a benefit concert, this venue hosted her. Ditto for John Cleese.
But with a few exceptions, a venue will host whoever and whatever the market demands. C.K., as the email boasts, is a six-time Emmy Award and three-time Grammy Award winner. One of those Grammys was awarded after five women came forward in 2017 to accuse him of sexual misconduct which, funny enough, wasn’t mentioned in the email.
To anyone scoffing at this with a “Why would they?” — well, why not? C.K. transformed his accusers’ horror at having him masturbate in their presence without their consent not simply into material but, you know, his “thing.” A sexual kink instead of sexual misconduct, a bit of light oopsie-doodle haha.
“I like company. I like to share! I’m good at it, too. If you’re good at juggling, you wouldn’t do it alone in the dark,” he jokes in 2020’s award-winning “Sincerely Louis CK.”
People are exhausted with all their anger and demands for justice resulting in nothing, including from figures they expect to do better.
It’s all out there, so why wouldn’t the theater’s PR team be as upfront with it as C.K. continues to be? “Six-time Emmy Award, three-time Grammy Award winner and five-time non-consensual masturbator – that we know of!” Now there’s an attention-grabber. Maybe insert a slide whistle sound effect! No reason to hold back. We’re well into the age of everything being permissible.
This is not expressly about one entertainer whose upcoming tour is selling out large venues across the country, proving his command over his fandom holds firm. And that is not an argument for his absolution, it’s a factual statement on par with saying that shopping at Amazon is convenient and Tesla car batteries tend to explode.
These are apt comparisons. Before Tesla CEO Elon Musk took a buzzsaw to our trust in constitutional checks and balances, people were still buying his cars despite multiple allegations of racist abuse at his plants and fatal accidents related to Tesla’s self-driving system failures.
The New York Times exposing Amazon’s brutal work culture a decade ago didn’t slow its march to becoming a multitrillion-dollar company.
Americans do not let the mistreatment of a few people, whether five, 500 or 5000, get in the way of their comfort or good time.
Last week when Netflix announced its three-special deal with Tony Hinchcliffe, the comic who referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” at Donald Trump’s pre-election Madison Square Garden rally, my reaction was the same as how I greeted that on-sale email for C.K.’s tour. “Of course.”
Fellow comic Marc Maron already called it days after Hinchcliffe dropped his rally set, as I previously quoted. “Fascism is good for business if you toe the line. Popular podcasts became tribal and divisive years ago,” he wrote. “Now they may be in the position to become part of the media oligarchy under the new anti-democratic government.”
Tony Hinchcliffe at a Trump rally on Oct. 27 at Madison Square Garden in New York. (Peter W. Stevenson /The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The broader mainstream may have been introduced to Hinchcliffe by way of that Madison Square Garden tight 10, but he was already a star. Hinchcliffe hosts the top live podcast in the world, “Kill Tony,” which is considered a main launching pad for aspiring comedians.
He’s also a superstar in Joe Rogan’s Comedy Mothership solar system, tied to Rogan’s Austin, Texas comedy club and its accompanying cadre of right-leaning headliners.
Netflix is a digital, for-profit venue following the money. According to a report in The Ankler citing Social Blade data, Hinchcliffe gained more than 36,000 new followers on X and 23,763 more on Instagram after the Trump rally.
“It was never my intention to swing an election,” The Ankler quoted him as saying onstage at the Mothership, “but god****t — right place, right time, I guess.”
Joking about terrible things disempowers them. Joking about vilified people reduces their humanity.
As people frantically paraphrase Martin Niemöller’s famous “First, they came for the socialists” poem in response to the detention and attempted deportation of activist Mahmoud Khalil, some have gotten bogged down in arguing which constituency they came for before Palestinians and campus protesters. Somebody will build that into a bit, I’m sure.
But here’s what we know: people are exhausted with all their anger and demands for justice resulting in nothing, including from figures they expect to do better.
Even Maron is about ready for the world to put a fork in him, addressing his cynicism over boycotts in his March 3 post. “Maybe public perception will change and maybe more angry people will once again believe that civil service in the form of candidacy will manifest,” he wrote. “. . . That’s if voting remains a thing. But in the meantime, if you want to go out in the world and shop at actual stores and stop buying Teslas, all the power to you. Whatever gets you through the day.”
Joking about terrible things disempowers them. Joking about vilified people reduces their humanity. “Everybody READ the ‘first they came for’ poem,” posted one Bluesky user, “And then IGNORED it because they decided who they were coming for was ‘content’ rather than humans.”
