The Witches Are Coming

by Lindy West

  It must also be said: some combination of the sheer amount of material she committed herself to producing, the boys’ club maxim “funny is funny,” and an innate brutality in her own comic sensibilities, led Joan to some truly horrific material, well beyond calling Liz Taylor a hippo. In 2014, when asked if she thought we’d see a gay president before a female president, Joan said, “We already have it with Obama, so let’s just calm down. You know Michelle is a tr*nny.” She then clarified: “A transgender. We all know it.” On the Golden Globes red carpet in 2006, she announced, “This is the sixty-third Golden Globe Awards, or, for our friends in China, the Groden Grobies! Herro!”

  It is so cruel to make great things and take them away in the same breath.

  In person she could be kind and vulnerable; her favorite flowers were yellow roses; she loved her fans and her family; she was devoted to the gay community; she always wanted to be an actress, not a comic. She was a magical person who was put into an impossible situation, who frequently said inexcusable things, who showed young women—myself included—a version of womanhood we didn’t know was possible, just how powerful and funny and excellent and strong a woman could be, and she used our fascination, our rapturous attention, to brutalize us. In her way, she mentored every loud, disobedient misfit just by being there, working, killing, bombing, getting up again, living, excelling until her last day.

  Joan fell into so many traps that society sets for women, and her failures and frailties mapped those pits so that those who came after could avoid them. But it should always be our goal not to perpetuate what is inflicted upon us. Your pain may not be fair, but it’s yours.

  Guy told me a story from the Fashion Police writers room, when drag queen and writer Jackie Beat asked Joan what she thought of Totie Fields, another pioneering female comic of the 1960s and ’70s. “What Jackie was looking for was some sort of lovely collegiality or mentorship or some sort of connection between them,” he explained. Instead, Joan recalled, as soon as Fields identified her as competition, she did her best to make sure Joan would never, ever work in Vegas. Joan eventually did play Vegas, but “it was a long, hard struggle because of the shit that Totie Fields pulled.”

  “It was an interesting moment of realizing that Joan completely came from a world where there can be only one, and that was being defined by people around her as much as it was being defined by her,” Guy said. “And you could feel the hurt and the fight in her voice as it was coming out.” That wasn’t the story that Jackie or Guy, both of whom worshipped both Joan and Totie, wanted to hear, but it was the truth. It’s not the truth anymore, partly because of Joan and partly despite her.

  Despite Joan’s vocal loathing of being called a pioneer (“I’m not ready to be an icon, and I’m not ready to be told thank you!” she hollered in A Piece of Work), she objectively did carve a path, an easier one than hers, for the women behind her. She had to give up every single thing to make room for herself, and that messy, blazing, cruel sacrifice made it possible for other women to take her place without the same self-negation.

  “She fucking locked some doors behind her, I will never question that,” Guy told me.

  He was quiet for a moment.

  “I think,” he said, “that if Joan stands for anything, isn’t it your right to talk shit about people who made you feel like garbage? Which is why I’ve always found her empowering.”

  You can hate someone and love them at the same time. Maybe that’s a natural side effect of searching for heroes in a world not built for you.

  _____________________

  1 At the 2018 Oscars I discovered I was leaning on a cocktail table next to nineties E! correspondent Jerry Penacoli and freaked the fuck out on him, only to realize midfreak that I didn’t actually have much of an opinion about nineties E! correspondent Jerry Penacoli. Sorry you had to take that journey with me, Jerry.

  2 Also, that Smurfette comparison is very good, because Gargamel is one of those classic effete, confirmed bachelor, gay-coded, fun-ruining villains (aka male feminist soy boy cuck), and Azrael is a literal pussy (aka bitch woman), and all they do is scheme and connive to catch and boil (aka DO CALL-OUT CULTURE ON) all the cool Smurf boys who are just trying to ease tension and lighten the mood in Smurf Village, man! Give me an award for this metaphor.

  Obsolescence Is a Preventable Disease

  One time, in the ’90s, Adam Carolla said, “I pick my nose like it powers my car.”

