Is Comedy Dead? An Interview with Adam Carolla

selling books as well. He's got his own podcast, which was in the Guinness World Book of Records at one point. I don't know if they still are, but they were a holder for the most downloaded podcast. I think it's currently the number one daily downloaded podcast in the world. He's got a new book out Everything reminds Me of something as well. He's got a show on the Daily

Wire called The truth Yeller as well. So the guys all over the place doing a ton of things, and he's doing the Lord's work because he doesn't back down to all these crazy people in our society. He still maintains a sense of humor. He doesn't treat them with kid gloves, and he just tells the truth. And that's the whole point of the show. And isn't that what

we need more of in this country? And the comedians are supposed to push boundaries, that's the point, you know, So what does it say as a society that we

don't even allow for humor anymore? And then I don't know if you guys noticed, but after someone literally tried to kill Dave Chappelle for his Netflix special, which was hilarious and my favorite joke, and that one was someone was telling him that they are after him because you know, he has been making a lot of jokes about transgender people, and they said they are after you, and he said many days or singular day. So I thought that was hilarious.

But but after someone literally tried to kill Dave Chappelle, the media did an interview with the attacker where the attacker was like, oh, I'm bisexual. I was triggered at Dave Chappelle's fault. He needs to be more sensitive. So how far away are we from someone literally killing someone?

And then the media and the left are like, oh, well, that the the individual shouldn't offended this person, right, like giving victim hood to the person who was offended, when in reality, the person who's so easily offended is the problem with their society. So anyways, a lot issues to get into, a lot to talk about with none other than Adam Corolla. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. He was in his car so some you know, hopefully

everything's clear. So Adam Carolla, here you go. So, Adam, I was reading that your parents did not give you a middle name, so when you filled out your driver's license application, you listed your middle name as Lakers as a joke. Do you still go by Adam Lakers Corolla? Yeah, It's on all my documentation, every piece of official paperwork I have, and it will probably be on my tombstone. Not that I'm even the biggest Lakers fan. I just

I didn't have a middle name. I got tired of looking at that blank spot, and at some point I just wrote the Lakers, and because they were on to their playoff runs against the Celtics or something, I guess it was on my mind, so I just wrote it in. Well, that's like sometimes when parents I can't come up with a name for their kid and they'll just you know, a Coca Cola or something. It's like, you hear this stuff happening. Uh, well, that's pretty Did you think you

would be able to get away with it? Or really like they're surely going to be like, you can't do this. I didn't give it much thought. I just wrote it in And it wasn't my first driver's license. My my first driver's license I just left blank because I have no middle name. Um. But it must have been when I was renewing it when I was in my early twenties that I that I wrote it in, so uh

and then they never questioned it. And it's now on Like I said, every mortgage indeed, and you know, certificate of authenticity everything I owned just says a Lakers stuff. That's awesome when you look at comedy today and you're coming up with jokes, isn't society the punch line? Like, isn't it all a joke? Today? It feels like we're living in a clown world. Yeah. I had that that

moment this morning. I was actually listening to Nancy Pelosi explained to the participants from Drag Race that they were essentially American heroes. And it was funny because earlier in the morning I turned on the TV and every single channel was just running the Capital hearings, and it was all just the same boring stuff. And I was just scrolling around and I found an episode of Lucy not I love Lucy, but her second she did a second

sitcom like in the sixties. Just watched it for half an hour and saw however one acted and how they dressed it, how they behaved. And then I heard Nancy Pelosi calling all the drag queens American heroes, and I thought, wow, we've really jumped the shark. We really have. And it's like, it's what's weird with the kids stuff, because it's like, you know whatever, if you're an adult, you know whatever.

