The Ultimate Dom featuring ALOK
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Hey, listeners, thank you so much for tuning in.

Sam here. So most of you already know we have a live show at the Ford Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday, July 14th. We, of course, want you there. So buy your tickets if you haven't already. But we also have some news right now about that live show and some very, very special guests that are going to join me and Saeed today.

and Zach on stage. That's right. Lacey Mosley, host of the amazing podcast, Scam Goddess, will be joining us on stage as our special guest. Listen, after all this time, particularly of Zach, like, cluing us into the glory of Lacey and her scam encyclopedic knowledge, it's so great that we'll be able to talk to her in person.

And the amazing DJ Novena Carmel will be there to get you girls together. So show up a little early because it's going to be a whole twirl before the show even officially starts. Right, Sam? And to be clear here, I'm so hyped about this because I've been a fan of Novena's DJing for years, but she's also a good friend of mine. Folks who live in LA hear her every morning on KSRW, spinning the best music. But she is truly a Los Angeles institution, and we're honored to have her join us for this show.

She really is, Sam. She really, really is. Well, listeners, it's going to be the best time, so come join us for our last live show of the season. Tickets are on sale now at theford.com. You can also find the link in our show notes. See you there. Lady to lady. Hello there. Singular ladies. Singular ladies. I'm Sam Sanders. And I'm Zach Stafford, and you are listening to Vibe Check. Vibe Check.

It's two of us because Saeed is a way writing, which I always love. Because when he goes away to write, he comes back with goodness and greatness.

Yeah. And he also just updates us all along the way. And we can literally see it's like, we're getting to watch side side adventures, you know, on TV shows where they have like the fishbowl episode, like girls did that a lot where it's like a character then goes on to have their own little adventure. Said is currently on his side adventure and he's having quite the time that he's writing about too, which is the best side adventures. It's beautiful. Speaking of side adventures.

I'm so happy this episode, Zach, because an event that you took part of, not even tied to Vibe Check a few weeks ago, we're lucky and honored to be able to share it in this show feed. Talk about it.

I'm so excited. So today you're going to be listening to a conversation between myself and my dear, dear friend, Alok. Alok is a comedian and a poet, a writer, an activist. You probably have seen their social media posts. They're always super viral. They're always under attack by the far right, and they're always pushing back. And Alok and I have a really long history of friendship. I actually would say...

out of all of our girls working in media these days, I may have known Alok the longest. I met them in college. I was leaving college and I got a book deal to do a collection of essays with queer people at Thought Catalog, if people remember Thought Catalog. Oh, baby, Thought Catalog meant so much to me. Right? So I used to be a Thought Catalog writer back in the day. I'm sorry, everyone, if you go back and read those archives. But Alok

was an up and coming activist, writer, performer. And I asked them to write an essay in this collection. And we've been friends ever since. And I hold the world record for Alok of being their first publisher and first editor. So anyway, I love them. And I love this conversation. As you noted, this is a conversation between the both of us at a Soho house in LA for Pride Month.

And Alok was taking a break from their world tour as a comedian. You can watch them on Netflix right now and the Hannah Gadsby special. But we sit down and talk about laughing and death and the power

and the power of understanding that we're all gonna be gone someday. And that actually is such a beautiful way to move through the world, knowing that everything is super precious and that everything should be celebrated. So it's a really, I don't know, just really special conversation. I'm excited you to hear. - I'm excited to hear it, but I'm also like, oh Lord, prepare my heart because with Alok,

they'll have these viral minute long, 90 second long moments on social media. And I'll start watching being like, hello, I love you. And then before I know it, I'm weeping. Yeah.

Yes. And if Alok can make me weep in 90 seconds, what is this episode going to give me? But I'm ready for it. I'm dead because, you know, you interview people all the time. You sit there, you just get into it and you go there and you're riding the ride. You're finishing the conversation. And I think you'll hear this on the tape. I look up and half the room is crying.

