The Bluestocking, vol 181

You've completely killed the comics table.

Happy Friday!

Our boiler broke last week, so I skipped the newsletter. How weird must it be to be a plumber? Like that thing with the Queen thinking everywhere smells of fresh paint, plumbers must experience life as a series of smelly people who are thrilled to see you.

Helen

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This week I’ve been reading Andrew Hankinson’s new book Don’t Applaud: Either Laugh, Or Don’t. (Unfortunately, like Leonard of Quirm, Hankinson is brilliantly inventive but terrible at naming stuff. His previous book on the final hours of Raoul Moat was called—deep breath—You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat].)

This one is about New York’s dingy, tiny Comedy Cellar, which became famous thanks to Louis CK’s show Louie. The book starts with CK’s implosion,for repeatedly masturbating front of female comics who thought they were having a business meeting, and runs backwards chronologically from there. It’s a collage of conversations with the club owner Noam and comedians who have performed at the club, as well as emails and tweets from offended patrons, and other miscellaneous entries.

Presenting a narrative like this, without any expository grouting to stick the bits together, is a big risk. It also trusts your audience to either know who everyone is—CK and Amy Schumer and Dave Chapelle and Jerry Seinfeld—or be OK with the uncertainty. Quite often, you hear about the reaction to an incident before the incident itself. Some things only make sense in retrospect.

Perhaps that makes this book a a minority taste. But it’s done with such skill that you imbibe stuff by osmosis, where a conventional narrative would spoonfeed you the author’s pre-chewed reckons. Often the points are made by juxtaposition: an anecdote about Jerry Seinfeld being offended because he mistakenly thought he “got the light” (a signal to wind up) segues into one about how Chappelle is allowed to smoke indoors at the club, because … he’s Dave Chappelle. Comedy is a status game, and one of the strands of the book is uncovering the vast and fragile egos of the same male comedians who think everyone else is a snowflake. Everyone has something which offends them, whether it’s rape jokes or being treated like a regular person.

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One of my favourite chapters is simply a reproduction of an email Louis CK sent to Noam after the club owner ordered a renovation to expand the kitchen so it could serve nicer food. That also meant moving the “comedian’s table” closer to the bar, which in turn meant more people gawking at CK while he had his pre-set dinner. “Hey Noam. Louis CK here,” reads the email. “I wanted to share some feelings I have about the current state of the Comedy Cellar. It’s up to you to decide if it matters what I think because it is your club, but in either case here’s what I think . . . The problem is that you’ve completely killed the comics’ table. I cringe every time I sit back there. . . Everyone is on top of us. There is no safe place.”

Wow, you think, what exquisite sensitivity to discomfort. And then you remember that the same person wrote this, in 2017. “At the time, I said to myself that what I did was O.K. because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question.”

What Hankinson doesn’t have to say is that a man who can understand why it’s not pleasant to eat too close to other people probably understood fine well that women in business meetings didn’t really want to see his dick. But like Chappelle smoking indoors, “when you’re a star they let you do it.”

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The table itself is a potent metaphor: who gets to sit there? As Guy Branum writes for Vulture, ‘Louis, of course, sexually harassed numerous comics. He was not expelled. When managers, club owners, and comics became aware that he was assaulting comics, they did not say, “Hey, let’s figure out what’s going on,” or “He might be a threat to the other comics.” They protected him. They made the problem go away. Louis’s behavior didn’t hurt the system. It maintained the system. It alienated women from careers in comedy and allowed everyone to continue to live in a world where they could believe that the table, the Official Council of American Funny, was a place only straight men were worthy of reaching.”

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All that said, the other half of the argument gets an airing, too. The book is punctuated by the tweets of those offended by one routine or another, and Noam’s attempts to placate them. Again, the juxtaposition works wonders. “I can’t believe they’d make jokes about X, you’d never get away with jokes about Y,” fumes one person, before 35 pages later, someone makes a joke about Y which causes equal offence to a different audience member. Your Holocaust is someone else’s dead baby is someone else’s rape is someone else’s racial reckoning is someone else’s 9/11. And yes, there’s a rape joke in there which I found extremely funny.

