That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

GQ: Mike, this never happens, but you're the only white straight guy here.

Kathy Griffin (her Laugh Your Head Off tour runs through the summer): It's getting racial. Mike, do you feel oppressed?

Mike Birbiglia (his special ‘Thank God for Jokes’ is available on Netflix; his one-man show ‘The New One’ is at Manhattan's Cherry Lane Theatre from July 26 through August 26): I was very concerned. I called the white police immediately and reported it. You're going to be getting a phone call.

White straight guys have a lot of privilege almost everywhere, but in comedy you're, like, disenfranchised. The most kinds of jokes are off-limits to you.

Aparna Nancherla (stars in the Comedy Central series ‘Corporate’; her episode on the show ‘The Standups’ is available on Netflix): I don't think that's true.

Roy Wood Jr. (correspondent on ‘The Daily Show’; his Comedy Central special, ‘Father Figure,’ is available on Amazon): But your tightrope is thinner than comics of other groups.

Birbiglia: Have you guys watched the National Lampoon documentary [Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead]? One of the things that hit me hard is it's all white dudes. It was the '70s. I found it really heartening to look around at comedy and be like, “Thank God my 3-year-old daughter is allowed to at least consider my fucking profession.” My God.

Griffin: Everything I watch, I count the women. Did they get one in? Did they get a person of color in? A gay person? I'm hyper-aware of that.

Hasan Minhaj (correspondent on ‘The Daily Show’; his special, ‘Homecoming King,’ is available on Netflix, where Minhaj's weekly talk show will premiere in the fall): You've always been?

Griffin: As I get older, I get more militantly feminist.

Wood: But when you started, were you aware of the fucking mountain that you had to climb?

Griffin: I knew it was a long shot, especially being from Illinois and not knowing a single person in comedy. But I just wanted to be Rhoda or Phyllis—the sidekick. I didn't want to be the star, because I knew I wasn't pretty enough. But I was like, “If I can be the funny one getting the jokes, I'm happy.”

Aparna, did you think about what it would be like to enter a mostly male profession?

Nancherla: No, I came from a very comedy-ignorant background—I didn't know you could make it a career. I was a little oblivious, like, “I'm just trying this thing.” All the identity stuff was put on me.

Minhaj: I think that actually plays to your strength. What I love about your comedy is that you're from another planet. The stuff you do onstage comes from this tabula rasa, clean-slate perspective.

The Daily Show satirizes the boxes people are put in. You're the “Senior This Race or Gender or Religion Correspondent.” It's a commentary on it, but it's also true.

Minhaj: The Daily Show satirized an entire form, and now what you see in the marketplace is all the tentacles of Jon Stewart's children in late-night satire. When Jon retired, I was like, “Why are you leaving?” And he was like, “I've manipulated this chess piece in every single way I could. For what I've been able to do from the desk, looking to camera one with an over-the-shoulder graphic, from the field pieces to the correspondents and them creating their own personas that satirize other personas, to the rivalry between me and Colbert… Now I'm interested to see where you guys can take it—how you can manipulate it.” And I think the biggest challenge we have is the characters have now mutated and evolved beyond just O'Reilly. The villains took steroids. How do you satirize Alex Jones? It really makes O'Reilly look like he's from planet Earth.

Wood: The stakes matter more. People always say, “Oh, this is a good time for comedy.” I don't think the comedy factories of satire that are on TV are creating better comedy. It's the same writers. It's the same people. But people care more, so now the jokes matter to you.

Minhaj: You don't think this is the golden age of comedy?

Birbiglia: I think it's the opposite. Because there's been the devaluation of news as truth, the accepted setups have gone away.

Minhaj: Like there being an objective reality we all agree on.

Birbiglia: If we can't agree on the setups, we can't have punch lines, so it's a very divisive time in comedy. I look at Jimmy Kimmel and go, “He's doing great work.” Another guy looks at Jimmy Kimmel and goes, “Fuck that guy. He's trying to get health care for his son, and he's got a platform.”

Wood: I would imagine somewhere in the pantheon of Jimmy Kimmel clips, he said something halfway political that showed a level of give-a-fuck-about-society that no one reacted to, because it was in '08 or '09. I wonder: If we weren't in the era of Trump, would people be telling him to shut up?