But like, just the the pushing of this on children is just super creepy and weird, and like all the parents taking their kids to drag shows and like like would you take your kids to a strip club? Like I just it's almost like I just I don't even understand what's going on. It feels like we're not even living in reality. I think the deal is once you

get the kids coached up, then it becomes reality. So I was sort of saying, you know, especially living in California, it's hard to justify shutting down a state small businesses, you know, restaurants and beaches. If the school is they're still open. So what you do is you shut the schools down, and then you go, hey, we have an emergency. The schools are shut down, and now you have to shut down your business and your nail salt and your restaurants.

So I think there's a thing about almost vetting it through kids. You know, it's almost like when they say, oh, this asperin is safe for kids to take, Like once it's okay for kids, then it just kind of is. And I think this is part of it. The other part of it is what I like to call crate training, Like they need to get the kids, create training, like you create train a dog. You can't create dog or an old dog. You have to get them when they're puppies and then you create train them. And that that's

a that's so people talk about indoctrination. I really just look at his great training. You just you have to get the puppies and you've got to create train them so they're obedient. And then once they're obedient, then they're your subject, you know, for the next lockdown or the next whatever it is we tell them to do. There are ours well, and like they did that with the vaccine stuff too. I think recently that oh it's safe for five and under, but they have like nearly like

a hundred percent chance of survival gets COVID. So it's just, uh, it's just ridiculous. But simultaneously, even though we live in this cloud world and we're all sort of part of this joke that's going on, we have seemed to as society of lost or sense of humor. Why do you think that happened? And when do you think that happened? Well, there's you know, we're taking people and we're making them agreed. You know, they all have a grievance now, so we

took everyone, broke them off into groups. So I used to do stand up for comedy or TV shows for an audience and the audience just the audience, And now the audience is broken up. You have the African Americans, we have the Latinos with the Latina acts, we have the Latinas, we have the gay and lesbian, we have the transit. So now within your audience is no longer just a audience. It's fourteen sub culture audiences. And you try to tell a joke that's not going to piss

one of them off. Well, it is that that the whole point of you know, what leftists try to do is they want us to be divided. They want everyone to feel like they're in their individual group as opposed to you know, a country with you know, common values and things that align us as Americans, all sharing the same patriotism and love for country. I mean, isn't isn't that the whole point is to have this scenario that you just laid out. Yeah, that's why. That's all they

do is break everyone off into groups. It's non it's non stop. And yes, they can't do it from the out side, you have to do it from the inside. So once you've sectioned off a group, you then explain how you're a fan of that group and what you're gonna do for that group, and then you go about to make promises to that group that are unfulfillable. So, you know, when you look at that, in the environment that we operate in today, can comedy continue to exist

in our society? Yeah, comedy don't exist. There's gonna be a whole subculture that just pushes back against that, and then you're gonna end up with a different kind of comedy. I mean, the Daily Wire exists, and and and Tucker Carlson exists because they've been trying to shove this crap down everyone's throat for long enough that they've created an alternative space for people with alternative views who will flourish

because we're tired. Most of America's tired of being force vent all the crap, and that'll be the same way with comedy. Well, and I totally agree with you in the sense of, you know, I think Americans are tired

of this being shoved down or throats. And then there's also you know, I think the majority of Americans realized the hypocrisy and it you know when like Ricky Gervais, he was able to say it to people's face in Hollywood during the Golden Globes when he said, you know, if I us have started a streaming service, you would call your agent. I mean, so, I think that's where

a lot of this frustration comes from. People wanting to push it back about this because we know that the people that are shoving this down our throats are just hypocrites. You know. I was kind of thinking about it earlier today, and basically basically what it is is there's only say that if dr drew, but there's only diet and exercise. It's really, if you want to lose weight, just eat less, crap in exercise, right, and and that's about it. That's the rule, that's the law. There doesn't need to be

another book written on dieting. It's exercent I had. But there are all these books, and there's all the you know, weight Watchers, low cost fun you know, low calorie fudge and and all this stuff. But it really just kind of keeps getting back to diet. It's about hard work. It's about you know, it's not showing up early and leaving late and not pointing fingers and not blaming. That's half of them, And then the other half thinks it's about government subsidies and racism and we need to tax