And I was like, what? Is everyone okay? People were like, it's just so beautiful. And you're right. Alok has this ability to move people deeply. And it's just such a gift. So I'm excited to share it today with everybody. Well, let's do it. I'm so excited. Let's do it. So with that, everyone strap in, maybe get your Kleenexes, maybe get a glass of wine. I don't know. But here is my conversation with Alok. Please join me in welcoming Alok. Hi, how are we?

Like jet lagged as a gender identity, jet lagged as an ontology, jet lagged as a way of being and becoming. I love that because Taylor Swift recently said jet lag is choice and gender is also a choice, right? Okay, here's my hot take. Okay. We're already beginning. Okay.

I think that there's actually a trans femme of color poet locked up in the tortured poets department. Oh, please unpack that. Because when I listen to her, I'm like, girl, you know my depression, you know? Like she is tapped deep into the ancestral trans misogynist violence. I don't understand. It's incredible. Is she tapped in or are you just tapped into white womanhood?

Which way does this go? So we're starting off spicy, everybody. We've been friends for a long time. Because I'm tapped into my white womanhood as well. Speaking of white womanhood, like I recently met Avril Lavigne and she's the reason I'm alive, actually. So Avril's first two albums were the first crystallization of angst for me where I was like, it's permissible to like,

be well off and still depressed, you know? Like that was a really important representation. Yeah. And so I went up to her and I said, Avril, if you ever doubt your purpose on earth, I want you to know that you're anointed and you kept an entire generation of queer people alive. She was like, have a nice day, you know? And I was like, I think I need to heal this reverence I have. I don't know.

Well, tonight I really want to spend the next 30 minutes diving into this new era, as I said, your comedy era. And I have seen your show and we'll talk about some of the textures of your show, some of the jokes in it. But why I want to talk about it is because I think you have a really profound way of thinking about comedy as a way of dealing with all of our existential crises at the moment. And I think I want to paint that picture for people today. And I think it's a really important thing to do.

And it's kind of like a new play on dying for laughter, dying from laughter, and how we can reimagine that tonight. So are you ready for that? I think so. Okay. So to begin, a year and a half ago, I was in Toronto. And my mom lives there with her husband, my stepdad. And I just came into town and someone told me Alok was doing a show and they were doing comedy.

And I was really, I knew you were doing it, but I didn't know you already had like this really big fan base waiting for you to do comedy. Because how I found out about it was that I think the show was sold out. So you were able to get me tickets, which I'm very grateful for. And I got to go. And as I walked in, I remember thinking, I know Alok and I can imagine where these jokes are going to go. But my mom doesn't and my stepdad don't.

My mom and stepdad are very cis. They're very normative. They're very proper liberals. And when we sat down, they were laughing so hard at your jokes. And it was shocking to me because I looked at my stepdad and I'm like, you are the problem though. You are like the thing that a locust is talking about.

So I want to begin there with your work. Tell us about your comedy. Why is it kind of an indictment of people like people in my life? And what are you enjoying most about the work that you're doing on stage right now? I think the problem is that we keep on reacting in the same frequency. So, for example, right now there's an attempt to say that being trans is just a pathology or a disorder.

there's two choices. One, I could say, no, it's not. But that in some ways legitimizes the initial provocation. The second avenue is to be like, what's actually disorderly is your obsession with me. And what comedy allows us to do is to zoom out of the interpersonal to say, you think I'm absurd because of what I look like, but what's actually absurd is how much money you're funneling into disappearing me.

The true comedy is politics. The true comedy is everything that you think of as serious and fixed and permanent and installed. Actually, comedy allows me to reveal a critical inversion that what you think is real isn't. What you think is superficial isn't. Yeah.

I have a quote from your show that I'd love to read that I think crystallizes that. Not coming with receipts. I don't even know what I'm saying out there sometimes. It's on Netflix, so everyone can watch this too. Alok was part of Hannah Gadsby's special, Gender Agenda. It's a really wonderful collection of queer comedians. But Alok is the closer of that. And Alok begins their set by saying the following...

