Adam Grabowski, a comedian perhaps best known for having performed at more than 500 colleges and making it to the second round of “America’s Got Talent” in 2016, performed in the Event Space on Friday, February 9. And there is a pretty good reason that Grabowski didn’t make it much further on the show: he just wasn’t that funny. When he told a joke about a topic, it would usually be the obvious joke about that topic. For example, he had a bit about women dropping hints, and the joke was that men were born too stupid to pick up on them, which seems like the obvious place to go with that.
This leads me to another issue I had with him: a lot of his jokes were based on stereotypes about women. At the start of the show, he talked about how he understood that gender is fluid and that stereotypes about men and women do not apply to all men and women — acknowledging that he’s progressive — but then most of his jokes implicitly contradicted that. Consider the joke about women dropping hints: he said that men were born too stupid to pick up on hints, meaning that women shouldn’t expect men to pick up on hints and should let them off the hook accordingly, this is problematic because all too often sexual assault comes about from men not picking up hints that women are not interested, not unlike Aziz Ansari.
This is indicative of a larger issue that ran throughout his show; Grabowski would take time to say something progressive but then make jokes contradicting what he said. This would bring a stop to the flow of the show, as he kept taking a break from jokes trying to say something progressive. This was made worse when he took about ten to twenty minutes out of the show to have a serious talk about depression. Now, talking about depression is important and can help destigmatize mental illness, but the way it was handled ended up being more of a problem than a legitimate discussion about mental health. Grabowski offered his advice to anyone who may be suffering from depression, saying that if something was causing them to be depressed they should just walk away. This advice is overly simplistic and doesn’t acknowledge any of the complexities that go with depression, but worse than that it tells people with depression that if they if they are feeling depressed it is because they are not strong enough to stop being depressed.
But, for the most part, these disclaimers would be about feminism— like how women cannot be defined by stereotypes — but then he would make jokes about women being emotional. It felt to me that he was making these kinds of jokes before people were politically correct and when that changed, instead of changing his set, he added disclaimers about how he wasn’t actually misogynistic and the jokes are just based on observations he’s made. I don’t think he realizes that the backlash he’s received is because the jokes are sexist. And instead of taking a critical look at himself, he added disclaimers to make sure everyone knew that his jokes are not sexist, even though they were.
As a result, his jokes came off as very defensive, which didn’t create the best atmosphere. A good example of this defensiveness is when he talked about getting kicked off of “America’s Got Talent.” Clearly bitter, Grabowski complained that the producers cut out the laughs and that he was cut because the judges had a long day — in other words, he was kicked off not because he was bad, but because of the situation. Some of that may be true, but he neglected to mention that he was booed and again, his jokes just weren’t very funny.
This combination of defensiveness and fake progressiveness created a bit of an issue at the end of the show. Grabowski took questions and someone asked what he thought of matadors’ butts. He responded that he didn’t like them because he didn’t like people who kill bulls; similar to how he wouldn’t find a Nazi cute — which upset someone in the audience. They called out that comparing Nazis and matadors is not okay, to which he responded — again, very defensively — that he could because he was using hyperbole. The crowd member replied that he had implicitly compared bulls and Jews, which Grabowski denied. The individual left, and later told me that she was more upset by his response than his joke, because she felt it tried to make her sound ridiculous.
Ultimately, this interaction is telling about Grabowski: his responses were all defensive, not at all concerned with her perspective. He also didn’t apologize or acknowledge that what he said may have upset her until after she left.
But it was more than just defensiveness, it was that Grabowski did so by attacking what she said in response and claiming she had no reason to be upset. This was particularly ironic because not long before this exchange, he had commented that if a woman is upset, you shouldn’t question it but support her. Again, just another example of Grabowski trying to be forward-thinking and then doing the exact opposite.
It is important to note that most of the things I’ve brought up here wouldn’t be so bad on their own — again, it was the fact that he was defensive throughout the show, and that most jokes were antiquated stereotypes. These things are forgivable if they happen once on their own, but they were all prevalent throughout the show. Adam Grabowski is a great example of how comedians have to convisingly adapt to our current climate; it’s more than just saying progressive things, it’s about following through in your actions, or else the comedian will become bitter that audiences no longer appreciate their antiquated jokes. It shows that comedians are in a new territory where they have to make sure their jokes are as progressive as their audiences.
