Andrew Clavin’s The Court Jester episode kicks off with a provocative, self-aware rant mocking political correctness—dismissing gender stereotypes ("pretty faces"), LGBTQ+ slurs ("gay chartreuse"), and faiths (calling Judaism "God’s special dialus direct program") as "truth" while feigning contrition. He pivots to culture wars, citing Breitbart’s "politics follows culture" mantra, then praises Game of Thrones Emmys despite conservative backlash, mocking Andy Samberg’s "performative" racism jokes while crediting Viola Davis’ win as a hollow victory. Clavin argues race is "bogus," ridicules Democrats’ segregationist past, and ends by promoting Danny Kaye’s 1955 film—hinting future segments will blend comedy with edgy acts like pole dancers—all framed as defiant cultural rebellion. [Automatically generated summary]
Before I begin talking, I want to apologize for the things I'll probably say.
If I'm about to offend anyone or make anyone uncomfortable, it's going to be an unthinking moment when I somehow allow myself to slip from your comfortable fog of politically correct dishonesty into an obscenely glaring truth.
I won't have meant to do that.
It will be an accident, and I'm going to feel really bad about it.
If in the things I'm about to say I make anyone feel like a freakish or unattractive outsider, unworthy of participating in the society of intelligent, well-adjusted, and frightfully good-looking manly men and feminine women who make up my entire audience, except for yourself, I will deeply, deeply regret it.
manly men and feminine women who make up my entire audience, except for yourself, I will deeply, deeply regret it.
And we'll take it back as soon as the rest of us stop snickering at you among ourselves and return to our senses.
Or if in anything I'm about to say, I trigger an unpleasant memory of that time someone triggered an unpleasant memory of that time someone triggered an unpleasant memory of...
I forgot what I was saying, but you know what I mean.
And I'm terribly sorry about that too.
I wish you had no clue what I meant, because then you wouldn't be so upset by it and could simply continue being the bitter, snarling, resentful person, pretending to be happy while secretly puzzled by your own lack of life satisfaction that you were perfectly content being before I started to say whatever it is I'm about to say.
I want to apologize for everything I'm going to say about women.
Baby, if at any point in the next several minutes it seems to you that I don't care about you as a full and complete human being, but only as a pretty face and shapely figure that causes me to say shazam or vava vavum, even if I say it in silence, or at least very softly under my breath, then I want to say how much I regret that I'll be giving myself away like that.
Let me assure each and every cute little one of you that I do in fact think of you as a person.
Unless you're absolutely smoking hot, in which case I'm truly sorry for the things I'll in fact be thinking, but really get on with your fine self and have mercy because I mean who we.
I want to apologize for everything I'm going to say about people of color, especially if the color happens to be chartreuse, which, let's face it, is just gay.
And I want to apologize to gay people for saying that, unless they're chartreuse, in which case, dude.
And I want to apologize to each and every one of you who may believe in some benighted and untrue religion that isn't Christianity.
Unless, of course, you're Jewish, in which case, congratulations, you've been chosen for God's special dialus direct program.
But I want to apologize to all the heathens, Musclemen, atheists, pagans, and adherents of any of that Eastern bourgeois.
If I'm about to suggest in any way that yours is not the true faith and you may therefore be damned to shrieking torment for all eternity, I really am sorry I'll be saying that.
But I don't make the rules.
Finally, and more than anything, from the bottom of my heart and with true contrition, I want to apologize for saying this.
Trigger warning.
Apology On Air00:02:20
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right.
All right, this is the Andrew Clavin Show, a conservative podcast about the culture.
The first edition of the Andrew Clavin Show, and I like to begin every major endeavor in my life by making excuses for myself.
I find this very effective for making me seem pathetic and hopefully, you know, making women pity me so they'll let me sit next to them and possibly secretly smell their hair.
I have to say I've never ever begun a major endeavor in my life under circumstances that are as difficult as these.
I mean, first of all, there's the minor stuff.
We're building this fantastic set.
I can't tell you how beautiful the set is going to be.
It has pole dancers, and we're going to have people juggling fire and dwarves and things like that.
Anything offensive we can think of to have, we'll eventually have.
But today, we haven't quite made it.
We haven't got the several cameras set up yet, so we're starting here, which reminds me a little bit of the last real, I don't know how many people still remember Mickey Rooney movies, but during World War II, there used to be these Mickey Rooney movies that would always end with a big musical show, and they would have to keep an orphanage going.
So they would say, well, I know what we'll do.
We'll raise money and we'll make a show.
My dad has a barn, and we'll use that as a tremendously unrealistic soundstage and put on all these musical numbers.
