Andrew Schulz knows that hosting Donald Trump on his Flagrant podcast would make everyone think he’s a “right-wing MAGA lunatic.” But, as he makes clear in this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, his politics are more complicated than meets the eye.
Schulz, who just put out a surprisingly vulnerable Netflix stand-up special called Life about his experience with fertility and fatherhood, opens up about the backlash he has received for being part of the Joe Rogan-led podcast manosphere, how he thinks this new Trump era could actually be bad for comedy, why he believes his triumphant set at the Roast of Tom Brady marked the night “wokeness died”—and his inspired idea for which “GOAT” Netflix should roast next.
We also go deep on his controversial Trump interview, the “Rorschach test” reactions from the two ends of political spectrum, why he declined an invitation to attend Trump’s inauguration, his biggest disappointment in the administration so far, and a lot more.
“I think we need more people talking about the importance of fatherhood,” Schulz says of his new special, before immediately tying the topic to a pet issue of the manosphere crowd. “I think that’s the last thing missing in the masculinity movement in America. There’s all these guys preaching about masculinity and, like, berating OnlyFans girls on their podcasts and none of them have kids. I think that’s just such a huge part in being a man.”
Schulz spends much of the special unpacking his and his wife’s struggles to conceive a child. One stand-out moment from the special comes when a doctor delivers the bad news that his sperm sample is graded a C+. On stage, Schulz jokes that first he “blacked out” and then came back with the “knee-jerk reaction, ‘You didn’t even taste it!’”
But in real life, Schulz wasn’t laughing. “Some of these things that are in the special are funny in the moment. As brutal as they are, they are funny, even in the moment, I’m thinking, oh, this is kind of hilarious.” he says now. “That was not funny.”
After trying every non-invasive approach available, including wearing baggy underwear and quitting drinking and smoking weed for two months, he got his sperm checked again and it actually got worse. “The doctor’s like, we’ve never seen this s--t before,” he says, trying out one more joke that didn’t make it into the special: “My sperm is like an NBA player in the ’80s, they like to play a little high.”
Schulz says his “ego” wanted to keep trying naturally for a year. “I can do it, I can get her pregnant, I’m the f---ing man,” he remembers thinking. “That would be the archetype of masculinity, and I think the real thing to do is just protect your wife and do this thing that doesn’t cause pain and suffering for your relationship.”
They ended up doing IVF—a process that both provided plenty more material for his comedy and became a linchpin of why he wanted to have Trump on his podcast—and had a healthy baby girl just over a year ago.
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by following The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
What struck me about your special is you’re known for, I think some pretty shock-value kind of jokes, and there are plenty of those in the special. But you do also get very vulnerable and very personal as well. How did you think about balancing that and sort of pleasing your audience, that wants a certain thing from you, but also maybe showing a different side of yourself, or being more the real you versus a character that you could sometimes slip into?
I never see myself being like a character on stage. I see myself being the most exaggerated version of the funny part of me. But I never think about what the audience wants. I try to make every special different. Early in my career, I just didn’t think my life was interesting. I thought my opinions were way more interesting than my life. So I talked about culture. So this thing was the only thing I could think about. The only thing in my mind was like this difficulty in getting pregnant.
I saw in an interview that you did recently, you said “Censorship is good for comedy.” I was curious. If you could expand on that a little bit. What did you mean?
Censorship separates the men from the boys, if you’re a cultural critic. The greatest cultural critics come about during times of censorship, right? Because you need a really sharp sword to slice it as thin as it possibly can. Now we’ve entered the age of like you can kind of say whatever you want. There’s no real words that are taboo.
Do you mean just in the last couple of months?
I think the last couple of years. And definitely with Trump winning. And the pendulum could swing back because of that. It just depends how much people abuse “Say whatever you want.”
It doesn’t feel as scary to say stuff now? Or it doesn’t feel like you’re going to get in trouble or canceled?
