Jimmy Dore
What freedom of speech feels like, live in Tampa, October 5, 2023
Comedians have historically been the truth-tellers. That’s why Shakespeare employed them liberally throughout his plays: to tell the truth to the audience and often to other characters.
The Fool in King Lear doesn’t pull any punches. He fearlessly speaks his truth, insulting Lear and ridiculing his actions, yet the King spares his life over and over, treating him less like a servant and more like a friend.
It makes sense. King Lear would have summarily executed any sane person exhibiting the same insubordination. Only a “madman” can get away with saying what the rest of us think and not get thwacked. Protected by his deranged status, the Fool exhibits rare wisdom as he comments with foresight about the King’s disastrous decision to banish his youngest daughter.
Isaac Asimov, in his Guide to Shakespeare, said “That, of course, is the great secret of the successful fool – that he is no fool at all.”
Enter Jimmy Dore, live at The Improv in Tampa, FL.
I find Jimmy Dore very funny, as did the hundreds seated at tables around me here in Florida, where Dore performed this week. If laughter is the measure of a comedian’s success, Dore succeeded wildly.
This essay is not so much a review of his performance, because comedy is a deeply personal thing. We’ve all had the experience of staring blankly at something others are busting a gut over, haven’t we?
Humor is also timely. Jokes I found funny years ago can go both ways — some still get me; others leave me cold. At this point in my life, what I find humorous seems to intersect perfectly with what Dore talks about, because he’s not so much telling jokes as he is playing the role of the wise fool, pointing out the absurd.
Jimmy Dore is a historically left-leaning comedian, so much so that two years ago, his show was deemed the farthest left of any. Yet I can attest, during his performance this week, he thundered nothing but scorn and outrage for just about every policy made and action taken in the past three years by our current government.
Dore dished on both Republicans and Democrats, reminding the audience that politicians are not the ones in charge. He likened the political scene in DC to a rollicking Harlem Globetrotters game, where the Globetrotters LOOK like they’re out-tricking the Washington Generals, and the Generals LOOK like they’re playing their hearts out, but in fact, both teams are owned by the same owner. It’s all spectacle.
Dore is not the first comedian to make it abundantly clear that the battle is not left vs. right, it’s oligarchs vs. plebeians. Some of his funniest riffs reminded me of George Carlin:
I agree with Joel Berry, managing editor of The Babylon Bee, who says in this Newsweek article:
“These comedians are tapping into a cultural realignment—traditional leftists and traditional conservatives united against the tyranny of a very small ruling class that doesn't want us to be free to think, say and do what we believe to be right.
As satirists and comedians, we are here to call out lies, hypocrisy and pride—whether they come from those in power or ourselves. Today's comedy is helping everyday people see who the real enemies are: those who want power over our lives, and who can't laugh at themselves.
It's possible that comedy isn't uniting the country so much as it's showing the world how united we already are, outside the fake worlds of Facebook and Twitter. And that's something ruling elites, tyrants and the bureaucratic moral busybodies can't allow. They want you to think you're alone. And our shared laughter directed at them is the most terrifying sound in the world.”
There was a refreshing energy in that comedy club I hadn’t felt in a while: the feeling of freedom. Dore was speaking completely freely, out loud, like any good Shakespearean fool, to an audience desperate to hear some truth. He wasn’t mincing words or couching terms, he was just laying it all out — just telling hard truths about our country.
At first, his honesty was almost jarring. I realized I was holding my breath when he talked about the lies we were told about the vaccine, or the surprisingly unsympathetic reactions of people to those — like him — who suffered injuries from it.
It was the same with his car buying joke: “When did ‘doing research’ become off-limits? And doing research means reading, by the way. Ooh, reading. It used to be okay to read up on something before you bought it, you know, look at Consumer Reports, whatever. All of a sudden, it was NOT okay to do that before getting the shot. ‘Research? Research? Are you a doctor?’ It’s like if you were buying a car, they’d be like, ‘Who the f*** do you think you are, Henry Ford?’”
I realized that somewhere in the deep recesses of being, I was having multiple “are we allowed to say that in front of a lot of people?” moments. Yes, the way he was describing the reality of his world, our world, was hilarious, but I was still tentative.
At some point he said he was still recovering from a recent illness, but that performing for hundreds of people at a comedy club was perfect because we were all sitting at tables and therefore couldn’t catch it. The absurdity of it all washed over me, and my laughter busted out.
Freedom. That’s what comedy clubs are supposed to feel like — anyone is free game. But comedy, like freedom, is in short order these days. Everyone’s hair trigger; everyone’s worried that something they say will upset someone else.
In a 2019 interview, comedian Joy Behar agreed with Tim Allen when he said that comics shouldn't have to censor their material for the “thought police.”
Then, in 2021, Behar apologized for “misgendering” Caytlin Jenner, saying:
“So first of all, let me apologize for my pronoun mixup. I think I just didn’t get enough sleep last night. I had no intention of mixing them up, and I tried to correct it immediately, but whatever, it just came out. So I’m sorry if anybody was upset by that.”
Then, in 2022 she said, “I just say what I say…And then they’re upset with me. I’m their favorite target over at Breitbart and Fox.”
Is this not the stuff of comedy?
Dore’s material made me laugh, for sure, but underneath was anger at an unjust system and deep sadness for the state of the country. In the car ride home, I talked with my husband about Dore’s ability to tap into that dichotomy, and I decided that our situation is absurdly comic because it’s so tragic.
A few weeks ago, commenting on fellow playwright C.J Hopkin’s essay Criminalization of Dissent (continued), I wrote:
“I'm a playwright, and I swear, EVERY SINGLE DAY I read something that seems like a play writing itself. But then before I can wrestle anything onto the page, another impossibly absurd situation presents itself.”
