Lou will still tell the joke that isn’t allowed in some circles. His audience doesn’t want “woke comedy” or watered down dirty jokes. It just has to be funny. Today’s guest standup comedian Lou Perez feels comfortable making the jokes that other comedians feel too scared to make.

In Lou’s new book, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: The Death and Rebirth of Comedy” he reflects about the days when not only were you allowed to experiment, but encouraged to fail, and audiences were down for the ride. The World’s Most Interesting People Podcast host Bart Baggett digs into the the last 20 years of Lou’s comedy career and the state of comedy in general.

Lou was surprised with the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, and more surprised at the short reign of woke comedy. You could start to see the punchlines from a mile away. Lou and Bart discuss the politics behind late night talk shows and how they found themselves unlikely defenders of free speech.

They also discuss some surprising findings in their respective DNA lineage, having each taken a 23andMe test. They consider how life would be different if they were more invested in identitarian politics, and the lasting influence of the greatest murderer in history, Genghis Khan.

If you’re looking for politically correct comedy, today’s conversation is not for you. Instead, Lou and Bart discuss the state of woke culture, why Twitter was once the best place for writing jokes, and why Joe hates to owe anyone anything.

Quotes

• “The book is a really great opportunity to look back at how lucky I was to start out doing comedy when I was doing it where you were expected to try stuff, experiment and make mistakes, to fail, to bomb, and to learn from that and come back and hopefully be funnier.” (3:54 | Lou Perez)
• “Suddenly, you had this huge population of comedians that were just aiming their weapons at the President, and you couldn’t stray from that, for a lot of people, you couldn’t stray from that. You couldn’t let this guy get an inch. You couldn’t even make jokes about your own party if you were a Democrat.” (5:43 | Lou Perez)
• "The TV writers all live in Los Angeles or New York. There's a heavy liberal element to it. Trump is a Republican president. So it's very easy for them to write those jokes. But if you're from another country, he just looks like a weird clown with orange makeup on. He's easy to make fun of.” (7:08 | Bart Baggett)
• “Yeah, that is one of the gifts and one of the gifts of 23andme is I found out I'm 4.8% indigenous American. It's funny, because does that really change anything about me like my day to day, it's kind of like, ‘Oh, that's kind of a cool thing. And then just sort of like taking that like, ‘Man, what if I leaned into that?’ Now what that now that just, if I leaned–if I was the type of person who really took identitarian politics seriously, and my bloodline really seriously, where can I go with that?” (12:52 | Lou Perez)
• “I’m glad they’re giving back, we raped and pillaged their land. OK, give them five percent of the oil money. Makes sense to me. Yeah, my body’s 4.8%; the rest of it’s been raped and pillaged. I would be a lot more if it weren’t for the conquistadors, or whatever, coming over and doing their thing.” (14:36 | Bart Baggett and Lou Perez)

Links

Learn more and subscribe to the Bart Show Fan Weekly Newsletter at https://thebartshow.com

Connect with Lou Perez:

https://www.facebook.com/thelouperez.com

https://www.youtube.com/thelouperez

https://www.tiktok.com/thelouperez

https://www.thelouperez.com

https://www.instagram.com/thelouperez

Connect with Bart Baggett

https://instagram.com/bartbaggett

https://www.instagram.com/bartshowpodcast/

https://www.youtube.com/@bartshowpodcast

https://bartbaggett.com

https://www.tiktok.com/@bartbaggett

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

“We’re a conspiracy-loving people,” says Elizabeth Nolan Brown, senior editor at Reason, a magazine which prides itself on debunking myth and emotion-based arguments from both the Left and the Right. On today’s episode of The Bart Baggett Show, she debunks a number of popular myths, including that the media was only ever a stalwart bastion of truth and integrity. In fact, she argues, with so many citizens acting as fact-checkers, the media is held to account more than ever.

Of course, transparency has its drawbacks. She and host Bart Baggett discuss the intrusion of constant surveillance and the importance of end-to-end encryption to keep our communication private from an intrusive government. The excuse that encryption will allow bad people to hide their bad deeds is another way in which the government exaggerates danger and instills fear so that we’ll forfeit our civil liberties for a false sense of safety.

What’s really behind the widespread conspiracy of a major sex trafficking circuit operating throughout the U.S.? Are aliens real? Are we really in a population decline? Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who also writes for libertarian feminist nonprofit Feminists for Liberty, answers these questions and more on today’s episode.

Quotes

• “It’s a little bit of a myth, actually. I do think that standards are somewhat different today; there’s a lot more opinion in certain news outlets today than there used to be. But this idea that we used to have this objective press that was infallible is really wrong and it’s just that we didn’t have people to correct them.” (2:56 | Elizabeth Nolan Brown)
• “And the other thing is that like a lot like with the war on drugs...they use this as an excuse to invade everyone's civil liberties. There have been a lot of laws passed over the past decade and a half that allow more surveillance by police, allow more monitoring of social media, allow all sorts of things that we wouldn’t stand for except that people say, ‘Oh, it’s to stop human trafficking,’ ad they they use it as sort of a backdoor way to invade civil liberties of everybody. (8:03 | Elizabeth Nolan Brown)
• “Free speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom of assembly. Freedom to avoid government surveillance, either in your physical space or in your digital life. That’s a big thing now, is that we’re fighting the same battles we fought in physical space now so much when it comes to your internet activity, your emails, your text messages.” (10:58 | Elizabeth Nolan Brown)
• “Criminals are going to use everything. You have to find a way to stop criminals without invading everyone’s privacy.” (12:24 | Elizabeth Nolan Brown)

• “There are a couple countries that have a "Yeah, go have sex go make babies" day. Which is actually one of the more benign things though. You also have government's paying people, trying to bribe people into having babies. You have Nordic countries doing a lot of free childcare and free mandatory parental leave and all these types of social welfare state things happening. There is no evidence that any of it is really working.” (13:49 | Elizabeth Nolan Brown)

Links

Learn more and subscribe to the Bart Baggett Show Fan Weekly Newsletter at https://thebartshow.com

Links

Connect with Elizabeth Nolan Brown:

https://www.reason.com

https://www.instagram.com/enbrown

https://www.facebook.com/elizabethnolanbrown

https://www.youtube.com/feministsforliberty

Connect with Bart Baggett

https://instagram.com/bartbaggett

https://www.instagram.com/bartshowpodcast/

https://www.youtube.com/@bartshowpodcast

https://bartbaggett.com

https://www.tiktok.com/@bartbaggett

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm