Netflix's Ari Shaffir Says Hate Speech Is Good, Actually
Also: Joe Rogan comes out against the measles vaccine.
Warning: this post quotes a comedian using a slur for disabled people.
I want to flag something I missed last month, when I wrote about the rapid rightward lurch in comedy’s Overton window. Specifically I want to flag the following section in Ari Shaffir’s latest Netflix special, released in January on Netflix, the streaming giant Netflix, which paid money for what you are about to read. In this segment, a little more than halfway through the hour, Shaffir proclaims his love for a certain ableist slur:
I’m gonna be honest. You gotta stand up for what you believe in in this world. And I’m trying to bring “retarded” back.
[audience cheers]
Oh? Oh! Oh, okay. Oh! Well, maybe you never left, southeast Washington, DC. Maybe it’s been here in hiding all along. They took it from us, everybody. They took it from us. Unconstitutionally. It was a casualty of the war against the N-word and the F-word. The N-word for Black people and the F-word for gay people. And somebody, some goody two-shoes, was like, “Also the R-word.” And we’re like, “Don’t do this. Please, please, don’t do this.”
And we let them take it, the greatest word in the English language. Retarded. The bald eagle of words. We should’ve said something. We didn’t say anything. We should’ve said something, should’ve spoken up. We all waited for someone else to say something. I’m to blame too. I was also a coward. I was waiting for someone else to speak up, and no one did. That’s how the Holocaust started, same way. Everybody was like, “Tell ’em you like the Jews.” Like, “You tell ’em you like the Jews. They seem pretty strong on this.” And we let them take it.
And to be clear, just so you know, I get it about the N-word and the F-word. We’re not talking about those, only talking about “retarded.” The N-word and the F-word had to go. But they’re gone now. They’ve been arrested. The N-word and the F-word are safely behind bars, they’re never getting paroled. But “retarded,” that was a marijuana arrest. We gotta correct these flimsy convictions. We just want to say it to our friends.
It’s actually a very positive word, you know? Your friend falls? Like, “Ha, you’re retarded.” Like, “I know!” You know. We just want to say it to our friends. And also about our enemies as well. And also about people with Down’s syndrome. Yeah, I want it all the way back. No compromise. It never should have left. All the way back. All the way back. Pre-80s “retarded” rules. Never shoulda left.
The bit continues for some time after this. Whereas Black people he’s asked overwhelmingly disapprove of the N-word, Shaffir says, the same is not true for disabled people, whom he asked many years ago—as a high schooler—when he worked at a camp for special needs youth. This turns out to be a misdirection. When he asked a camper named David, he says, David responded with a series of unintelligible grunts enacted by Shaffir in a disgusting performance reminiscent of Donald Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter nine years ago. “I’m sorry, everybody,” Shaffir says, shaking his head. “I wish I wasn’t like this.”
There are a few things I find notable about this routine. One, it is a full-throated embrace of a slur as a slur. Shaffir forgoes the usual defenses we see of hate speech in comedy, whether by casting it as irony (“I’m making fun of the real racists”) or as risk-taking in the service of edgy humor. There is no plausible deniability here. Shaffir’s argument is that he should be able to mock disabled people for being disabled, and he makes this argument by mocking disabled people for being disabled.
Two, this bit comes less than a year after Shane Gillis used the same slur in his 2024 SNL monologue, to the delight of his fans and contemporaries. I mention this to illustrate how these guys take cues from one another, giving each other permission to publicly dabble in various forms of hate speech while demonstrating to studios and distributors how profitable their dabbling can be. Dave Chappelle’s transphobia portended a broader mainstreaming of transphobia among his peers; now we are seeing the same effect with naked ableism. Both sentiments had long been simmering in the live comedy ecosystems and seedy podcast networks where Shaffir and Gillis spend most of their time, which perhaps tells us what will become of the other sentiments simmering there now.
