How Covid Changed Comedy
A grand unifying theory of comedy's rightward acceleration.
One thing I’ve been pondering recently is why Donald Trump’s election had the effect of granting a large class of comedians permission to indulge their more regressive impulses, but his defeat in 2020 hasn’t resulted in any noticeable shift in the other directed. Almost across the board, comedy’s right-wingers have grown increasingly unshackled over the course of the Biden presidency. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry has made significant progress commercializing what was previously a quasi-grassroots movement, turning many of them into major cash cows.
Perhaps the answer is obvious: toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube. The white backlash set into motion with Trump’s ascendancy was too complex and too powerful a force to be reversed by a few years of quasi-liberal governance, and indeed the return to Democratic rule inevitably added fuel to the fire. The market for so-called conservative art that opened up in 2016—and which was subject to a brief period of progressives backlash, before progressives largely gave up on feminism and antiracism as political projects—was ultimately too big for the entertainment industry to ignore; it had to be tapped and bled for all it’s worth. If Trump’s election functioned as license from the top down, then the subsequent years offered validation from the bottom up. The audience is there, it’s hungry, and just like Donald Trump, it’s not going away.
This is a simplistic rendering—the bird’s eye view. I’d like to zoom in on a few areas that offer a more granular explanation for the industry’s rightward acceleration these last few years. They’re familiar explanations, in that they’re basically what I’ve been writing about this whole time, but I think it might be worth examining them in one place with some recent context. Hopefully this will help us see just how far things have gone, how they got there, and where exactly they’re headed.
The Rogan Factor
I have written before of the pandemic’s virtually instantaneous transformation of comedy, in which the industry’s premature reopening functioned to repopulate audiences and lineups with people unconcerned with public health, at the same time hobbling the careers of comedians who do. In retrospect, I think this narrative may actually (unfortunately) give insufficient credit to Joe Rogan, who played a real and important role in that transformation.
As a new Bloomberg feature (archived here) describes, and as Rogan himself has said, the podcaster’s 2020 relocation to Austin was motivated by his unhappiness with “the California government’s response to the pandemic, the growth of homeless encampments and activist calls to defund the police.” Upon arriving in Austin, he quickly alienated LGBTQ artists in what was then a diverse, progressive community, while attracting like-minded comics from all over the country to perform with him at venues like The Creek and The Cave, Vulcan Gas Company, and Stubb’s BBQ. Some of these comics followed his lead in moving to Austin, including Tom Segura, Tony Hinchcliffe, Brian Redban, Tim Dillon, Kurt Metzger, flat-earther Eddie Bravo, and more recently Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker. You may notice that all of these figures have similar artistic and political sensibilities.
When Rogan set out to open his own comedy club—the Comedy Mothership, which opened last year—he partnered with longtime Comedy Store manager Adam Eget. As he told the conservative comedian and writer Bridget Phetasy in an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience released this week, Eget came to Austin for similar reasons as Rogan, largely to escape the intrusion of progressive politics on comedy. Here’s what Rogan said:
When Adam came over from the Comedy Store, he was dealing with a lot of pressure. People were saying, why don't you have X amount of blank on the lineup? X amount of women, X amount of gay people, X amount of trans—people were giving him a hard time about everything. He was worried that he was gonna get in trouble. People were gonna attack him and write articles about him. When he came here, specifically, I said, dude, "Everybody's welcome, but they have to be funny." It's really that simple. It's a complete meritocracy. We're not gonna say, let's get more women. We're gonna give all the women that want a chance to go on open mic nights. Everybody has a chance. You, if you get better, you get asked to do showcase shows. There's a whole, there's a real genuine system. And having a genuine talent coordinator like Adam, who really watches, he sits down on the—he was there last night. He was there last night, watching sets. He watches people progress, he watches the door people progress. He watches all the new people coming from outta town.
[…]
He really cares about his job and his job is free of all the mandates. All he has to do is find funny people. And look at what happens when you do that. The lineup is so diverse. If you look at all the different people on like showcase nights and different people, you're gonna see every type of gay, straight, black, white, Asian, tall, short, fat, skinny, everything, whatever the fuck, from different parts of the world. All you have to do is be good at this thing we're all trying to do.
To be clear, the “system” Rogan is describing is the system under which comedy has always operated, the one that has resulted in stark inequalities and allowed bigots and abusers to roam free. Eget, in Rogan’s telling, joined him because they shared the goal of preserving comedy’s status quo, in defiance of burgeoning pressures to build something more diverse.