When I was doing Trump jokes years ago, people thought I was a right-wing MAGA lunatic, in the comedy clubs. And I was, like, shocked. I was like, wait, isn’t this what we do? This is the point of comedy, we take the thing that you can’t say and find a really funny unique angle in it, and we make it funny, so that people can digest that thing. This is what we’ve been doing forever. But the emotional volatility was just insane at that point, I get it. But to me, I wasn’t going to stop doing comedy the way I wanted to do it because culture got sensitive. That was the whole impetus for putting things out on YouTube and Instagram. It’s like, I could change the way I do comedy, or I could find a place where I could still do my comedy the same way. And it turns out people really wanted that type of comedy.
I’m fascinated by celebrity roasts as the one place where it seems like none of these rules apply, and you can do whatever you want. And maybe that’s all of comedy now, but for a while it seems like, even during the time when you felt like censorship was more present, the roasts were just immune from all of that.
I think roasting has this baked in history. The offensiveness is grandfathered in. So there are people who are going to be upset by roast jokes, of course, but because it’s specifically called a roast, the intention is to make that person feel bad, and that person is signing up to feel bad and be humiliated. It’s a beautiful concept. I love it as part of American culture. I love the fact that we do it to the president. It’s awesome that we would humble the most powerful person in the land, and the fact that they would subscribe to that is like one of the most beautiful things about American culture.
I will say Trump is the one president of late who has not subjected himself to that. He refused. What does that say about him?
Yeah, that’s whack. I don’t like that. I completely disagree with that. Now I also think there’s a thing where you have to pick a comedian who’s going to be kind of fair about it. If you’re picking some big-time lefty, I get it. If you’re picking someone who’s a little bit more centrist, who’s going to go at both sides, then I think that maybe he’d be a little bit more open to it. But maybe he just really just doesn’t like getting skewered. But I don’t like that he doesn’t do it. I think he should do it.
So now the roasts are back in a big way, and I think you had a great set at the Tom Brady roast last year. What was that night like for you?
That roast was phenomenal. I feel like you could even mark that as the point where—and this term is so belabored—but wokeness died.
That was the night wokeness died?
Yes, exactly. That was the turning point in culture. That was the biggest network, the biggest stage, the biggest people, and nobody held back at all. All the words were said. Everybody felt comfortable. It was reviewed as an amazing success. It wasn’t lambasted in the media as this misogynistic, hateful, racist thing. Now, in order to have a moment like that, wokeness has to be dead, for like a year before that. Because live events are always a very delayed reflection of culture.
It does make me think that the venue and the setup matters a lot, because then you think about your friend Tony Hinchcliffe telling the jokes at the Trump event a few months later. People at the time were like, “This is going to kill Trump’s campaign,” and that obviously didn’t happen. But the reaction that it got was very different from the reaction that the roast got, and I think it probably has to do a lot with context, right?
Yeah, but I mean, Tony’s bigger than ever now. It was probably brutal for him to go through emotionally, but in terms of cancel culture, he’s got the biggest show on the internet right now. He got even bigger! So there’s a perfect example. If that’s five years ago, I don’t know if that happens. Maybe the weight of the cancellation does negatively impact him, who knows? But I think Trump winning and doing incredibly well with Puerto Ricans makes everybody just go, OK. Honestly, you know, who really helped with that? Jon Stewart was, I think, the most effective person.
He was very sympathetic towards Tony, he said he was funny.
Defended him! He was like, this is a roast comedian, you hired a roast comedian. He’s doing a roast up there. We all laughed when he said way more offensive jokes about Tom Brady and the rest of the guys a few weeks ago. And Jon has much cache with liberals, centrists, even conservatives to be honest, but especially with liberals. And it’s like, OK, well, if he says it’s OK then maybe we don’t have to crush him for it. It’s not that you’re not going to get s–-t. You can do something that people find offensive, and like they’ll s--t all over you. But it’s not an immediate, like, everything in your life is gone, which it felt like it was maybe eight years ago.
