When you see something starting to get traction and when you see something starting to make sense to people, it's like, okay, now we have to make that word a bad word.

You know what I mean? And we're just going to attack that word. We're not going to talk about the concepts or that how like nuance in principle

is really lovely and it's a really important thing. We're just going to say, oh, if you use that

word, you're a racist now. And what I've noticed in comedy too, you know, I'm still pretty liberal.

What's interesting is it backfires. And this is when you know that a lot of the people on the left don't actually care about

the issues.

So when you are saying that edgy comedy and everybody we love would be canceled nowadays,

Richard Pryor, Carlin.

Oh, yeah.

What happens is, what I've noticed is a lot of these comics will double down and become kind of

actually more hateful like really real hateful and then that's the audience they're attracting

yes and now you've created a hateful space that wasn't one.

Welcome to the Unspeakable podcast.

I'm your host, Megan Down.

This week's interview is with comedian Jamie Kielstein.

It's the audio version of a video interview I recorded with Jamie for The Unspeak Easy,

the new video feature of the podcast available to Patreon supporters.

I decided to make this available as a regular podcast because in addition to talking about comedy and what Jamie's been up to, we got pretty deep into some issues that are near and dear

to this show, including my signature topic, what nuance means and whether trying to uphold it in the face of

relentless group signaling and rage bait is a lost cause, not to mention a career killer.

Jamie, who is a seasoned comic and currently hosts two podcasts, considers himself among the canceled.

In this conversation, he talks about how that

...