The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Alan Dershowitz: Don't Say Gay
Episode Date: April 15, 2022Famed attorney, author and Harvard Professor and Comedy Cellar regular, comic Danny Cohen. ...
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Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast from the world-famous comedy seller on the Laugh Button Network and Sirius Radio.
I am the producer, and I guess...
You're a professional comedian. Is this the way you do introductions at your shows?
Well, I'm trying to be professional here.
It sounds self-assured.
Hi, welcome to blah, blah, blah.
You do it.
No, I don't know.
I don't have the script for it.
I'm here.
I'm here with the owner of the comedy cellar.
No, I'm Dwarven.
The cranky Noam Dwarven.
Who I basically had to drag up the fucking stairs to get here.
And the absolutely magnificent comic, Danny Cohen, who we all love and adore.
Hi, Danny.
So we're gathered here like this today because I waited too long.
Anyway, it doesn't matter because she waited too long to get a guest.
I waited too long to get a guest because I'm always nervous about booking a guest that
Noam is that I want to make sure that Noam's happy.
I really do feel like that is my main purpose here. But what I've learned is there's
nothing that I can do to make him happy. Okay, here it is, Danny. Let me tell you the truth.
I don't think I want to do the podcast anymore. I've gone through this before. I'm losing my
I'm losing my mojo on it. How do you keep yourself motivated to do things day in, day out?
You know, it's hard.
Sometimes it's also sort of like swimming.
Sometimes you just have to jump in and then figure it out when you're in the water.
And sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not.
And you have to accept that sometimes it's going to be great and sometimes it's not going to be great you know like i i understand that that psychological um armor but it's all i can do to stay married by using that armor how many how many things can i do that way right and then it's okay to take a break also sometimes
it's okay to say you know what i'm done for now uh let's revisit this at another time or maybe not
oh hold on i just made some money did you you hear that? Oh my God. No kidding.
That's because I'm deaf. I have
to put a... Will you shut that thing
off? I'm shutting it off now, but just so you know,
I had to choose the ringtone.
That's the most...
The EQ,
the frequency range that
my ears hear best.
That seems to be a cash register for some reason.
Here it is, Danny. I like to I like to interview political guests and things like that.
You know, journalists and stuff like that. And now there's tremendous pressure from within the ranks of this podcast, especially from Dan, but also Pariel.
No, no, no, no. Don't put it on me. And from Nicole to, to, um, just, you know,
to cast a wider net and talk about comedy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah. And, and the truth is, even though I own the comedy seller,
I don't know that much about that stuff. And, and, and it's like,
it doesn't interest me that much. Okay. I like hanging out with the,
I like the comedians talking about politics, but I like to keep political.
And Dan's like, well, we have a,
we have a podcast without any guests.
And our conversation was just as interesting.
But it's not just as interesting because listeners want to hear experts talk.
No, no, no, no, no.
I look at the numbers.
Listeners also want to hear you.
OK, you might not be that interested in talking to me and Dan, but that's a different thing.
So, OK, so put up pause that for a second.
So then I book two people who I know he loves talking to you.
I do love talking to you.
So I can hear the story, your gay conversion therapy stories over and over and over.
They are the most fascinating.
Dan, I don't remember how it turned out. Are you still
gay? But anyway, he went to gay conversion
therapy and he
liked it, but it didn't work,
but he liked it.
I just got an email
for Weekend Getaway
and I was like, should I go?
And I was like, oh, I don't know.
Is that like a reunion of a gay
conversion therapy reunion? Yeah, it's called Journey. You they're like. Is that like a reunion of a gay conversion therapy reunion?
Yeah, it's called Journey.
You're going to love the title.
The name of this weekend is Journey into Manhood.
Oh, wow.
Isn't that a great title?
And they have it like four times a year.
And it's these straight guys, gay guys, heterosexual men, married men,
who just can't seem to have their masculinity in check
and they're just trying to get
their balls back, I guess,
so to speak.
So they go away
and they just,
they learn a lot about themselves
and where they fit into their world,
I guess.
I just imagine all these
gay conversion.
All sorts of people.
Cured, so to speak, you know, scare quotes, cured.
They all meet for a reunion.
They have a few drinks.
And it's like all sorts of like ancient Greece, you know.
Is that what it is?
It's all the guys that have been through the conversion?
No, no, no, no.
