Nimish, welcome to The Gist. How are you doing? how are you thank you good so what i like to do on this show is talk about the jokes that comedians make and regard them as arguments regard them as like an op-ed is how i often phrase it and you've written an op-ed for the new york times actually so they're kind of different things i know but what are the similarities since you have written to win an argument and you've also written jokes to get a laugh? What

are the similarities between a joke to win an argument? I mean, a joke to get a laugh and an argument. Well, the kind

of routines, I know you do a lot of different kinds of jokes and a lot of jokes are based on upended expectations and you command the stage really well, but you also have a lot of jokes where you're building a thesis. Uh-huh. Yeah.

Uh, I've tried in my recent standup, I've tried to veer away from any thesis driven material only because I don't want to make arguments any longer. I'd rather just be, here's something silly and stupid that happened to me. Now let's, what's the turn i can make in it from like a writing perspective right in in the earlier iterations of my stand up there was definitely okay what am i trying to say what do i think about a particular thing what's the point and now how do i get there and how do i have a joke about each thing along the way? Yeah. And then that makes it funny. And then hopefully the end is some turn. Yeah. That ultimately subverts the entire argument upon me. Because I found early on that trying to convince a group of people that agree with me, just didn't didn't fulfill a comedic uh ego which is yeah

i've heard you like like you'll get applause don't clap you'll

say shut up see we don't need to stop asian hate we need to stop american stupidity that's what needs to happen stop don't clap people started beating up asians because some asshole got on TV and said Asians have a highly contagious virus. Someone tells you Asians have a highly contagious disease and your first instinct is to get within fighting distance of this person? I want to be annoying. That's like my, like annoying, but like you still having a good time. That's my comedic kind of sensibility. And if that means I'm annoying you because I'm winning you over with an argument, sure. Because I'm making you agree with something you don't want to agree with, right? But that's where I'm headed now. So, I mean, to answer your question, uh, there's similar in a sense I'm trying to get to a point, but I think with, with the joke part, it's like, let's pepper along to like soft. It's like, jab, jab, jab. Okay. Where's the, where's the hook to put you to bed? Do

you think that's, um, compared to the trajectory of most comedians backwards, I would think that most comedians start with here are jokes or a bunch of jokes. And then they say to themselves, all right, what's the truth of these jokes or what really is this adding up to? You

know, I can't speak much to, um, a lot of other, my peers or however, whoever, however, whoever approaches any particular set of uh of jokes for me it's always been uh i'm going through different phases of my joke writing life right and yeah i'm only 12 or 13 14 years into comedy which i know is a lot but for me i feel like a baby you know like a rookie and a vet at the same time kind of thing. Where there was times like, okay, I definitely started with jokes. Yes. These are all the jokes. And then it became, okay, now let me try to say something with my jokes. And say healthcare is bullshit or whatever it is. And now I'm at a point where I think the subtext of the joke, if you get it, you get it. Otherwise, you just appreciate it on the surface, which is also fine with me. But if you appreciate, if you're really listening, I'm saying stuff that I'm not saying. At least in the current hour that I'm working on right now.

What do you mean you're saying stuff that you're not saying? I

see. Like

you're saying things that you don't believe in.

No, I'm saying like, I'm trying to think of an example of a finished joke that I can tell without telling you the joke and still get to what I'm trying to get at. I have a bit about how I used to work for a billionaire, right? And on the surface, the joke is about this billionaire was an asshole, whatever. But the subtext is money is everything, right? And like that, like annoyingly, as much as we want to not believe that, that's what it is. And I could be up here bullshitting about how unhappy this guy was or whatever the fuck it was at the end of the day. I still work for him. I still need a job. And I still am driven by money. And that's the whole, that's, that subtext is not, that if you pick up on that, you pick up on, if not, you know, you

never say, you never say it as connective tissue. You never say it's bullshit. When people say you follow your bliss, you never say that. No, it's

just clear

that your point or it should be clear if the audience gets

it. Right. If they get it, if they don't, that's fine. Right. And they will glue their own values onto what I'm saying, which is also okay. Yeah. So

was it about two years ago when Thank You China came out? Thank

You China came out, I think, April 2022, I want to say something like that.

And maybe by the time it came out, you were moving on. But at least let's talk about what you were thinking of and what excited you about doing that material.

Healthcare is a criminal enterprise. It is. I wasn't concerned about getting COVID and dying. When it's your time to go, you go. I was concerned about getting COVID, being in a hospital for two weeks, and then coming out with a bill for $2 million. That's what I was terrified of. That happened to multiple people in this country. The greatest country in the world, multiple people got $2 million bills for having coronavirus. If I was in a coma for two weeks and I came out with a bill for $2 million, I would laugh myself back into the coma. $2 million, yeah, put the shit on China's tab. Might pay for that shit. Call up Xi Jinping, tell him Nemes for terrorism, $2 million. $2 million, $2 million. Because healthcare is a criminal enterprise. You

have a long bit about healthcare, and there's a thesis statement in it. And the thesis

is- Americans do not deserve healthcare.

That a funny thesis. And another one, you level the healthcare industry. And I think you're tweaking your cousins by saying.

Healthcare is a criminal enterprise.

