Jim "Look At Me I’m Jim" Acosta’s chaotic energy collides with Owen Benjamin’s sharp satire as they dissect comedy’s collapse—from God’s mockery of Maxine Waters to Hollywood’s alleged pedophilia cover-ups and the death of shared values. Benjamin traces jokes’ demise to polarized assumptions (e.g., Trump-Hitler comparisons) and his own blacklisting after opposing Jesse Thorne’s transgender advocacy, while Andrew Clavin blames leftist narratives—abortion, feminism, atheism—for stifling dissent. Both critique media hypocrisy: CNN’s declining trust vs. NYT’s Sarah Jung hire, and late-night comedy’s shift from humor to ideology, with Whoopi Goldberg as the rare voice questioning public anger’s roots. The episode ends with a call to reject ideological shame, framing modern outrage as a farce masking deeper cultural decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Congresswoman and loudmouth loony tune Maxine Waters recently told a crowd at a Los Angeles church that she was, quote, sent by God to attack Donald Trump.
Waters received some pushback on the statement.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Wire, God said that he had not, in fact, sent Maxine Waters to attack Donald Trump, but had only meant to provide the world with a little comic relief and maybe create an opportunity for some cheap jokes about how unreasonable women are, which apparently is a brand of humor the Lord is particularly fond of.
The maker of heaven and earth told The Wire, quote, to be honest, until she started mouthing off about me, it had slipped my mind I created that kooky old bat it all.
I'm sure I had a good reason for it since I'm, you know, God, but to be honest, it happened such a long time ago, I can't remember exactly what it was.
Something to do with my great gift of laughter to humankind.
So I hope you're all enjoying her, unquote.
Maxine Waters was only the latest in a line of left-wingers who made the mistake of thinking God was on their side.
There was also late night host Stephen Colbert, who recently remarked that God is a socialist because Jesus didn't charge lepers for his miraculous cures.
In his interview with The Daily Wire, God responded to Colbert's remark, saying, quote, what kind of stupid logic is that?
What the hell has happened to late-night comedy anyway?
I used to be able to tune in for a couple of yucks before going to bed.
Now, on every channel, there's some skinny, smirking white guy raving about Donald Trump.
I missed the Carson Show, unquote.
God warned that we could look forward to more Democrats claiming he was on their side as they ran out of actual arguments for their absurd policies.
He added, quote, I'd stop them, but I believe in human freedom.
It would be nice if they did the same.
Tricker warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm for hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are here in Washington, D.C. at the YAF Conference, the Young American Foundation Conference.
I'll tell you a little bit about it.
We have Owen Benjamin, comedian, on our show.
He's got a new Prager video he wants to talk about.
And we have to talk about ZipRecruiter because many of you ask the question, how did Michael Knowles get hired?
And we always say it's because we didn't use ziprecruiter.com.
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That's ziprecruiter.com/slash D-A-L-D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E, ziprecruiter.com slash DailyWire, ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.
Don't let Michael Knowles happen to you.
All right, so I got into DC.
ZipRecruiter Success Stories00:15:49
Well, first of all, you know, I love being in D.C. and I'm here for like a minute.
You know, they fly me and they fly me out.
But Sebastian Gorka got in touch with me as I was landing and said, you know, we've never met.
He's been on the show a number of times.
I think he's going to be on again, hopefully next week or the week after.
But we've never met.
So he said, come on over to the Trump International Hotel, which is right down the street from where we're staying.
And I walked over there.
And the last time I was in this place, this used to be what was called the old post office.
And it was a ruin.
I mean, it was just a dinosaur, absolutely empty building and had been sitting there for years and years and years.
And Trump won the bid to redo it, and he redid it.
I believe he brought it in ahead of schedule and under cost under his bid, which is pretty amazing.
Something he did in New York with the skating rink in Central Park.
One of his very big claims to fame is while the government was screwing up, the skating rink could never get it done.
He got so ticked off of seeing this unfinished Central Park skating rink outside his window that he finally said, I'll do it.
And they finished it in months.
It was done as a beautiful, beautiful addition to the park.
Anyway, this hotel is absolutely beautiful.
And it's got this vast, vast lobby bar.
And you come in there and it's kind of like, remember the alien bar and the first Star Trek?
It's like that for conservatives.
It's like every conservative in America is in this way.
You know, like there are conservatives from Mars, conservatives from, you know, Venus, all these different conservatives are there.
And I shook hands with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle was there, his new girlfriend.
And she introduced me.
We would play when we get to stuff I like.
She introduced me to one of the young fellows who had written one of our stuff I like theme songs.
And she was there.
And, you know, I'm a political junkie.
And so sitting in that atmosphere is just, it was just magical to me.
All these guys sitting around who are kind of, you know, fixers.
They're fixers, you know, like they're the kind of guy, the kind of guy, you know, nobody ever sees them, but they're always kind of behind the scenes.
I asked one of them, he was supposed to be the kind of great seer of political, you know, outcomes.
And I asked him how we're going to do in the midterms.
And he said he would bet right now that we were going to lose the house, but he was absolutely sure we were going to keep the Senate and add a few seats.
He said, anybody who tells you we're not is ridiculous.
So we'll see.
He admitted that he was a pessimist, so maybe he's wrong about the house.
I hope so.
This gut feeling that we may actually keep the house, which would be remarkable, as remarkable as the fact that Trump's ratings just went up.
He just, his approval rating went up to like 50%, shot up.
And so like a lot of the things that maybe people think are going on aren't going on.
Anyway, then I came on over to the hotel.
You know, traveling with Shapiro, you get mobbed by fans.
