Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.)

by Andrew Hankinson

  Author: He did not.

  Stewart: And I went, ‘Well, I don’t know about you, I don’t want to go back to the days when you could say “Paki, nigger, wog, coon” and put “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs” outside your pub, and the British football team … The English football team went to see the Black and White Minstrel Show for their Christmas trip, and the black kid in my school in 1983 was called “the black spot”, and we did Ten Little Niggers as the school play,’ and I kept saying ‘nigger’ and ‘paki’ and ‘coon’ to him. I wanted to see … And he goes, ‘No, you don’t want to go back to that.’ If you confront them with it … ‘Do you want “nigger” written everywhere? Is that what you want? What is it that you want to say that you’re not able to say?’ And apparently they wanted to say that all these Muslims were raping people in Rochdale. That’s said now and it’s said by their own community. That wasn’t caused by political correctness.

  [After fifty-one minutes]

  Stewart: Have you ever seen Kunt and the Gang?

  Author: No.

  Stewart: Well you can’t now, he’s given up, but he’s fucking hilarious, right. He knew that he couldn’t ever do what he did on a mainstream platform, but in the room he created this sense of … He was such a cheeky character. It was like a bloke playing a Casio keyboard, but a cheeky Essex bloke, and his songs were the most disgusting songs. But it didn’t matter because we were all in this room. We were in this room where it was like normal rules had been suspended. He had this song called ‘Paperboy’ and it was about when he was little and fancied this girl, but he never got it together with her, and then when he was old, like in his thirties, a little paperboy starts delivering his paper who looked really like the girl he’d been in love with when he was little. So he starts to really fancy this paperboy, and this really happy chorus was, ‘Paperboy, paperboy, I never thought that I would rape a boy …’

  This is a book about a room.

  It starts with the return of Louis CK.

  CHAPTER 204

  Noam Dworman, owner of the Comedy Cellar, is at home in Ardsley, a small town up the Hudson from Manhattan. There are lots of trees. The author phones him,

  Author: So you wouldn’t have been surprised?

  Noam: The world wouldn’t have been. I mean, there was a guy named … Jesus Christ … Poindexter? Was it Poindexter?

  Author: With the feminism thing?

  Noam: No, it was during the Iran-Contra hearings. One of those guys, I can’t remember his name. Bud McFarlane. He had been humiliated and he tried to kill himself, and that example always stayed with me. I know people think I’m the one with no empathy, but when you imagine what it’s like to essentially go on the world’s sexual offenders list, except every single person knows about it, and your children are carrying your last name, and you’ve lost everything, and you don’t know if you can work again, and you can’t walk down the street, and you can’t go in a restaurant, everybody’s staring at you, is it so surprising to think that somebody might say, ‘Listen, I’m checking out?’

  Author: I think it doesn’t cross a lot of people’s minds, the people who pile on with these things.

  Noam: It doesn’t cross a lot of people’s minds?

  Author: Yeah. I think the people who pile on, who get really angry … Whenever something like that happens I have empathy with basically everyone involved and I try not to make it worse for anyone, but some people who are piling on, I think they’re never thinking that Louis is vulnerable or upset, they don’t care about him, they’re just thinking he needs punishment and, ‘How can we get him?’

  Noam: This is a comment I’ve usually made when somebody has talked about the fact that, ‘Oh boo hoo, he hasn’t suffered’, and I say, ‘Do you really think he hasn’t suffered? Because would you have been surprised if he had strung himself up? If you wouldn’t have been surprised if he strung himself up then clearly you recognise there’s some suffering going on.’ That’s kind of where I was coming from. It’s totally disingenuous. It’s like, I hate Saddam Hussein, but when they picked him up in that spider hole, would I say he’s not suffering? Yeah, he’s suffering. You could say, ‘Good, I’m glad he’s suffering’, but what they try to do, and I see this through so many areas now when I think about it, how dehumanisation is the first step to bigotry, it’s so interesting, it really is, you have to find a way to discount them as human beings, and then it’s an open road in front of you. So they can’t accept that he’s suffering at all, because the whole premise is this is all okay because he hasn’t suffered. And it’s not honest. Yes, he’s suffered enormously. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t deserve it, but don’t pretend he hasn’t suffered enormously. Then you have to decide, is it enough?