Minhaj: I just think we have a shift now where political culture has become popular culture.

Griffin: This is everyone's lane now. Maybe there was a time when comedians should only talk about X, Y, or Z, but now everybody is talking about it.

I'm so fatigued by everything that's happening in the news, but whenever I try to divert my attention with something light, I feel like, “This is frivolous. I can't be watching this when there's serious stuff happening!”

Minhaj: Right now cerebral is sexy. But there was a big run of the “man baby” movies—40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up. There was a lot of Will Ferrell and adult 40-year-old dudes in diapers. Somebody like John Oliver never could have been that popular in that period of time doing niche comedy on crypto-currency. Do you think the pendulum will swing back to where people are like, “Look, man, I just want to see Will Ferrell in a diaper again”?

It's a luxury to watch Will Ferrell run around in a diaper. Right now, if you turn your attention away, you're abdicating your responsibility.

Wood: Do we have a responsibility?

Griffin: I think so. I feel it.

Nancherla: I think it's a personal choice how much you want to engage with it. I don't know if he still says this, but I read an interview with Kevin Hart where he was like, “That's just not my comedy life. I want to appeal to the Everyman, and I don't want people to think about politics when they come to one of my shows.”

Wood: Certain comedians make their careers on never being political. If someone wants to pay money to see Brian Regan, and Brian Regan is still an amazing comedian, does he not provide escapism for people?

Minhaj: Even he did the Israeli-Palestine joke in his new special. But I think comedy, like any art form, is about being authentic. So if Kevin's making that choice, he's being authentic to who he is, so I'm all for that.

Griffin: I'm such a stickler for the misogyny and the sexism and the ageism I experience daily that I'm just calling it out more and more. Don't even act like you know what it's like to be my age and to be a woman and been through what I've been through. I probably got a little lazy during Obama, thinking this was now going to be the future. We've had our first African-American president; we're going to have our first female. I didn't know it was going to fucking turn into The Handmaid's Tale. The shit I've been through in the last year is just unbelievable.

In May 2017, Griffin took part in a photo shoot in which she posed holding a mask styled to look like Donald Trump's severed head. The repercussions ranged from gigs being canceled to her friend and co-host of CNN's New Year's Eve broadcast, Anderson Cooper, calling the photo “disgusting” to death threats to having her ad for bowel-movement aid Squatty Potty pulled by the company.

Birbiglia: Did you have to meet with the FBI?

Griffin: I was interrogated. I was under a two-month federal investigation.

Nancherla: Really?

Griffin: Yeah. I was on the no-fly list for two months.

Birbiglia: I have to be cautious about what I say. I don't want to go through what you went through.

Griffin: I don't want you to, either. That's why I keep talking about it. I'm like the [fired FBI deputy director] Andrew McCabe of comedy. I'm seeing it happen to more people. Civilians. And it just shouldn't be like that. Not for a comic, not for anybody.

You apologized for the photo.

Griffin: I took the apology back. I'd take it back again today. I take it back every day.

I know you're not sorry, but if you could go back and not do it, just to save yourself the hassle, would you?

Griffin: No. Not knowing what I know now. Initially I had so many mixed feelings, and there was so much legal stuff going around. But now I feel like I just think it's important for me to stand by that photo just because of the First Amendment. If nothing else, I can educate people and go, “You can hate that picture all you want, but it's important to know it wasn't against the law.” So if one of your kids, God forbid, took that picture and put it on Twitter, your kid shouldn't be under a two-month federal investigation and shouldn't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal bills and shouldn't be detained at airports and shouldn't have their passport taken away. And shouldn't be on the no-fly list. My phones were tapped. They threatened me with a Paul Manafort–style no-knock raid if I didn't come in. They wanted to charge me with conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States. So that's why ultimately I feel like I have to defend that photo. I want to be a case study, because it is happening to other people.

Minhaj: I really agree with her. I heard people say, “What if a comedian held a photo of Barack Obama's bloody head? What would you be saying then?” Look, you can argue that the photo was distasteful. I'm open to that discussion. But the fundamental right that we're allowed to do that in this country is a privilege worth fighting for, even if you disagree with the position itself.