I just want to begin tonight by shouting out all the transphobic men in the audience. I see you and your uncomfortability is valid. I understand that I put you in a dilemma. If you find yourself accidentally laughing at one of my jokes tonight, then you're officially endorsing the transgender agenda. And if you don't laugh, then you're kind of affirming my gender because women aren't funny, right?

So let's walk through that jokes construction. Talk to us about that joke, but also the larger work you're doing there around calling people out while calling them in through their own gender biases.

Yes, I'm a trained academic. And what I found is that comedy actually is a place where I can teach people and they want to come. Because when you're giving a lecture or when you're explaining something, people kind of deactivate. By people, I mean like the majority of people, but not you and like people I like. Yeah. Who are like nerdy and bookworms and covet information.

And so what I began to realize is academia trained me on how to see the genesis of an argument. Okay, there's some base assumptions that are being made here. Let me deconstruct these. And what comedy can allow me to do is to land people through that deconstructive process. So it's one thing to say gender is a social construct. It's another thing to make a joke that helps people realize that. And what's so intentional about comedy is you have to build a premise, then construct

you're operating in that premise, you go in the next world, you build that premise, it's the next world. It's like a philosophical proof. And why I get frustrated often, I had someone tell me, Alok, you're too intelligent to be doing stand-up. Like, this is not an art form that's for academics. And I said, actually, this is one of the most genius places to engage in theory and ideas because it actually works.

So why are we more comfortable with hoarding these ideas in the academy versus democratizing them? And I think my call to comedy was I was like fatigued

at how fact-checking, debunking, and arguing weren't working as methods anymore. People don't actually care about truth. Sorry, they don't. No one's in the era of truth anymore. Everyone's in the era of trying to justify their feelings through decorating them with big intellectual words, but actually it's just the word I'm scared. So actually to make people realize that they're scared, you can't say you're scared. You have to make them laugh and then they can see it.

What laughter actually allows is an expansion, which allows possibility. What theory and criticism and lectures do is constriction, which is insecurity and shame. So somatically, comedy actually opens up people at an embodied level, but also intellectually and spiritually. What I've found is that people who would have never listened to anything that I was saying for the majority of my life are finally there. I love it when the girlies bring their boyfriends to my shows. It's so fun. At the merch table, they're like,

"You're really funny." And I'm like...

You're like destabilizing. I'm like, whoa. I'm healing something. I'm healing something with that. I love that. Well, speaking of healing, I have to talk to you about laughter as an actual thing that we experience. Humans laugh before they talk. We laugh when we're nervous, like what I was doing earlier. Laughter is such an intrinsic part of being a human. But when you are queer, when you're a queer person of color, when you're trans, laughter is also a violent act.

too because you get laughed at a lot in public space you get laughed at online and you've talked a lot about that experience since i've known you and you've written a lot about it

Talk to me about your journey with laughter and what made you want to lean into the laughing after being laughed at for so long and talking about it for so long. I just got very bored of how the myopic renditions of trans life in this world is that we're hapless killjoys who have no sense of humor because that's not actually accurate. I find that trans people are some of the funniest people I've ever met. And that actually for us, comedy has always been a resistance practice. Yeah.

of you're going to throw me in the trash and I find next season's accessories right there. You're going to spit on me in the face and oh wow, it's a sickening highlight. Comedy allows us to actually incorporate the vitriol and turn it into fabulosity, a process I think of as emotional alchemy. And so I found that actually some of the best standup was being done by drag queens, but it wasn't considered standup because it was around queer content and

and queer audiences. And I noticed that from its foundation, comedy has always been a masculinist project with a certain forms of humor, the affect, what people are wearing. Like whenever I asked to do my makeup at a comedy club, they don't have a spot for that. And I think a lot about that. Like that's a choice. That's a deliberate choice. That's an aesthetic to perform this. Like I'm not contrived.