billionaires more. People need to pay their fair share, and we need equity and schools, and we need to lower the map test scores and affirmative action on that. It doesn't work, it never works. But it does work for the people who run weight Watchers, and that that's Nancy Pelosi like. It does work for the small group of people who are in charge of the policies, they get rich, it doesn't work for anyone else. Well, and that's basically what COVID was about, right, I mean, you had all

the small you had all the small busins. This is getting crushed, all the working people getting crushed. And then yet well you know, Walmart and Target and all the big stores were able to stay open. Yeah, in effect and affect any anybody work for government. It didn't affect anybody in a in a white collar position who could work from home. And it affected all the people that work in the kitchen of those restaurants that were closed down. You know, I think, you know, we look at speech

just being one of the main targets. Well, guns too right now, but speech probably primarily, you know, and like comedians are supposed to be able to push boundaries. That's

the whole point. That's where in humor lies. But like, what does it say about our country right now where there's just this concentrated effort to stifle the speech of comedians, whether it's you know you've had this happened to you, and recently with people trying to cancel and Netflix specials for people like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais if you control the speech, then you can control the narrative than you control the policy, and they want to control policies.

In order to control the policies, you have to control the speech, and that's why they become speech police. It's been going on for longer than people think. But um, Ricky Gervaises and that that Dave Chappelle's have also felt that pressure, and what you're seeing is them pushing back against something that's being pushed on them. It's not a coincidence that both of them and their specials are making fun of transgenders. They're pushing on it because they feel

like it's being voiced on them. So um, you know, I think I think what the speech police will understand is they have no real actual power. Their only power is scared people around them caving. And the less those people cave in on an individual level or corporate level, uh, less power than the wheel. I mean, you take a look at Black Lives Matter. Two years ago would have been a death sentence to come out against Black Lives Matter and any any capacity. Now it's no big deal.

That's that's how this stuff works. It turns around pretty fast, especially whatever it is they're talking about is untrue. I think this is sort of like the problem that we have as a country is it's like everyone waits until things are safe to say what needs to be said. You know, like even like during COVID, like everyone was afraid to say lockdowns are bullshit. With the vaccines, everyone was afraid to question them even though we had no

long term data. It's like it's like or even like with police shootings, everyone was afraid to just say the truth and say, the numbers don't stack up with this narrative that police are just indiscriminately gunning down black men in America, Like it just doesn't hold up right, And so like we allow these narratives to take fold and so like, isn't the time to speak out at the beginning, to to try to challenge these narratives head on to stop them from from taking so much power? One one

thousand percent. You know everyone's against the holocaust. Now where were you in ninety nine? You know, like that's the time you need to hype up. I totally agree. Um. I was vocal and against lockdowns and all the COVID crap early and often, and I took up feeding for it. But I never cared and this is not provisionist history. You can listen to my podcast, you can read my tweets.

I said early, Uh, I sent a tweet out that trended, which is, uh, COVID is killing old people and it is killing sick people, and the rest of you post he's got played and who's getting played next time? And everyone went nuts, and some substantial people in Hollywood like, call me and tell me to delete that tweet, and I said, uh, now, and I just left it up and it's just bill up. I was never on with it.

I was never about it. I felt it early. They didn't give us the ages of the people who were dying early, and that's when I knew something was up, because they always give me the ages when somebody dies, and I wasn't getting any ages, and I knew. I knew the fix was in early. I talked about it all the time, and I became essentially a pariah. Quick commercial break more with Adam Carolla on the other side.

