"I can't believe anything anymore!"

I’m working my way through a massive, “definitive” new biography of Lorne Michaels by the New Yorker editor Susan Morrison, excerpted in that very magazine a couple weeks ago. I’ll have more to say when the book comes out next month, but don’t get your hopes up for anything resembling an exposé. While it provides ample insight into Michaels' eccentricities, it’s ultimately an admiring portrait, which is probably to be expected: it’s based on interviews with SNL’s vast alumni network and extensive access to the man himself, by someone who used to work for him (though the book curiously does not mention this latter detail). 

What interests me most about the Lorne Michaels revealed by the book is what’s always interested me about him. As Morrison describes, he sees himself as a modern Shakespeare—also a modern Thomas Edison, not to mention a Prometheus-like figure to his cast—and is fully cognizant of his abusive management style: he once told an assistant, “I teach by humiliation. But after you leave me, you’ll be able to work anywhere.” His own rationalization for this “teaching” method is the same one that’s been adopted by pretty much the entire industry and media: “The only thing that justifies that level of abuse,” he told Morrison, “is the exhilaration of it working.” 

In other words, Michaels has tormented 50 years of writers, actors, and crew members because his boiler-room process is supposedly vital to the great comedy that comes out of SNL. This is the common wisdom recited even to this day, when SNL looks like this:

Anyways. More on that soon.

In an episode of her podcast released last week, Whitney Cummings explained that she has not been red-pilled or succumbed to conspiracy theories; rather, she simply started thinking more critically over the last few years, especially in the wake of her pregnancy, during which she realized she should start wearing a seatbelt. 

I’m not exaggerating. Here’s the excerpt: 

When you're pregnant, you finally start reading ingredients on food. You start caring about yourself by accident, because, you know, you care about the baby. When I got pregnant, I realized how bad I was to myself, how poorly I treated myself. Once I got pregnant, I was like, “Well, I guess I should put a seatbelt on.” You know, “Where is it? Oh.” Like I'm literally putting a seatbelt on for the—it’s so wild that you start having self-respect and caring about yourself only when you're growing another person inside you.

The entire episode is like this—a fascinating and incredibly disturbing portrait of a very famous, very wealthy public figure in the process of losing her identity to conspiracism. Here are some other things she reveals:

Cummings traces her transformation to the Billy Cosby’s downfall:

You have to understand, if The Cosby Show was your favorite show, you’ll never be the same again. Like we joke about Bill Cosby a lot, fine, but actually I don't even know if this next generation—you guys find out that people are creeps so fast that you never lived with the delusion that someone was a good person for too long, right? I mean, I guess it still happens, but Bill Cosby was my hero for like 25 years—more, maybe. I don't know when, I don't know. You don't know what it's like to have one of your heroes—the true north of the type of family you wanted and the type of relationship you wanted and the type of man that you wanted to be married to and to have be your dad—all of it—outed as a complete serial psychopath. 

[…]

I think that things have chemically impacted my brain over time. But then also, the emotional impact of things like that, which I haven't had time to really unpack. I'm in a place where I'm just like, maybe I'm wrong about that. Of course not. We don't get to simultaneously think we're right about everything, and then say everything's fake news. Which is it? So if all the news is fake, then how could you possibly be right about everything? You know what I mean? My thing is like, the news is fake, so I'm an idiot. How would I know anything if everything's fake? You know? So I think this is also the year that I'm going, like, I don't think I've ever known anything. Let's be honest. You know? So that's kind of the place I'm in. I'm kind of in the market for some facts and belief systems, you know?

As a result of her realization that everything may be fake, she’s started to indulge such conspiracy theories as moon landing denial:

Once the Cosby thing happened, I was kind of like, anything I hold dear to me truth-wise could be untrue. I'm literally like, yeah, the moon landing, there's something fishy about that. Like yeah, for sure. I don't know if we landed on the moon, but it is funny to me that the moon landing is really what divides us as a country. You know? I don’t know. But my take on the moon thing is actually that—this is a hot take—I just don’t care. Is that weird? Like, it makes no difference to me if they went or not.

[…]

I know there's also a lot of things that our country has had to pretend to do to make Russia and China think twice about blowing us up. And I'm so pro-that. I'm like, government, whatever you need to do to like—go for it. This is not, I don't think that telling the truth about our vulnerabilities is the way to go. I don't feel like, you know, when you get to the top of whatever, you know, agencies protecting America, I don't think the strategy is to be authentic and to embrace our imperfections. That’s Instagram self-help nonsense. I'm like, military, whatever you need to do to keep the psychopaths to stop nuking us, I’m gonna defer to you on that. 

I can admit that that's not my expertise, you know? Whatever you need to do—make cardboard tanks, drones over New Jersey so they know we have—fake a moon landing, fine. I don’t care. Do what you have to do. I'm also one of the few people that believes that there's actually competent people in the military and competent people in our intelligence agencies. Yeah, f course there's criminals everywhere, but I don't know, I think there's smart ones and I do think there's a lot of things that we just shouldn't know. They know we shouldn’t—they're like, if we tell Americans this, chaos will ensue. There's certain things that we're just not capable of being able to know without losing our minds.

[…]

But the moon landing, I am kind of obsessed for some reason. It's in the zeitgeist, you know? I would find it way more impressive if we did fake the moon landing. It's just my take. If the moon landing was shot on a Hollywood sound stage, I feel like we would've heard about it in the MeToo movement. Someone would've come out of her grave and been like, “I was uncomfortable.” And maybe we went to the moon and just didn't get the footage. There's also that, the footage I've seen of the moon landing is very rash. I mean, a lot of stuff may be fake, you know?

