WADE STOTTS | A Laugh You Can Believe In: Comedy, Culture, and the American Landscape

My name is Will Spencer, and you're listening to the renaissance of Men podcast. My guest this week is a thought leader and the host of the Wade show with Wade on canon plus and YouTube. Please welcome Wade staats. You are the Renaissance. Let's talk about obsession. No, not with your ex. You really need to let her or him go. I'm talking about obsession with a pursuit. Something you love, something you study, something your energy flows towards, no matter what you do about it.

I'm not just talking about a hobby, which is something you do in your spare time, with your spare money. Those are fine, and every man and woman should have them. I'm talking about something else, though. Something that occupies your waking thoughts, your falling asleep, imaginations, and even your dreams. Okay, maybe obsession isn't the best word for it. Maybe you'd prefer the term passion, vocation, or calling. Whatever it is.

It's the thing that you'd do if you didn't have to do anything else. Do you know what that is? Or did you know at one time? Because it's obsession that makes for excellence. It's how all the great chefs, painters, artists, entrepreneurs, engineers, poets, sourdough bakers, candlestick makers, and dog walkers became elite at what they do.

Their curiosity became their interest, became their hobby, became their pursuit, became the profession, became their obsession, either over a period of time or sometimes right away. And talking with people who have walked that road is one of my favorite things to do, in part because they can illustrate for me dimensions of the things that I enjoy that I wouldn't have considered. I think I'm not alone in that.

Appreciating men and women who have worked so hard to hone their craft that they can talk with infectious enthusiasm for hours about the thing they love. It inspires us to pursue that level of excellence in the things we do, however humble they may be. And also, if you ask me, it's just cool to see people light up as their enthusiasm illuminates whole fields of study that I'd never explored, leaving me brimming with curiosity. Which brings me to my guest this week.

His name is Wade Stotts and hes the host of the Wade show with Wade on Canon and YouTube. You may have heard of Wade because a recent video he did about the untimely death of the Constitution went viral, being featured everywhere from Alex Jones to Tim Poole. Thats right, the upper echelons of american politics were fully wade maxing a daily practice I recommend. But like all overnight successes, theres nothing overnight about it. As you'll hear in this podcast.

Wade has been studying political comedy for years, observing late night television, Weekend Update, Norm Macdonald, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and many others, while the rest of us merely watched. You might call Wade obsessed, because thankfully a jury hasn't. At least not yet. But what that means is that the way Wade articulates the things he's learned can also help lend us insight into the world of comedy and comedic writing, which surrounds us to such a degree that we take it for granted.

This is what I mean about enthusiasm illuminating a field of study. Because yes, Wade and I could have talked about the dead old constitution making a whole lot of conservatives angry as they clapped their hands, hoping to revive the rule of law as if our founding document were a dying tinkerbell. But see, right there, ive already told you all you need to know. So instead, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Wade, where he shares things you might not know and that I certainly didnt.

So we can all enjoy his enthusiasm, curiosity, and passion for comedy together. Because those kinds of conversations are my obsession. See how that all works out.

In our conversation, Wade and I discussed Jon Stewarts innovation and Stephen Colberts boring sincerity, what happens when comedy becomes self important, why Wall e is a right wing robot, how conservatives havent conserved conservatism, the essence of comedy writing, the naivete of modern christians, and calculated nastiness as winsomeness. If you enjoy the renaissance of Men podcast, thank you. Please give us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

If this is your first time here, welcome. I release new episodes about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week, and please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the host of the Wade show with Wade on Canon, Wade Staats. Wade, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast this week. So glad to be here. Thank you, Will. I've been a huge fan of your content of the Wade show for the past few months that I've been watching it for many reasons.

But one of the big reasons is because when I was still a liberal about a decade or so ago, I was a big fan of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And to see, and obviously I don't agree with any of their politics anymore at all. And I can't believe that I ever did. But to see you doing something like that today in the christian counterculture has been incredibly exciting for me. So thank you for being here. Well, thank you. I love doing it.

I have a similar sort of experience with having watched a lot of those guys. Yeah, I was a late night fiend back in the day, but, yeah, I love being able to do the wait show and, yeah. Every week, being able to tell people, yeah. Basically do a format that I really love and be able to talk about things I care about and not whatever those guys care about. Right. Yeah. Well, let's.

Let's talk about that, because there, I think there was a moment where, like, comedy, tv news, like comedy central kind of stuff actually was kind of news. Right. I mean, at least it seemed that way to me. And, or maybe I was asleep. I mean, was that what was going on? Or did they change or was I wrong? The question is, were they news? Yeah. Were they back in the day? Yeah. I mean, yes, of course they have a bias, like, setting that aside, but I don't think they're the same anymore. Right.

Well, they were definitely, that was definitely Jon Stewart's innovation in the whole late night space. So the Daily show before he took over was basically a parody of the news. And so they would do sort of goofy jokes about, like, here's a, you know, squirrel on a jet ski or whatever, and, like, just make it into, like, this is a parody of the local news, and this is our parody of the sports guy and this is our parody of that.

But what it became during Jon Stewart's tenure, and especially after, like, after Bush came into office, was a kind of point by point breakdown of some happening of that day. And so, yeah, it became a center. I think there was a survey that happened to sometime within, I think Jon Stewart was there for ten years or something. Sometime within there, there was a huge portion of young people that saw him as their top news source. They weren't getting news anywhere else.

So you could walk away from, you could walk away from a Jon Stewart segment feeling like you have digested the news of the day when really you've just listened to a ten minute comedy monologue. And so it really did, it really was going through details, but there was, yeah, the slant was always there. And Stuart and Colbert had their very different kind of paths for it.

But, yeah, that was a huge innovation in that space around, around the turn of the century for those guys because mostly late night tv was, it was topical because they have to do a show every night and the jokes are going to be, you have to have new material. You're not just going to every night, try to come up with some new observation about, like, you know, when you're eating a hot dog and you're like, whatever kind of like Seinfeld kind of thing.

So, like, the comedy had to be topical, but those guys turned it into. Yeah. Here is the way you should be thinking about the news, which puts a lot of power in their hands, and folks followed them because they were very funny and because, and so a lot of times that skill of comedy writing, which is a skill, can make you swallow the underlying premises. And so the, it's all about subtext.

And so whatever, the, if the, if the text is done skillfully and they've, they've gotten you to laugh at the people they want you to laugh at for whatever reason, then you, you go along with it. So you don't, it's, it's kind of like, it's kind of like public school.

I went to public school, but, like, it's kind of like public school where you walk away from it feeling like you've learned about World War Two or you feel like you've learned about the Civil War or you feel like you've learned about Vietnam War and you've got, like, maybe a paragraph worth of information in your head.

What you've got is a story that is very, like, again, it's sort of summarized, easy to summarize, easy to, like, spit out, but you haven't gone through and done a lot of the work, so you haven't learned how to learn. You've just kind of been handed, oh, I feel like I know a lot about x. And so you get, like people of my generation, the millennials, walking around assuming that they know quite a bit more than they actually do because that's the way they've learned how to learn.

It's just sort of give me the bullet points and I won't have to dig any further because, well, Jon Stewart summarized it for me, or I went to college, and I feel like I know a lot about history, but really it was just a process of, I don't know. Yeah, it's like instilling a certain amount of unearned confidence. And I think the entertainment does that. I think education does that.

And I hope not to do that in my show, mainly because I hope to cite my sources and force people to do work outside of my five to ten minute little excursions. But, yeah, I love the format and I love the potency of it, and I can see how potent it is to be able to change people's minds. But I also just, I mean, it's a fun, entertaining way to do the kind of communication I want to do. Well, actually, I want to come back to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for in a minute.

But since you mentioned it, I'm curious about what does go into producing your monologues, because I can feel it now, as you articulate, this is what I create and the ethic behind what I create. You're not just trying to pre digest information and hand it to people so that they believe it in terms of, you just accept this unearned confidence, as you said, in information you have no background in, like, oh, well, Jon Stewart said it, so therefore, it must be true.

Versus the idea that citing your sources or putting forth something that isn't necessarily designed to tell people how to think, it's designed to make them think. Is that about right? Yeah. Yeah. And my hope is, like, as far as what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would do, they would make a, they would do a joke and make you dislike Rand Paul because his hair was weird, you know, so, like, you find. I find myself every time I see Rand Paul on the tv because, oh, I watch this.

There are still jokes from Stephen Colbert that stick in my head where, like, I think there's one particular joke about a, somebody had, like, a half of a percent in polling and, or, and then it said, like, or as they know, in the poll, as they call it in the polling world, one Santorum. And I was like, that's a great, that's a great joke. And it's. And, like, it always, like Rick Santorum. No, I like the Rick Santorum.

So it's no knock on him, but I always have that in my head as, like, a little bit of a, like, I don't know, like a mini denigration of this guy that I actually do respect. But, but anyway, I think there's, there's, there's a, there's a potency in it. And so, like, like you said, what, what I try to do is, yeah, push people, but also, like, encourage people who are already kind of suspecting something.

So I think the videos that have done the best on the channel have been typically ones that you may sort of. That have the common factor of you've probably been feeling a kind of cloud of x that sort of feels like a big cloud of undefined anxiety about x topic. Well, here's a case that might provide some clarity for that cloud so that somebody out there might be able to go, oh, that's it. That's the thing I've been saying. But I haven't had, haven't exactly had words for it.

I've heard Pastor Wilson, Pastor Doug Wilson talk about his ideal audience is a young man, a young reformed man in a church who doesn't have words to describe the chaos he seems around him. And then when he reads Doug, for him to go, that's it. That's what I've been seeing. And so I've got a similar kind of presentation thing. And so a lot of that is just trying to clarify things that seem unclear.

And so we've got, yeah, I've admired a lot of folks who've been able to do that kind of translation work, but honestly, like, along with that the whole time, I want it to be entertaining. So the, in one sense, I see it as like, oh, I want to clarify. It's stuff I care about, so I want to talk about it. And it also, so in one sense, it helps me get my thinking straight on some particular issue because I've said it before that, like, I've heard it many, many times, but writing is thinking.

So when I'm writing my thing, it's me just trying to explain it to myself. And if I can get me on the page, then I'm pretty good. If I can explain it to where I can understand it, then hopefully other folks can come along and grab on as well. But, yeah, that's the kind of encouraging side and the entertaining side. I want it to be something that's pleasant to watch no matter what the topic is. We get into some pretty depressing, sad kind of stuff on the show.

I'm talking bad about the late night guys, but they actually do a pretty decent job of that. If they're going somewhere that they think of as dark and they're going to make a case that I'm going to disagree with. But they go there and they go in a dark place and they're like, we can still have our humanity intact even as we go into a dark, weird place. Comedy is really great for that. Some of the best stand ups can pull you along.

They can do that in a subversive way, or they can do that in a positive way and pull you along and try to make a point that you wouldn't have agreed with otherwise. Start by pulling you in, getting you to trust them, and then saying, hey, we can still have fun here. We're still having fun in this uncomfortable, weird spot. So that's, that's the thinking behind what I'm doing.

But hopefully, hopefully if people watch it, they don't have to, you know, really, like, dissect what my thought is behind it. But that's, that is what it is kind of behind the scenes. I remember before Stephen Colbert became a late night guy, when he was sort of Jon Stewart's the companion show, and he was kind of doing a character like a skit. He was doing like a Fox News kind of character, right.