So here we are in my dad's barn doing the first edition of this.
But not just that.
The fact is, for the last 10 days or so, I've been in England, back to England, my old home where I lived for many years.
I went back to visit it after many more years.
And I flew in last night, and I've gotten about four hours of sleep in the last two days.
So I'm a little bit stoned on jet lag and exhaustion.
So if I say anything during the course of this podcast, like, I'm not making fun of people.
I'm not making fun of John Lennon or any other handicapped people.
I'm just losing my mind.
So we'll be in, let me begin by talking about what I want this podcast to be.
A conservative podcast about the culture, and what does that look like?
What It Won't Look Like00:15:26
That means, for instance, to start out with what it won't look like, it means we're not going to be talking about what the latest poll said or what the PAL said.
And we're not going to be talking about Donald Trump just beat Carly Fiorina to death with a coal scuttle, but at least he's a fighter.
At least, he just strangled a baby, but at least that shows that he's not politically correct.
We're not going to be talking about that.
And I know the way conservatives, conservatives are always rushing off to a crisis.
It's always a crisis.
If we don't close the border, we're going to turn into Mexico.
If we make a deal with Iran, they're going to blow us to Kingdom Come.
That one is true.
And in fact, they may all be true for all I know.
But the problem is, is while you're rushing off to deal with the latest crisis, before you rush off to deal with the latest crisis, just look over your shoulder and wave goodbye to your country.
Because while you are dealing with the latest political crisis, the latest poll, what Carly said, what Trump said, what Martha said, all this, the left is stealing our country through the culture.
And, you know, Andrew Breitbart used to love to say politics is downstream from culture.
And he was, you know, he didn't make that phrase up, but he used to like to say it a lot.
And it really is just a reflection of things that people have said through the ages.
The great poet Percy Shelley, one of the truly awful people of literature, but one of the greatest poets, said poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
And that was the same thing that Andrew was saying.
What he was saying was that in politics, the mindset of the people, the conscience of the race, as James Joyce said, are set by the artists and set by the trendsetters.
And by the time things get to be decided by a vote, by the time they get to be decided in elections, the game is actually over.
And when you look around and wonder how a guy like Barack Obama, a guy who's never had a job, a guy who's never signed a paycheck, a guy who doesn't know what he's doing, how he became president of the United States and the head of our armed forces.
The answer is he was sold to us through the culture as a salvific figure, as the first black president, and how important that was.
A man who couldn't be attacked without attacking his entire race or some race that looked like his.
Breitbart said, I've got this quote from him that he said, he gave a speech to the National Policy Council.
And he said, the people who have money, every four years at the last possible second, they're told you need to give millions of dollars because these four counties in Ohio are going to determine the election.
I am saying, Breitbart said, I am saying, why didn't we invest 20 years ago in a movie studio in Hollywood?
Why didn't we invest in creating television shows?
Why didn't we create institutions that would reflect and affirm that which is good about America?
I remember many years ago when I was first getting to know Breitbart, I gave a speech to the Young America Foundation, the Ronald Reagan ranch organization.
And I tried to, I thought, oh boy, it's college students, hundreds of college students, conservatives.
I'm going to talk to them about the culture and what it means, what literature means and how it created the idea of our country.
And I went out there and I gave this speech.
I thought they were going to carry me home on their shoulders.
And of course, I looked out and I was dying to death, just absolute flop.
And I called up Breitbart and said, you know, I just tried to talk to conservatives about the culture.
And I just heard this booming laugh on the other end of the phone.
And he said, welcome to my world.
You know, you made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Conservatives tend not to care about the culture.
They're always running off to deal with the latest political crisis.
My problem again is that when we talk about the culture, we tend to turn into what I call the conservative cultural critic Grampus McFuddy dud.
He's always the guy who's talking, we have a sign to talking about the culture.
He's always saying, you know, in my day, in my day, men were men and women, God, they were lovely.
I love them.
And now it's all different.
It's, you know, they're giving awards to people for things they used to be arrested for.
And the problem with that for me is not that I think the culture is in great shape, not that I think everything is fine.
It's that it's just a crappy argument.
You know, when I talk to young people, I was talking to young people in England, and they said to me, you know, they were trying to hear, they wanted to hear about American politics.
I wanted to talk about British politics.
And they said, you know, we love left-wing aesthetics, but we believe in right-wing policies.
When I asked them what that meant, it meant that, you know, the left-wing shows this happy family of all kinds of people, whether they're gay, straight, black, white, and the right is always complaining.
The right is always saying, you know, the negative thing, the thing that is a problem.