She also seems to be under the impression that soy milk causes cancer (something that’s come up in her podcast before):

Once you hit a certain age, you've been around long enough to see things that you held onto, as a belief system, be debunked and changed. I've been around long enough to see science change. You know how surreal that it, you know how hard it is to believe in anything after science—the one thing that's like, “this is true, it's science,” that's what you learn—that gets debunked and you're like, “whoa, whoa, whoa. I can't believe anything anymore!” 

I mean, it's like, I drank soy milk for 15 years. The science was soy milk is healthy. This is what is good for you. For 15 years I drank soy milk. All my friends were drinking soy milk, 'cause it was healthier. Now everybody has cancer. It's like all my girlfriends had to get their tits cut off, all my guy friends grew tits.

She has even started to question whether Helen Keller was truly blind and deaf:

People are like, “Helen Keller wasn't blind, she wasn't deaf.” I'm like, “yes, she was.” And I'm like, and I would know that because why? I've read all the books? I watched the movie? I don't have any proof either, it's just that we’ve believed this for a while and I don't think we can undo this right now. You know what I mean? I think—you know what it is, I think it's also more the disgust that like, why would you spend your time on this? Like, there's a little bit of like, people, I get it. When someone's like, “Helen Keller wasn't blind.” I'm like, I can't unpack Helen Keller right now.

You know what the solution is? Between conspiracy theory people and the people—the people that accuse people of being conspiracy theorists, and the conspiracy theorists that think people that are asleep? I think we all just need to get comfortable saying, “I don't know.” Like, we don't know. I don't know if Helen Keller was blind or not. That's the sanest sentence of all. I don't know if she was blind. Probably?

The common thread throughout all of these passages is a loss of faith in the very idea of truth—that anything can be known or trusted. As I said, it’s incredibly disturbing to witness, both in its own right and for what it reveals about comedy as a social milieu. There’s no one out there willing or able to pull her back from the edge. 

In a new episode of Theo Von's podcast recounting his attendance at Trump's inauguration, Von said he hopes he can hold GOP lawmakers accountable to their promises, unless it turns out he just doesn't really understand how anything works. The below follows a caller mentioning that she's from Shreveport, Louisiana:

Oh yeah, that's Mike Johnson country. And you know, he's Speaker of the House. And I liked his attitude. I liked his energy. You know, and I'm curious to see what this whole new campaign—what they do in there. I'm curious to see, you know, because it's a motley, it's a motley group that they got going in there. And I wanna get to meet some of 'em. I want to get to talk to some of 'em and learn some stuff, you know. And also ask 'em some promises. "Are you gonna do this? You gonna do this?" And then we can see if we can hold 'em to it. If we get to keep podcasting for years, we'll be able to hold 'em to it. "Hey, you said you were gonna get to do this. Why didn't it happen?" Or, "Why did it happen?" You know?

So that kind of stuff really intrigues me. You know, are we gonna get lobbyists and foreign countries and AIPACs [sic] and all these different people out from interfering with our candidates and interfering with our lobbies? Or how does it work? And also, am I just delusional and I just don't know the whole system? And if that's the case, then educate me on it. Because there's also just a cost of doing business in some things, you know. Sometimes there's just, there's a cost of doing business. You know, like you could go set up a fruit stand or something, or a little, little watermelon stand or something. A little banana shop or something on the corner of a street. You could do that. But you have to pay a permit, right? You have to. It's just the cost of doing business. So sometimes I wonder if there's, you know, what the truth is out there. I wanna learn more about that.

Before we close out, I just want to direct you to a really impressive new feature from Bloomberg, which produced with some nice solid data on the role that YouTubers (including some of our favorite comedians) played in the 2024 election. The piece looks at these podcasters’ immense reach, maps out the political and politics-adjacent figures they had on as guests, and quantifies just how often they discussed political issues (for audiences that likely trust them more than legacy news sources, given their outsider status):

To hear them tell it, America is in a desperate place, destabilized by soaring inflation, migrants streaming across the border and the beginnings of a third world war. Gender politics have gotten out of hand while schools and the medical establishment duped the public. The same messages were communicated in Trump’s inaugural address on Monday. Now that Trump is back in power, the broadcasters are well-positioned to help build support for his political agenda, transforming grievances into policy that could have lasting effects even beyond Trump’s term in office.

[…]

Of the programs reviewed, The Joe Rogan Experience, Flagrant by Andrew Schulz and The PBD Podcast by Bet-David follow the most typical host-and-interview talk show format, discussing news and popular culture, all while challenging political correctness. The hosts largely do not push back against their guests’ ideas. Von, Rogan and Schulz are also comedians, and they often recast controversial content as edgy humor.

Yet even as the podcasts have tried to brand themselves uniquely, similar themes and characters appear across the network. Bloomberg’s analysis of 2,002 episodes across the shows reveals how closely interconnected the podcasters’ relationships are, and how much the shows’ talking points overlap. Over the past two years, 152 guests made an appearance on at least two of the shows. Recurring characters are common, not just as guests, but as “friends of the shows,” including the UFC CEO White and comedian Shane Gillis. The effect gives viewers a sense of being inducted into a virtual, close-knit friend group from home.

It’s a really great piece—go give it a read.