And so a lot of people probably might not remember pre Covid Stephen Colbert or pre network television Stephen Colbert. He was a completely different. He was a completely different guy. And so the gag between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert was like MSNBC and Fox News. And there was a way in which it was really entertaining to engage with that. Yes, of course. Hard, liberal slant, caricaturizations, all of that.

But I felt like I walked away at least entertained, and now it feels like there's a lot less of that entertainment that's happening now. It feels like I'm going to lead with the slant, and then if you happen to laugh, cool, but I'll take some applause instead. Yeah. Well, it turned out that Stephen Colbert sincere is really boring, just like a really boring guy. He may have all the same talents.

He may be able to do all the same little, like, cool funny motions or do the voices and all that kind of stuff, but, like, without that layer of irony, he just doesn't have much going on. And I liked the old show. I thought it was really well done. The idea that somebody could do a character for ten years, every night for 30 minutes, and stick to it was amazing. Like an amazing feat of entertainment. And so, yeah, like, it goes back into the. Like, the skill.

There really has been a change in recent years, and I think the Colbert change was much more of a. Was. Was, in a lot of ways, a format change in that he had to drop one of the things that made the show funny. So if. Even if he were expressing his sincere and dumb opinion about something, it was always, he was expressing it the opposite way, which automatically turned everything into a joke so that it had one.

Like, if there was a funny joke, then the layer of irony on top of it made it a double funny joke. And so the more layers of that, the funnier he's gonna come off being. But if you take off that layer of irony, you get less. And then each one of those jokes gets evaluated based on its own merits and not through the character filter. So I think that has a lot to do with it. There was also a huge. I mean, you talked about pre network Colbert.

He was such a. He came on to network tv around the same time that a lot of other shows changed hands. And so this was all, like, 2014, 2015, where, like, Seth Meyers got a show and Seth Meyers is very much, like, straight to camera. Here's my opinion. Jokes, you know, weaved into it. And before, like, I. When I think of late night, when I think of the 1230 NBC slot, I think of Conan O'Brien, and which is a very different show.

Not the kind of, like, again, sincere political, like, begging the audience to take the Trump trial seriously or whatever, but it was, like, much more silly, goofy people in horse costumes. And that was. That's. That's my, like, I love that era of late night, but, yeah, like. And then Letterman left. Conan was still doing his thing on TBS. Craig Ferguson left at the end of 2014. So a lot of these guys who were less political passed off the shows around the time when the world got more political.

And so it's odd that it happened at the same time that. That these shows were handed to more political people as, I mean, as, like, negative world started. So, like, Aaron Rin's negative world, 2015, Obergefell, that's about the time that Letterman left his show and about the time that Colbert took it over and about the time, like, all these other late night shows were happening.

So when we think back on a period of late night that I liked a lot, we typically think about a time that is basically neutral world in Aaron Wren's scheme. But, yeah, so I think there's part of it was late night itself and these people and the talent, but a lot of them were also following. So Colbert changed into the sincere character away from the Fox News character around that same time. And I think, yeah, for some reason, that's fascinating to me.

And late night itself losing a lot of its prominence, but also becoming much more shrill, much more preachy around the time everybody else did. So you can say Trump did it, but it was also that all of the pieces were on the board before Trump came in as a political figure. So they did a year of Seth Meyers on NBC before this whole thing came out. And then now, of course, everything is about Trump, so he becomes the face of, oh, Trump must have changed late night, but it was.

It was these guys who didn't really have anything until Trump came along. So they were all like, they're all making a show for a year, trying to figure out what they are, and then all of a sudden, hey, now, I know it's gonna be this. It's gonna be the orange guy. But, yeah, I'm getting off on a hugely. This is great because I love this stuff.

No, this is great because one of the things that we all live in every day is we live in a world of television comedy, but it's one of those things that it's kind of opaque. The art of comedy, you might say, the science of comedy, the people behind the scenes, how it all comes together, is something that's invisible to a lot of people.

We consume the product of it, of writing staffs and teams and decades long careers, but we don't ever see how the sausage get made, because if you look at it, it makes the jokes not funny. So this kind of stuff really helps surface a whole world that most of us will never get a chance to experience. So, by all means, please, go crazy. I am. That's what I'm doing. Yeah, man.

Okay, so what seems clear is that something happened to late night tv that was the same as what happened to cable news is during 2013, 1415. It's like, who are we? 16? Who are we? What are we about? Does anyone care? Do they need this much news content in their lives? And then Trump came in. It's like, now we're going to talk about Trump all wall to wall all the time, right? And it sounds like the same was true for late night comedy as well. Like, who are we? What are we doing?

Trump gives us all something to talk about. So I guess the question then is, like, would Trump have been, and I mean this, like, as big a deal negatively if there hadn't been this entire class of people that were invested in making him a negative big deal, to make themselves a big deal in response? Does that make sense? Yeah, no, that's a good question. I think there's, it's, it is a fascinating, like, study of their estimation of him.

And also it, like, we realized at that point that these shows became extensions of the news networks because they were all hated the same thing. And so it wasn't jokes about the Kardashians or whatever anymore. It was all, like, explicitly, like, this is White House. We're talking about the White House, constantly talking about presidential politics, because that's where the threat was. But, yeah, the, you could see the kind of the rabid hatred slowly turn them into unfunny people in the same.

Edwin Friedman. I love Edwin Friedman, but he talks about how you can gauge the anxiety level of a society or of a family or of anything like that based on its capacity to be playful. So that playfulness and anxiety are like a seesaw effect where you don't, you can't. If you are anxious, then you're gonna be less fun. And if you're fun, then that actually chases away quite a bit of anxiety. And so you see that with tv, the funny goes out, whereas I think, yeah, so it's kind of this.

You can see during, like, the Obama years, these guys basically felt safe. And so any of the political jokes didn't have to be very high stakes. It wasn't. None of them saw themselves as saving the country or fighting satan, whereas what they saw themselves then as doing, they felt, we are now on the front lines. And as soon as comedy becomes, I've talked in this interview about how potent I think it is and how potent I think, making funny stuff is.

But as soon as comedy becomes self important, then I think it's a way gone. Like, it just goes out the door.

And so I think, yeah, I think, like, Colbert and Kimmel and those guys way overestimate the, I don't know, their own effectiveness or their own power in being able to do this stuff when really what they're doing is just relaying all the opinions of the people who are more powerful than they are because they feel like they, there's always the, like, punching up aspect of comedy where you want to, like, you want to be the rebel, you want to be the guy in the back of the class.

You want to be the jester who can make fun of the king or whatever, and that's, like, that's what people think of themselves as being. But what they're actually doing is just fighting the, like, person that's getting everything taken away from him.

So, like, they're, they're laughing hard at a guy who's, like, who ran for president and for all his, like, all his trouble, got, like, prosecuted for years and now is getting, like, you know, could get thrown in jail, but, like, they're, they're beating down a guy who's actually below them in the societal hierarchy, but that helps them hold onto their jobs, and they still get to feel transgressive. They still get to feel like, oh, I'm the punk rock guy because I'm fighting Trump.

He was the president. He was, he has a lot of power, but not, he's was, yeah, he's not really the guy in charge of everything. So, yeah, it's fascinating to, like, think of the psychology of these people who come out every day, every night, and are you? I don't know. They think they're doing one thing when they're doing something else. And most of the country is understanding that they're not. Yeah. Is understanding that the actual reality instead of whatever is going on in their.

Head, that's so interesting, because you're right. Like, how can they possibly conceive of themselves as the comedic underdogs, right, when you represent the regime? I'd never really thought of it that way before. It's like, how can you possibly consider yourself an underdog? You are literally the empire. Yeah, yeah. Well, and if they weren't, if they actually did anything to risk their careers, then, yeah, they would lose all their advertising money.

If they did something that was really transgressive to the culture that they were living in, then, yeah, they wouldn't have their jobs. But for some reason, yeah, that cognitive dissonance of I am on the cutting edge of fighting comedy, but actually also, all of my opinions are the same opinions of every major pharma company and the same opinions of NBCUniversal all the way to the top. And, you know, I have my complaints about Letterman. I used to watch Letterman every day. Huge Letterman fan.

I've made complaints about him. But what was great about him is whatever network he was on, he would always make fun of the network. He would make fun of the tv shows that were on the network. He would make fun of the executives by name on the show. So, like, when he was on NBC, he would, like, talk bad about NBC and how lame it was when some new company bought NBC from RCA, he was like, he would make fun of the idea that they were, yeah.

So it was just, it was like, it was actually like, to a point where there was some amount of risk involved and he ended up, like, leaving NBC because of the tension that it created while he was there. But, yeah, these guys still have jobs. They're not in any danger. And they get to, yeah, just kind of, I don't know, break in their millions of dollars and still think like, oh, yeah, this is, we're, we're fighting the system.

But, yeah, they're totally, totally embedded in it and, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, those, those, yeah, like I said, the psychology of that person is fascinating to me.

So maybe, maybe what we can do is we can talk a little bit then about David Letterman and Jay Leno and Johnny Carson and some of this, some of this era of comedy that preceded where we're at now, because I think there are a lot of people who really just started paying attention to comedy in the post Trump era when comedy stopped being funny and started being overtly political. But there was a whole shame. It is.

Yeah, but there was a whole era where comedians were actually funny, even the political ones like George Carlin, nakedly political comic. But at least he would make you laugh. He made me laugh. And, of course, and there were pre political comics as well, so maybe we could talk about some of those. Some of those and remind people of the good old days, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, my favorite stand up will always be Norm Macdonald.

And it was mainly because I think he, like, had a good head on his shoulders, knew how to make a. And knew how to, like, tell the truth in a really brutal way, but also to not be. He. He was, he was a guy who understood. I watched. There was a great interview of Norm where he's talking to his sister in law on canadian television. His sister in law was a canadian television presenter, and she says something about, will you ever make a Trump joke?

Or will you ever do Trump humor or stuff like that? He was talking about how it's kind of easy. And what he said is that Trump is often, when he's being ridiculous, he's often doing self parody. And that when you start doing. When you start parodying self parody, then you look like an idiot. And so that's like, that was the most succinct way to describe exactly the problem that was going on around him. But he saw that and it's just bad comedy.

So he was making a judgment about, oh, your instincts are bad. You're following the wrong path on how to make a good joke. If you want to hit somebody, hit them for real things. And not like, when Trump is being bombastic, because that's like a joke. Like, when he's, when he's talking about himself in the third person or doing something goofy like that. Why make fun of somebody who's making fun of himself? Or at least is like, again, doing self parody.

But, yeah, Norm was always great, and Norm did get political, but it was usually just sort of like, cutting through the crap kind of political. So that when it. So that, like, the. His whole OJ saga of him on Saturday Night Live, he was, he was, he was the weekend update guy when OJ was going through the trial, when the verdict was handed down, and he did not let up. And it wasn't, it wasn't like presidential politics in the same way, but it was.

It was an actual, like, huge political force in America that wanted people to say, no matter what, that OJ should get off, even if he did it. Or like, there was actually quite a bit of pressure from the network and quite a bit of pressure from just generally the culture you don't want. Like, people were calling him racist, people were doing all sorts of things. And Don Olmeier who was the president of NBC at the time, was close friends with OJ.

