Nov. 3, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
55:45
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
| Joining me today is a standup comic who apparently scares a whole bunch of people | ||
| with his choice of comedy words, which can be very dangerous. | ||
| Owen Benjamin, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| It's an honor. | ||
| Your scary comedy words. | ||
| You're freaking people out. | ||
| I see people angry at you on Twitter all the time. | ||
| Each week I make a commitment to not mention Twitter, and then somehow it... | ||
| It just rears its ugly 140 character head. | ||
| Yeah, it's like The Mob and Godfather. | ||
| I'm not even a troll or anything. | ||
| It's just for saying things that I think everyone would agree with. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, three-year-olds can't be trans. | ||
| And everyone's like, what? | ||
| I'm like, okay, so then I just start fighting. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to get into like some of the issues you talk about and all that, but first just, I don't talk to, I've talked to a whole bunch of stand-ups on here, but I don't talk to a lot of people that are sort of in the game at sort of the level you are at right now, like really kind of like in the thick of their career in it right now. | ||
| What possessed you, I asked you before you started, you're a couple years younger than me, 37 did you say? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What possessed you to become a stand-up comic? | ||
| Well, I was a classical piano player, and I was in college, and my dad taught public speech, still teaches public speech, so I've always been comfortable on stage. | ||
| And I would play piano at weddings, but I would just get hammered and write songs for people. | ||
| And so my friends in college were like, you should open for this dude who's coming. | ||
| I'm like, who is it? | ||
| They're like, I don't know what he's been in. | ||
| It's this dude named Kevin Hart. | ||
| So we were in a cafeteria, and I opened for him, and it was so fun. | ||
| That I was like, OK, I'm going to do that, you know, but I have to go to law school and do the normal thing. | ||
| And then there's an economic downturn. | ||
| And my advisor was like, since it's down anyway, just take a year and do what you want to do. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, maybe I will do that. | ||
| And then I just never stopped. | ||
| Who is this advisor? | ||
| His name is Dr. Skopp, because I was a World War II history, a history major focused on World War II. | ||
| And so I got really close with him. | ||
| Because he taught a class called the Holocaust, and so that was such an emotional class. | ||
| I think there was this weird bonding of trauma, so we just got really close. | ||
| So I trusted him, and then I met Nick Swartzen and Adam Sandler early on, so I could make a living. | ||
| It's so funny how when you're saying I'm pissing people off on Twitter, it's for things that I was almost called a hack for five years ago, like men and women being different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, back in the day, everyone's like, oh, Owen's so broad, he's such a hack. | ||
| And now it's like, you cannot say there's a difference in gender. | ||
| And I'm like, if you just don't move, the Overton window just keeps sliding right over. | ||
| Well, I've been saying, it's not that the Overton window has shifted, it's that it has shattered at this point. | ||
| Nothing that made sense five years ago in a comedy sense actually makes sense anymore. | ||
| Oh yeah, like watch Blazing Saddles or... I watched it like a month ago, and every... I mean, first off, the amount of times that they say the N-word, of course, is off the charts, but just everything, every stereotype, literally every stereotype you could think of, in a modern sense, is in that movie. | ||
| They could not make that movie right now. | ||
| No. | ||
| And I think people don't understand sarcasm. | ||
| It's almost like late-onset autism. | ||
| Like, I was doing a bit the other day. | ||
| This is what got me in this heat with this Sean White character. | ||
| I was doing a bit about being a progressive slave owner. | ||
| Yeah, what's up? | ||
| Yeah, I'm a progressive slave owner. | ||
| It's like, the problem with slavery was it's only black people, which is unfair. | ||
| I want all the people. | ||
| If you can't outrun the Nets and the Harpoons, you're mine, you know? | ||
| And people thought I was promoting slavery, and I'm like, I think not assuming that I know that's bad is like almost scarier to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where I'm like, I do another bit about not having white pride or white shame and I'm like, I've never done anything to anybody. | ||
| My last slave was in 08, you know, thanks a lot Obama, you know. | ||
| And people are like, what? | ||
| I'm like, Do you think someone's knock-knock? | ||
| Who's there? | ||
| Like, do you think there's a door here? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Like, how do you not see that mechanism of comedy? | ||
| What do you think has happened there? | ||
| Because I noticed that for me when I was in the thick of stand-up, which really from was about 98 to around 2010 and less in these last couple years, I noticed a change when cell phones started popping up in class. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And then there was obviously the Michael Richards incident, and then everyone was videotaping everything. | ||
| I noticed that comics were distracted all the time. | ||
| Even if I saw one guy just on his phone in the back, that would bother me, even if I was crushing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I could have 100 people, I'm killing it, but the one guy. | ||
| That was something that shifted comedy for me. | ||
| Well, it's the lowercase i. It's the bitten apple, man. | ||
| This is some biblical shit right here. | ||
| You know, it's like the lowercase i represents narcissism without even the strength of it. | ||
| You know, it's like that, there's a book, The Screwtape Letters, by I think C.S. | ||
| Lewis, where it's two demons talking to each other about how to get souls. | ||
| It's kind of comedic, but pretty profound. | ||
| And one of the demons is like, it's worse to want to do something terrible and not even have the balls to do it. | ||
| Like that lowercase i, iPhone, iMac, iii, but it's a lowercase. | ||
| And then the bitten apple is like the fall of man. | ||
| And I have an iPhone, I'm on tech all the time, I'm not judging or being above it, but that creates this environment where stupid people are now entitled. | ||
| Where they're like, well, as someone who knows nothing, I think, and people listen to these more. | ||
| If you know nothing, that gives you extra privilege, I think. | ||
| Oh yeah, because you're, yeah, because my smart privilege is really showing, I guess. | ||
| But it's like this weird, like people that don't know the definition of words, You know, I think we're 20 years away from people just being like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, I'm speaking Japanese. | ||
| Like, they almost don't care at all about the skill set. | ||
| How much of this do you think is actually just a phenomenon of the online world? | ||
| Because I'm a firm believer that out there in the real world and when you do what we're doing right now, you really can bring out the best in people and that they're not all hysteric know-it-alls. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I live firmly in the real world. | ||
| Like, my brother's an arborist, so when I'm not on the road, I'm literally doing lumberjack work with a bunch of vets. | ||
| So it's like, I live in the mountains in a small town. | ||
| Like, I know the sanity of people. | ||
| And I also tour so much that I know I'm not offending communities. | ||
| You know, like, I'll finish a show. | ||
| And a bunch of inner-city black dudes are like, you're the only white dude I find funny now, man, that was great. | ||
| And then you go online and it's just a bunch of white Yale chicks being like, how dare you? | ||
| And I'm like, but it almost doesn't matter because the online world is so powerful. | ||
| It gets me fired. | ||
| It'll make my income go down. | ||
| So that's when it becomes real to me. | ||
| Where people can be like, it's cyber, but is it? | ||
| I think it's becoming its own organism. | ||
| Yeah, so it literally can make your income go down. | ||
| You are not making that up. | ||
| So just in the last, what, two months, because of a comment, I think, that started on Twitter, you got a gig canceled for a couple grand. | ||
| I mean, what, it was about 7,000? | ||
| 7,500 bucks, yeah. | ||
| 7,500 bucks, you had a gig canceled at UConn. | ||
| So can you tell me about that? | ||
| Yeah, so I was having an argument online where I revealed a very problematic view that I don't think three-year-olds can be transgendered. | ||
| And then especially once they started talking about hormone blockers, like, you know, my instinct to protect was kicking in, and I was like, this is wrong, you know, and people started calling me transphobic. | ||
| Three years old. | ||
| Three. | ||
| And now the kid's like six. | ||
| And this guy is fairly powerful in podcasting. | ||
| I think he's been on NPR a lot. | ||
| So I get all these, what used to be trolls, like these little, what are they, eggs? | ||
| Now they're like blue checkmark people. | ||
| And I'm like, wait a minute, so you're a writer at an Amazon show and you're going to call me human garbage because of a child? | ||
| But I don't back down. | ||
| Okay, so do you believe a six-year-old? | ||
| It's like, well, they identify. | ||
| I'm like, dude, I identified as a dog. | ||
| Like, I thought I was a spaceman. | ||
| I was an autobot. | ||
| Right, yeah, and it's like, because it also completely derails Actual, you know, adults making the decision to transgender. | ||
| I'm like, what you're doing, it's almost like the Spacey thing, where he almost equated being gay with liking kids, and you're like, okay, that's stepped back a good ten years. | ||
| You know, I'm like, that's crazy, and so then people just kept coming at me, and I wouldn't stop. | ||
| You know, I'm like, no, I know people that wanna kill you guys, because it's child abuse. | ||
| I know boys that are rape survivors that became trained killers in Afghanistan that literally, like, just please don't do this, there's people that hate you. | ||
| And, because I used to, when it used to be that- Wait, wait, wait, I might have missed where you were going with that. | ||
| Boys that were- No, I have friends that, you know, because I live near a rehab facility for heroin, and a lot of them are vets, and When a grown man is saying that he's going to pump hormones into his little boy so they never go through puberty, there's people that want to hurt that guy. | ||
| I used to do a bit about when it was the Catholic Church back in the day. | ||
| It's weird how it swung. | ||
| I used to just rip on the right for some of these corruption stuff. | ||
| I was an altar boy, I knew something was up when they said wear a dress, light a candle, | ||
| and drink some wine. | ||
| You know, I'm like, I was on a date. | ||
| And I'm like, now you guys are encouraging this behavior. | ||
| And I'm like, and it just kept going until I got this email that was like, | ||
| due to recent Twitter stuff, like we have to disinvite you to UConn. | ||
| And I was, so I posted that. | ||
| Because that's happened to me before with stuff. | ||
| I've been asked by agents to take down certain tweets that looking back were absolutely valid. | ||
| And so I posted that. | ||
| Just because people think we're lying. | ||
| People like me and you in this industry are almost canaries in coal mines sometimes, where I'm like, no, they're trying to shut you up. | ||
| And so then my agent dropped me, and like... And you were with the, you don't have to name them if you don't want. | ||
| CAA, I can name them, yeah. | ||
| This is one of the big five or so agencies. | ||
| And I've been with them for 10 years. | ||
| I've been with the same manager and the same agent for 10 years. | ||
| So I'm not one of these problematic clients. | ||
| I've never left anybody. | ||
| And I'd just done a pilot with TruTV a month before, so it's not like I was even on a downward thing. | ||
| And I guess I just crossed so many lines. | ||
| And they're good guys. | ||
| You know, I'm not mad at the agents. | ||
| I'm mad at the system that makes it so comedians now have to push an agenda. | ||
| Right, like this endless cowardice that's sort of middle management people then. | ||
| So they're just like, all right, we're gonna cut Benjamin. | ||
| We'll just let him go because we don't want to deal with the heat. | ||
| Regardless of whether you're killing it in the clubs. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| Dude, because my Twitter has been going up. | ||
| My YouTube subscriptions have quadrupled in a month. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like, That doesn't matter to them. | ||
| It's this outrage Ponzi scheme. | ||
| It's almost like a Bernie Madoff thing with outrage where it's like you have this Ponzi scheme that has to grow and find new victims or else it all collapses and then you have to read Thomas Sowell and realize there's some economic issues. | ||
| Well, we're getting Sowell on the show in a couple weeks. | ||
| He's one of my heroes. | ||
| "Black Redneck, White Liberal" | ||
| is one of the best books I've ever read in my life. | ||
| I've been working on this guy literally for three years. | ||
| We're going up to Stanford to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, that's so, that's genius. | |
| Do you remember sort of a moment on stage when you saw the Overton window crash? | ||
| Like, was it a specific bit? | ||
| Like, I remember once being on stage and I used to do a bit, it was, | ||
| I just mentioned the Autobots, but it was a Transformers bit. | ||
| You say something about how Jazz was the Autobot who was black and he kind of talked in jive. | ||
| And I used to do this impression of Jazz and I would say the N word at the end. | ||
| But I was doing an impression of a fictitious cartoon character. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the whole purpose of it. | ||
| It used to get huge laughs. | ||
| I remember doing it on stage one night at Gotham Comedy Club in New York City. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And the audience kind of, it was a different reaction than I had ever gotten. | ||
| And I was like, all right, I'm done with that one. | ||
| And I just let it go. | ||
| Do you have a moment where you saw something shift? | ||
| For me, it was a slow, it was a death by a thousand cuts. | ||
| But I remember one joke in particular that, because in, LA a lot of my friends are gay, so I would write a lot of | ||
| jokes around like that I that would make them laugh, you know, and then | ||
| my and And I remember I'd go to certain areas and there'd be these | ||
| like housewife type Suburban brain dead idiots and I would do a similar joke | ||
| and they would turn so hard. I'm like, bro I wrote that like in a gay bar | ||
| You know, one of the bits, the bit was, I was like, yeah, AIDS affected a lot of communities, you know, but no one got hit harder than the vampires. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| It's hilarious, because it's not anti-gay remotely. | ||
| It's like, wait a minute, how do you get this from blood and sex? | ||
| That's all I've done for 1,000 years. | ||
| You can't put a condom on a fang. | ||
| I don't know who I just killed. | ||
| And I remember getting groans and being like, that's a brilliant joke. | ||
| I hate you guys. | ||
| But then I would keep it inside, though. | ||
| I wouldn't turn on the crowd. | ||
| I try not to turn on the crowd for being stupid, but I remember just being like, this is getting worse and worse and worse. | ||
| I've seen Zach Galifianakis say the N-word on stage in 06. | ||
| Without any hate or malice, obviously. | ||
| And that didn't get the same reaction, and now you can't even say, you can't even be a certain type of person on stage. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of just, like, the comics in general? | ||
| Like, the state of comedy to me right now is pretty awful. | ||
| Bunch of pussies. | ||
| These guys that I used to love and admire, many of whom I know... Dude, they're cowards. | ||
| I'm looking at them now and they're preaching all day long, whining all day long. | ||
| Yeah, like Jimmy Kimmel and all these guys. | ||
| I'm like, dude, you guys are cowards. | ||
| And history eats these people. | ||
| It's not like, it's only a matter of time. | ||
| I'm like, you are a comedian. | ||
| It's like, I played football, so it's like... | ||
| If you play on the offensive line, you don't throw the ball. | ||
| We're comedians. | ||
| We're supposed to push envelopes. | ||