So when we looked at the fact that you know, Chappelle literally someone tried to kill him on a stage recently, what was so interesting to me is the New York Post,

which is normally pretty good about stuff. But they did an interview with this guy where they give him like the heat where he's talking about how he's bisexual, how he was triggered, And it's really Dave Chappelle's fault because Dave Chappelle is the one who needs to be more sensitive, and clearly the guy wielding a knife to try to kill him is you know, obviously not at fault because

words hurt and words are violent. How far away are we from someone like actually maybe getting killed and the media and left are like, oh, well, he or she just shouldn't have been so offensive. Well, the media has to figure out the optics of everything really quickly, you know, and figure out like what color was the cop, what color was the assailant, what color was the comedian, what color was the attack, or you know, what was the

subject of the attack. You know, they have to figure it all out fast and then sort of decide how outrage they are. You know, So if someone wants to like firebombs some Christian you know, abortion alternative center, they don't.

You're not interested in that media wise, Or if you know, a black cop shoots a white woman in the face at the capital, uh, not not so much interest in those things, So they have to figure out what the narrative is, to decide how much interest to show and whatever the subject is, which is a weird way to do news if you think about it, you know, like what fits the theme and what doesn't fit the theme

in terms of your interest in covering the stories. But yeah, something will happen at some point, and uh, certain sides will be more outrage and certain sides will be less outrage. But you know, what are the choices I've been telling people. People have been telling me to shut up for a while when it comes to my opinions on a lot of the directions we're going as a country, And I just tell him, I'm a comedian. I have to give my opinions. That's it. I can't water them down and

I can't curtail them. So if they're more popular, that's my job. And if I stopped doing that, then I'll go back to swinging a hammer. But I am a carpenter, so I do at least have a trade. Well, I'm sure it's probably good to have a hobby too. You know. It's like, uh, the world's a stressful, like a reprief from it all. Oh absolutely, man, people have to get down to the garage. Hand's dirty. You know, why do you think it definitely seems like it's the left that

are constantly offended by words and speech. Why do you think speech offends them so much? You know, it's a crazy turnaround because when I started in radio in the mid nineties, if you've got a complaint, if the program director came in and said, we got a complaint or we're getting complaints, got complaints, it would always be the right to be some Christian fundamentalist group that was complaining

of out literally the language. So they you said tits or something and they got offended and they didn't like the language you're using. Right, So it was all from the religious right. About twenty five years ago, there was no such thing as the left or the progressive left complaining. And the progressive left, which does all the complaining now, doesn't complain about the language. They don't. You can swear your ass off. They they applaud that. They complain about

the ideas. They don't like your ideas, and they want to police your ideas, and that's much more insidious than policing the language. You know, we say language. Yeah, you have to police the language is don't say the S word or F word or whatever on broadcast television. They want the ideas police. That's a much scarier profess issue. Well, and if that happens, which is the you know way we're trending. I mean, there is pushback, which is comforting, But if that's what happens, we sort of cease to

live in a free society. I agree. Uh, the real I'll pay the real problem of where we're at right now. The left us to police the language and the thoughts and and and to do all that stuff. Um, the folks that voted for them are sitting around silently while they're running amok. But it's the right disagrees, but has

always disagreed with the left. What we need is people who are democrats, who are on the left, we're progressive, who have some clarity and some dignity to pipe up and say, even though this is my side pushing this, I disagree with it and I'm not going to support it. We need that. We don't have enough of that people saying, you know, I work with I do a podcast with the attorney Mark Grigs. Attorney Mark Gerris been a Democrat

for his entire life. But he's intellectually honest and he doesn't like what's going on out there, and he says it and he knows it's his side doing it, and he's vocal about it. Fine, we need more of that. So well, you know, I guess Bill Maher is like kind of But again, so these people are always so late to things, and that's just the sort. And Republicans

do this all the time. They're late to everything. And then they're like, oh yeah, I oppose lockdowns, and I know you were there before, but a lot of these people weren't, and it's like infuriating to see them on TV and they're like, oh yeah, lockdown and it's like we're, well, where are you? Where you when people like you and me were taking bullets, you know, because we were speaking

up against the grain and against the group think. And then they try to, you know, come to it late when it's the damage has already done right, People already out of business, people's lives have been taken, livelihoods or lives right, like all the suicides and overdoses and all those things that happened as well. But you know, should people fear being canceled. What you have to do is you have to position yourself. Um now, so it's it's