And so he had every incentive to stop making those jokes, but he didn't. And Jim Downey, who was the writer there at the time, the head writer of Weekend Update, they were going to fire Jim Downey. They were going to fire the head writer and leave Norm on because they didn't want to lose him because he was successful and good. And so they were going to blame it all on the head writer. And Norm said, no, if Jim's not here, then I'm not here. So they fired him both.

And so you have a guy with a lot to lose and ends up losing it because he did his job, and doing his job meant making fun of actual powerful people and just saying true things. There was a great norm, when the verdict was handed down, that he was not guilty, that OJ was not guilty, Norm came on and just said, well, everyone. Well, ladies and gentlemen, murder is legal in the state of California. And that was like, again, just cut through everything. It was well crafted.

And that was the case with a lot of his OJ jokes and his other kinds of jokes. You can find huge compilations of his really politically incorrect stuff, which wasn't popular at the time. So political correctness has been around for a long time, and he had, again, every cultural reason to stop doing what he was doing to be safe. Political correctness wasn't to the point that it is now. So he was still able to say it on there, but he had plenty of pressure.

So, yeah, Norm will always have a place in my heart, not just because of the courage. It feels strange to say the word courage when you're talking about a nightclub comic, but he actually was just gonna say the thing that he thought and also just the skill. Everybody, everybody in comedy will acknowledge Norm MacDonald. Best stand up like he, or at least like, among the greats. So anyway, I have loads of respect for him, and I think he was. I think it's obvious that he was a secret right winger.

He was a Christian. And I, like I said, just very, very cool guy, rough guy. So if any of your listeners don't listen to it with your kids in the room or whatever, but, yeah, it's worth going down that rabbit hole. He's. Yeah, he. The best. The best. Makes me think of Dennis Miller. Dennis Miller did weekend update guy when I was a kid, and I loved the Dennis Miller. Like, what's a, you know, what's a kid doing enjoying Dennis Miller? But there was something about the way that he put it.

It was just he had this. He had this style, and then he disappeared. Like Dennis Miller is. He's vanished from the stage. I don't know. Is he around? Does he still do comedy at all or he. He does a radio show or. I think he used to do a radio show. I wish. I wish I knew exactly was doing right now, but for a long time, he did a radio show, and then that transitioned into a podcast. But he's like, he's very talented. Like, and on. He was. He was update before norm was, and then.

And then Kevin Nealon was after. But, yeah, like, Dennis Miller. Yeah. Is like, kind of fox News conservative guy, like, and got kind of exiled into that, where he would do, like, weekly spots on the bill O'Reilly show after all. Wow. Yeah. And that's where I found out about Dennis Miller. My dad watched Bill O'Reilly every night, and I would watch when Miller time came on. So when it was, they always had a Dennis Miller segment, and Dennis had some, like, prepped punchlines.

I didn't understand any one of them, but it was, like, the most opaque references. But, yeah, that's Dennis. And what I love about Dennis. Dennis, if you listen to him talk about how to write a joke or how he's processed for everything, I've heard him say something about rhythm jokes where it doesn't have to really make sense. He just needed to get somewhere. He needed to get off of the topic to get somewhere else. And so he's like, so that's kind of a rhythm joke.

I love that category of, like, oh, I didn't have. I didn't know how to transition out of this, so I just kind of went, ba ba da ba ba ba, and then we're out. But, yeah, his. His. Dennis Miller has, like, a musicality to him that is just so fun to listen to. No matter, even if you don't understand exactly what's going on, you want to laugh and you want to understand it, which is. Yeah, like, any kind of comedy that can, like, make you sit up and go like, oh, I wish I got that. I think that's.

That's an achievement. And you get that with a, like, you got that with a lot of jewish stand ups where they would use, like, they would use yiddish terms in their jokes. And so you had a lot of people sitting up and going like, I wish I knew even what that meant. And so, like, people would try to, like, even understand. But, yeah, I think that's always. I don't know. I think that's an achievement where you, like, where at some level somebody wants to even get your little in jokes.

Yeah. I think it's making me realize I hadn't actually put these pieces together. But the history of topical news comedy goes much further back than I had realized because you have this lineage of weekend update going all the way back to 1970s Saturday Night Live, which, of course, is legendary, I think Jim Belushi, Jane, you ignorant slut, and all that. And you roll that forward all the way to some of the late night guys.

But then also you had, like, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, this whole big tradition that they, that these guys have inherited now almost feels like they're squandering it. Right? They're wasting it in a way. Yeah. Well, like, back in the day, like, back in late night or back in, like, the Saturday Night Live weekend update stuff, there was always set up punchlines, and it wasn't, nobody was trying to figure out what the beliefs of the anchor were of weekend update.

It was always just about, like. And they weren't putting those on display quite as much. And they were, I mean, all the bias was there, but it wasn't about that. It wasn't. It was just like everybody was speaking from their, like, admittedly terrible worldview and admittedly terrible way of thinking about the world. But once in a while, they would land on something true. And when they did, man, that really hit.

And you could admire the, like, skill that it took to get there, even if you disagreed with the, like, underlying subtext of everything going on. But, yeah, there was none of the guys got into it for, I don't know. They didn't get into it to express their political opinions. And I don't think even Colbert did. I think Colbert was a guy who wanted to get into comedy and then ended up getting into political comedy. And then now is a voice for a particular political persuasion.

But now, I mean, we talked about Jon Stewart earlier. Jon Stewart began the really started enhancing the research departments of his late night show. Interesting. His research department just became huge. And they were the ones Jon Stewart became famous for. These montages of clips where back in the day, before you could search all this stuff online, they would tape every cable news network and, like, find, oh, I think I saw somebody say this at CNN, on CNN at 08:00 a.m. oh, cool.

We'll scrub through our tapes. So they had, like, tapes recording each one of these huge research staffs trying to grab all these clips, writing all these, all these things. And so these research teams then became a huge part of turning it in. So, like, there were no research teams on, like, most of these late night shows. And if they were, there was a research team that would have just go out and try to find setups. So they would. They would go like, here.

Here are 20 things that happened today. Can we find one setup, 100 setups? Give me punch, like, and write a bunch of punchlines for those. We'll weed it down and we'll turn it into something. But now, yeah, late night before was, like, one setup, one punchline, one setup, one punchline. Maybe, like, three at tops as to how many punch lines per setup. But, yeah, Jon Stewart was the guy who transitioned late night from being something that was.

That turned into something that was one topic for ten minutes or eight minutes, whereas a real breakdown. And that's more of what I'm doing. So I'm making fun of him and making fun of the transition, but that's really the kind of animating force of what I'm doing as well. So, yeah, it was a time where, like, everybody who got into Saturday Night Live back in the seventies was from National Lampoon, and they were people who were Harvard Lampoon people, and it was just guys who wanted to perform.

There were guys who wanted to write comedy. That was it. So they were confused about the world, and that showed up. But you could, like, when you walked away from it, you were trying to figure out if it was funny or not, and that was the arbiter. Like, that was the standard everybody used. Whereas now. Yeah, now we've. It's always been easier. Everybody's always had the card to play. Like, oh, I'll just say something everybody agree with, and then everybody will clap.

For me, it's not something brand new, but it is something that everybody's leaning on now, so that you're not necessarily depending on the craft of somebody trying to put something together, but, like, oh, you know, Colbert said something bad about unvaccinated people, you know, all right, yay. I'll clap. Yeah. So it's always been there. And, like, that was. Norm talked about that in his memoir, which not really a memoir. It's the kind of memoir where he dies and meets God halfway through.

It's a weird little thing, but in his memory, he does talk about a weekend update. People were. There was a time where they wanted, like, yeah, somebody just said, like, we're never gonna go for applause. If we have a choice, we're never gonna go for it. And Jim Downey talked about Norm, that Norm was always the guy who, if the joke got a huge laugh, but he didn't feel good about it. He would always cut it. He's like, I don't like that joke. I don't like that laugh. I don't.

Even if it was a huge one and it was like, everybody would love it, he's like, I don't want that one. I don't want that laugh. And it doesn't seem like that's, that's not, I mean, when you have, when you're very talented like norm is, and when you're, when you have a ton of writers like Norm, like the weekend update crew did, then they were able to turn down stuff and then just sub in something else. I would rather like, they would rather get a laugh.

They believed in laugh for a joke that they liked than a cheap laugh for a joke that they were like, ah, it's, I don't know. I don't know. Like I said, cheap. I don't want to, they didn't want those cheap laughs, which I liked. I liked those guys.

Yeah. They wanted to edify and inspire, and they didn't want to be maybe bitter or shrill or there's a way in which, like, speaking truth to power has a necessarily combative kind of quality to it, but you don't want the audience to walk away feeling ugly as a result of it. Right. And as a comedian with the ability to kind of, it's a form of, I don't want to. Hypnosis isn't the word, but I can't think of a better word at the moment.

You want to handle that responsibility lightly because you can really shape people with comedy. Totally. And, I mean, back to the point about playfulness, there's a certain kind of humor that really can't be done now that when you watch back to Saturday Night Live in the nineties, back to Jim Downeye, I feel like I'm just talking about all my little weird pet things that I like. No, this is, but back to Jim Downey. He did a great sketch called Change bank.

And if anybody hasn't seen the change bank sketch by Jim Downey on Saturday Night Live, it's brilliant. And it's just silly. Put it in the show notes. There we go. Please, please go watch it. But it's just silly. And it is not. Nobody's trying to. It's nothing. It was, you watch it and you go, the reason it couldn't be made now. And it's not like blazing saddles can be made now. It's not like, oh, this is too offensive. It's just like, it's the kind of place that your mind doesn't go.

If you're anxious all the time, and if you're scared that, like, fascism is gonna take over America tomorrow, then you're not gonna sit around and go like, oh, I have this, like, silly idea for a change bank sketch. But, yeah, like, the kind of movies that couldn't be made now. Like, people talk about that a lot where it's like, oh, I wish. Yeah, blazing saddles could be made. Or, like, tropic thunder or whatever. Airplane. Airplane, yeah.

Like, when people have those examples, they tend to be because they're too offensive or, like, too politically incorrect. And that annoys me too. It annoys me that, like, the politically correct stuff, like, is a hindrance to creativity, but anxiety is a huge hindrance to creativity. And so, like, silly stuff can't make it. And, like, if Conan were making his show from the nineties now, it wouldn't be near anxious enough.

It wouldn't be near, like, abrasive enough, because we're just in a different time. And I, at some level, wish that, like, there was an opportunity to make stuff and people were still doing that because I loved it. I was such a fan of it. But we still have those, you know, we still have the YouTube clips, and you're, it's in the show notes. So everybody go watch Exchange bank. But, yeah, we still have them.

And, yeah, what I want, obviously, I want a healthy society for lots of reasons, and for us to be on the same page about a lot of things for a lot of reasons. But one is, it just opens people up in a huge way. So, obviously, a personal psychology, you can escape that. You can escape the anxiety that's around you constantly, individually. And you can do that in maybe, like, a small crowd of people that are, oh, these are the people I talk to, and they're not anxious.

And so you can be more creative, and you can make more cool stuff. But generally, the vibe of our culture right now is not one that's really conducive to people just kind of letting their minds go to a really funny place. It's not good for creativity. And I think that's as much to blame as political correctness as such for, like, the lack of creativity and where late night goes. And I think where Hollywood goes, comedy, generally, people can.

