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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You look at the rise of some of these, you look at the capture of power in the right-wing, the ascent of white nationalism, the concentration of wealth, and as a consequence, political power, and you cannot really animate or concentrate a movement like that without a sense of persecution or victimhood. That is what the role of cancel culture is.

David Remnick: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most influential progressives in electoral politics today. She's also a master of social media. There's probably no better person to talk to in order to understand the position of the left on cancel culture.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It is like the speck of dust around which the raindrop must form in order to precipitate takeovers of school boards, pushing actual discourse out of the acceptable norms, like in terms of The 1619 Project, for example, getting books banned from schools, they needed, and they need the concept of cancel culture to justify a political program of takeover, or really at least further concentration of their own power.

You talk about cancel culture, but you notice that those discussions only go one way. We don't talk about all people who were fired. You just talk about right-leaning podcast bros and more conservative figures, but there is also something to be said about the ferocity of what an internet-fueled backlash can do. That is unique, and I think that that is, in and of itself, is a conversation, but I don't think that that is what the cancel culture conversation is really about.

David Remnick: That's Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. My interview with her, which covered a lot of ground in Washington and well beyond, will be at newyorker.com on Monday. It's part of our first digital-only issue, a special edition we're calling The New Yorker Interviews.

Kliph Nesteroff: There used to be this conceit a few years ago, "They're going to take your guns away, they're coming to take your guns," and now it's, "They're going to take your jokes away, they're going to take the comedians." It's the same element driving the narrative.

David Remnick: Kliph Nesteroff writes about the history of comedy.

Kliph Nesteroff: Comedy and comedians are loved universally by right-wingers and left-wingers alike, but if you could demonize one political persuasion and say they're out to get the comedians, it's a great tactic for demonizing your opposition. I really believe there's a concerted effort on the part of think tanks and propagandists to create this illusion that the Liberals are out to get the comedians and that they're the new sensors.

David Remnick: In the debates about free speech, it's useful to consider comedy for a couple of reasons. For one thing, jokes at the expense of other people are a big point of contention here. How free do we want free speech to be when it comes to vulnerable or marginalized groups? For in other people throw around the word censorship all the time now, but in comedy, there really was a time when a joke could land you in jail. Kliph Nesteroff gives the example of Lenny Bruce in the '50s and early '60s. His persecution by the authorities is probably better remembered now than his jokes.

Kliph Nesteroff: The things that Lenny Bruce became notorious for and eventually was hounded for and arrested for were threefold. One, he talked about organized religion on stage and would criticize organized religion.

Lenny Bruce: They're taken out of the headquarters, religions, and cooperatives and seated around the desk on Madison Avenue, you sit, the religious leaders of our country, religion, big business.

Kliph Nesteroff: Two, he would use what you might call salty language. He swore on stage in an era in which you could literally get arrested for obscenity and put on trial and sent to jail if you swore on stage. It was left to local vise squads to determine what was or was not obscene.

Lenny Bruce: I would like an honest equation for many at least Grammar School graduate. Is the word "son of a bitch" less obscene to you than "motherfucker"?

Kliph Nesteroff: Then the third thing that he was busted for was narcotics news. If he toured across North America, and a police department did not bust him, then the local clergy or the local civic officials would criticize the police for being derelict in their duties even when a crime wasn't committed. Not only did Lenny Bruce get arrested for things that any of us could say today, he often got arrested simply because he was Lenny Bruce and had a reputation.

David Remnick: Comedians just don't face that kind of censorship in clubs these days, not to mention on Netflix specials, or YouTube, or podcasts, and all the rest. The last bastion of government control, as Nesteroff sees it, is on Network TV where the FCC still holds sway.

Kliph Nesteroff: When people talk about cancel culture, they never seem to reference that, that's where most of the censorship is. If there's more censorship on the late-night talk shows in terms of what a stand-up comedian can and cannot say than anywhere else. Social media is not where comedy lives, that is not where stand-up exists. On the nightclub stage at the Comedy Store, at the Comedy Cellar, at the Whitley, which is a popular club here in Los Angeles, you can say what you want, and audiences are having a great fucking time. I push back on this idea because it's just being repeated over and over on social media, but if you get off of social media, if you go to the live shows, you'll see the opposite thing happening.

David Remnick: That brings us to the recent controversy of Dave Chappelle and Netflix, and the feeling among some people, particularly trans people, but not only that he had transgressed in his jokes about trans people in a way that was unfair, illegitimate, even dehumanizing, how do you look on that passage?

Kliph Nesteroff: Think of The Chappelle Show in the early 2000s, and think of Dave Chappelle today. There's a 20-year difference between Dave Chappelle emerging as this nationally or universally beloved comedian, The Chappelle Show. Regardless of your political point of view, you like Dave Chappelle. Now it's 20 years later, he's still extremely successful, extremely popular, but polarizing.

Bob Hope in 1949 was universally beloved. He was the top movie star in comedy, top radio star in comedy. Everybody loved Bob Hope 1949. 20 years later, 1969, Bob Hope is still a huge star. He's still incredibly popular, but he had been speaking out in favor of the Vietnam war, against war protesters, against hippies, and in favor of President Nixon, and he became polarizing. I see Dave Chappelle today being rejected not just by a large contingent of transgendered people, but younger people, and supported by people that are his age or older.

David Remnick: I think that Dave Chappelle would probably take that as a crushing analogy. You're suggesting that Dave Chappelle lost his juice.

Kliph Nesteroff: I would say Dave Chappelle today, compared to Dave Chappelle 20 years ago, is square. He's a square.

David Remnick: On the other hand, some jokes become, in retrospect, not just bad taste, but really deeply wrong. The magazine that I worked for, The New Yorker, ran cartoons in the '30s with Black Africans in boiling pots surrounded by so-called white African explorers making stupid jokes. We ran that now, I think we'd be justifiably pilloried.

Kliph Nesteroff: Yes. It's interesting if you look at the 1930s. Of course, Blackface was still prevalent and Black stereotypes were prevalent. If you read the Black press, which you can now do, thanks to the internet, go back through the archives of newspaper.com and read the New York Age or the Pittsburgh Courier or the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro American or the California Eagle, the major Black newspapers of the 1930s, you will see editorials and letters complaining about that shit all the time. Why are we being insulted? Why don't they stop with this hackneyed tired old stereotypes? We're beyond this, we're human beings, and nobody listened because who was the demographic of The New Yorker in the 1930s? It was largely a white audience.

Minorities and their concerns were very easily ignored in those days. I just came out with a new book recently which is about indigenous representation or lack thereof. I have an example in the book of a contingent of Native American leaders in the year 1911 complaining about racist stereotypes in silent movies, the year 1911. Oh, you can't joke about anything anymore in the year 1911. That has gone on, those grievances have been lodged for ages but were willfully ignored as long as indigenous peoples or African Americans did not have the purchasing power or the influence of the body politic to have their voices heard.

David Remnick: What I hear you saying is on the one hand, you are for a sense of freedom, artistic freedom, speech freedom for artists like comedians, and at the same time, an equivalent sense of support for people standing up for themselves, whether it's a group or an individual.

Kliph Nesteroff: Standing up for yourselves is freedom of speech.

David Remnick: Exactly, and so you're describing it not as cancel culture but, as itself, debate.

Kliph Nesteroff: It's not even cancel culture. It's just culture. That is culture. It's the history of America is a tug of war between opposing forces, powerful forces versus weak forces but social media is the new thing that makes everything seem new because it's in your face all day every day, it's in your pocket. Every stoplight, you're scrolling through it. Every time you go through to the bathroom, you're scrolling through it.

In the old days, people would complain about certain things. They would say, "Oh, Milton Berle is in bad taste because he dresses up in drag." This is a bad example for my children, but you would read that letter in TV Guide once a month and never again. You didn't keep scrolling through the same TV Guide reading that same complaint over and over and over and over all day every day. It's just a different delivery system.

David Remnick: Kliph Nesteroff is a historian of comedy, and his most recent book is We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy.

Interviewer: Do you feel something new is going on around how outraged people seem to be getting or do you think that's just like an all-time human problem?

Interviewee 1: I think it's been like a seat that's inside of us, but we are exposed to the opinions of millions of people at a time. That's a scale that we never had to deal with. You're not safe anywhere with TikTok and YouTube because it's viral. You have these out-of-context snippets that exist outside of you, like this interview, I'm like, "Oh my God, what's going to happen?"

Interviewer: Is it ever good for people to get outraged about things that people say or do?

Interviewee 2: Sure, you can be outraged. The thing is to control your rage, and that, to me, is the real world, the rage.

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