Journey into manhood is actually mostly straight men
that feel, that they don't feel masculine they don't
feel um you know like you know maybe nerds and just maybe people that are men that just uh don't
feel good about themselves from a masculine perspective they want to have gay sex and that'll
make them feel it's not sexual no it's not sexual all. The only sexual part of it is that it's for men.
That's the only thing is.
I don't know, honey.
I'm not convinced.
Okay.
We do live, I mean, I know that nerds have never been
like what you close your eyes and imagine as masculine,
but nerds are more beta than they've ever been in
my lifetime. If you just look at the average, like elite nerd, like talks on, on TV now,
they have a vocal fry and like, there's literally nothing masculine about them. Like I went through
life. I'm fairly nerd. I'm'm not you know i i'm not the most
nerdy but i'm somewhat nerdy right like nobody ever mistook me for like a you know a rough and
tumble masculine guy but i don't but i'm not a beta male i was like you know you can be nerdy
without being so kind of limp but that seems to be the way it is now like the ezra klein type
uh nerd i find it um i guess i'm getting all, but I don't like it.
What do you think, Danny?
Well, some people embrace it.
And some people who are nerds, they don't embrace it.
They're embarrassed about it or they feel ashamed
or they feel lack of thereof.
I don't know, whatever.
They want to not, they don't want to be nerds anymore.
They don't want, they want to find,
they want to be a little bit more structured. don't know in a masculine way so they go to uh they go there
are these programs these getaways where they do all this dramatic therapy drama therapy and
soul searching and childhood wounds and all this stuff and it's sort of um i don't know i don't
know if it helps or i i know some straight
guys that went on you know matt who are married who just or who weren't married or who went on
these programs on these weekend getaways and and uh felt great about themselves um so it sounds
amazing but and i'm not being you know ridiculous or i'm not trying to be snarky by saying this, but it sounds so feminine.
Like it sounds like getting in touch.
And again, like in a very positive way.
But why is it called Journey into Manhood?
I don't know.
That's what I didn't title that.
But my program, Conversion Therapy, getting back to Noam, He loves the conversion therapy talk, but my, that, my little, my little group, there were only like eight of us in the, in my group. And then the 18 year olds, which I'm
not going to talk about, but my group, they were the 40, 35 years plus, and they were married.
That was my group. And they were like eight or 10 of us. And we went on this weekend getaway as well.
And it was primarily straight men, but we were there too, because it's all serves the same purpose.
It's to sort of be in touch with your masculinity and try to figure out how to
be a more of a, I guess,
masculine or more balanced man, so to speak,
whatever that means.
That's strange.
The problem is Bill Maher alluded to this and I, he got some flack,
but I'm not sure he was wrong.
I think the problem might be that in a very primitive way that they wish
they might wish it wasn't so,
but in a very primitive way women are attracted to masculinity.
Yeah. I mean, I mean, look, look there's a there's a pot for every lid
so there are all sorts of relationships like some sometimes you to you know a couple get married a
female uh heterosexual female male and sometimes the the female wears the pants in the family you
know where the pants and you know that can too. And that works perfectly well for many people. You know, but sometimes for, there are a lot of men
who are, who aren't really masculine and like it and are fine with it and don't have a problem with
it. Then there are some who have a problem with it and they're trying to figure out themselves.
So this is a program that was set up for those men. And so I just got an email about it a few weeks ago and I was like, Ooh,
should I go away just to sort of like, see, I don't know,
not for any other reason, but just to go.
For fun. It'd be interesting.
And then I was like, nah, I mean,
you're comfortable in your own skin at this point, right?
Yeah. I've always been very,
you've got to be with glasses like that.
When I was in conversion therapy, I was also been very You've got to be wearing glasses like that. When I was in
conversion therapy, I was also very comfortable
with my skin, actually. I was
very comfortable. I just was trying to
figure out what to do because of
my religiosity.
What happened to the
other men that were in the
program with you? Do you know?
I lost, I don't,
I've never, I was never in touch with any of them
really.
So I don't know.
Okay, but you can't convert somebody
from being gay, right? That's just,
you just can't, can you?
I don't think so.
But I don't know. Everyone's
different and I don't know what
people are willing to do in their lives
to do what they need to do to get to what they need to do.
You know, we all do things in our lives and maneuver in our lives differently.
And people do crazy things and live crazy lives.
For me, no, it didn't work for me.