Comedy movies are things that people aren't really making now because it feels frivolous, because the world's gonna end. And why would we, why would we make, I don't know why would we make a $4 million comedy movie when fascism's gonna take over America tomorrow? But, yeah, I think that's a problem, and I think I want societal health for lots of reasons. One of them is the comedy is going to be way better and the narratives are going to be way better.

People are going to be writing and working hard. That's funny that you say that, because it speaks to something that I couldn't put words to, which is sort of, yes, let's get our product in. Everyone, like and subscribe. Wade show with Wade and reformation coffee. Sub free sub free reformationcoffee.com comma, sub free one free twelve ounce bag of coffee. So good. Exactly. So I've noticed the same phenomenon in music. It's almost like, can we just be free to listen to music these days?

Or does everything have to be political? Like, can we let go of the world for 30 seconds to just enjoy something? Or does everything always have to be like, the world's going to end? Yeah, well, music is totally that. And it's just. It's just a symptom of the broader, like, politicization of everything. So when, when everything gets politicized, that means that everywhere is a fight. And so, like, you can't really go. There are very few places you can go where it's not a battleground.

And that's an exhausting place to live. Like, that's an exhausting place to be. And so, so, like, the pop music that's out now, then everybody's trying to figure out all the evil things in the new Taylor Swift album, and I'm sure there are plenty. I haven't listened to it, but because the culture war stuff is real, actually, there are some gross things that are happening in the culture, then anything that comes out is at some level participating in that. I don't believe in moral neutrality.

I don't believe in institutional neutrality or anything like that, but I do believe in the kind of institutions where everybody's on the same page. So, like, I believe in, like, unified institutions and, like, people who are trying to make stuff out of the same kind of worldview. And that seems to be something that, I don't know, that's a way forward, is not. It's not. Let's get back to neutral, but let's get back to, like, good.

Let's try to make something good and get everybody on the same page, and then we can all kind of work with the same assumptions. But, like, yeah, because, yeah, music, comedy, movies, entertainment is. Yeah. Is politicized because everything is, and we all kind of have been aware that things have become battlegrounds when we didn't realize that they were battlegrounds before. It's just that now we're kind of losing them.

And so, like, at the time when we've basically lost all these places, then we realized, like, this is kind of, they've, the enemies planted their flag and said, like, this is ours. Then we realized, only then do we realize, oh, we're at the end of the battle. And I think that's sad. It's like, it's not something I often think about. Like, people like Jim Downey, who was, I don't agree with him on everything, but he was a, like, conservative guy. He would write for some conservative magazines.

He would show up on the Dennis Miller show and come in and do, like, political stuff. And so he was a guy, and he was head writer of Saturday Night Live for years. And I think about that guy. And, like, that guy, no matter how talented Jim Downey is, he's not getting into Saturday Night Live because, well, that's a battleground. And even if he got like, four jokes on every week, it would still be like, well, the show itself is like, hates him.

And so it wouldn't like Jim Downey if Jim Downey couldn't get a job there. And it's not because he's too, it probably is like, private thoughts, politically correct, because the jokes, again, like, nobody watches change bank and goes like, get this right winger out of here. But, like, when, but he was just very talented. And if it were any worse, if he were any less talented than he wouldn't have made it. But, yeah, because it's a battleground.

We're, like, kicking out a lot of talent and we're not, I don't know. It's in a bad way for lots of reasons. But one of them. Yeah. Is that anxiety and the kind of, I don't know, there's the hopelessness and the fighting and the pugnacious attitude that a lot of people have. Yeah. There aren't very many culture. There used to be some cultural points where you could go and maybe get away from that for a second, but sadly, not so much anymore unless you have a pretty robust community.

So let's shift this then to sort of talk about what you're doing with the Wade show, because I agree with you that there's no such thing as neutrality. But I think that there was a time where christians were willing to look at various cultural outlets in America and say, okay, Saturday Night Live is not christian but at least they're not coming after us, right?

And now with everything becoming hyper politicized with Christians being in crosshairs now, it's like, well, we didn't want to have to do this, but now we're going to do this. Okay. If we're going to turn Christian, if we're going to turn comedy into a battleground over, I guess, religion or religious informed values, then let's go there. And that's sort of what you've stepped into. Well, I hope so. And I think there's maybe not overtly. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I hope that what I'm able to do is do something that makes sense now, because even though I wish that I could write stuff like change bank from a skill level, I'll never be as good as Jim Downey. But I love that the era that you could be a little more frivolous and silly and, like, the joke was the joke. But, yeah, what I hope to do with the show is to try to make something that is recognizes that we're in a hyper politicized age, and nothing can really stay entirely out of that.

And so even jokes from the nineties where you watch these stand ups and they're talking about, like, you know, men are like this and women are like this, you're like, oh, that sounds subversive. That sounds like if somebody did that. Yeah, if somebody did that now, then it would, yeah, it would be categorized as, like, right wing comedy when Bill Burr basically. Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of that with Bill Burr. And, yeah, Bill Burr is a funny case study.

But, yeah, what I hope to do with this show is, yeah, recognize we're in a political time. My show's gonna be political. And not everything has to be about presidential politics or about elections or whatever, but, like, hey, if this is what it's gonna, if this is the kind of fight we're in, then, yeah, I'm happy to do that.

And hopefully bringing some of that, the love of the comedy and the love of that history with it so that it's not just like, I think there are some, what I don't want to do is like, I'm a right wing, hyper political guy, and so I got to figure out how to put some, like, comedy sprinkles on that. So my hope is to try to do the thing that comedians are doing and do it from my own perspective. So you actually brought up a question.

That I wanted to ask, which was, so you're in this tradition of topical political comedy in an age of anxiety. And that's the need. That's the moment. That's, I guess, in a sense, an open door. But you said that you would like to do more change bank style comedy, sort of, if you could. Now, I've never seen change bank, but I'm familiar with the kind of comedy. Like, this is just about laughing and having a good time. Like, a good example is like, the movie misses. Doubtfire comes to mind.

Like, yes, of course you could use that movie to make all kinds of hyper political points about all this stuff, but really, can we just laugh our way through this film? It doesn't have to be this way. But then there's also this category of stuff that it's just fun, and let's laugh for the sake of laughing. Yeah, well, I've been surprised. I mean, you look back at, like, I. One of my kids favorite movies is Wall E, the Pixar movie. Yeah. You watch it now, and that's. That's.

Yeah, it's like, it's. You watch it and you realize this is kind of right wing. Like, this is kind of like. You're like. But. But it's. It only is because, like, every other. Every other, like, version of it, every other way of thinking about it, like, every other way of thinking about these issues is, like, totally gone now. And so, like, you couldn't. You couldn't say that. Excuse me. Excuse me. But the, like.

But Wall E itself is something that fit there, because it was kind of reasserting normalcy at some level. It was just kind of like a portrayal of normalcy, and it actually, like, yeah, just this kind of, like a guy who's supposed to be cleaning up things, and, like, the entire resolution of the movie is a guy, like, turning the ship off of autopilot and just being like, no, I'm the captain of the ship, and I'm gonna take it back down, and we're gonna retake Earth. It's like, oh, dude.

Like, yeah. Like, we ruined the planet, and we, like, ran away from it, and we're all fat and watching our screens, and now we're gonna take it back, and we're gonna be human, and we're gonna walk around and not sit in our chairs. It's like, yeah, dude, that's. Yeah, let's wall e. The right wing, you know, propaganda. But, like, right wing robot. Yeah, Wally the right wing robot. But, like, what I. What I love about that, though, is it doesn't. It's nothing. It doesn't talk about anything.

It's just a, again, reassertion of normalcy done by very talented people. So Andrew Stanton directed it. Ben Burtt was the sound designer on it. It's extremely well done. It's Pixar. They're gonna make it good. But I think sometimes when people back in the day would make what I would call right wing art, it came out in 2007 or 2008, but, like, I would call that a right wing movie. But what they were doing was just speaking normally.

It was the kind of dystopia that was just like, oh, I actually just love the planet. And it seems like we're being lazy, and it seems like we're, like, messing up our world. And so, like, maybe we should, like, stop being lazy and take it back and start, like, you know, again reasserting humanity, reasserting a man and a woman, even though they're, again, male and female robots.

But, like, there's, it's, again, the kind of right wing art that's not overtly, like, talking about civil war or doing some kind of, like, particular, I don't know. It's something that could be done and something that has been done, but it's making its case. And it didn't feel at the time like somebody made fascist art or whatever. Nobody, like, calls Wally fascist or whatever, but it was, yeah.

Again, the reassertion of normalcy, I think, is enough, especially if you're telling a story and if you're making a joke that is, that, like, can at some level feel just like a silly joke. At some level, there's something assumed there. So, like, if you, if there's a healthy foundation of life and, like, what men and women are like or whatever, then you can make what feels like just a kind of anodyne observation turn into something very funny.

Like, again, the observational comics back in the day would, but, yeah, because we're afraid to go places and also because we don't really even know. Again, we're so torn up about what's possible to even joke about, then, yeah, why would we joke in such a tough time? It's almost like learning in wartime. Have you read that CS Lewis essay? Anyway, it's a great point about where he's talking to, I believe, undergrads during World War Two. And it's just talking about the, it's great.

But he's talking to them about, like, there's a war on. And the best thing for you to do is to be right here and doing this because we have to have something, and we have to have, like, once the war is over, then we have to have something that we're, we have to have a society that we're still building.

And, I mean, England was basically crushed after the war, but the fact that there were still people after that could continue to build lives was the result of people actually just trying to live life, trying to, like, they're out there protecting something, and we have to, like, we have to have it in order to, for that to be worth anything. At least that was his argument in the essay. But I thought, I thought, I think I, it's related to that.

I think there's a sense that people like, why would we do anything so frivolous during wartime? I was like, well, we might as like nothing. You know, I've used the example constantly of Robin Hood where it's like there's a certain amount of, like, fighting that he does, and it's not an anxious fighting. You admire him for his clarity of mind. He knows that, you know, Prince John is not the rightful king. He knows that King Richard is going to come back someday.

But he also knows that in the meantime, I'm living out in the woods and I'm, and I've got my buddies with me, and we're going to keep, like, sticking it to Prince John. That's, that's, and like, so he's, he's not, he's not the kind of guy who is sitting around, like, whining about it. He's just like, things are really bad. Robin Hood's going to have a great time. And it's, and he's, he's the guy who, with the, with the, like, the spirit of it is much more fun, even though things are really ugly.

And that, to know that that's possible, it requires just a wild amount of psychological health that I don't think many people have. And so, like, even having heroes like Robin Hood just shows us, hey, we can actually do stuff like music.

We can sit down and learn how to play the guitar, or we can sit down and learn how to play the piano, even though that doesn't feel like, oh, it's, well, there's this guy out here and he's on the news, or he's the guy who's in politics or whatever, and so he's doing the real fight. But there's something we have to be able to preserve something. There are people out there fighting. They're on the front lines of whatever culture war, political war.

But what they want when their fighting is done is for there to be a society left that is worth preserving, so why destroy the thing that they're fighting for? Okay, so you said a wild amount of psychological health, and you talked about a couple different things. A wild amount of psychological health that one has to possess during wartime. And I think the question that raises for me is, I think that there are people who haven't yet acknowledged what time it is. Right.