Do you think there will be another big Netflix roast this year?
It just depends on if they can get somebody worthy of it. When you call it the “GOAT” roast, there’s only a handful of people that can do it. Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan. You know who could do it? I bet Zuckerberg would do it.
You think he would do that?
I think he would, because his rebrand is brilliant. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but he’s cool now.
I guess, if you think that’s cool.
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s cooler than before!
He’s trying very hard, I would say.
You don’t buy it?
Not really, no. I’m just not sure how authentic it comes off that he’s dressing this way and acting this way.
So you think everybody in entertainment is authentic? Is that what you’re saying? You’re adorable, Matt, you little cutie pie. So here’s the deal, OK? You got to compare him to other tech guys.
Like Elon Musk?
Yeah, like, I see him training with MMA dudes. I see him calling out Elon to an actual fight, and then Elon’s like, “I’m busy.” So I see some cool cachet, so he’s now at the point where you know him for other things than just, oh, he’s this Facebook guy and Facebook’s looking at your data. There’s not just negative sentiment around him where, if you went back 10 years, it’s like he stole this company from those f---ing good-looking twins and that’s it.
Well, he’s in with your crew now, so maybe he’ll do the roast. That would be something, I would like to see that.
I’m very curious if that would happen. That is interesting. And he’s got enough baggage where it would be good. You need baggage. You can’t be too clean. And the beautiful thing about a roast, I don’t know if people realize this, but it’s like, once you do that to yourself publicly, put yourself in front of everybody for public shame, you don’t gotta address that s--t ever again. It’s cathartic. We dealt with that in front of a hundred million people, and everybody laughed. We moved on, it’s fine now. Once you joke about something, it must not be that serious. And that is the subversive power of the roast.
So let’s talk about the Trump interview. What were your goals going in? What did you want to accomplish by having him on?
I had three things that I wanted to talk to him about specifically. I wanted him to put his support behind IVF. Obviously, that’s how I was able to have my kid. And because of the abortion ban that he definitely spearheaded, people were using that in certain states to also eliminate IVF. And I wanted him to reject that notion and come out and support IVF, which he did, which was amazing. And I think they recently passed an executive order to expand access to it. So let’s see what that ends up becoming. Then it was the end of the foreign wars for profit. I don’t think that American companies need to make millions of dollars off of these proxy wars with innocent people just getting f---ing mutilated. And then lastly, it was just a pathway, some empathy, maybe a pathway to citizenship for illegals that are working here, not committing crimes, not doing any of that kind of stuff, but like the people who have been—
Yeah, that one’s not going so well.
Not at all, not at all. So that was the objective going in there. I mean, also the objective going in there was to understand who he is, as a person. I spent a lot of time talking to his son [Donald Trump Jr.], Dana White, just anybody else that I could to get a sense of who he is as a man. What is he like when he’s not performing or on? What is he as a human being?
Do you feel like you saw that when you interacted with him in person?
Yeah, I felt like on the pod, I think we did the best of that, to be honest with you, just like letting him talk about his kids, and just understanding that relationship and just having the walls come down. And I did wrestle with it. I understood by doing it I’m politicizing myself. Politics is ugly, bro, it just f---ing sucks.
You said before people thought you were this MAGA comedian, and I think this probably adds to that right?
Of course, of course.
Are you OK being seen that way now?
What I’ve realized is, you’ve gotta have empathy for how people see you based on the way that we consume information. You can’t be angry that people didn’t do an eight hour deep dive and find out exactly how nuanced you are and like what your thought process is. I grew up in a f---ing dance family and an arts family in New York City. Do you really think I’ve been right-wing my entire life? No, I’ve been a Democrat my entire life. As a kid, I was pushed left because of how censorious the right was, waving their fingers, don’t use cuss words, this is too sexual. I’m like, “Yo, I want to be like the Democrats, they got girls sucking d--k in the Oval Office.” They were cool as s--t. And now it’s the opposite. The Republicans are getting pussy left and right, they’re the ones who say crazy jokes. And then the Democrats are a little bit more censorious, they’re like “This is going too far,” which is the burden of being progressive. Don’t get me wrong, It is a much harder thing to push us into progress, which we need.