but it's contrived, you know? You're not caring is an aesthetic, you know? It's like, I make this joke in my current show, we should seriously question the motivations of any dude who's like, "Oh, I'm gonna make people laugh tonight. Let me put on my jeans and button down shirt, my ideal outfit to inspire hysterics." Like, come on. So what I began to really realize is like, actually,

We are some of the funniest people, and our humor actually is something that can save the world because it's a technology of survival. The ability to laugh is a place where the state can intervene. The state can criminalize me, can prevent me from using restrooms, can prevent me from being in public space, but it cannot prevent me from laughing. There's no technology that can allow me to sever a laugh. And actually to give people laughter is a form of gender-affirming care. It's a form of medicine to give people an ability to not...

or obfuscate how severe the conditions we're under are, but to also offer them an instrument of saying alongside that severity, there's also silliness. And that approach to the world, I think is exactly what the universe needs.

And I felt called in this moment to share a kind of sacred wisdom of trans life with the entire world, because people are all having to reckon with war, with grief, with injustice, with pain. And often the only vocabularies they have to engage in that are vocabularies of misery. But if trans people only had vocabularies of misery, we'd all be dead because things have always been shit for us. We've always had the end of times. We've always been in the end of worlds. But as

But at the end of the world, we're also having a good time. And that's a story that I think doesn't get told about trans life. We're just defined as hapless victims. Not in fact that the people that people see as hapless victims are some of the most fully alive people on earth. And in fact, the reason we're being targeted is because we're fully alive.

So I wanted to show that comedy is not just a profession, not just a genre, it's a method. It's an approach to the world. It's being able to actually deepen the way that we feel grief. When we laugh about something, it doesn't have to be deflection. It can be enhancement. Listeners, we're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

This message is brought to you by McDonald's. Did you know only 7.3% of American fashion designers are Black? Well, McDonald's 2024 Change Leaders Program is ready to change the face of fashion. The innovative program awards a monetary grant to five emerging Black American designers and pairs each with an industry professional to help them elevate their brands.

I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just black Gen Z, but black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors.

at events like the BET Awards and the Essence Festival of Culture. And follow the journey of the 2024 McDonald's Change Leaders on their Instagram page, We Are Golden.

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We're back and I'm jumping right back into this conversation with Alok. Can we talk about grief? Because I know you've been through some experiences. I've been through some lately, but we share one, but yours is very personal. So

Your aunt, Irvashi, passed away. And Irvashi is an iconic activist. She and I sat on the board of the American LGBTQ Museum, which she thought of and created. And she has a massive legacy in the queer community. And she also was your aunt, which I didn't realize until years later because I read her work and watched her. And then I realized after we were friends that you two were connected. And you talk a lot about her death and how it

shaped you and pushed you. How is grief right now sitting in your body and helping you think through the laughter of the world, especially as we live in a world that is grieving right now when you think of Gaza and everything happening? One of the profound joys and terrors of being human is grief. Because if we were just a cosmological ethereal entity, we couldn't experience grief. Grief is unique to having flesh.

And in one story, we can say that's an inconvenience. And another, we could say that's an invitation. So let's ask the bigger question. What is the function of grief in the world and our species? And I've come to the belief that the function of grief is an intimate portal to connection with one another. If I can recognize that the people that I love die, then I can realize that someone else has someone that they love die. I don't need to know anything about you. I know that you're in the same kind of pain.

And that pain actually is a form of connection beyond language, beyond culture, beyond gender, beyond identity. And so a lot of people get confused at how I'm able to see myself in other people, but it's because I'm intimately familiar with my grief and I can see how grief shapes how other people show up in the world. So I feel like grief ultimately is an essential ingredient in being human. If we didn't have grief, we wouldn't create some of the best art in the world. If we didn't have grief, we wouldn't create some of the best friendships.

