month before the transgender comedian Jaye McBride was supposed to appear at a festival, she got a phone call. “The board has decided that we still want you to come, but on the ‘clean’ [family friendly] show, we don’t want you to talk about trans material,” the man said. “It blew me away at the time,” McBride recalled. “I’m just like, really? Do you tell other comics what material they can talk about?” McBride contemplated skipping the show, but decided she was “not turning down the paycheck”. So she stripped any mention of her trans identity from the “clean” set and only discussed being transgender in her “dirty” set. “It wasn’t a good feeling” to only be allowed to talk about being trans on the “dirty” show, she said. That’s not the only time being trans has affected her comedy. Once, when touring with a headlining comic, a club owner refused to let McBride perform. And another comic refused to perform in a venue on the same night as McBride. “It gets to you,” she said. “That’s real cancel culture.” McBride is just one of many trans comics who faces prejudice and discrimination in landing gigs because of who they are. Yet it’s not trans comics who are loudly complaining about cancel culture. It’s cis comics like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais who make it a staple of their comedy. Cancel culture is notoriously hard to define. It’s like trying to pin down pornography: both are nebulous concepts that no two people are likely to define the same way, but nearly everybody has strong opinions on. Is cancel culture just being trashed on Twitter? Or does it only count as cancelled when you lose your job? “The phrase ‘cancel culture’ is useless,” says Kliph Nesteroff, comedy historian and author of We Had A Little Real Estate Problem. “It lumps everything together – dismissing valid and invalid concerns – instead of addressing each situation on a case-by-case basis.” “Cancelled” comedians include wildly successful performers like Chappelle. His jokes about transgender people have cost him some gigs, but he also has Netflix specials and won a Grammy for an album discussing cancel culture. Fellow cancelled comic and frequent critic of cancel culture, Gervais, is a multimillionaire with a hit Netflix show and special, and a job last year hosting the Golden Globes. “It cracks me up someone on Netflix complaining about cancel culture. It’s like, please, I would like to be canceled like that for once,” McBride said. Nesteroff makes a similar argument. “To hear Chappelle complain about it seems a bit ridiculous. He is probably the most popular comedian in North America. He said things about trans people and Asian people in his most recent special – it was not censored. And it is widely available on the most popular streaming platform on the planet,” Nesteroff said. “In the 1890s, if a vaudeville comedian made jokes about religion, they were kicked off the circuit. Comedians have far more freedom on the stage today than they did in the past. But due to social media, they’ll also receive far more feedback – both rational and irrational.” Not all comedians emerge from cancellation triumphant. Shane Gillis was fired from SNL after his jokes on podcasts were deemed racist. Louis CK lost a Netflix special and movie distribution, but it was for his behavior, not for his words. He’d spent his entire career talking about masturbation (to acclaim), but it was only when he did it in front of non-consenting women that he got cancelled. Yet even Gillis and Louis CK are still headlining some clubs. Sophie Connell, a trans comedian in Baltimore, points out that the 500-seat Maryland club Magooby’s still books Louis CK, “but they have never given an award for new comedian of the year to a woman”. Some trans comics defend cancel culture, at least to a degree. “I never want to say that cancel culture is toxic because it is a tool of resistance for so many people who don’t have any power,” says D’Lo, a trans comedian and actor who has appeared on Transparent and Sense 8. Caty Borum Chattoo, executive director of the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University and co-creator of the Yes, And … Laughter Lab, has a similar view. “If cancel culture means that comedians who have traditionally had all the cultural power in our society can no longer use comedy to dehumanize people, I think that’s a social corrective,” she said. “White heterosexual men are not the only ones who get the full spotlight in comedy any more. People are saying, we’re not going to accept your rape jokes, or your misogynistic jokes, or your racist jokes, and we’re really interested in hearing this broad array of diverse lived experiences.” Critics of cancel culture say its defenders are humorless scolds who want to strip comedy of its offensiveness. “It’s too hard to entertain a country whose ears are so brittle … Everything you say upsets somebody,” Chappelle said in his Netflix special Equanimity. Yet some of the trans comics I spoke to don’t see it that way. They don’t want to censor comedy, they want to improve it. They’d rather be talked about than ignored. “Honestly with transphobic jokes, I’m more offended as a comedian than I am as a trans person,” said Anna Piper Scott, a trans comic from Australia. “They’ve been done to death. Every joke is like, ‘Oh, I identify as being a dog.’” Even though