no no longer. Can you just hit yourself a job with a fortune five company and uh or even a college and expect to be able to speak your mind and not be canceled. That's gonna happen. Um. But if you position yourself. Uh. You know, I've been saying whatever I want to say for the last years, but it's because I positioned myself to be sort of independent and have a sixteen year old son who thinks like me, and I've told him a million times, like say, whenever

you want to speak your mind, don't be afraid. H you have to get good at something. If you're good at something, that can't really cancel you. If you have get some you know, cubicle job and some giant company, don't get rid of you. If you're When I say good at something, it could be comedy, but it could also be welding. You're really good like a good carpenter, good welder, a good electrician. You say whatever you want,

you'll always work. That makes a lot of sense. And I feel like you're good about You've got Like I was looking at the stuff you're We've got about a billion different projects going on. You know, you've got a book. Uh, everything reminds me of something. You've gotten numerous books. You've got you know, the Truth Yeller and Daily Wire. You've got your podcast. You've got you know a ton of things going on, which is is probably the way to do it. So that way, if one dries up, you've

got all these other projects that you're working on as well. Um, you know, I wanted to ask you. I know you're you're tight on time, so I want to be respectful of your time today. I always like to ask people, is there anything else you want to leave the audience with before we go? Most of what people are fearful of when in most facets of life, but certainly is subject we've been talking about about, you know, being canceled or ostracized or whatever. It's it's mainly just in the

ether and in your head. It doesn't really exist, you know, Like I just take a few days off of social media, it'll just cease to exist. Everyone what kind of knows that feeling of like going camping for three days and not knowing anything and it and not missing anything. So you know, Definitely speak up. Definitely speak your mind. And the only way that we're really gonna turn this thing around. We're not going to turn this thing around by you, Lisa or me or Dave Chappelle talking. Just like we

couldn't do anything with COVID lockdowns. It were all the it was all the subjects, It was all the people that willingly went along with it. It was all the people that dutifully or their masks outside and policed everyone else who didn't wear a mask outside. Those are the people who need to be turned around, who need to be converted, who need to be fit. And if we can get to those people, then we can change society.

That makes sense. I mean, it's got to be a you know, a revolution of some degree in people just rising up and not accepting it. I say that doctor, I would say that Doctor Drew all the time. Like everyone in California. When Gavin Newsom said no, no more outdoor dining, everyone should have said no, they can't police that. How could they police that. Every small business should have just said no, every every restaurant show said no. They

could never police it, and they would lift it. It would get rid of it too, even just small things like not wearing a mask, and you know, just like small bacts of rebellion against the lunacy of all of it. Oh, every every commercial flight I flew and they required you to wear a mask, I was told an average of twenty one time to pull my mask back up by

the stewardess, an average that I told. I told my son, you're wearing a mask at school, and they don't tell you to pull the mask up at least four times a day, I will be very disappointed in you. I want them to follow you around and tell you to pull your mask up. I got I don't have a car. Uh, and I got banned from lift a couple of times. Uh.

I don't know. It's we live in instine world. But it's important to laugh about it and at least try to find some sense of humor and you know, sources of happiness, because there's a lot to life besides a lot of this crazy things that we're facing. So thanks so much for joining the show, Adam, I appreciate it, my pleasure. Thanks for having so much to add of

Corolla for joining the show. You know, free speech is important to a society, and just being a free society and so it's important that we've got people like add Up and some of these other folks like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais that we're sort of unafraid and taking on some of the craziness of society and pushing back. So who's good to happen on the show, and and just appreciate what he's doing. If you enjoy the show, we're out every Monday and Thursday. Leave us a review

on Apple. If you don't mind leave us five stars, leave us a review. We appreciate it. I want to thank my producer, John Cassio for always working hard to put this together. And I want to thank you at home for listening.