It wasn’t only established comics that followed Rogan, but aspiring ones too. “A lot of people from other states started moving here,” Brandon Lewin, who starting producing comedy shows at Vulcan Gas Company after the pandemic hit, told me in 2021. “I've met comedians from eastern Pennsylvania and they moved down here and people from Ohio. It's not just New York and LA.”
In the Bloomberg feature, Austin comedian Arielle Isaac Norman described one side-effect of the migration of Rogan acolytes: the proliferation of “borderline unwatchable” open mic nights dominated by reactionary comedians. “It can be really awful to listen to men making disgusting rape-apology jokes, that kind of stuff, saying bigoted things, talking disgustingly about women,” said Norman, whose success at Rogan’s club has led to such opportunities as opening for Louis CK and Tim Dillon. “I’m not one of those people who is easily offended. But it needs to be funny.”
All Transphobia, All the Time
A defining characteristic of Rogan’s cohort—not that you will find any mention of it in the Bloomberg piece—is its transphobia. Rogan, Dillon, Segura, Gillis: they all harbor a visceral, sustained disgust towards trans people and especially trans women. While transphobia is neither new in comedy nor unique to this particular set of comics, I think it is safe to say that Rogan, who hosts “the most listened-to podcast in the US in the first quarter of this year,” per Bloomberg, has helped turn comedy into a powerful vector for anti-trans sentiment. It is a consistent subject of his podcast, one he turns to multiple times each week. Consider a stretch of his conversation with Phetasy yesterday, following their complaints about the new California law prohibiting schools from outing trans students to their parents:
Rogan: This whole trans-2-A-B-I-T-plus thing, it's all attached to an ideology. And the crazy thing for a lot of gay people is they are looking at this trans thing—a lot of gay people that I talk to, they think it's homophobic. A lot of these guys who think that they're girls will eventually just be gay men. And that a lot of them go through it during puberty. And when you are telling them that they really are gonna live their authentic self, and you're saying things like this, these—
Phetasy: Pray the gay away.
Rogan: It is a very similar thing.
Phetasy: It's the same thing.
Rogan: That is the same thing, right?
Phetasy: It's conversion therapy.
Rogan: Right.
Phetasy: I did a whole piece, "How Pride Lost the Public," and it was, I interviewed Douglas Murray, all these brilliant—I wish I could have just posted every interview I did with all these individuals, because they're all so brilliant. But it was, these guys have all been sounding—and women—have all been sounding the alarm. And lesbians are really getting erased. You know, you go on a lesbian app and it's like, I joked on Dumpster Fire in like 2019 that we're on our way to like, "suck my dick, bigot." And now we've been there for years.
Rogan: Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of men who identify as being a woman who say they're a lesbian. Which is crazy.
Phetasy: Yeah. They're not even—but my lesbian friends are like, they're not even identifying. They're just straight-up men on the lesbian app saying like, I'm a lesbian. They're not even trying to look like a woman.
Rogan: And you wanna date with them and they just have lipstick on. "Hi." Like, what? "I like girls. I'm a girl. What are you trying to say, you fucking bigot? I'll fuck you in your ass." Like, wait, what are you saying?
Phetasy: It's not good.
Rogan: It's so nuts. And it's also like, some of these people who identify as women, they think that because they're a woman, it's okay to punch other women. And I've seen a lot of that. I've seen a lot of that.
Phetasy: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Rogan: Like trans women getting in fistfights with biological women. They're like, what is going on here? This is so crazy.
Phetasy: I think it's lost a lot of support though, don't you think? Do you feel like it has or no?
Rogan: Yeah. It's lost a giant chunk, but there's still a lot of really confused people that don't know what's going on. They read mainstream newspapers, and rarely. They work in a bubble. Generally it's like a liberal bubble. They work in a bubble that's also influenced by DEI. It's also also influenced by, you know, the culture of the workforce in general. And then these people, they don't hear everything. They don't get all the data. They don't have time to research these things. So it takes them a lot longer to catch on that. What a lot of this is, is mentally ill people that are trying to infiltrate into women's spaces. That's a lot of it. So you get people that have legitimate gender dysphoria, that really wanna be identifying as a woman. And then you have creeps. And to not identify the creeps and to pretend the creeps don't exist, you're not helping anybody.
From there they proceed to question gender-affirming care and suggest that it is a fraud on par with the use of lobotomies to treat mental illness.
