Jacques Berlinerblau: To me, at the very least, if you look at the last paragraph of the book, this kind of tortured reflection on, I don’t know what we do, at the very least, it demands a new way of thinking about artistic freedom in the digital era.

Mark Oppenheimer: I mean, basically you’re saying there’s less of it and we have to accept that and that’s not changing.

JB: No, I don’t want to accept it. I want to fight it.

MO: Hello, friends. This is Mark Oppenheimer and this is Arc: The Podcast, the audio companion to the web magazine Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, which itself is the public facing journal of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, known to some as WashU, but known to all who have written to our email accounts as wustl because we are wustl.edu, Washington University in St Louis.edu, wustl.edu. I think there might be some attempt to rebrand, and it might even be that our emails now go to washu.edu, but we are forever wustl in the hearts and minds of the web generation.

Today’s guest is Jacques Berlinerblau. Jacques, or as I think of him, Jaquis, which is I believe how they pronounced the name Jacques in Shakespearean times, so that in the play, As You Like It, where the character, J-A-C-Q-U-E-S, gives that famous monologue, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” was pronounced in that time Jaquis, or so my director told me when I was in a youth production of that show.

But Mr. Berlinerblau, Jacques, is professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University. He teaches on Judaism. He has a doctorate in Near Eastern languages and literatures. He also teaches on secularism and Jewish Africans and African Jews, Black Jewish relations. And I’ve had a lot of conversations with him over the years about various things. Like me, he enjoys opining on the state of higher education. He is famously sanguine about it. He loves teaching undergraduates. He tends to think that there is more that is working than that is broken. I hope I’m not putting words in his mouth there, but where many professors love to talk about how everything’s going to hell in a hand basket and there’s no future for the humanities and so forth. Jacques Berlinerblau is someone who’s, I think, relatively optimistic and it’s been enjoyable talking to him over the years about matters academic.

He also has taught Philip Roth a lot. And when I was writing about Blake Bailey, Philip Roth’s last biographer, although there’s a new biography coming from Steven Zipperstein, but most recent and most prolific biographer, Blake Bailey, Jacques and I had occasion to talk then because he has some very particular and spicy opinions about Roth and how to teach Roth in the classroom. But the new book which came out March 22 is “Can We Laugh At That?” And it’s about comedy and what’s funny and what’s not, what we’re allowed to think is funny. And, to put it bluntly, about the cancellation of certain comedians when comedians go too far or when they have to apologize for past jokes. He has great chapters on Sarah Silverman and Dave Chappelle, also on the French comedian known as Dieudonné, who is half black and famously antisemitic, let’s say 50% black and 100% anti-Jewish these days.

And the book really looks at comedy in a global setting and what it’s for and what it can do and what it can’t do and basically how comedians get in trouble. You’ll hear in the interview that I grew a little bit frustrated with Jacques at some points. I think I wanted him to be more of a free speech purist and polemicist than perhaps he’s inclined to be. I actually think that he and I probably agree on a lot of things. We’re probably both pretty close to being free speech purists, but he was doing the thing that actually academics should do, which is to describe and explain without judging and being somewhat less of an academic myself and a little bit more of an argumentative, opinionated scribe. I like to come out sort of more whole hog against the people who would tut-tut about what we say against the people who would limit our speech, against the people who take offense. I tend to be less sympathetic and sort of feel like just get over it. I certainly have.

And Jacques was being more descriptive about what it is that gives offense and how we can handle that, especially in an age when there have been murders by people offended because they’ve seen a particular cartoon, for example, in a newspaper. So it’s an interesting conversation. I really enjoyed it. I always enjoy talking to Jacques Berlinerblau and not just because it’s so much fun to say his last name, and I invite you to join us in this conversation. Have a listen.

JB: Hey, thank you for having me, Mark. I’m in a really good mood. It’s Friday.

MO: Because shabbos is coming.

JB: The shabbos is coming.

MO: The Sabbath bride is upon us.

So there’ve been a lot of books about comedy. There’s also been books about cancellation. There was Claire Dederer’s book, “Monsters,” about who do we let back in? Who do we admit after they’ve been canceled? How do we think about art that no longer holds up? What made you think that … I mean, you’re not Jeremy Dauber. You’re not a historian of comedy. What are you doing trespassing on this field you never written on? Why did you think this book had to be written?

JB: Yeah, because it’s a good question. And thank you for challenging my fundamental right to publish the book with the California Press. I appreciate that.

MO: You bet.

JB: Well, I write a lot as I look back on my career, the thing I’ve always written about is secularism, and a subsidiary of secularism is free speech. And a subsidiary of that is artists who get themselves involved in these types of free speech scrums. So a lot of what I write about is scholar, artist, comedian, says X, and then a shit storm ensues. And I’m trying to create a sociology of that moment. What does it mean when somebody says something and they have every right to say it and then they get canceled or deported or beaten up or ostracized? That’s the sociological mechanism I’m most interested in.

MO: Your book is divided up by examples, case studies. In the United States, you talk about Dave Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Kathy Griffin, Shane Gillis. You talk about the men in France, Dieudonné. What’s his full name?

JB: Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.

MO: But he’s known as Diodon. Is that right?

JB: Diodon is his nickname. Yeah.

MO: Diodon, right. I like how in Europe everybody gets a nickname. Every soccer player has only one name.

JB: What’s your nickamename, Mark? I just want to-

MO: Well, I was Oppy. I mean, I’m a fifth generation Oppy. I like to think of you as Jaquis in the Shakespearean sense from As You Like It. Didn’t they pronounce it Jaquis back in Jacobian Times?

JB: On the street, I’m known as white chocolate. Just want to put that up.

MO: No doubt. And one of my ongoing obsessions is the decline of nicknames in America. There’s no more, I like Ikes or no one’s Ike, no one’s junior or no one so and so. I’m glad Europe’s keeping it alive.

So you have all these case studies and you use them to tease out your sociology of comedy. What happens? There’s sort of the initial joke, then there’s the response, then there’s the meta jokes, that there’s the persona drop. There’s all these ways that they do it. Let’s jump in and start with the case study of, you pick either Chappelle or Sarah Silverman and explain what happened to them. What was the joke and then what’s the backlash to the joke? And then how does it change their comedy? The whole kind of performance art. It’s almost a ritual that we keep enacting with our comedians. Pick one of them and explain the ritual.

JB: So when you take an intro to sociology course, Mark, did you ever take an intro to sociology course?

MO: Never did. I avoided the social sciences as if they were the hard sciences, all to be avoided.

JB: Because we’re under the yoke of psychology. What sociologists often speak about are patterned interactions. And it’s our given epistemological assumption that things aren’t that original, they happen again and again and again and again because of various ways of explaining why that is. So what I was looking at is something that I called the comedic controversy. And what I started to notice in researching the book is that they all sort of followed a script and it was precisely as you noted. You noted most of the aspects of that script. So let’s start with Chappelle and you can redirect.

MO: Okay.

