Howie Mandel, the comedian and former “Deal or No Deal” host, appeared on the Stand Up World podcast on March 16, 2024, and told its host, Mike Binder, that the woke attempts to cancel comedians are an attack on comedy itself. Particularly, he insisted that comedy hurts no one and that it has to come from a place of darkness to be good, something cancel culture disrupts.
Speaking about the situation in comedy and how it began, Mandel first said that things were trending in the wrong direction when comedians started noticing that their material was being complained about by college kids who found it “offensive.” That got worse and worse, Mandel went on to note, with numerous comedians canceled, but now he thinks the pendulum is swinging in the other direction.
Commenting on that swinging pendulum and how once-canceled comedians are back in a big way, Mandel said, “I think the pendulum swung really far into the woke, and I feel people like Shane Gillis and Bert Kreischer and Ari Shaffir and all these Austin comics … these people who don’t give a s*** about that and believe in the purity of what [stand-up comedy] is, and it is an art form, are bringing the pendulum back, and they’re selling bigger numbers than anybody that is trying to conform to what you believe you need to conform to.”
Continuing, he explained how cancel culture ruins the art form of comedy, saying, “If you think of comedy as an art, they started telling us there are certain colors you can’t use. If you’re a painter you shouldn’t say, ‘you can paint anything you want, but don’t use black, don’t use any yellows and it’s really not right to use blue.’ Art suffers, and there isn’t anything we shouldn’t talk about.”
He wasn’t done. Later on in the podcast, Mandel argued that comedians need to be free to make jokes and poke fun bout even sensitive situations, as humor comes from darkness. “All humor comes out of darkness. That’s why the Tragedy and Comedy masks are so close together,” he began.
He continued, “If you’re a little kid and you go to the circus you’re laughing at a clown falling down. You’re laughing at the misfortune of somebody you don’t know. If something bad doesn’t happen, it’s not funny. If something embarrassing doesn’t happen, it’s not funny. If something awkward doesn’t happen, it’s not funny.”
Then, Mandel, who suffers from OCD, argued that comedy and laughter are how he makes it through the day despite mental health issues, saying, “As someone who suffers from mental health issues and has a tough time every day, laughter is my bridge to existing. There is a thin line between making myself laugh … and being just crushed by darkness.”
The host, Mike Binder, chimed in, noting that much of what people think is verboten ends up being material audiences love, saying, “So many people are afraid of humor. I’ve tried jokes on my wife, or people or friends and they’ll go, ‘Oh, you can’t say that.’ Why? Why? And then you go up to an audience and everybody laughs and you go, ‘what were you afraid of?’”
Watch them here:
Featured image credit: By TYMA4561 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110142697
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