Owen Benjamin details his cancellation at UConn and loss of CAA representation due to jokes about transgender three-year-olds, attributing the shift to social media-fueled narcissism and corporate-enforced conformity. He contrasts left-wing groupthink with true liberalism, noting that while traditional clubs face heckling restrictions, his fanbase remains engaged and intelligent. Ultimately, Benjamin argues that comedians have become cowards who self-censor, yet he finds hope in young audiences valuing liberty over identity politics. [Automatically generated summary]
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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?
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.
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.
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.