In a digital flyer promoting the stand-up shows that would culminate in her new HBO comedy special, “Parmesan,” comedian, actress and one of America’s greatest working artists, Kate Berlant, posed an important question: “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CLOWN?” In one photo, Berlant, fresh from glam, seduces the camera; in the other, her face contorts into a rascally grin, eyes half-crossed for effect. No dichotomy better represents Berlant’s razor-sharp, thoroughly tasteful wit, which sits halfway between refined humorist and go-for-broke court jester.
If you haven’t seen this clown, there’s no better time than the present. Like most of Berlant’s work — from her extensive collaborations with best friend John Early to her unforgettable one-woman show, “KATE” — “Parmesan” is a masterful send-up of a time when we’re all doing character work. What begins as an honest account of modern life’s bleak state is distorted alongside Berlant’s malleable expressions, slowly blossoming into something life-affirming, like a diamond among the rubble. Some comedians like to say they give their audience a “night off” from the world. Berlant, on the other hand, relishes the chance to remind her audiences of just how blissfully hysterical the world can be.
Everyday life, in the Berlantian sense, is driven by affection for both the mundane and the surreal in equal measure. In the joke that inspires the special’s title, she measures an Instagram comment’s subzero value in a wide scope, lampooning the communal yet cartoonish nature of our endless scroll. Elsewhere, Berlant gets more personal than she ever has on stage, using the relatively recent discovery that she isn’t straight as the springboard for bits about how embracing queerness later in life can be as beautiful as it is uniquely mortifying.
But with Berlant, it’s not just about the jokes; it’s about the rhythm and physicality that accompany them. No one understands their audience better than she does, knowing comedy relies as much on observation as on good, old-fashioned slapstick. Berlant’s a tenured professor at the Make-‘Em-Laugh Institute, and “Parmesan” proves her research-driven thesis statement time and again: There’s no bad mood a good clown can’t improve.
Watching Shane Gillis tickle himself to the point of being red in the face during his third “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig this past weekend, I’d wager that no one thinks Shane Gillis is funnier than Shane Gillis. But while that’s a pretty safe bet, his confidence in his own comedic stylings can’t get full credit for landing him where he’s at: appearances on a show he was fired from, Bud Light commercials where, as he points out, he “looked like a lesbian,” and a TV show about tires that 59% of critics hate and 91% of people who probably also think it’s funny to hear women called whores love.
No, we can thank everyone who, during the course of his 38 years on this earth, politely laughed at one of Gillis’ “Cornell 7‘s Big Book of Punchlines” zingers. And additional thanks to Lorne Michaels, who knows a ratings/headlines cow when he sees one, even if he doesn’t want to house him in his own barn at the end of the night.
Just as journalists worth their paychecks are taught to shy away from punching up headlines with puns or expletives because it’s lazy work, plenty of successful comedians refrain from desperately grasping for an easy laugh by calling women whores or punching down at their “big fat bit*h sisters,” as Gillis did in his monologue on Saturday night. Leanne Morgan has, to my knowledge, never joked about going to the gym and the men there being sluts for wearing sweatpants that show off their D and B’s, and she probably actually goes to the gym. Oh wait, Gillis did say in his monologue that he feels most comfortable working out in “his friend Joe Rogan‘s private gym.” Right. Riiiiiiiight.
It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like “SNL”; it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same.
Point being, happy, successful, confident, well-loved comedians are creative and secure enough to reach out and up for their material, not straight into their own asses. There’s a difference between being a “controversial” comic and appealing to the lowest common denominator. Dave Chappelle is equally awful, content-wise, but at least he’s good at being the absolute worst, if that can be a thing for the sake of this argument. Worth noting here that, even though he’s been in the game far longer than Gillis, Chappelle’s hosting number is only one larger than his . . . wonder why that is?
Gillis has made a career out of appealing to people chomping at the bit for their chance to storm the Capitol, and apparently there’s a home for that now on “SNL,” a show that’s lasted 51 years and counting by offering up a little something for everyone and carving out space for anyone — except for women, and people of color, and, more and more, viewers who haven’t been able to wear a red ball cap since 2017. Who’s laughing now? Not anyone I’d want to be next to on the treadmill.
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It’s not the controversy alone that’s of value to a show like “SNL”; it’s giving a platform to someone who’s more than willing to stand there, in front of a live audience, and verbalize the ugly things that people are afraid to say out loud . . . for now. But if they see enough people doing it, they may just be bold enough to do the same. And so it goes, and here we are. Audiences just want to look in a mirror, even if they themselves internally despise what they see in that mirror.
