Ep. 763’s Andrew Clavin skewers Congress’s absurdity—Democrats like Jerry Nadler chasing Trump impeachments while Mitch McConnell ignores gun control—and contrasts leftist "easy fantasies" (climate activism, Medicare for All) with hard truths: 70,000 despair deaths since 2000 and Elizabeth Warren’s unconstitutional fracking bans. Congressman Sean Duffy highlights rural revival under Trump, while Clavin mocks media distortions like Jim Mattis’ NATO defense vs. Andrea Mitchell’s anti-Trump bias. Yakov Smirnov, a Soviet defector, warns U.S. political correctness mirrors Kremlin-era censorship, where jokes needed state approval, and laments modern comedy’s lack of bipartisan satire. The episode exposes how elites prioritize narratives over reality, from Harvard’s debunked Trump-hate-crime study to leftist media’s John Bolton flip-flops. [Automatically generated summary]
Congress is back in session and ready to take on the number one crisis facing America, namely that Congress is back in session.
The lawmakers returned to Washington facing a full agenda, including financing the government so they can get money to pay for Congress, so they can finance the government, so they can get money to pay for Congress, so they can finance the government.
D.C. residents welcomed the legislature back by running away from the Capitol building in a panicked mob, clutching their wallets and screaming as if Godzilla was chasing them.
When they found out Godzilla actually was chasing them, they calmed down and said, that's a relief.
We thought it was Congress.
On the House side, Democrat Jerry Nadler said he had enjoyed a lazy summer just wasting time and spending money by way of practicing for his return to government work.
Nadler's list of things to do includes threatening to impeach President Trump, threatening to investigate President Trump, threatening to investigate impeaching President Trump, and subpoenaing the last few Americans he hasn't interrogated yet, including the scary clown from the Stephen King movie and the guy who runs the Dairy Queen in Aspenwall, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was happy to come back from wherever she'd been to wherever she was now and was looking forward to churning out useless anti-Trump bills that would never become law until she had completely wasted the rapidly dwindling time remaining to her life.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell listed his priorities as getting more judges confirmed, talking very slowly with a deadpan expression, and then getting more judges confirmed and then talking slowly some more.
McConnell was asked yesterday why he hadn't mentioned gun control in his agenda.
He should be done with his answer sometime this afternoon.
Meanwhile, though the parties remain sharply divided, Congress hopes to bring the nation together on the issue of giving them more money for their important work of getting more money.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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It makes me want to sing.
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Oh, hooray, hurrah.
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All right.
When I was a kid, really before I was even a teenager, I remember listening to things that people said to me and asking myself, is that true or is it just easy?
I find myself still asking that question a lot today.
I guess because I'm from that generation that listened to John F. Kennedy say we were going to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.
And this is one of the reasons, you know, I don't like a lot of Christian entertainment.
For that matter, I don't like a lot of Christian thought and preaching.
And my central problem with it is that it makes faith look easy and happy and pleasant instead of difficult, a difficult road to a higher joy.
I think conservatives do the same thing with politics.
We tell you capitalism and freedom and morality are going to make everything better.
And that is true in the grand sense, but not always true in your immediate life right now.
In fact, what we conservatives and we Christians are proposing is hard.
It's a harder life, and it's only a better life in a high sense, not necessarily in the low sense.
Abortion is a perfect example.
You're a guy, you get a girl pregnant, you don't want to marry her.
She doesn't want to marry you.
You've both got your careers and your social life going on.
Neither of you wants to have a baby.
Abortion is easy.
Doing what's right is hard.
The Democrats keep telling us that climate change is our World War II, which at least has the benefit of being hilarious.
World War II, everybody's son, husband, and father, even movie stars, millionaires, left home, went to endure the rigors of basic training, and many of them risk being shipped out into mortal danger to push back against a cancerous present evil.
With climate change, a bunch of wealthy Democrats funnel your tax dollars to billionaire political donors in order to subsidize their useless businesses with the word green in the title to fight back against clouds.
Risking your personal life for righteousness' sake is hard.
Virtue signaling and risking nothing while flying on your private jet to green energy conferences is easy.
Welfare is easy.
Work and risk are hard.
Sex with strangers is great.
Building a relationship is hard.
Drugs are fun.
Sobriety is hard.
If you ever wonder why we as conservatives and as Christians feel like we're swimming upstream in the great debate of our time, it's because we are.
This is a country that has generated a lot of wealth and offers a lot of ease and fun and virtue signaling for no apparent cost and no apparent risk.
The fact that it'll one day all collapse on our grandchildren is really not that big a worry.
They'll think of something and we'll be dead then, so what?
We have to understand the human brain, the human body are not built for freedom.
They don't like it.
They don't want it.
They want to eat and drink and screw and screw around.
In times of scarcity, we do what's right out of necessity.
When the money comes rolling in, we do what comes naturally.
My generation inherited the wealth of centuries.
We went nuts.
We threw it all away and we sold you a crap philosophy of free stuff and free sex and murdered babies and unsustainable debt.
And you bought that crap philosophy because it was easy.
And now, conservatives and Christians are asking you to give up that easy life in exchange for hard reality and truth and noble joy.
It sucks to be you.
The Death of Democracy00:15:15
Tomorrow, the mailbag is coming up.
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That is the mailbag, the famous mailbag scream.
Go on thedailywire.com, scream that scream, and then hit the podcast button, then scream that scream again.
Hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, scream that scream one more time, and then hit the mailbag picture, and you can ask me if you are a subscriber.
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If you are a subscriber, you can ask me anything you want.
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My answers will change your life on occasion for the better.
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So please subscribe and get your questions into the mailbag.
I would like to solve all your problems for you, but it costs you lousy 10 bucks a month.
What else?
You know, just as before I went on the air, I saw that John Bolton has been canned.
He's been kicked out of the Oval Office.
Trump said that they just disagreed on too much and he fired him.
He asked for his resignation and Bolton has left.
But since I haven't had time to look into that, I won't talk about it too much today, but I will talk about it tomorrow.
Obviously, I know they disagreed a lot on Iran.
Bolton, you know, I love John Bolton.
I think he's great.
But, you know, John Bolton, I always say if your toilet got clogged up, he would call in like a bombing raid to open up your toilet.
He's a hawk.
And I'm sure he was not happy about what happened with the Afghanistan, with the Taliban stuff.
So I'm sure we'll find out more about that as things go on.
And it'll be absolutely great to find John Bolton a hero of the left.
Remember, the left has always hated Bolton.
They always, I mean, they despised him.
Remember, they twisted themselves in knots to keep George W. Bush from making him the ambassador to the U.N. Bush had to appoint him as an interim appointment.
Then the minute Congress came back, they threw him out again.
And they just hate him.
So suddenly, now that Trump has fired him, it's going to be that wonderful patriot, that patriot, John Bolton.
How could Bush have done anything Bush, anything Trump does?
The opposite has to be true.
So now that Trump has fired him, it'll be John Bolton the hero.
So for me, who is laughing through the apocalypse, I mean, that's why I'm here, one of my favorite sources of comedy is watching these nudmiks try and sell their fantasies as reality while actually trying to convince you that the reality in front of you isn't there.
I call this reading the news.
So here are two columns from the New York Times, a former newspaper.
We go right into the heart of New York Times darkness on Knucklehead Row.
So Paul Krugman is one of the biggest knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row.
I love the guy.
I don't think he has ever said anything that turned out to be true.
I don't think he's ever made a financial prediction that was true.
I don't think any political thing he says is ever true.
I don't think anybody, I think the people who listen to him are the people who like wear aluminum foil hats and sit around talking about how Donald Trump is going to prison any minute when they find him in bed with Putin or whatever.
And I think that's the Paul Krugman audience.
The fact that he has a Nobel Prize for some obscure economic theory, which apparently wasn't bad, but now his economics has been so polluted by politics that it's just absurd.
His column today is a triumph of Paul Krugmanism.
It is like a classic.
It's called How Democracy Dies, American Style.
And I bring it up because one of the things that I feel is happening is we're being fed these fake crises that are easy to deal with because they're not really there.
And we ignore the real crises that are there that are difficult and complex and require bipartisan conversation, debate, and discussion.
So his column, How Democracy Dies, American Style.
This is the threat our democracy as we watch, as we sit here, is dying.
He says democracies used to collapse suddenly with tanks rolling noisily toward the presidential palace.
In the 21st century, however, the process is subtler.
So, you know, democracy is dying.
Don't look for any tanks or anything.
Just take your Krugman's word for it.
