You Can't Joke About That by Kat Timpf

Author:Kat Timpf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

But Chanty Marostica—who had spent their career alleging the worst of others—was about to lose their career due to others’ allegations about them.

A piece in Quillette shares a story about how, in 2019, Marostica heard another comic, Matt Billon, tell a joke onstage that Marostica felt was transphobic during a show that both of them were on. I wasn’t there, but my sources (the Internet) say Billon’s joke was something about how men being in women’s sports would make those sports more interesting to watch or something. Marostica heard the joke, wrote their transphobia allegation on a napkin in the greenroom for Billon (and everyone) to see, and then promptly left the show.

Billon was, of course, totally fucked. He had upset the scene’s Brave and Inspiring Hero, and no amount of apologies or attempts to make it right were any match for Marostica’s, uh, compassion. He was smeared as a transphobe, which affected him in terms of Facebook posts saying so, and people denying him opportunities without saying so. No one had his back, presumably out of fear that they’d be dragged down with him. Amid Billon’s cancellation, people continued to rally around Marostica—at least until later in 2019, when Marostica made a post calling a Canadian comedy club’s decision to book “abuser” Louis C.K. a slap in the face to women everywhere and “unsurprising, lazy, and archaic.”

It wasn’t the post itself that caused problems for Marostica. I mean, the post was classic Chanty! Rather, it was the comments on the post accusing Marostica of sexual abuse.

A comedy club employee accused them of abusing several people. A female comic accused them of being a “predator and a gatekeeper,” claiming she herself was one of Marostica’s victims. It’s unclear if any of these online accusations turned into real-world claims, but the Internet took them very seriously.

Eventually Marostica issued a buzzword-salad apology and essentially faded from public discourse. Matt Billon died by suicide in November 2021.

It seems possible that Marostica was a predator parading around as a social justice champion. It’s not the first time someone hasn’t walked the talk. In 2019, New York governor Andrew Cuomo signed multiple pieces of legislation that “strengthened protections against discrimination and harassment,” only to resign over his own sexual harassment scandal in 2021. Chrissy Teigen was once widely celebrated as a woke, progressive darling, largely for her sassy, Twitter-clapback opposition to Mean Bully President Donald Trump and anyone who supported him—even demanding a boycott (some might say, a cancellation) of Equinox and Soul Cycle in response to reports that the companies’ developer planned to host a fundraiser for then-President Trump’s reelection campaign. All of this, of course, for Teigen to still be whining a year later about how devastating her own cancellation was after she got busted DMing a minor—Courtney Stodden, who uses they/them pronouns—and telling them to kill themselves, which sounds suspiciously like something a bully might say. (In Teigen’s defense, she’s so quirky! A model, but quirky!)

I’m not saying that everyone who champions the “safe space” mentality is a predator, or even a jerk.

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