But, you know, my God. How much stock do you put in the notion that right now, because of the particular time we're living in that there's a social contagion where it's really cool to come out as gay or trans or something out of the ordinary.
And that, you know, there's people who are not bigots who think that this,
that there is a significant amount of this going on. Do you put any stock in that?
The social contagion of trans and gay right now?
Yeah. I mean, it's happening. It's happening. It's a reality. It's really tough in the religious circles. In the non-religious circles,
not as tough.
Especially in the Jewish religious circles.
I don't know about any other religion,
but Judaism specifically
forbids
men
to transition, really.
It's a law.
They're not allowed to dress like women
and they're not allowed to act like women.
Why don't we pause right there and bring in Dershowitz
because he's probably interested in that, go ahead.
So I moved into this, a small,
me and no Manhattan, it's a studio,
but it's really, it's a room.
It's a small little, there's no room.
When I moved in, I realized there's no place to put the bed.
There's only one designated wall
and it's right by the front door.
So I'm sleeping, and the doorknob is right,
it's just like this.
You see, just like that.
So I'll wake up at 3 in the morning,
and I'll wake up at 4 in the morning,
and I'll just stare at the doorknob.
I'll just stare at it, you know,
because I'm waiting for it to turn.
Because I'm thinking, if somebody decides
to break in at night, I'm not gonna even have a chance to scream. It's thinking if somebody decides to break in at night i'm not gonna even
have a chance to scream it's gonna be like an immediate breaking and stabbing and it's over
finished no time to scream no time to dial 9-1-1 no time to run finished over
they won't even be a break-in and entering they're gonna stab me from the hallway
it's gonna be like a break-in and stabbing.
That's it.
Like the cops will get there
and they're going to be really confused.
We see there's a break-in,
but there was no entering yet.
There was a stabbing also I want to know why I'm
being stabbed I think we all have the right to know why we're being stairs an
event who gets there when you get stabbed you want to know like if you're
walking in the street and someone said you give me your money you're like now
I'm not gonna give you my money and then they stab you that's what happened
that's what happened they wanted your money and and you said no and then you got standing you
got stabbed it's a sensible stabbing but if you're sleeping and then you're scared that's not that's
unacceptable it's an unacceptable stabbing and then there's this one thing called a push-in robbery.
I don't know if anybody knows what this is.
This is when you're walking up to your home
and you're unlocking your door
and someone comes from behind you
and pushes you into your home and robs you.
This is what they've titled a push-in robbery.
If someone attempts a push-in robbery on me in my apartment,
we're both going to end up in my bed.
So what started off as something really scary
is gonna turn into something really beautiful.
I'll be like, I don't know, you pushed me, I pushed back.
That's it.
I'm out, I'm done.
I'm Danny Cohen.
Thank you.
You know me and know me.
This is the wonderful comedian Danny Cohen,
Professor Alan Dershowitz.
I love wonderful comedians. I used to be a good friend with one named Larry David.
He shunned you.
He got mad at you, right?
He got mad at me because I put my arm around Mike Pompeo, who had been my student, and I was congratulating him on the Abraham Accords. And so
Larry said I was disgusting and he would never talk to me after using my gym, eating in my house,
getting his daughter into college and all that. But that's the current generation of
cancel culture. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. That doesn't seem very fair.
So just as you joined us, first'm sorry to hear that. That doesn't seem very fair. So so just just just as you joined us, what first give him his proper introduction?
Well, I will. Not that he needs one. Everybody knows who Professor Alan Dershowitz is.
And we've introduced him several times on this show. most peripatetic, peripatetic, peripatetic civil liberties lawyer, and one of its, quote,
most distinguished defenders of individual rights, quote, the best criminal lawyer in the world.
And some of the things that I found really fun here, he's also been the subject of two New Yorker cartoons, a New York Times crossword puzzle and a trivial pursuit question. And a sandwich at Fenway Park has been named after him.
And it says pastrami, of course. Is that your favorite kind of sandwich?
Better than naming turkey after me. So I'm happy. Yeah yeah and he also has a podcast right yep it's called the dir show it's
on monday tuesday and wednesday 5 30 live or anytime during the week on rumble youtube any
of the platforms and um i love doing it it's a lot of fun and the reason why um other than the
obvious that i asked you to come on
today was before you said, I'd like to say something just I might have told you this before,
you know, feel this way. But I want to say it from my heart, aside from all the legal accolades
and the fact that he's that that peril doesn't know the word peripatetic. You're you have been in my opinion the most important champion of the jewish people and of
israel in my lifetime well let me tell you the reward i've gotten for that temple emmanuel has
banned me i can never go to temple emmanuel or speak there uh even though peter beinhart who
believes israel should not exist as a Jewish state,
was paid to speak there. I can't speak at the 92nd Street Y. The Ramaz School has banned me
from helping their high school seniors navigate anti-Semitism in colleges. That's the reward I've
gotten for being what was called, I didn't call it, somebody else did, the lead defender,
Jewish defender in the
court of public opinion. It's been absolutely disgraceful. And I have a new book coming out
about that. It's called The Price of Principle, how being consistent and principled can cost you
friends, family, jobs, and income. So my book will be out in about a month and it tells that story.
Well, honestly, Alan, and my father felt the same way. I mean, I hope you live to be 200 years old,
but as everybody's getting older, I've actually alone worried as well, who will there be? Like when there's no Dershowitz, who will there be to put it all together in such a compelling way with so
knowledgeably and, and with such a,
essentially a common sense way of appealing to people by the argument,
because the arguments in my opinion are actually quite simple and easy to
comprehend when you're smart enough to put them simply. So,
so thank you for being people belong. In the meantime,
I'm still alive and well and healthy and 83 years old.
And I've been canceled by major Jewish organizations that just don't want to hear me because although they all tell me that they know I'm innocent of that false charge by a woman who I never met because I've been accused, they can't afford to have me.
It's too controversial. It's McCarthyism, Jewish McCarthyism.
Yeah, well, shame on them. Hopefully someday though. So, but before we join,
we want to talk about the don't say gay Billbin.
And I should tell you that right before you joined us,
Danny was telling us Danny's gay. He's also, are you Orthodox still Danny?
Yeah. I mean, I'm Orthodox. I saw, I, sometimes I fall off the wagon,
but I'm pretty much a Orthodox.
Well, they put again, if you're Orthodox, don't they, if you're gay? I mean,
you know, the Torah.
I'm gay, but I don't live a gay lifestyle.
No, I haven't had sex in
15 years. Yeah, I don't have
I don't live
a gay lifestyle. I don't have gay sex.
He's not a practicing gay.
Not a practicing gay.
I'm a practicing Jew, therefore
I'm not a practicing gay.
Right. Do you practice, go to shul, I'm not a practicing gay. I'm a practicing Jew, therefore I'm not a practicing gay. Right, right.
Do you practice, go to shul, or do you do the gay?
Yeah, I mean, from time to time, and Shabbos when I can, if I can, as much as I can.
Well, good Passover.
Yeah, I know.
Then there are the big ones, like, you know, Kippur, I fast and, you know, shul and all that.
And Pesach, strictly kosher home.
I don't eat anywhere.
I don't eat out at anywhere on Pesach.
You know, it's a big one.
That's, you know, there are certain big, big ones that we have to follow if you're Orthodox, you know.
Good.
Yeah.
It is what it is.
I try.
So, Professor Dershowitz, tell us, what are we supposed to think about this don't say gay bill in Florida?
Don't listen to anybody. Both sides are extreme.
The left is saying that the bill says you can't mention gay. That's, of course, totally false. It's not a don't say
gay bill. And the right is saying, if you support the bill, then you're a pedophile and you're
grooming people. Don't listen to anybody. Only fools are basically talking about this. Listen
to me and the two, the three of us. So let me tell you what the real,
you know, the real truth is. The truth is that the people who drafted that the bill,
the Florida bill, and there are now six or seven others that are pending, have a point.
They have a point. The point is that it probably is inappropriate for kindergarten kids and for first grade and second grade kids to be
taught about the intricacies of sex, whether it be heterosexual, homosexual, transgender,
it doesn't matter. Kids ought to know about going pee-pee and wiping your tushy. That's basically
what kids ought to learn at that age. But of course,
the bill goes further than that. And it gives discretion to boards of education and to
principals and politicians to decide what's age appropriate. And some of the bigots who support
the bill, and there are bigots who support the bill, anti-gay bigots, should not be trusted
with a weapon like that that could have them go after teachers who wanted to introduce
in age-appropriate ways, say, a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old. Certainly, it's okay to talk about
people having two daddies or two mommies. It's appropriate to talk about abortion, how if
a woman gets pregnant and can't have the baby for medical or other reasons, it's appropriate at 10,
11, 12, but there are going to be school boards that say it's never appropriate, that 17-year-olds
shouldn't be taught about it because everybody should be a virgin until they're
married. So it's a loaded weapon that I don't trust to be allowed for people who run school
boards or are political people. But it's not on its face. I've read the statutes all very carefully.