You mentioned this in your constitution video. Like, no, it is wartime. And so in order to properly relate to the moment, you have to be able to perceive it as wartime, and then you have to go through that whole journey to have psychological health, to be able to laugh again. But people won't even take that first step to recognize that we are a war. There's this resistance to acknowledging the uniqueness of the moment. Well, yeah, and I think that there's.

People know themselves at some level, and they go, well, if I believed that, then I would lose all hope. So with. With the Constitution is dead video, then I think a lot of people reacted negligently to that because they've always thought of the Constitution as their secret weapon. And so if. If the constitution's dead, then I got nothing. And so, like. And I don't. I don't agree. I don't think that that's the.

Like, I think there are plenty of things to love about America and plenty of reasons to be patriotic, even if we don't live under that order anymore, that constitutional order anymore. But they've thought of that document, again, as the thing that they can use to fight back.

But if they can face that and if, you know, hey, I can get through this on the other end, and it's gonna be fine, and at least I'm gonna be okay, and I'm gonna try to figure out how to make sure my family's okay, then that's where you gotta go. So, yeah, if you can't, I mean, we've got the leadership and emotional sabotage book here, and I get.

I'm a big Edwin Freeman fan, but his concept of being well differentiated is not like, if you're having to lead through a really messy situation, then it really will do you no good to not acknowledge the severity of the situation. But once you've acknowledged it, then you can see it as something outside of yourself and something that you've got to, like. You can. Okay, I'll figure out what to do. I'll know what I can do and know what I'm. Is out of my hands.

But, yeah, it doesn't do you any good. It actually is possible to see how bad things are and to also go, okay, it's my responsibility. I'm gonna take the responsibility to make this better. But, yeah, I think broadly, christians are just afraid of realizing how bad things are, especially. I mean, in kind of the more optimistic, more like people, maybe with an optimistic eschatology, people have more of that kind of thing.

They might not be okay with saying, like, not be okay with acknowledging how bad things actually are now. So there's. But there's nothing contradictory between saying that things are really ugly here. Things are really ugly and bad now, and I can still work, optimistic or not, I can still be faithful during this period. But, yeah, I do think that people use optimistic eschatology as a way of, like, getting out of uncomfortable realizations and also getting out of some responsibility.

So I think some people will, like, say, well, things are going to turn out fine, and God's going to save the world. People are going to be evangelized, and everything's going to be great. I'll just sit on my hands in the meantime, and I'll just trust. If I just sit here and trust in post millennialism, then I'm going to be okay, and everything's going to be fine. But I think that's a mistake tactically. And also just not a good reading of post millennialism. Not a good reading.

It's not a good statement of that eschatology either way. No eschatology should give you permission to be unfaithful or permission to neglect something that matters, especially like, neglect your duty. I'm glad you said that, because that was kind of my feeling about people who have a more pessimistic eschatology, is that somehow both of these eschatological positions can be flipped in on themselves to kind of say.

To kind of say, well, Jesus is going to come back soon and going to make it all okay. So I can withdraw from the public square and retreat into my basement bunker. Right? Or also just kind of trusting that the constitution will save me. At the same time, it's this weird. This weird contradiction is going to draw. Me to heaven, right? Yeah. Yes, exactly. It's like the constitution with, like, a big s on its chest or something like that. It's going to fly in and bail us out.

But, yeah, there is also a way that the post millennial position can be like, well, I mean, God's obviously going to make it all work out for America. That's just how it is. Well, neither of those might be true. We might actually have something to go through here, because that's the biblical pattern. You read the Old Testament, you see, the Jews went through it quite a few times because of their faithlessness. And are we experiencing something similar now? Yeah, no, I think that's true.

Yeah, I think any category of theology, yeah, you can abuse it. And so, like, you can abuse true theology. You can abuse false theology, whatever you. Whatever you believe about eschatology. Again, it doesn't give you any kind of permission to sit on your hands or to despair. And so, like, you can. And it also doesn't give you permission to not acknowledge again, how bad things are or how, like, ugly something's gotten because, yeah, like, you can. You can, but you can.

It is possible to retain your faith through realizing that, and it is possible to retain your sanity and, like, health and again, playfulness through all this. But, yeah, again, I think that's the place that I've been able to see at least comedy help in some of the things I'm doing. Hopefully, that's. Hopefully the spirit of the show is much more an entertainment kind of show so that people can, again, watch and go, hey, the constitution's dead.

And I'm not sitting there with, like, my eyebrows like this, but I don't know, it's. I talked to one of the guys. Somebody on Twitter said something about, like, it's the best, the best video about the constitution, including, like, fish and hot dogs. Like, jokes about fish and hot dogs or whatever. Or, like, they're saying, like, you're treating this. You're treating this serious topic.

And there's another person who said, like, you're treating this serious topic with frivolous jokes about psycho and, like, Norman Bates mom, it's like, oh, like, we're having fun. Like, and I can be like, why in the world would I treat a serious topic with despair if I don't, if that's not a good way of doing that, why would I fight in an ineffective way?

And why would I, like, if I'm trying to get people over to believe something I believe, then why would I think, why would I want them to think, well, if I believe that, then I'm going to be angry and sad. Like, Wade is. Like, it's an unattractive thing and it's also, yeah, it's unattractive, it's ineffective, and it's also just not faithful. It's not a good attitude to have. Nobody wants to be sadder. Well, if I agree with him, then I'm gonna be sad. Okay, well, then I'm out.

Well, but I mean, yes. And you can think about what Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart or any of the late night guys are doing right now is that they're not trying to make people sad per se, but they're trying to push on some sensitive spot overtly, like in this shrill tone where everyone's like, yeah, those anti vax people are terrible. Right. And it's so like there's a way in which you're maybe adhering to the unwritten rules of comedy that were there until this previous moment.

Like we just understood that we don't do that or that we don't have to do that. It's like maybe you're a traditionalist in a way. Yeah. Well, I hope so. I mean, the best of the spirit is like, the best part of that spirit of comedy is. Yeah, just like, well, no matter what, at the end of the day, it's gonna be a weird, it may have been a weird day in the news, but at the end of the day I can laugh about it. And that was the positive of a lot of late night shows.

And they knew how to rip apart something and do it in a pleasant way. Yeah, I think that the spirit of playfulness has just really gone out and yeah, it takes no matter how talented you are, and Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and Conan are very talented, but no matter how talented you are, your anxiety is going to push out your playfulness. It's going to lower your comedy IQ. It just works that way. That's the spirit I've tried to put together in this show. And I hope it translates.

I hope it works. We'll see. If you want to find out if I can do it, subscribe to the Wade show with Wade. Is it possible? Yes. Canonpress.com. yeah. Right. Wade 99. Wade 99. So for people who. So Tim Pool just shared your constitution video, I think it was today. Right. And then Alex Jones shared it last week. So world is way maxing. But you started the show. Was it six months ago? Something like that? I started it last year, in February of last year. So I've been doing it. So over a year.

Yeah, almost a year and a half. Yeah, it's wild. Okay. It's been fun. So can you walk us through some of the signature episodes or some of the touchpoint episodes as it's evolved to get to the point now where, like, Tim Pool and Alex Jones agree on something? Yeah, it's very fun. That attention from those guys has been very fun.

But I like those guys and I'm glad they've enjoyed the content, the show itself what I wanted to do originally was more of a, I had quite a bit of more setup punchline kind of news monologue where it wasn't one story, and then, so I would do several stories within five or six minutes. Here's the news of the week, here's a quick breakdown of it. And at a certain point, I just started to realize that it's hard to click on something that's about three different things.

And so if I click, then I assume I want to know what this video is about. And if it's about three different things in six minutes, then that's too much. So anyway, I started moving more toward doing one story or maybe two stories within, and then try to tie those stories together with a thought. But I realized a lot of the ones that were getting more attention were ones where I started doing this year, which was breaking down and doing essays.

So the first one I did, first show I did this year was Sam Francis article from back in 1994 called Anarcho Tyranny USA. And I just kind of presented his argument with trying to bring in contemporary examples and also, again, make it into a comedy monologue. But it became just breaking down the essay that did well, and I was encouraged by that because I assumed people were going to be more hungry for the news type content. But people liked this.

Again, quoting an essay from 1994, it turned out pretty well. So I kept doing that this year. And so it's kind of evolved to wherever that's the main focus of the channel. So most of my videos now, I'll still do a random news one if something big happens, and I try to tie in news stuff with my essays. And so if I think there was one week where there was a big, when Boeing, a bunch of Boeing lawsuits started happening, and I was able to tie that in with some essay from whatever early 19 hundreds.

So just try to figure out ways of bringing, bringing things that have benefited me and be able to translate those in entertaining format. But that's been very fun. And one of the big ones, as you mentioned earlier, was the why everything is political now video. And that was the first one that Alex Jones at Infowars shared, which I was very pleased with. And Mark Hemingway and Molly Hemmingway have also been very kind of with their retweets and reposts of my videos.

So there have been a lot of folks, Arn McIntyre, another one who consistently has been very encouraging to what I do and a big influence on me, a big influence as far as the translation of something that's heady and might be a little bit hard to grasp and try to translate that in a way that's informative, entertaining to folks. RMAC guitar is great. So yeah, that's been the trajectory of it.

It's kind of morphed from more straightforward news, topical kind of thing into something that is topical. I do bring in news stuff, but it's mostly about like it's become mostly about tying the news to older topics or things. Oh, that reminds me of this Chesterton essay I readdeze. Oh, that'd be great. Let's talk about that. So yeah, that's kind of the structure of the channel. And folks have really again latched onto the ones, the friend enemy video.

Why everything's political now that one was a Carl Schmitt essay and I've pulled in people like Mary Rothbard, people like Russell Kirk, Chesterton, like I mentioned. And so it's fun just to kind of like plumb the depths of right wing thinking. It's been kind of happening for a lot longer than I've been around.

And I'm working on one on Edmund Burke right now with his takes on the French Revolution because again, these are all people who are wise and have been talking about this stuff for a long time. And we as America has kind of lost. We talk about how conservatives haven't conserved much. That's a pretty common refrain. But one thing that conservatives didn't conserve was conservatism.

And so the old school, like the people that they, people like Russell Kirk just kind of get, nobody reads him anymore. Same with again, Chesterton and some of these other guys. And so I think the real, like a lot of people who are right wing and probably knew where we were headed have just not gotten the short shrift from conservatives in the same way that we've dropped the old conservatives, just like we've dropped all the old values that they stood for.

But yeah, so my hope is to present those and be able to again turn those somehow, somehow turn a Russell Kirk essay into a comedy monologue. That's my weekly challenge. So this is what you mean by sort of citing your sources. So it's not just here's a news story that I'm going to kick around for a little bit.

It's like here's actual know deep thinkers over the generations that have thought about issues related or parallel to this that can help people who are listening and watching understand how to process this moment. Because it's really not all that new in some ways. I mean super new in some ways, but in other ways. Like conservatives have been talking about this for generations. Yeah, well, everything that we're seeing is the end result of a trajectory.

And so we might as well talk to the, like, might as well listen from the people who saw what was coming and could tell all, tell us all the dynamics that were happening when that trajectory was not nearly as clear. Right. So, like, people like Chetcherton, it's amazing what he was able to see.