Chappelle was never a particularly homophobic or transphobic comedian as far as I can tell. But in some of his early work, Chappelle show, for example, some of his early standups, some of the early specials, they were occasional anti-gay jokes, but it was nothing. And I mean nothing compared to let’s say Eddie Murphy or Andrew Dice Clay or those titans of the homophobic slur. Around 2017 when there was an explosion of Chappelle specials, I think he had four Netflix specials come out in 2017 after a rather prolonged sort of low key absence from the public sphere, we start to notice a surfeit of jokes about the LGBTQ community in his oeuvra, and then the cycle began. So that’s the point.

Yeah. Well, give me an example. Why don’t you give me an example of some of the jokes that he got taken to task for?

JB: Ready? “These transgenders, these N-words won’t be dead. I’ve gone too far. I said too much. I’m very worried about it. I’m not even joking. Every time I come out on stage, I’d be scared. I’ve been looking around the crowd searching for knuckles and Adam’s apples to see where the threats might be coming from. An N-word came up to me on the street the other day. He said, ‘Careful, Dave, they’re after you.’ I said, ‘What? One they or many theys?'”

MO: So it’s interesting because I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed that that would’ve set off a controversy. That’s actually pretty clever. I mean, I think a lot of us are trying to negotiate pronouns, having troubles, even people. I have friends who are themselves trans who have say, “Oh yeah, I misgender people all the time and have to deal with it.” I mean, I think we might begin by saying, why was he not able to tell that joke and just quote, get away with it?

JB: Well, I think the problem is audiences are generally accepting of the fact that you can catch a stray. I think most groups, be they Jews, be they African Americans, be they LGBTQ folks, right? They accept that a comedian can make a joke about you. That happens all the time. What was happening with Chappelle is that this was starting to infiltrate the work itself and it was saturating his sets. We know that in the 80s in particular, a lot of standup comedy was writing on the pocketbooks of gay men who loved standup. They were like adamant, adamant fans of the genre. So there’s no contradiction between making jokes about gay people to gay people and being allowed to ply your wares as an artist. What was happening with Chappelle is the LGBT jokes were beginning to first occupy a larger and larger percentage of his sets.

That’s one. And then we have to talk about digitality, which is the joker in our deck. The move to digitality, let’s just call it that, has, I believe, fundamentally changed not only art, but the very ground rules of free speech and liberal democracies.

MO: And by digitality, you mean social media?

JB: The existence of-

MO: I would probably say virality.

JB: Well, right. Virality is something that happens in the larger category of digitality that we now live on our phones.

MO: So Chappelle tells jokes like this, some of them, he catches a stray. They suffusing the work. More and more of them are catching the stray bullet from people who are upset by them, activists, but also people who aren’t necessarily hardcore activists. He catches a lot of flack. And then there’s this patterned interaction. There’s this ritual that gets performed where … Now, he didn’t really apologize. In Sarah Silverman’s case, she did apologize a lot. So talk about the next steps, the next step that can be taken in the patterned ritual.

JB: Yeah. And it’s so interesting that it always happens the same way. And if you’re a sociologist, you’re aroused because you’re seeing different inputs creating the same structural pattern.

So Chappelle makes jokes. The next step is something develops that I call the coalition of the incensed or the coalition of the profaned. And the coalition of the profaned might be spontaneous or they might have preexisted the joke. They might be an advocacy group like HRC, for example, that are very, very attuned to certain types of cultural expressions about their particular group. So Chappelle’s making his jokes almost immediately online. There is pushback, right? The jokes are being blasted to every corner of the earth. Chappelle is adamant … and his fans are online arguing with those who are excoriating Chappelle for making such derogatory jokes about LGBTQ people. And good, that’s our pattern. Now is where things get really, really interesting.

As you know, Mark, we’ve had some epic New York Times moments together about the author, Philip Roth, and Philip Roth is a master of a genre called meta fiction. So meta, what’s one definition of meta fiction? When a work of art is cognizant of itself as a work of art within the work of art, that’s a pretty standard way of thinking. About metafiction, you could read Patricia Waugh or Yaël Schlick. There are many great scholars who metafiction. Read them folks and you will learn a lot.
Philip Roth, at a very early moment in his career, probably as early as the 1974 My Life as a Man, started writing novels about the writing of novels. And he started writing novels about the writing of novels that you are reading, which is very, very peculiar. Scholars of literature refer to that as the self-begetting novel, which is a really cool term, a novel that sort of creates itself as you’re reading it and because you’re reading it.

All right. Why am I engaging in this lengthy excursis about Roth? I do believe that Roth and the other metafictionalists injected into the artistic mainstream a conjuries of metafictional techniques, which comedians very quickly picked up on and elaborated upon and innovated upon. And one of these techniques was to take a controversy about their joke and bring the controversy back in to the artwork, which is very, very difficult to do, let’s say in fiction, because it takes a long time to write something and has to be copy edited. With the advent of digitality, you can make a joke on Tuesday, get a lot of negativity about it online. And on Wednesday in your next set, wherever you might be, you can be talking about reactions to the joke and that becomes part of the comedy itself. And this is what Chappelle started doing. I want to read you a quote, if I can.

This is Chappelle in 2024 in the middle of one of his specials, The Age of Spin. So he begins this way. “To be honest with you, I’ve been trying to repair my relationship with the transgender community because I don’t want them to think that I don’t like them. You know how I’ve been repairing it? I wrote a play. I did because I know that gays love plays. It’s a very sad play, but it’s moving. It’s about a black transgender woman whose pronoun is sadly N-word. It’s a tearjerker. At the end of the play, she dies of loneliness because white liberals don’t know how to speak to her. Sad.”

MO: That’s pretty funny. You don’t think that’s funny?

JB: But I mean, maybe we should have this discussion as two Yids, two Jews. Maybe we should have this discussion about Dieudonné. And I think we should.

MO: Well, I mean, you’re giving me examples of jokes that are actually fairly clever. I think he’s-

JB: Oh, he’s a brilliant comedian. He’s a brilliant comedian.

MO: Okay. Okay. Anyway, so he works it into his controversies with the trans community become part of his material. And then what? What’s the next stage? He pulls it back in-

JB: That’s the meta function.

MO: Right.

JB: And one of my suggestions is there’s something about doing that, which enrages that audience even more. That meta move is a nitroglycerin. It blows things up even more than they were. So then there’s this counter response and now you have this dialectic or loop where every day this thing is simmering, simmering, simmering, and there’s going to be a blowup. And usually the blowup involves some type of deplatforming, which is or is not going to occur. And we can talk about Chappelle’s-

MO: And in the case of Chappelle, it doesn’t really. Netflix keeps running his specials.

JB: Netflix defends him, and he does a bit. Talking about how great Netflix is, it’s a comedic bit, I guess, right? Talking about how great Netflix and Ted Sarandos are for defending him against the LGBTQ community and their attempt to de-platform.

