Chef Eric Ripert’s secret to outlasting trends

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Chef Eric Ripert’s secret to outlasting trends’

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi, listeners. It’s Lilah. One quick announcement before we start the show. We are preparing for our annual cultural predictions episode for the end of the year, which means that FT Magazine editor Matt Vella will be back on the show with me to talk through your cultural predictions for 2023. You may remember last year you wanted Beyoncé́ to drop an album. You wanted the return of the flip phone. What do you want now? Let us know one thing that you either think will happen or you want to happen next year. I put a link in our show notes which will bring you to a place where you can easily record a voice note. So tap that link and make sure to get us something before this Wednesday, November 16th. We’ll be playing some of your voice notes on the show. By the way, we loved your messages that challenged us to make a boring topic interesting. The first of those segments is coming in a few weeks. Last note, this episode contains bit of adult language and themes in the second segment. You’ve been warned. Enjoy the show.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There’s only one restaurant in New York that’s kept a four-star New York Times rating over 35 years.

Eric Ripert
Come in . . . I’m here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I did a tour of it recently on a busy Tuesday morning just before lunchtime. It’s called Le Bernardin.

So tell me, is this how the restaurant worked when you first started? Was very different, the kitchen?

Eric Ripert
The kitchen is actually exactly the same, except that we have changed the stove many, many times.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Chef Eric Ripert. He’s showing me around their spacious kitchen. There are multiple fish stations because it’s a fish restaurant.

Eric Ripert
We have what we call garde manger, which is dedicated to all the cold, cold appetisers, raw fish, marinated fish and so on . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
In the back, a chef looks like he’s ironing raw tuna into very thin carpaccio.

Eric Ripert
 . . . He has a pounder in his hand, and he just pounded the fish.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
And he made it very thin, like a carpaccio.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
And then he’s going to cut it so the fish will have the same shape as the plate.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
And then it will go in the fridge. And then during the lunch, we would use it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Eric has been running this place since 1995. By then, Le Bernardin had already established itself as one of the city’s best restaurants. But it’s under his leadership that it got a three-star Michelin rating, which it has maintained for 17 years. Le Bernardin is consistently one of the world’s top 50 restaurants, and I wanted to talk to Eric about what it takes to run a restaurant that’s not only very high-end but also that’s never had a bad spell.

Eric Ripert
Consistency, first of all, is the most difficult . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
. . . thing to achieve for a restaurateur or chef. But you want consistency because if you had a great experience last week, you want a great experience today and next week if you come back in a month or in six months. So I think the restaurant that beats the trends . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
 . . . are the restaurants that are focusing on quality, on consistency . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Eric Ripert
. . . with an edge. The edge doesn’t have to be, like, downtown-sexy-edgy (Lilah laughs). The edge means that you have the personality, and it’s something that is very unique that wants you to go back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today we bring you my full conversation with Eric Ripert. This week, Le Bernardin is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Then we’ll talk about comedy with my editors, Alec Russell and Horatia Harrod. I recently wrote a piece about how comedians in New York are grappling with the line between provocation and offence, and we get into it. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Le Bernardin is a kind of sanctuary. Just listen to the difference as we move from the kitchen to the dining room.

Could I ask you to show me the dining room a little bit?

Eric Ripert
Yes. So let’s go to the dining room . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m curious about . . . yes . . . (Ripert talks indistinctively in the background).

Eric Ripert
So those doors are basically separating the dining room from the kitchen with the noise and everything.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes.

Eric Ripert
And it has to be a big contrast in between the street, which can be hectic, especially midtown in the, in the heart of New York.

Lilah Raptopoulos
During open hours, there would probably be people talking, probably laughing. But that sense of calm is definitely intentional.

Eric Ripert
And you have to come here, and you have to feel like (exhales in relief) . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
 . . . I have arrived. I’m going to have a good time. And the food, and the wines, and I’m here to have a special experience.

Lilah Raptopoulos
When you walk into Le Bernardin, it feels sophisticated, but it doesn’t feel unattainable or unwelcoming. OK, lunch is $120 for a three-course tasting menu, but it isn’t $350, which is kind of how much a tasting menu will run you at other three-star restaurants in town. It’s one of the world’s best places, but it doesn’t feel entirely out of reach.

Unidentified man
We are shortened a little bit today so yeah . . . 

Eric Ripert
Can you check what it is?

Lilah Raptopoulos
The other thing that stands out about it is that Eric is everywhere.