| There's no line for us. | ||
| We let the crowd figure out who they are by hyperbole. | ||
| There's that quote, I exaggerate to clarify. | ||
| And then you see these guys talking about self-censorship, like Trevor Noah talking about self-censorship and stuff, and I'm like, bro, I had your back when they came at you. | ||
| And now in two years, nine million later, you're like talking this shit? | ||
| But just to give you a compliment, I'm so happy that people like you exist, because you can get depressed with this stuff. | ||
| You know, like you and Shapiro and Rogan and Crowder, and there's people that are really intelligent people that aren't going down this hole that just were a lifeline to me. | ||
| Because I felt like everyone was going insane, and I still think they are, but at least I know that You know, I try to ask myself, am I crazy? | ||
| You know, I'm like, you know, if one guy... That's what every comic ever is walking around thinking, you know? | ||
| But if it's like, if one guy calls you an asshole, you might be an asshole, but the third guy, you might be an asshole. | ||
| You know, so I'm like, I'm killing on stage, but like, the community's starting to get weird, but then, so I'm just glad that you guys exist, because I know a lot of professors that love your show, too, that are like, They want that dialogue, that marketplace of ideas, and lately it's just been like, what color is your skin? | ||
| How much do you like Hillary? | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| I mean, I appreciate that, and that's why I wanted to have you on, and that's, I think, why we sort of got in the loop. | ||
| You know, we're very much in that same loop in Twitter, and there's a lot of crossover in our audiences and all that. | ||
| You mentioned the college thing and professors. | ||
| You come from two professors. | ||
| Both my parents are professors. | ||
| SUNY System, State University of New York. | ||
| I'm a product of Binghamton. | ||
| SUNY Plattsburgh right here. | ||
| Oh, and your parents from Oswego, right? | ||
| SUNY Oswego, yeah. | ||
| And the professors right now are going through a hard time. | ||
| Because people that thought they were liberal, it's kind of like what you went through and what I went through, where it's like, you think that the personal liberty aspect of liberalism, which was like pro-gay rights, stuff like that, but then you're like, I'm also pro-guns. | ||
| You know, I think that citizens should have guns. | ||
| And they're like, no, but not that one. | ||
| And I'm like, And then you see how saturated leftism is on colleges, where people are now just judged based on their skin and sexuality, where it's like, well, as a black person who's gay, and you're like, you never read Martin Luther King Jr.? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, or any of that stuff? | ||
| Like, the whole point was not to think this way. | ||
| And it's intense. | ||
| So yeah, but the good news is I was pretty sad for a few weeks, but then I just kind of started doing my own thing. | ||
| And I had self-produced an hour special in England that I just put up for sale myself at vimeo.com slash Owen Benjamin if anyone wants to get Feed the Bear. | ||
| Excellent self-promotion. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Very subtle. | ||
| We normally do it at the end. | ||
| Not me, Matt. | ||
| I break all those rules. | ||
| You have no rules. | ||
| That's your thing. | ||
| My only rule is no rules. | ||
| What if I just killed myself? | ||
| That's my only rule, man. | ||
| Hey, it's good for clicks, you know. | ||
| Well, that's why I was always against anarchy. | ||
| I always make fun of, like, I'm buddies with Michael Malice, and one joke I said to him, I was like, I was like, the problem with anarchy is bad leadership. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's like, if there's no rules, how do you have an organization? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What do you make of a guy like Malice? | ||
| I had him on the show. | ||
| Love him. | ||
| I love Malice. | ||
| Did you see our interview, by any chance? | ||
| I've listened to all your interviews. | ||
| I never watch any of them. | ||
| That's why I didn't even know. | ||
| I always listen. | ||
| This is the place we do it. | ||
| I'm digging it, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we go. | |
| Very colorful. | ||
| As a 6'7 guy who's bad at basketball, that's a taunt. | ||
| Are you bad at basketball? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| First pick and then a disappointment. | ||
| I would have killed to be 6'7. | ||
| That's a whole other thing. | ||
| But Malice... | ||
| I really like talking to him. | ||
| I didn't know what to expect, really. | ||
| He has the heart of a comic, actually, is what it struck me as. | ||
| He wants to throw some shit out there, kind of see what sticks, and then explore it. | ||
| And that's what a comic is really supposed to do, and that's what we see so little of these days. | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot of really good, like Dave Smith is also really funny, and he's libertarian. | ||
| A few people have mentioned him to me, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, where it's a lot of these guys, I find Crowder's hilarious, you know, it's like when someone says the right, there's so many types, you know, and I think that there is no leftist comedian that isn't lying, in my opinion. | ||
| It's piracy, like you have to think, like you have to poke, you have to move, like you're living out of a suitcase. | ||
| Like, you can't possibly be like, what does the group think? | ||
| It goes completely against what your job is. | ||
| You have to be able to tilt the other direction when things go like this. | ||
| You know, you can be a liberal comedian, but leftist? | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| There's no Stalingrad funny bone? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, that'd be insane. | ||
| Like, he killed the first dude to stop clapping got killed. | ||
| But is that why this is so dangerous right now? | ||
| Like, I can see the passion you're talking about it with, and I feel it when I talk to all my friends that are comics. | ||
| Like, everyone can feel this thing. | ||
| Like, when comedy dies in a society, and we just replace it with screaming, that seems like it's pretty fertile ground for some other stuff to go really wrong. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because words are what keeps us from killing each other. | ||
| Where if you debate an idea up here, then you don't have to kill each other. | ||
| And so provocative ideas, and people aren't born knowing what they are, what they think. | ||
| Like that's another thing that I have a problem with. | ||
| It's like, "Oh, you said the wrong thing." | ||
| It's like, "I might be wrong, but I'm not lying," is my point. | ||
| And I will find the line. | ||
| But sometimes I thought Colin Kaepernick was Puerto Rican for like a year. | ||
| You know? And I'm like, "Why is a Puerto Rican taking a knee?" | ||
| Does it have to do with Puerto Rico? | ||
| I'm dead serious. | ||
| And then I figured out it was a black situation, and, you know, so you're always trying to figure it out. | ||
| What about the clubs? | ||
| Like, what's actually going on in the clubs? | ||
| And so, like, management, that kind of thing. | ||
| I've always dug the improvs. | ||
| I had a recent thing with one of the improvs, but it turned out to be this bizarre thing that happened because I had just lost my agent. | ||
| Where I guess they, like, They wanted to switch a week, but I didn't have an agent, and they didn't wait to be told anything back, so I assumed it was like some sort of... I still don't really know what happened, but they seem cool, but I'm gonna break away from that too. | ||
| I just think with the internet and your own fan base, you can just do small theaters and rock clubs and stuff. | ||
| Even though I love comedy clubs, but... | ||
| It is political, and I think that if you don't have an agent, it's not that easy. | ||
| Yeah, so nobody has called you and been like, all right, so CAA dropped you? | ||
| No, people have offered to rep me, but another weird thing that happened is a lot of these mid-level agencies got gobbled up by the big guys. | ||
| So now it's basically just Walmart, Target, and it used to have, there was all these agencies, and now it's just UTA, CAA, WME, now there's like six of them. | ||
| I think that there's a real push to not break ranks, you know? | ||
| And I can't go with that, because if you look at the late night comedy hosts, they're all the same party. | ||
| So that's where I wanted to go, because you tweeted that image, right? | ||
| I saw that image going around of all the late night hosts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And basically, it's pretty much all white guys. | ||
| Now, I know we don't care about identity politics, but I'm just painting it. | ||
| I do, bro! | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's that? | |
| No, I'm just kidding. | ||
| I'm just painting this for the average person. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| Basically, it's all these sort of 40-ish to 50-ish white guys, and then Trevor Noah, and then Larry Wilmore, who's not in Late Night anymore. | ||
| But your point, and I think what a bunch of other people picked up on in it, is every single one of these guys think the same way. | ||
| And I thought that was really interesting, because in an odd way, I was looking through it, and I'm looking at everybody, and I was thinking, man, Bill Maher is probably the most centrist of this crew. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is a crazy proposition. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And yeah, I got 30,000 retweets and still Hollywood agencies and stuff are like, yeah, there's no market for that. | ||
| But what does that tell you in light of just the Weinstein thing and just the way Hollywood's kind of crumbling right now? | ||
| It's like, what are they doing? | ||
| What do you think they're actually doing? | ||
| Spiraling. | ||
| Like, it makes no business sense. | ||
| They're losing out on, you know, like, yeah, I'm selling my hour and it's doing fine. | ||
| I'm like, do I? | ||
| I think it's almost like certain gatekeeper positions, when a technology exists that starts eliminating those positions, I think universities are almost starting to lose what makes them great. | ||
| And I think that's when they get on this moral condemnation kick. | ||
| Well, some of the smartest people I meet are truck drivers because they listen to your show and Peterson and all these lecture series for a dollar. | ||
| And then you go to Yale and you're just told that white men are the reason Halloween is about slavery. | ||
| Just nonsense. | ||
| And I think they're just trying to hold on to a position that is just not going to stay. | ||
| I think all of Hollywood You know, Warner Brothers is because they needed sunshine and giant cameras. | ||
| Like, we have those cameras now in our pockets and a distribution platform in the air. | ||
| But yet these people are going to tell me that I can't dress as, you know, like a big Mexican hat or else it's sad. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what they're talking about now. | ||
| I was going to offer you some tequila behind you, but that's cultural appropriation. | ||
| That could be offensive. | ||
| I can only drink vodka. | ||
| There is some clear vodka. | ||
| Bro, I'm a glacier monkey. | ||
| I've never heard that phrase before. | ||
| I know, I think I might have coined it. | ||
| Did you just make that up? | ||
| Well, I was ripping on a Canadian the other day. | ||
| Somebody was yelling out I was Canadian. | ||
| And I called her a maple leaf eating snow monkey. | ||
| And that kind of stuck in my head. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| One of the other times I noticed that something was changing in the clubs was that I noticed that heckling started getting people kicked out of the clubs, which for the first many years that I... I always loved hecklers. | ||
| Always loved. | ||
| I didn't even... Love them. | ||
| If I was on the best tear of my life and a heckler started, I would always use it and I always loved it. | ||
| A heckler never beat me. | ||
| You just know how to do it. | ||
| If you're live and you're present, you have the mic, they're there to see you. | ||
| If that person beats you, you need to find another line of work. | ||
| It's real life. | ||
| It's real! | ||
| It's like that's why people want to see you live, because you can see all the bits on YouTube, but come see something really go down. | ||
| Yeah, and you never know what's going to happen. | ||
| But did you notice that also, that then they'd start kicking hecklers out? | ||
| I always hated it. | ||
| It's back to your original point. | ||
| I think it's about the phone. | ||
| Like, with the invention of the phone, I think a lot of comedians felt very vulnerable. | ||
| That if they were working on a new joke, someone could embarrass them. | ||
| And then that started creating this weird world of like... | ||
| Don't let things be natural because I could be embarrassed. | ||
| But I used to be a heckler at a renaissance fair in high school. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like I was in a stock, and people would pay money to throw tomatoes in my face, so the more deeply I could hurt someone, the more money I made. | ||
| And I was just with gypsies all day long when I was 17. | ||
| And that's when I learned that it isn't what you are, it's what you have pride in that can be used against you. | ||
| You know, like a giant fat person doesn't care if you call him fat. | ||
| It's someone like me right now who's like 10 pounds overweight because he has a new kid and he's not sleeping enough. | ||
| You know, like I would spiral if someone called me fat. | ||
| But a giant fat guy... You haven't lost all the baby weight yet, that's what you're telling me. | ||
| I've still got baby weight, bro. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| Yeah, if you don't sleep enough you just crave chocolate. | ||
| So it's like, that's what can get someone. | ||
| It's like, you know, the super chiseled guys, you know, imply that they're gay. | ||
| Like a happy gay couple, don't care if you call them gay. | ||
| It's the dudes that are like, trying to be like Swayze Roadhouse. | ||
| You know, it's like that. | ||
| And I would do that 10 hours a day, just getting crushed with tomatoes. | ||
| I mean, that's your sitcom right there. | ||
| I mean, have you wrote that yet? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| No. | ||
| What incredible, like, what great, rich stuff for a comic. | ||
| Just call it The Fair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's incredible. | ||
| That's how you got into stand-up? | ||
| That's like the most perfect thing I've ever heard. | ||
| And I didn't even know I was getting into stand-up. | ||
| It was just a summer job. | ||
| I was working in the turkey leg booth, and this one gypsy realized... Also very funny. | ||
| The turkey legs are huge. | ||
| Everyone likes turkey legs. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like people don't even get mad when we kill turkeys because they're such dickheads. | ||
| You know, like, have you seen wild turkey, like, do you hang with wild turkeys ever? | ||
| Not, I mean, I'm landlocked here in L.A., there's not a lot of fowl running around. | ||
| Well, I'm in the mountains, if you ever, you know, wanna know what it's like to be a man. | ||
| Yeah, I got some chickens back there. | ||
| Did I hear you have chickens also? | ||
| I have 10 chickens. | ||
| I only have three chickens. | ||
| I used to have three chickens, and I went into ninth grade, bro. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, but like, turkeys are like dicks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So when you kill them, even vegans are like, yeah, it's a good kill, bro. | ||
| But so then, I was good at like, handling customers and so someone threw me in the stocks | ||
| and I just I did pretty good I started beating the joust and | ||
| Attendance, you know cuz you got to take your highest thing probably right? Yeah, those guys the Knights can be real | ||
| arrogant and haha and | ||
| Cuz you also got to lose I can't just always win as the heck or I | ||
| I can't pretend like it's okay when I get hit with a tomato. | ||
| Like, oh, I don't care about the tomato. | ||
| There has to be stakes. | ||
| Like, if you hit me, I'm humiliated. | ||
| Even though I wasn't really. | ||
| But I had to set it up where someone could potentially win. | ||
| And so I created this little world that... So I really understand heckling and trolling. | ||
| Like, really understand it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wait, we somehow, we shifted all over the place there. | ||
| That was a heck of a map we just did there. | ||