Wood: We all have freedom of speech, but sometimes as comedians we get outraged when one of our own is under fire. I think the problem comes with thinking that freedom of speech entitles you to freedom of venue, or absolves you of consequence for saying whatever you want to say. Much as I disagree with CNN for taking Kathy off the air for New Year's Eve—

Griffin: Banned for life.

Wood: Which is stupid. But we all know CNN did that for the sake of stockholders, shareholders, and viewers who are outraged. Colleges canceled Richard Spencer because the students made an uproar. If the students had never said a thing, colleges would have been perfectly fine with him speaking.

Minhaj: One of my proudest things as an American is that we can let these trolls speak, because I believe the open market will take care of it itself. When Milo [Yiannopoulos] dropped his book, that shit tanked so bad. He's not as big as we think he is. But a lot of comedians are in this new zone where we have to apologize for jokes.

Wood: That's bullshit. I don't care what the joke is. You shouldn't have to apologize.

Griffin: Yeah, I shouldn't have apologized. All my comedy friends turned on me, and it didn't make anything better.

Nancherla: I do feel like there's a culture now of publicly shaming people. It's this trend where when anyone raises attention in any kind of way to provoke or outrage, everybody jumps on them, like, “Let's beat this down. We're going to shame you into submission.”

Minhaj: You think that's a good thing?

Nancherla: I think it's a bad thing.

Minhaj: Even if the person deserved it?

Nancherla: I don't think anyone deserves it.

Roy, when you were talking about “freedom of venue,” it reminded me of how you spoke on the NPR show Fresh Air about performing in clubs that had Confederate flags. It's almost like there's a Confederate flag hanging over America right now. When do you employ self-protection, and when do you just go, “This is my comedy, and I have to be true to myself”?

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Wood: There are nights when I go onstage and I have to decide how much of an argument I want to get into with the audience. When they hear certain buzzwords, they instantly go into their place of argument.

Griffin: That was not around five years ago.

Wood: It wasn't around two years ago.

Minhaj: Do you think it's forcing us to get better as performers?

Wood: It depends. Because if they are not there to hear that and that's what you're there to say, it's going to be a problem. I did a show in Bloomington, Indiana, God bless them. But I'm sitting backstage deciding how much Trump shit to do. I'm working on a bit right now where the premise is old racists don't like new racists. If you're an old racist, you can't be happy, because you're about to die and everything you worked for is about to happen.

Griffin: And those damn kids in Charlottesville are taking your scene. You worked your whole life for that torch.

Wood: They're carrying tiki torches. You made a cross by hand. You literally can't purchase a cross. If you want to burn a cross in a black person's yard, you have to make it from scratch. So you do a joke like that in a room full of Trumpers, they instantly act like I'm calling you the racist. And I believe a lot of Trump voters are incidentally racist, or they are ignoring the cause and effect of their vote. You have to decide what kind of a night it's going to be some nights.

Do you have to have different versions of the same joke for different crowds?

Wood: But then you're getting into “How much of a pair of kid gloves should I wear with this volatile material so that you aren't hurt by my saying what I'm feeling?” Sometimes there's no way. You're just not going to like this joke, and there's nothing I can do about that. I wish late-night shows would book heavier comics to help set the tone for what's happening in the clubs. Amanda Seales did Late Night with Seth Meyers. It was the most unapologetically black comedy I had ever seen.

Minhaj: She did the black national anthem.

Wood: Who the fuck does that? So if you watch it at home, and you squirm, and you go, “I don't like her,” you're going to be more discerning about what you're going to see live. Do your homework. We're not just some fucking showbiz pizza Chuck E. Cheese's robot that's doing basic bullshit jokes.

Minhaj: Do you think that's the problem of art, becoming à la carte now? Look at the way music is now. In the '90s, when I first started getting introduced to hip-hop, there were like 15 rappers—and that included Wu-Tang Clan. It was them and six other rappers. And now there's literally subgenres of subgenres of subgenres of hip-hop. Stand-up comedy is like that, too. We used to have to go into clubs and appeal to everybody. Now audiences are treating it like it's a salad bar where I get to pick and choose my condiments.

Griffin: Absolutely. It's very segregated.

Nancherla: I think people also just want to be in on the joke. They want to be like, “Yeah! We're all laughing at these dumb people.” If they ever feel like they're inching toward being like whatever you're targeting, they're immediately like, “Well, now I feel like you're making fun of me.” They never want to be the target.