Right. So

I

thought there were great jokes around that. Thank you. Did you stop? Did you start resenting the clapping? Did you start saying, all right, just by saying this, I feel like I'm not being as pure. I can be

as a comedian. I think I started, I didn't resent the clapping so much as I resented that it wasn't a fully, it wasn't a complete argument and much to my detriment and much to the annoyance of many physicians who who re who watch comedy and think it's supposed to be complete you know like uh when a comedian gets on stage they're not they're not on stage to win anything or make an argument. Right. It's to be funny. Right. And then on the off chance that they are making an argument, to me, it's like you can, if you're watching, you either hate that their argument's incomplete or you understand that they're not up there to make a complete argument. They're there to just say whatever they find funny and if it bolsters their argument, sure, if not, they left it out on purpose because it didn't for me when i was developing that uh it was boring to talk about how much insurance companies are actually evil and how much evil private equity plays in the health care industry and how evil insurance companies and private equity companies they're they're then working together is in hospital all that it wasn't funny and so i just dropped it yeah what was funny to me was to annoy doctors yeah

and

and what i would the pushback i got was like from doctors saying like you don't understand what's going on in health care it's like no i fully understand what's going on in health care i know doctors aren't fully to blame i know they deserve some of the blame but not definitely not the the lion's share but trying to talk about the 90 percent of blame belonging to other people it wasn't funny right

so if right so you were saying to yourself like guys it's just supposed to be funny concentrate on the jokes and then you say to yourself well if i'm telling them to concentrate on the jokes guess how i could help them right just by giving them the jokes yes not giving them

the other connective tissue exactly and uh uh that definitely in hindsight was like man i could have just left one or two shitty insurance jokes in there and that would have been like okay but i said i think i said at one point it's not fully your fault yeah but i don't know people that work in insurance companies

right i

know plenty of doctors

i know

plenty of doctors who are doing shit they shouldn't be doing uh on the on the right side of the law but on the on the gray side of what you would find correct. And so, you know, that

was- Because you have 16 first cousins and what? Five of them are doctors. And all we do is argue about

healthcare prices in America. Why don't you do something about healthcare prices? And all my doctor cousins say the same thing. Our hands are tied, okay? Our hands are tied. It's a system that's broken, which is the dorkiest way of saying, don't hate the player, hate the game. Doctors don't do shit because their hands are tied with money. That's what the problem is. Listen, we care about people. We don't do it for the money. And then they drive off into Tesla. It's like, wait, what, bro? What? Mother Teresa never had no Model 3. And so I know, and one of them now works for an insurance company. And three of them are like hyper-specialized. And one of them who is uh uh indirectly employed by private equity because he's a er physician at a uh urgent care center which is owned by a private equity company yeah so like i know a lot of what and i've been a patient like a billion times and i when i was at sam b uh full front with samantha b for six months as a field producer. The piece that got me hired. Was a piece on the healthcare industry. And so. I always found it funny. When people are like. You don't know what you're talking about. It's like. Yeah I do. But I can't present the argument. If all of it's not funny.

Right. I'm

just here to make jokes. Stop thinking. I'm trying to change the world here. Do

you think though. Let's look back. Yeah. A couple observations. the audience loved it too. I, as a member of the audience loved it, not just the jokes, the argument. I don't, by the way, I'm not one of these people who always has to believe in an argument. I just appreciate the fact. So maybe I'm not a doctor, but then again, a doctor doesn't go halfway. Once they open up a patient, they know they have to suture them closed to be complete. But my question is now where you are now, you look back and say, A, it was annoying to have to say this to doctors. And B, I acknowledge there was a bunch of stuff that wasn't funny. 100%. Right. Does that mean you won't change your mind? Like maybe you'll get back into, you'll go in phases and you'll get back into a phase where you say, okay, now I'm going to say, use my jokes to lard and make points along the way. Might you go back to that form of comedy?

Yeah, maybe. I mean, it really depends on what happens to me and what life I'm living. Sure. You know, it's, right now I'm just taking what comes in. I think there's a lot of value in approaching a joke or a situation from an argument perspective, because it can help you. It, it's always good to play the contrarian with yourself. And then in that sense, like argue with yourself. Yes. It's always, that's a good writing exercise to do you find

things there yes it's surprising things and that's where comedy lies not what's expected right so you know what you expect because that's your own brain so you say to yourself all right what's the other side you'll come up with things you didn't expect guess what there's often comedy yes

100 like if i'm talking if i'm talking to myself from the perspective of my billionaire boss, that's a fun way to challenge the jokes that I'm making, right? Yeah,

yeah.

But again, that just really depends on if the joke or the thing I'm trying to make funny beckons an argument versus beckons a silly story or a character or something like that.

Other than that process of being the contrarian and playing it out in your head, do you think that creatively there was anything to approaching that bit as I have this tree and the branches from the tree are going to be jokes? Like if you didn't do that, if all you said was, I'm just going to think of jokes of healthcare, maybe you'd only think of two and stop there and you wouldn't think of the great third joke. I

think, I think with, with that bit in particular, that bit came together over like, I'm going to say five or six years. That's a long. In

fact, I'll interrupt you. You have two bits where the NYU Langone medical center are connected because of both your experiences there. And I imagined, I bet he's in there waiting in the ER saying, just thinking of funny things or outrageous things, or he's probably writing, he can't help it, but he's probably writing in this moment, just as he was writing in that moment years ago from

the same place. It was, uh, every time I need, anytime I've been to a hospital, uh, a lot of material has come out of it uh whether it be you know with the asthma attack or the time i had a a bowel obstruction or my my uh testicular cancer scare like all three of those i was just like i should have gotten a punch card at nyu you know like oh he's back here it is again like clockwork you know like three o'clock in the morning something hurts what's going on uh i was always in the i'm always kind of in the writing mode i think it's one way to i think i think at some point as a comedian your brain just switches into just a b w and always be writing whether it be whatever i'm doing you

so