Rogan’s transphobia is not news, of course; it’s long been a major subject of this newsletter. What I want to draw attention to here is the chain of causality between the pandemic and the ascendance of comedy as a locus for anti-trans propaganda in the US. The Bloomberg feature rightly describes Rogan as the industry’s new kingmaker. The artists he has aligned with and promoted—Hinchcliffe, Segura, Dillon, Gillis, Theo Von, Andrew Schulz—are huge, huge talents, earning millions in podcast revenue and selling out arenas. Netflix just announced a new special from Dillon and is currently producing the second season of Gillis’s critically panned series Tires; Kill Tony will record at Madison Square Garden next month. These people owe their careers to one of the most vocal opponents of the movement for trans equality, their friend and collaborator, a man who just told his audience that transitioning is a form of conversion therapy.
Bloomberg suggests that the younger comics seeking success in the Roganverse come from all sides of the political spectrum, but it is quite evidently the case that only a certain type succeed: if not solely those who share his politics to the letter, then at minimum those willing to remain silent about their disagreements. Consider the downward pressure this exerts on comedy, an increasingly fragmented industry with fewer and fewer identifiable paths to financial security. What becomes of pro-trans sentiment in a field whose kingmakers are anti-trans? What chance to succeed do comedians from marginalized communities have in a culture that mandates space for racism and misogyny, for ableism and homophobia, and which harshly punishes dissent?
“There's an ambition that comedians have these days where they very much want to be on tour with the Dave Chappelle,” historian Kliph Nesteroff told me last year. “They very much want to appear on the Joe Rogan podcast, because they feel it'll propel their career. And so I don't see that many people parodying or ridiculing Dave Chappelle, as you might expect, him being such a huge celebrity. And I don't see that many people parodying or ridiculing Joe Rogan, as you would expect, him being such a huge celebrity.”
This is an apt observation and an important analysis of where we are. It is not some coincidence that progressive politics do not have the same constituency in comedy as right-wing politics (despite the complaints of right-wing comedians). It is, in fact, a direct result of the Rogan cohort’s power. Thanks to them, the structural barriers faced by left-wing and marginalized voices are even higher than they were before Spotify and Netflix paid him and Chappelle hundreds of millions of dollars. As we can see now, this money was functionally an investment in a talent pipeline and media ecosystem for right-wing comedians. This is not to say there are no progressive comics—there are plenty. But by and large they do not have access to the same income streams or professional networks as right-wingers, and you are far more likely to see them work with right-wingers than speak a single word against their faction.
Radicalized by Covid
It’s worth acknowledging that the reasoning behind Rogan’s move to Austin is flatly ridiculous: faced with the slight inconvenience of Covid rules and the discomfort of visible unhoused people, as he tells it, he uprooted his family’s lives and went south. This is pathetic, embarrassing, and utterly discordant with his tough-guy image, not that anyone in his camp is a stickler for intellectual consistency. What it reveals, I think, is the way Covid, like Trump, created a new permission structure for right-leaning comedians. Under the “Covid regime,” as Dave Smith called public health policies like vaccine mandates and restrictions on indoor activities, even comics who previously passed themselves off as above politics—“I don’t care about left or right, I just care about being funny”—were suddenly under assault by Democratic governments in California and New York, governments that were of course synonymous with wokeness, DEI, CRT, cancel culture, and MeToo. It was in red states like Texas and Florida where they found refuge, performing for adoring audiences in cities without oppressive health measures—and, totally coincidentally, getting Covid over and over again.
At the same time, the pandemic fueled a broader public hunger for conspiratorial thinking, one that many comedians were happy to satisfy. Where QAnon may have been a bridge too far a few years earlier, vaccine skepticism suddenly made sense. So did Covid denialism in general. These were not fringe beliefs, after all, but the mainstream positions of the Republican party. They were also the positions that justified working in live comedy in 2020 and 2021.
As we have discussed in the past, of course, the thing about comedy is that it offers an intrinsic permission structure for people who wish to traffic in bigotry with plausible deniability. In that sense, the last eight years have offered a steady rightward push for comics who got into comedy for one simple reason: they are Republicans, and comedy is where you can be a Republican and popular. Each new upheaval—Trump, Covid—had the convenient effect of validating their contrarian impulses while expanding their audiences. The very nature of their work, in which they are constantly consuming and producing content with politically aligned figures, essentially requires them to live in a positive feedback loop of radicalizing media. It was inevitable that they would get worse and worse over time, by which I mean more and more comfortable with straightforward hate speech.
