Adam Carolla, with the most downloaded podcast ever, clashes with cancel culture, defending his COVID-19 tweets while mocking Jimmy Kimmel’s blackface apology, rejecting apology culture as stifling comedy. His documentary No Safe Spaces predicts ideological segregation—"safe spaces" vs. "octagons"—mirrored by Tesla vs. Raptor car divides. He argues left-wing media dominance backfires, fueling conservative growth, and declares centrists obsolete in today’s polarized landscape where moderation is now a liability. [Automatically generated summary]
Okay, we got a great guest today, Adam Corolla, really good guy, really funny guy.
He has the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded podcast, The Adam Corolla Show.
He's a comedian, actor, podcaster, radio personality, and New York Times best-selling author.
But what's he done for us lately?
We'll ask him.
So I want to talk about comedy because this is the thing that has been really bugging me.
It's really getting up my nose.
You started out, you had a show with Jimmy Kimmel, The Man Show, and you used to do very elevated comedy like women with large breasts bouncing up and down on trampolines.
I loved it.
I thought it was fantastic.
So I found an article in which they traced the trajectory of Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Corolla, right?
And here's, here's just a line from this article.
It says, Really?
I didn't know there was an article.
Yeah, here it is.
Here it is.
He said, both have gotten themselves in trouble in 2020.
Jimmy Kimmel apologized after blackface impersonations resurfaced and caused a frenzy.
One of you is speaking your mind and saying what you have to say, and the other one is apologizing.
Now, I know that you're pals with Jimmy Kimmel, and I don't want you to say anything bad about him, but has he become a sniveling eunuch?
Jimmy is one of the best people I've ever met in my life.
I'm sure that's true.
He is one of the best individual people I've ever met in my life, but he has to navigate and negotiate Hollywood.
And Hollywood is relentless.
I mean, it just is relentless.
I'm not, I don't have his national stage.
I do a podcast.
I write books.
I make documentaries.
I basically pulled myself off of that stage or was asked to leave many years ago.
And I had somebody say to me the other day, they said, did you see all this coming?
And I said, no, I don't think so.
And they said, well, you've been doing a podcast for over 12 years.
Like you must have known something.
And I was like, yeah, maybe I did know.
Maybe I did know that I was not going to be able to live in that world.
I wasn't going to be able to live in that corporate world.
I wasn't going to be able to make my money off of, you know, doing sitcoms and being a part of Hollywood in a more mainstream way like I was.
And also, I didn't really get into this to be successful as much as I got into it to speak my mind.
I've always just kind of been that way.
I don't, I don't look at it as a choice or brave or defiant or anything.
I just, I just, I got into comedy to speak my mind.
I don't even, I don't even claim that all that comes out of my mind is correct.
Although given a little time and a little perspective, you will find that most things I announced did come to fruition or were correct.
But, you know, I got, I said, I said, COVID affects old people and sick people, and the rest of you just got played.
And who's next?
What's next?
When are you getting played next?
And I meant it.
Judd Apatow told me, take that down.
I said, I don't think so.
And I think save, you know, the tweets where you go, my 14-year-old nephew got COVID.
You know, I get it.
I'm not saying nobody outside of those two realms, but I'm saying by and large, that's where the death toll was.
And that's what I was saying.
And all I was saying was, is they made it seem like this was going to get to everybody and kill everyone.
And my feeling is, is why don't we focus on the people who are at risk and give, you know, we don't have unlimited time or resources.
Why don't we decide who's at highest risk here and focus on them and leave my 14-year-old twins out of the equation?
And that's what I meant and I'm sticking by it.
But, you know, when you were asked to apologize, you actually said, I'm not apologizing.
You had a line.
I think I'm getting this line right.
I'm not apologizing.
I'm a comedian.
And it seems to me that apology culture is like a cancer on comedy.
I mean, you know, Kimmel has to apologize for having once worn blackface.
Is it really bad to imitate a black person like Oprah Winfrey or something like that and put on blackface to do it?
I mean, I understand that there was a culture of blackface that was inherently racist, but is it necessarily racist to dress up as somebody in order to make fun of them?
