Future of Comedy and Free Speech

Oh man, all right. Picture the year nineteen seventy two. That's where we're starting. All right. George Carlin, he stood in front of a microphone and he said the following profane words. So if you're listening to this on a speaker at work, maybe you know, or if the kids are around, the words were shit piss, fuck, kunt cocksucker, motherfucker and tits . He received gasps, laughs , and an order for his arrest . Apparently the seven words he couldn't say on television, he also couldn't say at the Summerfest Festival in Milwaukee. Look, George Carlin wasn't the first comedian to get arrested for his jokes, and he wouldn't be the last. But in nineteen seventy three, a year after Carlin's arrest, the U. S. Supreme Court made it much harder to throw performers in jail for their offensive language , which is why I can say all of those seven words on this podcast right now, right? I can say them, right ? Anyway, in twenty twenty one, comedian Virdas got up on stage to share a monologue called Two Indias to a sold out Canada center audience in Washington DC . When he said that he came from quote an India where women are worshipped and quote an India where women are gang raped, it wasn't a George Car lin moment. There were no police waiting for him in the wing because he was on U. S. soil. The thing is Virdas doesn't live in the U. S. When his monologue went viral in India where he does live, some officials wanted him arrested . I put it up on my YouTube thinking, what could happen ? And my world kind of turned upside down. So that led to fourteen police complaints in five different states. I was banned in two states . You were going to be arrested. All the work went away . Effectively life came to a standstill because of this. On today's show , International Emmy Award winner , actor and comedian Virdas . We're going to talk about the politics of comedy and how it's changing. Plus how he navigates satire and jokes that sometimes include govern ments in a way that doesn't land him in jail. Also worth noting for the record along those lines , the Kennedy Center is now called the Trump Kennedy Center . So, you know, take that for what you will. Here we go again . Here we go again , again , again . Hey, I'm Calpen and this is Here We Go Again a show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks why does history keep repeating itself? Here go This is an IHART podcast guaranteed human How has GP Morgan Chase helped communities create more afford able homes through financing, investment, and support. We've helped create or preserve over four hundred thousand homes in the last five years. Together, we make What Matters happen. Learn more at JPMorgan Chase. com slash America. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem . When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odu is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odu at ODO . com . That's ODO . com . You're listening to a podcast . So you're doing something else too, like maybe scrolling homelessings on Redf in, saving places you like without thinking you'll get them . Because that's what househunting has become. But Redfin isn't built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents , which means when you find a place you love, you've got a real shot at getting it. Redfin helps turn saved listings into real addresses . Get started at redfin. com the dream . Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just fifteen dollars a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgement . Anyway, give it a try at mint mobile. com slash switch . Up front payment of forty five dollars for three month plan, equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required, intro rate for three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See filters at MintMobile. com What's up? Hey man . Hey man, how are you? Good. How are you? Hi, my name is Vir Das. I'm a comedian from Mumbai and a big time fan and friend of Cal. Thanks for being here. Nobody I see this every time I meet you, but you always show up for South Asian talent. Every time we're doing something cool, you kind of come in and show support. So I appreciate you deeply. Thank you. And also what's funny about when you say that is I have I have younger brown friends in entertainment who have now explained to me that you know, like I'm not that much older than like you Husan, like, you know, basically peer group, right? But I'm just old enough that I didn't know how much beef some brown artists have with each other because there's like enough now that like, you know, this person doesn't like this person and this person will never produce with that guy again. I was like, I don't want to know all that. I just like the let's show up for each other crowd . Because in my day there were only there were too few . I mean, you can still map it out, right? Like when I lose a role, I'm like, all right, I lost it to one of these five guys , usually. Yeah. So like my list is it's either Himesh a Tale , Rizahmed , Yukomel, Kunal Nayer and Hassan. Yeah, I think that's the audition pool. So I remember there was like an inner retro movie that I think he did with with Tom Cruise recently and there was like a brown roll in there and everybody's going out for that shit. And I think that went a raise . And then we all read for that . We all went for that . And there was the white lotus season four brown guy rolled. And I think Omega got that. We all went for that. Yeah, we all went for that. So we're all on the we're all on this one list. We're all going for this stuff. Yeah. That's really funny. I mean, this is what I mean though. I'm old enough where like there would be the same seven brown guys rating for the role and then they would just like give it to a white dude and like sort of make him darker . So so that's why I think my affinity for okay at least at least like one of us got it. That's great, you know. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I'm excited to have you on because we wanted to do an episode talking about the for lack of a better phrase like the politics around comedy . Some of this was selfish because I just started doing stand up a few months ago and it's been really fun and really weird and fascinating. And you know, it started talking to a bunch of my comedian friends about obviously comedians publicly have there were always things where people were like, Oh, you can't say that or you can say that and some of it was language like George Carlin, some of it was sex, some of it is race, some of it is about politics or government. And so there was always this limit pushing thing historically . You know, there's been it's more like a rollercoaster rather than an evolution in terms of what artists feel like they can and can't do. And so we just figured, oh man, there's like nobody better versed in the ins and outs of that over the last few years than you. But before diving into that, that for a lot of our audience , they obviously know and love you. For the ones who are less familiar, can you talk about what made you get into comedy to begin with? It was three guys. It was so I was I went to college in Gailsburg, Illinois, right? And this is two thousand two . And I think two thousand two is when like the Comedy Central Half Hour Special started to come out Like if you look at that lineup of who did the first thirty minute specials on Comedy Central, it's a pretty legendary , you know, just kind of lineup. It's massive comics of today. We're doing half hour specials there. So I remember like my roommate would always have it on in the dome and then that kind of sent me to Carlin to there's a British comic called Eddie Izard. Of course. And Prial. Oh, amazing. If you begin with those guys and then you do Eddie Murphy, you do raw, you do delirious. And it was a drama program. And in my final year , I wrote this stand up comedy show. This is like my thesis performance because it was after , you know, like four years of emoting with your shoulders and doing Alexander techniques and movement and all of that shit. Now I was just like, I want to get on stage and cuss a bunch. So I wrote this show called Brown Men Can't Hump, which is the worst title in the world and booked out like a tiny theater in Knox College and did like did about eighty five minutes , right ? Which is a disservice because you're doing eighty five minutes for friends and you're telling inside jokes and inside stories. So it went really well and then I was in Chicago and just doing open mics and that's what kind of got me into it. Say of that one show. I mean, that sounds that sounds amazing. One of the funnier things that I've seen you do is when you talk about like also being culturally Nigerian . Yeah, yeah. So you grew up in Nigeria, India, you went to college. You didn't just go to college in America. You went to college in the cornfields of Illinois, basically. Yeah, man. But like real America, America. Like I've always been , I think because of that, like averse to any content that shits on Middle America. Yeah, you know what I mean? Because like I had American host parents and like I had a I had a host mom who was pinky Gibbons , who was the cafeteria lady and her husband was Jean Gibbons who , you know, fired guns and probably voted for Trump and drove Harley's on the weekend and it was this nice kind of not racist but ignorant. Sure. Middle America. And there was something sweet to that. There was something very innocent to it. I'm with you. I am not a fan of shitting on Middle America. I think it's too easy to do and it comes from on our side , meaning lefties in big cities also come from a place of fear and insecurity. Also I love that you know the only pinkies I know are Indian . So this is the first time I've heard of a non Indian pinky . Yeah , yeah, who also feeds people. So at least that's the constant right if they're pinky their job is feeding people . So growing up in all these different places, they were obviously impactful to you. In what ways did they shape your perspectives that then led to comedy? I think with Nigeria, at least it was that you never fully integrate. There is a privileged difference between the Indians in Nigeria and Nigerians in Nigeria that I don't think that gap has ever shortened. So you can very much be in Nigeria in this kind of gilded cage . You learn to experience a country without ever really assimilating in that country , right? And then you're going from that boarding school in India or to Del hi public school in India where you don't survive unless you assimilate really, really quick, right? So being the Indian in Africa is much easier than being the kid from Africa in India . it And's this kind of tus sle between assimilation and standing out . And I