Seth Simons
Three, this segment functions as a handy simulacrum of the broader anti-woke movement, which functioned as a moral panic that cast its target as the real moral panic. In the eyes of the anti-woke, those of us who recognized hate speech in cultural spaces as hate speech were puritanical censors, what Shaffir might call “goody two-shoes.” Of course the opposite was true, and it was the anti-woke movement hysterically suppressing efforts to preserve and expand existing social norms—norms that justly recognize speech as a vector for structural oppression. (Consider the Trump administration’s swift moves to target trans Americans, or the GOP’s proposed spending cuts that will disproportionately harm disabled people.)
Note the inversion Shaffir pulls in his routine: the people who refused to speak up as the slur was stigmatized, he jokes, are just like the people in Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, cowardly watching as the Nazis came for one group after another. Again, exactly the opposite is true: Shaffir is explicitly endorsing the oppression of a vulnerable group, even acknowledging that many of them are unable to advocate for themselves.
One particularly repugnant thing about Shaffir—as a comedian and as the teller of these specific jokes—is that he is the grandson of a 103-year-old Holocaust survivor. For his entire life, he has had direct access to that history. What he’s done with it is trot out his grandfather’s experience as an implicit shield against criticism and a sign of his own enlightenment about hate movements. Even in this very special, he closes with a story about the time he asked his grandfather if there were any good days at Bergen-Belsen. How quickly we forget.
I would be remiss if I did not share two recent pieces of Joe Rogan news. The first is this see-it-to-believe-it monologue in his new episode with former NFL player Antonio Brown, emphasis mine:
We have to stop the division in this country. And I feel like people are digging in their trenches. They're digging in deeper and deeper and really we should be encouraging the opposite. Most of what people are arguing about all day long in politics is not affecting your life. It's bullshit. It's bullshit. And you could get caught up in it and it can become your whole life and you will waste your life thinking about that stuff instead of thinking about stuff that you actually have control over. Your family, your friends, your life. Stuff that's actually important, which is what you should be thinking about most of the time. But some people, they think about that and then think, "Yeah, what are these motherfuckers doing behind the scenes? They're stealing my fucking taxes, doing this, and bringing in the illegals, and what are they doing with the trans kids?" Yeah, it's nonstop.
THAT'S YOU! YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT YOURSELF!
The second is this video Rogan reposted on his Instagram story last night, originally posted by an anti-vaxxer, Covid denialist, and “health freedom” influencer. The video features a Brady Bunch clip popular among anti-vaccine circles. Per a 2019 report in NPR:
The episode "Is There a Doctor in the House?" features the whole family sick with measles. First, Peter gets sent home from school. Mother Carol Brady, played by Florence Henderson, describes his symptoms as "a slight temperature, a lot of dots and a great big smile," because he gets to stay home from school for a few days.
Once the rest of the six kids come down with measles, the youngest two Brady siblings fool around, with Bobby trying to color Cindy's measles spots green.
"If you have to get sick, sure can't beat the measles," sister Marcia says, as the older Bradys sit around a Monopoly board on one of the kid's beds. All the kids are thankful they don't have to take any medicine or, worse, get shots, the thought of which causes Jan to groan.
People who are critical of vaccines bring the episode up often. It's used in videos and memes and is cited by activists like Dr. Toni Bark, who testifies against vaccines in courts and at public hearings across the United States. To them, it aptly illustrates what they consider to be the harmlessness of the illness.
"You stayed home like the Brady Bunch show. You stayed home. You didn't go to the doctor," she says. "We never said, 'Oh my God, your kid could die. Oh my God, this is a deadly disease.' It's become that."
And here is the influencer’s caption for the clip Rogan shared: “I wonder what made it go from “staying home for a few days” to something “so dangerous” we are willing to inject poison something into our children that causes brain damage (encephalitis) & life long chronic illness?”
In other words: in the midst of a measles outbreak that has already killed two people, including an unvaccinated child in Texas, Joe Rogan just came out against the measles vaccine.