And for me, laughter is a grief ritual. I have to live the fullest and freest version of myself for the people who couldn't. I think a lot of what frustrated me when Orvish died is that people spoke about how young she was, 62. And I said, yeah, okay, young by some metrics, but actually she was living such a full-throttle life.

And isn't that a more interesting story to tell? Like how incredible, how magnificent, how spectacular a life was. Is that really a short life? Mm-hmm.

I think a shorter life is people who are coasting on autopilot, not actually doing or being who they want to be. They might be 95, but they haven't really lived a life, you know? And so I started to really notice like, oh, a lot of people think that they're living, but they're actually dead. And a lot of people just focus on the dead, but don't notice the ways that they're living. And I think that's a lot of what anti-transness is, or I've come to that belief.

is that a lot of people see me as the worst thing that could ever happen to you. Like the loss of power and control and ego and masculinity. And I'm like, actually, that's what freedom is. Now that I no longer have the luxury of having a stable self because I'm constantly porous with the world, I found freedom there. And that's why ultimately my relationship to my gender and my craft is a death practice. It's about saying I might die,

But that's okay because things have to die in order for there to be new things born. That death is part of a regenerative cycle of the world. Everything has a termination and that's its beauty. Yeah. Whew. Yeah. You said it now. Yeah. I love that you said that. And I love that we're going there because I went for a hike on Sunday, as I told you. I heard that you moved to LA and you were doing these kinds of things. Yes. But I'm...

I hike. I keep hiking shoes in my car. I can't really relate. I pulled you on to say people I like and I'm questioning that. Yeah, you're like, mm, this friendship may be ending. I'm going to have to hike the fuck out of here. Well, okay. So I went hiking and I'm going to make it even worse. I went hiking and listened to one of my favorite white women, Glennon Doyle. I think we all need to have a favorite white woman. Yes. My mother's one of mine. You know, my mother is actually white. But Glennon Doyle's up there with her too. But Glennon's a friend of yours. Maybe Glennon is mother.

She is mother. Yes. Very mother. But if you don't know Glennon, Glennon wrote the book Untamed, which was just incredible and is about her journey from fundamentalist Christianity to being a queer woman, now married. And you all were talking about death and you shared that you have a romance with death these days because it's helped you look at the world in a much bigger way. And what you said, and I'm going to paraphrase and I'd love for you to clarify it, is that

if everyone thought of death more and looked at everything around them as precious as if it could be gone tomorrow, all the hate in the world would go away because we know it wouldn't be worth fighting that battle. Expand on that and share that with these people because it really stopped me. Mm-hmm.

Living is stand-up comedy because people keep on walking around thinking that their car will be there forever, that their relationship will be there forever, that their body will be there forever. And the joke that the universe tells us is like, no bitch. And so the amount of time that people invest into the artifice of immortality that could be reallocated into the appreciation of mortality. Franz Kafka says, life has meaning because it ends. Without death,

life wouldn't be beautiful. It would be repetitive, boring, anodyne, algorithmic.

But life is precious because it has a termination, which means that we know that inevitably we're going to die. So then the question of a good life is how do I live a life such that when I die, inevitably, I'm laughing. That's my plan. That's the most important thing. When people ask, what's your career goals, whatever, I just want to be laughing when I'm dead. And I think we have precedence in the queer community. Sylvester, the queen of disco, dies of HIV and AIDS.

One of her final public appearances is her in a hospital gown and a wheelchair at the Gay Liberation Parade in San Francisco. Everyone says, what are you doing here? She's like, I'm here to have a good time. And then she was cracking jokes until the very end. People would say, Sylvester, we heard that you're dead. She says, honey, you're only going to know I'm dead if I call you and tell you myself. The ability to joke in the face of AIDS...

That's the power we come from, right? And I think those kind of traditions of queerness is we are death doulas. We had to kill the cis-hetero version of ourselves, a people-pleasing version of ourselves, that we were on autopilot in order to be accepted to the world. And we don't be honest about that enough, that there was a death that had to occur. And then outside of that death, a life that came from it. So queer people actually embody that grief ritual that's possible for the entire world. And that's why we're targeted.

because we show people you don't have to stay in stagnancy. And that that's actually death, not this, the replenishment. So much of the work that I'm trying to do around death right now is not just speak about death, but actually integrate death and fear of death as the way to empathize with every political system.

Every political system, white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary, functions off of the myth of immortality. The myth that you can have something that's stable, that's here forever. White supremacy is like the biggest version of that. And so what if we were to understand white supremacy as fear of death? Yes, it's fear of black people, it's fear of indigenous people, but it

ultimately stems from this idea of I need to have power to protect me from my own death. If you remove that buffer and you say actually true power is embrace of death, these systems have no purchase on us. The reason that ideologies of oppression and fascism take control of our imagination is because they offer us a brief respite from having to contend with our mortality because ideologies don't let us down like people do.

The preciousness of being human is you and I stutter and make mistakes and flounder. White supremacy is a pristine ideology, so we can live in a fantasy world. Oh, it's ideal, it's great.

So that's why I have so much grace for people who submit to authoritarian's jaws, because it makes a lot of sense to have to really contend with the fact that all of this is ephemeral, that every single material object could once disintegrate is so profoundly destabilizing. So why not make a joke where people can microdose into that reality? So that's why comedy comes in, because comedy allows me to say...

All of this is so silly, you know, and that the reaction shouldn't be one of despair. It's one of profound delight. It's so silly. So that means that we can mess up and the stakes aren't that big. It's so silly that we think that these small things are so big when in the scheme of the universe, we're actually a speck of dust. That's so silly to me. Whenever I'm feeling anxious, I zoom out into the entire galaxy. And I'm like, does the Milky Way give a shit about my panic attack girl? Like, no, I'm going to die.

And there's something so refreshing about that being like, why are you trying to seek control? Yeah. Because ultimately what it's about is control, right? Yeah. Death is the one girl who enters our life and it says, you can't dom me. Yeah. Death is the ultimate dom. I thought you were going to say ultimate top for some reason. We were on the same wavelength. We were. We were. But I've just met some tops that are recessive, so. That's true. That's tea. That's tea. Yeah.

We're going to take one more quick break, but don't go anywhere. We'll be right back with more Five Check.

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This message is brought to you by McDonald's. Did you know only 7.3% of American fashion designers are Black? Well, McDonald's 2024 Change Leaders Program is ready to change the face of fashion. The innovative program awards a monetary grant to five emerging Black American designers and pairs each with an industry professional to help them elevate their brands. I

I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just black Gen Z, but black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors

at events like the BET Awards and the Essence Festival of Culture. And follow the journey of the 2024 McDonald's change leaders on their Instagram page, We Are Golden. We're back and we're getting back into this conversation.

I love what you're saying about death ritual and the rituals of death and grief. And I want to connect it to your comedy practice itself because I would say I've seen it a few times. I've seen it in person. You've got to see the new show. It's really stunning. Okay, I need to go. I'll come to Paris tomorrow. Greg, we're going to Paris. But it feels like a death ritual for gender when you're on stage. Do you see it that way? No, but I live for that take. That's my hot take.

Yeah, I'm processing and photosynthesizing that information in this particular moment to give a really quippy rebuttal. One second. Download it. Got it. Yes. Totally. Okay.

When gender is an instrument of coercion, I'm not interested in it. When gender is an energy that can be harnessed for creative combustion, I'm so here for it. The problem is that the only ways people have been taught gender is the physiological element, not the mystical element. And the mystical element of gender is an energy that allows us to do what so many people think of as impossible, like smile.

like camp, camp is a mystical gender practice of being able to maintain self-esteem even in the face of severe policing and judgment.

that isn't something that makes sense. Like so many of the things I do don't make sense. Like people like, why are you compassionate? It doesn't make sense when people are not gonna meet you with compassion. I'm like, whose sense are you appealing to? Actually, when I'm thinking about death of gender, it's death of a particular worldview. A particular worldview is dying. And in one story, it's tragic. Another, it's quite exciting. I love that. That was a quick take too. You know? That was really fast. Sleep deprivation. One time, just a fun background story of our relationship. There was one time we were at South by Southwest together. Oh yeah.