  CHAPTER 203

  Author: It’s getting nasty though.

  Noam: Is it getting nasty? I think it’s calming down.

  Author: Do you think it’s calming down? Well, maybe. I don’t know.

  Noam: Why’s it getting nasty?

  Author: I think people will gather themselves … It’s all just stuff online. Even that firebomb tweet that you had. People are taking against things, and it’s people who are very angry anyway and feel they want to have a fight for some reason, but it’s not necessarily people who are thinking things through carefully.

  Noam: Listen, I went down there for the first time to watch him, because I hadn’t really watched him in person all through this, and I was really struck by how small this was. This tiny room, and ninety-five people watching him, and they’re all laughing. And yes, this is a man who did something shameful in his past, not exactly unique to Planet Earth in that way, and when you take away from that this nonsense that’s said about us, the way we’re treating women, and the way we’re a gatekeeper, and, like, ‘Dworman is such a powerful figure’, and all this nonsense, really, you know, then you say this is such a small event. It’s a man, a broken man, kind of speaking to a small group of people who are voluntarily listening to him and laughing, yet hundreds of millions of people who couldn’t find Yemen on a map regard this as vitally important to the world. It’s like, guys, it’s stunning.

  CHAPTER 202

  Noam and the author sit in Noam’s office at his home,

  Author: I go backwards and forwards in my head, trying to figure it out, because I was in the room there, and I clapped for him, and I laughed at the jokes, and then I think, ‘Am I a bad person? Am I supporting a predator?’ You know what I mean? Does that seem silly to even think that? It crosses my mind.

  Noam: It crosses your mind because you’re a thinking person and there’s this situation that’s feeding us that we’re supposed to think that way, but the fact is we know people all around us who have done bad things. I mean, if somebody at the table, the comedian table, said, ‘You know what, fifteen years ago I was in this hotel room with these girls’, people would say, ‘You’re a pig.’ No one would say, ‘You know, Noam, I don’t think you should put that guy on anymore’. We’d just chalk it off to another dude who did something disgusting, nothing to be proud of, but nobody would consider throwing him out fifteen years later. The world doesn’t work that way. You wouldn’t either, and then when he went on stage you’d be applauding, but now, it’s just public now. And there’s this whole thing around it. So there’s this question of, ‘Is this okay? Am I doing the right thing?’

  Author: And do you question yourself?

  Noam: I did a million times. That’s why I had reached out to so many people to speak to me about it, but nobody has any answers.

  CHAPTER 201

  The author speaks to Bonnie McFarlane,

  Bonnie: I think Noam truly believes people should have a voice. That’s how he books the club and that’s why Louis gets to go on and that’s why … The other night I was with Hannah Gadsby and I almost had her convinced to come down to the Cellar and do a set, but she was worried she would run i
nto Louis. I was like, ‘He won’t be there,’ but when I got to the Cellar, Louis was on stage so I had to text her and say, ‘Hey, he’s here.’ But I know Noam would have put her on.

  Author: Why does she not want to run into Louis?

  Bonnie: She’s got a lot of Louis material I think.

  Author: So it’s because of that?

  Bonnie: Yeah, and I think there’s a misperception that the Cellar’s saying, ‘Hey, we love this guy,’ when really that’s not what Noam’s saying. Noam’s saying, ‘I give a voice to all these different …’ He would never tell anyone … Ted Alexandro did this whole set about Louis and Cosby and the MeToo movement and stuff, and it went viral. Nobody was like, ‘Hey, don’t do that, we’re trying to get Louis back in the game.’ Noam just wants the discussion I think. I think Noam is really, truly coming from a place of his own belief system. He’s not like kissing anybody’s ass or trying to help anyone in particular. He’s just, like, ‘I like when all voices get heard and all points of view get heard.’

