Name: Why the American Revolution REALLY Happened
Uploaded: 2025-12-03T19:00:31.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why the American Revolution REALLY Happened' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why the American Revolution REALLY Happened' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-12-03. Transcript available.

There's two groups, right?
The Patriots and the Loyalists.
We discovered America, right?
We developed these colonies along the Eastern Seaboard.
So there's 13 colonies.
But there's also the Native Americans.
I mean, there's so many things going on.
There's so many elements going on.
So what happens is, is everybody wants to bust out,
cross over the Appalachians and take more Native American land.
And it isn't just them.
They are many, many nations that are lined up again.
And there is different-
You mean, so is it many nations wanted to go over there?
No, no, no.
Many Native American nations are there.
So you might have the Delaware, the Shawnee.
You might have the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,
the Seneca, Onondaga, Tuscarora.
The Oneida.
Oneida and Mohawk.
You've got, you know, all the Cherokees in the South.
You have all these different-
And they're as separate and as unique as, say, Virginia is,
or say France is, or the Netherlands.
And so you need to treat them not as a monolithic them.
You need to treat them as themselves.
In fact, Franklin's whole idea, Benjamin Franklin has the idea of uniting the
colonies
because he reads about the Iroquois Confederacy.
And they said, we are a powerful Confederacy.
Never fall out one with the other.
So they had their individual interests.
We call that state's rights.
But they had the federal connection that protected them in their general rights.
So it's the great irony is the American Revolution destroys their confederacy.
But what's going on here is people are wanting to move west.
The British win the French and Indian War.
Their treasury is bankrupt.
And they have no way to protect the settlers as they're pouring across the land,
trying to take land.
So the British are trying to control everything from over there.
Yes.
But remember, they have no money to protect their own people.
They're all Brits from that.
They also have 13 other colonies in the Caribbean, which are much more
profitable.
They're all based on slave labor.
Oh, yeah.
Only Virginia and South Carolina are profitable.
All the rest aren't.
But we're the most populist.
We're the most literate.
We make things.
We trade with them.
And so, and we're also on the continent, which is what everybody wants.
The French want it.
The Spanish want it.
The Dutch want it.
Everybody wants this.
To be in the Americas.
And to own what we call North America.
And of course, the native peoples who've been there for, you know, 20,000 years
want to keep it.
And so there's all these tensions.
And so they're big land speculators, too.
Like normally, you and I, we'd have, we'd be working our land for 1,000 years
for somebody else in Wales or Scotland or Ireland or England.
But now we're over here and we can get 125 acres of our own.
But there's big speculators like Franklin and Washington.
And they just decided that Native American land is mine.
Why don't I divide it up and sell it and be the middleman for land they didn't
yet own?
The British are like, we can't protect you.
Our treasury is whatever.
So not only can you not cross the Appalachians, in 1763, they made a rule, you
can't go over there.
That enraged the colonists.
And then they said, we need you to help pay.
The Stamp Act, is that it?
And various things that they were going to tax us.
T, Stamp Act, they proposed and everybody went crazy.
That was amazing.
That was a good sign of how the people had a lot of control.
Well, this is what happened.
Those individual colonies that had no interest in connecting with one another.
Franklin had suggested back in the 1750s, let's get together and do a union
like the Native peoples do.
And we all said, no, we're not giving up our autonomy.
Nobody came.
Nobody wanted to do it.
But then, as these taxes happened, as the decision to not allow colonists to go
into Indian land was enforced, they just suddenly started coming together.
And there's committees of correspondents.
There's the Sons of Liberty.
There's resistance.
Women are hugely part of it.
You never hear about this.
They keep this thing going.
They said, we can do without these imported goods.
We'll make our own homespun cloth.
And so, people are in competition.
The ladies of this province are this.
And so, what happens is, eventually, as always happens, and this happens in
history so much, is that I tell you, you know, you're acting radical.
You may not be acting radical, but then you start acting more radical.
You say me.
You're being tyrannical.
And I may not be tyrannical, but I start acting more tyrannical.
And you get to this point where somebody says, we think they're storing arms in
Lexington and Concord.
Let's go and capture their leaders, this firebrand, Samuel Adams and John Hancock,
and let's collect this stuff.
So, it's the weapons of mass destruction thing.
Well, it's their rifles and muskets and flints and gunpowder.
And they go, and, you know, the patriots meet them on the green at Lexington,
and the British say, disperse.
And they start to, and a shot fires out.
Somebody said, it's a massacre.
The British kill eight or nine of us and wound others.
And then they march on to Concord.
And then finally at Concord, everybody said, if this, you know, we're going.
And so, they fight back.
And the whole way, the retreat back to Boston is just a slaughter for the
British.
And then they're hemmed in.
They're not, they can get out.
They've got their most powerful navy on earth.
But they can't, they can't move out because there's just thousands of patriots
who've rushed from Rhode Island and Connecticut and New Hampshire, as well as
Massachusetts towns, to the defense of Boston.
And then it begins a war that is going to take six and a half years until Yorktown.
And any time you're in telling a story, you have to remember that everyone who's
in it doesn't know how it's going to turn out.
And that if you're a good storyteller, you have people tune in, pay attention
to the story, because you think it may not turn out the way you know it did.
That's the essence of it.
So, I have people telling me about my Civil War series.
They say, you know, I went into that Ford's Theater hoping the gun would jam
this time.
And I went, yes, that's exactly what you want, right?
Let's look at a little bit of the minutia.
So, just to make, just to like add, just to get into a little bit of the
storytelling, to add some like blush to the cheeks of this conversation.
What about Paul Revere's ride?
What was real about that?
Was he just a loud mouth?
Some people said it was autism.
He got a hold of a horse and some booze.
There's a lot of like, a lot of rumors going on out there.
Some of that's TikTok, but still.
Yeah, well, so let me dispel the most important thing, which is he did not say
the British are coming, the British are coming.
He didn't.
He didn't say the Redcoats are coming or the Redcoats are coming.
What he yelled was, the regulars are coming out.
The regulars are coming out, meaning the regular British army that has been
stationed in Boston for whatever it is, almost two years.
Are coming out.
And so, he is a patriot.
He has made, he's a silversmith and an engraver.
And he's made an engraving of the 1770 event in March called the Boston Massacre.
He calls it the Bloody Massacre.
We end up calling it the Boston Massacre.
When some of these occupying, a standing army, I mean, this is the big deal,
right?
You didn't send an army to a place unless you were protecting them.
You didn't send an army there to police the population.
That's not what free people have, right?
Is the army in your midst.
So, the British army is in there, in the colonies.
They're in Boston because there's so much particularly-
Only in Boston or in all the colonies?
They've got a presence to protect the stuff.
But they are in Boston particularly to try to put down the resistance to their
taxes, the resistance to that.
So, the people realize that the military is there kind of against them.
Uh-huh.
And that's kind of what we have a lot going on right now, hypothetically.
I had a premiere of the film at the Telluride Film Festival, episode one.
Telluride, beautiful over there.
Gorgeous, gorgeous.
And we go every year, even whether we have a film or not.
Anyway, so they were doing it.
And when they got to the point when General Gage imported these number of ships
from Halifax, Nova Scotia,
to go to occupy Boston, not to protect it, but to police it.
And then you hear the voices from the past saying, a standing army in peacetime,
this is horrible, you know, like that.
And the audience in Telluride erupted because they're going, wait, that's
happening now.
That's where history can be your best teacher.
To go, wait a second, did we just get, did they just raise the temperature on
that pot I'm sitting in?
Am I about to be boiled?
You know, what's going on?
I'm about to be boiled.