What did you notice?

Eric Ripert
We have some fish that the flesh looks a little bit different than usually. It could be because the fish is spawning. I’m not sure. But we’re going to check now.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. OK.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And no wonder. The restaurant is his pride and joy. Eric was only 28 when he became executive chef, and he hasn’t left since. He’s gotten way more famous. He’s been on Top Chef. He’s been on No Reservations with his friend Anthony Bourdain and so much more. But for him, Le Bernardin is it. Instead of franchising or building out a restaurant empire, he’s focused in. And to create something lasting, he’s constantly changing to keep up.

Eric, welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you on.

Eric Ripert
It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So when you were 26, you became a chef de cuisine at Le Bernardin?

Eric Ripert
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
At 28, the owner and executive chef Gilbert Le Coze passed away, unexpectedly. And you took over as executive chef?

Eric Ripert
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And you’ve been executive chef and co-partner of Le Bernardin ever since. This feels very unique to me. And I’m curious what the restaurant was like when you joined.

Eric Ripert
Sure. When I came Le Bernardin in 1991, actually, it was June 11, 7.40am, because I look at my watch and it was like, this is a special place here, and I feel something special is going to happen. And we very passionate about what we do, obviously.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
We gather the best seafood possible on the planet, and I would say the galaxy (Laughter). And we have beautiful ingredients from local farmers, and then our style is based into French tradition with a lot of influence coming from all over the world.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
Because as you know, New York is a melting pot of different cultures . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
So that’s very inspiring, and that it’s kind of a smart natural fusion that comes into our cooking.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Was it always like that? Like, is that something that sort of maintained or was, did it have sort of a different energy . . .

Eric Ripert
So Le Bernardin was always a seafood restaurant.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes.

Eric Ripert
They created a mini revolution in New York and in the US because when they opened, the New York Times for the first time in the history of the newspaper, gave four stars right away, which never happens. And they got great articles and reviews all over the country because the style of cooking was very different. In the US, usually seafood restaurants were like a shack where you were frying a lot of fish or grilling, and it was good, but it was not at the level of Le Bernardin. So they, they really created that revolution. The cooking of Gilbert Le Coze, the chef, was very light. It was very different than what they were cooking in France. But it was very, very inspired by Brittany, the region where the chef was coming from.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
Then, when I came on board, we started to see some influence from the south because I was born in Antibes in the French Riviera. I had a Italian grandmother. I’d live part of my life in Andorra, which is a very small country between France and Spain.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
So we started to see those influence come in. And then after Gilbert Le Coze passed away, I started to really impose my style more and more. And then, again, being in New York and being exposed to all those cultures, I started to bring influences from all over the planet.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, you were quite young when you took over. Did you feel young or not? (Laughter) What did it feel like?

Eric Ripert
I feel, I feel young, yes. But I was very young. And the beauty is that when you are that young, you don’t know. You’re very naive. You have no fear. You don’t care about anything. You just do your things and then don’t, don’t think too much.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Do you have any memories from those early years of, like, things you wanted to try?

Eric Ripert
Yes. I mean, I always want to try things. I mean . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
. . . that doesn’t, hasn’t change even today. But what was interesting was to bring my Mediterranean influence into that more French classic influence. And then when I started to bring influences from Asia, I mean, today, it doesn’t look like it’s a big deal. But at that time it was like, wow, what is he doing?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
And I went to Peru. Right away, I think in the early 90s, I came back from Peru so inspired. And the ceviche culture and whatever I was finding in Peru, I brought it back to Le Bernardin. We were pioneers . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
. . . without knowing because nobody really knew much about ceviches and preparation from Peru.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I was going to ask just how Le Bernardin has changed over the years? Like it’s a broad question, but are there points that stand out in your memory where you made subtle changes that felt very significant?

Eric Ripert
Yes, in 1986 when Le Bernardin opened, it was a very classic, beautiful dining room with paintings from 19th century that belong in museums, that are actually back in museums now, with every draperies.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Interesting.

