Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1325 - Dr. Cornel West
Uploaded: 2019-07-24T23:32:16.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1325 - Dr. Cornel West' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-07-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1325 - Dr. Cornel West' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-07-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1325 - Dr. Cornel West

boom and we're live how are you sir oh brother i'm so blessed to be here man i
want to salute
you the work that you do and the fact that you were one hell of an artist man i'm
telling you
well thank you very much coming stand up comedy strange times we the swing from
the political
the personal from the animals on to the uh the visionary it's just a beautiful
thing to behold
my brother thank you from you that is an honor i've been a huge fan of you for
a long time
so for you to say that to me means means the world oh it's a deep thing and i
can see your love for
richard prior man i walk in your space and i'm just transformed by the geist
the spirit that's
free of this place man yeah here prior here then when you tell me you work with
the great richard
price oh my for five weeks i followed him when i was a young comedian at the
comedy store i went on
right after him every night he performed what was that like though brother it
was strange to be in
the room with him because uh when i was a 14 year old boy my parents took me to
see live at the sunsets
trip and i could not believe that anybody could be so funny just talking that
was my first experience
with stand-up comedy other than that i'd seen like i'd seen people perform on
the tonight show and
things along those lines about hope and some of these others it was like ha ha
ha it was okay you
know what i mean but when you see richard in concert in a movie theater i
couldn't believe how funny it
was it didn't make sense i had seen funny movies before like you know comedy
movies that made you
laugh but nothing nothing like that i'm like this guy's just talking it changed
my life that's that's
that's but you can see the power of art yeah and it's connected to freedom
because i've always viewed
richard prior as the freest man in the 20th century certainly free as black man
along with muhammad ali
he's the freest black man in the 20th century he is so self-determining yeah
the choices that he
makes has to do with his own sense of self he doesn't care what other people
think he doesn't know
looking for other people's approval recognition he's gonna be who he is and he
pays a major cost for
that of course i mean anytime you that free in a world of such uh uh such unfreedom
you're gonna
pay a major major cost well he had spectacular honesty and he took i i feel
like what happened was lenny
bruce opened the art form up and then richard prior took it to a new place that's
in terms of the
origins the real greats that's exactly but then george oh yeah oh george carlin
well he was the
most prolific he did an hour special every year until he died every year he did
a new different each
one different and but all three but after but you are in that tradition i was
saying man when when i saw
you doing the uh the dogs and the cats and getting inside of their souls i mean
you know how profound
that is though man as an artist and as a human being to do that i said oh my
god and it reminded me of prior
and so when i walk in and i see your connection i said i'll be i'll be i
shouldn't be surprised
well it was just being in the room with him was strange i just couldn't believe
it was real you
know i was in my 20s you were in the 20s he was in his he was at the end and
like i said uh he couldn't
walk anymore they used to have to carry him to the stage and uh but he
performed sold out every night
sitting in the chair yeah i sat in the chair yeah really yeah yeah but it was
sold out every night
people couldn't couldn't believe they were there i've never seen that before i
don't believe there's
tapes of it i don't believe anybody recorded it if they did record it nobody
released it it was just
this was in the 90s and um this was again this was the end of his life he just
decided you know he was
dying and he's decided he'd go back to his love to go out he wanted to go back
doing stand-up and because
you got you all got that picture january 1st 1963 brother prior my brother just
broke down yeah jamie
i didn't even know what he got arrested 35 days in jail man he he had a woman
that he knew he moved
to pittsburgh apparently which is when he was about 22 years old um let me
switch that in there prior
conviction there it is there's the mugshot wow so he had a friend of his which
is a woman that was
singing in clubs her father was a cop and in his autobiography he wrote that
among other things that
he or she paid him or she gave him money he admitted to beating her ass so i
beat her ass first didn't
think about hitting a woman as much as i thought about my own survival that led
him to being arrested uh
sentenced to 90 days he served 35 of them and had a seven dollar fine he had a
crazy life man he grew
up in a brothel yeah right there in peoria yeah peoria yeah with the violence
against
any sisters wrong but prior though my man he uh he was wild free cruel tender
genius
crazy wrong as he could be right as he can be he's a human being he's a
complicated human being though
i never met him before but uh his spirit means the world to me me as well i'll
tell you well i think
every comic i've never met a single comic that doesn't think he's one of the
most important figures in
the history of the art probably the most important it's like him and lenny bruce
in my opinion and then
kinnison later but kinnison for a much much shorter time who would be the
greatest female uh comic
artist i think roseanne barr roseanne yeah roseanne is profoundly talented yeah
there's no doubt about
it she she doesn't get the credit she deserves because she's legitimately
mentally ill and that's
one of the things i had on the podcast to highlight with her legitimately she
was hit by a car when she
was 15 and she she spent nine months in a mental hospital yeah she lost her