Gillis got enough polite, awkward laughs on his misogynistic sad clown shtick thus far from friends, relatives and dates just waiting for him to shut up so they can order appetizers that now he not only has a whole career to showcase that shtick, but a built-in audience of like-minded fans who also were told by one too many people that they have “a great sense of humor.” We’re all paying the nauseating price now, and anyone who paved the way is complicit.
But “SNL” is a liberal show, you may be thinking. I mean . . . sure? But it’s also a show with a sound bite archive spanning decades which includes such hits as “Jane, you ignorant slut,” from a late-’70s “Weekend Update” sketch starring Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin. I’ll save you the Google. There’s more.
Gillis got enough polite, awkward laughs on his misogynistic sad clown shtick thus far from friends, relatives and dates just waiting for him to shut up so they can order appetizers that now he not only has a whole career to showcase that shtick, but a built-in audience of like-minded fans who also were told by one too many people that they have “a great sense of humor.”
In the wake of Gillis’ most recent hosting gig, it’s been refreshing to see men in the entertainment industry call him out. Michael Che, who started at “SNL” as a writer in 2013 and transitioned to an on-screen role as a “Weekend Update” co-anchor the following year, weighed in on Gillis’ monologue via a series of Instagram stories, writing, “Gotta do more press this week to promote the special . . . wonder what every f—ing questions gonna be about . . . thanks a lot, Shane.” “Schitt’s Creek” star Dan Levy, son of “SCTV” alum Eugene Levy, also took to Instagram with a more direct and thoughtful approach, saying, “Women wearing short shorts at the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists.”
But the most effective statement would be from Lorne Michaels, which he could make by honoring his first instinct to place Gillis in the persona non grata pile after clips from his podcast, “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,” showed him using racist and homophobic slurs, causing Gillis to be canned from the cast of “SNL” just days after his hiring was announced.
I personally regret every time I put wind in the sails of a deeply unfunny and offensive man by politely laughing, feeling too awkward to course-correct the moment. Most women have these moments. I had one during my first job, when I was 15, and I laughed at the security guard twice my age who joked about his pants feeling tight after I mentioned that I had a girlfriend. I had one when I was driving with an old friend and didn’t give more than a “you gotta be careful with stuff like that” warning when he launched into a rant about how the women assaulted by Harvey Weinstein “shouldn’t have been surprised” he acted the way he did. It’s hard to stand up in moments like these, but look what happens when we don’t. Shane Gillis is a cystic pimple. All the rest of it is the pus.
Lorne Michaels will likely invite Gillis back. The fact that I and countless other writers are typing out similar commentaries all but ensures it. But what he should be asking himself is whether the audience he’s going after with jokes like the ones Gillis made this past weekend is an audience he’d feel comfortable sitting in. That should matter. And more people should say something if it seems like it doesn’t.
Just like comedy fans replay their favorite routines every so often, I often find myself returning to a few journalistic pieces written about comedy to help me order my thoughts. One is Lindy West’s 2013 Jezebel piece she wrote in the wake of debating Jim Norton concerning comedy’s role in perpetuating rape culture on the canceled FX series “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.”
The aftershock is probably more memorable than the piece. The barrage of hatred that bombarded West moved her to record a YouTube video wherein she reads the litany of threats prompted by her daring to suggest that comedians be more thoughtful in their stand-up routines.
The essay she wrote about that experience plainly summarizes her reasonable stance. “I believe that the way we speak about things and the type of media we consume profoundly influences how we think about the world,” she wrote.
Emily Nussbaum’s 2017 New Yorker essay “How Jokes Won the Election,” a second repeat reader, is a kind of response to that call, taking a hard look at the far-right’s weaponizing of humor and cloaking threats in punchlines. This tactic helped Donald Trump, a most ridiculous candidate, sail to the White House.
“How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” Nussbaum asked, a question we should be mulling each time Netflix triumphantly announces a new stand-up special from celebrities who can’t get enough of reducing queerness into a punchline.
One year before West debated Norton on TV, Joe Rogan’s NBC gig “Fear Factor” aired its last episode. He talks about his departure in his Netflix stand-up “Burn the Boats,” in which he revealed that the line he refused to cross was to challenge contestants to drink donkey semen.