When you see like the whole, like the whole cliche about like if you turn, make one small turn, then you're going to end up, you know, 100 miles off course no matter how, like the further you go, further off course. Chesterton was a guy who saw that one degree turn and said, guys, this is where it's headed. And you read back and you go, how did he know?

It's like, oh, no, he was just a clear thinker who could, again, he had eyes in his head and somehow he was able to track stuff way better than we can. And so we can learn that and we can see little ways in which we might go wrong and obviously big ways in which we have gone wrong. So, yeah, I want to incorporate, that's the conservative in me. I'm not sort of a, there are ways in which I'm not a conservative in the sense that I want to restore something that doesn't exist anymore.

You know, like there's, but the conservative in me just wants to hold on to, again, the wisdom that has been built up in the way of doing things. Russell Kirk said best back to him, said that, like, the american order is the result of 3000 years of human striving, going back to the ancient Hebrews, to the Greeks and like, through all of that.

And so if we can, if we can take advantage of that, then we can actually build something in the future that feels american because it's taking all of that into account. It's taking in all of that thrust. And so I think that's, that's, I don't know. That may not be an exact answer. To your question, but no, no, I. Hope it was at least interesting, interesting for the audience.

No, it is an interesting comment because it makes me think about, okay, so if the american experiment is the result of 3000 years of human striving, then there's something else that has come. It can't be out of nowhere, right? Because liberalism, progressivism, whatever it is, has its own lineage. And so it didn't just spring out of the ground out of nowhere and they have their own texts and stuff like that.

So there's this way in which these two ancient traditions are colliding right now in everyone's lives from top to bottom, left and right. Right. Yeah. And I think that there's a, the only way, the best way I've been able to figure out how to, or best way I've heard being right wing described in a succinct way is that like right wing means is like pro order and left wing is pro chaos. And so, like, if you've got this american order that again is a unique thing.

That's the result again of 3000 years of people again developing different ways of life and also trying to build on the wisdom of the people that came before them. Then you've got people who want to tear that down. Well, that's a pretty easy thing to do. So in a sense, that's a very old tendency, the entropy tendency, the tear it down tendency. So in a sense it's very old, but it's new because it's tearing down something particular. It's tearing down this new thing.

And so it takes on a new form. But that's a, yeah, it's an old school mentality that again, is applying itself now. But I think that the particular incarnation of it gets a lot of attention because we can talk about Marxism, we can talk about wokeism and those are, again, particular incarnations of this, this thing that is. Okay, well, it seems like it's all coming from ingratitude.

So if we have this thing that we've inherited for 3000 years or longer, even if the particularly american order is the result of 3000 years of human striving, then, and I'm ungrateful for it, then it's really easy to grab onto the sin of ingratitude because everybody's got it. So everybody starts from there. And there's also envy and bitterness toward the people that gave us that.

So not honoring your father and mother, there's a reason that God included in the ten commandments because we're all tempted to not honor our father and mother. And so if we treat our tradition, if we treat our forefathers, the broad, like our fathers in the broad sense, if we treat them poorly like that is just acting according to our sin nature. So that's like a very blatant way of everybody always, there's always something to grab onto when somebody wants to tear down something.

And like the ingratitude of the inheritors of the american tradition is always easy to grab onto because we always are pulled in that direction naturally. And, yeah, so we've torn it down ourselves. And there's also been, again, an alien force of just destruction. Things go that way. But yeah, sin is ugly. I guess that's my, I've heard stories. I wonder if the distinction that the right wing enjoys order and the left wing enjoys chaos.

I wonder if that's valid, because I think to see the way the left wing actually does something, because here we are during it's not pride month, it's shameless month, because it's not pride that we're seeing, it's shamelessness. And so what they're actually proposing isn't chaos, it's actually a hyper order, like at the end of Marxism. Yeah, it's not chaos, it's totalitarianism. Like Oren McIntyre's book the total state, which I haven't read yet, but certainly it's been highly recommended.

So I wonder if what we're seeing with leftism and woke ism is a push towards such insane levels of order and what's on the right, the counterpoint, isn't necessarily chaos. It's just more like boundaries. Right. It's like boundaries versus hyper order. I don't know if those are diametrically opposed enough. That's interesting. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a certain kind of order that is at heart. I don't know, maybe we're going too deep into this, but the, like, have you seen the movie Brazil?

Terry Gilliam, Brazil? No, I haven't. No. Okay. That's a great movie about, like, it's about a lot of things, but one of them is bureaucracy. And so there's this guy who finds himself a part of a bureaucracy and he hates it more than anything. And one major characteristic of this bureaucracy, it's like post, it's a sort of dystopian. It's really great. You should go watch it. But it's kind of order that's like bureaucratic order that doesn't ever get anything built or done.

All it can do is kind of build ugly glass boxes. So you get like, you know, gropius building these ugly, ugly buildings, and you get, again, bureaucracies that are impermeable. You can't get any, like you have to fill out 18 forms before you can get some particular thing done. So that's a documentary? Yeah, you'd think so. But, but it's, it's a great movie.

And, and there's, there, in a sense, yes, it's ordered because, well, they have a form for everything and everybody knows who their job is and everybody's got their little office and all that. But at bottom of it, I think the heart of it, it's like, yeah, it is this odd blending of the worst kind of order with, like, the worst kind of chaos because it's not like nobody's. Nobody's safe, nobody's happy, and there's no real. Yeah, it's a bureaucratic order. It's like, it's an ugly, soulless order.

And I think there's a kind of. What's the. There's some meme that's, like, has a tree and then a bunch of leaves branching off of it and then, like, this. That's order. And then, like, somebody, like, then somebody plucked a bunch of leaves off and just put them all in line. Like, lined up all the leaves and go, like, that's chaos. So, like, it depends on, you know, what your version of what your vision of order is. So, like, there's a certain amount of, like, if you.

If you lay out all the, all the leaves on a tree and lay out all the branches and sort everything based on color and size and all that, then, yeah, you could say it's ordered, but you could. But it's dead and it's certain. It's a. It's the kind of thing that doesn't. It doesn't grow anymore while we cut it up and we, we put it on the table. And so, yeah, you could. So maybe order and disorder, you could also, like, sub in life and death. So that, like, that's Russell Kirk talked about.

I keep quoting him. That's a great. But he talked about how he ends his essay, the order, the first need of all, which is intro to his roots of american order. The last line of his essay is the traveler in the wilderness searches for living order. So what is a tree except for order that's growing and headed somewhere? So it's not the kind of order of a concrete block or concrete structure or a porta potty sitting out in the middle of the wilderness.

If there's some kind of wander in the wilderness, he wants to sit under a tree. Not that there's something else. Not that the other things wouldn't give him shelter, but that is something you can build on. It's something that's living. It's something headed somewhere. And so it's a promise of life. It's a promise of the future. But, yeah, I think that there's a kind of. There is a dead order, and there's a living order, and we don't want the dead one.

But, yeah, I did a video about order the first need of all, the Russell Kirk essay on the Wade show with Wade. But, yeah, I think that's part of it. So, like order. Yes, but living order. And there's a dead. Yeah, hyper order might be an interesting way of saying that. Again, fascinating to think about bureaucracy and modern architecture as being. Yes. Ordered, but also unnatural.

And I don't know, we may be getting too into the weeds, but, yeah, I would just say that there's, there's a certain kind of order that looks orderly but is also just like its own little sub brand of chaos. It makes me think of that hideous strength by Cs Lewis. I mean, that's kind of what the nice is doing, is they're taking the small english countryside kind of town and they're killing it to make it like the surface of the moon.

I think one of the characters actually says there's a way in which, yes, it's ordered what they're trying to build, but it's also dead. So is that, in a sense, that's. We killed it. We killed it, exactly. But it's. Everything's in its place, but it's dead. So is that order or is that chaos versus. Versus healthy human flourishing, which is alive but a bit messier. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Life and death is probably better than ordering chaos. Yeah, that's fascinating. I'll think about it more.

I'll make a video about it. Excellent. Excellent. So. And I think people are looking. So let's go back to the Constitution video again, because I think people feel this attempt to, whether it's to create hyper order, whether it's to create chaos, or whether it's to kill something, I think people are all feeling this anxiety of that something valuable is under attack. The attack isn't new. It's been going on for a number of years at this point, but now the illness has become acute.

Now you can no longer say that this isn't a problem. You can only cover your eyes and cover your ears so often and for so long until even the reality breaks through that now something serious is going on. And I think people, it sounds to me they expected that they'd be able to hold up the constitution as this magical shining talisman that would drive back Gandalf on the pell in our. Well, it's Gandalf on the Pellanur fields, driving back the Nazgul holding the constitution.

And you sort of contributed to the piercing of that veil, it sounds like for some people. Yeah, well, and it's never, I hope people don't take that as any kind of insult to the thing. So, like, saying, like, you like, making fun of the idea that the constitution is a talisman is not any kind of disrespect to the work of these men 200 years ago. Of course not. No disrespect. But, like, if you asked them and you, like, if you said, could somebody treat this as some kind of talisman?

And, okay, sure, you can do that with anything. But, like, we get superstitious about stuff. But, yeah, it's no insult to the men who were involved. It's no insult to the order. I'm sad that we lost the old constitutional order. There was something that, that written constitution was trying to preserve that we don't have anymore, because we just lost the will, I think.

And because we act, we lost the will in one sense, and on the other side, we had people who were actively fighting against that order. And yeah, we're always tempted to throw away something that people have given, but, yeah, I hope that it has open people's eyes to it, but not, again, not in a despairing way, and not in any kind of denigrating of the past, because anything that I want to build in the future is going to have to. I said this in the video, but I want it to be american.

Whatever comes in the future, I want everybody to be able to recognize that's american. And we're still, like, we're still doing 4 July fireworks in 500 years. That's what I want. That would be great. And so I, yeah, I celebrate America. I celebrate anything that we do next. We've just also got a, like, the point of my video was more just that we gotta acknowledge that we're not being ruled by this thing anymore and recognize again that we're not.

That it's not gonna save us, it's not gonna burst through the bulletproof glass, start, like, punching out all the tyrants. Like, though that would be great. I would love that. But it's just not going to work out that way. And, yeah, it's going to be all right, though. We'll figure it out. It's not just going to burst out of our chest like alien either, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope not. Right.

So as this has now percolated into the political, socio political, even religious environment at the levels that it has, what's been the response that's been coming back to you? You mentioned that you don't know if the word you use was entertained, but you've clearly seen some of the responses to it. What's that been like? I love it. It's the kind of thing where, like I said, I knew it was a hot topic. I knew I wanted to drop something.

There was a fight that was already happening, and I think I just dropped something in the middle so that everybody could fight over it. And I think that the response to it, I'm encouraged by, largely because I think that it's kind of, I've gotten all sorts of responses where, like, I've been accused of being too hard on something or too soft on another thing.

And just like, it's actually really, it's fun to, when something does get out there and you're getting every kind of accusation and also a bunch of like, but your people, who you trust, really like it. That's really fun. And so I knew within 24 hours or so, all my pastors reposted it. And so, like, that, that felt really great. You know, it's like, okay, well, no matter what anybody else says about this video, it's gonna be fine. Like, my people like it, and we're all, we're on the same team.

And so, yeah, that's been really cool. It's honestly, like, I, like you said, the video is about knowing what time it is. And I'm encouraged to know that people want to know what time it is and want to talk about it and want to have a further conversation because like I said earlier, I hope that this video doesn't end the conversation and doesn't become like, oh, that he already did all the work.

