Comedian Brian Simpson taps radical honesty and provokes all sides at Just for Laughs VANCOUVER
A background that includes work as an electronics technician, a stint as a Marine, and a childhood in foster care has helped shape the standup’s unique and irreverent take on the world
Comedian Brian Simpson directs a gimlet eye at all of the hardened partisan orthodoxies of our time.
Just for Laughs VANCOUVER presents Brian Simpson at the Rio Theatre on February 20
COMEDIAN BRIAN SIMPSON HAS been a frequent guest on the Joe Rogan podcast, so that means anyone unfamiliar with his work will suddenly have an opinion about him. “It’s so funny to watch the reaction,” he says about an appearance in late January. “A lot of conservatives watched that and were like, ‘He voted for Kamala!’ And a lot of liberals watched and were like, ‘He’s cozying up to the right wing!’ This is how polarized we are.”
In a call to Stir from his hometown of Austin, Texas, Simpson refers to himself more than once as an “honest liberal,” adding that “most liberals are frauds”. But in the polarized climate he mentions, “liberal” is like the Schrödinger’s cat of modern political discourse, forever changing in relation to the observer. In Simpson’s case, he’s just a Black American with some unusual life experience telling us what he sees, generally with a gimlet eye directed at all of the hardened partisan orthodoxies of our time, therefore provoking all sides. And this is why he’s one of the more exciting performers coming to this year’s Just For Laughs VANCOUVER.
“I’ve lived in some of the most quote-unquote liberal places in the country and it’s just a different kind of racism,” he says. “I lived in Portland when I worked at Intel, and it’s interesting: the city that considers itself to be the most progressive and tolerant also don’t have any Black people. I used to have this bit where I’d go, ‘It’s easy to love Black people when you don’t know enough to hate us yet.’ People move to these places and pat themselves on the back for being tolerant, even though they live 40 miles away from any minority. People do the same thing with the working class. They talk a good game—they want equal pay, equal rights—but the truth is they don’t want to see the people doing the work. They definitely don’t want any of those people to make as much as they make.”
It was Simpson’s career as an electronics technician that took him to Oregon and then, after that, to the Pentagon as a subcontractor for Lockheed Martin. In his youth he was a Marine. Before that a foster child.
“I learned to read people very well, I learned to adapt to my environment,” he says. “But you got serious abandonment issues. Then the Marine Corps, it kinda forced me to stop feeling sorry for myself and expecting the universe to repay some sort of imaginary debt. So those two things did make me a little irreverent.” He chuckles: “Before I was a comedian it was not too good.”
Simpson made it good in 2009, switching to comedy presumably to get shit off his chest. His rise has been fast and last year he was anointed with his first Netflix special, Live From the Mothership. If there’s an overarching vibe to his standup, or even just in a phone call to a journalist, it’s radical honesty.
“People are very mixed about whether they’re being authentic or if they’re doing an impression of an authentic person,” he muses. “Are you an activist or are you a narcissist disguised an activist? Are you a comedian or just doing an impression of a comedian? Is your persona contrived? I think the line has been blurred, we’re living in the era of the death of truth. And the young people growing up in it, it’s hard for them to tell what’s true even about themselves.”
He applies the same rules to the ever-present, so-called culture war, now entering its, what—15th happy year? “Conservatives,” says Simpson, “are more honest. I’m talking about the people, not politicians. They lie. I think the people are more honest. Maybe not as intelligent. Maybe not as worldly. But I think they’re speaking what they really think whereas a lot of my friends on the left are just overly concerned with making sure they have the correct answer instead of the true answer.”
Is he wrong? It speaks to our dreary place on the timeline that Simpson might raise some hackles with a statement like that. No less silly, in his view, is the notion that the recent US election has somehow freed us from an era of censorious woke tyranny.
“Some people act like the day Trump sat in the office, it was: ‘Now we can talk about it!’” he laughs. “You always could talk about it, you just didn’t have the balls to. That’s all it was. Now you feel safe talking about it. Not the same thing! It’s fine, there are things I don’t have the nuts to talk about, but I didn’t put it on anything but that: my lack of courage to say the thing. We all have stuff to lose. And the more successful you get, the more shit you have to lose. It’s easy to speak truth to power when you don’t have shit! I lived in a homeless shelter for almost two years when I moved to LA, and that’s when I was the bravest comic I was ever going to be. What can you take from me? I’m gonna say whatever the fuck I want today, I don’t have anything for you to take!”
In good news, maybe, these days Brian Simpson has something to take. And as he mentioned on a recent episode of his own podcast, BS with Brian Simpson, the Canadian government will do exactly that: it will take a percentage of his earnings when he appears at the Rio Theatre for two nights next Wednesday and Thursday. This is why he declared he’d never come back after his last visit. “But I got a new agent,” he sniffs. “So I said yes to a lot of things.” (We should thank his agent.) “My main issue with Canada,” he begins, “is you have to jump through all the same hoops as if you’re going to France, or Japan, or Korea. But you’re just in Canada. Getting there’s a pain in the ass and then they take fifteen percent of your money before you leave and then if you don’t file taxes in Canada, they charge you thousands of dollars even though they already took the money from you!”
No shit, man, try living up here. 
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