Later, today, I'm going to talk about the Emmys.
The Emmys were last night, and will show you exactly what I mean by this and exactly what the problem is with the way the right talks about the culture.
I'm not saying that everything is great.
There was an article recently by Stephen Erlanger, the London Bureau Chief of the New York Times, talking about how Western values were in retreat.
And he said, reading this piece, he said, the West, well, I have to do this in the New York Times, this is the London Bureau Chief of the New York Times, the West is suddenly suffused with self-doubt.
Centuries, I won't do the whole thing like that because then it would sound pompous and like the New York Times, basically.
Centuries of superiority and global influence appeared to reach a new summit with the collapse of the Soviet Union as the country's values and civilization of the West appeared to have won the dark, difficult battle with communism.
But, but, couple the tightening of Chinese authoritarianism with Russia's turn toward revanchism and dictatorship and then add the rise of radical Islam and the grand victory of Western liberalism can seem hollow, its values under threat even within its own societies.
I love, he has one wonderful line.
He says, are Western values, essentially Judeo-Christian ones, truly universal?
And he's talking about individual rights and transparent justice and democracy.
Here's the thing about this, and this is what I want, this is what I want to talk about, is those aren't values.
Individual justice, transparent justice, individual rights, those aren't values.
Those are virtues.
It doesn't matter whether they're universally held.
They're universally true.
They're always true for everybody.
And so when we are talking negatively about the culture, about the arts, we should really be talking about what it is we believe and what we want to represent.
So let's talk.
I want to talk about the Emmys.
Last night there was a pretty different Emmy Award season.
First of all, all the awards went to Game of Thrones, which is my favorite show ever.
It's a great show.
A lot of conservatives get very upset about the nudity and the cursing and the prostitutes and all that stuff.
But I just think it's an absolutely terrific show.
Dinkledge, is it Peter Dinklage?
It's Peter Dinklage, isn't it?
Peter Dinklage, yeah.
Peter Dinkledge won, Peter Dinkledge, the luckiest dwarf who has ever been born.
Peter Dinkledge, this is absolutely, he's a great, great actor.
He's a great, great actor.
But there's a line of poetry from the elegy in a country churchyard, and it's something like, full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
And what that means is plenty of people have talent, you know, I mean, but they are not born at the right time.
I always used to say that if, you know, Fred Astaire had not been born when he was, he'd have just been running a dance school in Albany.
Peter Dinkledge is a great actor who was born at the one moment when the best show ever had a romantic hero who's a dwarf.
That's never happened before.
This guy should wake up every morning and think, hey, hey, this is great.
I mean, I am one lucky dwarf.
I am the luckiest dwarf in the world.
Anyway, the big thing, the big story about the Emmys was that there were a lot of people of different colors, you know, a black woman, Viola Davis, a terrific actress, an actress who, like Judy Dench, manages to combine being kind of dumpy and unattractive with being incredibly sexy.
I don't know how she does that, but it is true.
She's a wonderfully sexy actress.
She's in How to Get Away with Murder.
She won the first black woman to win as best actress in a drama.
There were awards for Transparent about a transsexual father.
I'm reading this from CNN's The Wrap.
That's CNN's showbiz news and everything.
This is a story by Tim Malloy.
And he's talking about the host who was Andy Samberg.
And he says, Andy Sandberg felt a little like a token white guy at Sunday's awards, trying earnestly to show he was on the right side of things.
On a night of broken barriers and long overdue respect paid to long neglected artists, neglected artists.
He saved his best jokes for fellow white guys.
And then he made a joke about Donald Trump being racist.
Ha ha ha.
I noticed there were no jokes.
I don't think there were any jokes about Hillary Clinton.
Of course not.
But here's the point of this article.
Good news.
We don't have to debate whether Samberg's solid jokes about racism, Hollywood's gender-based wage and age gap, wage and age gap, and court clerk gone rogue Kim Davis, she's the lady who won't give licenses to gay people getting married.
We don't have to argue about whether his jokes might someday somehow change American hearts and minds because the awards themselves made a difference.
The awards made a difference.
And what they mean, what he means by that, of course, is that it went to a transsexual show, a black woman, and all this stuff.
In fact, let's take a look.
Viola Davis, who, as I say, is an excellent actress, Viola Davis made a speech.
Can we bring up that speech, Mathis?
I see a line and over that line I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line.
But I can't seem to get there nohow.
I can't seem to get over that line.
That was Harriet Tubman in the 1800s.
And let me tell you something.
The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.
You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.
So here's to all the writers, the awesome people that are Ben Sherwood, Paul Lee, Peter Nowok, Shonda Rhines, people who have redefined what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black.