Isn't that like a nice thing?
Isn't that kind of, don't friends make fun of one another?
Is there any way you can continue to be funny if you have to apologize every time you step over the line?
No, there's pictures of me that have resurfaced, but they only resurface because I post them of me when I was 19 for Halloween.
I went as Mr. T and people are like, you should apologize.
I go, why should I apologize for worshiping Mr. T when I was 19?
I mean, it's the ultimate progression in race relations, if you think about it.
I watched TV.
I loved Mr. T.
And so I dressed as the guy who happens to be black named Mr. T. That's not a minstrel show.
That's not blackface.
That's not me making fun of black people.
That's me wanting to look as much as I can look like Mr. T. You know, Jimmy Fallon got the same thing for doing Chris Rock.
It's it's but again, it is the it's the attack on the English language.
You know, what Chris, what Jimmy Fallon did wasn't blackface.
He was playing Chris Rock, who happens to be black.
Exactly, right, right.
Which is, I mean, if, if your kid, if, if you, if you're a black guy and your kid comes to you on Halloween and wants to be Batman, would you tell him he can't be Batman because Batman is white?
No, he puts on the little plastic mask with a white Batman face.
And why can't a white kid be Black Panther?
I mean, is that essentially wearing blackface?
And yet, and yet what's fascinating to me about it is Megan Kelly was thrown off TV for suggesting that that might be the case, that blackface might not always be racist.
Whereas the governor of Virginia is still there because if they get rid of him, they wind up with a Republican governor.
So it's kind of, it's not, it's not as sincere, I think, as people think it is.
They don't, the people who want you to apologize don't really care.
I mean, that's something I figured out pretty early and often.
They're not interested.
And by the way, who are they?
They speak for whom?
Who do they speak for?
The black community, the Batman community, the Mr. T community.
Like, who decided that you would be the spokesperson for this person or this group?
I reject that notion.
So during the Trump administration, I'm watching TV at night and every single late night comedian has the same opinion, exact same opinion.
Nobody's laughing at the left.
Are there?
Are there still comedians that you like?
Are there people who you sit and look at and think there's a guy who's doing what needs to be done to be funny?
I don't have my ear to the ground and or my finger in the wind of the comedic.
You know, stand-up community.
I'm i'm fairly detached from it.
For from for a guy who does it for a living uh, i'm sort of like, sort of like.
I always, I always laugh about, you know, half the guys that were on the bears in the, you know 1985 when Didka would yell something at them, they'd probably some rookie, be like coach.
You don't know what it's like to be out on that field.
You know what I mean.
I uh meaning i've never been in the community, so to speak.
You know I had a radio background and a and a construction background, so i've never really hung with the comedians.
There's guys out there speaking their mind.
They're guys and gals out there that are, that are funny, but it's just not a community that i've ever really socialized with, spent a lot of time with and and and or study.
What do you think in terms of you being, because you're a very funny guy what do you, what do you think when uh, you hear, for instance, people talking about transgenderism, as if you can think your way from being one sex to another?
Not not that somebody might have a problem with the bodies, and I understand that, and I understand that nature makes all kinds of uh strange, goes down all kinds of strange pathways, but the argument of the left is that you literally become a woman when you think that you might have some feminine traits.
Can you make fun of that?
I mean is, is that the sort of thing that, like feeds into comedy, or do you look at that and just think that's beyond laughing at?
I, I don't think there's anything that's inherently off the table comedically I I, I was at a hue, I think I was at the Hugh Hefner roast in New York City.
We taped that for Comedy Central about 10 days after 9-11 and we were three miles away from, you know, the smoldering ashes and the rubble of 9-11 and Gilbert Godfrey was doing 9-11 jokes.
And yeah and, in New York City.
You know we weren't in uh to create, we were in New York City and um, some people found it distasteful, other people laughed, other people were sort of toggled in between.
You know both those, those emotions, and it's been uh, you know, 20 years and I do remember that you know.
And so if you say to me what other jokes you remember from that night, I will say none, except for I remember Gilbert Godfrey was doing jokes about 9-11.
I didn't think he had anything to do with 9-11.
I now think differently.
But at the time, no, I realized he didn't, he's a New Yorker.
He was probably scared and heartbroken by 9-11.
I didn't think he was happy about it.
I didn't think he was disrespecting.
In my world, it's hard.
The people that are dead are dead.
It's hard for him to disrespect him.
I didn't assume family members were in the audience.
And that's his prerogative.
You know, I, you know, there are things for me that I don't find funny and I don't like to, you know, I don't like to make fun of, but that's my own personal decision.
And I certainly couldn't decide it for other people.
Right.
And you don't want to destroy the guy for even for stepping.
I mean, comedians step over the line sometimes.
That's kind of part of your job.
Yeah, although, you know, I would kind of argue for a comedian, there shouldn't be a line.
You know, maybe there should be a line for politicians and school teachers and bus drivers.
But I don't know if there should be a line for comedians.
That's what comedy is historically.
So you made a documentary with Dennis Brager, No Safe Spaces, and you traveled around to the colleges and confronted the fact that colleges specifically, where you're supposed to be learning the liberal arts, are supposed to be learning the great, what they used to call the great conversation, which is all the different thoughts that people have had in Western civilization through the centuries.
They've kind of become centers of censorship and centers of what they call snowflakeism, people who just feel that they're under attack if anybody disagrees with them.
Raptor vs. Octagon00:03:27
Do you foresee?
I mean, you've always had a really good sense of what was coming down the pike.
Do you foresee that as getting worse or are we going to reach a point where we just can't stand that anymore?
I think what we're going to do and what we're creating, I was talking to you on my podcast that there was a White Lives Matter rally, which is inevitable because you can only have so many black lives.
Look, you could only have, forget about race.
You could only have so many Green Lives Matter rallies before you had an Orange Lives Matter rally.
That's just kind of who we are as human beings, you know.
So I've been kind of studying it and I've been saying for years that, you know, people keep saying, where are we heading as a society?
I say half the country is going to safe spaces and the other half's going to an octagon.
That's what this is going to create.
And I've been kind of interestingly kind of noticing driving through LA.
I do a lot of commuting and I've spent a lot of time on the road.
I have started seeing more Teslas and more Priuses and more hybrids and, you know, full all-electric cars and stuff like that.
But I've seen a lot of Teslas, a lot of Teslas.
But in the last two years, I've seen a lot of Jeeps and a lot of Ford Raptor pickup trucks.
You know, there's no reason to ever own a Ford Raptor.
I'm a car guy, but that essentially is a Baja 1000 trophy truck, you know, big knobby tires, big suspension lift kits.
So what do we have?
Well, we have Teslas and we have Ford Raptors.
And even the, even Dodge Ram has gotten in the mix with their, oh, God, what is the RAM?
It's the RX.
What is it, Chris will tell me?
The TRX, which is the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
It's going to kill the Raptor.
The point is, you know, these cars have 700 plus horsepower and can do 140 miles an hour under, you know, on uneven terrain in the desert.
There's no reason to be going down PCH or Wilshire Boulevard in one of those.
So, well, what do we have?
Well, we have half the population saying, I want a Tesla.
And you have the other population going, that, I'm getting a Raptor.
Now, we used to all just drive around in Camrys and accords because we weren't trying to make a statement.
We just hung out in the middle.
More and more Jeeps, more and more off-road vehicles, more and more big-ass trucks with lift kits on it, and more and more Teslas.
And that's where we're heading.
So how does that play out in terms of media?
You know, you did the man show.
You couldn't put the man show on any outlet that I can think of today, including, I think, right-wing outlets.
I don't think, you know, the Daily Wire would put on the man show with its what the British call lattice humor, you know, the kind of frat boy humor.
Will there exist, will there come into being outlets that will do that again, that will be politically incorrect again?
Or does political incorrectness just keep spreading like a sort of toxic fog?
I think wherever you create a void, something will rush in and fill it, you know?
Folks On The Right And Left00:06:06
And if you have a thousand Mexican food restaurants, then somebody's going to open a burger joint.
