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

by Andrew Hankinson

Bonnie: It was relentless and I’ve been a part of it before but never quite getting this full tsunami of, you know, insults. And it was funny for a while.

  Author: What was it about?

  Bonnie: I don’t remember. They just started making fun of me. I mean, it was like that was just standard practice. You just sort of found someone, someone who was weak, and this particular time it was me. And I was laughing at first. And then at some point it was like I just told myself, ‘Keep laughing,’ and then at one point Colin Quinn said, this is the only thing I really remember, Colin Quinn said, ‘The other night I bombed so hard I thought I was married to Rich Vos.’ And they were just unrelenting. I felt like, you know, you just have to sit there and get through it and hope it ends at some point, because I’m not easily offended, I don’t have thin skin, but I remember being like, ‘Oh god, this is what it feels like when you’re in it.’ It’s just, you’re fake laughing, ‘Oh very funny.’ The jokes start to get very like, ‘Alright, I get it, I bomb a lot.’

  Author: Is that something you’re sensitive about? Like, bombing a lot?

  Bonnie: Well this is the thing. When I got in the car to go home I was thinking, ‘Is that the thing that they think about me? Is that my character?’ You learn a lot about yourself.

  Author: So it hadn’t occurred to you before?

  Bonnie: I guess I didn’t know that’s what they … I guess maybe I did. I do bomb.

  Author: It’s not something anybody’s said to me about you, but basically, it’s not something that had occurred to you before? But it got into your head?

  Bonnie: I guess maybe I thought I’d been hiding that and now I was like, ‘They do know,’ because usually when I’m getting shit on, really they’re just shitting on Rich through me. Like, ‘Why would you marry …’ Bad-taste-in-men kind of jokes. But this was really about me. And I swear, I think about that still every few days.

  Author: Is that true? You really think about that?

  Bonnie: I really do, because it’s like one of those things. Like, that was my Vietnam. Like, I made it through. I’m tougher because of it. I’m a better person because of it.

  Author: Did it particularly stick with you because … I know you’re fond of Colin, or I’ve heard you say on podcasts that you’re very fond of Colin.

  Bonnie: I love Colin, yeah. I love all those guys.

  Author: Is that why it particularly stuck though? Because Colin’s usually a really nice person, or he’s often a very nice person when I see him. Is it because he decided to join in rather than it being like Sherrod or Jim Norton or someone like that?

  Bonnie: No. I think … I don’t … I think it’s because it felt inclusive actually. You know, like, they didn’t go soft on me at all. They weren’t treating me with kid gloves in any way. They were just hammering on. And it was like, ‘I’m part of it. I’m in it.’

  CHAPTER 114

  Andy de la Tour: You’re actually told, you’re under instruction, if you heckle you get thrown out, and it’s quite aggressive that. Well, okay, but my experience of New York comedy by that time was that nobody heckles anyway. This is the most well-behaved audiences I’ve ever been to. That’s one of the things people asked me when I came back, about it somehow being really, really difficult. The audiences were, I would say exclusively, every single space that I went to and the ones that I played were fantastically well behaved. Nobody heckled and shouted and stuff. Just nobody did that. You know, it was great. It’s as it should be I suppose, but there was no sort of real danger. But I was also very … I’m remembering now. I was very disappointed by some of the stuff. That was a general observation about the stand-up in New York, but it’s probably true of the stand-up in Britain, is that it’s very mainstream, you know, it’s become very, very mainstream. I mean, not overtly reactionary and racist, although some of it was and I was shocked by that. I think I mention that in the book.

  Author: You do, and I wanted to ask you about that.

  Andy: When I mention racist stereotypes, I was quite … As I’m talking now it’s coming back to me. I was quite shocked about this whole thing about Mexicans and all that stuff. I thought, ‘Oh, here we go.’ We don’t have ‘lazy Mexicans’ in the UK. So this vein of humour seemed to be acceptable. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the situation is it now?’ That the, as it were, so-called alternative scene has become the mainstream like it has in Britain of course years ago. So this stuff is now totally okay, to go on about this stuff and nobody would heckle? I was surprised. I mean, there was one particular comedian, I think he was the compere, who was coming out with this stuff, and I didn’t heckle, but I tell you, I came bloody close to it. I came bloody close to it because I thought, ‘This is really out of order this stuff.’ Which is interesting because that touches into what you’re talking about, what’s allowable and what’s not allowable. Well, one of the points I’ve made to people in the past, and I believe this, is that no-platforming comics to me is not acceptable, but if you don’t like what they say, then heckle. Exercise your right to free speech to interrupt their right to free speech and see how they handle it.

  Author: Well they get thrown out at the Comedy Cellar.

