Nick Kroll Disputes Claims ‘Woke Culture’ is Killing Comedy: I Don’t ‘Feel Too Censored’

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Comedian and Big Mouth creator Nick Kroll disputed claims that “woke culture” is killing comedy during an interview with the Daily Beast published Tuesday.

In response to Joker director Todd Phillips’ statement — “Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture” — Kroll told the Beast, “I think that you can still talk about anything and be crazy and not feel too censored.

“It’s a trickier time, but also we have a show where a boy sends a dick pic to his cousin that he made out with,” claimed Kroll. “You can still do and say some pretty crazy, wild shit. But everybody approaches comedy differently and has different objectives and opinions inside of it. And we don’t always get it exactly right and there are people who are not always thrilled about how we are speaking about an issue.”

“I’m of the opinion, personally, we have this ability to listen and communicate with the audience and hear what they have to say. And sometimes, I’m like, I don’t agree with you. And other times I’m like yeah, I hear you, we didn’t get that exactly right,” he continued. “We’ll do better. I’m here to evolve and adapt. And everybody goes and makes their own art and however they want to do it, god bless ‘em. And if they stop making it because it’s not the way they want to do it anymore, go ahead.”

In the interview, Kroll also discussed #MeToo and how his show decided to approach the movement.

“This season was the first season that we wrote after #MeToo had really taken hold and built momentum,” Kroll said. “We wanted to talk about sexual harassment, so I sort of said off-handedly, ‘The bad example would be they do a musical of the movie Disclosure.’ Everyone laughed and then were like, well let’s try to figure out what the actual movie is.”

“We went back to look at other movies that are now ‘problematic,’ like Revenge of the Nerds or Sixteen Candles — movies that we all loved growing up but then you go back and watch and go, these are tricky. But they weren’t quite as funny or didn’t make as much sense,” he expressed. “And Disclosure really speaks to 25 years later, there is a lot of talk of the paranoia of women weaponizing sexual harassment.”