  Author: I think there was concern from some people that having Louis at the Cellar meant it wasn’t a safe place for female comedians. I wondered if you’d heard that?

  Bonnie: I don’t get it. I don’t get that comment. Like, a safe place in what way? In that he’s just going to whip it out and masturbate in front of you? I don’t think that’s going to happen anymore. That’s bizarre. That’s ridiculous. That’s insanity. That’s insanity. If a female comedian is sitting around scared Louis is going to masturbate in front of her, that’s insanity. The thing about it being a safe place or not, that audience has already been curated for twenty, thirty, forty years. I don’t think Louis coming in and doing sets is going to suddenly, ‘Oh, now it’s a bro audience.’ It’s always been a bro audience. That’s the problem with the whole system. The system has curated this bro-type audience and now they’re like, ‘Oh, women don’t do as well.’ This is any club by the way, not the Cellar, any club, maybe any club in the world, I don’t know, but in New York for sure. A certain type of person stopped coming to the club, and people who like sort of dirty, misogynistic comedy do come to the club. So when a woman or a minority gets on stage and they don’t do as well, people point to it, ‘See what I’m saying? They don’t do as well as these guys.’ That’s because that audience likes that kind of comedy so much more. That’s why they keep coming. So I don’t think Louis coming to the Cellar is going to change. It’s not making it worse. It is what it is. The soup has already been simmering for twenty-five years.

  Author: I went to a lot of shows at the Cellar last week and Nikki Glaser did jokes about a vibrator and there were lots of women in there and they were laughing really hard, harder than they laughed at any of the other comedians.

  Bonnie: There you go.

  Author: And Liza Treyger told me male comedians complain about female audiences being terrible, but they’re her best audience because she’s telling jokes for them, whereas the men neglect them as audience members. Do you feel that?

  Bonnie: I feel like that has been the issue from day one. Men tend to think that if they think it’s funny it is funny, and if they don’t think it’s funny it’s not funny, and nobody else gets to have a say in any of it.

  [After twenty-two minutes]

  Author: It’s really hard because they won’t speak to anyone really now since the New York Times piece.

  Bonnie: Well because that’s the thing, Louis gets to walk around going on stage, and they get death threats.

  Author: Yeah. I saw Louis doing four shows back at the Cellar last week.

  Bonnie: How was he?

  Author: In the first one I saw, which was his third show back, and don’t say this to anyone, but in the first one he was a real mess. He seemed really angry and he wasn’t funny and I actually thought … Quite a few people left and I thought he might be about to clear the room. I thought everyone was just going to get up and leave, and he would just be on stage by himself. It really felt like that could happen.

  Bonnie: He was on last?

  Author: Yeah, he went on last. And then on other shows he was put in the middle, so it was harder for people to leave. So he was doing terrible, but then he did a later show that night and he didn’t do some of the more angry stuff that he’d done at the beginning, and the next day he was much, much better, where he just kind of self-deprecated a bit about losing lots of money and stuff, and then he kept doing that each night for about three minutes. He’d do stuff like that, which wasn’t really talking about the thing, just about the impact on him, and then he’d go into the jokes.

  Bonnie: It’s really too bad. He’s so insightful. It’s too bad that he can’t be insightful about this.

  Author: I was in the room and I clapped and I laughed at some of the stuff he said, but he was doing lots of sex jokes, and as soon as he was doing the sex jokes it pulled me out of it. I felt awkward, because your mind just goes straight back to, ‘Oh yeah, he’s the guy who did that stuff, and here I am in a room kind of supporting him by laughing and clapping.’ I didn’t clap at the jokes but I clapped him on and clapped him off and it’s like … I think he’s going to have a problem with that.

  Bonnie: Did anyone boo him or anything?