They're not, don't say gay bills. They're not on the face of the bills themselves bigoted.
It's just that they're written in vague terms to general.
And I don't trust politicians to with a weapon like that, which can be used in a bigoted way against gay and transgender people.
So that's the bottom line. So you would you would oppose the bill? I oppose the bill. I would favor a bill that was drafted after a lot of study by a commission of people consisting of educators, gay educators, some transgender people, Christians and Jews who are religious or Muslims.
Let's have people get together and draft a bill that satisfies
everybody. I don't know anybody who thinks that a kindergarten kid should be taught,
or there should be discussions in kindergarten about what it means to be transgender, or that
you can change sexes later on in life from being a girl to being a boy.
So I don't think anybody supports that.
There are matters of degree, and there should be other ability by teachers to make decisions
about what's age appropriate.
And, you know, every family is different.
Kids are different.
I know families that talk about sex at a very young age and
have their kids drink wine at 12 or 13. I know families who've allowed their kids to smoke
marijuana at 15. Not that they don't smoke it anyway, even if the family doesn't let them,
but there are different attitudes. And so one of the questions is, is this a decision for parents? Is it a decision for school teachers? Is it a decision for politicians? And these are very,
very hard questions. But in America, we don't know how to have discussions anymore.
It's all name-calling and bumper stickers. Don't say gay. You're grooming. You're a pedophile.
You're a bigot. We don't have conversations anymore. And this is why I love your show.
This is an interesting subject and you want to have an interesting, nuanced conversation about it.
Right. Well, one of the things, first of all, I have I think I have seen materials aimed at young kids.
I don't know about kindergarten, but second and third graders, which do seem to want to introduce them to the idea that they might be trans and this and that.
But maybe maybe this is cherry picked and not that significant because, you know,
one thing will just spread around the whole Internet. But I have seen things like that.
So I think there are some people who do have an agenda. But anyway, the question I want to ask
you is zooming out. This is a common phenomenon. I wonder what your opinion is. Let's take gay marriage, for instance.
It wasn't that long ago when Bill Clinton proudly signed a bill that would protect heterosexual
marriage against gay marriage. And Barack Obama was proudly against gay marriage. And then at some
point, the elite cosmopolitan, most educated and most sophisticated sect in our society come to a new conclusion about an issue like this.
And we agree with that conclusion. And then they turn to their back.
And all of a sudden, everybody that was they agreed with now become bigots and rubes overnight. The people who didn't on the same schedule that they came to it,
as soon as they've come to it,
all the less sophisticated working class people, religious people.
Now they're not, it's not like, Hey, you know, let me, let me,
why don't you think about this? I was like you, I came to a new conclusion.
No, it's a, they're bigots. They're the enemy.
All of a sudden that seems to me to be very arrogant.
And I agree what we see. I completely agree with you with one exception.
I don't believe there was a second in the life of Barack Obama in which he didn't believe in gay marriage or Bill Clinton.
They were just making political calculations. The same thing happened with John Kerry, who was opposed to the death penalty all of his life
until he ran for president then he said whoops for terrorists it's okay so these folks don't
make decisions based on their own personal morality that's how they differ from us you know
we speak from our hearts and our principles what do you call a politician who speaks from principles?
You call him an ex-governor, an ex-senator. But, you know, you can't be running for office
and supporting gay marriage in 2000, but you can't run for office and not support gay marriage
in 2020. I completely agree with you. It's hypocrisy on stilts. And look, I went to the Yankee Red Sox opening game the other night.
It was a great, great moment.
But when it came to the seventh inning, I wouldn't stand and sing God Bless America,
a song I love.
Why?
Because the Yankees banned the recording of Kate Smith singing God Bless America.
Kate Smith sang that song better than anybody in history.