One of the reasons to do live comedy is to find the line, to work out the difference between the unarticulated and the unspeakable. You only know when you’ve gone too far when your joke meets a wall of painful silence. The audience is the best editor, as John Lloyd once put it to me. As a result, this book is far more interesting and uncomfortable and memorable than any number of op-eds about free speech and offence.

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The Identity Hoaxers (The Atlantic)

The notion of needing “to be associated with the victims rather than the perpetrators” is what sent me down the rabbit hole of identity hoaxers. You would be surprised at how many there are: the “pretendians,” who claim Native American ancestry, including the former Klansman who reinvented himself as a best-selling “Cherokee” author; the Syrian blogger “Gay Girl in Damascus,” who turned out to be a straight American man named Tom MacMaster; Scott Peake, who presented himself as a fluent Gaelic speaker from a remote Scottish island when he took over the Saltire Society, which promotes Scottish culture. (He was really from South London, and couldn’t speak Gaelic.)

Within this galaxy of hoaxers, the academics and activists who attempt “reverse passing” are a distinct group. “Passing” has historically referred to the practice of nonwhite people adopting white identities or being read as white, allowing them to bypass the racial segregation of housing, jobs, and services. But the racial reckoning in the United States in recent years has asked white Americans to see themselves as perpetrators of centuries of injustice, and Black Americans as victims of that injustice. “Reverse passing,” also called “blackfishing” or “race-shifting,” seems intriguingly common in university humanities departments and leftist activist spaces, where many subscribe to the worldview outlined by Robin DiAngelo in her best-selling book White Fragility: “White people do need to feel grief about the brutality of white supremacy and our role in it.” Perhaps the subconscious reasoning runs like this: White people are oppressors, but I’m a good person, not an oppressor, so I can’t be white. (The right-wing version of this argument is different: I’m white, but don’t feel like an oppressor, so I reject this ideology.)

This is one of the most intriguing rabbit holes I’ve ever fallen down. There are so many fakers out there! Thanks to all the Bluestocking readers who supplied examples—including Francis Wheen, whose knowledge of fake Holocaust survivors is encyclopaedic; Cyril Maury and Tim Heath for pointing me to the story of another Holocaust faker, the Spanish mechanic Enrico Marco; the several people who sent me the Chameleon, one of my favourite ever New Yorker pieces, which has a HELL of a twist; Andrew Bell for the fake Gaelic speaker running the Saltire society*, a hoax whose smalltimeness made it appealing. And anyone I have forgotten!

Aficionados may also enjoy the stories of the Tichborne claimant and Ern Malley, and the Modernist poet Frank Prewett. I’m also gutted to hear that the man who inspired Jean Claude Van Damme’s seminal Bloodsport may have been economical with the truth about his ju-jitsu prowess and military service. I’ll be honest, my trust fell when he claimed to have been recruited by the CIA director for a secret mission after a meeting in the men’s loos.

Perhaps the maddest thing about researching this piece was the fact there were so many cases I could have included, although many involve questions rather than established facts: Elizabeth Warren’s contested Cherokee ancestry; the black activist Shaun King, who was accused of being white after his birth certificate was dug up and named two white parents (he says he is the product of his mother’s affair with a light-skinned black man); University of California Riverside professor Andrea Smith, who is accused of passing herself off as Cherokee. Then there’s the tale of Sciencing_Bi, a bisexual Native American professor at Arizona State University, who “died” of Covid last year, and was then revealed to be a fabrication by BethAnn McLaughlin, a former academic. In a delicious irony, even my beloved Jordan Peterson has been accused of overstating his links to the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe.

It’s hard to accept—and deal with—the fact that some people will colonise and exploit marginalised identities, and we therefore need to be OK with some level of gatekeeping, eg Native American tribal registration.