You know, it's kind of like being Ringo Star, you know, like sort of being mob after they finish with Paul McCartney.
They come over and mob you.
But it was great.
Kids are so great.
And I was, I gave my speech earlier in the day and I was talking to them about the fact that the first speech I ever gave was to YAF, a YAF conference, and it was an absolute disaster because, you know, I spent my life in my room like writing fiction and talking about werewolves and cops.
And what if a werewolf became a cop?
Or should a cop become a werewolf?
And then went out and gave this kind of high intellectual speech while everybody else was delivering the red meat and just died the absolute death.
So it was nice to come back and get a nice, you know, I got a very nice reception, really, really pleasant.
I was talking to people about the culture, which is kind of the thing I know best.
And, you know, I've been in some form of culture creation all my life.
That's all I've done is write novels, write screenplays.
Now doing videos, every time a new technology comes along, I've been in it, you know, and it's funny.
I always go out, I always find myself going out and giving speeches to young people and saying, what you should do is get on YouTube.
And then I find that I'm on YouTube.
And I go out and give speeches saying, well, what you should do is you should do fictional podcasts.
And then I start another kingdom.
So maybe I should just give speeches to myself.
Maybe I'm the only one who's paying attention to me since I go out and do the things I tell people to do.
But one of the things I talked about that I just think is so immensely important is because the left owns the culture.
These narratives, and when I talk about a narrative, what I'm talking about is a kind of a cloud, a cultural cloud that surrounds you.
You don't even know you're breathing it in.
You have opinions that you think are rock solid, but you've never really thought them through.
You don't even know where they come from.
But that's just the narrative.
That is the American narrative or the Western narrative.
And it's created now by the left because they own everything.
They own the academies.
They own the television stations.
They own the movie studios.
They own publishing most of it.
And so they managed to create this.
And I was talking about the four kinds of narratives that I think are so powerful and overwhelming and pointing out what they all had in common.
And I talked about abortion, the fact that 3,000 babies are being killed every day in America, and though many on the right understand that that's wrong, none of us feel it.
Not one of us feels it.
I'm sorry, none of us feels it the way we should.
We don't feel the urgency of it.
We don't feel that something must be done right this minute because the narrative that surrounds us has kind of taken the atrocity out of it, the sense of an atrocity out of it.
And then about feminism, I always love talking about feminism because guys are not supposed to criticize feminism, and I think feminism stinks.
I think feminism is one of the truly harmful and destructive philosophies that's ever come along.
And I'm an individualist.
I want everybody to do whatever he or she wants to do with his life.
But I do feel that feminism has essentially degraded and denigrated femininity.
I always tell people, young guys care what feminists say about men.
I couldn't care less what they say about men.
They're a bunch of idiots.
What do I care what they say about men?
But I do think they have an effect on women by teaching women to get rid of their feminine dreams and basically follow masculine dreams.
And then, you know, these women wake up and they're 35 and they've never had a family and they never know what it's like to make a home for people.
And they're not happy.
You know, I meet these women all the time and they will tell you, you know, I followed these dreams and they were not my dreams.
They were not my true dreams.
And, you know, it gets to this point.
Your time runs out.
That is the thing about life.
It doesn't go on forever.
You can't go back and do it again.
Your time runs out.
The other one is atheism.
Atheism is something that just young, intelligent men, I see this so much and I see it on the right wing.
It drives me a little crazy.
They're absolutely certain that God is obsolete, that science has disproved God.
They know this.
They know it for a fact.
And the minute you say that's absurd, you know, the logic isn't there.
The arguments aren't there.
The arguments that people like Steven Pinker make and Sam Harris make, they're not good arguments.
They're not sound arguments.
And they basically, in the end, have to argue that everything we know and think is an illusion.
And that's a kind of silly argument.
You could only, only a scientist can make that argument.
If you made that argument as a Buddhist, you know, everybody would say, ah, you're just one of those crazy Buddhists.
But if you make it as a scientist, everybody says, hmm, that must be true.
But it's absurd.
But that's another thing that's in the narrative.
That's in the air, a narrative that's in the air.
And the final one is victimhood, which always just makes me, it just makes me sad to see, especially young men, you know, talk about microaggressions when I sometimes go to these colleges, some young black guy, tall, you know, able, healthy, is telling me about microaggression.
Somebody looked at him wrong or didn't, you know, tensed up when he came into the elevator or something.
And I just think like, you know, men don't care about microaggression.
You've let somebody talk you out of your manhood.
You know, I mean, a microaggression is something a man steps on as he's going to do the thing that he means to do.
And later on, you can say to him, you know, you stepped on that microaggression.
He should be like, I didn't see it.
You know, it's micro.
A micro is too small to see.
What am I going to do?
Look for it?
You've got to be looking for it because it's a microaggression.
And the thing that I wanted to emphasize in this speech was just that these four things are all linked together by the fact that the opposition can't talk back.
The opposition cannot voice its opinion.
In abortion, the baby has no voice, right?
The mother can go on and say, I was raped.
That's why I had an abortion.
That's a sad, that's a tragic story, no question about it.
Baby can't go on and say, hey, you know what?
I would have cured cancer.
I would have had like 10 children who would have enhanced the world.
I would have written music or just lived a great life.
That baby, if that baby could show up on TV, the dialogue would be a lot different.
When it comes to feminism, of course, all the women in the public eye are feminists by definition.
I mean, a woman goes and has a baby and goes back and starts hosting her news show two weeks later and she's slimmed down to 100 pounds.
She's not going to go on and say, you know, the most important thing you can do is stay home with your kids.