Griffin: Well, that's the whole Roseanne thing. All those people are so fucking excited because they feel like they finally have somebody representing them. It's my nightmare. Roseanne is literally tweeting shit about the [Hillary Clinton pedophile-ring conspiracy] pizza-parlor shit.

Nancherla: Now people are picking comedians based on their politics.

Wood: No one wants to be the target. And Roseanne's taking an aim at people that traditionally in scripted television don't get shot at.

Griffin: It's just really deep for me. She's one of the people who gave me my first jobs. Her reputation for so long was she was crazy. And I'm like, “Here's this woman. She looks atypical. She's from Salt Lake. She came up through the clubs.” I remember all the stories she would tell about how when she was bombing, her sister would stand behind the one laughing table.

Wood: She knew where to look. Where to target the jokes.

Griffin: I haven't seen her in a few years, but the whole time I've known her, she was absolutely a lefty. She actually referred to herself as an old hippie and stuff. I remember asking her one time, “What happened to Dennis Miller? I used to really like him and respect him. Is he a true believer with this O'Reilly shit?” And she goes, “Dennis Miller needed a job!” And I'm like, ding ding. Is she a true believer, or did she just need a job just like Dennis Miller needed a job?

On TV, when one premise is a hit, they all copy it. But I do hate that comedy has become so segregated. I know you guys can laugh at me, but in the era of three networks, I loved growing up watching every color of comedy that was at least allowed to be on those shows. And now, just being honest, I don't know a lot of African-American comics, and they don't know me. Like I was on Bravo. That's a very narrow gay/soccer-mom audience.

Nancherla: But it's like Hasan was saying, where things are à la carte now. With Netflix and Hulu, you can just go to what you want to watch. There's no incentive to be broad.

Minhaj: And when I hear something I don't want to hear, it's like, “I didn't sign up for this.”

Wood: I think news being à la carte is probably part of the problem, too.

Minhaj: That being said, objective reality used to be a thing. That's worth fighting for. When athletes can go on a podium and go, “So you believe the earth is flat, Kyrie Irving?” He goes, “Yeah.” And they just move on. “So you guys going to the playoffs?”

Griffin: I think it can be our job. I think there's actually a humorous or harmless way to shame people or shine a light on things. I think that's something where you should be able to make fun of him for that but still love and respect him as a player.

Minhaj: [turning to Jeremiah Stone, co-chef at N.Y.C.'s Contra, as he drops off some poached lobster] Can I ask you a question that's relevant to our conversation? Do you, as a person in the restaurant business, think that bloggers and Yelp help? Unprofessional people giving their critical reviews?

Chef Jeremiah Stone: You can imagine the type of people who want to say something on Yelp—they're either really, really happy or really pissed off. They mean well. They think they're doing a service for other people, but we don't read those kinds of things because we stopped and we realized people have no idea what they're talking about. They're writing a review two weeks later and describing other restaurants on accident.

Griffin: Everything I read is “It's so expensive! Two dollars for a hamburger, what?!”

Minhaj: I hear this: “Hey, I'm your audience. Why can't you take criticism?” What's your pushback?

Stone: With what you guys do, it's such a treat. I think there's something weird that happens with food that they get really offended when things don't go right. Art and comedy are kind of a luxury. But with food, they're like, “You messed up my dinner. That's part of my day.”

Minhaj: We'll perform at clubs now, and people on Twitter after the show will be like, “I didn't like this joke, this joke, and this joke.”

Nancherla: I got a troll who said they got sushi and watched my special and were like, “I got food poisoning from the sushi, but your special made me feel worse.”

Griffin: “Love, Mom.”

Wood: I saw Doug Stanhope in Alabama years ago, and he does 20 minutes on why Jesus is bullshit. In fucking Alabama! And at ten-minute intervals, people are not only walking out of the show; they're walking down front, giving him the finger, and then walking out of the show. So there are people who give you instant feedback. They don't have time to blog.

Birbiglia: Stanhope is my favorite comic to watch. He intentionally brings the audience to zero, or -5, at the top of the show. A special of his in New York City has the line “Fuck the Yankees.” He really makes the audience fucking hate him. He wants to lose the audience. And then he builds back up from there.

