In 2001, after graduating from Duke University, I moved to Los Angeles to work in the entertainment industry. Specifically, I wanted to represent comedians who were changing the world with their jokes and their message.
At Duke, I'd picked up a raging case of social justice. I was woke back before it was called woke, when we still thought of ourselves as third wave feminists and anti-racist progressives. Like a lot of my similarly brainwashed cohorts, I wanted to bring my ideology into my career and use my work to change the world where I could, in my little corner of the universe. In my case, that meant managing and producing with comedians who were also on "my side," who were progressive and addressed issues like ending bigotry and oppression in their comedy. Sounds hilarious, right?
When I first started working in comedy, woke ideology couldn't have been further from the mainstream. It was still centered mostly at colleges and universities and my generation was only then moving into the workforce and trying to bring our progressive ideas with us. Many of the comedians I ended up representing were seen as niche because they talked about issues like sexism, racism and homophobia in their comedy.
I worked with one such comedian who was prominent in the LGBTQ community and known for being an outspoken minority. She was also a leftie, like me. In my eyes, she spoke the "right" ideology. Plus, I found her to be hilarious and no-holds-barred.
But as woke ideology became more mainstream, things started to shift.
Suddenly, my client was being asked to censor herself, by people on our own "side." One LGBT organization that hired her for an event sent over a list of words and phrases she shouldn't use. The word "tranny," for example—a word she and many in the LGBT community had used for decades—was now off-limits.
I am ashamed to say that as a true believer in the ideology, I not only went along with many of these encroachments on language, thought and comedy, I also helped to enforce them. I remember arguing in favor of striking the word "c*nt" from one of her stand up specials, even though she directed it at a Republican woman—someone we on the left we regarded as an enemy—because I believed in abiding by social justice principles, no matter the target. Social justice regarded that word as sexist, so I advocated to abolish it.
What I didn't yet realize at that point is that woke ideology has no principles, only ever-changing rules that are consistently broken.
In 2012, mainstream comedy leaned into social justice. I became an Executive Producer on FX's "Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell," starring my client Bell, who I regarded as a true believer in social justice, and a very funny human.
"Totally Biased" was the first explicitly woke late night comedy show. All late night comedy shows were left-leaning up until that point, but more liberal than woke. On "Totally Biased" we were able to hire up and coming comedians as writers, some of whom were also my clients, and most of whom shared our ideology.
The joke-writing process on that show was filtered through the lens of social justice. We worried about if a joke was sending the right message, we worried about "punching up instead of down," and there would frequently be arguments about ideology and intent as well as battles with two of our more old-school and much less woke Executive Producers, one of whom was Chris Rock.
A joke about Governor Chris Christie, for example, that poked fun at his weight, would lead to an argument about whether or not we could make fun of the fact that he was fat.
On the one hand, we viewed him as evil, being a Republican, but on the other hand, mocking him for his size was seen as "fatphobia" and an example of "punching down."
Chris Rock was often on the side of "be funny first," while myself, Bell and the young woke writers would fall on the side of "be ideologically correct first."
We brought on Lindy West to talk about if it was OK to do a rape joke; she'd penned a viral essay about it in response to Daniel Tosh making a rape joke. Spoiler alert: We decided that it was OK to make rape jokes, but only if they worked to end oppression, and it would be better if you were a female comedian telling the joke than a male comedian. Or something.
We also featured a segment with comedian and writer Hari Kondobolu explaining why Apu from "The Simpsons" was racist and problematic. That segment was later developed into a special of Kondobolu's and played a large part in Abu being canceled.
It was no surprise that after going from a weekly to a daily show, we ended up getting canceled after just one year. But though our show had gotten the ax, by 2016 woke had made the jump successfully to the mainstream.
Behind the scenes, many comedians I knew continued to speak as they always had, but in public they began to abide by the new language rules, to self-censor and to add things to their comedy to signal that they were one of the "good guys."
All around me, comedians who had never before infused their work with social justice were going woke, putting claps before laughs, and getting TV shows that were explicitly woke. "The Jim Jeffries Show" (2016-2017) and "Problematic with Moshe Kasher" (2017) were two such short-lived woke comedy shows.
Around 2016, just as woke was ascending into the culturally dominant religion it is today, I started questioning the ideology I'd spent 20 years believing. Something about its jump to the mainstream, and perhaps the election of Trump, caused it to ramp up and start to reveal its inconsistencies and true nature.
I saw people in my woke echo chamber celebrating censorship and violence. At first I merely thought we were losing our way. It didn't become clear to me until much later that what I was seeing was a feature, not a bug, of the ideology itself.
When someone shared a video of Jordan Peterson, describing him as transphobic, I was surprised to find I didn't view him as transphobic at all. In fact, I thought he made a great argument against both censorship and compelled speech. I ended up writing him a letter explaining the crossroads I was at, and he read it on his show, which terrified me. I told him I was afraid people would know it was me, even though he changed my name. He said I had to get over my fear. That took me six more months.
When I first started questioning my old ideology, I was still working in comedy and was in the midst of producing a TV pilot with another client, a pilot for yet another explicitly woke show. The process for pitching a series can sometimes take years—this one had.
I never expected to come to a place where I viewed my old belief system as thoroughly evil. But it is evil.
Any ideology that tries to convince us that we can fight racism with racism, or sexism with sexism, or collectivism with collectivism, is evil. Fortunately, I was saved from having to make a difficult decision when our pilot didn't get picked up for series, and at that point I closed my company and left the entertainment business, and my old woke ideology, for good.
Many people who are still a part of the woke left like to call anyone who speaks against it a "grifter." If that's the case I must be doing it wrong because I make significantly less money doing odd gig jobs now than I did as a comedy manager and Executive Producer. And yet, I wouldn't trade my freedom to speak and laugh freely for any price in the world. Freedom, glorious freedom, and joy, glorious joy, buoy you up so high that worldly measurements of success falter in comparison.
Some of the people in comedy and entertainment who speak woke do so because they're true believers. But I know the low-grade anxiety and cognitive dissonance they live with well.
Most of the people in comedy and entertainment who speak woke do so out of fear of the social and financial consequences; they do it because it's in fashion. When the fashion changes, they'll stop pretending.
Thankfully, I believe we're at the cusp of seeing woke fall out of fashion. Comedians like Dave Chappelle, Ricky Gervais, and John Cleese have been leading the way, and others like Chris Rock are now following. It takes people who have amassed the amount of power, influence and respect that these comics have to help turn the tide. Comedians are starting to feel more comfortable expressing their true thoughts and putting funny above everything else, which they should have been doing the whole time. And audiences are craving something authentic and edgy that genuinely makes them laugh.
As Andrew Breitbart said, "Politics is downstream from culture." I still believe that comedians can change the world with jokes. But it's up to them to be brave and not censor themselves anymore.
We're ready to laugh again.
Keri Smith is the host of Deprogrammed, a podcast examining her old belief system, social justice. She’ll be hosting MindsFest on April 15th in Austin, TX.