“When I’m the voice of reason,” Rogan said, “you’ve got a really f***ed-up program.” You could reasonably apply that same note to Netflix, which recently debuted Rogan’s hour-plus special as a live comedy event.
Netflix is determined to maintain its claim as the top destination for stand-up specials, which it does by flooding the stream with choices. The Hollywood Reporter cites a source that counted the total number of comedy specials released in 2023 at more than 150, with most of those appearing on Netflix.
Amazon’s Prime Video is also a player, countering Netflix’s “anything goes” approach with a select stream of comics known for working clean like Nate Bargatze and Jim Gaffigan. Hulu is also beefing up its stand-up presence with 12 specials per year while one-time king HBO is going niche, matching Amazon’s eight-special ballpark.
This feels like light years from the era when a Comedy Central special was every ambitious comic’s goal – that, or getting a sitcom deal. Then HBO became the comic’s dream gig and, to a lesser extent, Showtime.
Now Netflix is the comedian’s golden ticket. Get a stand-up special there or a deal for multiple gigs, and the possibilities are endless. On the lower end, lesser-known comics can fill clubs or maybe larger theaters.
Mid-to-top range comics can fill arenas once they’re in with the service’s top executive Ted Sarandos. Taylor Tomlinson was a relative unknown when she signed on to do a few specials. Now she has a weeknight broadcast network gig, “After Midnight,” following “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Live events, however, are reserved for the top-level killers. Chris Rock’s followed nearly a year of silence about getting slapped at the Oscars, which also happened live. Katt Williams’ live special “Woke Foke” came after his post-New Year’s tea-spilling on Club Shay Shay.
Other live specials, including “The Roast of Tom Brady” and John Mulaney’s six-episode variety talk show “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A.” were exercises in brand establishment as much as entertainment events, although Mulaney’s was undeniably more of a creative high-wire act.
Rogan’s stand-up special, his first in six years, is a mutual exhibit of power and influence. He’s one of a very few entertainers whose presidential endorsement makes headlines. (He’s backing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as you may have guessed.)
He doesn’t need Netflix, but surely Netflix is happy to have him.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the new multiyear contract Spotify signed with Rogan in February to continue hosting his podcast could be worth as much as $250 million and is no longer exclusive to the streamer.
He’s also opened Comedy Mothership in Austin, drawing performers from around the country to the Texas city in a quest to create another stand-up epicenter driven by successful podcasters as opposed to New York’s and Los Angeles’ comedy club pipeline.
And Rogan, who caused a furor in 2022 for spreading misinformation during the pandemic, is accepted as an inevitability of modern popular culture. A recent Bloomberg profile softened his reputation to just short of baby skin texture by describing his podcast as “[mixing] marathon interviews of prominent guests with a hefty dose of often conventional and sometimes iffy lifestyle advice — including diet tips, exercise routines and vitamin supplements.”
Some have moved their lives to Austin to be close to Rogan’s Mothership, including the likes of Tom Segura and Shane Gillis. Exerting his pull in the comedy world, which boasts a booming live performance market, only makes him more powerful. Pollstar says the Top 30 comedy tours grossed nearly $514 million in 2023.
Joe Rogan doesn’t need Netflix, but surely Netflix is happy to have him.
But what he and the other comics he boosts have in common, besides Netflix deals, is their penchant for anti-trans material and platforming far-right bigots in the name of “asking questions” and pursuing the “truth.” They also sell out arenas, cultivating their audiences online and forwarding some truly odious ideas in the name of yuks and supposed pondering.
Segura welcomed accused sex trafficker and vocal misogynist Andrew Tate as a guest on “Your Mom’s House,” which he co-hosts with his wife Christina Pazsitzky. Gillis and Matt McCusker’s “Secret Podcast” is where listeners can hear more of the racist material that got Gillis fired from his “Saturday Night Live” gig before it began.
Rogan has hosted all these comics along with all types of conspiracy theorists, “free-thinkers” like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson, and worst of all, repeat Rogan guest Alex Jones.
Rogan goes on at length about Jones in “Burn the Boats,” calling him “right about a lot of things . . . he was wrong about that one thing, though. But he’s right — the wrong thing was a big one! But he’s right — that one thing was huge. But he’s often correct!”
That is quite a stance to take about a man who not only concocted a massive lie about the Sandy Hook massacre, that one thing he was wrong about, but recently opined that Trump should embrace Project 2025 instead of distancing himself from it. And not for the jokes.