And she was a wonderful woman who fought for civil rights and supported integration. But when she was
a kid, she sang somebody else's song, which made references to Black people in ways that today we
find unacceptable. But back in the day, auditoriums were filled with people clapping that kind of thing. You cannot rewrite history and judge people by the current status of evolution of where our society is at. You have to judge them from where they were at the time. Otherwise, you can cancel Obama and you can cancel clinton you can cancel them all just
so i don't know which is worse to actually have been against gay marriage or to have been ready
to pretend you were in order to get elected but neither of them anything to be proud of clinton
also it's off the subject but one thing i could never get over is when he flew back to arkansas
to execute what was his name ruby uh ray uh I mean, you know, vote for him for that reason.
I didn't I I became a supporter of Bill Clinton later, but I voted against him in the primaries and I didn't support him because of that decision to go back and execute a man who half of his brain had been shot out, who ordered breakfast the
morning after he was executed. And they said, why are you ordering breakfast? You're going to be
dead. Yeah, but I want to have eggs. He didn't know anything. And Bill Clinton rushed back to
Arkansas. And if he could have, you know, pulled the trigger, however they executed in those days,
he would have done it because he would do
anything to get elected. And, you know, when I was a kid, I was very articulate. I was president
of everything. I was president of the student body. I was president of the debate society.
I was president of the law review. Everybody said, get into politics. And I said, no,
I can't get into politics because I can't hold back on views that I believe in.
And all my life I've tried to act on my beliefs.
That's why I could never be a politician. And that's why I'm being canceled today.
I mean, interestingly enough. So I went on the floor of the Senate and defended the Constitution on behalf of President Trump, who I voted against. The Republicans all praised me.
Oh, wow. John Adams defending the people in the Boston massacre. That's what America is all about,
defending the guilty. Then suddenly, Justice Jackson appears before the committee. These
same Republicans who praised me condemn her for having defended people in Guantanamo, but the same Democrats
who praise her for defending the Guantanamo people condemned me for defending Trump and
canceled me for that. So I don't know which side is more hypocritical, but I have to tell you the totality of hypocrisy in Washington, D.C.
knows no bounds.
Well, maybe it knows bounds, not as bad
as Putin, but boy, is
the hypocrisy horrible in Washington.
Nobody passes the shoe on the other
foot test.
You know, I agree with you very much.
By the way, on this
Trump thing, they want to, they're pressuring
the Attorney general now to
to indict Trump on charges related to the fact that he pressured Mike Pence to overturn or to
subvert the election in some ways. Does that does that hold water in any way?
Absolutely not. He didn't conspire with him. He expressed his opinion. He's entitled to express his opinion. He was wrong. One reason why I didn't defend Trump in his second impeachment is I thought the election was fair. I thought. But Trump honestly believed that it did,
and he had the right to express those views without fearing the weaponization of the criminal
justice system against him. Including the right to pressure his vice president not to certify the
election? Well, it depends on what you mean by pressure. Did he extort him? Did he threaten him? Or did he just say, I think you would be doing the right thing by not certifying
the election? Pence withstood that and certified the election. So no, I don't think it would be a
crime. I don't even know how you would state the crime. It wouldn't be a conspiracy because they
didn't agree. It wouldn't be extortion. There was no threat of consequences.
So you can't just make up crimes. No, what he did was wrong. What he did was bad. What he did is a
good reason for not voting for him if he runs again, but not criminal punishment. All right.
Danny, do you have any, I mean, being gay, how does any, anything you want to add to this don't say gay thing in florida how does it make you feel no no because like the professor said i i agree i i it was all baloney it's all it was
all sensationalism so i didn't jump on the bandwagon it was all sensationalism yeah i hate
bandwagons i just hate it's not jumping on board with any of it. I don't I generally do not jump on board with, you know, whenever I hear whenever I see, you know, when I when I can smell sensationalism, even the slightest of it.
I back away and then I start looking and I'm like, all right, I'm out.
I don't want to I'm not I'm not going to go near it. I'm not interested in it. So you're the comedy seller. What, what are we going to do
about the fact that you can't be a comedian these days, uh, without being canceled? What are we
going to do about the fact that comedians aren't appearing on college campuses anymore? That the
woke generation doesn't want to laugh at jokes that, uh, you know, nothing's funny anymore.
You know, when I was 25 years ago, there was a joke
that went around. Knock, knock. How did it go? Knock, knock. No, no. How many? No. The joke was
how many feminists does it take to tell a joke? And the answer was, that's not funny. You know, you can't tell a joke about feminism.
You can't tell a joke about race.