  I think about “I pick my nose like it powers my car” every time I pick my nose and every time I drive my car, so multiple times per day. It’s so funny—such a perfectly revelatory little detail, indulgently defiant of Middle American manners, celebrating one of the base pleasures of having a body and inviting the audience to throw off propriety and confess, too. My love for Adam Carolla started in my early teens, with Loveline, and carried through the first half of my twenties as he transitioned into a morning show (a welcome development for me when Howard Stern moved to satellite radio) and, eventually, a podcast.

  In the early days, Carolla was still a relative unknown, whose previous life as a blue-collar worker hadn’t yet been supplanted by his new identity as a Literal Millionaire and who’d found his way to Loveline after offering his services as a boxing coach to a pre–Win Ben Stein’s Money Jimmy Kimmel. He was just a guy. And it’s easy to dispute this in hindsight, but I’m telling you, Carolla was very good at the radio. He was a virtuosic observer, weaving riffs on society’s hypocrisies, and his own, with genuine compassion for Loveline’s callers. But there was always a discomforting edge: vicious jokes about the feckless poor (but it’s okay because he grew up poor!), gleeful stereotyping of Latinos (but they’re his buddies from the construction site!) and women and fat people and gay people and trans people (but he makes fun of everyone equally!), which only became less playful and pliable as Carolla grew older and richer.

  I got older, too, my conscience matured and solidified, and eventually I realized that the taste of it had changed in my mouth. “Common sense” without growth, curiosity, or perspective eventually becomes conservatism and bitterness. I moved on.

  There are pieces of pop culture that you outgrow because you get older. Then there are pieces of pop culture that you outgrow because you get better. Or rather the world gets better. The world moves forward. Not in secret, not in ambush, but in front of our faces. Everyone has the choice to listen and absorb, or to shut down and dig in.

  As a child I loved Roseanne Barr so much, and just the knowledge of her existence out there—as a fat, funny, defiant, loud woman—bolstered my fat, funny, shrinking, quiet adolescence. It never occurred to me that twenty years later Roseanne would call me a “fat bitch” on Twitter for critiquing misogyny in comedy, which she perceived as “advocating censorship.”

  The Simpsons are the original high bar of comedy: surreal, subversive, yet emotionally alive. White kids my age never had to wonder about the impact of Apu on our South Asian classmates, and “white privilege” wasn’t in the mainstream lexicon yet (let alone pervasive enough to warrant a reactionary sneering backlash from Adam Carolla).

  Many people—myself included, at one time—consider Louis CK to be one of the greatest living stand-up comics, an astute, self-effacing, disgusting, loving dad who managed to win over not just the morning talk radio boys’ club but tougher crowds such as feminists and art snobs (probably because none of us paid attention to what he was saying to the talk radio boys’ club). His 2013 HBO special Oh My God was praised for its frank acknowledgment of rape culture (acknowledgment may be a low bar, but it was all we had in the pre-Cosby landscape). In what, at the time, was catnip for feminist bloggers, Louis CK called men “the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women” and pointed out that for women, spending time alone with a man requires “courage.”

  I suppose he would know.

  I was in college in Los Angeles—still shy, ungainly, unsettled—when the British Office came out. I remember watching it for the first ti
me, hunched over my ancient laptop in my mouse-infested room in my black widow–infested house, and thinking “I never knew.” I’d been a comedy obsessive all my life, but I was young. It had never clicked before. I’d never known that comedy could be so perfect and efficient. I’d never put it together that if you make a piece of writing very, very funny you can take it very, very dark. The power of humor to manipulate an audience’s thinking, to make surgically precise points, and the responsibility that goes along with that—the responsibility to always watch where you’re punching—I learned that from Ricky Gervais. Not so many years later, Gervais would suggest that supermarkets make their doors smaller so that fat people cannot access the food.

  Art has no obligation to evolve, but it has a powerful incentive to do so. Art that is static, that captures a dead moment, is nothing. It is, at best, nostalgia; at worst, it can be a blight on our sense of who we are, a shame we pack away. Artists who refuse to listen, participate, and change along with the world around them are not being silenced or punished by censorious college sophomores. They are letting obsolescence devour them, voluntarily. Political correctness is just the inexorable turn of the gear. Falling behind is preventable.

  But so many people are fighting that turn of the gear. Gervais, for example, insists that he does not care what you say about him on Twitter. He does not care if you are offended. He does not care if you hate the latest joke he told about rape or the Bible or Caitlyn Jenner or Hitler or your child’s fatal peanut allergy. And just to make sure you’re crystal clear on all of the tweets he does not remotely care about, he built his 2018 Netflix stand-up special, Ricky Gervais: Humanity, around them—those negligible tweets, the droning of gnats, several years of which he appears to have accidentally screen grabbed and saved to his phone. (Ricky Gervais: butterfingers!)

  Similarly, I don’t care about Formula One racing, which is why I’m working on a tight seventy-five about the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

  Gervais seems to care quite intensely, of course, which is natural. It would be grotesque, inhuman, not to care. Absorbing critique on a scale as vast as Gervais’s Twitter feed (13.1 million followers), whether the specific critiques are warranted or not, is objectively grueling. Doing stand-up comedy is vulnerable and hard. Twitter is Hell. Devoid of context, Gervais’s bravado might be sympathetic, a relatable if tedious coping mechanism. As Gervais himself helpfully pointed out in Humanity, however, nothing can truly be divorced from context.

  “People see something they don’t like, and they expect it to stop,” he said. “The world is getting worse. Don’t get me wrong, I think I’ve lived through the best fifty years of humanity, 1960 through 2015, the peak of civilization for everything. For tolerances, for freedoms, for communication, for medicine! And now it’s going the other way a little bit.”

  “Dumpster fire” has emerged as the favorite emblem of our present sociopolitical moment, but that Gervais quote feels both more apt and more tragic as metaphor: the Trump/Brexit era is a rich, famous, white, middle-aged man declaring the world to be in decline the moment he stops understanding it.

  I had the chance to interview Carolla for The Stranger in 2010, years after I’d soured on his work but before he’d turned quite as hard-line antisnowflake as he is now. I still held some vestige of youthful nostalgia for the good part of Adam, the part that at least always wanted to hear everyone’s story, and I was curious to see if I could talk to that guy.

  It took little prompting from me before he was off on a rant:

  As far as the feminist stuff goes, or the gay movement, or the black movement, or the Hispanic movement, or something—you see, people mistake being against the general movement for being against the people. Like, I want women to have equal rights and access to abortions and lesbians should be able to get married and women should get equal pay for equal work and all that shit. I’m just so fucking tired of recognizing everyone’s group. That’s the whole point. All these groups, by the way, would be much better off without their groups. The people would be better off without their groups. Yeah, fucking Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are working wonders in the black community. Man, have they really turned things around. Imagine where they’d be without them. Fuckin’ ridiculous. These guys are professional extortionists—that’s all they are. The only group that should matter is your fuckin’ family.

  I asked, sincerely, how he proposed that oppressed people advocate for themselves, fight to make their lives better, without some form of collective action.

  “Oh, without a group?” He paused for a long time. “Yeah, well, how do you get off the ground with a topic like gay marriage, or how do you push an agenda like gay marriage if you don’t have a group to back that? That’s a valid point.”

  “Because that seems like the most effective means to get people to shut up,” I said.

  “Yeah. I would love the gays to marry so they could shut up.”

  He was right there, so close to taking a step into the future. But our phone call ended, and so did that moment, that crystal of potential.

  In July 2017, Carolla announced that he was producing a documentary called No Safe Spaces with conservative radio host Dennis Prager, which “exposes the dangerous trend of suppressing free speech” on America’s college campuses. “Trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, the suppression of free speech, and other illogical ideas born on campuses are proliferating and spreading out into the real world,” the film’s IndieGoGo page reads. “Today’s campus snowflake is tomorrow’s teacher, judge, or elected official. And if that doesn’t scare you, maybe you should reconsider. No matter where you live or what you do, if you don’t think the way they do, they will attempt to silence and punish you.”

  Adam Carolla is a multimillionaire who holds the Guinness World Record for “most downloaded podcast” and has published two New York Times best-selling books. Clearly the snowflakes have done their worst.

  Carolla isn’t angry because he’s being silenced; he’s angry because he’s being challenged. He’s been shown the road map to continued relevance, and it doesn’t lead straight back to his mansion. He’s angry because he’s being asked to do the basic work of maintaining a shared humanity or else be left behind. He’s choosing the past.

  Gervais and Carolla are not alone in presenting themselves as noble bulwarks against a wave of supposed left-wing censorship. (A Netflix special, for the record, is not what “silencing” looks like.) We’ve heard similar sentiments from handwringers across the political spectrum who insist that overzealous, “politically correct” college activists are strangling academia. We’ve heard it from pundits and politicians who insist that white men have been so victimized by the “sensitivity” of marginalized people that they had no choice but to vote for Donald Trump.

  In November 2017, following a New York Times report detailing CK’s proclivity for (among other things) masturbating in front of female colleagues, CK announced that he was retreating from the public eye to “take a long time to listen.” Nine months later he performed an unannounced set at the Comedy Cellar in New York, reportedly to a standing ovation. Four months after that, an audience member surreptitiously recorded CK working on new material at a Long Island comedy club and leaked the audio online.

  On the tape, CK delivered an extended riff on the supposed self-seriousness of the survivors of the Parkland school shooting: “Fuck you. That’s not interesting. Because you went to a high school where kids got shot? Why does that mean I gotta listen to you? Why does that make you interesting? You didn’t get shot. You pushed some fat kid in the way and now I gotta listen to you talk?”

  Less than a year after his vow to retreat and listen, CK made the laziest and most cowardly choice possible: to turn away from the difficult, necessary work of self-reflection, growth, and reparation, and run into the comforting arms of people who don’t think it’s that big a deal to show your penis to female subordinates. Conservatives adore a disgraced liberal who’s willing to pander to them because he’s too we
ak to grow. How pathetic to take them up on it.

  If you’ve spent any time with Gervais’s work beyond The Office and Extras, you know that the man is obsessed with evolution. His 2003 stand-up special was about animals; his 2010 special was called Science; in 2009 and 2010, he released special episodes of his podcast, The Ricky Gervais Show, devoted to natural history, the human body, the earth.

  On their Xfm radio show in the early 2000s, Gervais and his cohost, Stephen Merchant, did a recurring segment called “Do We Need ’Em?” in which the producer, Karl Pilkington, chose an animal he found strange or useless (jellyfish, for instance) and interviewed a scientist about whether or not we should “keep” them.

  “What are they adding to the world?” he once asked Gervais and Merchant about giraffes. “What are they doing?”

  Gervais explained that species aren’t here because they add something to the world. They weren’t chosen by a benevolent creator; they aren’t the most beautiful or the strongest or the most beneficial to the whole. They just didn’t die. They survived to pass on their genetic material, and that’s it. That’s evolution. The world thunders on, with or without you. Adapt or perish.

  It’s baffling that Gervais can have so much reverence for physical evolution and so little for intellectual evolution. He might find trans people silly, but you know who doesn’t? Teenagers. I remember the first gay kiss on TV, and I am only thirty-seven years old; my kids think I must be exaggerating. My husband, a stand-up comic, used to do a bit about a Comcast commercial in which a woman goes on a date with a little green alien and, it is implied, fucks him; at the time, interracial human couples were taboo in advertising. That joke doesn’t work anymore, because the world changed and it’s going to keep changing.

  I’m being hard on Ricky Gervais not because his attitude is extraordinary but because it is common. Not because I think he and the other ostensibly left-leaning men who succumb to this trap are just like Trump but because I believe they aren’t. Or they don’t have to be.