I had never heard of the concept, “Theatre of the Absurd,” until high school when I played a role in The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco. At the time, I was 15 and thought the play was nuts. So did the audience, I think, and they laughed a lot.
In college, I sat around a table with other eager beavers in a class called Modern Drama, taught by Martin Esslin, the man actually who coined the term “Theatre of the Absurd.” Twice weekly we listened to our professor name-drop theatrical luminaries like George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett in self-congratulatory personal ramblings, and in turn we wrote short papers that I don’t think he even read. Everyone got A’s.
I recognize now the irony inherent in the absurdity of the class itself. I also have, after living through the last three years, a visceral understanding of what those playwrights were actually attempting to do.
Intellectually, I understood that Esslin chose the word “absurd,” to describe the spate of “meaningless” plays written between 1940 and 1960 because the plays emphasized the absurdity of the human condition within a meaningless world.
I also understood that he used the word “absurd” not in its general meaning of “ridiculous,” but in its original meaning: “out of harmony with reason or propriety; illogical.”
What I didn’t fully grasp until the last few years, incredibly, is that playwrights like Ionesco and Beckett were writing plays from personal experience, not as philosophical musings in an attempt to be stylistically different or “avante-garde.” (Which is what grad school taught me was “good” theatre. The more inscrutable, the better.)
Those playwrights were just trying to make sense of their collapsed worlds. After World Wars I and II, they found themselves lost in an unfamiliar landscape. Everything they had believed in, trusted — political institutions, social structures, religion, morals, even the very existence of God, — were all destroyed. Their disorientation was complete.
From that utter devastation came existentialism, the belief that human beings define their own meaning in life, exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. But in the wake of that bleak philosophy also came an absurdist play I’d never heard of until now, a play called Rhinoceros, written by Ionesco in 1959.
Ionesco, who apparently hated Sartre for his indiscriminate support of Communism, wrote the play as a criticism of blind conformity.
In interwar Romania, the most virulent, violently antisemitic, and fascist movement was the Iron Guard, formed as the paramilitary branch of the “Legion of the Archangel Michael” and also known as “the Legion.”
As a young writer and playwright in Bucharest the 1930s, Ionesco felt more and more out of place as he clung to his humanist values while his brilliant, artistic friends all became caught up in the Legion’s “ideological contagion” and joined it. It was that lived, illogical experience that inspired him to write Rhinoceros.
In it, the inhabitants of a small French town turn into rhinoceroses one by one; ultimately the only human being who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure whom others criticize initially for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle, and then later for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses. (Sounds like a conspiracy theorist to me!)
Toward the end of Rhinoceros, Bérenger, like Ionesco, remains the last man on Earth to resist transformation into a rhinoceros.
The loneliness of his solitude drives Bérenger to doubt his existence, and he attempts to change into a rhinoceros, but cannot. The play ends with his recommitment to fight the beasts, shouting, “I'm not capitulating!”
There is much to unpack in this play, but I want to highlight just two takeaways — and then remind you of what the managing editor of The Babylon Bee said.
The only time Bérenger falters in his conviction is when he is alone; isolation is a powerful tool to weaken resolve. Find your community.
Ionesco chose to write this play as a comedy. Authoritarians can’t stand comedy, and really can’t stand being laughed at. It rips the rug of authority right out from under their feet. Go see Dore or other dissident comedians in person.
“They want you to think you're alone. And our shared laughter directed at them is the most terrifying sound in the world.” — Joel Berry
Shakespeare had it right, creating a close relationship between King Lear and the Fool. Lear needs the truth, as ugly as it may be and as painful as it is to hear. He needs to hear that his decision is wrong, that it is born out of overweening pride and ego.
We all need truth-tellers in our lives like that. Sure, it’s easier to surround ourselves with those who will blow smoke up our asses and tell us we’re wonderful, we don’t need to change, we’re perfect already. But how will growth occur? Will change ever happen?
Shakespeare’s plays almost always draw parallels with modern society, and King Lear is no exception. In America, the ruling class has fools it loves and holds close: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel. Yet they are not Shakespearean fools. How do I know? Follow the money.
Colbert is apparently worth $75M and makes $15M per year; Fallon is worth $70M and makes $16M per year; and Kimmel is worth $50M and makes $15M per year. There’s no doubt in my mind that every single one of these guys is in Carlin’s famous “big club.”
Meanwhile, Jimmy Dore’s net worth is $2M. His YouTube channel has 1.25M subscribers. An article by CNN in 2018 lumped The Jimmy Dore Show in with “extremist YouTube channels promoting conspiracy theories, white supremacy, pedophilia and propaganda.”
The ruling class hates Jimmy Dore, because he didn’t sing along with dancing syringes, or say that unvaccinated people shouldn’t get ICU beds in hospitals, or belt out a song he made up for a new covid variant. He’s not the fool they want to befriend because he’s the honest fool, the uncomfortable one, the one asking “dangerous” questions and challenging the narrative.
He’s not in the club, nor will he ever be if he keeps up this tack.
Instead, he’s a modern-day Bérenger, a man who has watched his world crumble and his neighbors turn into rhinos, and he’s standing at a microphone screaming the truth to anyone who will listen: “the oligarchs want us to keep us fighting with each other over race, and pronouns, and Ukraine, and vaccines, rather than fighting the real criminals who run this country. Don’t let them keep us apart. Don’t let them win.”
He’s not capitulating. And neither should we.
This is excellent, Mary! Did you see his interview with RFK Jr.?
Thank you Mary. I LOVE Jimmy Dore! Such a stellar Human Being!! Watch him every moment I can; he gives my spirit a boost.