“The Party of Gay”
Consider yesterday’s episode of Flagrant, Andrew Schulz’s podcast. Let us skip past the opening monologue where he describes Kamala Harris as a “throat goat” and jokes that the Black and Indian-American Vice President’s parents “met at a 7/11 robbery.” About 45 minutes into the episode, Schulz criticizes what he sees as the Democrats’ branding issue: that they’ve become “the party of gay,” to the point that no straight men under 60 identify as Democrats anymore.
Schulz: When I grew up as a Democrat, this is how I saw Democrats. This is the perception of what happened as a kid. I was like, "Yo, the Democrats seem to like Black people. And I like Black people, so I wanna be with the side who likes the Black people. Black people make cool shit.
Akaash Singh: Republicans seem to hate gay people—
Schulz: No, no, no, fuck gay, we're not even talking about gays yet. Republicans were seen as racist. The branding of it, I don't know if that was true, but in New York, it was like, "Yo, you're a Republican, are you kind of racist?" You know? I'm not even looking at my family, who's all Republicans outside of my dad. And even the way that my dad described it to me, he was like, "Yeah, I grew up in like a Republican household, but when it came to the civil rights, it seemed like they didn't really step up and they didn't really care." And my dad was like, "I saw my brothers and shit dodge the draft, I'm the only one that entered the draft. So you're talking all this war shit, but you're dodging the draft. I'm the only one that's actually was in the army here, and you are just ignoring the civil rights thing. Nah, I'm a Democrat."
So it was this, this feeling of, to me, acceptance and looking out for this group of people that were very important culturally to America. Okay. So, Black people cool? Democrat. You don't like black people? Republican. Right? Now, Democrat got nothing to do with black people. Now Democrat is gay. It's just like, how do we protect the gays? How do we make everything trans? How do we make everything DEI? And DEI is just gay everything. Right? Just gay—women—it's like, “women, gay, trans.” That's the only branding. I feel like they don't give a fuck about Black people no more.
Alexx Media: Nah, they still—
Schulz: They still they front like they do. But here's the thing—
Media: Oh, they front like they do. Yes, yes.
Schulz: Here's the—and maybe all parties front like they do. But you gotta ask yourself this question. And this is why I think that straight dudes just don't identify with it. Let's say that Republicans are thought of as racist. I think that's going away a little bit. But let's just say Republicans are thought of as racist still, but Democrats are thought of as gay. Would you rather people think you racist or gay?
Media: Gay.
Schulz: You rather think people think you're gay?
Media: Gay. Than racist? Yeah.
Schulz: Because you're black. You can't be racist. For, I think for the average dude—you're cool with the gay shit, obviously, you lean in with the fucking nails and stuff. But I think for the average dude, they would rather people think that they're a little racist than a little gay.
Mark Gagnon: They already tell you that you're kind of racist. They'll be like, oh yeah, you got implicit racism. You're implicitly racist living in America. So you're already racist. I'm like, all right.
Schulz: Well, if I'm already racist I'm with them—not the nip tucks. I don't wanna fuck with the nip tucks. So the branding, I think that they really thought that they were doing the right thing, being progressive and protecting these oppressed people. It could come from a good place. But they lean so far into that.
Singh: Yeah, and they need some protections, but they lean so far—and to your point—
Schulz: That you alienated all the straight dudes and now you just got a bunch of women, gays, and trans that are like "rah rah, rah, Democrats." And everybody else is like, all right bro. How many Disney movies we gotta make gay?
In other words: the Democrats used to be champions of an oppressed group Schulz thinks is cool, then they became the champions of an oppressed group he thinks is gross. “You’re trying to make my kids gay,” he complains a few minutes later. “That’s a huge component.”
To their credit, Schulz and his cohosts know their audience. Elsewhere in this segment he declares that “the Trump train is coming” and that “we going MAGA on the pod, we might have to go MAGA.” (One of his cohosts responds, sarcastically, “Starting now?”) They’ve consciously positioned themselves for a Trump victory and the continued demand for Trumpist culture. This, for them, is what that looks like: an explicit white supremacist realignment.
Indeed, that’s how all these comedians have positioned themselves—for a world where they can truly be themselves, which just so happens to be on the wrong side of the defining civil rights issues of our time. The brilliant thing is that it doesn’t matter who wins in November; it doesn’t matter which way the winds blow. They’ve already built the world they want, and that world is thriving.
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