| But the coming from academic parents I think is interesting. | ||
| Were you, was education like always part of growing up and talking about this stuff and figuring out what freedom is and all that stuff? | ||
| Oh yeah, man. | ||
| That was like, my birthdays was always I could go to Book Warehouse and get any books I wanted. | ||
| You know, we didn't have a TV. | ||
| I played piano all day. | ||
| It was just the most idea-rich, awesome upbringing I could imagine that almost bites me in the ass a little now because I know what words mean and shit like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The words-to-action thing has become crazy, right? | ||
| That people think that words are action? | ||
| Well, the easiest thing to do with that is just do that and go, word or face punch. | ||
| Then I go, word, and you go, oh, so you know you're lying. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like, words being equated with violence is the craziest, most... That could end our civilization. | ||
| If you say that a criticism is the same as a hit. | ||
| All right, so we're sort of talking about the importance of words, and obviously a comic is a wordsmith. | ||
| We were talking before, and I mentioned something about liberals versus leftists, and you were saying how much you like Crowder, and one of the things that I talk to Crowder about all the time is that I wish that he would focus more on leftists than liberals, because I want those things separated. | ||
| I am a liberal, but I am not a leftist. | ||
| Yeah, I think about this a lot and I think that I agree with you totally about the difference between leftism and and then there's also difference between being a liberal and being liberal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because liberal, I'm a liberal person, like it's a it's a personality trait of openness. | ||
| You know, there's a little bit of chaos in your life. | ||
| You know, my shoes aren't always tied. | ||
| Someone gives me a new idea. | ||
| I'm like, oh, let's think about that. | ||
| You change when you need to. | ||
| But like a leftist is Groupthink, identity politics, it's actually very close to white nationalism, it's just the inverse of it. | ||
| Right, so that's the horseshoe theory that everyone's always talking about. | ||
| On Twitter I don't mock liberals, I always say leftists, or I'll mock the DNC because they're a corrupt institution in my opinion. | ||
| The liberals have a tough spot right now because the words are getting so weird. | ||
| Because I know people who call themselves liberals that are acting like leftists, and the lines are so all over the place. | ||
| Because a lot of times, a liberal does not act liberal. | ||
| You know, they act like they put people in these holes. | ||
| Kind of like what your experience was, I've listened to the show a long time, like you are a Jewish gay married man and you're not allowed to have certain opinions about some of these things if it doesn't follow the exact narrative they want. | ||
| That's the opposite of being liberal, like what they're doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's why it's a very interesting time to be alive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And by the way, those two adjectives they use there to me are the least interesting things about me. | ||
| Those happen to be two things that the identity politics... I'm the same way. | ||
| I'm the same way. | ||
| They like those things, but I would rather sit across from somebody, tell them what I think, and be judged for that than, of course... | ||
| Oh yeah, I almost get pissed off when people will have my, not pissed off, if anyone has my back, God bless them, but you know when I was being called a racist and someone's like, well he has a Jewish grandmother and he's married to a Hispanic woman, I'm like, that shouldn't matter! | ||
| Like just come at my idea, I'm not gonna do that whole like, My piano teacher my whole life was trans. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Back in 91 that happened before any of this bullshit. | ||
| I know all about that shit. | ||
| But I don't want that to be an answer to an idea because that goes against my whole ethos. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| The least interesting thing about you is being gay and being Jewish. | ||
| I like where your brain is. | ||
| But in a weird way, it's just an effective way of fighting back with them sometimes. | ||
| It doesn't seem effective anymore. | ||
| Ben Shapiro's a Nazi? | ||
| I mean, that's insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like that's, he's got like a circus tent. | |
| Like it doesn't get more or less how I see it. | ||
| Now I know you had a Jewish grandma. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| So right, so that's, it's just kind of basically, we're through the looking glass at this point. | ||
| So do you think that actually some reason and all the other things that we're talking about here, do you think we're starting to win? | ||
| Because I am starting to see major signs of regaining the narrative. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that the young, young people, I have a lot of hope for. | ||
| Because a lot of these people come to my shows, I'm talking, you know, 20, 21, 22 year olds, and they're alive again. | ||
| And they're talking about liberty and talking about things that I was I'm fortunate enough to never have to battle as a kid, I think, because it wasn't as threatened as it is now. | ||
| And I think that there's a real backswing away from the millennial, you know, dead eyes of trolling the internet all day, and I think we're going to be okay. | ||
| And I have a new admiration for conservatives, because I think conserving The original founding fathers were the ultimate progressives, and to conserve that is so important. | ||
| That's a point Crowder made to me about what conservative means. | ||
| I thought it meant just not changing, and he was like, No, it's conserving the original constitution and founding ideas of the sovereign individual, and that's the most progressive thing you can be, and I found that to be amazing. | ||
| You know, so I don't know who your favorite founder is, but Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| I was just at the Jefferson Memorial, and he writes, I mean, if you look, they have these five or six giant texts on the wall around his statue, and one of them, you're right, he was a progressive in that he wanted people to change with the times, but at the same time, he was a conservative because he wanted them to respect the original documents. | ||
| And it's like, and I always say, defending my liberal principles is now a conservative position. | ||
| It's not a leftist position, my liberal stuff. | ||
| Who's defending me? | ||
| It's conservative. | ||
| So all of these things change over time. | ||
| Yeah, and that's another thing, because I haven't changed very much on my type of comedy. | ||
| It's just, I think leftism has gotten to the point where they've just burned so many obvious institutions and just made everything chaos, that now I seem very, very right wing. | ||
| And it's like, If you go back, I don't know though, I don't know if it's like this Kaiser Sosa situation or like was it always like this and I just didn't know it, but I was always raised that the Republican was the boogeyman under my bed and that like they were trying to take away gay rights and kick poor people in the face and my upbringing was my dad yelling at McNeil Ware about the goddamn Republicans and I was, and then you see who has your back in times of crisis and who will pick you up at the airport and who, you know, and you're like, oh it's people that just focus on | ||
| Individual rights, and there's corruption on all sides. | ||
| You're saying all your drivers at your fancy stand-up gigs are Republican. | ||
| That's what you're telling me here. | ||
| I don't even know what they are. | ||
| I just know that they're not leftists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because it's like, because they always eat themselves. | ||
| Because they have a job, basically. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| One of the things that I like to ask stand-ups is, were there guys that you thought were incredible, truly telling the truth, crossing that line when necessary, all that stuff, that just disappeared? | ||
| Because some of the best comics that I knew just couldn't take it anymore. | ||
| They just couldn't take the life, the grind, all that stuff, and got out. | ||