You can't tell a, you know,
being Jewish,
I'm lucky because I can tell
Jewish jokes.
You know,
how many Jewish mothers does it take
to change a light bulb? I'd rather sit
in the dark and suffer.
I'm Jewish and gay,
so I'm lucky twice.
You're lucky, yeah.
You're lucky, yeah.
I'm lucky twice.
And I'm also lucky three times
because I'm not famous yet.
So I haven't crossed that,
I haven't gotten to that bridge.
I don't have to worry about being canceled
because no one can cancel me
because nobody knows me yet. I'm nobody. I'm not a household name. Nobody has to worry about being canceled because no one can cancel me because nobody knows me yet.
I'm nobody.
I'm not a household name.
Nobody has to worry about me.
So I have three things going for me right now.
But, Danny, you do some very deep parody on your Facebook posts, which if you were to ever become famous, you would have some explaining.
Oh, yeah.
Of course I would have some explaining to do, but there's nothing I can do. I'm only just, I'm just, I'm a storyteller and a joke writer and
I'm a clown. I'm a comic. And, and this is, this is the way it is. And if I, and there's nothing
I can do if you don't like it, if I'm, if that's my, if that will be my fate, then that will be
my fate. If I have to be canceled, then that's what's going to happen.
There's nothing I can do.
I can only be honest.
I can only be truthful.
And I can only, I come from a very good place all the time.
I never come from a hateful place.
I'm not a hateful person.
I, you know, comics, especially comics, we are the good comics.
We love to take our audiences to the really, really dark places.
But if you're a good comic,
you always know how to shine the light in these dark places
so that the audience isn't scared of the dark places.
Yes, at first they will be scared
because you're taking them into a cave and there's no light
and they're scared.
It's almost like being a tour guide.
And then you shine the light.
That's what you do with your comedy creatively.
And you show them, look, it's not so scary.
Look how beautiful it is.
I'll show you the way.
And you lead them the way into a dark place.
And then everyone laughs and everyone's okay
because it's not so scary anymore.
So a good comic knows how to shine the light in a in a cave and and a not great comic doesn't know how to shine the light yet
they they have to find they have to know how to do it so i i grew up a very funny neighborhood
so my next door neighbor i lived 1558 he lived 1562 was a kid kid named Yaakov Mazor. He became Jackie Mason. And so Jackie
Mason lived literally next door. And my mother would always say, stay away from him. He's a
Meshuggah. And when I took my mother to see him once on Broadway. Her answer was, he's too Jewish. He's too Jewish.
Take away all of our secrets.
He's too Jewish.
Then around the corner from me lived another guy named Buddy Hackett.
And he also challenged.
And then down the block was Elliot Gould.
What neighborhood was this?
Neighborhood.
And about 20 blocks away, course was woody allen and um and i don't know where um
where mel brooks lived but couldn't have been too far away uh it was a very funny neighborhood
where i grew up you were judged by three things one how good you were in punch ball
number two how funny you are and number three whether you were willing to use
your funniness to talk back to the teacher and be what was called a bandit a bandit
and you were a funny bandit let me tell you what i did which got me high praise as a bandit so one
day my teacher threw me out of yeshiva because my friend Alan Bachman
went into my basketball case and threw a jockstrap which had my name Avi Dershowitz on it and it hit
the rabbi on the head. And there's a principle of res ipsa lakwa, the thing speaks for itself.
It had my name tag, the jockstrap, he threw me out. I had to get even. So it was the middle of the winter.
I went upstairs to the roof and I took my heavy coat and I have a hat and I stuffed it with paper
and I made a dummy of myself and I hung it over the wall of the yeshiva. And I had my friend Jake
Greenfield run in and say to the rabbi, Avi is about to jump,
go to the window, make him stop. I dropped the dummy. And the rabbi, I'm amazed he didn't have
a heart attack. It broke into about seven pieces. And I got suspended for a month and had to go to
the public library to do my reading, where I got my real education.
So I made it as a funny bandit, and that's the way you would judge.
I was pretty good in punch ball and stick ball too.
So I had a good youth, a good youth in Borough Park and Brooklyn.
Oh, Borough Park.
I'm from Midwood, and I still live in Midwood, right.
Well, that's where Woody Allen lived.
Three homes down from where I live, that's where he grew up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
On my block.
Good block, good block.