MO: Now, in the case of Shane Gillis, he does get, in a sense, de-platformed, he loses a job when it has dug up that he used to use anti-Asian slurs in his act and some other stuff. Four days after Saturday Night Live hires him, this is a few years back, they fire him. He climbs his way back. He changes his comedy, basically, and I think goes on a bit of an apology tour. And that’s another way the ritual can go. So Chappelle, if it comes to a standstill, I’m not sure he is cool with the trans community right now, but it doesn’t … Maybe he’s lost some audience, although he’s probably picked up some from the right who are excited he’s been transgressive, but it comes to a standstill. He never goes around apologizing trans comedy or repairing with them. He just is too big to be canceled.

In the case of Shane Gillis, he gets kind of canceled and then works his way back. And Louis C.K. works his way, way, way back. I’m very interested in the case of Sarah Silverman, who it seems like, who I, by the way, think is completely brilliant. And I think some of her comedy really was too smart for today’s world, for digitality. It’s offensive on a level. And then if you are a little bit more attuned to what comedy is, you realize how smart it is. But she ended up yanking some of her old, an old clip down. You can’t find the clip of her doing blackface with, by the way, a Black person doing Jew face, and she ends up apologizing a lot. So that’s another way it can go is that there’s the ritual performative apology tour, right?

JB: All right. So one question this book was asking, and I already knew the answer in advance, but I figured I’d just give it a spin anyhow. What is cancellation? Is it a thing? What are the mechanics of cancellation? And what I’ve been saying for a long time, even before I wrote this book is certain types of artists are simply too big to fail because they already have a platform and because the ensuing controversy, which they exponentially multiply through the use of meta brings new fans into the fold. There are simply some types of artists that just cannot be canceled. They might get a smaller audience, by the way, right? They might be playing different venues. But as you mentioned, in the case of Louis C.K., he’s making a little less, but he’s still playing in Europe. He’s playing to a lot of places. He’s moved himself online.

And I think he’s having a fine career. It might not be the career that he particularly wanted to have. You mentioned Gillis. Gillis, unlike Chappelle, was deeply reflective about his cancellation. And I would even go as far as to say … Now, I don’t know Gillis. I’ve never spoken to him. And that’s a major aspect of what I do. I never want to speak to these people. I feel that I learned that right in the book about Roth. Mark, remember that?

MO: Interesting.

JB: I learned when you know these people, you’re under their space. So I try to stay as far away from these people as I possibly can. I don’t know Gillis. I would say as a human being, looking at another human being, his reflections on what happened to him were fairly sincere, as sincere as an artist can be. And he changed his comedy slightly. It wasn’t a tectonic shift, but he started to tone down certain themes and he put his head to the ground and he just worked. He worked and he worked and he worked. And like Chappelle, he’s supremely talented. And the people we’re looking at in this book are just masters of their craft.

So instead of being canceled, Shane Gillis is huge right now. I know you want to get to Silverman and we’ll get to her in a moment. But Shane Gillis was given, and I’m sure you harped on this detail and underlined it, he was given apology templates when the whole thing happened. So some company came to him, consultants are like, “You could do this apology or this apology.” And he didn’t do any of them. And he just kind of took the pain, absorbed the hatred. There’s a story that he was on a subway and he was sitting next to somebody who was reading on their iPhone, the story of Shane Gillis’s cancellation from SNL. So that must be such an interesting experience in life. And now Shane Gillis is Shane Gillis, though I do notice that he never totally let go of the sort of more risque material that punches down a bit, but he punches up all the time. Now, punch up and punch down is something we should talk about that also appears in every committed controversy.

All right. What do we want to talk about with Sarah Silverman though, Mark?

MO: I’m reading through your book, which talk about all the apologies that she’s done and there have been a bunch. The joke that I think is most interesting is where she says, am I right? The joke is “I was raped by a doctor, which for a Jewish girl is a very bittersweet experience.” Now, I can’t know what it’s like to hear that as a woman or as a rape victim, but I can know what it’s like to hear that as a Jew. And the joke aims at, it goes off in three directions: women, rape victims and Jews. And as a Jew, it’s a clever joke because there is this sort of well-hewn cultural stereotype that Jewish parents want their daughters to marry doctors, that there’s nothing higher than marrying a doctor. Though actually I think fewer Jews are going to medicine than ever before. My friends who teach at med schools say, “Actually, there aren’t that many Jews.” And the joke might be offensive and it’s also smart.

I’m not going to say if it’s offensive. When I heard it, and I think I heard it in the first round of when she was telling it, I probably laughed very hard, to be honest. It’s also really sharp. Okay. Leaving that aside, I have two thoughts I want to say about the apology tour of Sarah Silverman. Number one is I was a little saddened by it because a) I would’ve thought she was too big to fail and didn’t have to, b) I don’t think it was super sincere. Certainly if people want to apologize, they should. Third, I think her comedy has probably gotten worse in the way that Howard Stern, who used to be offensive but funny, is now fairly inert and unfunny because I think pushing those limits and feeling the freedom push those limits also is what gave us her best material. And fourth, I’m not sure that … I want to talk about the whole issue of apologies because in the Jewish tradition, and I hue to this tradition, apologies are to people, to specific humans you’ve actually hurt.
And one of the comedians you write about says, “I’ll apologize to anyone I’ve actually hurt.” In other words, call me and I’ll give you an apology. I think the sort of performative expression of, “I hereby apologize to anyone who’s been offended” is nonsensical. I actually am bothered by it because you don’t know that anyone’s been offended. If they’ve been offended, you haven’t met them, you haven’t repaired with them, you haven’t done Teshuvah. It strikes me as a PR move, not a sincere apology. It’s a press release, not an apology. Apologies are to people you’ve wounded. And maybe Sarah Silverman heard from rape victims whom she wounded, and then it would’ve been entirely appropriate to apologize. But the press release or the going on late night TV to say how sorry you are strikes me as a career saving move, a PR move, not a move of actual repair with actual humans.

So everything about it bothered me. And you take a very dispassionate, non-normative approach. You’re not saying what we should think. You’re just telling us how it all goes, but it was hard for me to read all that because I thought the self defenestration of Sarah Silverman struck me as wrong on many levels.

JB: Good. So we’re really getting into this sociological pattern. Another one of the stops of the cross in these comedic controversies is the apology. And Sarah Silverman is unusual because she goes on a sort of apology rampage starting around 2010 forward. Is it sincere? Unlike you, Mark, I listened to her podcast a lot. I don’t know if you listen to it, right?

MO: I’ve heard it a few times, but I trust you listen to it much more.

JB: Well, unfortunately, well, fortunately, right, when you work on these types of artists, every professor knows you’ve got to listen to every imaginable word. To everything. It’s almost impossible, but you’ve got to try. So every time I took a walk when I was working on the Silverman chapter, every time in the gym, when I was pumping iron, when I was giving guy a spot, when I was getting swole, I was listening to these Sarah Silverman podcasts. And one thing I thought, Mark, is she has changed. There is a change here, and I call it a therapeutic turn where she’s unusually interested in the psychological dimensions of her listeners and her audience, where she’s offering advice, where she’s talking about what her therapist told her. So I don’t know if I agree with you that the apology was insincere. One thing she did that she could have done better is a lot of the apologies used the exact same wording.