| And I know guys that are very average, some of whom are pretty crappy, that actually succeeded. | ||
| And there's every version of that, of course. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Most of my friends in comedy have done pretty well because I started in LA. | ||
| So I think a lot of them have either ended up on TV shows or are doing pretty well. | ||
| And some of the ones that sucked are doing really well. | ||
| But what does that tell you? | ||
| Is that, do you think, a personality trait or an ability to sell out a little easier or just give them what they want? | ||
| Well, I think it's the focus on marketing over the art. | ||
| And I think like, because I would be on shows with people that couldn't come close to following me. | ||
| I mean, I'm closing with classical piano after establishing I'm a solid stand-up. | ||
| It's like, I might as well do a backflip. | ||
| And it's like, and I'll see some of those guys rock it up. | ||
| And I was never Envious because I knew what it was. | ||
| I'm like, oh you you figured out a very specific market you have some weird identity thing to like appease the You know the progressive gods, you know, you're a left-handed handed lesbian from Sri Lanka You know like some bullshit and then you figure out the marketing and I was never good at marketing but I could just always do stand up very well, and I was always I had a great crew. | ||
| My friends have always helped me. | ||
| I'm very fortunate. | ||
| As much bullshit that's happened to me in the last month, I've had some breaks that you just can't imagine. | ||
| Adam Sandler watching me do stand-up and putting me in a movie, that was my childhood idol. | ||
| Sandler is just the best. | ||
| As much as it sucks right now for some of the shit I'm going through, my life has been very, very fortunate. | ||
| It's funny, have you seen all of his Netflix movies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| So he's got this new deal with, or it's not even new anymore, but this deal over the last five years or so. | ||
| So a couple, six or eight movies with Netflix. | ||
| And a few of them, in my humble opinion, were pretty crappy. | ||
| But this last one that he did, Sandy Wexler, it's about this washed up basically comedy agent, Hollywood agent. | ||
| It got back to a lot of what made him so good all that time. | ||
| It had some heart and all that. | ||
| Well, I think one of the things about Sandler is he went to appealing to the globe | ||
| instead of just America, which is like he's making more now than ever. | ||
| And it's like, when we're shooting Jack and Jill, just on set, he's the funniest dude ever. | ||
| And you know that he didn't lose a step in his comedy. | ||
| It's just, sometimes he writes for the world. | ||
| And not, like, because sometimes comedy is so good when it's very personal and very, like, my life, my niche. | ||
| And, like, you know, he knows that it's a global marketplace and sometimes you just have to do a lot of big physical gags. | ||
| Do you think success is sort of the downfall of all comics? | ||
| I don't mean this about Sandler specifically, but just that in general, you see so many guys that then, you know, they're so great, that fire burns so bright, and then they become something else, and then... | ||
| The edginess is lost. | ||
| I think it's when their goal is success. | ||
| 'Cause look at Trey Parker, look at Bill Burr, look at Norm Macdonald. | ||
| They were unimpeded by success. | ||
| And then you see a bunch, the opposite, where it's exactly what you say, | ||
| where like the Jim Carrey joke, where it's like, I can still relate to everybody, | ||
| so I'm banging nine Superbottles, and the ugliest is like, save it from my face, Jim. | ||
| 'Cause it's like, your problems don't relate anymore, but when you see it as like a craft, | ||
| like Sebastian, Seinfeld, like these guys. | ||
| I think that it only helps them. | ||
| South Park is doing some of their best work, and I'm pretty sure they're billionaires. | ||
| They've got to be, right? | ||
| But success in money is actually an obstacle sometimes to art, because now you can't grow as much, you have people staring at you, there's more stress, but some of these dudes can really handle it. | ||
| Also, the hunger. | ||
| I think it's just sort of natural. | ||
| As success grows and grows and grows, the hunger, the struggle. | ||
| You know, I heard George Carlin once talk about how it's like you need all of that bullshit and that pain and angst. | ||
| You need that for a certain point to be a great comic. | ||
| And then at some point, if you don't own that, It'll ultimately destroy you, which is why you still see so many comics dying of drug overdoses and killing each other. | ||
| Yeah, like lately, now that I don't have a safety net, I've been doing some of my best shit. | ||
| I'm doing live streams on YouTube, I'm starting a Patreon, more podcasting, because it's like, I have an infant son and a wife who doesn't work, so it's like, well she works obviously as a mom. | ||
| So when I'm put in that, when you back me into a corner, It's like the wounded deer jumps highest. | ||
| And I think that, like, that hunger that I felt when I was a 23, 24-year-old busboy in L.A., I'm almost regetting again in my mid-30s and trying to get just a direct connection to my actual fans, which is pretty fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think people don't know about the life of a comic? | ||
| Like, everyone's heard the road stories. | ||
| The amount of time you are alone. | ||
| and how that can destroy your brain. | ||
| Because you see the guy or girl in front or ziz or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, let's, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, whatever you identify as. | ||
| But you see them in front of all these people and then you see the love they get | ||
| and the hugs and the high fives and the drinks. | ||
| Every other hour was just staring at the back of someone's head in a plane, | ||
| being in a hotel, missing your family, wondering if you can jump rope on the roof | ||
| to try and, can you get a green smoothie somewhere you don't get fat and diabetes. | ||
| I was going to do a whole show called Downtime, which was everything else, because that'll kill you. | ||
| Isolation kills animals. | ||
| And humans are very communicative, social animals, and if you put someone in a little room by themselves, they can go kind of nuts. | ||
| I remember for like the year that I was really doing road work, and I was mostly in New York City, I opened for a weekend. | ||
| We did six shows over three nights for Bobcat Goldthwait, just the two of us. | ||
| And he's a great comic. | ||
| I actually didn't know, you know, I thought of him as the Police Academy guy. | ||
| I never really knew him as a comic. | ||
| Those documentaries are sick. | ||
| Yeah, but I hadn't seen any of them until after this. | ||
| But I did this weekend with him. | ||
| It was at Bananas in Poughkeepsie, not too far from Oswego, somewhere up there in that area. | ||
| But it's in a Best Western hotel, sort of in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| But to me it was like the greatest gig that I had ever gotten. | ||
| I'm doing all these shows and there were hundreds of people and I couldn't believe it. | ||
| But I remember one of the nights, I think the second night after the second show, I'm like, you know, we get to It's great. | ||
| I'm saying hi to all these people. | ||
| I think I signed my first autograph. | ||
| I was so excited. | ||
| But then I end up in my hotel room alone at a Best Western, like three in the morning. | ||
| I'm starving. | ||
| There's nowhere to go. | ||
| And the juxtaposition makes it even worse. | ||
| Yeah, and I ended up going to the end of the hallway and getting Skittles and ate Skittles in bed at three in the morning. | ||
| And I remember thinking, this is a nightmare, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, and the bigger you go, the bigger that drop is. | ||
| Like, I closed Carnegie Hall with Vince Vaughn. | ||
| You know, I'm touring with those guys. | ||
| He has me be his closer because I do a big, like, journey thing. | ||
| It just couldn't be bigger, and then you're alone again. | ||
| And it's like, if your day goes like this, it doesn't hurt as much as it goes like that. | ||
| And when I was featuring for Swartzen, I was always like, oh, this is an easy life, because I didn't have to do morning press. | ||
| And like, when you wake up at 5 a.m. | ||