And this was what, 2018? And I was supposed to be on stage with someone else I won't mention. And I love them. I just don't want to express them. That sounded unnecessarily shady. I love them very much. We're in West Hollywood. You have to guard your language. I know. And they work in West Hollywood. Everything becomes charged when we look outside this window. That's the West Hollywood. I need to go back east.

But this person got really sick before we got on stage. They didn't die. They did not die. They are alive. And Alok got on stage and did a whole South by Southwest hour conversation with me on the fly. So it looks very good on the fly. But living is on the fly. It is. Everything is just a costume that we're putting on. And that's why it's so interesting to me because it's really external perception that I have to contend with the most.

I'm just vibing, you know? And then people put all these categories, words, whatever. Like, oh, you're doing comedy now. Oh, you're doing this. Oh, you're acting. You're doing this. And I'm like, imagine living in a world where categories are relevant. Can't really, like, I'm not interested. That's so boring. As a creative, I just want to have fun. So I'm just trying to have fun and I go where I'm having fun and people get so irritated by that.

because part of that control project is the category project. I think a lot of the fear of what trans people like me are saying is people are saying, "Who would I be if I didn't have these categories?" As if that's despair, but I actually think that's delight. Okay, play, figure it out, experiment, put on something new, let's go, here's a dress.

Yeah, I mean, that's what freedom is. You talk about that a lot, is that safety is freedom for you. And that's what people are fighting up against when they're policing gender so much. Because you're saying to someone who's expanding outside those categories, oh, get tighter, get smaller, don't be so free. And that's not where we should be moving in a world, right? Yeah. We have to close this. I'm trying to figure out a way to close this in the best way. Dave Chappelle. So we've talked a lot about laughter.

being a very powerful thing, a powerful thing for us to think about death, gender, the patriarchy. But laughter has been used as a form of violence against trans people. And someone right now named Dave Chappelle gets a lot of money from Netflix for making jokes about trans people. So how do you see laughter as a political weapon being used against queer people right now and also being used by queer

people right now. You know, my concern with comics like him is not that they're doing anti-trans comedy. It's just that it's not funny. Like, if you want anti-trans comedy, come to my show. I hate myself too, you know? So...

Actually, like, I'm down to be made fun of if it's clever, insightful, contributes something to the conversation. But the jokes are just so juvenile and boring and poorly executed. It's just actually just resentment and bitterness masquerading as comedy. Comedy has to be clever. Comedy has to contribute to something, has to have an energetic force. And that's not what it is. And so it's just frustrating because people want to fix words like

prejudice, transphobia, yeah, but I think the more accurate one is just boring. And then I think the deeper question is like, why do the majority of people laugh at things that are boring? And it's because comedy, which began as a kind of rogue art form of people who are disenfranchised critiquing political establishments,

What happens is that you then become incorporated into that establishment and the focus becomes the maintenance of that status rather than actually the agility to adjust. You know, we've seen this with recent notable comedians saying comedy has been ruined by this woke generation of young people. I'm like, actually, that just means you have to do your homework, you know, like just like work a little harder. Yeah.

Because I don't know, what makes you think that just because you were good once, you're good forever? I feel like my practice means I have to constantly relearn how to make art. And that's terrifying. I wish I could just like coast on work from 10 years ago, but you have to change. Yeah, I mean, that's very queer what you just said. I think a lot about Jack Halberstam's work, The Art of Queer Failure, which is this idea that queerness is an inherent failure because you wake up every day in a normative system that says you aren't right.

that you have failed us and it beat you up every day, but yet queerness is that powerful thing that pushes you to be like, "No, I'm gonna keep trying. "I'm gonna wake up every single day." And I would say that queer comics are funnier than cis comics because they actually have to try. And I think the comic you were referring to earlier is from a very famous TV show and he has not been relevant for a long time in my mind.