So she’d always go, “Comedy is not evergreen.” I don’t know how many times I heard her use that term evergreen, which is kind of a hapex legamenon. It’s a word that you hear very, very infrequently. Comedy is not evergreen. So she apologized. What she did on, I believe the show was called I Love America where she bought out a friend of hers, I’m just blocking on his name right now to tell her how uncool her blackface skits were. To me, that’s indicative of a person that’s really trying to say in jerky Semaphore strokes, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish I hadn’t done that. ” Now you raise an interesting point. You’re saying it got unfunny.

MO: If what you love a comedian for is their sharp elbows and then they take a therapeutic turn, they’re a different comedian. And maybe if I listened to her more and heard her work now, I would actually think it’s almost as good or as good. The times I’ve ventured into it, I thought, well, this isn’t what I came to Sarah Silverman for, but also artists change. And there are people who might like your early books or my early books who like, “I don’t like what Berlinerblau or Oppenheimer is doing anymore.” I mean, people grow and develop as artists and I get that. And so she has to do her, as they say, and maybe it is sincere, but again, I think apologies are to specific human beings you’ve heard. I don’t think … And you’ve conceded she kind of went on a tour and she kind of became sort of wrote and was deploying it.

And that doesn’t bespeak … That’s not what genuine human searching looks like. It’s not incompatible with it, but it doesn’t scream out to me, “I see you, I hear your pain, I hurt you, and I’m going to say I’m sorry.” The other thing is, if that’s the way you feel, you say it once or maybe twice or to specific humans who walk up to you and you don’t go on the tour because the tour is a kind of, again, it strikes me as something a PR consultant told her to do.

JB: But the sociologist in me would say, you’re imposing a psychological discourse on her. You’re asking Silverman to engage in one-on-one apologies. The very nature of digitality and art even before digitality is you radiate something to tens of thousands of people.

MO: Right. That’s why I think most of these apologies should not be given because you don’t have relations with tens of thousands of people. They opted in, they got to see it. And you make this point elsewhere that comedy, that one of the things that the whole free speech discourse presumes when it’s working well, when it’s honoring the old American consensus, capital C, about free speech is that people opt in. Could it be the case that when you opt into something and then are offended by it, that the person whose book you purchased at Barnes & Noble that then offended you owes you an apology?

JB: That’s a really good question. So at a comedy club, yes. I feel that when you walk into a comedy club, there is a contract that everyone understands, right? That comedian is going to light you up. So if you walked into a comedy club wearing the shirt you’re wearing right now, Mark, I mean, that could be fracked for hours via comedian. When I walk into a comedy club, they somehow always pick on me for whatever reasons and I get it, I accept it. All right, but now we have this thing called digitality. And now there’s just this joke out there that somebody at work mentioned and was kind of chuckling by the water cooler. And you didn’t ask for this joke to enter your space, but it’s out there because let’s say Sarah Silverman has this incredible platform and she has these tools of post-modernity at her disposal.

And when she makes a joke, millions of people can potentially hear it. So we’re really, you and I are digging into this question of an individual apology versus a collective apology. I think a collective apology-

MO: Wait a second. I love your example. Some schmock at the water cooler retells an offensive joke, he owes the apology. I mean, what if he got the joke from Rudyard Kipling? Does Kipling owe the apology? I don’t know. I think I’m not buying what you’re selling. The idea that when you say something, anyone down the road who hears it repeated and is offended, deserves an apology or may deserve an apology of you. I don’t know. That strikes me as a corruption of how apology works. Here’s the other thing while I’m piling on, is anyone actually appeased by, or mollified by, such an apology, right?

So Sarah Silverman goes out there and sells some joke in 2012. I then hear it. I see a YouTube clip of it in 2019. I’m offended. And again, I understand why people would be offended by some of these jokes and hurt by them and even wounded by them. So I’m hurt. I’m wounded.

Now one can imagine that I reach out to Sarah Silverman and I email her and she gets back to me and says, “I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t told that. I’m sorry I’d hurt you.” Okay, that’s a human interaction. She probably can’t do that for all her fans, but if that happens, that strikes me as a valid human interaction. But if what happens is I keep Googling and discover that she went on Conan four months after the joke and said, “Comedy’s not evergreen. I’m so sorry I shouldn’t have told it.” Or two years after the joke. Do I now feel less wounded?

JB: So what can the comedian do, Mark? Do they have to-

MO: Nothing.

JB: Nothing.

MO: They could do better work.

JB: Ember of their shame for the rest-

MO: I would say-

JB: What if the comedian is truly sorry? They’re truly, truly contrite. What are they supposed to do?

MO: I mean, I don’t know. If you accidentally set a building on fire and people are harmed, you can apologize to those people. But do you issue a public statement? I mean, at what point do you owe the public anything? You harm individual people. I don’t know that … I guess the assumption that they have to do something. Sometimes you put harm in the world and you can’t repair it. You just resolve to be better.

JB: I want to give you some tools to continue your argument. I’m thinking of Kevin Hart who got into it with the LGBTQ community and I believe Wanda Sykes comedian I really, really like, spoke to him and kind of explained to him why this wasn’t working. And he did apologize. And I believe Kevin Hart, I hope I’m getting this… Yeah, I’m definitely getting this right. At one point said, “I’ve apologized and people are still giving me shit for these jokes. What else do you want me to do?” So we have to understand what an apology is. What it can actually do is symbolic at best. It’s like, “Hey, I didn’t mean it guys. I don’t hate you.” But it’s also got a huge commercial dimension. An apology is meant in this world of mass comedy, which is a billion dollar a year industry. And apology is meant to keep the artist viable in certain markets. Can we agree on that?

MO: Right. But you’re accepting that as … I mean, that might be unfortunate that the apology is required. Descriptively, that might be true. But normatively, is that a good thing? If the comedian’s funny and keeps doing good work, why should their marketability depend on some possibly insincere performative press release they issued with their apology?

JB: The way the market works because people aren’t going to purchase the product. People aren’t going to watch them on Netflix. People aren’t going to come to the show. So the apology is commercially necessary because the comedian is worried about their long-term financial existence. That’s probably why most of them apologize. What I’m trying to say is Silverman added a little extra. And the little extra was what I would view as sincerity. And I think Gillis as well, there was some sincerity there. Chappelle, oh my God, he keeps doubling down and doubling down and doubling down. And one of the arguments in the book is this does damage to the fundamental texture of comedy. It becomes a different thing. It becomes like a political rally almost. It feels different.