All right, we're just about out of time. I love to hear your stories, Professor Dershowitz, I really do.
Anytime. Come down to your club, it's a great place and i'm not you know going to
theater as much lately these days because of covid but as soon as it gets a little better
i'll come down and do something all right just to just to wrap up on the on the don't say gay just
because people listen you know and i'll get angry at letters um about me my attitude i grew up in a
very very uh gay friendly home from a very, very young age,
socializing with gay couples when I was, you know, my parents socialized with gay couples when I was
nine or 10 years old and was was aware of it. And we have I have absolutely no qualms about my
young children being around gay people, trans people, knowing that they're gay, knowing that they're trans. And yet, I don't want the school teachers
discussing one bit of this with my kids.
That's just, I don't know if I'm right or I'm wrong.
I want them to teach them academics and that's it.
And they come home with crazy ideas about race as it is.
They don't need more crazy ideas about sexuality.
Teachers should learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the rest of the stuff should
be taught at home, in the church, in the synagogue. You don't send your kid to a public school,
a public school, to be indoctrinated. If you want to indoctrinate them, send them to yeshiva,
send them to a Catholic school, send them to a fundamentalist school or a muslim school
that's the purpose it's called a parochial school because it teaches you to be parochial but if you
want to go to a public school that everybody can go to you can't have your own particular policies
determine everybody else uh if you're absolutely right if a parent wants to teach a three-year-old
about transgender, a four-year-old about gay, that's fine. That's a parent. And I would be
strongly opposed to any statute that limited the parental right to do that. But to have the public
school indoctrinate, I just don't think it's the right thing. Yeah. And I imagine there's quite a
few people like me who have absolutely no
issue with these things and personally who just want to stop this trend of all these controversial
issues becoming taught to them by, after all, mediocre public school teachers with no expertise
in this one way or another. This is it's, the schools are doing badly enough as it is.
Let them double up on arithmetic.
That's why if they have spare time.
Look, I agree, except that I think
public school teachers are heroes.
And I think some of them are really good.
I went to a public college, Brooklyn College.
It was much better than Harvard, Yale and Princeton
in the day that I went there in 1955.
And thank God for free public education
or else I never would have become a lawyer.
I'll retract that. Good for you for correcting me on that because it was a harsh thing to say.
I only mean to say that the people who go into public schools are just not equipped to be
teaching these very, very sensitive, controversial, unsettled, even in science issues to our kids that they will.
And I know people who are public school teachers, they're fed a certain kind of reality of these
issues, which is comes from an agenda. There's less debate than there's ever been before and
an ability to to debate these things. And what comes out on the other end is naive
and not settled science. And even if it were, just doesn't need to be taught to young children.
But, you know, the point to make is that the teacher is always going to err on the side of
wokeness because they know that unless they do that, they're going to be fired. If they do
anything, say anything, even introduce a debate or a discussion that presents both sides,
they're going to be fired. They have to be politically correct in order to keep their jobs.
And so we know they'll opt toward woke culture, particularly in some parts of the
country. Maybe they'll opt toward conservative views and religious views in other parts of the
country. But you're right. These are decisions that should be made by parents at home, not by teachers of public school students of every
kind of background. A perfect example. And then we'll wind up as a is a second grader, I know,
comes home with the, you know, quoting the three fifths compromise. Completely backwards in terms
of what it meant and why, how it and the the teacher had no idea what the three-fifths compromise was.
The teacher, you know, they just,
it's fed this kind of a white fragility version of the three-fifths
compromise. And I won't even bore the listener.
Three-fifths compromise is very complicated.
It actually gave more votes to Southern states than they would have
gotten under other proposals. So, you know,
of course, the idea of calling a person three-fifths for any reason is abominable. But
to understand the three-fifths compromise, you really have to delve deeply into the Constitution
and the 1619 Project, which sees everything through the lens of racism, is simply wrong.
Yeah.
All right, Professor Dershowitz, it's always a pleasure.
And hopefully there'll be another really hot, controversial issue on the horizon that we can bring you in to educate us on.
Thank you very, very much.
Great chatting with you, Professor.
This is great.
Happy holidays.
Good.
Take care.
Thank you.
Thank you, Danny.
Thank you, Danny.
Where can we find you on Instagram, Mr. Danny?
Danny Cohen Comedy.
Danny Cohen Comedy.
Got it.
Bye.
Thank you.
Good night.
Thanks.