think at some point I was just like, Oh, I'm not good at either one of these things . And so maybe the outsider's perspective is just my thing and that's still kind of my thing is I'm passing through town and here's what I feel about the place that I'm passing through. It's the outsider perspective , you know? Yeah, yeah. Did the did the outsider's perspect lead into full volume? And for people listening who don't know, I mention this in the intro, but there's new Netflix special is called full volume. Can you can you tell me about it? It was I, think , originally supposed to be like a bit of a celebratory special, right? And the universe has a good way of humbling you pretty nicely and medically and carmatically, right? So the pitch to Netflix was alright, man, we're do like going to a stadium in Mumbai and then we're going to do like this church called Union Chapel in London and it's the follow off special to a special that won an international Emmy so everybody's happy and it's going to be silly and fun And also does the trick of , you know, the special that won the International Emmy was a bit of a tragic special , right? And it was a special about oppression and being down on your luck, right ? And everybody loves you when you're down on your luck. When you succeed and you come back , that's when you hit dislike, you know what I mean? So every when you're down on your luck, everybody's like, We're in your corner man . And then you win an Emmy and they're like, fuck this guy. I don't like this guy . So it's really important to kind of be humble and silly again and get back to joke jokes . And then five weeks before the special I lost my voice and I got vocal nodules and I was told it's going to be, you know, Adele took four months to recover with surgery. I had the same thing . And so I'd already sold out this stadium. I'd sold like twelve thousand tickets, two shows , and I couldn't rehearse . So it was one of those where I went up and shot a Netflix special with like one day of rehearsal , but I was just in my head rewriting the whole thing and it became a show about silence . So what we ended up doing was still doing the church, still doing the stadium, but then I ducked into the comedy cellar and the comedy seller became like the after movie that cut into the main movie. And so it became three cities instead of two. That's cool. What part of it evolved into silence? Was it just the necess ity of because what you were dealing with? Yeah, I couldn't talk for five weeks and the show was on the sixth week. And if you spend five weeks in your head, you will discover what a terrible person you are You will confront some shit. And also you're just so desperate because you're working backwards from this goal, right? So you're trying anything . So in five weeks, I tried Ayurveda , antibiotics, pundits who came and did a really expensive puja in my house. Oh wow. Myofascial release from like a German spiritual healer , homeopathy, just whatever gets me back up on st age and the weirdest thing of it all was you're terrified, right? To use your voice, the muscles have kind of atrophied, you don't know if they're going to work . And a delivery guy came and dropped off some kung p au chicken in my house and just kind of taking the kung pao chicken. I was just like, thank you Bai Sub , right? And that just came out without thinking . And it kind of changed the comedic beat in me for a little bit where I'm like, oh, the only way to do this now is to not think about what I'm saying , rather than think about what I'm saying. And if I just don't think about it, these vocal cords open right up and I'm able to express, which is kind of a metaphor for, you know, freedom of speech and and all those other things as well . You know, so that's kind of what made the show then . That's a great creative takeaway. My other takeaway from this is that you basically followed every remedy suggestion from an auntie and uncle Whatsapp group that was like, May not try this , get this, follow this link. Here's the do this puja. No, no, no, do the other puja. It's all the things. I still don't know which one worked, but I suspect it was the steroids, right? But if it wasn't right . So the medical one is the one that works. The medical one . Also the contrast between Indian medical and like British medical, right? Yeah. So I had this British doctor who was like, Oh man, it's gonna be four months before you can use your voice properly. Right? And then I went to Adele speech therapist , right? This lady called Dr. Dr. Ruth, who kind of gave me these voice exercises and she's like, don't worry, I got Adell back to the Grammys. I'm going to get you back just fine . But it's going to take four months. And then I came home to Mumbai and an Indian doctor was like, Yo, I'll get you back on stage in six weeks. You just got to take you just got to take a bunch of fucking meds, right? The most meds you have ever taken in your life . And I'm like, Show, and she's like if the day before you're not feeling good, I'm a shower for the syringe and I'm literally gonna shoot your throat and then you'll be able to do the show the day after I can't promise you what's going to happen, but the show will happen . So that's God bless Indian medical doctors, you know? Absolutely. At what point does your material ever bump up against people's expectations. And what I really mean by that is