Wood: I've always put him in that same realm with Carlin, a guy who can make you laugh even if you don't agree with him. And you don't feel the need to go home and blog it.

Birbiglia: I don't agree with him at all. There's nothing I agree with in his set.

Griffin: You like that he makes you think.

Birbiglia: He's truly provocative.

Louis C.K. has said Stanhope is one of his favorite comedians. I saw Louie in December 2016. And not that Chris Rock has done anything wrong, but when everything came out about Louie masturbating in front of those women, the first thing I did was buy Chris Rock tickets. I thought, I need to go see everyone as soon as I can, because anybody can turn out to be a monster.

Griffin: I'll give you a list. I know them all. I've had to fire openers because they literally bring whores to the room, and if shit goes down, the hotel room's under my name. The other thing that's tough is the check signers are the same fucking guys: The same guys run the agencies as did when I started. The same guys run the networks as when I started. Same people at Comedy Central. Same people at NBC. It's the same middle-aged white guys. Same with Live Nation, AEG. I've got to battle these fuckers all day. I've had to fight to say, “Please let me try to get Carnegie.” “Nope, you can't fill it.” Sold it out in a day. I had to offer to do Radio City for nothing. Do you know what four-walling is?

Birbiglia: You pay for the venue.

Griffin: Yeah, so I paid for everything.

Wood: Good for you.

Griffin: Well, good for me unless I don't sell it out. Then bad for me. So it's a fucking roll of the dice. But I just was determined. I just wanted to do it as a woman. I know that Joan Rivers has a record for a single female stand-up comedian playing Carnegie, which is five times, and I've played four. So I'm very into setting bars and breaking records. That's why I'm in Guinness World Records for the most televised comedy specials of any comedian, living or dead, male or female. I just want younger folks to go, “If that old dame did fucking 23, maybe I should write one.”

Birbiglia: I saw Joan Rivers a year or two before she passed. It was phenomenal.

Wood: If nothing else, whenever Hollywood chews me up and spits me out and I've just got some house on some stupid catfish lake, as long as I write and perform and at some point between now and then I connect with people, I will always be able to do this. Dick Gregory died with dates on the books. That shit is just everything to me.

Griffin: How long can you guys go without doing stand-up before getting itchy?

Wood: In 20 years, I've never gone more than two weeks. Two weeks is my longest stretch.

Nancherla: I would say I perform most nights a week.

Griffin: That is dazzling. That's grueling. I fucking respect that big-time, the way you guys run around doing sets and taking taxis and all this shit.

Minhaj: I've got to get the reps in to really refine it to get it to a point where there's joke density and every sentence adds up.

Wood: I got a good window into Hasan's process as he was preparing for the White House Correspondents' dinner. He's sitting there, splitting time, working at The Daily Show, and at night you'd see him at the Comedy Cellar. He would do his set and then immediately sit with his laptop open. Remove two commas. Change a sentence. I'm like, “What the…is he doing?” Then you see the finished product and you go, “Oh yeah, I remember.”

Minhaj: Mike, the notes you gave me on the closing were everything. I had to figure out, “Okay, I'm bringing this home. What is the point?” And older comics that I look up to who have all these notches under their belt go, “All right, I see what you're trying to do, Padawan. But this comes off as sanctimonious.” When I said, “Now you know what it feels like to be a minority,” Mike, you said something really simple: “That's really good.” I was talking about being a child of immigrants, and what the First Amendment means to me, and why this person who abuses that very right every single day when he tweets at 3:30 in the morning refuses to come to the dinner that gives him the very right to do that.

Birbiglia: That was the part that was meaningful to me. I knew that was how you actually felt. It was special.

Minhaj: Birbiglia is one of the few people in this business who are like, “Lean into your authenticity.” John Mulaney can say the same thing. You really showed us the ropes on how to build a thing in show business on your own terms and to stay true to yourself.

Birbiglia: I love talking to comics. I feel like comics don't have allegiance to political parties or ideas. I find when I'm talking to my comic friends, any kind of opinion can be in the mix. That's how I find it to be. I don't think it's a lockstep thing.

Question everything.

Griffin: And take the heat when people think you have the audacity to question everything.

Is that your job, to question everything?

Nancherla: I think it's a natural mind-set of people who do comedy. You're just turning everything over, like, “Why is it like this?” It feels presumptuous to be like, “We're philosophers!” But I do feel like we're constantly like, “Why?” We can't take anything at face value.

Wood: Yeah, and it could be something as serious as global warming or something as mundane as putting the toilet seat down. You're questioning it. “Why do we do this thing? Why do we exist? Why have we as a people always agreed that this is the way it is? Does it really have to be that?” Explore that.

Hasan, Roy, and Aparna, you take huge, heavy things like racism and depression, and in order to make them funny, you break them down into component parts. It's like you have to make it so small it's almost petty to let it be digestible to people.

Minhaj: Growing up as the son of immigrants made me able to speak to two different worlds. “My family's from India. We think of it this way. You guys think of it this way.” I'm able to communicate and connect both things, which growing up I didn't think it was a strength, but I think now is a strength. I didn't realize until later that comedy is basically simile and metaphor. “That's like this. This is like that.”

Wood: You've got more shit to make a comparison with.

Griffin: I'm from the era where you did kind of have to act like a dude to succeed. There's been so many situations where I've been the only girl and I have to figure out how to talk to these guys. Finding that common ground is a glorious thing about comedy.

Minhaj: Yeah. I mean, I remember seeing footage of you with A$AP Rocky [on the Vice video series Back & Forth].

Griffin: I fucked him up, down, and up. He had to go to the hospital after that.

Minhaj: But you've been doing that your entire career, Kathy. Not fucking dudes up, but connecting to people from all different walks of life.

Griffin: I'm trying. Man, it's hard. I've been doing this for a long time.

Birbiglia: You've been famous long enough to be famous and then not famous and then famous again.

Griffin: Now I'm Monica Lewinsky. I walk into a room and civilians gasp. Or come up to me and go, “Oh, my God! You're from the picture [with the head]!” I just have to deal with it. And then I show them the poster of the Kathy Griffin Laugh Your Head Off world tour, and I go, “You're damn right, I am. Here's the picture.”

Do you regret anything?

Griffin: I think the social parts have been the most challenging for me. A lot of those guys were just really hard on me. Just years and years of guys saying, “You're not a real comic.” But eventually, when you get those guys to laugh, even if they're assholes, you're like, “Ha!” So it was a little victorious moment.

Birbiglia: Seinfeld said this shit in the '80s that stuck with me forever: “The audience tells you what's funny about you.” I think that couldn't be more true.

Wood: Kathy, you're fearless. Some of the material that you do is edgy, but it also has to be delivered shoulders back, chin off the chest, without a flinch. That shit is hard to do when you're saying something that may make someone want to throw a ketchup bottle at the stage.

Birbiglia: I think what the audience enjoys about Kathy most is the glee that she's experiencing that as a result we're experiencing.

Griffin: I would die without it. This last year, to not work for ten months? It was brutal to lose that gleeful feeling. I'm welling up. Has this been a catfish? Is this a real interview?

Birbiglia: I wrote this joke the other night. The audience gets mad about Trump. I go, “It's not my fault we got catfished by Russia. She looked good online, but when she shows up it's 19 Russian dudes.” I don't know if it's going to make it into a special, so let's put it in GQ. Have to get it somewhere.

And Now, a Few Questions for John Leguizamo

GQ: Is there anything in your comedy that you regret?

John Leguizamo: There was [my one-man show] Spic-O-Rama. Obviously the term is kinda harsh—it was banned in Texas and Canada because of the title. But I was trying to reappropriate that horrible word.

Do you think it would still be as provocative today?

Leguizamo: It wouldn’t be shocking anymore. It would still play, but comedy changed. All of a sudden, it seems kind of mundane.

Who is doing provocative comedy really well right now?

Leguizamo: Colbert is so funny and so biting. When all the Michael Cohen stuff [about representing Sean Hannity] came out, he was so excited by it that he lay on the couch with a glass of wine and started playing with his nipples. He was tweakin’ himself! It was incredible. Leguizamo’s newest one-man show, Latin History for Morons, is coming to Netflix soon.

Anna Peele is GQ's culture editor.

This story originally appeared in the June 2018 Comedy issue with the title "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore."