CHAPTER 180

Before that, the author phones Noam,

Author: I mentioned this when I was over, that you called in Jay, and I was thinking about that, because I really liked when you defended Sam Morril and you sent this email saying you can’t decide what a comedian can and can’t say on stage, which is why the First Amendment is so broad. But with the Jay thing, it’s a bit annoying for me, because you called someone in, so there is a line.

Noam: Because it wasn’t going over. There is no line. Sam said one errant joke and one person complained. It was an outlier incident. Jay was having a series of unhappy audiences. All I did was call his attention to it so that he could, if he wanted to, adjust. And by the way, I believe he did, because it stopped, so I don’t even know what he’s saying. I went down there the other night and saw Jay Oakerson and I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe the level of filth that was coming out of his mouth, but we got no complaints about it. And I’m not even sure what he was saying in that little period. Sometimes when you say it to a person as opposed to generally, people are more likely to get upset. It can be very subtle. Jay’s doing a high-wire act down there in the degree of filth that he wraps himself in, and his genius is in being able to present this stuff in a way which somehow people accept, but there was a little period there where all of a sudden they weren’t accepting it like they always had, and I called his attention to it, and that’s all I said. I said, ‘Listen, I’m just registering this with you, I’m not doing anything, I’m not affecting your spots, I’m not telling you what to do, but you need to know, because obviously you can’t work if people don’t want to see you,’ and that’s, you know … He has a right to say whatever he wants.

Author: I guess from his point of view he’d say the room was laughing but there was one person in there who sent you an email, and maybe there’d been like an email before.

Noam: Yeah, but it wasn’t just one email. We were getting a series of complaints about it. It wasn’t just one email. I would never come to somebody about one email or whatever, unless it was something like they’d said, ‘You’re a fucking cunt’.

Author: So with Sam though, if Sam had got five emails about his alligator joke, you might have considered talking to him about that?

Noam: If he kept with that joke every night and we were getting complaints about it every night, yeah. I would say, ‘Sam, listen, what are you going to do here?’ I would never tell him he can’t do it.

Author: But it has a chilling effect on the comedian, doesn’t it? Like, what I think Jay would say is it makes him wonder if he should or should not do a joke from then on, because is it going to stop him from getting booked at the Cellar?

Noam: Well, he may have to worry about that. I mean at some point that’s up to him. He didn’t get any fewer spots and he’s still as filthy as ever so the outcome doesn’t seem to line up with that having been something he had to worry about. Maybe at that meeting he was, but I tried very hard after that meeting, I even remember that night, I said, ‘Jay, I just want to make sure we’re okay, I want to make clear I’m not telling you to do anything, I just want to put this on the radar because it’s worrying me,’ you know, or whatever I said. But I mean, this is about the audience. I mean, it is. I don’t care if the reason the audience hates a comedian is because he’s bashing Arabs or bashing Jews. That would be me violating the free expression rule. But I do have the right to tell a comedian that, for whatever reason, whether it’s just they suck or because they’re dirty, whatever they’re saying, ‘Listen, there is a clear and evident pattern here that this is turning off the audience.’ It’s not about what he says. I don’t care what he says. He can say anything he wants. I have to be able to tell him the audience is not accepting this.