My hope is when people saw it, what they said was, oh, man, now I feel like I have a whole reading list. It's like, that's great. I love that. So then they said, well, could you link all the books that you mentioned in the description? I still, I need to do that. But, but that people wanted, that just makes me go, oh, cool. This is like, we're headed in a great direction.

When people are getting curious and when the videos themselves are not serving as, like, me, I'm not using, it doesn't become about like, yeah, the end result of the action is not just like, and subscribe to the Wade show, though. I would like for that to happen. Definitely everybody should do that. But the end result is, like, more work. Like, oh, cool. I have something to do now, and I have responsibility after watching this video, which is more fun.

So you mentioned that all your pastors reshared it. Maybe, like, there's a way in which this is feeding into the Moscow mood a little bit because I think the kind of comedy that you're doing does not seem like the sort of thing that's common for evangelicalism for a while outside of the Babylon bee. But a lot of churches, a lot of church communities wouldn't support the kind of thing that you're doing in that way.

Yeah, well, I'm honestly very pleased as long as I've been doing because I did comedy writing back when I lived in Texas as well. And I had a great pastor there who would watch the stuff that I would do and would talk to me about it. And since being here, I've been able to show my pastors I do this stuff for Canop Press. And so I've always recognized that I don't want to do any of these things that I'm doing without being under authority, without recognizing that, like I can get things wrong.

And when you're in creative mode and when you're in like brainstorm mode, you're gonna miss and it's gonna be kind of messy and you don't always know editing wise what, you know, what really works and what doesn't. So that's why, yeah, it's encouraging to have that kind of feedback here. And yeah, I also recognize, um, it's, it's the kind of place and, and being, being involved in Moscow.

I always know that no matter if I get big views or I get small views, uh, I know that my pastors aren't going to factor that into their care of me. You know, like they're, they're not, they're not coming over and going like, well, we gotta not step on, we gotta make sure to not uh, you know, ever tell wade that he sinned because, well, he gets all these views. Like, I love that.

So like I, no matter, like, and the reason it's funny is because you can't picture like good men doing that, but you can picture like weasels doing that.

You can picture weasel pastors just sort of like sucking up to people because, well, he's famous and he comes to our church and, well, and like, I'm not saying I'm famous, but I mean, like you could picture like weasel pastors at like megachurches who are like, well, we don't want to get this person mad because, well, it's kind of a big deal if they come to our church. But, but like, I love that. I love the accountability. I love, yeah.

Being under authority and being under authority of people that I really trust and I know are, yeah, are good pastors, good men and will talk to me and engage with the stuff that I'm doing, always very encouraging. So, like, that's, even if the videos that I do get a handful of retweets or whatever, as long as they're like, people I respect and people that matter to me personally, then I go, okay, I'm on the right track.

If I get a retweet from Will Spencer, then I know I'm doing the right thing every day. Well, I mean, there's a way that I think one of the things that people look to Moscow and what they want for themselves is they want that sort of what appears to be like an esprit de corps. Like, here we all are. We're all together in this town. We're all here together. And, you know, we're moving forward.

We're moving the cultural ball forward and the american landscape, the american political landscape and the american evangelical landscape. And I think men look around at their church communities and like, well, I can barely move the ball forward in this church. Right, or in this small town. And so, like, but there's a way in which all these men coming together in this place can have an outsized impact. Every single one of them, by supporting each other, can really push things forward.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've felt that in a lot of ways. When we moved here, when my family and I moved here in 2021, I took a couple of years off of doing any kind of content because one of the reasons why is that I really wanted to just be able to sit back and be able to push and let other people show other people the content from canon Press, the stuff that's been here and they've been making for decades. A lot of what I did was trying to work behind the scenes to get stuff out in the open.

So trying to grow our YouTube presence and try to get folks, yeah. Just kind of catch people up with all the, again, amazing material that's been coming out of here for a long time. And so I wanted to insert myself in first as somebody who's here to, again, serve outsiders by presenting again the value that I've gotten here. So it's been fun to be able to participate in that after, again, two years of, of, again, promoting other people. But that's my heart, really. I love canon.

I love the vision that's here, and I love the Moscow in particular. I love being here. It's been great for my family. And, yeah, there's a positive spirit of, hey, we're all working toward the same things. We want normalcy. We want good stuff. And, yeah, it's a fun team to be a part of. Do you have time for just a couple more questions? You bet. Okay, so as we discuss all this, if you could have it all your way and the Wade show could have the impact that you wanted to have. What would that be?

What kind of change would you like to create? Or what would you like to create with the Wade show? Yeah. Well, if any particular video had the impact that I wanted to have, what I wanted, the impact that I want to have is some of what I was talking about earlier with, like, just people walk away from it feeling informed and entertained and curious about follow up. So it makes them, it's, something sticks in their head or like, I don't know.

I see Lloyd show, this is, I don't use this as a bad word, but as propaganda. I see it as more just like, hey, we're here to, like, we're going to communicate things. It's going to be simple, and then there's going to be like, it's a loyalty kind of thing. I'm just expressing my loyalties, expressing my opinions, and trying to get, trying to get this, again, high minded stuff that might be coming out. So again, it's like, entertained, enlightened, and also curious for further stuff.

When people are in the comments asking questions and going like, oh, what about this? And what this makes me think of that and what I love that. I love when something spurs on discussion. I said this in the description of my constitution video. I said something about, like, constitution is dead. And if you don't believe me, just watch the video. And if you still don't believe me, then just argue in the comments. It's really great for the algorithm, but I actually, I do love the engagement.

And so I hope to be, like, starting a conversation, pushing things forward, and also just hopefully modeling a spirit of playfulness. And so if there's a young man listening right now who's wanted to get into comedy, you know, maybe he's, maybe he's in his twenties, maybe he's in high school, and this is a direction that he sees himself wanting to go in. What kind of advice would you give?

What kind of advice would you give to that young man, you know, based on your experience having gone through this world and now to where you are today? I would say 20 jokes a day. And, like, there are books to read about this. There are books, like, there's a book called how to write funny by Scott Dickers, who started the onion. There's a bunch of other great ones that are just not coming to my head right now. But there's a bunch of great stuff if you really want to get into it.

So how I want to describe comedy writing, or any kind of writing, is that it is a trade. Like, if you treat it like a trade, if you treat it like I want to learn this, it's not, it's not. The less you think of it as kind of, like, my self expression and my art and more of, like, I got to learn this. Like, this is a weird skill that I want to learn. I really want to learn woodworking, and there's a guy who wants to do that, so I got to learn this, then the better off you're going to be.

So, like, if you treat it like a tradesman and you're just like, all right, clocking in 2020 jokes, and if. If all 20 of them are bad, that's fine, and I'm going to turn it over the next day. But I did this. I wrote jokes. And again, I don't see myself as, like, the greatest comedy writer ever, but I used to write jokes every day on my lunch breaks. I worked at the call center at Ligonier ministries, and I would write, and I would write my monologue jokes every day.

So it was just, like, set up from the news, and then punchline, and I tried to write, like, three punchlines, perennial set up, and then I would get to my 20, and then I'd finish up and eat my little, like, you know, lasagna or whatever. And so that, that was, that was how I tried to work it into my day, because I, for some reason, I don't know why, I wasn't ever gonna, I wasn't gonna go work for David Letterman.

David Letterman had already retired, but it's still, like, I thought of it as, at the time, I just thought of it as a writing exercise because I've always respected writers and thought, like, well, a joke. What is a joke but a sentence? And what is, like. And it seems like if you're working on a sentence, that you want it to be as punchy as possible, and it seems like it's like a joke is the kind of sentence that has a goal, and it's to make somebody laugh.

So, like, very, very few sentences, you kind of learn how to. Hopefully, it's turned me into the kind of writer who can be writing in a direction and pushing people forward and knowing where to put some particular syllable or word in word order. So it's, comedy writing is like a. Yeah, it's a, just like any kind of writing is a weird trade that you've got to be kind of obsessed with in a weird way. And if you find yourself, like, getting bored by it, then you're not quite ready.

But if, like, it may not be for you, and that's fine. If you're, if you're like, if 20 jokes a day sounds like I wouldn't even care, or like, it's a matter of just like, putting in a, like, weird amount of hours, and then in the end, you're still going to write stuff that you don't really like, and you're still going to write stuff that's like, some stuff that's going to come to you and you're going to go, that is amazing. I love that. And other ones are just not going to.

Not going to quite sail. But yeah, I'd say just, it's the practice and it's also just like finding mentors of people that you like. So if you like late night, then watch great late night things, find their little transition phrases. Again, this is like nuts and bolts stuff, so it may not be super interesting, but little transition phrases are really helpful. Learning the rhythm of those things as well as.

But if you want to be a stand up, if you like stand up and want to get into that, then study people who are very good at that. Neighbor Gatsby is really good. I mean, Brian Regan, the kind of obvious example is Jim Gaffigan. I talked about Norm. He's my favorite.

But yeah, like, there are people who are doing it who are very good, and there are patterns, and it's the same kind of thing with music where you can learn the instrument, you can learn the basics, but at some level, it's about picking up the patterns over the course of years. And that sounds. That sounds. So it's kind of, it's just a skill. So I'm not trying to glorify it and turn it into, again, it's some kind of, it's not a special kind of skill.

It's just like anything else where you pick up what you pick up. And it's usually you just kind of in the same way with music. If you are spending enough time doing it, then you recognize when something isn't going to work. And your radar for oh, that. If I do that, if I write that out and then I try to perform that, that isn't going to work. So developing that instinct is also an important part of it.

But yeah, if you want to get into comedy, there are ways in and there, I don't know about, like, the comedy business, but if it's something that you, I don't know anything about the comedy business, but if you love doing it and it's worth it to you, then just do it and do it a bunch. And it may not be like, it may be that in the end, all you're doing is you just have a really entertaining Twitter presence, and the world needs more of those.

But, like, in the same way that if somebody says, like, I love writing short stories and it doesn't, like, I know I'll never sell them, because short story collections are things that just don't go anywhere anymore. Nobody sells short stories. You don't sell them to magazines anymore like you used to. But somebody just, I love the form. I love Flannery O'Connor. I want to be the next Flanner of Connor. I want to write the greatest short stories. That's fine.

And it may be that, like, you're the only person who reads them or you self publish them, but, like, it's, it's, it's a form that is really cool and it's worth. Worth doing, worth trying out, but, yeah, I feel like I'm now discouraging people from, from doing it. But it's, it's a, it's a very interesting, it's, it's very fun if it only happens if you get obsessed, like I said, just like anything, if I am, I am a musician.

And so, like, I had, at a certain point, I did have to get obsessed with learning to sound like this person, or I would do audio recordings. So I would record on my computer and just, like, study the way somebody did something and be like, oh, it sounds like the reverb's in this ear, but the signals here. So how do I get that? And figuring out little technical solutions to stuff.

Yeah. Joke writing, it's much more like brick laying than it is, like, I don't know, ascending to the heavens and just receiving amazing comedy. You don't go on an ayahuasca trip, and they just get great jokes for some reason. You just got to sit down every day and write these stupid jokes that you hate until you don't, don't get. Me started on ayahuasca. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, I forgot that I was bringing up. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We can go there. Yeah. I don't know.

There are actually, on instagram, there are comics that do kind of new age comedy, ridiculing some of those communities in Los Angeles primarily. So sort of like the, and it's funny, but I actually interviewed a comic who that was what he did. And so we did a whole bit to begin with. You and I talked about that, and then we did an actual interview. And then during the course of the actual interview, I discovered, like, no, he actually believes this stuff. I was like, I was trying to square that.

Like, wait a minute. I thought together we were going to be poking holes, and it was, like. Fun of these guys. Yeah, exactly. No, he actually believes this. And that's the thing about that, is that they make fun of it from within their own worldview. Okay. I guess I get it. But, like, there's an uncritical nature to that. I'm not sure what the word is. Sure. Right. Yeah. It seems like you'd take your own jokes to heart at some level. If I'm making fun of this, maybe I'm a dope.

I'm making fun of myself. Right. Maybe I'm gonna make fun of this world, but maybe I shouldn't be in this world. You know? Big surprise. Yeah. And that's. I want to listen to that interview now. Everybody here should go listen to that, too. So. Yeah, that's the one with seven figure shamanism. I'll put that in the show. Okay. Yeah, that was fun. I mean, he and I worked together on a skit beforehand, and then we did the actual interview.

And as I'm talking to him through the actual interview, it's dawning on me that it's like he really believes this stuff. Like, what am I going to do? Like, how am I going to. Yeah. So I did get to preach the gospel to him a little bit at the end. So. I watched a little bit of the clip, and it does seem like it seemed like a funny guy. Seemed like a very talented guy. I'm glad you had him on. That's cool. Yeah, it was a fun experiment.

So then I guess the last question I have is, are there comedians that are out there working today? You've mentioned Jim Downey and Norm MacDonald, who passed away. Are there comedians that are out there today that are still doing good comedy in this age of anxiety? Okay. I mean, yeah, I'd love to hear some of those names. Yeah, I mentioned Nate Bergazzi earlier. I think he's one of the great stand ups going right now. I don't know how to spell that name. Nate Bergatz.

Yeah, Nate. And then b a r g a t z e. He's very funny. He's a great stand up. He just. I think he had a special that came out last year on Amazon prime, but he's got Netflix specials as well. He did comedy central for a while. He's such an interesting guy, and I'd love to meet him someday, but he's originally from Tennessee, small town in I forget exactly what. New old hickory. Old hickory, Tennessee. Small town Tennessee guy. And then moves to New York to go pursue stand up.

And really, he gets his chops up in New York, and then as soon as he gets to the point where he can, like, from what I could tell from, like, sustain his family on touring income, he moved back to Tennessee. So I think he's in Nashville now. So, like, he's a guy, like, a guy who loves where he's from, but also, like, he's just very talented. Very, very funny. Mostly observational stories. And his, his comedy Central album, full time magic, is, has a, has a, like, that's, that is a great one.

That's a great record. But his, that was, I think, going on when he was living in New York City, he was married, they had a young daughter, and then. Yeah, but as soon as they could, they moved back to Tennessee. And now a lot of his stuff is much more personal and much more like family kind of storytelling. But I think he's very talented. He's got a certain. His rhythm is really, like, really infectious.

He's got a podcast called Nate Land, and I haven't listened to the podcast quite as much as I'd like to, but very funny guy. I'm trying to think of other examples. Most of the examples of guys that I think are doing it now that are good. I think Jim Gaffkin is very funny, but he's far from being a right winger. But I think he's. As far as the skill goes, I think he's very good. I mean, Dave Chappelle is still doing stuff, and Dave's. He's very talented, very blue, but I don't know, it's kind of.

Yeah, it's hard to recommend, but similar with Tim. Like, comedy right now is in a fascinating place because especially stand up. Stand up is. It used to be that stand up, you would go and you would sell, you would try to work with a club owner. So if I'm working with a club owner in Spokane, Washington, and I'm trying to book this thing this night, then I need to go. I'm going to fly to Spokane. I need to get there.

And then the next, like, Friday, I'm doing the Friday and Saturday, I'm doing the morning radio shows to try to sell tickets to my show that night, whereas now. And Chris Rock would always say, I'll know I've made it when I don't have to do morning radio anymore. And so, like, that was the level people wanted to get. They wanted to get famous enough to where they didn't have to do morning radio. And the, but that was the kind of grind of a comic.

What's happening now is you've got comics now who are having to grow a podcast presence, and so that's the way they market things. So it's kind of replaced the morning radio, so they grow the audience there. And so you've got kind of some comics that are splitting into comics who are very good at podcasting and may not be as good at stand up. And there are others who are really good at stand up and are not as great at podcasting, but they're trying to do both in order to build those audiences.

So I think Mark Normand is very funny. I think he's also very blue. And Tim Dillon, similar kind of things. But, yeah, again, very talented guys. And guys, I love listening to who I. And on the weirder side, this is very much on the weirder side, but a guy named Connor O'Malley, I think, is like, anything he does always makes me laugh, and it's very goofy. It does get, like, it does get blue, but you can usually skip his stuff when he does that. But, yeah, Connor O'Malley. C o n n e R. O'Malley.

But anyway, there are people doing stuff, and it's very good. And those are people who have influenced me, and not everybody has to watch them. Not everybody has to like them. And like I said, if. If. And if anybody watches those things and goes like, it's. Well, Wade is telling me that it's okay to say this ugly thing that Tim Dillon said. I am not saying that. I'm just saying that there are people who are still very funny and are still doing cool stuff. And I like Theo Vaughn.

I like Theo Vaughan a lot. His podcast is good. I wish I could think of more examples. But, yeah, people are doing comedy, and it's good. But, yeah, they tend to be people a lot of times who are outside of some part of the system. So I mentioned Nate Brigadsy. He's in Nashville now, and he's not a part of, like, his. His place is probably not anxious. He's. He's not. He's, like, has a pretty. His storytelling stuff.

It seems like he has a pretty normal life other than touring, which I'm sure takes up a lot of his weekends. But, yeah, like, the more. The more like cosmopolitan comics or the more like people who just kind of live, live nowhere and are constantly on the road. That's a, that's, that's also, yeah, your comedy kind of gets less grounded in that way. So, yeah, like I said, I continue to, I'll just, yeah, maybe I should have just recommended Nate Bragazzi.

And if anybody in your audience again watches something dirty and then blames me for it, I apologize in advance. We both take that on. So, actually, this reminds me of another question. So the uneasy relationship that christians have, not necessarily with secular comedy, but with comedy as a concept in general, it almost feels like sometimes maybe it's a lack of playfulness thing, but it's almost like, are we allowed to poke fun at the world? Are we allowed to poke.

Yeah, everyone's made in the image of God, but can I, but even though that's true, can I make fun of that person? And it's almost like, ugh. It's kind of this strange thing, but it leads to this joylessness. And I'm sure this is something that you've had to encounter over and over again, whether or not blue comics or not. Yeah, there's like, can you make fun of person x because they're made in the end of God? I think that's, yeah, that's understandable.

There's a certain, I think, naivete that is particular to christians, and that's not an insult to Jesus to say that, but I think that what christians can think is that if this person is presenting as nice, then they're not a threat. And so a lot of times people can really be threats and not make it really obvious. So they're not like, doing Mister Burns fingers and they're not doing anything, but you, you see it.

And if somebody can actually recognize, you know, this person's acting like a bad person and can say that out loud, a lot of times that will feel like you're the person who drew the gun first. Right? So, like, if somebody's presenting as nice and not and trying to be doing the, there's a very calculate, like we talked about, we talk about winsomeness a lot, but, like, there's a very calculated kind of winsomeness that's really nasty.

That can be nasty, but with, with a big smile and sweet, I, but if you hit back and you just go like, oh, no, that's not the way things actually are. Or like, no, you're just lying to me and you just, like, want my church to be destroyed or like, I don't know, you're trying to break down my marriage or that kind of thing. If you're, if you like, actually, if you actually sometimes just call things by what they are, then yeah, sure. Like, we're not.

It may be insulting to somebody, but it's also telling the truth and calling it like it is. So I would rather tell the truth than lie and be thought nice. I think that's a very important distinction of being able to call out wolves in sheep's clothing and to be able to do it in a way that makes people laugh and entertains them at the same time. That's okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Well, and it's disarming to a lot of folks because what I recognize in some people is if I once, sometimes I'll make a joke or make a video, and some people will respond like, will sub tweet the joke, be like, oh, this. Or like, even with the Constitution video, it's like if somebody talked about, well, with all this bad talk about the Constitution is dead. Like, they're obviously talking about my video but not talking about it.

But if anybody watched it, then they would again realize, like, the first thing they would hear is me making a joke about a fish shooting a dog, you know, and it's like all of a sudden, then all of a sudden your defenses are a little bit down and you're like, oh, I thought we were going to be self serious here. I thought we were going to be like, you know, I thought we were going to, again, eyebrows.

I thought it was going to be like this, but no, it was like, and so I think it's disarming at some level to just, again, we're, hey, we're going to have fun here, and that's much, much more fun. Way to make it spirited. I've always admired the kind of debates, I mean, we, with collision.

Like Doug and Christopher Hitchens documentary back in the day, that was a very funny, there were very funny moments in that documentary, and those guys genuinely enjoyed each other and they had great quips and lines. And in the end, nobody hated each other. And what happened was like, they were opponents. They were opponents, and they treated each other like opponents, but they were also having a good time. And that's much more fun. It's much more rewarding, and it's not as tiring.

You don't get quite as tired. Yeah. There was a way in which there was a spirit about that. Like, we can be in diametrically opposed worldviews, and yet we're still men together. Right? Right. Yeah. There's yeah, men together is a great way to put that because there's something. There's something human, there's something inhuman about just being, like, logic choppers, where we have to have everything. Everything on a diagram, but, like, much more. It's much more human.

Yeah. To kind of relate to somebody and use an analogy that's, like, true to life and just the kind of things. Again, analogies. Analogies don't occur to you when you're anxious. Analogies, like, even just that little bit of creative thinking actually takes some amount of being removed from the situation and start to think, oh, this is kind of like this.

And that's, again, a way of thinking that's foreign to somebody who's, again, logic chopping and just like, can't handle anything that's not furrow browed. Serious discussion, but, yeah, unattractive, not fun. Yeah. It's not a debate. It's rhetoric, not a debate. Right? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Well, thank you so much for your time today, sir. I must say that Ken did a great job finding the correct Wade for the Wade show. Long audition process, I got to tell you that. So many wades out there.

So where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do? And I'll link the constitution video on the show notes so everyone can watch it. That'd be great. Yeah. So I'm on xtats. I'm also on YouTube. Wade show with Wade and our main hub where we keep it, our kind of cancel proof thing is canon plus, and that's where I post every week there. And we also just have tons of tons, tons and tons of content that have been building up over the past Dec. Few decades.

We got documentaries that come out there all the time. If you want to find my stuff, my twitter is a good way to see stuff that I'm pointing people to. That's wonderful. May we all begin? Wade maxing, please. Please, everyone. Cheers. And if you want a mug, if you want a mug, canonpress.com dot check it out. That's going in the show notes, too. Oh, yeah. Gotta get the mug. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men Podcast.

Visit us on the [email protected] or on your favorite social media platform at Ren of Men. This is the renaissance of men. You are the renaissance.