Authoritarianism is on the march across much of the world, but its advance tends to be relatively quiet and gradual so that it's hard to point to a single moment and say, this is the day democracy ended.
You just wake up one morning and realize it's gone.
So what is he talking about?
I mean, this is something that concerns me, the end of democracy.
I think that when the EPA, an unelected drone at the EPA, can declare your bathtub a public waterway and come in and tell you you can only take a bath at certain times, you know, when they can talk about, you know, banning everything on earth, their cheeseburgers, that the government, the federal government, is going to have the power to ban your cheeseburgers because they save the environment.
When Barack Obama used the IRS to silence the Tea Party, yeah, that was a threat to democracy.
I'll tell you what I thought was one of the true big threats to democracy.
and you never heard a word from anybody at the New York Times on this, was when President Obama, this was 2011, President Obama told the Justice Department to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act.
Okay, remember that was a Clinton-era law that said that marriage was between a man and a woman.
And basically, Obama said he was not going to defend it anymore.
So my question is this.
If the legislature can pass a law and the president can just decide that he's not going to defend it or enforce it, right?
What makes it a law?
And what keeps him from being king?
Why isn't he king when he does that, when he decides what the laws are rather than the legislature?
Obviously, the Department of Justice is there to enforce the laws the legislature makes, not to determine that they are unconstitutional when no one has ever said that.
But none of this, none of this is what is bothering Paul Krugman.
What does he see as the great threat to democracy?
I will give you three guesses.
No, you are wrong.
It is Sharpiegate.
It is Sharpiegate is the great, that is democracy dying.
This is Donald Trump saying that a hurricane was going to hit Alabama because on CNN they said a hurricane was going to hit Alabama.
And then he put forward a map that had a Sharpie showing that it would hit Alabama to defend himself from charges that what he had said wasn't true.
This is the death of democracy.
I know you don't believe me, but stay tuned and I will tell you about it.
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And I know, I know what you're saying.
I can hear it.
I can hear it.
It's coming across me.
Wait a minute.
It's like I'm psychic.
I hear you saying, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So democracy dies for Paul Krugman at Sharpiegate, Donald Trump's inability to admit that he misstated a weather projection by claiming that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian.
It was reported on CNN.
We played it yesterday, so it was not Trump's fault.
He says it's not reassuring when the President of the United States can't face reality, but it's stopping any kind of a joke on Friday when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a statement falsely backing up Trump's claim, which was true.
Okay?
Think about it.
Think about it, says Paul Krugman.
If even weather forecasters are expected to be apologists for Dear Leader, the corruption of our institutions is truly complete.
And of course, Dear Leader is the way they refer to Kim in North Korea.
So that's Trump.
He is, look, okay, he's not rounding up people and killing them.
He's not watching you through your television set.
He's not oppressing you.
You're not starving.
You're doing great.
Your job is good.
You're making more money, but he's just like that guy in North Korea because he said that the hurricane was going to hit Alabama and put a Sharpie on a, this is what people in the New York Times.
This is what people in the New York Times are reading.
This is what intelligent New Yorkers opened up the New York Times and this is what they say, the end of democracy.
I mean, this is a terrible, terrible thing.
And, you know, they push this.
You know, they put out a thing, the Washington Post and CNN pushed a study that's saying President Trump's 2016 campaign rallies caused an upsurge, a 226% spike in hate crimes in the areas in which they were held.
Okay, this is the kind of thing they're pushing, the end of democracy because of President Trump.
So a university, Harvard University PhD student, Matthew Lilly and Brian Wheaton, two of them, got together with Reason Magazine associate editor Robbie Swaba and debunked the original study's finding, right?
They looked at the methods that were used to figure this out, all these hate crimes that were coming up whenever Trump held a rally, and they found that using additional data, this is their writing we collected, we also analyzed the effect of Hillary Clinton's campaign rallies and the ostensible finding Clinton rallies contributed to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.
Of course, what they found is that people went to rallies, that rallies are held in cities, that there are more hate crimes in cities, that the people, when they go there, maybe that stirs up other people who are around.
Anyway, it was all nonsense, but this is what they're pushing, the end of democracy.
What else?
It's not just Sharpiegate, though.
It's not just Sharpiegate that has Paul Krugman worried.
He says, as part of its jihad, there is a jihad.
You remember jihad.
We're not allowed to say who has jihads, but we are allowed to say that Trump has a jihad.