Now, now, you may be saying. If these guys aren’t intentionally out to harm anyone, as they often claim, what reason do we have to fuss? Besides the shout-outs they’ve received from a White House that’s dedicated to legislatively and extralegally inflicting maximum harm?
Comics are only out to make money. We would understand that if we only knew them through their podcasts.
Andrew Schulz, another Rogan crewmember, recently released his special “Life” on Netflix. He and his wife’s fertility struggle and his entry into fatherhood are the heart of the set. He also finds room to bust out a joke – which kills, by the way – that every newborn baby looks Puerto Rican.
You may wonder what is with these guys knocking around Puerto Rico. One theory, and hear me out, is that the right wing made the island and its residents a safe target to be “othered.” Since many don’t realize its Spanish-speaking people are fellow Americans, the ignorant can gleefully lump them in with other so-called immigrant invaders. Go ahead and joke about deporting them, because you can’t.
If you don’t follow Schulz’s podcasts or, say, listen to him lovingly rave about how much New Yorkers love Puerto Rico and its people on Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay,” you might not know that he’s laughing with them, not at them.
The thing is, the average giggler isn’t a student of nuance, and even Schulz’s avid listeners may not see anything wrong with him and his co-hosts taking casual swipes at marginalized people. It’s all with love. Except, maybe, when it comes to the transgender community.
Schulz riffing on his infant resembling a Puerto Rican may be a tad more defensible than Hinchcliffe’s bigotry nuke at Madison Square Garden. But Schulz helped a brother out in his recent conversation with Sharpe, explaining that Hinchcliffe was trying to joke about the very real environmental disaster that is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (which we’re specifically naming since he did not).
“He was actually referencing, like, an actual climate issue with, like, recycling,” Schulz said, “But still, I think that if he was, like, in New York and working it out at clubs, he’d be like, ‘Oh, they’re not going to get this. Let me change this for something else.’ I don’t think he, like has a personal vendetta, for Puerto Rico.”
Oh. Of course.
Mel Gibson attends a special screening of “Monster Summer” at the DGA Theater Complex in Los Angeles on September 24, 2024. (VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images)
Comedy employs equations that decode the American psyche, like the classic “tragedy plus time” math, or a certain comedian’s popular “of course, but maybe” bit. For example, of course former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo should have stepped down after he was accused of underreporting thousands of deaths among elderly residents in his state’s nursing homes during the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic to protect his reputation. That was dishonest and wrong.
But maybe that doesn’t disqualify him from running for mayor of New York City; how much longer were those sick old people going to live anyway? Would Cuomo be worse or more corrupt than the hilariously bent Eric Adams? Debatable.
Cuomo also faces multiple allegations of sexual harassment, but maybe that’s not disqualifying in the age where everything is permissible.
Adams denied the misconduct claims against him — of course! — as did fellow candidate Scott M. Stringer, who the New York Times reports was accused of sexual harassment decades earlier by two women.
Only two? That’s not so bad. Besides, we’ve already established legislatively and recreationally that nobody cares about women’s safety or well-being.
If they did, we wouldn’t be talking about the real possibility of the Trump administration re-arming Mel Gibson, whose gun ownership rights were stripped away from him in 2011 under a 1996 federal law that prohibits people convicted of domestic violence from owning firearms.
Gibson pleaded “no contest” to a misdemeanor battery charge for physically assaulting then-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva while she was holding their infant daughter.
But that was such a long time ago, and Gibson has made so many wonderful movies since then. The man directed 2016’s “Hacksaw Ridge” and that was nominated for, like, a bunch of Oscars and Golden Globes. What’s the worst that could happen if he loses his temper while packing heat?
We joke. We kid! That is pretty much all the energy we can muster to face life right now.
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Experts on fascist regimes have been counseling all who will listen that among the first tactics employed by those seeking power is to overwhelm the masses to silence and inaction.
What we hadn’t considered is the extent to which a complicit entertainment industry has been softening us up by elevating clowns into sages.
Before the legislative attacks on transgender people came jokes. Lots of jokes. Before that came #MeToo, which was dismantled by the near total lack of accountability for the famous men it ensnared, and jokes.
Helping that along were years’ worth of jokes minimizing rape culture, and the racist, sexist yuks that were the hallmark of the ‘90s and aughts’ political correctness backlash.
It’s better to laugh than to sweat the giant nightmares, like the next coming of Roseanne Barr, or our accelerating slide into a dictatorship under a game show host. As long as misery isn’t banging on your doorstep, everything’s laughable and nothing matters. And if nothing matters, then anything goes.
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