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I was living there.
I was in Queens.
I watched that second tower fall.
I was on my roof.
The woman upstairs from me died in the fucking tower.
Her whole family was upstairs, and they were surrounding the television because she had gone to work.
I knew these people; I lived in the same building with them.
He came back one day, and this is a macho guy who just broke down crying.
Theres a lot of levels to this thing.
There was no too soon.
We were living in it.
We felt like it was sort of a duty or something.
People were wandering around like zombies.
This trauma that happened to the city and to everybody there was tangible.
Then people started flooding in to go look at the pile of smoking metal.
What I remember is the way [the Comedy Cellar] felt.
Nobody was secure in their sense of reality, and people were clearly freaked the fuck out.
It was like shock.
The laughter was quick and weird.
Clearly what we were doing wasnt really a comfortable or effective show.
It was just doing something, because at that point, Lower Manhattan was closed.
It was constant police activity and excavation activity.
People were sleepwalking in a state of profound shock, so that was your audience.
I couldnt not talk about it.
I just wanted to venture to give people relief.
Im not the big relief comic; Im not frequently asked to lighten things up.
He was like, Im a fucking Marine.
So it was definitely tricky onstage for me, but I saw it as a challenge.
Here in New York, we may be the target of terrorism, but youre the target of God.
I was like, Arguably, God is the biggest terrorist of all.
That was one of those jokes where I couldnt just leave it at God.
But I dont remember which button-pushing jokes got me into a standoff.
But the guy wasnt mad at me; people were just mad.
Theyre nervous, it doesnt feel right, and nothing is going to really make it better.
I saw comedy as a platform that you worked through things on.
For me, the challenge was:How do we make this funny?
There was no way to not be in the shadow of it.
There was a tension.
It was out of that tension where you really saw comics sort of sizing up.
There were definitely comics that were like, Lets kill all these fucking Muslims.
Lets lock them all up!
And then there were a few liberal comics who were like, Is that really the solution?
But it was at that time, post-9/11, where lines were really drawn.
You directly getTough Crowdout of 9/11.
So that was where it was.
There was no real middle; finding the middle happened over time.
The take was, Theres no good Arabs.
Looking back on it, and moving through that as a city, Im not that different a person.
I ended up, in 2004, at Air America.
I think the interesting narrative is where we are with woke and anti-woke and the tribalization of comedy.
I think that theres a direct line from 9/11 to that.
If youre going to fight, right now your war is against this idea of censorship or wokeness.
Its rife for understanding and criticism on some level, but theres definitely lines drawn.
Its more of a team loyalty thing, and they have their own audience.
Its also so easily co-opted by right-wing politics.
I dont want to label it in a lazy way.
I guess its sort of a bully situation.
And its a fairly new realization, so I dont know when comedy starts to speak to that.
Its just that the fury and the momentum of the proudly ill-informed is problematic.
So that was all happening too.
Theres not generally a lot of them at any given time.
I mean, youve got to poke around.
Its destabilized the fucking country and the world, to a degree.
So thats a reality.
How am I not going to take a stab at manage that frequency?