when you think about your voice as a comedian , what sort of responsibility do you feel that you have? I'm not saying speak for all comedians because obviously it's subjective and everybody feels different ly. But in your journey, what have you felt there was maybe a responsibility for? And then how did that often bump against what an audience's expectations might have been? It's tough, man, because you know, I think a comedy special is a snapshot to where you are in life. Yeah. It's like this little ad campaign that a comedian puts out that says, Here's who I am right now . So please buy tickets to see me in this phase in my life , right ? If you do too much of one thing, you'll end up getting captured by your audience, which I think is very is very dangerous, right? Because your audience is also kind of growing up with you. So I think responsibility number one is to figure out what your audience wants you to do and kind of not do that and do the other thing because otherwise the room will just get smaller and smaller and you'll never grow as an artist, right? The other thing and perhaps this is an India specific thing, but when it comes to freedom, I don't think you can separate the comedian from the privilege they are born into , you know, so if you consider me as a heterosexual Hindu man, upper middle class , born into privilege, studied at a really good boarding school . So I do have a microphone that is less challenged than comedians who are born with less privilege than I have been born with. So then I think in terms of how political your art gets to be my art gets to be more political than other comed ians. So that's a responsibility too, you know, that people expect from you in India , I think, as an artist. Yeah, yeah, that makes do you have any examples of what that privilege means? I mean, I get it being, you know , being Indian, but for yeah, for people who don't understand, can you is there an example or two that you think of ? Well, you know, we have a comedian called Monaur Faruki, right? And Mona Farveru ki spent , I think during the pandemic, three weeks in jail, you know , for a joke that he didn't do that evening, right? Like a group showed up and said, We saw a video of you and we're going to kind of lock you up before you even do jokes this evening . I don't know if that's happening to me. Yeah, you know, with my surname and with my religion. I know that's happening to Munawar . So I think it is my responsibility to write material about that when it happens coming from the privilege that I come from. Yeah, no, that's a great example for folks who don't know Munoar is Muslim, you're Hindu. There's a lot done there. And to your point, it's a I remember reading about this case and I'm like the brother didn't even make the joke like I would have I would have defended him if he made the joke but he also didn't even make the joke and again , came back huge and Touchwood is doing amazingly in his life and all of that stuff. But yeah, that wouldn't have happened to a Hindu comic. There's no chance that would have happened to a Hindu comic If you sometimes turn down the podcast just to hear the hum of your engine, then shell has the fuel for you Power Nitro Plus fuels every drive from the Pacific Coast Highway to the Sierra Peaks with a fuel like no other. It contains active coating ingredients that clean and protect for longer lasting engines , because your car's engine matters. That means more protection with active ingredients for longer lasting engines. Shellv Nitro plus premium gasoline, engine performance that lasts. Chances are, you're not far from a shell station. Find it using the Shell app. Formulation unique to Shell comp, to minimaredum detergent gasoline with continuous use of shellv power nitro plus and gasoline direct injection engines. Actual effects and benefits may vary. See shell. US slash more dash protection for more information. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem ? Business software is expensive, and when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing, slow to use, hard to integrate. Odu solves that, because all Odu software is connected on a single affordable platform . Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odu has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odu has over sixty apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge . Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out Odu at ODO . com That's ODO . com Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn, host of Earsay the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Lily Chu, the author of the Audible Original Romantic Comedy Just Kiss Already. It's a story about a forensic anthropologist who secretly writes mystery novels, an actress who adapts his book into a film, and what happ ens when a meme and a mediator collide with a slow burn romance ? It's performed by Simul u and Philippa Sue and it is an absolute blast . When you actually hear the performance , you realize that other people are taking your words and what you thought was kind of a straightforward sentence like the cat in the corner is black . In my head, it's the cat in the corner is black , not the dog, not the gerbil , but someone else might say, the cat in the corner is black. That's always fascinating to me. How they just bring in all these different nuances and really make it fun and interesting and distinctive. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHR Audiobook Club on the IHART radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about modern home shopping. It's sort of become a fun side hobby, right? Scrolling listings at night, dreaming about kitchens you've never seen, or backyards you haven't even stepped foot in, all from the comfort of pretty much anywhere. Redfin knows a lot of people like you want to own but are stuck in this browsing mode loop. That's where Redfin flips the script with listings that update within minutes and tours you can book right from the Redfin app, you can see your dream home the moment it appears. Now liking a listing is easy, but actually landing it, that's where Redfin comes in. Redfin has over twenty two hundred agents with local expertise . And Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. That means they want to help you win, not just Windowshop. Redfin is built to help you go from just looking to wait , this could actually be home. So become the newest neighbor on the block. Visit redfin. com to start finding and start owning. That's redfin. com . The stuff that did happen to you was jarring to a lot of us who even understand that privilege and certainly to your fans who don't, can you talk about two Indias and the impact of two Indias? Yeah, show . I was in DC and it was the end of a tour and you know , that's when you start thinking about home and you start thinking about your country and you're just missing Indian food and we did this this tour of all the DC monuments and And I was feeling a little inspired , I suppose , in life . And I ended up writing this piece called The Two Indias , right? And it was a piece about the duality in my country , right? And how there's light and there's dark, and there's things we're getting right and things were not getting right . And the intent of the piece was to say all you will ever see on social media is the darkness, please remember where we come from, who we are, what makes us great, right I wrote it at like two PM and did it at the Kennedy Centre at the end of my show like a six minute piece, right ? We didn't even have a camera guy. So we found a wedding guy on Yelp for four hundred bucks who shot the damn thing, right? And I put it up on my YouTube thinking, what could happen ? And we ended up getting something like eleven million views across platforms. And that was okay. It was largely positive. And then a news channel took it and took a few snippets , put it up, and my world kind of turned upside down. So that led to fourteen police complaints in five different states. I was banned in two states. We were going to be arrested. All the work went away . You know, so I was in two movies, I had a bunch of brands, everything just kind of disappeared . And it was a two year kind of I think can cellation is too minor a term for it. You know what I mean? Because I had to go through a lot of legal processes and I had to fight all these police complaints , but it was a lot of death threats and it was just kind of going underground for four months and then writing a show about it. But yeah, effectively life came to a standstill because of this. And the charges were largely betrayal, sedition, defamation , you know , et cetera, et cetera. Like I still can't go back to Madhy Pradesh, apparently I'm still banned in Madhy Pradesh. You're still banned just from performing or even from visiting? From performing, but the minister has changed. So I don't know if it still holds or if it doesn't hold. I just don't want to I don't want to find out, you know what I mean? I don't want to I don't want to sell like two thousand tickets in Madiphation find out shit still holds. Yeah, you know, that would be that would be strange. Yeah. So yeah. So that was that , but alls well that ends well, we wrote a Netflix special about it and that kind of brought everything back. You know? Yeah, and that was a tremendous special . So this thing exploded and then just kept getting more. So I remember when that turned happen when people were like, Hey, they're fucking with Vir. I'm like, What for what ? This is a love letter, you know, so I'm glad obviously that that's all behind. But did that end up transforming comedy at all? Was there fear that stays with you? Do you have to be excessively thoughtful? Because there's nothing worse at killing an artist's creativity than having to always use the other side of your thinking part of your brain to be like, Is this okay? Is this okay is this okay is this okay ? I think it's done two things right. The strange thing of it is and what nobody ever talks about but which is fun to know is the allegation is that we were defaming India abroad . As a video on my YouTube, it has six million views and on my Instagram it has like nine million views, which as an Ind ian video goes is an o mount of views . About ninety eight percent of those views come from India . So it wasn't really watched abroad at all , but it was shared on WhatsApp as a text. Okay , about thirty five to forty five million times. Wow. So that's really where it went viral . Just people privately texting it to each other saying, Do you feel this way too? Yeah, right . What that's done it is a little bit of a scarlet letter in terms of having it like I could go to a city and any fringe group could decide to take that up and go and file another