I would love to close this off with some recommendations. I host the show Vibe Check, which is on SiriusXM. In every episode we end with recs of things that are helping people keep their vibes right. So Alok, you're currently on a world tour. How do you take care of yourself? How do you find refuge? How do you find peace? Do you go on dates? What do you do? So I'm not taking care of myself. So thank you so much for staging that for all of us. Queerness is also tremendous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, well, like group threads are really important to me. Like I have different group chats from friend groups from all across the world in different time zones. So no matter where I am, I always have someone to gossip with, which is an essential need. Do you put timestamps? No, I just know I've got like my India crew there at this hour, my South Africa crew there over here, you know? And that makes me feel this profound sense of interconnectivity being on the road because often it's just me or I bring a friend, but I'm like,

in Bucharest and I'm like, it's my birthday, what? But then I feel part of a larger world and I guess friendship is another way of saying that, a synonym. I mean, you have a romance with friendship. You were the first person to say that to me. It's my favorite thing in the world. I love my friends. Why is that?

Friendship is what bell hooks was asking for when she said, do we have a laboratory to learn how to love? That's what friendship is. Friendship is the place that we go to figure out how to not love in the way that our parents taught us how to love. A lot of people keep on trying to do that through romantic love and I don't know if that's it.

So I actually feel like they're trying to work out their daddy. I'd rather work out my daddy issues without, you know? - Yeah, yeah. - So I think friendship is the first place that I learned how to be loved as me, not as my performance act. Friendship was the first place that people actually said, "You did a great show. Are you tired?" And actually cared about my materiality, my physicality, my life.

Friendship was a place that I could democratize my loneliness, say I'm lonely, and then someone else could say I'm lonely, and then we found each other. Friendship was where I didn't feel like I had to contend with all the violence of the world alone. I think growing up in Texas as I did, boo-hoo, you know, tragic, sad. The actual violence was not the bullies. It was having to be bullied alone. Mm.

Now I'm bullied all the time, but it doesn't stick because I've got community. Yeah, that's so real. It's like when, you know, growing up as a queer person, you get called faggot. And when I was alone in Tennessee and got called that word, it was so destabilizing because I felt so alone. I moved to Chicago. I remember getting called it walking through Boys Town and I wore it like a badge of pride. Totally. Because I had friends with me.

And that is such a good point, is that so much of the world doesn't hurt you if you have people to lean on. And sometimes partners and romances, some of the romances some people we know get into are not things that they should be leaning on at all. Well, my friend, thank you so much for this time. Oh, I saw what you just did there. Wow, that was nice. Okay, cool. Well, my friend, I appreciate your friendship. I learn from it every time I'm with you. And I'm so proud of the work that you're doing now globally. It is really...

so tremendous and I cannot I can't believe when I met you and you were at Stanford as an undergrad going to grad school doing amazing poetry I saw a star but now to me you're a galaxy so thank you for sharing that galaxy with us oh my god wow that was good thank you

Listeners, thank you for tuning into this week's episode of Vibe Check. If you love the show and want to support us, please make sure to follow the show on your favorite podcast listening platform, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, and leave a review, and most importantly, tell a friend. Special thanks to Alok, and as always, huge thank you to our producer Chantal Holder, engineers Rich Garcia, and Brendan Burns and Marcus Halm for our theme music and sound design. Special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Ritchie at Stitcher, and Brandon Sharp from Agenda. As

As always, we want to hear from you. So don't forget, you can email us at vibecheckatstitcher.com. Keep in touch with us on Instagram on our page at vibecheck underscore pod and our Patreon, where for $5 a month, you get direct access to our group chat. And that is patreon.com slash vibecheck. Stay tuned for another episode next week with all the girls together. Until then, bye. Stitcher.

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