Hannah Einbinder Demands Better Jokes From ‘Old F-ing Guys’ Who Complain About Wokeness
If some crotchety old comedian is going to cry and moan that “cancel culture” won’t let him tell his best jokes, then his “killer” material better not just be a repackaged 4chan bit from 2006.
It’s the most tired argument repeated by unremarkable comedians and unremarkable comedy fans alike — apparently, the last 10-plus years of marginalized groups gaining enough visibility in online spaces to push back on the veiled, clichéd attacks against them under the label of “edgy humor” has led to a comedy genocide that’s worse than any real-world atrocities ever committed, because this one affects white guys with podcasts. If you subscribed to any one of the many Manosphere shows dedicated to combating cancel culture in comedy, you’d think that the stand-up world is run by a secret police that destroys the career and tears up the Netflix contract of any comic brave enough to step on stage and explain how white people and Black people fold laundry differently.
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Unlike the many middle-aged male comedians who have made anti-wokeness their whole brand, Hacks star and stand-up comedian Hannah Einbinder takes joke-writing very seriously, and she continues to find success onstage by honing her original point-of-view. In a recent interview with The Last Laugh, Einbinder went after the real-world hacks who have hijacked the conversation about comedy’s right to offend with their complaints about how no one’s laughing at their “Nothing, you already told her twice!”-style punchlines anymore.
The topic came up when Einbinder’s interviewer asked the Hacks star about Jerry Seinfeld's semi-recent claim that the “extreme left” ruined comedy and created a humor environment in which his self-titled sitcom would be chased off TV by the woke mob. “It’s ridiculous. You just have to be smart,” Einbinder said of the kind of envelope-pushing humor that Seinfeld himself has never once performed. “When marginalized groups have heard every joke under the sun at their expense, it’s not that they can’t take jokes, it’s that they are sick and tired of hearing the hack, if you will, redundant shit that is easy and low-hanging-fruit-like.”
“I don’t think that anyone I know — or I can just speak to my experience of being queer and being a woman and being Jewish — I actually don’t have any problem with jokes at my expense or the expense of any groups I may belong to if the joke is smart,” Einbinder claimed. “I think everybody, especially people from marginalized groups, have to laugh to keep from crying and have to laugh at themselves. And we do. We’re just asking for better material.”
Einbinder offered her theory on why so many in the stand-up world refuse to adapt to a more empathetic era, saying, “I think a lot of stand-up comedians are really hardened in their perspective. That is an inherent personality trait of a comic, being like, this is what I think, and everybody pays to listen to me say what I think, so I’m the arbiter of what’s what! It’s this egomaniacal personality type.”
“I would be so embarrassed to be so seen in that way,” Einbinder added. “It’s so transparent when someone gets defensive and blames whatever words they want to use — the P.C. woke leftist mob or whatever — oh my God, you should be so embarrassed because we all see that you’re scared and hurt and don’t want to be wrong, and don’t want to be labeled a bad person.”
“When you call someone out on something and they get defensive, it just shows sort of a lack of evolution,” Einbinder opined. “People who self-reflect can go, ‘I wonder if they’re right? Maybe I am wrong. I can learn from that.’ That is actually more impressive to me.”
Ultimately, however, it’s up to the comedian to decide whether the negative feedback is just noise not worth their time, an opportunity to grow as a person and an artist or an attack on their very being that demands an explosive and slur-laden Twitter rant in response. Said Einbinder, “I’m not holding my breath for any of these old fucking guys who wanna blame whatever they want to blame, instead of looking inward."
Maybe Hacks Season Four will cover the subject of older comedians throwing tantrums over “cancel culture.” Though, honestly, I’d take Deborah Vance on her worst day over Jerry Seinfeld’s best bit.