  Author: Nobody booed, but in the first couple of shows people left, maybe like a dozen people left in the first show and they weren’t happy, but nobody booed. In one of the shows people stood up to clap. Maybe like half a dozen people stood up to clap for him.

  Bonnie: Like, giving him a standing ovation? My god.

  [After twenty-seven minutes.]

  Bonnie: The thing you were just telling me about his set, maybe that’s his penance? Now Louis gets to feel like what it is to be a female comic. Like, people kind of hate you when you get up there. You’ve got to really prove yourself. You can’t do too much sexual stuff, you know? It’s like, ‘Oh, look at you not having the easiest … Just get up there and be funny Louis.’ That’s what comics love to say. ‘Just get up there and be funny.’ Well, now you know what it’s like to have baggage.

  CHAPTER 200

  Before that, Louis CK goes on during the 11.30pm show. It’s his sixth spot back at the Cellar. There’s a loud roar. A sign on the wall says,

  Anyone using any recording or photo device will be asked to leave immediately, no arguments, no second chances. Thank you.

  The only camera belongs to the Comedy Cellar.

  It records to a disk in a locked cage upstairs.

  The cage is monitored by another camera.

  The video will not be leaked.

  Louis tells jokes. Some are about sex.

  Nobody walks out.

  Four men stand up and clap.

  CHAPTER 199

  Hours earlier, Louis does a spot during the 9.30pm show. It’s his fifth spot at the Cellar since he took time off to listen. Half a dozen comedians watch through the doorway at the back of the room. Four people walk out.

  CHAPTER 198

  The night before, Louis does his fourth spot back. A few people walk out.

  CHAPTER 197

  Hours earlier, Louis does his third spot back. He says it’s been a weird year. He says he’s not a rapist, but he accepts the right of people to call him a rapist. It’s a joke. He says the world has gone nuts. About a dozen people walk out.

  CHAPTER 196

  Days before, Louis sits at the back table of the Olive Tree, Noam’s Middle Eastern restaurant on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. The Comedy Cellar is in the basement downstairs. There are steps down to the Cellar from the street or from inside the Olive Tree. The back table of the Olive Tree is a kind of green room for the comedians at night. A sign on the table says,

  This table is reserved for Comedy Cellar comedians only. Thank you.

  Louis is at the table having lunch with Noam. Louis asked for a meeting. It’s the first time t
hey’ve spoken in person since the story in the New York Times last year.

  The author asks Noam about the meeting,

  Noam: I don’t want to talk about the meeting, but no he was not angry, he was just clearly overwrought.

  Author: Because of what was happening to you or the club or because of what his life was?

  Noam: I just think I really don’t want this personal meeting between me and Louis being described in any way other than when I saw him it was clear to me that he had been through a lot, that’s it.

  CHAPTER 195

  Author: I was looking on Twitter for the reaction to Louis coming back and there was one person who was quite sensible. She said that the Comedy Cellar should just put on a show with Louis advertised for that show, and sell tickets for that show.

  Noam: But we can’t.

  Author: Why not?

  Noam: Because people would show up to disrupt it. People would buy tickets and they would heckle. I understand the temptation to kind of defend these people and this trend of being uncivil and throwing people out of restaurants and pointing people out in the street and, you know, heckling at college campuses and whatever it is, but it’s an ever-escalating thing, and it has downsides. I would love nothing better if we lived in a different culture where people didn’t do that. They could strongly disagree but they would draw the line at disrupting a show that people had bought tickets for, which is not crazy. We probably did have a culture like that at one time. Then, yeah, we’d put Louis’s name up and he’d perform and even people who were protesting outside it would be one thing, but now it wouldn’t be that at all. For sure somebody would buy tickets or multiple people would buy tickets and they would come down and they would try to disrupt the show, and we can’t take that chance. And somebody could get hurt. You don’t know where that would lead. Somebody next to them says, ‘Shut the fuck up, I paid money for this thing, go fuck yourself,’ and all of a sudden a punch is thrown.