police complaint and it would make permissions to do a large public show tough. And that has happened , you know, in the two years after it . But then different people started doing the format over the last few years. So at some point two years ago Rahul Gandhi said there are two Indians in the Lok Sabah in parliament I. And was like , I've fucked all that like this is what am I gonna do now, right ? Because it then brought it back up, et cetera, et cetera . And then at some point in a political speech, Narindra Modhi was like, there are two Indians. Oh wow, right. And he did a thing . And then like last year , Arnob Goswami, who's kind of like our Fox News equivalent, you know, really right wing news an chor who called me a terrorist on the news for doing the two Indians peace . Did the two Indians peace? You know what I mean? It was like, ladies and gentlemen, there are two Indians . And we need to talk about both of them, etc , et cetera. So I think now I'm finally okay, you know, because I share the letter with the ruling party and the opposition and the most mainstream journalist in the country , but for about a year and a half I was looking at the door as much as I was looking at the audience, just to see who comes through the door , you know, if I'm being honest. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the US has no stranger to any of that. Lenny Bruce was arrested a bunch of times in the nineteen sixties on obscenity charges. George Carlin , nineteen seventy two with the seven words you can never say on television. I'm sure you followed all the things that are happening with Colbert and Kimmel and Yeah, man. It's not very different from what's happening over here. It's surprising to see America which has had this flagship freedom of speech leading the charge kind of a movement almost regress into what feels like McCarthyism at some level. So it's a weird one, you know , it feels like a twilight zone flashback of America that I don't recognize. Yeah, you know, it's jarring. I mean, the Colbert stuff too, what's really jarring is I have so many friends who are obviously good people . They identify with , oh, no, we should have freedom of speech. We're on the left . They're executives in a lot of these companies, and they the way that they're enabling what the government is doing or complying before there's a complaint . So keeping their artists in line, not green lighting certain projects, canceling other projects so as to not piss off essentially what's an audience of one in Washington, DC is the really jarring part. I'm wondering if that, I know you're not here till January, but do those changes in American culture and I guess the zyk of what's happening right now, does that give you pause when you come here? Does it change any material that you do ? It does. I'm going to be honest in terms of I do think like at some point maybe three months ago or four months ago, I was like it feels like America is going through this kind of great white cultural reclamation of comedy and culture , who you lost it to. I don't know, 'cause you were still making all the great white programs, you know what I mean? You were still cooking for people in Illinois. Yeah , exactly, right? But it did feel that way. I remember going into a couple of clubs and seeing the lineup change and kind of becoming quintessentially all American. And I was just like I think I need to see this country on the other side of whatever this thing is . And I recognize it because every other country is going through, we got to take our country back . We must take our country back . From who the people who tell great stories and who we let in and who built it for us. I remember the last time I don't know where I was, I was somewhere in a theater in America and I kind of went into a comedy club that evening and said, let me go in the night before and test some shit , right at like a local I felt like Aladdin man. You know what I mean? On the lineup where I was like, I feel like if I came here three years ago it would have been a more diverse lineup. Like sometimes I wonder if Trevor Noah showed up today in America. Would he have the same career arc as the year that he showed up If you sometimes turn down the podcast just to hear the hum of your engine, then Shell has the fuel for you . Shellbower Nitro Plus fuels every drive from the Pacific Coast Highway to the Sierra Peaks with a fuel like no other . It provides engine performance that lasts to give you more time on the road , because your car's engine matters. That means more protection with active ingredients for longer lasting engines , she Pllowerv Nitro plus Premium Gasoline, Engine performance that lasts. Chances are, you're not far from a shell station. Find it using the Shell app. Formulation Unique to Shell Compare to minimum detergent gasoline with continuous use of Shellv itaro,pl nus and gasoline direct injection engines. Actual effects and benefits may vary. See shell dot us slash more dash protection for more information This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem . When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs set up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odu solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory, to sales. Odu is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odu at ODO . com That's DO . com Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay , the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary , Massive Sci fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth . I really had to make the decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, No, at this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great because it served the story. People will say like, Oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club on the IHR radio app or wherever you get your podcast . Let's talk about modern home shopping. It's sort of become a fun side hobby, right? Scrolling listings at night, dreaming about kitchens you've never seen, or backyards you haven't even stepped fo ot in, all from the comfort of pretty much anywhere. Redfin knows a lot of people like you want to own but are stuck in this browsing mode loop. That's where Redfin flips the script . l Withistings that update within minutes and tours you can book right from the Redfin app, you can see your dream home the moment it appears. Now liking a listing is easy, but actually landing it, that's where Redfin comes in. Redfin has over twenty two hundred agents with local expertise . And Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. That means they want to help you win, not just Windows shop. Redfin is built to help you go from just looking to wait. This could actually be home. So become the newest neighbor on the block. Visit redfin. com to start finding and start owning. That's redfin. com you've traveled all over the world obviously places like Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia, I know them well. I've shopped things in all three countries and whenever I've shopped there, usually your line producer will remind you of whatever the local laws are about what you can and can't do . But before you perform in a country, do you have to look up certain lines that you can't cross, whether it's like, I mean, we would call it free speech rules, but I know Singapore , for example, there's a constitutional , there's protection, but then a long history of censorship around certain topics. How do you navigate all that? I think the promoter will let you know and especially if the promoter's hiring me, they have cont ext for who I am. So they make it a point to let me know. Okay , right . But there's sometimes when you just kind of go ahead and do it anyway. I was at the Qatar Comedy Festival and I think it was Maz iobrani, Moam er, Nimer, and myself. Oh, wow, right. And we got the brief and I kind of got an extra brief because I'm not from there, right? And I have no Arabic heritage, etc . And I was like, really, you know, there's three thousand people here will have fun, et cetera, et cetera . And I did this bit where I pitched them a new religion called Krislam, which was just a mix of a mix of Christianity and Islam and went through like the five tenets of Krishlam, right? Crowd loved it . But there were like ten sheikhs in there who looked really fucking unhappy, right? So at the end of it, I get offstage and Mars is like, you got some balls on you, kid, right? And the promoter's like, you are not coming to the after party at all. Like I am putting you in your hotel and you are flying the fuck out of this country on the first flight that you can get. So sometimes you follow and sometimes you don't, man, you know? Did they actually stick to that? You stayed in your hotel room and fle youw out. I still very much stayed in my hotel room. I flew out. Like if there's one area you don't want to go to jail, it's the middle east like that . Yeah, I do not want to wind up in a jail in Qatar. Yes, absolutely. In your most recent special , you talk about an interaction you had with the Indian government. Can you talk about the story behind that joke and how you navigated writing it? So I got accused of copyright infringement. It's really weird. I got accused of stealing a joke from myself . All right. So I wrote two shows about India. Okay . Right. And they had two different producers, but I'm the script writer, right? In both shows, there were jokes about three similar topics , right? And one was like an architectural monument, and I think one was Nehru and one was something else . And when you want a headline, you file a police complaint against a controversial artist and you'll get a headline . That's just fair game , right? And so that's how it's done . And I had to explain to the Mumbai police how premise set up punchline goes, you know what I'm making so I had to take them through joke structure and the starting of the meeting was submit your passport. And that's death for a communion, especially one who works as internationally as I do . And by the end of it, he gave me my passport back. But that's how young the scene is we're still there , you know , and it's ironic because we've had a history of satire that predates America, predates England, predates everybody. You know, there's a community called the Berupias who are like your court jesters who would come into the king's court and parody the king to humanize the king a little bit and that's thousands of years old . So it's weird that we kind of had comedy, forgot comedy and now are getting back to growing comedy again. Yeah . Do you have a sense of the powers that be who has a sense of humor? Here's what I mean by this. The like , you know, the cops themselves are not the policymakers. They're the enforcers . But