Canadian comedian, Ryan Long talks to Jonathan Kay about the nature of comedy in the current political climate. Ryan Long’s recent skit “When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything” has recently gone viral.

Jonathan Kay (JK): Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m Jonathan Kay. By now a lot of you may have seen a very funny video called, When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything, in which two guys—one wearing a t-shirt that says “woke” and the other with a t-shirt that says “racist”—turn out to, like the title says, have a lot in common. Well the guy in the racist shirt in that video, who also wrote and directed it, is 34-year-old Canadian born-New York resident comedian Ryan Long, and this week we were lucky enough to get him on the Quillette podcast. In the interview that follows, I’ll ask him about his politics, his comedy, and of course his Canadian roots. But first, here’s a taste of Ryan Long’s stand up.

One thing I loved about that bit is that you made yourself the butt of the joke. Is that sort of a fine line you have to tread? Because you don’t want to be accused of punching down but at the same time you are trying to satirize abstract ideas that do involve real people.

Ryan Long (RL): I mean, I don’t care if I’m accused of punching down, but I think what you described is one technique, so I think a lot of times people like to think of comedy and art in terms of their rules like that. Whereas I consider that one of the things. So when I do my videos a lot of what I do is I take a character make him saying something terrible and then I put music and I cut it and I do everything to make your body feel like he’s a guy you should be rooting for, except for the things he’s saying and I even say the terrible things in a way that someone would be saying something really nice. So, it’s kind of this like juxtaposition. In comedy, when people talk about punching down there, I know that’s become sort of a theme. Everyone says, the idea is that you should be punching up-which is higher than yourself-and they see that those levels are divided by race and gender and they’ve made that a kind of a pyramid of what they consider punching down. But, in reality, the dynamics can be changing in every room, right?

So if I was on the road and I was doing a show somewhere in the deep south and they were the most, you know, racist-sexist place—this place probably doesn’t even exist—and I start doing these kind of really racist jokes and everyone is laughing than that you might kind of feel like punching down. But if I go to the gay pride parade and there are 10,000 gay people, obviously the dynamic changes. So same reason when I do an all black show. The dynamics are different than when I do some super-white liberal show. So a lot of times when you’re making fun of ideas, let’s say it’s kind of like woke social justice stuff, for example, let’s say I’m making fun of that, and they would say, “Oh you’re punching down because of minorities.” I go, “What you’re not realizing is I’m actually making fun of you.”

JK: Okay, so in the category of “Actually, I’m making fun of you,” let’s play a clip from one of your extremely popular pieces, in which you play a character who is a writer for Vice. He’s just been let go, and he’s talking about how sad he is about it.