CHAPTER 174

Guy Branum writes an article for Vulture,

At the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, there’s a table where the comics sit. It’s where they joke, debate, goof off, and ridicule their friends. As depicted on the FX series Louie, it’s the most fun place to be with the smartest, coolest comics in America. Every club has one, but the Comedy Cellar is the best club, and the table Louis CK sat at was the best table, occupied by the likes of Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Marc Maron. That table is the most important force in comedy. There are rarely women at that table. There are never gay men or trans people.

I’m a cisgender man, thus not someone who has had to deal with sexual harassment of the sort Louis doled out to his colleagues. But I am a gay man, so I understand very well the kind of culture that harassment helps enforce, and which is perpetuated by that culture.

Here’s a New Yorker article from a few months ago about the table [he links to it]. It lists seventeen comedians, including, of course, Louis CK. Only three are women, they are confined to a single line of the article. None are gay men. The article defines the table as sanctified space, reserved only for the realest comics, and discusses their hostility to even minor changes to the table. The article describes how these comedy icons ‘defended the table against comedians who didn’t do stand-up at the Cellar, were hacks, or were dressed badly.’ People who weren’t like them didn’t get to be part of the club. I am not like them. Louis’s victims were not like them.

That boys’ club is the only real structure that exists in stand-up. The patronage and mentorship that good comics receive from more established male comics is how they get stage time, representation, and jobs. Improvisers and actors have schools and casting workshops to help them build skills and connections, but for a stand-up, you’re always just waiting for one of the guys — and it is always a guy — to pay attention and help you out. If you’re not part of their club, you learn that such mentorship rarely comes your way, and when it does, it often has a cost.

Sexual harassment is one of many tools heterosexual men use to remind other comics that our status is provisional. We’re not equals. We’re not colleagues. We’re flavors, we’re different, we’re people who should quietly accept whatever creepiness is presented to us. Mostly, these tools remind us that our status as real comics is provisional. We understand that if we question the rules of the table, if we say there aren’t enough women getting stage time, or that maybe they shouldn’t use that word, or even just that Kesha is more talented than Springsteen, we’ll be expelled.

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. They kicked Megan Beth Koester out of the Montreal Just for Laughs festival.

That’s because 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. Louis CK once said during a Daily Show appearance, ‘Comedians and feminists … are natural enemies.’ The table doesn’t have any space for comedians who are feminists.

I’m scared to write this, because I know the people who sit at the table will see it and say I’m not a real comic, and I don’t value real comedy. Writing this means I never get to sit at the table. At the beginning of my career when I was invited into some lesser comedy boys’ club, I did my best to play by their rules. I kept silent as they denigrated women, or explained to me how I wasn’t like the other gays. It never earned me real respect from anyone, least of all myself. My silence simply empowered a system to treat me and many other people like we were negligible and disposable.

In more recent years, I’ve questioned the established rules of comedy, particularly as they relate to discussion and participation by gay comics. Once I did a TV segment mocking the homophobia of a Comedy Central show. A famous, respected, politically liberal comic unbooked me from his show because he didn’t think comics should criticize other comics in public. He never considered that when the Comedy Central show in question was incessantly ridiculing homosexuality with no gay comics present, they were criticizing those comics. They were criticizing me.

So that’s why I’m writing this, so I no longer have the option of sitting at that table. We don’t need a female comic with provisional status at the table. We don’t need the table to find the trans comic who’s least offensive to them and kind of learn his name. It will still perpetuate a system that privileges and protects the perspective of straight cis men. The table is the problem. Burn the table down.

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.