Eric Ripert
It was into a very rich and what we could perceive as stuffy today. But at the time was this type of restaurant in fine dining. Today, when you come to Le Bernardin, we changed the decor completely. In early 90s and in 80s, people were going to restaurant, (whispering) and you would speak like these . . . You wouldn’t raise your voice. Today, you have a lot of energy in a dining room. People are laughing. People are happy. The service was different, too, because the French culture doesn’t allow, I mean, didn’t allow at the time the waiters to really interact into the experience of the table. So French waiters were always very formal to show that they were disciplined and serious about their jobs. And that was perceived as being cold and stuffy. So today, our waiters, of course, read the mind of the client. But most of the people want to interact with our staff in the dining room. And then, of course, the cooking has changed. Our cooking and recipes change all the time. So Le Bernardin is evolving every day. And if we look at Le Bernardin a year from now, we will see huge differences like the menu will have changed by 80 per cent.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I went to Le Bernardin once for lunch, and the person I was meeting had to cancel last minute. So I ate alone. I had escaped with brown butter that was life-altering, and I spent most of an hour just looking around the restaurant. What struck me was that it felt very confident in itself. It wasn’t crazy or showy or trying too hard. I felt it was extremely peaceful. It was sort of like decidedly not buzzy or cool. It was . . . I don’t know. That was part of what I loved about it.

Eric Ripert
We are not the trendy spot.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yes.

Eric Ripert
And as you know, New York has a lot of trends and a lot of trendy spots. And people go there because it’s sexy. It’s exciting. Now, and it’s very noisy, and there’s a lot of energy and we love it. And suddenly we don’t want. And we move to the next place. And as we all know, New York is a very intense city . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Eric Ripert
. . . in the street, at work, everywhere. It’s always a competition. It’s high energy in a city, which is fantastic. I mean, it’s not to complain. I love, I love that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
But when you come to Le Bernardin you should feel like, wow, I’m disconnecting from the craziness of the streets.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
And I’m here to splurge, and I’m going have a good time. And now it’s time to eat, and to drink, and to be with my friends and again have a special experience.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Eric, I would love to learn a little bit more about like the choices that you’ve made at Le Bernardin and how they’ve given it the lifespan that it’s had. I know that you have a, personally have a reputation for calmness, that you meditate, that you practise Buddhism and you’ve spoken about making a choice to be a good leader. But you’ve also said it hasn’t always been that way.

Eric Ripert
No.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And I’m wondering if you could tell me about that.

Eric Ripert
Yes, sure. So I grew up in the kitchens at a very young age in 80s. And the culture at that time was very difficult. We were verbally abused so being insulted all day long by our chefs. Physically abused, they were punching us in the shoulder or kicking us in the butt. They were throwing plates at us. And that was the culture of the, at that time. They were calling that the old school way of running restaurants and kitchens. So as a young chef, when I when I came to America and was in the kitchens, I tried to emulate some of my mentors, and I didn’t realise that anger is not a strength. Anger is actually a big weakness. And I was miserable in my life. My team was miserable, all the talented people were leaving. And I had this kind of like moment and I said, Oh my God, I know why I’m treating people so poorly, and I’m angry all the time. How can I be, I mean, nobody’s happy to be angry. You cannot mix the both feelings, right? It’s either way you happy or you’re angry.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
(Lilah chuckles) But it doesn’t work at the same time. The brain cannot process that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Eric Ripert
So I realised that, and I was like, Oh, my God, this is a revelation. And I decided that the day after I will change completely. Of course, it took more than one day (Lilah laughs), but I would work on my temper. I will work on all my mistakes, and I will make sure that in the restaurant we have tremendous respect for the employees in between us, with our employees, without the various ways everybody was interacting with us. And it took me some time to do so because I was training people under me to be abusive. So then I had to convince them that I was wrong. And they were looking at me like, six months you’ve trained me like that . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
. . . And now you’re telling me that it’s wrong? So anyway, we really changed the culture of the restaurant for the best, and that was in the early 90s. It’s not something recent, of course.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I asked Eric about the practical choices he’s made to make the restaurant better. Because after all, we still hear about chefs assaulting their staff, verbally abusing their staff. He told me that a restaurant is a hostile environment — hot fish, sharp knives. And you need to invest in enough staff and equipment to keep things calm, even at the busiest times. He said often new staff have to adjust to a gentler workplace culture when they get there.

Why, Eric, do you put so much effort into that? Like, why does it matter to you? Because, you know, so many restaurant staff don’t have health insurance, don’t have paid vacation. I know it’s different at Le Bernardin, partially, because you’re working with a higher price point. But I’m still curious sort of how do you run a good restaurant when the system is kind of against you? And why do you, why do you focus on that?