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The Demise of Political Blackness (Unherd)

Discussions surrounding race in Britain have been further fudged by the super-diversity that has resulted from recent decades of mass migration from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Eastern European migrants, for example, have been the frequent object of xenophobia in the past couple of decades, despite being “white”. At the same time, the emergence of identity politics in recent years has had the effect of breaking up what was once a unified “black struggle” into ethnic and religious fragments.

Within this political desiccation, it is hardly surprising that the Tories are the political group best equipped to appeal to an increasingly diverse electorate. It is, after all, something that they have been trying to do for a long time; in 1983, they ran an election poster featuring a besuited black man alongside the words: “Labour say he’s black. Tories say he’s British”. The message is clear: we emphasise nationhood and want to include you in it, while the Left wants to keep you imprisoned by your race.

Of course, when the Tories first tried to paint themselves as the party of the aspirational ethnic minority, the message was hollow: the party was extremely white. Now, the party is responsible for the most ethnically diverse cabinet in the history of British government. 

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That Scene in a Christopher Nolan Film Where You Lose the Plot

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Quick Links

1. Conflict vs Mistake Models of Politics. Trying to decide which side I’m on. (Slate Star Codex)

2. “We learned that when Boris Johnson visited [Cummings’s] home just before becoming prime minister to beg him to join the team, Dom had four conditions. The first was that Johnson had to be “deadly serious” about Brexit.  It’s revealing that Cummings felt he needed to check this in summer 2019, but then, he’d dealt with Johnson before.” Dominic Cummings is back! (The Critic)

3. Watching Nigel Farage scrabble for coins by doing birthday shoutouts on Cameo is so undignified I just cringed a kidney out of my mouth. He was an MEP for 20 years—salary: €107,000; golden parachute c. €169,680; pension payable at 63, c.£73,000—he can’t possibly need the money.

4. “[Teen Vogue’s] Alexi McCammond was fired because Conde Nast can’t fire Anna Wintour.” (My New Band Is) Good piece about the wider office politics behind the ousting of the new Teen Vogue editor for anti-Asian tweets sent when she was 17. I have delegated my own view on this brouhaha to my colleague Graeme Wood, who says “the entire point of being a teenager is to make and correct the most mortifying errors of your life.”

5. “Let there be more biographies of failures, people who were ignored by the world, whose ideas came before their time, whose great work was left in ruins.” (The Common Reader) This sent me on a binge of Common Reader, a Substack of historical biographies, which I hadn’t encountered before. Per last week’s newsletter, I discovered that Helen deWitt also had a Great Wife, although in her case it was a Great Husband.

6. Hadley Freeman interviews Edward St Aubyn.

7. If you get all of the people you don’t like fired from Substack tomorrow, what will change? How will your life improve? [Glenn] Greenwald will spend more time with his hottie husband and his beloved kids and his 6,000 dogs in his beautiful home in Rio. Glenn will be fine. How do we do the real work of getting you job security and a decent wage?” Freddie deBoer on the recent Twitter backlash to Substack giving advances to high-profile contrarians. (Substack, ironically).

8. Chaser: Stratechery on the rise of the “sovereign writer,” which is also my worry about Substack: i.e. when the rest of the media has died, what will Andrew Sullivan have to be contrarian about? “Sovereign writers, particularly those focused on analysis and opinion, depend on journalists actually reporting the news. This second unbundling, though, will divert more and more revenue to the former at the expense of the latter.”

9. Kara Swisher explains NFTs—non-fungible tokens—i.e. original artworks or collectibles encoded in a blockchain to verify that they’re unique. My starting position was that this was all art-world circular hype to create a new market, but Swisher is more open-minded.

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You’ve almost certainly bought by book by now if you were ever going to buy it, but this is a nice pop of colour to end the email

* A previous version incorrectly identified the Saltire Society as a Gaelic society. It is a general Scottish cultural society.