she thinks most trans jokes are hacky, she says, “I want more people to be making jokes about trans people. I wish comedians who weren’t trans were brave enough to try to say something new about us and risk being wrong.” It’s not that hard to steer away from bad trans jokes, says McBride. “If you want to make a joke about a trans person, don’t make it like the typical, ‘Oh, I found out she had a dick’ bullshit.” And trans comics can be just as edgy as anyone, says Australian comic Jordan Raskopoulos. “I am quite an offensive comic from time to time. But the people I offend, I intend to offend. And there are people that I am happy to hurt because they are usually assholes.” Groups she doesn’t care about offending include “politicians, religious fundamentalists, trans exclusionary radical feminists, [and] Nazis”. Sometimes mere criticism of a joke is viewed as cancel culture, says Jeffrey Jay, a trans comedian from Texas. “When you say [we should get rid of] cancel culture, you’re saying that there shouldn’t be any calling out, and there definitely should be.” Most of the trans comics I spoke with were not enthusiastic about cancelling fellow comedians because they have themselves been cancelled for their gender identity. “One person turned me down for a gig because they thought they had too much diversity on the lineup already,” Piper Scott said. “Having transitioned has probably canceled a lot more of my career than saying anything bigoted ever would have done. I’m a lot less likely to perform on international tours because there are no comedians at that level because of institutionalized, systemic transphobia.” Raskopoulos, too, says that transitioning has stifled her career. “I definitely notice fewer opportunities for myself now than earlier, [and] the types of gigs that I get offered have changed. It’s very interesting to see how quickly you become paved into the trans comedian role … rather than the generic funny person.” Trans comedians can face calls for cancellation for the same reason cis comics have: because their jokes were deemed “problematic”. “I hate it when people say, ‘What D’Lo said is problematic, I’m going to cancel him,’” D’Lo said. “Somebody who prides myself as being rooted in social justice movements, you’re basically making a decision to erase work I’ve done.” D’Lo’s experiences have made him more forgiving. Instead of calling people out, we should sometimes call people in, he says. “When trans and queer people call out cis people, I just hope that we can assess whether or not somebody actually needs to be cancelled, or if they actually need to be called in. I am a huge proponent of calling in. Being in conversation with people, and having patience to sit with some other people’s shortcomings is how we end the cycle of the toxic shit around callout culture.” Raskopoulos also says that we should be more understanding and recognize that society and not just the individual is to blame. “If we canceled everyone who was transphobic 20 years ago, we would cancel everybody because the problems with transphobia, or racism or sexism are systemic,” she said. (Raskopoulos herself told transphobic jokes two decades ago.) “If you are woke, you don’t need to be the cops of wokeness. It’s not about rules of language. If someone doesn’t speak English very well, our role is to try to understand them rather than shut them down when they make a misstep.” Although there can be power in cancelling people, “Giving people a pass if they accidentally fuck up is also powerful,” says D’Lo. This is exactly what Jay has done since coming out in the early 2010s. “The amount of accidentally offensive things people, friends, family members said to me, there’s no way I could count. So should I as a human, say, this is unforgivable? When people are ignorant, they say things they don’t realize are offensive, and people should be given the opportunity to grow and apologize and learn and change.” Jay has himself been criticized for a joke he tells about when he came out to his mother as a lesbian, and his mother said, “But you’re pretty.” It’s a true story, but people have called the joke “offensive”, he says. “I’m sharing a story to go into the ridiculousness that a mother would think that lesbians are not pretty. That somebody would call me problematic for starting a joke off with a personal story sucks,” he said. Piper Scott says a good test for jokes about a particular group is if “you want them to laugh at it and appreciate it the most”. When she jokes about her sister with cerebral palsy, this is the standard she uses. “If I look into an audience and see a disabled person and think to myself, I shouldn’t do that joke, that means it’s a bad joke and I shouldn’t be telling it,” she says. “If I look at the audience and I see a disabled person, I think, ‘Oh, I have to do it now because they gonna love it,’ that’s kind of a measure to me.” Is cancel culture the death of comedy? Borum Chattoo doesn’t think so. “Nobody wants comedy not to be funny. Speaking truth to power, letting people in on a subculture, you can do all of that without it being overly sanitized, and without it being ‘politically correct’,” she said. “Am I worried that comedy is about to not become funny because white male comedians are upset about not being able to do everything they want to do? No, not worried about that.”