Eric Ripert
We . . . I’m not sure if the system is against us. I think, we create our own system. Every restaurant is different from another. And you could be very selfish and create a very good environment for one reason — you want to produce for your clients. So you could do that in a selfish way, and it could work more or less (Lilah laughs). But really, at the end of the day, I mean, why not make people happy? Why not put efforts to work in an environment that is positive environment? Why not? I’m happy when I see smiles from the employees or when I’m seeing a lot of them and they say a lot to me, and we have a few minutes together or I’m happy when we have a good day. I don’t think I could be happy making people miserable.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
It’s not my personality, and I’m not the only one to do that, by the way. It’s a lot of restaurateurs, a lot of chefs, who we are really trying hard to create something positive in their own company. Restaurants sort of staff can be happy. But you’re right, it’s like in a classroom, you have some bad students . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Eric Ripert
And those are the restaurants that and restaurateurs and managements that don’t care about their employees. But I don’t think it brings joy to be mean. Again, I like, we go back to the idea of being angry . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
 . . . of being mean . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Eric Ripert
I don’t see where, where is the happiness there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Eric, thank you so much. This was such a pleasure.

Eric Ripert
Thank you. Thank you very much for listening to me (Laughter).

Lilah Raptopoulos
Eric is on TV a lot, and I’ve put some links to his shows and his books in the show notes. I’ve also linked to my personal favourite cooking class of his. It’s a multi-part toaster oven series. He teaches you how to make amazing dinners in a toaster oven.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’ve been going to a lot of comedy shows lately. If you live in New York City, there’s usually at least one within walking distance on any given night. You can see set-up punch line comedy, political comedy, deadpan, absurdist. Here is a confessional joke I heard back in July from the comedian Dylan Adler.

Dylan Adler
I just kind of want to get a quick gauge of the room. Who here is in therapy? (Crowd cheers) Yes! I love to hear it. I’m in therapy. I love my therapist, but I feel like she still doesn’t know that I am fundamentally . . . evil. You know, she’s like, it’s trauma. I’m like, I’m Jafar (evil laughter).

Lilah Raptopoulos
Dylan is well-known in New York’s alt comedy scene, and a lot of his comedy is about his own identity. Also, he sings. This joke continues into a musical number called Why Am I Still Fucked Up?

Dylan Adler
Why am I still fucked up? One time at a family gathering, I made a joke about the sexual tension between my twin brother and I, and it bombed! It was so awkward for my grandma. She survived Japanese internment. Why am I still . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Dylan’s an example of what a lot of New York comics are doing these days. They’re drawing humour from personal experience, whether that be for Dylan being gay, in therapy, half-Japanese, a survivor of sexual assault. On the other hand, you have comics that make jokes about others. Sometimes that’s referred to as punching down. Most famously, big stars like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais have been in the news for making jokes about trans people and then defending their right to do so. And that’s created a conflict. So I wrote a recent piece for FT Weekend magazine that explored how working comics in New York are thinking about the jokes they tell now. And today I’ve invited my editors on to talk through it. Editor of FT Weekend, Alec Russell and senior editor Horatia Harrod. OK, so where should we start?

Alec Russell
I know where we start, Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, tell me.

Alec Russell
We start walking (Lilah laughs) on a sunny spring afternoon in New York.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yep.

Alec Russell
Where you and I first talked about this, didn’t we?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Alec Russell
And what was on my mind at that time was that Horatia and other colleagues and I had been noodling away at the subject of comedy for, for some months, I think it’s fair to say, Horatia. And there’d been endless columns written about the subject of comedy. But most of them were sort of rather predictable. It was either someone saying, Oh, no, you can’t be funny about anything these days.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Alec Russell
Or it was somebody saying, Oh, no, that’s totally rubbish. Cancel culture doesn’t exist. And so there we were thinking about it, and I remember thinking, well, why don’t we actually get away from people shouting at each other about comedy? And I thought, why don’t you take a deep breath and head off and talk to comedians?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Alec Russell
And you rather wonderfully, slightly to my surprise, said yes! (Laughter)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
To be honest, I had to think about it a little before I said yes because I was taking on a topic that was basically a Venus flytrap of everything that makes people mad. Cancel culture. Dave Chappelle. Wokeness. Freedom of speech. But the fact that there’s no easy answer makes it interesting. So I started going to tons of shows.

Horatia Harrod
So but then, Lilah, when I saw you in London a few months later, you were in the thick of it (Lilah laughs). And I think feeling this kind of sense that you’ve spoken of the kind of immensity of this task.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s one of those situations where, like, the more you learn, the more you realise you don’t know. And then things start to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So you start to realise like, OK, what makes comedy funny these days? What’s OK to say? Where is the line? Like, it’s so depends because as I started looking in New York and started going to comedy in New York, I started realising like, there’s so many types of comedy. And so I think the only what was helpful to hear from you was like, you can have a question that’s like a big, complicated question and just have a few different people answer it differently. It doesn’t have to be one, one answer. There is no one answer.

Horatia Harrod
I totally sympathise with your worry about writing about comedy because a comedy piece, there’s a kind of weird expectation that it is going to like be just rib-achingly funny when actually what you’re doing is, tends to be, when you write about comedy, it’s a little more serious than that might imply.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Horatia Harrod
You did speak to some great people who were theorists of comedy, and that was one called, I think, Michelle Robinson, who kind of struck on an interesting point, which is kind of a humorous identity.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So I spoke with an academic named Michelle Robinson. She teaches American studies at the University of North Carolina, and she does this whole course with students about comedy and ethics. And she told me about this study of rape jokes from 2011 by a different academic named Elise Kramer. And basically it argued that we use our taste in humour as like an identity marker. So we’re self-categorising with humour ideologies the way we do with political ones. So like I’m the kind of person who thinks a rape joke or a trans joke is funny, or I’m not that kind of person. I think that it’s offensive, and you can’t say it. And like there’s this kind of binary of like, do you have a sense of humour or not? But you know that that’s like very simplistic, you know, like it depends on the joke. It depends on the context. It depends on who’s telling the joke.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Here’s what bothered me about what I was seeing from star comedians. They started to use getting cancelled as a kind of easy protection to tell lazy or deliberately provocative jokes. Here’s Ricky Gervais from his most recent Netflix special, Super Nature.

Ricky Gervais
The worst thing you can say today that you cancel on Twitter, death threats . . . The worst thing you can say today is women don’t have penises, right? (Audience laughs) Now, no one saw that coming (Audience laughs).

Lilah Raptopoulos
But it doesn’t seem like these comics are actually being cancelled or silenced. Their critics don’t have that kind of power. Instead, they’re generating headlines and getting more famous. Dave Chappelle’s most recent, most controversial special was according to him the most popular special on Netflix ever.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I guess I came out of this reporting thinking like we’re kind of having the wrong conversation. It’s not, is cancel culture threatening comedy — because people aren’t really getting cancelled for what they say — it’s like, is it good? You know what makes something good?

Horatia Harrod
But all of these comedians are kind of thinking about these questions, aren’t they? On where to draw that line.

Alec Russell
Or are they not sometimes just trying to push the line and saying, how far can I push this? I mean, if you’re a, if you’re a really famous comedian, you can kind of get away with thinking beyond the question where to draw the line and thinking, you know what, let’s see what these people will take . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Alec Russell
. . . which is slightly different and sort of not such a good thing, is it? And there’s a deliberate bit of provocation going on that is going beyond trying to be funny.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Alec Russell
It, it’s actually just sort of just pushing things.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. One example of what Alec is talking about is a comic that I started the piece with. His name is Aaron Berg. I saw him at the Stand, which is this sort of seamy comedy club in Manhattan. And here’s a taste of the kind of comedy that he does. In this clip, he’s pointing at a couple in the front row.

Aaron Berg
Fucking love, a good lesbian couple that doesn’t look like a lesbian couple. (Audience laughs) It’s awesome. Yeah, you do, but yeah, I get it. But you knew you were lesbian before she knew she was lesbian. Like, she probably still isn’t sure. And you’re just like, shut, shut up. You are just how you are, Jessica! (Audience laughs).

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was like all crowd work, and he just started making fun of people, and it was like so fast. And it was things like making fun of someone for looking gay, making fun of Asian people for looking Asian. Like there was no intellectual rigour. There was no like complexity to the jokes. It was just like, bam, bam, bam. There was a little self-deprecation in there. It was like he was obviously saying things he wasn’t supposed to say, and people were laughing. And the people he was making fun of were laughing. And I, you know, like, there were times that I was, like, nervous with what he was saying. There were times where I was offended by what he was saying, and there is times I was laughing, too. I am not holier than thou. So I basically . . .

Alec Russell
Yeah. It’s the last time you’re writing for us, Lilah.