Let’s not forget another significant event Jones made possible: he spearheaded the organization efforts that became the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021. You know, the direct attack on democracy sane people refer to as an insurrection.
This is part of Rogan’s Netflix special, in which he also jokes, “We lost a lot of good people during the pandemic. Many of them are still alive.”
Ha! Kidding! Not about his admiration for Alex Jones, though.
The prevailing model in any business, showbiz included, is that success breeds success. A week after Rogan’s special premiered it’s still in the service’s Top 10 most popular titles, sitting at No. 4 as of Friday.
Netflix’s average output of one special per week along with its other debuts means Rogan will eventually be washed down the stream along with the other comics. But his Netflix berth places him in front of many more people, including those who don’t follow his podcast.
Contemplating what all of this means returned me to West’s thoughts from 11 years ago because they apply here. “I do believe that comedy’s current permissiveness around cavalier, cruel, victim-targeting rape jokes contributes to (that’s contributes — not causes) a culture of young men who don’t understand what it means to take this stuff seriously,” she wrote.
Indeed. Comedians who may have made light of sexual assault a decade ago have since moved on to joke about others more easily vilified than half the human population. Mainly transgender people.
Rogan is right there with them. And Netflix’s willingness to further elevate a performer whose entire schtick is slapping a smile on disinformation and normalizing trans panic should worry more of us, even if they’ve done it several times before.
A predictable rebuttal is that people don’t have to watch if they don’t want to, which is true. A lot of people watch Netflix, though; the service accounted for 8.4% of TV usage for June, according to Nielsen, a month during which 40.3% of time spent watching TV in June was attributable to streaming.
You can turn on Netflix and watch Hannah Gadsby or other progressive comedians who took a stand against the service’s promotion of Dave Chappelle’s anti-trans material. Besides, there’s a market for this stuff, as Spotify proved by standing by Rogan in 2022. The service lost subscribers and artists over Rogan’s conspiracy-mongering related to COVID and vaccines, but even Neil Young’s back now. If you can’t beat ‘em, et cetera, et cetera.
“[A] joke can be another kind of Big Lie, shrunk to look like a toy,” Nussbaum wrote. “It’s the thrill of hyperbole, of treating the extreme as normal, the shock (and the joy) of seeing the normal get violated, fast.” Flood the stream with so many jokes like that and from a whole lot of mainstreamed mouthpieces to the point of making fringe nonsense into just another normal bit, and like Rogan said, you’ve got yourself a really f***ed-up program.
Tom Gammill stars in an absolutely hilarious new limited-run play in New York City, A Morning with Ernie Bushmiller.
Photo: Ruben Bolling
Ernie Bushmiller was the author of the comic strip Nancy, about a little girl living with her glamorous Aunt Fritzi, and her tough boyfriend Sluggo, which he produced for hundreds of newspapers from 1938-1982. — Read the rest
Josh Lieb has been a comedy writer/producer for some of the best comedy on television: The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Simpsons, NewsRadio, etc. He's been writing funny and interesting children's books recently, and his latest is a Choose Your Own Adventure picture book that's that's more comedy than adventure. — Read the rest
Kathy Griffin apologizes in advance for all the noise. On the day we connected by phone, she expected a lot of activity in her Malibu home, including air-conditioning repairers and the usual four or five yapping dogs. “It’s mayhem,” she said.
We’ve all been there. Regular viewers of her YouTube series, “Talk Your Head Off with Kathy Griffin,” can actually picture it, since every episode is shot in her home, on her couch, with Griffin and that week’s guest snuggled up to a pooch pile.
“It’s the cutest thing: they see the lights being put up and then they just take the seat on the couch,” she said.
Team Griffin, she says, is a very bare-bones operation. When Griffin decided to jump into the video talk show arena, she initially thought she’d need a whole shiny studio before shooting the first episode in her living room. People like it, she says, because they feel like they’ve been invited over to her house. And it’s catching on.
“The only way I know that is it doesn’t get like a gazillion views, but I’m in the Daily Mail and Page Six pretty much every two weeks,” she noted. “It’s funny, they finally figured out that if they want to get me in trouble and keep bringing me up about how, you know, anti-Trump I am … all they have to do is watch the half-hour YouTube show, and they can get all the sound bites.”
Since we’re talking to and about Kathy Griffin, we can’t rightly quote the old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Nine years ago, the bad press about a photo of Griffin holding a mask made to look like the bloodied head of Donald Trump nearly ended her.
Overnight, the “My Life on the D-List” and “Fashion Police” star transformed into a national traitor.
While it would be terrific to liken her fate to that of Deborah Vance on “Hacks,” at least Jean Smart’s diva got a Vegas rebirth. Griffin, the woman who played Carnegie Hall five times, couldn’t book a show anywhere. That meant going for eight years without income, dropping from the D-list to a comedy blacklist and, as she confessed in her 2024 comeback show “My Life on the PTSD List,” a suicide attempt.
What I’m saying is, do not whine to Kathy Griffin about cancel culture. She’s lived through it, not the version stand-up bros claim to have suffered during their latest Netflix specials.
(Rick Kern/Getty Images) Comedian Kathy Griffin performs on stage during Moontower Comedy Festival at The Paramount Theatre on April 16, 2024 in Austin, Texas.
That makes her unique among all those commenting on the Macklemore and Ed Sheeran situation. When we spoke, the news had recently broken that billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to cut Macklemore from his tour following a performance of his protest anthem “Hind’s Hall,” punctuated with a “Free Palestine” declaration.
And Griffin didn’t mince words. “I am just a D-lister . . . but I have been under more pressure than Ed Sheeran,” she said. “I know what it’s like to be pressured by authorities to change something you’re doing in your art or what you do for a living.
“If I can stand up to the president of the United States and the Department of Justice and the Attorney General of the United States, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the Secret Service, and say ‘No, I’m doing what I want,’” Griffin offered, then so can everyone else.
“It’s time that all public people with a platform grow some balls, because I had to in 2017,” she added. “And let me tell you, the cheese stood alone.”
That crucible reforged Griffin into a political phoenix. She’s hitting 50 cities on her “New Face, New Tour” circuit and has a Palm Springs residency set for early 2027.
Griffin still has plenty of stories about her run-ins with Hollywood names. But her foray into topical talk has lit a fire in her spirit. Of course, while that territory is relatively new to her, Griffin’s male peers have been welding their routines to politics for years now without being ruined by the resulting blowback. Dave Chappelle’s anti-trans punchlines, for example, played a role in emboldening politicians to enact discriminatory policies against that community. Griffin called Chappelle’s case a tricky one because while she doesn’t love his views, she still considers him to be a friend. Besides, “He got like ‘fake canceled,’ but he didn’t get Kathy Griffin-ed, which is the ultimate.”
No question that on every level, stand-up comedy has gotten meaner over the last decade. Perhaps that’s changing, I suggested to Griffin. She agreed, to a point. The appeal of slinging around epithets for shock value is waning, but the country is still very divided.
“I feel like a lot of these Joe Rogan-type bros are really fighting actual evolution and progress,” she said. “Comedy is a fluid art, and I really believe strongly you have to change along with it; you’ve got to go with it. And in my case, I try to drive it in my little storytelling way. … I don’t tell hacky one-liners that their buddies wrote for them backstage. I write all my own material. It all comes out of my life. I tell stories that are all true.
Griffin continued, “So I think these comics that are complaining about use of language or where to try to sneak in this naughty word – that’s just childlike behavior or, like, trying to get away with something to see if you can. And there’s a place for that where you don’t have to use words that were used during the murder of people that came before you to have the privilege of even standing onstage.”
Then she pauses. “Listen to me, all angry today!” Griffin joked.
But she didn’t sound angry, simply real.
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Honesty has always been Griffin’s superpower, and in this new chapter it lends her the air of a happy warrior. When Griffin speaks with “Talk Your Head Off” guests about, for instance, the effects of media consolidation or what a political candidate stands for, she takes pains to pause and make sure her audience knows the who, what and why of it all.
Griffin can’t assume the average “Talk Your Head Off” viewer thinks the old guys running it all have the same level of celebrity as, say, her friend Cher. And yet she has a gift for making politics relatable without enraging rhetoric since, as she points out, political figures are celebrities too.
As for the residual costs of exercising her right to offend back in 2017, Griffin confirmed that some of her shows still draw protesters. But these days they’re less of a threat than just material.
“They’re so pitiful because they’re usually just, like, 20 people,” she said, “and they’ve detailed their car where there’s a picture of Trump, but he looks like Rambo. They’ve painted it on their actual vehicle.
“I mean, they’re always fun to film,” she added, “so please watch my socials.”
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