And to the Taraji P. Hensons, the Kerry Washingtons, the Halle Berrys, the Nicole Baharis, the Megan Goods, to Gabrielle Union, thank you for taking us over that line.
All right.
Well, that was, you know, that was an eloquent and touching speech.
And Shonda Rhimes, you know, is who got the applause.
She has, in fact, changed the face of television.
She's the creator.
She started out as the creator of Gray's Anatomy.
Gray's Anatomy.
Shows that I think of as women shows, scandal.
My wife goes nuts over scandal.
I mean, this is a show in which every 15 minutes, some insane revelation takes place.
And also stars a black woman.
And then this How to Get Away with Murder, which I've seen several times.
And it's okay.
You know, I'm not a big fan, but I did recognize the minute she walked on screen that this is a spectacularly talented and sexy artist.
You hear, you couldn't see, if you're only listening, you couldn't see some of the seriousness of the faces.
I was reminded of that Tennessee Williams play, A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where Big Daddy is always walking around his southern accent going, mendacity, mendacity.
Well, when I watched this, I was thinking, pomposity, pomposity.
The sense that Hollywood has changed us.
Listen, this is more from the rap, from a different article in the rap.
The Emmys embrace change on Sunday night honoring the rising tide of African-American talent.
Davis went into, it capped a night in which Uzo Aduba had already won for Orange is the New Black, and Regina King had scored an upset victory for American crime.
Fully half of the six Emmys handed out to actresses went to women of color or first for the show.
It was a watershed moment for the Emmys.
And it was, in fact, if you're counting how many black people are winning things, I guess it was a watershed moment.
And I have no objection to people, you know, having racial pride.
You know, I think that we all feel a little bit happy when somebody from where we come, our neighborhood, hits a home run or wins an Emmy.
My problem, my only problem with this is the make-believe American who is the enemy of these people, the guy who's sitting around going, I'm a make-believe American.
You know, I'm not a real American, but I am, by golly, I'm a make-believe American, and I do not like Viola Davis because of the color of her skin.
I will not watch that show because, first of all, I have highly suspicions that she may be a female, and I don't like females getting out of the house.
You know, who is this guy?
I mean, who is it?
Do you know anybody like them?
Is anybody like this besides Donald Trump?
I mean, does anybody really feel that way?
And it's this notion that Hollywood is somehow delivering this wonderful, wonderful object lesson to us.
Listen, like I said, the arts are to me one of the great reasons, things that make life worth living.
They really are.
And television is going through this amazing moment.
I mean, this is an amazing moment in TV.
You know, recently I was on a cruise for the National Review, and I was talking about how this is a golden age of television.
I'm not the first person to say this.
I was the first person to say it because I noticed it right away.
But now we've all noticed the wonderful shows, The Wire, The Shield, Breaking Bad, certainly Game of Thrones.
And this is an amazing moment for that and for the art in video games.
The art and video games, while people are trading this horrible modern art that will be worthless in about 30 years, video gamers are sitting around with this immersive, beautiful art.
This is a wonderful time for the arts in America.
A Wonderful Time for Arts00:06:07
That doesn't mean that it's a wonderful time for the rest of the culture in America.
We all remember.
Do we have that Harry Lyme clip, the clip from The Third Man, Orson Welles?
No?
Okay.
But yeah, I thought I sent that.
All right, that's all right.
We remember The Third Man, one of the two or three greatest movies ever made, in my opinion.
Orson Welles says, you know, in Switzerland, they had hundreds of years of democracy and peace, and all they ever created was the cuckoo clock, whereas, you know, the Borges had violence and terror and everything they created, the Renaissance.
So just because the arts are doing well doesn't mean the country is doing well, but the arts are doing well.
And my only problem with the Emmys is really that sense that these guys are delivering something to us.
They exist because we let them exist.
How to get away with murder is a hit because we watch it.
If we weren't watching it, it wouldn't be on.
If it didn't have an audience, if we weren't tolerant, if we didn't elect people despite their color or without looking at their color, it wouldn't be on.
Conservatives always get caught in the position of seeming to be the guys who say, oh, they turn into the make-believe American the left tries to make, ah, well, you know, who cares if a black person wins?
Well, it's great.
I'm happy a black person wins.
But that's not the reason.
The reason I'm happy is because I believe race is a bogus quality.
Race is a superstitious idea that was come up with a long time ago.
It's an absolute nonsense, and I'm glad that it's passing away from the world.
I'm glad all the Democrats who were segregationists and slaveholders have gone away, and we don't have to deal with them anymore.
And we just have the Republicans who brought us the free culture that we have today.