  Andy: Well I think there’s a really important distinction between that, because I think a comic should be allowed to say what he or she wants to say on stage. And that would include Bernard Manning. But their right to say that doesn’t take away the right of an audience to respond to that if they don’t like it. So to me, that’s where I think free speech works. And in the stand-up comedy scene that’s how it works. I don’t think any comic should be banned. I don’t think a comic should be blacklisted. I mean, for example, to go off the subject a bit, although it isn’t really, the whole alternative comedy scene in the early Eighties arose out of a cultural reaction against the likes of Bernard Manning and co. That was a reaction against that kind of comedy. And the way you deal with that kind of comedy is you create your own. You create your own mores, you create your own comedy style, you create your own comedy in all the sense that means, but that’s not calling for people to be banned or blacklisted because they’re racist, you know. You answer it by dealing with it. You say, ‘This guy says this stuff, it isn’t funny, but what we do is funny and we’ll win the audience, and we’ll win a bigger audience.’

  [After twenty-eight minutes]

  Andy: Don’t stand up in a public space and mouth off about something, it doesn’t matter what your politics are, and then have a hissy fit if people answer back and say, ‘Well you’re not supposed to do that, you’re just supposed to pay and listen.’ You’re up there showing off, you are, you’re up there showing off, because you’re up there telling the world, ‘This is what I think and this is worth listening to.’ So if somebody in the audience thinks, ‘This is actually not worth listening to, blah blah blah,’ then you have to deal with that. So if you’re going to come out with material which you know is controversial, because most stand-up comedians, even if they’re right-wing, are not complete idiots, if you’re going to come up with stuff which you know is controversial, and somebody stands up and says something, then you have to have an answer to that. You have to deal with that. That’s their right and so you have to deal with it. And if you’re very good you deal with it and you come out on top because you have the microphone of course. So if people come out with some stuff and some person stands up and says, ‘You’re a racist’, then that person gets thrown out, it’s completely out of order in my book, completely out of order.

  CHAPTER 113

  Greg Giraldo is dead.

  Noam: He was one of the people my father really, really, really felt a strong closeness with.

  Author: Why?

  Noam: Because he was so smart and he also … They had some kind of connection. I remember, I have it somewhere, there was a big fight they had one time, where Giraldo was drunk, my father would have been drinking, they had a nasty fight and Giral
do said some stuff about Israel or something. I can’t even remember, but then Giraldo wrote my father a two-page letter a few days later apologising and expressing how much he loved my father and stuff like that, and my father was just so moved by that letter. He carried it around with him. He showed it to people who were close to him. It was very, very important to him. And sometimes a close bond is formed through arguments and bad things.

  CHAPTER 112

  Noam: I was going to run for Senate against Gillibrand in I guess 2010, and I had written to Pat Caddell about it, who was in the Jimmy Carter administration, and he’s on TV a lot, and he asked me to … He met with me and then he asked me to write something for him and I wrote him, like, where it’s coming from, a summary of my positions and stuff. He was very impressed with it. He showed it to a lot of people. He showed it to Joe Trippe who was Howard Dean’s campaign manager and I had some conversations with him. And then I had some conversations with Pat and I had a meeting with Dick Morris of all people, this is before Dick Morris was really untouchable, on the set of the O’Reilly Factor, but it never got off the ground because it was a little bit too late and raising the money was daunting.

  CHAPTER 111

  Noam emails the position summary to Pat,

  My name is Noam Dworman and I want to be the next Senator from New York. The most important thing you need to know about me is that I’m not a politician, and that’s exactly why I’m right for the job.

  John Adams in his Thoughts on Government wrote that our legislature ‘should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.’ His point is so clearly correct, it would be hard to find anyone to dispute it. Nevertheless, we have suffered for years with an entrenched group of uninspired elitist politicians who clearly do not ‘think, feel and reason’ like us. To be clear, this is a problem of both parties. We have for too long ignored Adams’ advice, and we are suffering the consequences.

  Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I’m a lifelong New Yorker with a very New York story. For twenty years I’ve been a small businessman running restaurants and nightclubs in Greenwich Village. I have an Ivy League law degree and I’ve served on my local community board. I’m a musician and a computer programmer. Between my wife and me, our family is a melting pot of Jewish, Puerto Rican, African American, and Indian. While the idea of me running for Senate may seem a bit crazy, I think there has never been a time when a citizen politician was more urgently needed. Our current leaders are out of ideas, and have failed us. It’s time to consider other options.

  Based on my experience, it is painfully obvious to me that we are moving in the wrong direction. Barack Obama has promised that he will ‘bring about the change that won’t just win an election, but will transform America.’ He’s not promising a ‘kinder, gentler’ America, or a course correction, but a total transformation. Well I don’t want to see America transformed.

  I want to start by saying that I believe American ideas, American innovation, and American power have been the greatest forces for good in the history of the world. There is no person on earth who lives free, who does not in some way owe a debt of gratitude to the United States of America. In the twentieth century, in two world wars, and one cold war, it was America that stood between the world and tyranny. And now, in our war against terror, I believe historians will someday realize, we are doing so again. Virtually every major innovation, every great invention or industry of the last hundred years began in America. Like in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s worth imagining what the world would be like if America had not existed. It’s a frightening thought.