His jihad against environmental regulation.
The Trump administration has declared its intention to roll back Obama-era rules mandating a gradual rise in fuel efficiency.
First of all, these rules have been more dangerous than anything else.
They've caused car, I mean, the car companies get around them.
My car does this.
I have a fairly new car.
When you step on the brake, the engine stops.
And then it starts again when you take your foot off the brake.
And that helps them to duck under the EPA rules.
I mean, it's all just nonsense.
It costs you money.
It's not doing anything.
Recently, the Trump administration took off the bans on methane, and all the environmentalists went nuts.
Methane is not a big problem in America, but they just, putting restrictions on it helps the big oil companies and stops the small oil companies from rising up.
You know, let me just show you why this is happening, though, why this kind of fantasy crisis is going on.
Congressman Sean Duffy from Wisconsin and his wife, Rachel, who they have eight kids and she's pregnant, they went on the view, okay?
And they're trying to explain to these elite coastal millionaire entertainers that life has been very tough in the Midwest, that Obama, when he sat around and said these jobs are never coming back, and when people say, oh, we'll give you a guaranteed income, they're talking to people who have lost everything.
Communities have collapsed, factories have closed, people have been out of work, and suddenly, in the Donald Trump administration, they're coming back to work.
And the audience, this View audience that has been trained by the View to think what they think and probably agrees with them anyway, sits there and groans and moans and they can't believe that this is an important thing that people in the middle of this country who aren't, they aren't even in New York and LA.
So do they even exist?
Is there actually a place between New York and LA that they want their jobs back so they can feed their kids, so they can have dignity, so they can have purpose and meaning in their lives and independence in their lives.
And Joy Behar says, yes, but your jobs are bad for the environment.
Listen to this meeting between reality and fantasy.
As conservatives, we're implementing a lot of conservative policy that are making people's lives better.
Their economies, yeah, their economies are stronger.
Their salaries are rising.
Their opportunity is growing.
The U.S. may not see that in New York and California, but in the middle of America, that's happening.
But, Congressman...
But, hold on a second.
Go ahead.
I think what's important to note that they're leaving despite a great opportunity to implement policy, they're making decisions individually about their families like we are.
You have so many children.
Don't you worry about the environment.
He's terrible on the environment.
I would think that alone could turn you against.
Hold on, hold on.
I really think it's hard.
I do believe it's really hard to see when you are in these coastal bubbles.
If you live in Middle America, we live in rural Wisconsin.
The towns have turned around.
The factories are back.
People have jobs.
There's more jobs than there are people to fill them.
And that was not a lot of crimes at the expense of the environment.
That the regulations that you want to implement isn't going to cost you your job.
I would gladly give up my job.
If I could have a magic wand to make it all go back to what we're doing.
I would really.
That's an amazing thing.
First of all, that she's so self-deceived that her fantasy has engulfed her that she thinks she would give up her job.
She might now that she has millions to fall back on, but if she didn't have money, like these people didn't have that kind of money, she wouldn't give up her job.
She wouldn't give up her job for some magic wand that make things go back the way it was, is what she's saying, to go back the way it was.
To win, to when?
I mean, you know, our actually, our output of pollutants has gotten better since Trump has taken office.
It's just a pure fantasy.
And this woman is sitting there telling her that these towns that she's never seen and just flies over in first class, that she doesn't care about, are coming back to life and she doesn't give a damn because she's got this fantasy world in which we're facing this climate crisis, that she's willing, oh, how willing she is to give up her job.
Oh, you can just see her, the sacrifice, the make-believe sacrifice that she is willing to make believe to face this make-believe crisis is so make-believe that it just moves you to tears how real her make-believe is.
Meanwhile, back on the New York Times, let's play, well, you know, we won't play Knucklehead Row because this is the one guy on the New York Times page, Ross Duthot, who I actually have a lot of respect for.
I don't always agree with him, but he is an honest guy who faces the problems.
He's talking about something else.
Listen to what Ross Duthot says about fantasy versus reality.
Facing Reality Despairingly00:08:55
It's called the Age of American Despair.
He says this week, CNN devoted seven hours of programming to climate change, bringing the leading Democratic candidates on stage to grill them on the issue.
You can't grill them because we can't have cheeseburgers anymore.
But anyway, I have no complaints about the decision, he says, but I wish that some network would set aside a similar amount of time for a more immediate crisis, one that is killing tens of thousands of Americans right now, more than the crack epidemic at its worst, more than the Vietnam War.
A new report from the Senate's Joint Economic Committee, and just think about how often you've heard about this compared to climate change, charts the scale of this increase, a doubling from 22.7 deaths from despair per 100,000 Americans in 2000, right, to 45.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2017, easily eclipsing all prior 20th century highs.
More people killing themselves out of despair in America than ever before.
By way of comparison to climate change, this summer's National Climate Assessment estimated that rising temperatures could cause between 4 and 10,000 additional heat-related deaths annually by the end of the 21st century.
So in fantasy land and fantasy prediction land and computer, you know, the fantasies of computers, it's possible at the highest worst level that at the end of the 21st century, right, 10,000 people a year could die.
That's the worst prediction from a computer that might happen at the end of the 21st century.
But had deaths of despair remained at 2,000 era levels, approximately 70,000 fewer Americans would have died this year alone.
70, I mean, think about this.
I know figures are hard to keep up with, but 70,000 fewer Americans would have died.
In other words, despair has killed 70,000 more Americans this year than they would have in 2000.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
And then he goes on in a very mature way to talk about the fact that it's very difficult to know what the sources are.
Maybe these are different crises.
Maybe it's a drug crisis and a despair crisis.
Maybe it's a joblessness economic crisis and a drug crisis and a despair crisis.
Maybe we have to come to it from spiritual, economic, and technocratic ways.
You know, it's a complicated problem.
You know why?
Because it's real.
Because it's a real problem.
The climate, this climate crisis is not a real problem.
And so many of the things, you know, reality is important to talk about because only the truth will set you free and only the truth can solve your problems.
And meanwhile, the Democrats are pouring out these things.
You know, Daniel French has a column in National Review today where he talks about that almost everything Elizabeth Warren talked, you know how Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that?
Everything she talks about, I have a plan for that.
He says almost all her plans are unconstitutional and wouldn't make it pass the law, as the law stands today.
She says she's banned fracking.
And French says the courts have already made it clear that you're not going to, the government doesn't have the power to ban fracking.
Why should the government have the power to ban fracking?
I mean, it's one of the best things that's happened to this country and to the oil markets.
It's just taken some of the power away from the sheiks and Araby.
And it's given us more power, us more energy.
It's kind of cleaner energy.
What's the problem?
But they're going to ban fracking.
But French says, no, they're not.
Her gun ban, probably unconstitutional.
Even her wealth tax is probably limited by the Constitution.
They talk about Medicare for all, which would be a disaster.
I mean, it would turn our entire health care system into the VA, and you know how that looks.
Rahm Emmanuel, right, Barack Obama's Rahm Emmanuel, mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel, says this is absurd.
The risk you said, which is appropriate and it measures up, is healthcare is a single issue that Democrats have a 35-point advantage on.
President Trump is trying to do everything he can to narrow that down.
We've taken a position so far, and the Kenates have, through the process, a few have not, about on basically Medicare for all, which is we're going to eliminate 150 million people's health care, and we're going to provide health care for people that just come over the border.
That is an untenable position for the general election.
As you know, George, I just biked around Lake Michigan, nearly 1,000 miles, through Michigan and Wisconsin, two really important states.
Nobody at a diner ran at me and said, take my health care away.
Nobody.
This is reckless as it relates to, and you don't have to take the position to win the primary, and you're basically literally hindering yourself for the general election.
Rahm Emmanuel trying to inject a little bit of reality, or as a leftist, as a far leftist, trying to inject a little bit of reality into the minds of Democrats.
Let me show you how hard it is for the left to face reality.
Let me show you how hard it is for the media to face reality because the media now believes, you know, the media used to believe that they were reporting on reality.
Now they think they're creating it.
They think that they are, if they tell you stuff, you'll believe it and then those things will be true.
This is actually a left-wing, a leftist philosophical problem, that they believe that narrative is reality, that if you can change the narrative, you have in fact changed reality.
And since the news and the entertainment business have such a powerful, are such a powerful forces for pushing narrative, they believe that if they push the right narrative, reality will change because we'll all believe it.
And that's why they hate comedy.
We're going to be talking to Yakov Smirnov, a comic legend, in just a few minutes.
But this is one of the reasons they hate comedy because they hate for their narrative to be interrupted.