And that's great.
And I just don't want to be lectured by a bunch of Hollywood people on how bad I am when I'm the reason, me as the audience, I'm the reason that they're doing what they do.
I think I'm almost running out of time here.
Am I right back there?
There's a long hook on its way.
There's a long hook on its way.
All right, a long hook on its way.
I'll tell you what I want to end with.
I want to end with a segment that is going to become a daily part of this podcast called Stuff I Like.
And because I want to end by talking about all the artistic stuff that America and the West has produced that is just so beautiful.
I'm going to talk about stuff that goes back into the classical past and stuff that is as new as the latest video game I've downloaded on my iPhone.
My wife told me to start with something absolutely brand new, so I'm starting with something from the 50s.
And wait, wait, what?
What?
I had to start with this because it's one of my favorite movies and it's a movie that's been all but forgotten.
A lot of modern people do not know about the court gesture and don't know about Danny Kay.
Danny Kaye was one of the funniest comedians ever.
I would say he was up there with any comedian working today.
But the reason he is not remembered by too many people is because, like almost all comedians who go into the movies, he gets co-opted by sentimentality.
You see this happen with Steve Martin, Robin Williams.
It happened to Bill Murray, who has kind of fought back about it, but it did happen at one part of his career where these guys start out as incredibly creative and cutting edge.
And then pretty soon they're in movies that end with their eyes tearing up and they're saying, Yes, I should pay more attention to my kids and not work so hard.
And, you know, just very bland, G-rated stuff.
And that happened to Danny Kaye, and there are moments of genius in his movies that come directly from him.
But a lot of them are just kind of dull and bland and G-rated.
The court jester is an exception.
Now, I want to put this before you.
If you haven't seen the court jester, it was made in 1955.
It's slow by today's standards.
Today, everything goes by really quickly.
This is a slow thing.
If you have kids and they're about six to ten, I would say, they'll really enjoy it because kids actually like slow stuff.
If they're in their teens, they're going to get bored.
In the interstices of some of the slow parts, there are some of the most brilliant comedy ever.
It's the story of a court jester who becomes the attendant of a Robin Hood-like character who's in the woods, and it falls to Danny Kaye as the court jester, this cowardly comedian, basically, to restore the rightful king to his throne.
And he gets caught up in the fights that he should in no way be doing.
There's one scene we have a cut from.
Danny Kay gets stuck in this situation where he has to joust with this actual powerful, huge knight, and he's obviously going to be killed.
But at the last moment, his friend, a good witch, played by Mildred Natwick, tells him that it's okay because she has poisoned one of the cups that they're going to use to drink the toast before the joust.
So if he drinks from the right cup, he'll win the joust because the bad knight will die.
And here she explains to him how to remember where the poison is.
I put a pellet of poison in one of the vessels.
Which one?
The one with the finger of a pestle.
The vessel with the pestle.
Yes.
But you don't want the vessel with the pestle.
You want the chalice from the palace.
I don't want the vessel with the pestle.
I want the chalice from the what?
The chalice from the palace.
It's a little crystal chalice with the figure of a palace.
Does the chalisman palace have the pellet with the poison?
Oh, the pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle.
Oh, the pestle with the vessel.
The vessel with the pestle.
What about the palace from the chalice?
Not the palace from the chalice, the chalice from the palace.
Where's the pellet with the poison?
In the vessel with the pestle.
Don't you see?
The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle.
The chalice from the palace has the brood.
It is true.
It's so easy, I can say.
Well, then you fight it.
Well, then you fight him.
It's a great movie.
Check it out.
The court jester.
You can get it.
I don't know if it streams on Netflix, but you can definitely get it on any kind of DVD and bring it down.
That's a very famous routine, possibly one of the most famous comedy routines in movies.
But it's only one of several comedy routines.
There is a duel in this movie that will make you...
Jay Hay, no, Jonathan Hay, one of our producers, is back there.
He has seen it many times.
He's laughing because it is just one of the funniest pictures ever.
Dancing Dwarves And Fire Bearers00:00:34
And I think we're going to wind up there.
Look, we're doing this a little short for the first week.
It's kind of practice to get ready for a longer podcast.
We're going to, like I said, we're going to have dancing girls.
We're going to have fire bearers, dwarves.
We'll have dancing dwarves because, you know, we don't have a role for Peter.
But we'll do all this stuff.
So until then, I want you to come back tomorrow, try us again.
And remember, what can I say to you?
If you're getting ready to do some apoplectic negativity like many of our right-wing friends, remember, this is the day that the Lord has made, and so rejoice in it and be glad.