Because if she believed that, she'd be doing it.
And I'm not saying she shouldn't live the life she wants.
I'm just saying that means that every woman's voice that you're going to hear is not going to be the voice of a mom saying, you know what, this is the most rewarding job you can have because moms are too busy to go on TV and talk and tell you that stuff.
You know, atheism, the same thing.
Christianity is against the world.
Christianity defines itself in opposition to the world.
So whenever Christianity tries to reach out to the world, it has to sell out its Christianity.
And whenever Christians say, whenever I hear Christian pastors say, how can we reach out to the world?
I think it's easy.
Just stop preaching the gospel of Christ and the world will come rushing to you.
It's when you preach the gospel of Christ suddenly that they say, eh, not so much.
The final one is victimhood, which they just, they shut people up by telling them they can't say anything.
You know, already there was somebody tweeting, you know, how dare this man come out and say something about feminism?
Who wants to listen to a man?
Who wants to listen to a white about what's happening to black people?
You know, that's the way they shut you up.
So all those voices.
And so you have to become the voice.
But the result of this is people get ticked off.
And that is why when I see Jim Acosta complaining about the fact that he gets heckled, how can I put this to you?
You know, my heart does something other than break.
You know, this is Jim.
Look at me.
I'm Jim Acosta.
He's not a reporter.
He's just a little clown sitting there shouting again and again, look at me.
I'm shouting at Donald Trump.
Aren't I brave?
Every report is slanted.
Every report is negative.
You know, he represents, he's a perfect representative of the mainstream media news culture.
And by the way, CNN is now the least trusted name in news.
I think they put out a list of 10 news sources.
They were number nine.
And the one under that was Sinclair, which is such a minor, you know, it doesn't have the same kind of weight as a CNN.
So nobody trusts them anymore.
So he goes out and now he's complaining.
He got heckled at a Trump thing.
They were shouting, CNN sucks.
And now he's going on and he has the SADS.
So here's Jim Acosta.
Honestly, it felt like we weren't in America anymore.
I don't know how to put it any more plainly than that.
Americans should not be treating their fellow Americans in this way.
But unfortunately, what we've seen, and this has been building for some time since the campaign, I've been talking about this as an issue since the campaign.
When the president during the campaign referred to us as the dishonest media, the disgusting news media, liar, scum, and thieves, and so on.
And then he rolled that right into the Oval Office and started calling us fake news and the enemy of the people.
He is whipping these crowds up into a frenzy to the point where they really want to come after us.
And we have these bike rack-like barriers around the press cage, as we call it, to protect us essentially from people who might take things too far.
It's unfortunate because, and I try to calmly talk to a lot of these folks at the rally last night to say, listen, Hey, you know, tell me what you want to talk about here.
Why are you guys so upset with us?
And they would kind of go through a list of questions.
Most of the questions were about why don't you guys report positive news about the president?
And I said, hey, you know what?
We do that.
Which is a lie.
They don't.
But on top of that, he says to you, you know, this doesn't feel like I'm in America anymore.
But you know what, Jim?
It feels exactly what it's like to be in America if you don't happen to be a coastal elite.
This is what people have been listening to for 50 years.
You know, I was going to put together a montage of cultural attacks on typical Americans, attacks on religion, attacks on patriotism, attacks on the culture of the Midwest that have been pouring out of Hollywood and out of the news media and out of the academy for years, decades on end.
But I didn't put it together because I know that when I put that stuff together, they censor me on YouTube.
You know, they never do it to the young Turks.
If Chink Unger, however he pronounces his name, if he uses material like that, not a thing happens.
But if I do it, they do.
And that's what's happening to us, Jim.
So that's what's happening to this culture for 50 years.
50 years people have been hearing, you know, you stink, you're an idiot, you have no teeth, you're clinging to your Bible, you're clinging to your guns.
And now you're upset that they're heckling you.
I mean, like, boo, bloody who?
You know, it's just, it's just amazing that these guys have no self-awareness.
You know, the New York Times, the New York Times just hired a new person for their editorial board, Sarah, what is her name?
Jung?
Sarah Jung.
Okay, yes.
And they have, she has a history of racist tweets.
Let me read to you.
I think if I can find them.
Let me just read to you.
Just a couple.
I can't read them the whole thing because they're so foul.
But these are tweets she sent out where she says, dumb, effing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on a fire hydrant.
She says, are white people predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically only being fit to live underground like groveling goblins?
Oh man, it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.
I dare you to get on Wikipedia and play things white people can definitely take credit for.
It's really hard.
Really?
Really?
Because, you know, they made a movie called The Day Without a Mexican, because in Beverly Hills, you know, they think if there were no Mexicans, who would, how the lawn won't mow itself.
You know, I mean, those dishes won't wash.
That's what they think in Beverly Hills.
If there were no Mexicans, we'd all be crippled.
We'd be crippled.
The grass would grow up and would just consume my mansion.
That's the way they think.
So they made a movie, The Day Without a Mexican.
Let's try a day without a white man.
Let's try a day without computers, without cars, without all the things that white men invented, things that they can take credit for.
You know, if you're going to think racist, if you're going to be a racist, that's the way you have to think.
I mean, how can you blame white people for striking back with racism when they strike?
Yes, so the New York Times stands up for her and they issue this statement.
We hired Sarah Jong because of the exceptional work she has done.
Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment.
So she's the victim here.
When she talks about how much she likes being cruel to white men, she's the victim.
For a period of time, she responded to the harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.
She regrets it, and the Times does not condone it.
I mean, that's just nonsense.
You know, in Santa Barbara, you know, they banned straws, and the guy came out and he apologized because one of the councilmen made the comment.
He said, we must regulate every aspect of people's lives.
That's what he said.
And then he said, I apologize.
That was just rhetoric.
It's like rhetoric meaning exactly what you said it should mean.
You know, the Times knew about this.
This is, you know, you compare it to Kevin Williamson.
They hired Kevin Williamson.
He had made some jokes about, I think, hanging women who have abortions or something like that.
It was obviously a joke.
They knew about it.
Then they fired him.
The Times knew about this.
I'm sure this is why they hired her.
They hired her because this is how they feel.
If you read the Times editorial page, this kind of racism is endemic to the Times.
So the fact that they're not, I don't think they should fire her because she represents them.
She represents them.
Bias And Unforgiveness00:15:02
I also don't think people should buy their paper because it's racist trash.
So this is what they've been throwing at us all these years.
And now they're getting a little of it back, a little bit of heckling back, and they're imagining immediately that the end of the time has come.
Here is Chuck Todd.
And pay attention to this because this is the way the media works.
Because they live in their own imaginations, because they don't live in America, they live in their own minds with other people who share their ideas, they can immediately go over the top because everyone around them feels the same way.
Here's Chuck Todd.
This kind of unfocused, visceral anger at the other side of really neutral people like folks in the press corps, it can lead to this.
Look, according to today's Washington Post, President Trump has made 4,229 false or misleading claims in 558 days in office.
It's an average of 7.6 a day.
This is not normal.
We shouldn't be in the business of just shrugging our shoulders and normalizing it.
So he showed a car running over people.
And so, in other words, Trump is one step, Trump criticizing this incredibly dishonest media.
He didn't mention how many lies the media had told in that same number of days.
I don't know why he didn't bring that up, just to compare them.
But, you know, immediately he's going to be killed because people are fighting back against the media that has been lying about them.
And remember, it's not the lies.
It's not the lies.
It's the bias.
Okay, they do lie.
It is true they lie.
And they lie with a purpose.
When they say Trump has taken the statue, the bust of Martin Luther King out of the Oval Office, that has a purpose.
That's not just a mistake.
Even if it was a mistake, it's a mistake with a purpose.
They do it on purpose.
It's not the lies, though.
It's the bias.
It is the idea that if somebody raises the issue of abortion and says maybe you shouldn't kill your babies, that suddenly we're in the handmaid's tail.
That's the bias.
The bias that if somebody, as I read from the New York Times just this week, if somebody makes a joke about Obama online, he must be a racist.
That's the bias.
That's what they've been selling to us for 50 years.
And they, you know, Mike Barnacle is on Morning Joe, and he made a comment.
He said, Trump supporters are deranged.
Trump supporters are deranged.
I want to show you deranged.
Chris Cuomo, there's this thing called the Q, Q Anon.
Have you heard of this?
It's QAnon.
It's supposedly a conspiracy that Robert Mueller is not actually investigating Donald Trump.
He is secretly investigating Hillary Clinton and all the lefties.
And in some kind of night of the long knife scenario, one day they're all going to be suddenly arrested.
And this is called Q because I think the guy who tweets it, it calls himself Q, does call it Q, hashtag QAnon.
Here's Chris Cuomo.
Somebody held up a sign at a Trump rally, We Are Q.
And Chris Cuomo decides that Trump in his speeches is secretly communicating with Q. Listen to this, talking about Trump supporters being deranged.
Here's the press.
He has his people at his rally that look for the number 17 as signs of truth.
Q is the 17th letter in the alphabet.
Not that that helps make any sense of its significance to them.
And they see Trump tweeting something like this.
17 angry Democrats.
They take value in the number 17, a potential sign.
I hope he didn't use that number for them.
He hasn't always used the number 17.
You know, that guy used to just be stupid.
Now he's stupid and he's out of what was left of his mind.
I mean, this is amazing.
And this, and they're calling us deranged.
We're deranged.
This is the way they say, how could anybody, how could they have let that go off over the airwaves?
How could, did nobody see that before he started talking?
It had to be in his prompter.
I mean, it's unbelievable what these guys are talking about.
And frankly, I feel the same way about the Russian investigation.
I feel about what he just said.
You know, I just want to play one more clip and then I'm going to get to the Owen Benjamin interview because I want to do a little bit of an extended stuff I like at the end, so I want to keep our time under control.
But I just want to play the views' reaction to the sads of Jim.
Look at me, I'm Jim Acosta.
Trump is debasing our press on a regular basis and telling people it's fake.
And it's metastasizing around the world.
This year, Egypt, Vietnam, Belarus, Belarus, Belarus, Malaysia, Pakistan, and others have passed laws and fine news outlets after accusing them of spreading false information.
And then you read about people who live in Canada and who live in France, et cetera, who are afraid that this president is so out of control and so on wrong page about every single thing that he does every single day that they're afraid for them also.
He is not just a menace in this country, is my point.
Right.
Okay.
So is there a way?
Is there a way to change the narrative about the media?
Well, sorry.
No, no, I was just a quick comment that I heard Jim went into the audience afterwards, which they don't have video of this, and he spoke one-on-one with the people.
And I think that maybe on that level, they can see a personalized way.
But they need to keep on doing their jobs, and their jobs are to report the facts.
Now, of course, as I've said before, I do not mind them attacking Trump.
I mind after eight years of supporting Obama, of hiding Obama's scandals, of covering up the things that Obama did.
And Trump hasn't had any scandals like Obama had.
Obama's scandals were real.
And we've played that montage before of the press saying, oh, he was scandal-free.
He was, you know, he only used the IRS to shut up the opposition and use the State Department to lie about Benghazi and use the Justice Department to investigate an opposing cat.
I mean, that scandal is going on right now and they won't cover it.
They absolutely turn the other way.
That's the problem here.
It's the lying and the bias.
But what I loved about that cut is Whoopi Goldberg's saying, is there any way to change the narrative?
She didn't say, is there any way to change what the press does?
Is there any, is there any, you know, are all these people just angry?
Did they just wake up one morning kind of with a thorn in their butts?
You know, I'm just angry.
I just feel, I'm just on the wrong side of the bed.
And you know who I'm going to blame?
Jim Acosta.
That's who I'm going to blame.
Or, or is it decades of lies, decades of insults, decades of bias, decades of attacking American culture that has them angry?
Nobody, nobody on the press is asking that question.
Not one single person.
And that, of course, is where wisdom begins.
All right.
I want to talk, bring on Owen Benjamin.
Great interview.
The guy cracks me up.
He really is funny.
Stand-up comedian, actor, podcast host, pianist.
I have to pronounce that carefully because he makes a lot of hay with that word.
He's never afraid to share his unique perspective.
He's got a new Prager View, Prager U video titled The Strange Death of Comedy.
Do we have a minute of that?
Can we play a minute of it?
Comedy only works when we agree on certain realities.
Take this joke.
Why do you always go fishing with at least two Baptists?
Because if you only take one, he'll drink all your beer.
The reason this gets a laugh is because most of us recognize that many religious people are a little more religious around other religious people.
That hypocrisy is funny because everyone can relate to it on some level.
We're all a little hypocritical now and then.
The problem is that today, fewer and fewer people seem to agree on the basics.
You know, shared assumptions.
I recently did a joke on stage.
People keep comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
He's nothing like Hitler.
Hitler would have never let CNN talk like that.
Anderson Cooper wouldn't have made it through the night of the long knives.
There are people that don't understand that joke.
And the reason is that joke requires us all to agree and stick with me here that Hitler was a bad, bad man.
And that the night of long knives was a bad, bad thing.
And that President Trump, whether you like him or not, isn't anything like that bad, bad man who did that bad, bad thing.
And I wouldn't want him to be.
But since we now live in a world where some stupid people like Hitler and some other stupid people think Trump is Hitler, well, we just can't agree that this obviously absurd joke is funny.
You can find Owen on his YouTube channel, youtube.com/slash Owen Benjamin Comedy.
And he also has a podcast, Why Didn't They Laugh?
Here's Owen Benjamin.
Owen Benjamin, it's good to see you again.
Oh, thanks for having me, man.
I was just telling you when we first started talking, you've been just crushing on the show.
Like those opening monologues make me laugh so hard.
Oh, coming, well, coming from you, that's a genuine compliment.
I appreciate it.
I saw your new video, the Prager video, also made me laugh, which is tough to do on a Prager video.
It's not easy to get laughs out of a Prager video.
Yeah, Prager Community College is a little funnier and dirtier, but Prager US pretty airy today.
So those guys are great.
And I love that they kept it so clean because it reaches a bigger audience.
But we'd be going back and forth about how far we could push a joke and stuff like that.
But I'm really proud of the message.
So I hope a lot of people watch it.
Well, let's talk about it.
It's about called the strange death of comedy.
Why do you feel comedy is dead?
Well, I think it's a lack of shared values.
You know, I've wrestled with this for a long time.
It's you got to have the assumptions in place in order to be funny.
Like that joke in the video about people say Donald Trump is like Adolf Hitler.
That's not true.
Not fair to Trump.
Adolf Hitler's a great leader.
You have to know I don't like Hitler.
Like there has to be a given.
And it's the same with like James Gunn claiming that a lot of these are jokes.
It's like there's no given there.
Like Hollywood's so riddled with sexual deviance that like that isn't like, that's like a, there's just no given.
Like no one's trusting that that's a joke at all.
And because I've been racking my brain about my problems where if I take something that was intended to be a joke, like where are my blind spots?
You know, that's more of a conservative libertarian way of thinking that the left has never once thought ever.
But that's something like your fault.
Yeah, it's like my inability to see James Gunn as joking.
And I think it's because I can't assume he's a good guy because he's not.
So it's like that to me just seems like proclamations.
Yeah.
No, go ahead.
Well, I mean, it is a real problem in Hollywood.
There is a pedophiliac mafia.
We know it's there.
It's come close to being exposed.
I'm not saying he's part of it.
It just makes the jokes a little less funny.
Yeah.
Well, I think there's evil doers and evil followers.
And I think the majority are evil followers, not doers.
Gun to head, I don't know what I does he ever, is he actually attracted to children?
Probably not.
I think the majority of Hollywood is not actually pedophiles.
But what the majority of Hollywood is, is they will cover for people.
They will see things that are horrifying and not say anything.
They will defend evil.
And it's almost like the way, you know, pimps and hookers all have that pyramid force of don't rat on me.
I don't rat on you.
And that to me is pretty gross.
Like when I came out against, what's that, Jesse Thorne about his five-year-old transgender kid?
And I named him my name.
I got kicked out of CIA, Principato Young, which is one of the biggest management companies.
They're at a publishing deal with Norton that did gun storms and steel and all that, like a big upfront money deal.
Like all of it just started vanishing, just all of it gone.
Wow.
And it's because it's not because these people, like privately, they'd be like, hey, man, I know they're like, I know, I know you're right.
But that only lasts like a year.
Like when people pretend to be something they're not, the neuroplasticity in your brain starts becoming that.
That's why when people like pretend something's okay when it's not, I'm like, man, you got about a year before you have to address that.
And you either think, like, you either have to admit to yourself you're a coward or believe it and you'll believe it.
Why?
So that's why.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a novel called Mother Knight and he said the theme is you become what you pretend to be.
And I think you're absolutely right.
Yeah.
I believe in free will and a soul.
So, but at the same time, there is determinism affecting us.
And one of the proofs against determinism is all the carrots and sticks would have made me a liberal in Hollywood.
And I broke away from that.
Like all of my motivations would have kept me in that, in that kind of silver screen hell.
Cause I had my biggest year the year before I left and all this started happening.
So it wasn't like this weird decay.
It was like this this Kaiser Soze moment where I'm like, wait a minute, you guys are really trying to like dismantle families.
You know, it's one thing when the liberals are just these wacky, anything goes people, but once they start inflicting on others, especially children and other people's way of life and way of worship and way of living, freedoms they have, that's the worst of both worlds to a degree where people have to fight it or it's going to come for them.
Appeasement just means you get eaten last.
Well, let me ask you this.
You have a song that I saw online.
I can't say it, but the thing is, that N-word stole my bike.
I got to tell you, it cracked me up.
But at the same time, it cracked me up.
I felt a little chill, like, whoa.
Is there a point where you've gone too far?
Is there in your own mind a place where you cross the line?
Well, it's funny you bring that up because that's the only joke in my entire career where I actually think it wasn't ready because it's based on a meme from Mike Tyson's Punch Out.
It's, there was a meme from like 2001 where it was little Mike is like jogging and it goes forever.
And there's a black dude on a bike and he's jumping behind it.
And that was the joke for like a decade and it was nothing.
It was just funny.
And, but in my life and in my career, I never call black people that, even in like jest, you know, but I will use the word in irony.
Like I'll call Justin Trudeau that if he's trying to ban Mother's Day or something, you know.
But the joke just wasn't ready.
Like the whole joke now, which I don't even really do on stage anymore because there's just too much heat around it.
But it turns out it's like, oh, that N-word's white.
And that turns out it's Justin Trudeau stole my rights.
Like I make an irony out of it because that's the one time where I'm like, that might be too far.
But the comedian's role is to go too far.
And I co-wrote that with a black guy.
It's like, I had this argument with somebody recently where someone was like, well, you know, black people have said don't use that word.
I'm like, what about all the ones that squeal with delight when they're friends with a white guy who knows they're cool and it's just so taboo and weird and they laugh and they're like, well, that's a minority of the black population.
I'm like, so now you're going against a minority.
I'm like, don't battle with me.
Mulaney On Political Comedy00:09:05
Did you see that?
Did you see Myanmette?
Oh, horrifying.
Is that the Australian that says jokes aren't funny anymore?
Yeah, she stops in the middle of her comedy routine to announce that she's not going to be a comedian anymore because she doesn't want to make straight white men feel good about themselves and she's just lacerating herself.
Oh, yeah.
It's mind-blowing.
That's like if someone's a plumber and they're just like, you know what?
I'm done with this pipe stuff.
You deserve to have PP all over you because you're white.
Like it's that crazy.
I didn't like Chris Rock's joke about more white kids need to be shot, but I got the structure.
And of course, he should take the risk and whatever.
Like, it doesn't even make me not like the guy.
I just think that was a misread.
So I think everyone should give each other that element when you're dealing with stand-up comedy.
The only reason I thought James Gunn should be fired is he directs kids' movies, which I, that'd be like because of that Edward stole my bike.
Like, if someone, if I got fired from like Selma 2, I get it.
You know, someone's like, hey, Dick Bear, we know you're not racist, but like this song, like, it's going to piss people off.
I'm like, of course, I should not direct Selma 2.
It's the same with, you know, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is for kids.
And it's like, there's videos of this dude making jokes that I can't even come close to repeating because even censors, it's, it's insane.
I'm not even talking about his tweets, like videos of the guy.
I tweeted one.
It's just the guy's a total scumbag.
Yeah.
And so free market firing is not like, because I'm a free speech absolutist to the point where I really wrestle with whether or not pedophiles are allowed to say their pedophiles.
And I had to say yes, even though I physically want to kill them.
Yeah.
But at the same time, you got to let businesses fire people.
I'm like, what if you find out your babysitter tweeted that 10 years ago?
No firing.
He has his rights.
Like, of course not.
So what is happening?
You make this really interesting point in the video that we were talking about before that we've lost our shared values.
So it's hard to work play off the assumptions to get a laugh.
It's hard to play off people's assumptions.
Is that what killed late night comedy or is it something else?
I mean, late night comedy is virtually gone.
Man, I wrestle with this a lot because I don't know if it was just this weird descent into this or was it planned?
Was it this weird Marxist thing where they want another avenue of rhetoric and promote?
I don't know because these guys were funny.
Like I know Jimmy Fallon.
I've toured with Jimmy Fallon.
He's probably the best one left, but I've done Chelsea Handler's show.
I've done Amy Schumer's show.
Like the thing that a lot of people on the right need to understand is at one point, Sarah Silverman was funny.
And to see them all choose to become these shells of themselves and just become these puppets and these applause-seeking, just ideological weirdos.
I'm like, was that by choice or was that just, I don't know.
I don't know what it is.
Did they run out of jokes?
Well, I don't know.
There is always that danger with comedians that they, that somewhere deep inside them, they want to be taken seriously and they can fall prey to that as they get older, I think.
Yeah, it's almost like when you two wanted to do a jazz album, everyone's like, bad for branding, bud.
You know, it's like, it's like, I just, enough of the laughter.
It's time to really talk about faith.
It's like, no, Nanette, no one wants to hear that.
So all these streaming services, they're now featuring a lot of stand-up.
There's a lot of stand-up on this.
Is there anything that you see that you really love?
Yeah, Norm McDonald.
There's a bunch of people.
Norm McDonald's.
Norm McDonald is the best of all time.
I mean, we're living in a time when I consider the best comedian who's ever lived is still touring.
Who's that?
You know, like Norm McDonald is unbelievable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you know him?
No, I don't, but there's a bunch of, there's a lot of comedians that are still funny.
I just have to, I just don't see the names in front of me.
But what's his name?
Mulaney, John Mulaney's a structurally and unbelievably good joke writer.
Yep.
And he's a guy that's on the, that's why I did that video, Why I Hate the Left.
I made sure I didn't, because there is a difference between just the normal 90s liberal versus the left.
And John Mulaney reminds me of a guy where I would disagree with his policies, but I would have beers with him and be like, that guy's a funny guy.
You know, he even talked about that.
He's not a very political guy on his last routine.
He just, you know, Trump appalls him, but he's not a political person.
Yeah, which is cool.
And I think that's when you're on Netflix, it means you are a political person and it's on the left.
But yeah, I like that guy.
I just think that what's happening is everything's so politicized.
And people are like, well, why do you do politics?
Like your best stuff is men and women stuff.
Because my best material is always relationship material and how men and women are different and how you can make fun of, because I can make fun of women and they laugh, which is a big thing in the comedy world.
And I'm like, you can ignore politics, but politics won't ignore you.
And it got to the point where saying men and women are different was considered like hate speech.
And then it's like, all right, we'll just talk about football.
And they're like, what?
How do you feel about kneeling?
And then you're like, let's just go shoot guns.
And they're like, excuse me.
And you're like, all right, I either have to beat this leftist dragon or I can never talk about anything again.
Well, so now you have paid a price.
I mean, you really have.
And you had all these deals and they've gone away.
What's happening in your career right now?
Great, man.
That's the funniest thing.
It's through the looking glass is I'm trying to be, I do a lot of live streams on my YouTube channel.
And one thing I try to do is show people how they can construct a career outside of Hollywood because that's the future's there.
You know, same with education.
That's why I love PregerU.
I love Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
I love the, Eric Weinstein was talking about this, or was it Weinstein or was it Roe?
Shout out to Ben Shapiro Sunday specials, by the way.
They've been unbreakable.
He's terribly.
And he was talking about how the gatekeeper to information is gone and no one's really reacting.
It's almost like the housing bubble took like two years to like actually fall.
It's like college is, the appeal's over, you know, because now you can listen to like a Harvard lecture for a dollar.
And that's why all these like truckers are becoming like intellectuals.
And it is, yeah, it is why they're trying to censor.
Well, it's why they're trying to censor social media, isn't it?
I mean, they want it back.
They want to take back that gatekeeping role.
Yeah.
So many people don't understand how rooting for the underdog conservatives are, where it's a lot of these regulations keep the single mom who wants to be a hairdresser out of the business or minimum wage makes certain work illegal.
So no one can have an entry-level job.
And all these things, you know, you know, all the history behind a lot of these labor unions and all this stuff.
It isn't what people think.
It's this lie that keeps being pushed.
And one of the big lies is you got to go to college to make something of yourself.
Like I have two sons under three right now.
And, you know, one was born three weeks early, little Charlie.
We had a bunch of complications.
And it blew my mind as I'm holding him that the Democrats want to be able to, if he was still in my wife, he could be abortable, which is like mind-blowing.
You know, like that's straight up evil.
But I'm looking at these kids and I'm like, I'm not going to do a college fund.
I'm going to do like a small business fund.
You know, I'm going to be like, I'll raise an egg for you so you can launch your own business and I'm going to teach you better than any state school.
And my parents are professors.
So I'm not, I'm very knowledgeable in that world.
Yeah.
And it's these like these unlimited loans just devalued it.
It skyrocketed how much it costs to go to college.
It flooded the market with all anyone can go to college.
So now the degree doesn't mean anything unless, you know, it's like Harvard or something.
So if people want to see you now, where do they go?
Where do they go to find your latest stuff?
Oh, well, youtube.com slash OwenBenjamin Comedy and then hugepianist.com for my last three specials I sell myself.
And I'm going to start setting up a tour again soon.
And to answer your question before, it's the reason there's all this social justice nonsense and all this like, he's a racist or blah, blah, blah, or like, take him down, is because they don't want people to know how free we are.
It's like I'm doing, I'm having a better career now than I was.
I don't get these large sums of money based on like just a holding deal for a year to make sure I don't actually make anything, but just the daily grind of it is so much better.
The freedom of it.
I have way bigger shows.
More people come.
My videos get bigger hits.
I have more self-respect.
My wife loves it because I get to just completely be myself and not have to kneel to something I don't like.
Lucy's Dress Mystery00:02:54
And I recommend people just don't be scared of it and know thyself.
If you're not hateful, which I know I'm not racist, I was raised in a family and in a life where my piano teacher was trans back in the 90s when it was like unheard of.
You know, we'd have students from all over the world come live with us and stuff.
So I know exactly what I am when it comes to prejudice.
Like I'll prejudice you if you have a face tattoo, not because you're black.
And so I know enough about myself to take these big risks.
So if you know yourself and you know you're not hateful, just go and trust your gut and trust your values and don't be intimidated by this shame squad.