Let me just show you, because it's just great, a great piece of video and audio.
Let me just show you what happens with this.
Yesterday, Donald Trump was in North Carolina holding one of his rallies.
They're having a special election in the 9th congressional district, and he is there to promote the Republicans, the Republican candidates Dan Bishop and Greg Murphy.
So he goes out and he starts to talk about NATO and the fact that our allies have not really stepped up, and now they are stepping up.
So here's Trump talking to the crowd.
For decades, our leaders put global interests and special interests ahead of your interests.
You know that better than anybody, and this state knows it better than anybody.
They traded away your factories, sold your future, squandered your tax dollars, sacrificed your security, and bogged us down in one foreign debacle after another.
But all of that has changed.
We're respected again.
They're all saying, oh, gee, I hope he doesn't do this or that.
They've taken advantage of us for years.
And I have to say, sadly, in many cases, it's our allies that took the greatest advantage of this country.
But now you finally have a president who understands that I'm not supposed to be the president of the world.
I'm supposed to be the president of the United States of America.
Okay, so that's him saying, you know, he's gotten allies.
Sometimes our allies have not treated us fairly, as well as our enemies.
So Jim Mattis is touring.
Again, we've mentioned him a lot because he's in the media a lot, former defense secretary.
He's touring because he's got this book, Call Sign Chaos is Out.
And all they've done is tried to get him to talk about his resignation from Trump and how he hates Trump.
And he won't do it.
He's too big a patriot.
He will not attack a sitting president.
So Andrea Mitchell, who just is MSNBC, she just hates Trump.
She hates all Republicans.
She says she wants him to talk about this and how bad Trump has made it for NATO, how he has ruined NATO.
And Mattis won't give it to her.
Just listen to her reaction.
In the last two and a half years, we've seen our alliances weakened in NATO, certainly in Asia and in Europe.
You know, Andrea, if you take a look at current events, you can always see the tensions because that's what grabs your attention, is the tensions in those alliances.
However, right now you see a NATO that for, I think we're into the fourth straight year or fifth straight year of the nations, almost all of them, increasing their defense budgets.
So I could say quantitatively, NATO's actually stronger today.
Now, there are political tensions.
Those tensions have always been there in NATO, where the American presidents, I remember all the way back to President Clinton when I became aware of this issue, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, all saying the same thing President Trump is, you've got to pay more.
The way I carried the message to NATO when I first went there as a Secretary of Defense was I've sat in this room and you've heard this message before, but the American people are saying they will not care more about your children's future than you care.
You've got to pay your fair share.
Well, in your resignation letter, returning to that.
She can't stand it.
She says, can we get back to attacking?
Lived Experiences in Russia00:06:31
Try, can we get back to my fantasy life, please?
Stop having facts on my television show.
A lot of fantasy out there.
Why?
Because reality is hard.
That's what we're trying to sell people.
That's why conservatives always have an uphill fight.
We're trying to sell them reality.
All right, we've got Yakov Smurov coming up to talk about comedy.
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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Come on over.
I'm really happy to bring on this guest, Yakov Smirnov, the guy.
The guy is a legend in American comedy.
He escaped from the Soviet Russia in the 1970s, came to America without knowing any English.
He was on the Tonight Show.
He was a regular on Night Court.
He had his own show.
I think it was on the SNL, too.
I seem to remember that.
And he's currently touring the country during stand-up.
Let me just show you a clip.
This is an old clip, but it's really good.
That's why I thought I'd bring on.
This is from when Dangerfield, Rodney Dangerfield, introduced his young comedians as a special in 1984 as Jakov Smirnov.
I am actually from Russia.
I was born there, grew up there, worked as a comedian out there.
What surprises me, American people don't know we have comedy in Russia.
We have comedians.
They're there.
They're dead.
They're there.
It's very hard to do comedy in the Soviet Union.
You have to write out all your material and you send it to Department of Jokes.
I'm not making this up.
They send it back to you censored.
You have to stay with a script.
You cannot improvise.
If someone heckles you from the audience, you can't say like, your mother wears army boots.
Because she probably does.
And she will hurt you.
Good thing about doing comedy in Russia, you have captured audience.
They're not going anywhere.
You got to be very selective, very careful what jokes you say.
If you say like, take my wife, please, you get home, she's gone.
I realized that I wanted to get out of Russia.
It's not easy to get out because you apply for a visa, but they give you a MasterCard.