What was so interesting to me about the interview that you did with Trump, and the reaction to it, was that it had these very different takeaways from the two different sides. There were a lot of people on the right who were Trump fans, who said, this is so great, we’re seeing him in this new light, look how human he looks, and all that. And then there were people on the left, who really latched on to some moments where it seemed like maybe you were making fun of him. Like the part where he says he’s basically a truthful person and you laugh in his face, which became a Kamala Harris ad on social media. What was your takeaway from that experience of seeing it taken so differently by the different sides?
This is beautiful. This is a perfect example of how life is a Rorschach test. A lot of times we say “You have to see it to believe it,” and that is the complete wrong statement. You have to believe it to see it. Whatever you believe, you will see, simple as that. So when I saw both sides clipping the exact same things, saying they show how amazing their candidate was because of it, I was like, “Oh wow, we did it. We did the perfect interview.” The right is like, “This is amazing, look how incredible he is!” And the left is like, “See? He’s not amazing. He’s not incredible at all!” And it’s the same interview. So I was like, whoa, because what I thought was gonna happen is, we were gonna do this interview, and then we were gonna get made radioactive and get s–-t on. But we were celebrated by both sides.
You’ve kind of dismissed the idea that you helped Trump win in any way. But would it bother you if it did?
That’s a good question. Nobody’s asked me that one. No, it wouldn’t bother me. Not at all. But I don’t think that we did. I think that America had made their mind up, and I think that a lot of people assumed that the vote for Trump was because he’s this populist superstar that everybody loves and they’re obsessed with. And I think what they’re not calculating is, there are a lot of people that were unhappy with the status quo and they were voting to reject the current administration, which seemingly was saying that they weren’t going to make any changes.
You didn’t endorse him the way that Joe Rogan did. Did you consider that at all before the election?
I don’t believe in endorsing candidates. I’m a comedian. And I didn’t want to go to the inauguration either. They were very kind to invite me, but it wasn’t for me.
You didn’t want to sit with Theo Von and the whole crew there?
I mean, hanging with them I’m sure it would have been a lot of fun, but my feeling is, I’m a comedian. Now you guys are in power, you guys are going to get these jokes.
You don’t want to be seen as part of the club.
The tribe, yeah. I like where I stand. We offered Kamala to come on the pod as well. We offered every Democrat, and they all had something to do. But if that interview helped Kamala become president, to your same question, I wouldn’t feel guilty at all. Something about what she’s saying, her messaging is resonating with the American people. I can’t make you answer questions good. I can’t make you engaging to an audience. I can’t make you feel like you’re giving people hope. So I’m going to ask you things that I’m concerned about that are important to me, because I feel if I don’t take on that opportunity, I can’t really complain that much about the administration. Let’s say they did get rid of IVF, and I had the opportunity to sit down with the most powerful person on the planet and tell him how important it was to me? I’m not saying that it swayed him in any way. But I could, maybe. So I would feel like, now, I’m just one of these people crying on the internet, but doesn’t really do anything. I was actually in a position to potentially influence somebody.
And he obviously valued coming on your show and reaching your listeners.
Yeah, so that to me was, I think, the most important part of the decision-making. You know, a lot of people talk about, “I would never platform that person.” It’s like, yeah, but you don’t have the opportunity so nobody’s really worried about what you think. Once you’re given the opportunity, let’s see how you feel, because you might feel really strongly about something, and you will have the opportunity to talk to the most powerful person on the planet about it. Not doing that, I think in a lot of ways, makes me feel like you don’t really care that much about that issue that you say you care about.
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