| and you don't shut off till 2 a.m., like, there's no possible way, your sleep pattern is basically like special ops war shit. | ||
| And like, you can't sleep right. | ||
| And so then people start taking pills to go up and pills to go down, and before you know it, you're dead. | ||
| Yeah, what's your journey thing? | ||
| Oh, I do... | ||
| In my new Feed the Bear special, you can get it at vimeo.com slash Owen Benjamin. | ||
| We'll link to it down below. | ||
| No, I know, but it's kind of funny to plug stuff. | ||
| It's like so classless that it's funny to me. | ||
| This is like 1960s, you know, you could have a shirt on. | ||
| Yeah, we're merch. | ||
| Have you read Norm Macdonald's new book? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| You gotta read it. | ||
| It talks about how he's always wearing his dirty hat shirt and his SNL. | ||
| He's always wearing his merch. | ||
| So I do a bit where I talk about how I'm not living my first dream. | ||
| Being a comedian was my third dream. | ||
| My first dream was to be a real ballad guy, but people just kept laughing. | ||
| You know, and so I have the crowd pretend I'm a real ballad guy. | ||
| So I like instruct them when to laugh and when to, no, not to laugh, when to clap, when to sing along. | ||
| And so I do, back then I was doing Journey, and so I'd be like, just a small town girl, and everyone would be like, ah! | ||
| And then Vaughn had come out, Living in a Lonely World, and Kevin James had come out, you know, Took the Midnight, and then Faze on Love, and we're all doing this big dance routine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was just, When you tell the crowd to do something, they will do it, and then they'll actually feel it. | ||
| I was in England with the Impractical Jokers in January, and we're doing 12,000 seat stadiums, and I'm doing the same shit, right? | ||
| And so I started calling them my fireflies, because it would just be the O2 arena. | ||
| Ah, except I was doing over the pants hand job in a Walgreens as my closer, but it was to Coldplay. | ||
| And it's like, 'cause it sounds funny, but then within 30 seconds, they're like, | ||
| "I feel emotional." | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, that's like motion is what creates emotion. | ||
| It's almost as if social media should be actual social people in a room together | ||
| doing something together. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's almost as if that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because when you do that, there's so much communication that's non-verbal in tone. | ||
| That's what gets me in trouble on Twitter. | ||
| Because, like, my tone and my demeanor always makes it feel funny, I think. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| I bomb in person. | ||
| But typically, you know where I'm going with it. | ||
| But on print, I can sound like a psychopath. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because I love sarcasm. | ||
| I love juxtaposition, irony. | ||
| You know, someone was like, do you think if students were forced to read Mein Kampf, would that be better for school kids or something? | ||
| This is like today, I was like, well I read it every morning. | ||
| But that's a joke, but you have to kind of see the glimmer to see it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you don't see it, you might be like, does this dude read Mein Kampf every morning? | ||
| Maybe Twitter, Twitter might need like a new, you know, now they're going to 280 characters, which is a nightmare. | ||
| Like, did, was anyone like, I want more tweets? | ||
| I don't even want the 280. | ||
| I like, I like my limitations. | ||
| Don't, but as a, as a writer and a, and someone that cares about words, there's a beauty to the 140. | ||
| If they told me they were making it 70, I'd be okay. | ||
| But going the other way seems like that is exactly what we don't want. | ||
| Dude, the mortality of man is why our life has meaning. | ||
| Like, imagine if we lived to be 1,000. | ||
| It's like every year it'd be like, ah, fuck it. | ||
| Like 140. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Keep it tight. | |
| I was this little sidebar, but since we were talking about Journey, I got narked at a Journey concert in Orange County. | ||
| Outdoor Right. | ||
| I was smoking pot with some friends. | ||
| We got busted like two years ago. | ||
| What did they say? | ||
| They came over and they said, "Oh, what are you smoking?" | ||
| And blah, blah, blah. | ||
| My friend threw the joint away. | ||
| They didn't kick us out, but we were scolded at an outdoor journey concert. | ||
| What is this, World Comic Show? | ||
| With Steve Miller band. | ||
| I mean, legally, I thought you had to smoke pot there. | ||
| Like, you have to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To hand it out. | ||
| I mean, how are you supposed to think about being on a magic carpet ride? | ||
| No, that's not them. | ||
| What's the one, Fly Like an Eagle? | ||
| Fly Like an Eagle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| With Steve Miller. | ||
| Fly Like an Eagle? | ||
| More like, be on the ground like a turkey. | ||
| I said something about turkeys being landlocked so there's no turkey. | ||
| That was really funny. | ||
| I don't know what I meant by that. | ||
| That was the least turkey expertise you could possibly have, and I respected that about you. | ||
| I said I'm a chicken guy, I'm not a turkey guy. | ||
| You are a chicken guy. | ||
| I thought turkeys swim, I don't know. | ||
| They probably do. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Have you been able to steer clear of all the bad side of comedy, the drugs, drinking, all that kind of stuff? | ||
| Well, I mean, I drink, but I'm a red-blooded American man who has a fire pit in his backyard and a wife and a baby. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| But yeah, I never had a drug problem. | ||
| I did coke a couple times and I just kept having business ideas that would suck. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, I'm tiny, man. | ||
| We could just have a flower shop. | ||
| And it just never drew me. | ||
| I think depression would kick in, or like, I don't know. | ||
| But no, I never really was close to death or anything. | ||
| Because I think I was raised... | ||
| To kind of do comedy, so I'm not like a Mormon who's trying to do the opposite of their awful parents or some shit because they were beaten. | ||
| My dad teaches public speech, my mom teaches children's lit, which is basically how do you boil down an archetype to the simplest possible thing is children's lit, and then my dad is how do you speak it without being scared. | ||
| Has your dad ever invited you to a class? | ||
| Oh yeah, I was raised watching him. | ||
| Have you ever done stand-up for a class or anything like that? | ||
| I just gave a speech to the Living Writers group at SUNY Oswego like two months ago, or a month ago, because it was right before the firing from UConn, and it was such a weird juxtaposition because it's like, I got all these letters of how much they like my speech and all this shit, and then this other college is saying I can't talk there. | ||
| It was just like, who's pulling the strings? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What kind of groups invite you to schools? | ||
| For me, it was always comedy. | ||
| It was from being in the House Bunny. | ||
| It was like sororities would sponsor something. | ||
| And having an agent, I didn't even know. | ||
| They'd be like, oh, here are your offers, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And now, I've been getting emails from Libertarian groups or Republican groups and stuff, and I find that so funny. | ||
| I just never thought that that was going to be me. | ||
| That those groups would would invite me and the other ones would think I was problematic. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, welcome to my world, man. | ||
| I mean, every invite that I get is from, usually from libertarian students for liberty and freedom this, and conservative groups, and I get nothing from Democrats or liberals. | ||
| They don't care about the gay thing, the pro-choice thing. | ||
| No, they're onto it. | ||
| Against the death penalty. | ||
| Transgender toddlers, bro. | ||
| Gays are the patriarchy. | ||
| It's like, with the cool, my wife pointed this out, she was like, your fans are now like really smart and engaged. | ||
| Like literally, I'll just post anything and they're like, well I happen to be a nuclear physicist. | ||