There are no things like American Express.
They give you Russian Express.
Don't leave home.
Yagov, it's great to see you.
Great to meet you.
You just told me a minute ago that you agreed to come on before watching the show.
So I'm glad you actually are willing to sacrifice your reputation and possibly your career.
I'm hoping that we can find that middle ground where I can help the reputation of being on your show.
No one has ever done that before.
No, but I'm going to attempt.
I'm going to give it a shot.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
So you came out, you were in your 20s, right?
I was 26.
When you came out of the Soviet Union.
That's correct.
So tell people, people don't know anymore what it was like.
What was it?
You were in the Ukraine, I guess, right?
I lived in Ukraine, yes.
I grew up there.
I was a comedian there.
You were a comedian in the Soviet Union.
I was a comedian in the Soviet Union, which is kind of hard for Americans to, it sounds like Oxymor and sounds like Amish electrician.
You know, it's just like, how is that possible, right?
But what was happening that in that country, you had a lot of, we had a lot of humor, but it wasn't publicly displayed.
Right.
So, and the humor really helped us to survive through the really difficult time.
So it would be interesting to your viewers to know that the word political correctness started in the Soviet Union, 1917, by Lenin.
And that was to stay with the party line.
And whoever didn't follow that would end up in winter camps.
That's right.
And so I grew up kind of understanding that fine line that I can't say something in public, but people who I trust, I can tell something that makes the government or the politics ridiculous.
And that would create laughter.
And that would help.
And I grew up with my, you know, my parents were funny.
And I remember asking my mom, I said, where do people come from?
And she said, well, you know, there was Adam and Eve and then they had a baby and that's how people multiplied.
And I went to my dad and I said, Dad, how people came about?
And he said, well, there were monkeys and they evolved.
And so I go back to my mom and I said, mom, so how come you say there was Adam and Eve?
And dad said that there was monkeys.
And my mom said, well, I was talking about my side of the family.
So I grew up with this very funny family and used humor to kind of release the tension.
And tension was all over the place.
We had to stand in line for food.
I mean, since I was a little kid, my grandmother would put me, I was maybe six, and my job was to stand in line for bread.
And it would be like till we get bread, which could be a couple of hours.
And then she would go in line for milk.
And that's how we would, you know, live.
And it was normal.
Everybody lived like this.
We lived in a communal apartment.
Nine families lived in one apartment, one bathroom, one kitchen.
And I tell a joke in my show that when my parents wanted to be romantic, they would send me to look out the window.
And then my dad would say, so what do you see in the window?
I said, our neighbors being romantic.
And he said, how can you tell?
I said, because their son is looking at me.
And I was the only child because we had only one window.
So that's basically, it was the beginnings of my comedy career.
Able to Tell Jokes00:08:32
And then I went, I got, you know, went through high school, went to the Soviet army, started to tell jokes, but I knew that it had to be very carefully selected.
And then after the army, I went to university.
And then during that time, I decided I'm going to start doing comedy professionally, which was a daring thing to do because the censorship was pretty brutal.
And so I had to submit my material to Department of Jokes, which sounds so bizarre, right?
But every, so we had 16 states in the Soviet Union.
Every state had a Ministry of Culture and each Ministry of Culture had Department of Dance, Department of Humor, Department of Music, Singing, all of those departments.
And there were bureaucrats who would allow you, and it was like a license.
would get to get a license to be able to to get you know some permission to perform in those different venues and that's how I and they would censor jokes out that they didn't think was so it was one of those things that it would be it was a challenge to find something that the public would get but the bureaucrat would not They wouldn't understand.
They wouldn't get it.
And so one of the jokes I remember was that they allowed me to say, but it was so obvious, it was that little aunt got married to female elephant.
And after first wedding night, elephant died.
And the little aunt said, only one night I enjoyed myself.
And now for the rest of my life, I have to dig this grave.
And they let me tell that joke.
But the audience could relate that this was the elephant was the Communist Party and the government.
That's amazing.
So, I wish I had a lot of time, but I don't have too much time.
I just want to know when you first came here.
Yes.
What was your reaction?
You look at America's the 80s, the 70s, I guess, late 70s.
Yes, 77.
I arrived here.
Well, it was a moment.
My dad was very much into understanding America.
And my mom was scared to get out because she was used to the Soviets telling you what to do, when to do it, what shoes you're going to wear.
I mean, they had two kinds of shoes, brown shoes and what's wrong with brown shoes, right?
So she was comfortable with that.
So for her, it was a little bit challenging.
I was excited.
My dad was excited.
My mom, you know, she would go to the department, to the supermarket, and she would be depressed because she said, I had a purpose in the Soviet Union.
I had to stand in line for this and this and this and this.
And now I can walk into a supermarket and I can get whatever I want for the whole week.
What am I going to do?
I said, well, mom, there is DNV.
You can go stand in line there.
That's a little bit of the Soviet Union.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So my excitement, again, I didn't speak English.
I wanted to do comedy, but I knew that I need to learn the language.
And I was excited, amazed, but scared at the same time.
And Americans have been so kind and so loving.
The people who kind of, we found an apartment in Washington Heights in New York, and it was like tiny place.
And the lady, Ms. Landau, who kind of organized all the, she paid the difference.
We didn't have much money.
We only had $50 left.
And there was like $240 rent for the first month.
And she paid out of her pocket and gave us our first home in America.
And I never imagined that possible because in the Soviet Union, you just wanted to survive.
So the altruism was not giving.
What is that?
So I tell a joke in my show that two communists are talking to one another.
One said, let me ask you, if you had two houses, would you give me one?
And the other said, of course, you're my fellow communist.
Of course, I give you one.
If you had two cars, would you give me one?
Yeah, why even asking?
That's what we're supposed to do.
We share things.
Of course, I give you one.
If you had two chickens, would you give me one?
No.
Why not?
I have two chickens.
So that's kind of what I grew up with.
And then when I see these possibilities happening, the censorship in the United States and the people are becoming more and more the same.
I worry from a sense of humor perspective because I know what it feels like to be restricted, to not say this and this and this and this.
And I came here and I felt like I was able to take this breath of freedom in.
And now I'm feeling that it's challenging again for freedom to be.
I mean, is that something you talk to audiences about?
Because I mean, I watch comedy on Netflix and I just see people being torn to pieces for just making jokes, the way the comedians do.
I do.
I do.
But what I do, I paint a picture of what socialism looks like.
And it's just not, I'm not exaggerating anything.
And I love what America stands for.
I believe that you need the left and the right.
And I want to be in the center to build that bridge of laughter across the aisle.
That is when people are laughing together, they know it's true.
They can't help it.
So that's my goal.
When I go to the comedy store and I, you know, do 15-minute set there and I talk about that.
I talk about socialism.
I talk about all the shortages or all the challenges that we have.
And I believe that what created this society is so unique and amazing that they were able, because people can be greedy or altruistic in Soviet or in socialism, and they could be greedy and altruistic in America.
We were able to create abundance here that makes people want to help others.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
So when you look at the comedy scene, I mean, what bothers me is not that people attack politicians that I like.
It's that they only attack the politicians that I like.
Nobody attacks the other side.
I mean, because I'm happy to laugh at all politicians.
They all deserve it.
But it really does bother me that it's become such a limited voice, especially on TV.
Who do you like today?
Who are the new comedians who?
Oh, gosh.
Probably would be the guys like Jim Gaffigan.
And they're neutral.
They don't try to nail anybody.
I actually loved Dave Chappelle and his last special, Sticks and Stones.
I think it's very daring and very funny.
And he's so likable that you kind of have to laugh.
And you will laugh in the left or you will laugh in the right because you see the craziness of that.
So I think there are people out there that are, you know, Joe Rogan also takes on those topics and being true to himself and staying in the center and helping people kind of see the ridiculous part that we don't get to see unless we use some humor.
Humor in Politics00:01:51
Yeah.
Well, listen, I'm sorry I'm out of time, but it's great talking to you.
I can hear, you know, I have to say, when I'm listening to you, I've been around comedy my whole life.
My father was a comedian.
And my listening to your jokes, I can hear how incredibly well crafted they are.
At Elevent and Anchoke is brilliant.
A brilliant joke.
Jakob, Smirna, thank you.
Where can people find you if they jakov.com or Jakov underscore Smirnov on Instagram or Twitter?
Okay, great.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I hope your reputation survives.
I hope so.
I got to stop there.
I'm out of time.
I went a little long, but it was worth it.
I'll be here tomorrow.
Don't forget the mailbag.
Get your questions in now.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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