  America has transformed the world, yet now we are told that we are the ones that need to be transformed — as if we should repudiate and apologize for the last hundred years of American history. I believe this is a terrible mistake. We have our problems, as every generation has had its unique problems, but the answer has always been the same. Yes, it is essential to make sure that our financial markets are better regulated. But even more urgently, we need to unleash the creative and innovative forces of the American people. We must set government on a fiscally responsible path and move aggressively to remove the barriers that are preventing us from achieving the greatness that used to come to us so easily.

  It’s fashionable in certain circles to believe that our best days are behind us. New York construction workers built the Empire State Building in just one year and forty-five days using 1920s technology, during a recession. Yet today, almost ten years later there is still a hole at Ground Zero. In a different time our leaders would have rebuilt the towers and added a few extra stories as a message to our enemies: we will not be defeated. Today, we accept paralysis as a fact of life. We have to ask ourselves: are we ready to accept that America can no longer build Empire State Buildings? Are we ready to accept that we can no longer land men on the moon? Have we psychologically accepted that we are a nation in decline? For if we have, it will certainly become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  I don’t think Americans are ready to accept our decline. We need to turn things around, and we need to start by cleaning house. We hire our legislators for a term, and at the end of that term we are almost universally dissatisfied with their results. Then rather than hold them accountable, we routinely re-elect them for another term. This brings to mind the classic definition of mental illness: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. We are not going to get a different result unless we do things differently.

  Many may call me too inexperienced for the job of Senator. On the contrary, it is our current crop of legislators who lack the necessary experience to do their jobs well. Most of our legislators are either lawyers or career politicians — a scant few have ever held a real job let alone had to meet a payroll. I believe that the people who make the laws should have had experience living and working under them. We have a ruling class in our country that give the illusion of experience and competence, but actually have neither. A ruling class that claims to be fighting unemployment while they wage war on the only people who can actually create a job — employers.

  Small businesses are the biggest employers in America. You want a small business owner to hire more people? Easy. Let him keep his money and use it to grow his business. Business owners are after all dreamers. They had an idea, and they’ve taken an enormous risk to see it come true. They view their businesses as an extension of themselves, and are always looking to improve them. Every extra dollar that they don’t pay in taxes is a dollar that they can use to hire a new worker, give raises, increase hours, start renovations, and use to expand their business. But what do our experienced legislators do? They tax business to the bone, add on fees, fines, surcharges and penalties, while at the same time saddling them with the bureaucratic burdens of collecting child support, withholding taxes, garnishing wages, and now administering the health insurance of all its employees. The ease with which the government saddles business owners with an ever-growing list of responsibilities and costs is stupefying, until you realize that the people making these laws have never run a business themselves. They don’t know what they are doing. They are the ones without experience.

  Senators with the proper life experiences are essential to good government. George McGovern after retiring from the Senate went into the inn business. His experience caused him to rethink the laws he had supported. ‘If I were back in the US Senate or in the White House,’ he wrote, ‘I would ask a lot of questions before I voted for any more burdens on the thousands of struggling businesses across the nation.’ And let’s remember that the burdens on business he dealt with in his day were minuscule compared to the ones that Washington is now planning.

  It is not reasonable to fight unemployment by fighting employers. Let’s remember — despite what they take credit for, no president has ever created a job.

  If the current healthcare bill is not drastically altere
d, it threatens to be the final knife in the back of small businesses. Businesses with more than fifty employees will now be required to provide health insurance to its employees, or pay a $2,000 fine per employee. And, if you have two businesses with let’s say twenty-six employees each, the government will consider it as one business (never mind that each business has its own rent and expenses, or that they may not both be profitable). So if you employ fifty-one people, you can either pay $102,000 in fines, or pay who knows how much for healthcare. $102,000 is enough money to put many small businesses out of business. This is the greatest tax on small business ever conceived. Yet the government claims it cares about unemployment. As I’ve said, our leaders, having never run anything but a campaign, have no experience; they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s time to elect someone who does.

  Leaving aside the burden on small business, they have made a drastic mistake in the healthcare bill. How can Congress arrogantly pass a three-thousand-page bill that they haven’t even read, revamping one-sixth of our GDP, and really expect it to be anything but a disaster? Any business owner knows how difficult it is to accomplish even small things well. Only the inexperienced think they can wish something and make it so. Anybody who thinks that the cost of this plan will not be at least two or three times the current projections is living in a dream world.

  And amazingly, the plan offers absolutely no mechanisms to stem the growth of healthcare costs. The problem with health insurance costs is contained in the very nature of insurance: once you pay the upfront premium, your incentive is to get as much in return as possible. You don’t care what the medical treatment is costing, and have absolutely no reason to watch what you spend — so of course prices soar. We need a system which uses competition to drive medical costs down. Consumers must have an incentive to compare prices. Supercomputers have gone from hundreds of thousands of dollars, to less than one hundred. GPS satellites can guide your car from outer space for $50. The American free enterprise system has produced miracle after miracle, why wouldn’t it have the same effect on healthcare? It seems our leaders have lost faith in competition.