| You know, they just, they're all so like... | ||
| Fifty will tag a joke better than I can ever tag it. | ||
| I'm not going into this insecure, so I see it as this unbelievable resource of information. | ||
| I do a podcast, Why Didn't They Laugh?, about why jokes don't work. | ||
| People used to be like, Fans of it, kind of. | ||
| But now, I'll have people write spreadsheets of what could work. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, individuals are much smarter. | ||
| So basically, we're boiling all this down. | ||
| I mean, this really all comes down to the individual versus the collective. | ||
| That's the whole thing. | ||
| It's individual versus collective, and you can call it any political party you want, but that's the split. | ||
| Because I know Republicans that think collective, and they piss me off too. | ||
| It's not like there's a clear right answer. | ||
| I just know leftism is not the answer, and then everyone else I just have to figure out Do you believe in individual autonomy, or do you think you're defined by the group that you're associated with? | ||
| And I think the group stuff is, you know, pretty much usually leads to genocide, so we'll see. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It always leads to genocide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Always! | |
| And by the way, a lot of state power always leads to genocide, or war, or any of that stuff, and how do you get that back? | ||
| It has to. | ||
| Liberty, yeah. | ||
| It's like, look at, even like some of, like Venezuela, or some of these socialist plans, it's like, Marxism is perfect as long as there's no people. | ||
| Yeah, we're the problem. | ||
| Yeah, it is, because human nature itself needs competition and they will always establish a hierarchy, so it's this wonderful, altruistic utopia in Lester's human nature, so eventually that algorithm will start getting rid of what makes it not work, which is people. | ||
| And Stalin did it, Mao, Pol Pot, people that don't get 50 Netflix specials a year like | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hitler. | |
| He gets more Netflix specials than Bill Burr at this point. | ||
| That guy, well, he's got a good publicist. | ||
| Yeah, Hitler and Kahle. | ||
| Speaking of Hitler, where does Trump fit into all of this? | ||
| I think Trump's just a response. | ||
| He's a response. | ||
| He's a, you know, he's an agitator. | ||
| He's a guy that was, I was against Trump in the beginning and then I saw that a lot of | ||
| this fire and brimstone never happened and they keep acting like it's happening. | ||
| And I'm like, are you guys crazy? | ||
| He's the first president ever elected that's pro-gay marriage. | ||
| The stock market's up. | ||
| We're not rounding up Muslims. | ||
| He tweets like a jackass. | ||
| He tweets like a Twitter on Coke. | ||
| And he has that embarrassment element, but at the same time he was kind of shattering this PC thing that was happening. | ||
| So I think that he just is what he is. | ||
| He's kind of like this eccentric, narcissistic guy that is, in my opinion, better than what Hillary Clinton would have been. | ||
| And the Libertarians need to get their shit together. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it is, is that the libertarian's gotta get there. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| For me, it's like, as I said, I love that Thomas Jefferson stuff, and it's like, that's the guy I want. | ||
| The guy who understands that. | ||
| But they don't get elected. | ||
| We need someone to be like, now that I have power, I wanna limit my own power, which is so hard to find someone to have those simultaneous personality traits. | ||
| It's like, how do you get someone in office that's willing to pull back The federal government's expansion, because that's the part of the right wing I like, is limited government, individual freedom. | ||
| But it's just like Bush was expanding the government. | ||
| It's like all these guys, they'll say they're right wing, but then they just do the same shit that the leftists are doing. | ||
| And that's what I'm like, how do we get around that? | ||
| It's almost like absolute power corrupts absolutely. | ||
| Unless you're over 6'5". | ||
| In which case, very good. | ||
| I mean, we've been powerful since birth. | ||
| I'm still depressed about the 6'7 basketball thing. | ||
| It seems like such a waste of height. | ||
| That's what people say. | ||
| That's why I go up to short people and I ask them if they get shot out of a cannon. | ||
| And when they haven't, I get real disappointed. | ||
| That's a waste of cannonball size. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know you're going to have the little people lobby after you for that. | ||
| Well, a lot of them like me because I balance them out. | ||
| Like, they jump on me. | ||
| We have adventures. | ||
| I carry them on my back. | ||
| A little Master Blaster, Mad Max kind of thing? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty good. | ||
| I feel like we did a little bit of everything here. | ||
| Did we miss anything? | ||
| I mean, we could just keep talking. | ||
| Well, you're doing Rogan tomorrow, I think. | ||
| I am, yeah. | ||
| You do a three-hour thing with him. | ||
| Are you going to get high with him, or you don't smoke the weed? | ||
| I smoke a cage. | ||
| He hasn't smoked in a month, so I think there's really no way around smoking weed with him tomorrow. | ||
| Oh, I'm a little behind. | ||
| Has he not smoked in a month? | ||
| He took Sober October. | ||
| Yeah, and so I'm going to go out on a limb and say we're going to smoke some weed. | ||
| I'll smoke weed, but for me it's like I ate an edible on Joey Diaz's podcast and I kind of lost my mind. | ||
| Like not in a bad way, but I just kind of wandered off during the podcast and never came back. | ||
| And ever since then, but that was like 200 milligrams of THC. | ||
| That's a lot, that's a lot. | ||
| But ever since then I've been a little... | ||
| I don't know, I'm a little nervous to smoke and try and talk. | ||
| Well, I always saw guys that were really doing a ton of drugs or smoking a ton of pot and all that, that were doing stand-up, and I always thought, you're just gonna keep opening up doors till you can never get back, you know what I mean? | ||
| And for me, it was like, I could open up some of those doors, but then I was like, all right, I need to have some semblance of sanity to be part of this. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, where's home base? | ||
| Are you just now coming from, like, You know, and Tim Ferriss had a good phrase, he called, he said there's always a biological, oh man, like a biological debt. | ||
| It's like, you know, whether it's human growth hormone or Adderall, you know, it's like if you go up, like whatever you just made has to be paid back somehow. | ||
| You know, whether it's like a hard sleep crash or like you get like fat boobs, you know, like something's coming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| You know, like I had friends that took a lot of steroids and now they have like no balls. | ||
| Because their balls are like, I guess you don't need us anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's pretty crazy. | ||
| My balls are too important to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do I love my balls? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That seems like a fitting end. | ||
| I'm going to let you pimp out the Vimeo one. | ||
| I'm going to pimp out your website. | ||
| But you know what you can even do? | ||
| You want to do it directly to the camera? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Go directly to the camera. | ||
| This one? | ||
| That one right there. | ||
| That one right there. | ||
| Hi, if you've liked me today or tonight, I don't judge when you watch, you can go to HugePianist.com, which is my website, or Vimeo.com slash Owen Benjamin to get my new special Feed the Bear. | ||
| Feed that bear, baby. | ||
| It's going to be a long winter. | ||
| And I was gonna go to HugePianist.com. | ||
| I had it right there. | ||
| I was gonna say it. | ||
| I just wanted to say it, really. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| Thank you for that. | ||
| You pimped it out yourself. | ||
| So, you know what? | ||
| Instead, I'll pimp out your Twitter. | ||
| It's at Owen Benjamin. | ||
| It's been fun, man. | ||
| Thanks for having me. |
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