You know, it just, it just creates that.
You know, it's like, look at Gutfeld.
You know, there was never any kind of nighttime, late night thing that had any kind of conservative right-wing anything.
And now there is.
So I think there's always going to be, I think the trend, yeah, I was actually talking to Dr. Drew about this, and I said half the, you know, the country's basically split in half.
You got folks on the right and folks on the left.
Now, the folks on the left have all the cool, coolest people from high school.
They got the LeBron James, they got Obama's, they got Oprah's, they got all the, all the George Clooney's, all the cool kids are on the left.
But, and the right has no, you know, we got Scott Bayo and Ted Nugent.
You know what I mean?
There's nothing, there's nothing on the right.
Nobody's, nobody's creating this or doing that.
There's the left has Sasha Baron Cohen, you know, and so that seems like the cool party to go to, but everyone still just gets one vote.
And if you're selling tacos, there's still four bucks a taco, whoever, whether LeBron James is buying one or Ted Nugent is buying one.
And I think media is starting to kind of wake up to it slowly, but they're starting to wake up to it and go, there's a lot of people at that uncool kids party, and they got credit cards and they drive cars and they shop.
Like, how about, how about something for them?
And I think this is a trend that you're going to see.
I also said, you know, I was, if you look at the, I'll give you a very good example here in terms of the way it's kind of shifting, I think.
If you took a look at the iTunes, you know, top 100 podcast five years ago, the only conservative you'd see on there would be Ben Shapiro.
Now there's probably 10, 12, 15 in the top 50.
So where did this come from?
It was created.
You know, and it was so much to the left that it created opportunities for Dan Bongino.
I like Dan Bongino, but we probably wouldn't know who Dan Bongino was if it didn't pull so hard to the left and create an opening for a Dan Bongino or many others of his ilk.
So the classic, I'm running out of time, but just last question.
The classic set point for most conservatives is all is lost.
That's almost instantly anything changes on earth.
And immediately conservatives think all is lost.
That's just the way they're built.
But you don't seem to be saying that.
You don't, I mean, the left is making a concerted effort to use the power of corporations, use the power of social media to shut down and demonize all voices on the right.
But you seem to feel like it doesn't matter.
Those voices will eventually rise one way or the other.
Is that fair?
Fair to say?
Well, look, I think they have.
I mean, Gutfeld is doing great in the ratings.
And, you know, Guttfeld's good.
And I like Greg, but this is the ratings are more what has been created by the hard pull to the left.
You know, my take is you either want to, we're unfortunately, we're creating an environment where you have to declare major.
You either have to go right or you have to go left.
The people that shall be punished, you say the right is being punished.
Well, Ben Shapiro is not being punished.
Ben Shapiro is thriving and the Daily Wire is thriving.
Candace Owens is not, you know, Jordan Peterson.
No, no.
I'll tell you who gets punished.
Anyone who lives in the middle.
Because that is essentially, it's trench warfare.
And you're Kevin Costner just riding a horse like right down the middle.
You got both sides shooting at you.
It's essentially trench warfare.
And if you're literally in the middle of trench warfare, your ass is grass.
It's not necessarily that one trench is better than the other.
It's anyone who thought they could hang out in the middle is not going to survive anymore.
And there is no financial viability to hanging out in the middle anymore.
There used to be a financial viability.
Now you must either head to the left and hang out with Joy Reed, or you can go join the Daily Wire.
You can't just sort of that's that's kind of what I was talking about with Dr. Drew, because Dr. Drew is kind of a centrist.
He's kind of a middle guy.
It's like, I agree with this point.
I agree with that.
I said, there's no, no one, no one cares about that anymore.
By the way, the left doesn't recognize a center.
They only recognize a left and a right.
There is no center for the left.
So if you think you're going to be a sensible, even-keeled guy and get jobs in Hollywood, no, you are not.
They don't have a middle.
It's like a restaurant that doesn't have a medium.
They just have a small and a large.
They do not recognize the middle.
So you're better off just going over to the right and hanging your shingle there.
Adam Carolla, one of the podcast pioneers, one of the most popular podcasters in the country still.