I agree with you 100%.
Owen Benjamin, great to talk to you again.
And thanks for having me.
Big fan.
Thanks a lot.
I appreciate it.
All right.
stuff I like.
I had to play that again.
It was by Anthony Leonardi and Norman Young.
And last night, Kimberly Guilfoyle introduced me to Anthony Leonardi, really nice guy, really sharp.
And he was thrilled when we played it on the show.
So we played it again.
That's why.
Stuff I like.
I want to talk, you know, I may have talked about this film before, but I want to talk about it in a different context.
I want to talk about The Searchers, which is a 1956 film.
It's considered one of the great American classics, one of John Wayne's greatest roles.
The truth about it is only half the movie is any good.
But that half is one of the greatest movies ever made.
It deals with John Wayne plays an Indian fighter whose niece is kidnapped by the Indians.
And he goes off to hunt her down.
And really, he wants to hunt her down and kill her because he figures once she's been raped by the Indians, she's no good anymore.
And she's going to become a squaw.
And he just despises the Indians.
And there's two stories.
There's the home story.
There's John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter go out hunting for Natalie Wood, who's the little girl.
And then there's the story at home.
And the story at home is just mock comedy.
It's not very funny.
It's really kind of dated and all this.
The stuff with John Wayne is one of the greatest movies of all time.
And it's worth watching.
It's worth sitting through the other part.
It's not terrible.
It's just worth sitting through that other part to see this great picture.
Here's a little clip where they find some Indians.
They're searching for these women who've been kidnapped.
And they find some Indians.
Here, let's just play this one-minute clip.
I found them.
I found Lucy.
They're camped about a half mile over.
I was just swinging back, and I seen their smoke bellied up a ridge.
And there they was, right below me.
Did you see Debbie?
No.
No, but I saw Lucy, all right.
The Woman Taken in Adultery00:04:02
She was wearing that blue dress.
What you saw wasn't Lucy.
Oh, but it was, I tell you.
What you saw was a buck wearing Lucy's dress.
I found Lucy back in the canyon.
Wrapped her in my coat.
Buried her with my own hands.
Thought it best to keep it from you.
Today was she.
What do you want me to do?
Draw your picture?
Spell it out?
Don't ever ask me.
long as you live, don't ever ask me more.
It's a very, very compelling story of a guy who just despises the Indians, has good reason to despise them, and is hunting down the niece that he loves because he loves her, he wants to kill her because he feels like she's lost.
When you watch this film, what comes to my mind is the parable, the story, it's not a parable, of Jesus and the woman who's taken in adultery.
I'm sure you all know the stories.
They bring her, the scribes and the Pharisees bring her to Jesus and say, should she be stoned?
And he says, well, yeah, let he who is without sin throw the first stone.
And everybody goes home, of course.
And then he says, you know, to the woman, he says, go and sin no more.
And it's an amazing story.
It's not in the earliest Gospels.
It's not in the earliest copies that we have of the Gospels.
And so there are people this very day, some on the right, who want it removed from, it's in the Gospel of John.
They want it removed from the Gospel of John.
They say, well, it's not in the earliest editions, the earliest copies that we have.
So therefore, it's not real.
And they actually want to take it out of the Gospels.
There's a whole other school that says, finds very, very early references.
It's not in the Gospels.
They're very early references to the event itself.
So it's in texts that are very close to the event, people saying that this woman was brought before the Lord and basically telling the story, even though it's not the John version.
So it seems really clear to me that it was actually edited out, not that it was edited in.
And the reason it was edited out, I think, is pretty obvious, that it offends, it's offensive to everybody.
If you are a leftist and you hear that this woman has been brought to be stoned by adultery, you say, oh, this is so judgmental.
There shouldn't be adultery.
There shouldn't even be marriage.
You know, it's all this is just, these are just cultural constructs, the construct of sin.
You know, what do we do?
We're going to stone people.
Look at this, this evil thing that's been stoned.
If you're on the right, though, there's also this argument, well, if you let her off the hook for her adultery, then adultery will be without a price, and therefore marriage will fall apart.
Marriage is one of the pillars of society, and therefore society will fall apart.
You know that's how conservatives think.
They do think that way.
And Jesus says, you know, it is a sin that he is with who is without sin throw the first stone.
And I really do feel that that idea, that idea that the moral universe is there, but it can only be understood through love and compassion.
It can only be understood by including ourself in our condemnation and really not judging, judging not lest we be judged, which is the one thing that Jesus said that would have gotten crucified, would get him crucified this very day, not by the left, but by everybody.
You know, when you say judge not lest you be judged, people go nuts.
And when I point out that he really meant it, he meant that.
He meant that you cannot judge a person's state before God.
And when he said, you know, take the plank out of your own eye before you remove the moat out of another person's eye, he actually meant that.
He meant that you should do that.
And that's a lifelong occupation, taking the plank out of your own eye.
And when you see the way that parable plays out in The Searchers with John Wayne, it is a heartbreaking, heart-wrenching story that really does speak about how the philosophy and outlook of Jesus Christ imbues the arts of the West.
It is really worth watching.
Clavenless Weekend Begins00:00:52
That's it.
This Clavenless weekend begins, doesn't it?
This is Thursday.
Yeah, I'm kind of confused because I've been flying around, but this is the Clavenless weekend.
I don't know what I can do.
I can do no more for you.
Hold your breath.
Hide, you know, keep away from the riots and all that stuff.
And those of you who survive, gather with me again on Monday, and I will be back.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Emily Jai.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Alvera.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.