MO: And also you point out, at a certain point, he’s not making jokes. He’s just giving applause lines to the people in his audience who are kind of giving the middle finger to political correctness or whatever. You also make the point that he does that this technique, this persona drop where all of a sudden he’s not doing Dave Chappelle, the comedian, but he’s like, “Hey man, let me get real.” And all of a sudden he’s telling you what he’s been going through. And it becomes kind of a little bit cringey, a little bit unfunny, a little bit overly personal. It actually changes the art. And I agree with that. I don’t think that’s great either. But as I was reading this book, I kind of did want to know, and I respect the scholar’s right to just stay objective and be descriptive about it. But I did want to know where you stand because I tend to think of a lot of these … I think of what virality or digitality has done to comedy in terms of amping up people’s ability to learn about offensive jokes to then form coalitions of the … Is that what you call it? A coalition of the offended?

JB: Of the profaned, right.

MO: Of the profane, right. To then form these coalitions and then kind of force, for market reasons, the comedian to issue public apologies, which again, I don’t think are the best form of apology. I see this as all as a bad turn. I think it probably inhibits the amount of good art we get in the end. I also think it comes at a psychic cost to actual human beings. What happened to Kathy Griffin where she really did feel like she couldn’t pay the bills for a while seemed disproportionate to the offense she’d given by any standard. It all seems fairly broken to me. And I in many ways want to go back to 2000 on all of this. Even as I understand that there were jokes being told then that were cruel. And I think we could have lessened the cruelty in our culture without upping this kind of dysfunction you described.

I guess I’m curious, where do you stand on it? You’re describing it. Do you regret it? Do you think it’s beneficial?

JB: So you’re asking me, don’t be the kind of dispassionate scholar you wear in this… What’s my personal view on the utility of an apology?

MO: Yeah, because I’m reading your book and I think it’s beautifully written and really interesting and everyone should read it. And I’m also thinking what he’s describing is really, really atrocious for culture.

JB: Yeah. I’d hate to live in a world mark where a person couldn’t issue a sincere … Or let’s think about Blacks and Jews, right? A subject that we’re both also … We’re like twins, right? Twinsies, you and I. So some African American artists have said things about Jews and that’s really upset white Jews. And some of them, there’s a subset that have said, oh gosh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. And they’ve changed and they’ve never done it again. And some have doubled down. So I’d hate to live in a world where we never assume that another person, whether it’s individual or collective, can say, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry and not mean it.” I want to argue, you’re right. You, the cynic are probably right. It’s probably rare. These apologies are tactical.

MO: It’s actually not important to my argument how sincere they are all the time. That’s pretty tangential. It’s more than if the comedian’s funny, even if they’ve been mean about Jews, I’ll keep listening to them because I like good comedy. I mean, I’ll still go see Mel Gibson movies, right? Horrible antisemite, but I mean, I don’t know how much I’ll pay these days for them, but if Lethal Weapon came on, I’d still watch Lethal Weapons. Lethal Weapon’s like a totally cool baller movie. It’s pretty great. Okay.

JB: All right.

MO: I don’t walk through the world thinking I can’t cast my eyes on that artist because I know that … I mean, look, I actually think a lot of the literary community is antisemitic right now. I think there’s real concerns about ways in which anti-Zionism is shaded into anti-Semitism and how they’re treating literature produced by Jews. But if I looked at every person who’d signed a moronic petition and said, “I’m not going to read that person anymore,” I’d be cutting out a lot of important literature.

JB: You would, but the proof test for you is this comedian I keep mentioning Juduni because Juduni is comedy. So it’s what Chappelle does to LGBTQ, Juduni does to the Jews. It’s like 20 years you go to a Judonis show, he’s going to make jokes about Jews. And this is where I’m going to push back hard. Wait, wait, wait, Mark Oppenheimer. Some of those jokes are funny. If you can move back, forget about all your ancestors of blessed memory who perished in the Holocaust. If you can just affect that move, and apparently you can, and I can, some of them are funny, but I still have real concerns-

MO: But wait-

JB: About that type of comedy.

MO: Yeah. Wait, but I think that’s, I don’t know what they … It’s a bit of a straw man, a steel man. I don’t know. It’s a man. Because I don’t know Dieudonné’s work. It’s funny. My French used to be pretty good. Maybe I should brush up by just immersing myself in YouTubes of Dieudonné, but you present him, and certainly this is constant with what I’ve read about him, as giving you just a shower of antisemitism. A lot of his act is antisemitism, substantial amount of his act. As I believe you, and I’m not so up on Chappelle’s specials, I’ve probably seen two of the last eight, but that his work has become increasingly about his conflicts with the trans community, and you argue persuasively that his work has suffered for it.
So, okay, but that strikes me as different from Sarah Silverman. It strikes me as different from a lot of comedians who have issued performative apologies. Yeah, I don’t want to go see the comedian who has become identified with antisemitism in France. Yeah. Okay, but that’s a pretty extreme example. I probably don’t buy that.

JB: But Mel Gibson, you’re eating your popcorn at a fucking Mel Gibson movie. I mean, Mel Gibson is associated with a really virulent form of antisemitism, but you’re but going…

MO: Wait a second. Yeah. But wait a second. But his art isn’t all antisemitism all the time. I mean, the Jesus movie, there are arguments to made about one or two of his movies that they ferment anti-Semitic stereotypes. And I’m not minimizing that as a Jew and a father of little Jews. I’m not minimizing that at all, but that is not the experience of seeing lethal weapon, right? It’s just not. So whereas the experience of going to see Judone is you might be subjected to a good 20 to 30 minutes out of a one-hour set that have to do with the Zionists, the Jews, the whatever. So let me put a finer point on it. If the person’s comedy is not principally about its racism and antisemitism, but they’ve told that joke at some point, I’ve probably moved on and continued to enjoy their comedy, even if that joke was at my expense, and a lot of these jokes are at Jew’s expense.

JB: That’s fair. I mean, we’re asking a question. There are two questions here. Should an individual subsidize it by attending the work of art? That’s one question, right?

MO: Yeah.

JB: But the nastier question that my book is asking is, what’s a government’s role in all of this? So there are these two structural levels.

MO: We’ll get to that in a second. Could you answer for me the question of, do you think you’ve given me the upside. It’s nice that we are a culture that allows apologies, that has rituals for them. And you correctly point out if people sincerely want to apologize, they should. And I’m not saying don’t, but you’re also describing something that probably does make comedy a little bit less adventuresome that sometimes comes at a psychic cost to the comedians that sometimes involves, I think, some dishonesty. They pretend to apologize and people pretend not to have been offended or to be forgiving. Or the coalition of the profaned was they pretended to be really more offended than they were for political reasons. They get the insincere apology and now they pretend that all is good and they’ve just all enacted this kind of ritual that is not honest. Some of this seems icky to me. Do you not share the … Where’s your icky meter on all this?

JB: Yeah. The world is icky, right? The artist and the critic, right? We’re the people who stand the part and we describe the ickiness. So again, can you just redirect the question so I can fully understand? I see-

MO: Yeah. Do you wish it were different? Do you wish people took less offense and demanded fewer apologies and laughed more?

JB: Prior to the advent of the internet, I was full on Mark Oppenheimer on this. I was totally in agreement with you, right? But there’s a new thing in town. There’s a new technology which is fundamentally changing the species. That’s something I believe. We as human beings are learning things about ourselves that are not good vis-a-vis this technology. Now that this technology exists and knowing what it can do, I’m going to say, “You know what? I just took cross our t’s and dot our i’s, just issue the apology.” All right, let’s tamp everything down because as the book continues, we start to look at things that are getting more and more and more serious vis-a-vis jokes gone wrong. So at one point we’re like, “Hey, is Kim Jong-un go to lob a nuke into California because of the interview?” So maybe the prudent thing there to do for Rogan, we’ll talk about Rogan was, “Hey, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean it.” He wouldn’t do it. Good for him. Comedians almost never back down, which is fascinating and it’s part of this pattern.

But then there’s Obama, on the collective level, representing the government of the United States who delivers this classic, Philippic in defense of what I’ve called the pre-digital liberal free speech consensus. It’s a beautiful speech. It’s probably Obama’s finest moment. But if you read my book, you’re like, but actually, if you look deeper into Obama’s own free speech conundra that he was walking into that situation with, Obama’s knight and shining armor moment is much less glamorous. So you talked about ick. Artists and critics are people who study ick and they’re kind of at a remove from it. We try to explain the ick to the world. So I’m neither endorsing nor denouncing. I’m just saying, there it is.

MO: That’s me talking with Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University, author of the new book, “Can We Laugh at that?” It’s really a great read. If you like comedy at all, go buy Judd Apatow’s books on comedy, go buy Jerry Seinfeld’s memoir, go buy Jeremy Dauber’s book on the history of Jewish comedy, and then go by Jacques on whether and when we can laugh at certain jokes.

But also, go read what we’re publishing over at arcmag.org. Over at Arc, we’ve had some really, really fun pieces. Just this week, we have Stuart Halpern writing about the Exodus and how it was used rhetorically in the Civil War. This is a piece very much key to Passover and a happy Passover, A Zissen Pesach, Chag Sameach, to all of you who celebrate.

Also at arcmag.org in the past couple weeks, a really, really fun piece by my friend Liam Brennan called “The Rise of Liam.” Liam describes how when he was a child growing up in Stamford, Connecticut, the son of very Irish American parents, nobody could pronounce the name Liam. People said, Leo, Leem, Liam, Lame, what is this name? And now Liam is the most popular baby boy’s name in the country, but it’s not just for the Irish anymore. So the piece is a really sweet, soulful description of how one name becomes something of a multicultural touchstone. The philosopher and classicist, Max DuBoff has a piece over at arcmag.org about waves of population panic. This is about the death of Paul Ehrlich, whose book, The Population Bomb, panicked everyone in the late 1960s about the possibility of exploding population, too many mouths to feed. Now, of course, we’ve swung the other way and we worry that there aren’t going to be enough people. And Max DuBoff really smartly puts Ehrlich in conversation with the pronatalist, Elon Musk, who is something less of a philosopher, but a pretty important voice in this space, just by virtue of the platform that he has.

Paul Anthony has an essay at Arc about fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, pro-polygamy Mormons in the movies. There’s a new movie out that features some of these characters, and he looks back at other movies that have featured such characters. The journalist, Tom Goggola, interviews the writer, Darcey Steinke, about her new book about suffering from persistent pain. It’s really quite harrowing just to read about, but it’s a great piece by Tom Gogola. Marjorie Ingall has an essay about the project that she and her daughter undertake every year on the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Fire. And that piece was really quite moving. Amy Laura Hall has an essay called Home Movies for Holy Week, recommending some movies and TV shows that you should watch in honor of the upcoming holidays of Easter and Lent and so forth. Just so much great stuff. Go over to arcmag.org, have a read, and now go back to having a listen to me and Jacques Berlinerblau.

So the Charlie Hebdo situation, we have a great chapter on that, and they publish all these cartoons that some Muslims find offensive, not all Muslims, of course, but some. And a dozen of them end up, people in their offices end up getting murdered. And then you said something that I didn’t know, I’ll take your word on it, which is then France escalated its foreign adventures in the Arab world in what, Iraq, and that resulted in further deaths, and then there was blowback from that. So then PEN America gave an award to Charlie Hebdo. And I thought good for them. Lots of writers whom I now respect less said, not good for them. This was an example of punching down, but of course they’d been punching at religion forever and it’s very important principle in French society. And I’m curious, it seemed to me the job of the intellectual then, and again, I’m not a petition signer.

I’m not saying everyone has to sign this or that petition or come out in support of this. I’m asking you as my buddy, I thought what was really important was to defend the issue of the principle of free speech. That was not what the literary community thought. A lot of people said, “No, no, no. They should not have published these things. They were too offensive. The place of Muslims and French society is too precarious.” And it is precarious in many ways. That’s real. These are conflicting goals here. And I guess I’m curious, how do you think that should have shaken out?

JB: Good. All right. So let’s go back to Emile Durkheim. Emile Durkheim, one of my heroes. What does he argue, good French Jew, good secular French Jew, I would add. What does he argue is the responsibility of the professor? The job of the professor is to render complexity with clarity so that one’s compatriots, our fellow citizens, can understand how to think about an issue. So a lot of the moves that I’m making in the book are like, all right, let me try to explain to you what this side is saying, what that side is saying. However, there is a normative bias. I mean, I’ve got biases like anyone else. I keep coming to this tortured conclusion, which you’re sensing. And the tortured conclusion is yes, I believe in free speech. Yes, I think it’s better for human beings to be subjected or to be able to enjoy these types of characters of the prophet Muhammad or Zionism or whatever it might be.

So I’m an old school free speech lifer, but because this new technology exists, because it has opened a new way of being human, especially of being human in collective terms, and that’s what the Judone chapter and the North Korea chapter where I do a kind of war game. So let’s say that Kim Jong-un did have a nuke and it’s aimed at Mark Oppenheimer’s house. What would Obama do?

MO: Look, I mean, you quote the Danish newspaper editor who eventually didn’t republish or publish certain more cartoons and he said, “Yeah, they won. They won. I caved.” And I’m not saying I wouldn’t. I mean, I think of myself as a fairly cowardly person. I’d probably cave. I want to live a long life. My principle’s never been tested, but my resolve has never been tested. I’m sure I’d fail all sorts of tests of courage. And I think that the Heckler’s veto or the religious fundamentalist veto is never going to be sated. They’re never going to draw, say, “Okay, now’s good enough.” I mean, what a lot of these people want, and some are Roman Catholics, some are Haredi Jews, and some are Muslims, and some are just secular authoritarians who don’t want to be mocked. What they want is control. They don’t want a nice via media. They don’t want a nice middle path. That’s not the nature of fundamentalism. I mean, they are fundamentally, at the end of the day, Muslim and Jewish and Christian and secular Talibs, Taliban. They want to control us. And Sam Harris has made the point, they kind of do. They’ve decided that in any country in the world, there’s certain things you can’t publish. And that’s fricking terrifying.

JB: Okay. Sure. There’s not much disagreement that ideally we would be able to have untrammeled freedom of speech and every artist could say his or her or their piece. We’re not disagreeing about that, Mark. We’re just saying there’s this novel way of conveying ideas now, which can have real world immediate impacts on human beings.

MO: Well, that’s true.

JB: And I want you to think, you said you were a coward. I doubt you’re a coward, but I’m asking you to think through my war game or there’s a nuke aimed at your house. It’s coming. Unless somebody says they’re really sorry and they’re going to retract the work and it’s never going to appear in any form, what would you do? Now, you can put on your individual or your head of state hat, your head of state hat.

MO: I mean, I’m sure that I would decide to avert nuclear war by yanking something off of, by issuing a presidential edict that Netflix take down my favorite episode of Never Have I Ever. But we’d have some pretty serious problems if North Korea were threatening nuclear war over art being produced by Americans. I mean, at that point, we’re pretty close.

JB: Not even Americans. Canadians.

MO: Well produced in America, I presume. Let’s always blame the Canadians. I mean, at that point when they’re exercising vetoes over American art with the threat of nuclear annihilation, we’re pretty close to nuclear war at that point. We’ve got pretty big problems. I think a more useful question would be like, how do we react as a society when … How does France react when there are people who get murdered when they publish stuff? Not millions of people. Although then there was the attack at the concert hall, which was hundreds, 150, 100. And I appreciate that you’re describing it, and I think the free speeches have to win.

JB: France and the United States are different, as you know. So I think the French answer is different from the American answer. France is the nation of what we would call secularism somewhat incorrectly. These fellows at Shali Abdul who were martyred for their belief in free speech, they, I think, fairly accurately assumed that what they were doing was consonant with the greatest values of French democracy, right? That Voltaire fought for this, right? The French enlightenment fought. The revolution fought for this. The commune fought for this. The 1905 laws on separation of church and state fought for this. The Fifth Republic fought for this. And they were making a very, very compelling case that by printing these incendiary caricatures, they were defending the values of France. And I’m sympathetic to that argument in the French theater because this to me is pretty clearly something that the French have believed for a good long time.

Obviously, it’s changing and obviously there are columns of French society that disagree. The United States is a different beast on some of these issues. So in French space, I admire what they did. I respect them. I deplore the outcome, but the outcome was the outcome. 16 dead in about three days, four Jewish shoppers on the outskirts of Paris, 12 were killed in the offices of Shali Abdul. To me, at the very least, if you look at the last paragraph of the book, this kind of tortured reflection on, I don’t know what we do, at the very least, it demands a new way of thinking about artistic freedom in the digital era.

MO: I mean, basically you’re saying there’s less of it and we have to accept that and that’s not changing.

JB: No, I don’t want to accept it. I want to fight it, Mark.

MO: Well, how do you fight? I mean, one way you fight it is by stigmatizing the fundamentalists. I mean, they’re worse. I mean, they’re worse for society. They’re worse for freedom. They’re worse for free thought. They’re worse for humor. They’re a huge problem.

JB: And this is why I work on political secularism, but there’s so much an individual person can do.

MO: But I mean, you must have, when you saw all of those American intellectuals sort of coming in on the side, coming in against the defense of Abdul, I mean, you write about this, that a lot of this comes to the post-colonial left now. I mean, as somebody who works on secularism and free speech, you must think of them as pretty bad actors.

JB: Of course I do. But Dieudonné , not all of them, right? I mean, a lot of them are my colleagues and we just disagree. Dieudonné , as I point out in that chapter, there was one thing he was saying that regrettably was true, that there was a double standard in France on free speech. There was a glaring double standard because of. In France, Holocaust denial is against … You can’t say that.

MO: I know. I think that’s a problem too.

JB: Oh, no. That’s a huge effing problem, Mark. I mean, this is where Dieudonné gets launched from. He’s like, “Well, why-”

MO: There’s a lot of free speech problems. I mean, in England, there’s huge limits on free speech. Their libel laws are not very writer-friendly. You can get sued and maybe jailed for all sorts of things that the freedom of the United States. I’m not saying that it’s not like these places were paradises and now the woke mob have come for them. And as we know here, we have a government that’s trying to weaponize control of the airwaves to tell people what they can say and get Jimmy Kimmel this and whatever. So yeah, it’s not a left-wing problem or a right-wing problem, but I did feel, I guess insofar as your book is descriptive, you’re not giving prescriptions, but describing things and helping us to understand better. The piece that I felt that was missing, or just maybe this is the next book, is how this curtails free speech and comedy.
I mean, the point that everyone always misses on cancellation is it’s not the people who are too big to fail. It’s the up and coming comics who don’t tell certain jokes because they’re afraid of the consequences. And you don’t talk about that either.

JB: The medium is the message. The political move that the book makes, Mark, is this attempt to take this conversation away from people screaming about the woke and about DEI and left-wing call-out culture. So that was the politics of the book. So I politely reject the premises of your analysis by writing this type of book, I’m saying this is the way we have to speak about free speech. We cannot be imbiscoles about this. We cannot be rabble-rousers about this issue. It’s complicated. I wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I think you read, I think we discussed it about what to do post October 7. And what I said was, if you study free speech as a scholar, the one thing you learn is that when a nation comes to a free speech arrangement, it’s an arrangement that satisfies no one, but it kind of works for a while.

And if you want to study free speech seriously, you can’t go in assuming that every desiderata that you might have, everything you believe to be true about free speech is going to come to the fore. If we’re going to live in a democracy, unfortunately or fortunately, we must assume we are not going to get all that we want in terms of-

MO: Well, yeah, I remember that piece. Good piece. Yes and no. I mean, I would say for the most part, I would say that from say post-Lenny Bruce, let’s say from the sixties through about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if what you wanted was a kind of libertarian free speech utopia, the United States was pretty much as close as you were going to get. The Pentagon papers had been defend … The Times could publish the Pentagon papers. They weren’t arresting people on Lenny Bruce or Lady Chatterly’s lover type stuff anymore. And that it has gotten from a free speech perspective, not necessarily from a human kindness perspective, but from a free speech perspective, we have retreated. We’ve gotten markedly worse the past 10 or 12 years because of the internet and because people have been shot for doing stuff and because of the Charlie Hebdo type situations and those resonate in America as well. I mean, Yale University Press in their book on the whole controversy wouldn’t reprint the actual cartoons because they were worried about their employees here, but probably also more so with them. London offices.

JB: Can we explain to your listeners what that is because that to me is … Do you want to explain it or should I explain it?

MO: You should explain it. You’re definitely much better at it.