Horatia Harrod
Crossed the line.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s just like it’s over (Laughter). But yeah, it was really confusing. And I started the piece with that because it was sort of like, what was that (Laughter)? And like, how does that upend our questions about what makes something funny today? And if you’re laughing, does that make it funny? Like, are we laughing because of shock, or are we laughing because it is funny, anyway? And so Horatio said you talked to him. So he agreed to talk. We got on the phone, and he was ready to chat. You know, he said like, are you calling to cancel me? And I said, I don’t think so (Laughter). And we got going. He said that he had tried for a long time to do the type of complex, hour-long special comedy that dealt with class and privilege and race and sexuality and whatever, and that it wasn’t really getting him anywhere. And so he just changed his strategy to really go for like clearing his head and just getting the guttural laugh, getting like the deepest laugh, the crying laugh that you can get out of somebody. And in whatever style of comedy he was trained in, the way that happens is just to get on stage and be like, I need every 15 seconds, I need a laugh, and if I’m not getting that, then I failed. And so that means whatever blurts out has to be in service of that, and that can be as low or as dumb as it takes. But if you’re doing it fast enough, and if you’re sort of bringing people to the edge enough, they’re more likely to laugh more.

Horatia Harrod
Yeah. I mean, I do think it’s interesting because I guess every comedian lives or dies by the response of the room that they’re in. It really depends who’s in that room. That was an interesting thing that George Carlin, the comedian, said. He suggested that stand-up comedy is more of a craft than an art. Because his view was that could be interpreted in many different ways by many different people. But as a comedian, the craft is you’ve got to get everyone in that room laughing at the same thing at the same time. You know, there is something that’s to draw together a whole room for people to laugh at the same thing you need to kind of press particular buttons. And each of your comedians had a different kind of crowd they were playing to.

Lilah Raptopoulos
When I was talking to Aaron, that’s exactly what he told me, too. That his obligation was to make people laugh, not to think through moral questions. As long as the room is laughing, he’s doing his job. So I asked him, you know, when you’re on stage, there’s a natural power imbalance. It’s not a dialogue. You’re talking to people, not with them. So what if a parent leaves your set and your jokes give them permission to go say, misgender their kids? It can be insidious. He said, OK, maybe there are a few sickos who hear my jokes as permission to do something awful, but that’s rare. He didn’t see the big deal. And one of the comics that I talked to, Mahdiy Drummond, had a really good point about this, which is basically like if you’re making fun of a community and they say that’s not funny, they have the right to tell you where their line is. And it’s your job as a comedian to figure out how to say something, right? So that you can you can joke with people and not have them feel that you’re against them.

Horatia Harrod
I mean, you know, the thing I found, though, that I find interesting, difficult about all of this is, you know, it’s very hard to be absolute about what is and isn’t funny.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Horatia Harrod
If you’ve got a room full of people laughing at something that someone else was very offensive. It’s hard to say. They’re wrong.

Lilah Raptopoulos
They’re wrong. That’s not funny. Right.

Alec Russell
Yeah. You know, I actually came away feeling quite uplifted and . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Good.

Alec Russell
 . . . thinking, all said and done, comedy is in pretty good shape. There’s obviously there’s some, there is some offensive stuff out there that some of which will be better not aired. But fundamentally, there are all sorts of people out there who are thinking about it, thinking about what the line is, certainly all sorts of people out there who aren’t being cancelled. So I felt I felt kind of uplifted about the state of comedy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks, Alec. I mean, and what I appreciated about it too was like, one having the time and two, was that like this sort of reassurance that like these questions are not binary. You know, it’s like very easy to just decide this is what I think about a very complex, nuanced topic. And so like a story about it or reporting about it, it’s OK if you leave it knowing more but having less of a strong opinion. Actually, maybe that’s a good thing (Laughter). Alec and Horatia, thanks for coming on the show.

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Horatia Harrod
Pleasure. Thank you for probably sitting through loads and loads of awful comedy on our behalf (Lilah laughs).

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. Next weekend on the podcast, we are learning how our brains respond to music with neuroscientist Susan Rogers. After that, we have our literary editors on Fred Studemann and Laura Battle. They are coming to recommend their favourite fiction from 2022.

If you want to keep in touch in other ways, you can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. This show is on Twitter @FTWeekendpod, and I am on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. I will also be collecting your cultural recommendations from you this week on my Instagram. I am Lilah Raptopoulos, and here’s my talented, hardworking team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with engineering help this week from Tommy Bazarian. And original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And special thanks, as always, go to Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll find each other again next week.

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