ability to count she was
very good at mathematics before that and then after the car accident the severe
head injury changed her
personality yeah same with kinnison kinnison is hit by a car when he was young
as well and changed his
personality radically too head injuries make people very impulsive very wild
and impulsive and oftentimes a
slave to their own impulses and i think uh kinnison was a big example of that
as was roseanne but
roseanne was the first really loud brash almost male female comedian who could
kill like a man
you know she was but what about the joan rivers and the oh yeah she was great
too and so i love
monique great monique gets to me she she she touches my soul every time she's
on stage have you ever seen
miss pat no miss pat's a monster really she's a monster and she's had a crazy
life she's been on
this podcast a couple times her life was insane i mean she was selling crack
when she was 14 she had a
baby when she was 14 or was it 13 she was pregnant at 13 with a married man had
a couple kids with him
yeah she's she and she is so funny she's so wild and funny yeah there's
something about the uh it goes
back to aristophanes you know it goes back to uh uh those early comics in the
history of the west
who were willing to tell the truth especially as it related to the everyday
experiences of ordinary people
you know the first plato's text itself you know the republic was grounded in an
imitation of the comic writers
who were the first to really delve into everyday people's experiences not the
well-to-do that's
tragedy tragedy only had to do with with the nobility and the aristocracy but
it was comedy that dwelled into
the lives of everyday people then plato takes the whole form and shifts it into
the dialogue
and make socrates of course the grand the grand hero but it was aristophanes at
least in the west who
initiated this with the clouds and and frogs and so on and it goes all the way
through from jonathan
swift to mark twain to nathaniel west to uh uh um the brother ishmael reed i
mean these are the great
american american comic writers twain west read and see comic writers are
different than the tragic ones
of dostoevsky and kofka's comic in his own deep way too the greatest of course
the checkoff though
anton checkoff but i know you check out checkoff right no oh brother you you
haven't fully lived
than you read samanton checkoff yeah oh you read three sisters of uncle von you
you read the cherry
orchard or any of the short stories he's had over six thousand characters in
his short stories man
whoa to beat throst and and and and into the uh in in the ravine or even misery
man the greatest one is called a student it's only two and a half pages it's
his favorite short story oh you read that tonight it'll blow your mind
not mine wow you listen you read that tonight listen to a little curtis mayfield
okay listen to a little
stephen sondheim okay stephen sondheim no more into the woods curtis mayfield i
loved and i lost
and then the student checkoff oh man you'd be ready for some serious serious
cognac
on your recommendation oh no no because i know you you serious uh intellectual
too you you do your
homework but i'm just saying this in terms of just enhancing you know all of
our lives i mean the
comic writers the comedians of various sorts be they on the stage or be they on
the page
are i think vanguards of the species in a very deep way you know because we as
a species
have to objectify our grief and our pain and our sadness and our sorrow and it
begins with moans and
groans and groans and you transfigure those moans and groans first into song
but song then moves into
language and the language is not rational language of philosophy and dialectic
but it's a language of
stories especially the stories that are self-critical we laugh at ourselves not
at others we left with
others rather than just at others so it's not that sudden glory that hobbes
talks about in regard to the
comic where you're looking down and condescending you see that's an aristocratic
conception of the comic you
laughing at the ordinary people who are so dirty and filthy it's profoundly
anti-democratic right
as if you know well-to-do folk don't fart right don't essay don't don't don't
don't do number one
and number two and fall in and out of love and act a fool and live lives of
inconsistency right
but act when you get these democratic forms of the comic see that's you and
prior and roseanne and
moanique and george carlin and all of that that's free spirit though brother in
most of our lives you
see we're dealing with a whole history of a species of structures of domination
oppression that's the
history of the species for the most part and there's moments in which there's
breakthroughs in which there's
a freedom of spirit and then you have some institutionalization of that which
is democracy
that's why democracies are so fragile and usually don't last that long because
it cuts so radically
against the sense of really wanting to be free i mean dosyevsky's right most
people really are afraid of
freedom they want to defer to authority they want to conform and when they're
introduced to freedom and
they really catch us hold they say oh my god it's tremendous cost to be paid
but i like that
there's something about that and they they can hear it in the music they can
see it in your comic
art the priors and others and it allows these effects and consequences of
people's lives to really
enrich their lives before they die why do you think people are afraid of
freedom well it's courage i mean
there is no freedom without unbelievable unprecedented unstoppable courage and
courage is not widely
distributed in the species that's a very charitable way of looking at people no
it's true those people
rather conform they complacent they're complicitous they're cowardly yeah they
well adjusted the injustice
and want to smile and walk around as peacocks rather than cut against the grain
and have to bear witness
and therefore end up on a cross or like socrates condemned i mean most of the
great figures that we
know yeah and there's more consequences for that now than ever oh yeah cancel
culture that's exactly right yeah
oh it's true it's very very true 