JB: So Jytte Klausen writes this wonderful book, I believe it’s called The Cartoons that shook the world about the Danish cartoon comedic controversy. And she published it on Yale University Press and the book itself doesn’t feature the cartoons. So you have this masterful analysis by a great scholar of the semiotics of the cartoon and the geopolitical impact of the cartoons, but you can’t look at the cartoons themselves. So one pattern that Klausen pointed to, really important point is that American institutions, when it comes to free speech, tend to be very, very sheepish compared to European institutions that are like, “All right, bring it on. Let’s just publish it.”

Why is that so frightening to me, that whole episode? Because how on earth are we supposed to teach this stuff? I like to tell my classes, when we look at the cartoons, which are in some cases, really Islamophobic, I usually have them up on a screen in the room, right? So there are 15 of us in a seminar and we’re looking at this cartoon and we’re trying to deconstruct what it is. If I move that screen 15 feet outside the door of my classroom, we would be in a completely different situation, a different circumstance. The fact that it happens in the classroom and that an alleged expert is explaining this to students is one of those agreements we’ve come to in a free liberal democracy, which I think is workable. So Berlinerblau can show these to students because he’s credentialed, because the university gave him tenure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However-

MO: So do you think-

JB: Put that out in the hallway, that could be pretty incendiary because it offends some.

MO: So do you think that Yale University Press should have published … If you were head of Yale University Press, would you have published the cartoons in the book about-

JB: Absolutely. And I knew the head of Yale University Press because I was going to publish a book with them at that very moment. So categorically, I did not believe in 2005, I think that’s when it was, I did not believe that there was imminent lawless action on the horizon. Today’s a little different, but back then I did not buy the argument that they’re sleeper cells in New Haven and they’re ready to go. Today, I would be a little-

MO: See, that’s interesting. I might be a little more chicken shit than that. We know Iran has been funding for an assassins. They’ve had an international assassination program for decades. And of course it doesn’t need to be a sleeper cell. It could be someone who’s just offended. So I don’t know. I might’ve thought that they made the right call. But that is to say, I think your argument that, well, no one’s ever happy. I would say where we were about 20 years ago, I was happy. And I think it’s gotten worse.

JB: Well, then came the internet. That’s why it got worse.

MO: Yeah, it got worse. Right. And so we have to figure out how to make it better again.

JB: Let’s do it, Mark.

So I’d really like for people to look at that Dieudonné chapter. I want people to understand that my whole thing is anguished reflection. I’m not a cheerleader or an explorer, though I have my biases, obviously. I really wish, Mark, we could live in a world where there was untrambled free speech and citizens were habituated to looking at messages that they don’t like, but understanding the greater import of that feeling. That’s how democracy gets done. We see things we don’t like. We confront materials that offend us. What happened with the internet and social media is it unlocked a type of speech. And I’m speaking of misinformation and disinformation that sort of overwhelmed other types of speech. And I think that’s where the problem begins. So what I would love to do is train. I mean, my thing is secularism. I would love to get law students like L2s and get them in a room, 20 of them, and get them in a retreat in Genoa, Italy.

Every year we would meet and we would talk about where the law is, what we could do.

MO: You want a free trip to Genoa, Italy every year.

JB: I’m describing the Christian right. I mean, that’s what the Christian right was doing and that’s why they’re winning because they were actually training people to think about these legal issues. I would love for there to be a sort of serious, liberal thinking through of what we do now that the old free speech bromides are just not working, not acceptable and completely impotent. That’s what I’d love to be a part of. And I’d love to have people even thinking that this is a problem. I mean, this kind of libertarian mantra that just print it, whatever, don’t trample on my rights is absurd, not because it’s wrong, but it just simply cannot work in the reality-based community. And the sort of left wing retort, shut it down, shut it down, cancel it, it’s offending me, is equally absurd. So there has to be, I don’t want to say a middle ground, right? There has to be a new way, a new path to thinking about free speech in the age of digital.

MO: My big thanks to Jacques Berlinerblau for that really, really fun interview. You should check out his book, Can We Laugh At That, which was published March 22. It’s April already. There are a lot of celebrity birthdays. Pedro Pascal’s birthday is April 2. So is Michael Fasbender. So is Christopher Maloney of one of the Law & Orders. I think it was SVU. Jesse Plemons, whom you’ll remember from Friday Night Lights, also a birthday on April 2. April 3, Eddie Murphy and Alec Baldwin and Adam Scott and Rachel Bloom. Basically a really holy quartet of great comedic entertainers. April 4 is Robert Downey Jr. and Jewish women’s hero, Natasha Leone, also David Cross. Just a lot of comedians coming up. April 6, the eternally youthful Paul Rudd has a birthday. April 9, Kristen Stewart. April 11th. Joel Gray, whom I once saw in person. I’ve actually had very few random celebrity sightings in my life.

As somebody who lived in New York for a while, was born in New York and has spent a lot of time reporting from D.C. and Hollywood, LA. You’d think I’d have had some random celebrity spottings. And I do think that I once early in the morning in lower Manhattan, I think I was riding a bicycle across town, a city bike, a rent a bike from my in-law’s place on the Lower East Side over to Tribeca on the lower west side, so to speak, for some event at seven or eight in the morning. And I think I almost ran over Ben Affleck walking a dog, but I’m not even sure that I did. However, Joel Gray, the terrific Broadway star, famous for Cabaret and other stuff. Also for the movie Rema Williams: The Adventure Begins, you may recall. His birthday, April 11. That was a celebrity sighting I did have. I once saw him in a deli. I think he was having a bagel with Tony Roberts from the movie Annie Hall, the sort of Woody Allen sidekick.

Major religious holidays coming up. Passover starts April 1 in the evening and in the diaspora goes through April 9. So lots of matzah will be consumed. Maundy Thursday is April 2, Good Friday is April 3, and Easter Sunday when He’s risen, April 5. Ramadan has passed, but a belated happy Ramadan to all who observe Hindu holidays like Rama Navami is April 6 and the Theravada New Year for Buddhist is April 2. We wish all of you much joy on your holidays, secular and religious.
We have some really good podcasts coming up. Just today, I’m going to be going into the studio to record with the poet Christian Wiman and the theologian Miroslav Volf. They have a beautiful new book of their letters back and forth, their emails back and forth about cancer and suffering and God and the resurrection. It’s a beautiful epistolary joint essay that they are recording. Down the road a little bit, I’m also going to be doing a conversation with Shai Held and Christopher Beya, who both have books out that deal in part with religion and love, books that really kind of speak to each other. And we’re all reading each other’s books and we’ll be talking. That’ll probably air sometime in June or July. So much good stuff in the can.

And for all of that and more, I have to thank our host, the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University. At the Danforth Center, we are supported ably and capably and lovingly by Debra Kennard and Abram Van Engen and Sheri Pena and Hannah Pierce and all the others. I want to thank my editor, David Sugarman and our ACE interns, Sadie and Ezra and Ben and Caroline.

And I want to thank all of you. Until next time, I’m Mark Oppenheimer. Go check us out at arcmag.org.