Noam leaves a comment online beneath the article,
I’m the owner of the Comedy Cellar. This is libellous. Can you back up your description of the Comedy Table in any way? It’s total fantasy. A total lie. The precise exact opposite of the truth. Do the right thing. Admit you made a mistake and take it down. Or lawyer up.
Guy replies in the comments,
The table is a metaphor, but … Your web page has photos of fifteen comics, one is a woman, none are gay. Your photo album has photos of sixty-five comics, five are women, one is a gay woman. Tomorrow (11/11) your 7:00 show has seven comics, one is a woman, none are gay. Your 8:15 show has seven comics, one is a woman, none are gay. Your 10:30 show has seven comics, none are women or gay. Your 12:15 show has seven comics, one is a woman, none are gay.
Noam comments again,
Everything you have just written may be true. Unfortunately what you wrote in the article — that there are rarely women and never gays — IS NOT. We put on the best show we can. How many openly gay comics, Cellar level, do you think there are right now? You’ve never submitted a tape. I actually watched you on YouTube at the table last night, and laughed out loud at your haunted vagina joke. I don’t know if you’re good enough for the Cellar but you’ve never even tried. We book the best show based on who is available. PERIOD. I couldn’t care less if it’s all female or all male. It usually works out in between. You accused me of sexism and homophobia. That is a baseless charge and I really will sue you if my lawyer says I can. I don’t care what it costs. What you have written is verifiably false. Reckless disregard for the truth, I believe is what they call it. Or, just retract the parts which are wrong. Maybe you made a mistake. If so, don’t be ashamed to admit it. Most would admire it.
Noam comments again,
Really, if you had any understanding of the Cellar, you’d realize it was the very opposite of what you decry. It’s a place where the only thing anyone cares about is whether you’re funny. Like the NBA, can you score or not?
Guy receives an email inviting him on the Comedy Cellar podcast. He replies, saying the Cellar’s threatening to sue him and Vulture, but he’ll come on if Noam waives all claims. Noam says okay. The Vulture lawyers write a contract. Noam signs it. Guy is a guest on the Cellar podcast at the back table of the Olive Tree. The podcast’s co-host is Dan Naturman. Rich Vos and Rick Crom are also guests,
[After six minutes]
Noam: Are you ready to say that it’s not true that gays are never at the table?
Guy: At this literal table, of course there have been gays. The thing I am …
Noam: At the Comedy Cellar?
Guy: This week you guys have Mehran Khaghani performing. The thing that makes me saddest about everything that I wrote is the fact that it did not respect or contemplate the place of Jim David at this club or on Tough Crowd. Like, having a gay man in stand-up comedy … There are currently no gay touring national headliners.
Noam: I’m talking about my club here. I could not care less about anything you say about … I might agree with you. There’s plenty of bigots in the world.
Guy: The only thing I was saying about your club is that it is the apex and it is reflective of that …
Noam: No. Why?
Guy: Because it is on Louie, because it is the representation of the comedy community …
Noam: Hold on, hold on.
Guy: That you saw on Louie and that was an article …
Noam: On Louie …
Rick: That’s fiction.
Noam: Hold on. No. No. There’s a better answer than that. On Louie, when he depicted the comedians … Alright, it was at the poker game rather than at the table, but it was the same group …
Guy: Right, it was at the poker game. That is the only time that Rick Crom showed up on that show, and when he stopped teaching Louis a lesson he went away.
Noam: But it was …
Rick: I did three of them.
Guy: Okay, I’m sorry.
Rick: We did three poker table episodes.
Noam: And it was a huge event in the gay … It got a lot of attention as being one of the …
Rick: It was.
Noam: Most sensitive portrayals of … And it was credited with stopping stand-up comics from using the word ‘fag’ in their acts, all because of that thing that came from the Comedy Cellar.
Rick: Which was something that Louis asked me to do when I saw him here at the table. He said, ‘I want to put those stories that you’ve said here at the table on the show and I want to reflect how we all are supportive of one another.’ We bust each other’s balls, but at the end of it I’m still part of it, I’m still one of the crowd. So in that scene, not only is there all this information, there’s also this great camaraderie and acceptance that I think should be reflected in any …
Noam: Was that reflective of the Comedy Cellar?
Rick: Yes.
Noam: Listen, this is how I fantasised this show would go, that you would come here and you would acknowledge, ‘You know what, you’re right, I shouldn’t have said that about the table, I should have been clear I didn’t mean the table,’ whatever you meant. And I figured, oh that’d be great, and then we could launch into a bigger discussion of the things that are important to you, which are how women are treated, how homosexuals are treated. But it’s very important to me that you clear my name, or if you don’t want to clear my name, you don’t have to, that you back it up with some facts.
Guy: I have asserted that I’m not claiming that this club is any better or worse …
Noam: You keep doing that. I don’t care about any other club. You said that this table never has gays. Never. Is that true?
Guy: No, it is not true.
Noam: Okay. This table rarely has women. Is that true?
Guy: Again, I feel … No. And I feel …
Noam: Okay, that’s all I wanted to hear.
[After fourteen minutes]
Noam: I just want to let you know something, at five years old I used to be taken to dinner parties with gay couples. Gay male couples. My father and my grandmother would take me to socialise with gay male couples at five years old and I knew and understood … They told me exactly what it was and my whole life has been like that. This place in the Sixties was known to be accepting of gays, as a place where gays could come and work and didn’t have to hide, before anybody was like that. What you have done is attacked the very people who are on your side.
[After thirty-seven minutes]
Dan: Well, I challenged him on Twitter, because he also made the point that there’s no transgenders that work here, to give me the name of a transgender. He did give me such a name, I forwarded it to you, I don’t know if you want to look at her.
Noam: Of course I’ll look at her. By the way, is there any transgender host on MSNBC? I mean, transgender, really? If I don’t have a transgender comedian working here that’s evidence that I discriminated against transgender?
Guy: Not you, comedy as a whole.
Noam: What percentage of the population is transgender?
Guy: I have no idea.
Noam: Well you need to know these things before you make statements.
Guy: But I know that Patti Harrison is a really good comic. I know that Riley Silverman is a really good comic.
Rich: Have they been on your TV show? Have they?
Guy: No.
Vulture changes the article. It now says,
There are rarely women or gay men at that table. There are never trans people.
Noam receives an email from an editor at the Vulture. He replies, saying the article still maintains the table seldom has women or homosexuals, and it maintains that the Cellar is a sexist bigoted outfit, and it maintains they protected Louis. He says those things are not true and he would be happy to debate it with an editor.
; CHAPTER 173
Before that, an article appears in the New York Times. The headline is,
Louis CK is Accused by 5 Women of Sexual Misconduct.
Noam: Nobody knew. Nobody knew. We all saw the rumour on Gawker and some people had heard the rumour, but nobody knew as a matter of fact. Louis I think had denied it to the people that he did have a close enough relationship with to discuss it and they believed him, so no, they didn’t know.
CHAPTER 172
The author interviews Kevin Brennan after he’s called a racist by a woman in the audience at the Cellar. The author’s already interviewed the woman,
Author: I said to her, I think it’s a funny joke. Do you not use it anymore?
Kevin: It works all the time. I stopped doing it because it was an older joke, and then with the whole Trump stuff, there was definitely backlash when Trump was elected and there’s backlash now, period, where if you’re a white comedian, white, male, not young, and you basically have any kind of an attitude, they associate it with, you know, anything, like the MeToo thing, any kind of aggression, any kind of testosterone or I-don’t-give-a-shit kind of an attitude, they take that as you’re potentially dangerous to them, so they have to yell.
CHAPTER 171
The author interviews @9amburritos, who called Kevin a racist,
Author: I can understand people like yourself who are very outspoken about, you know, ensuring there’s progressiveness. I can understand you guys becoming more … And I’m kind of left and liberal, but I’m not as outspoken as people like you … I think I can understand why you become more defensive about it all now, and police it more, because you can see the wider stuff that’s happening in society. Is that correct? You can see the Trump thing happening, so you’re thinking, well, I can’t do anything about Trump, but I can do something about this stuff in front of me?
@9amburritos: Yeah, right. Because in that room there was a lot of bystander effect going on. Like, I shouldn’t be the one. Diffusion of responsibility, you know? It’s like watching an accident happen, like watching someone hurt in front of you. Who’s going to … It’s not my responsibility to say … And I wasn’t even the minority that was being attacked. I think I would have flipped out even harder if he was talking about Asians. But I think there’s a lack of empathy that is happening, because there is so many things to care about now, to be upset about and … I don’t know, I think people are just exhausted, empathetically exhausted. And I forgot to say this, but after I heckled, a woman who I think was sitting at the same table, but her back was to me, she turned around and was like, ‘I’m an Arab and I’m okay with that joke.’ She said that, you know. That just made me so sad.
[After thirty-nine minutes]
@9amburritos: I think a lot of what the older generation of comedians is scared about is, ‘Where’s the line? Like, if I can’t talk about this then what can I talk about?’ And I think it’s all about doing it in an intelligent way. And another thing is, what they say is, ‘It’s just comedy, it’s just a joke, it doesn’t mean the person is racist, it doesn’t mean the person is sexist,’ but I think that having the platform to say something and to have people laugh at it, I think it makes the thing you say socially acceptable. Like, if you say something and the crowd laughs at it, the audience, they look around and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is socially acceptable.’ And I think this is kind of analogous to the presidency in a way, because when Donald Trump first became president people were like, ‘He’s just one guy, it’s not going to change the mindset of American people,’ but it did just that.
Author: You said in one of your emails that it was a kind of green light to people to talk a certain way and show certain attitudes.
@9amburritos: Right, so when Kevin Brennan, someone who’s paid to say things onstage goes up there, says something, the crowd laughs, maybe there’s someone in the crowd who goes, ‘Hey, that’s a chill thing to say, so I’m going to start saying that, so that’s an okay thing to think,’ even though it’s presented in a joke. So I don’t think it matters whether someone is inherently a racist. I think it’s what you put out there that matters.
CHAPTER 170
Before that, Noam emails @9amburritos,
I’m Noam Dworman the owner of the Cellar. I’m just finding out about this now. I will talk to Kevin and see if I can have him stop this Twitter stuff. People are especially disgusting with anonymity provided online. Kevin’s material is not PC, but honestly he’s not a racist. His wife is dark-skinned Hispanic, which I know is not the end of the story, but it’s not irrelevant. The jokes are kind of in character, like Archie Bunker.
Most of the comedians, from the most famous on down, have some material that some find offensive and over the line. That’s the nature of comedy and comedy clubs. I don’t control their material, nevertheless I don’t take your reaction lightly. Interestingly, there is some material that is done that I find offensive, that I notice seems to go down ok with the audience. It’s not as easy a call as you might think.
I’d be very happy to have you back as my guest on a night when the line-up is more to your taste.
@9amburritos replies. She says the Cellar shouldn’t book comedians like Kevin and she hopes New York businesses will be on the right side of history.
Noam replies, repeating his invitation to return to the Cellar as his guest, but adding that he would never be able to define an acceptable joke,
So sometimes I wince and wait for the next act.
CHAPTER 169
Before that, @9amburritos writes a message to her friends,
It all started when I was at a stand-up comedy show at the Comedy Cellar in NYC on September 4. I live in Brooklyn and I frequent these shows. This time, however, an incredibly racist comedian was performing: Kevin Brennan. He was second to go on stage, and his entire set was based on racism/sexism.
First, he called a girl in the front row ‘titties’ then he said ‘it’s okay, I’m married, to a guy’ like being gay is the punchline. Then he said he got stopped on the subway because he had a backpack on for a random check, which he was mad about because ‘I can’t be a terrorist, I’m not an Arab’ THEN he pointed out a POC waiter and said ‘that guy looks suspicious, he’s wearing a backwards hat so he could blend in’ and then he said ‘it’s okay, I can be racist because I have a Hispanic wife.’
People laughed awkwardly, or perhaps in agreement. But nobody said a thing while Brennan was spewing unfunny HATE SPEECH on stage. Simply because he was on stage. The couple beside me whispered ‘We really don’t like him.’ But I’m sure many people in the room thought, ‘I would never be brave enough to say such a thing. Good for him!’ Which was the most disappointing part.
I, being the enraged liberal I am, heckled him, calling him out for being a racist. I was promptly kicked out by the bouncer. I shed some angry tears, but was overall okay with the repercussions. To me, it was worth it. I couldn’t stand it if he went on uninterrupted. He called me ‘sweetie’ on the way out and made a joke out of me. This was normal for him.
I went home and sent a tweet outlining what I did, and that I didn’t regret it and that white comedians don’t just get to do whatever they want. What I didn’t expect was that the comedian Kevin Brennan would retweet it. That was when I started receiving hate mail from his racist fans saying that comedy is sacred, calling me racist slurs and harassing me daily. It got even worse when another more famous comedian friend of his, Jim Norton, quote-retweeted me chastising me for my actions, clearly looking to send his angry, racist and bigoted friends my way. I started receiving hundreds of tweets and DMs calling me sexist and racist slurs, insults about my appearance and intelligence. Anything in attempts to hurt me. When my friends came to my defense, they too were quote-retweeted by Norton. He had one goal, to hurt us with his 500k following, almost all of which were MAGA right-winger white men. You can probably find many of these just by loo
king at Norton’s tweets and replies to them.
CHAPTER 168
Before that, a friend visits @9amburritos. They go to the Cellar. Kevin Brennan comes on. He does his joke about a cop searching his backpack, where he says to the cop, ‘I look like a terrorist?’ And the cop says they have to randomly select people, so Kevin says, ‘Well randomly select Arabs.’ The cop says, ‘Sir that’s racist,’ and Kevin says, ‘That’s okay, I’m racist.’ @9amburritos hasn’t heckled before, but when Kevin says that joke and all the other things too, she shouts. A bouncer asks her to leave. She leaves. She cries. She tweets,
yelled at a racist comic at @NYCComedyCellar tonight and got kicked out. I regret nothing. White men don’t just get to do whatever they want.
Kevin retweets her tweet without a comment.
Jim Norton retweets it with a comment,
I agree, you have every right to interrupt a live performance, those other paying customers are NOT important, YOU need to be heard.
People tweet to @9amburritos,
you not smaht for chinky
you’re a fucking slant-eyed moron
shut your mouth you slant
we’ll be clapping as they hall your ass over the border #DACA
we’ll be laughing our asses off while you’re kicking and screaming
#deport
It gives her flashbacks to when she arrived from China as a kid. She responds. She gets banned from Twitter.
Author: What did you get banned for?
@9amburritos: I don’t remember. It must have been like the ‘I hate white men’ thing.
Author: You said that?
@9amburritos: I don’t like saying it, but in that moment I think I said, ‘I hate white men,’ and I’m sorry.
Author: Do you hate them?
@9amburritos: No I don’t.
Don't applaud. Either laugh or don't. (At the Comedy Cellar.) Page 6
