The comic who can save America

Also: A reader gets beaten in NYC and the police don't care

CBS ran the Golden Globes Award show hosted by Jo Koy against an NFL game on Sunday night. The reviews were not pretty for the DEI comedian. Even HuffPost dumped on him.

Koy: “The big difference between the NFL and the Golden Globes. On the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift.”

Then the camera cut to Miss Swift in the audience.

Get it? No? What? You didn’t laugh because it was lame?

Koy: “Yo, I got the gig 10 days ago. You want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up. I wrote some of these, and those are the ones you’re gonna laugh at.”

Well, it was a nice career while it lasted. He needs to check into the Michael Richards Clinic for Comics Who Yell at the Audience.

HuffPost’s review was funnier than he was.

It said, “Many of his jokes were in bad taste and loaded with sexism or insensitivities. It was painful to watch as he reduced Barbie to a movie about a plastic doll ‘with big boobies.’”

I must have missed the part where Barbie built the first atomic bomb.

Koy’s problem is that he was born in Tacoma and not Canada, the country that produces more laughs per capita than anywhere in the world. Canada has given us Phil Hartman, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, John Candy and of course, Ben Bankas.

OK, you likely have not heard of that last guy. He’s from Toronto. He’s in his early 30s and trying to break through. He’s got 92,000 followers on Instagram and 3,000 listeners to his podcast. It can take a while to break through. Hartman almost threw in the towel at 36 but a few years later, SNL called and he broke through.

I don’t care how many followers Bankas has. He is funny. Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld gave him national exposure to strut his stuff. Benny Johnson is promoting the comedian on Twitter.

Bankas goofed on Justin Castreau’s she-cession remark by dressing as a tranny (that’s the picture of Bankas in drag).

Bankas: “As you know, women get paid less than men because men have to pay women to like them.”

His standups are funny.

Bankas: “You know how our country’s falling apart. And then you know the woke people are like, the country was built on racism. It’s like maybe we should do more of that. Maybe that was working. Like the railroad wasn’t built by the LGBTs, I’ll tell you.”

Bankas to a white woman in the audience in a mask: “Are you wearing that for safety? Or just to let everybody know who you’re voting for?”

He took another shot at her when he asked an Indian couple in the audience how many kids they had.

Bankas: “Four. Dude, they’re taking the fuck over. Can we just admit it? Four kids. (Points to mask lady.) This woman’s had more than four abortions for God’s sake. She’s had as many abortions as she’s had doses of the vaccine.

“Eight.”

The woman laughed.

Bankas: “People call white people colonizers like that’s some kind of an insult. Bro, that’s kind of a big accomplishment.”

He’s below the mainstream media’s radar right now and that’s a good thing because it gives him experience. He has learned to think on his feet. He needs that skill because when he starts to make it, they will try everything to break him.

Bankas opened a show in the capital of Canada: “I’m really happy to be here in the Muslim Caliphate of Ottawa. I think all the Muslims are coming here because Parliament looks like a mosque.”

Race is the third rail for white people. We cannot touch it because we never will win and we always will lose.

This guy skips rope with it. Consider his chat one night with front-row audience members.

Bankas: “You’re half-white, right? You’re Korean. You Chinese? You could have fooled me. (Inaudible as she speaks.) She goes ‘I’m the only Chinese of this row.’ She’s Vietnamese. You guys are Filipino. I love this. All the Asian people are up front.”

The woman who arranged this later said after the show, “We brought all the Asians with us.” Someone with her said, “She brought the Asian Crew.”

They were there to hear his Chinese accent.

He said, “Asian people love when I do the Accent. It’s weird. I have fans in Toronto who are from China, right? And they come and they love it. ‘I love it. Freedom of speech. Do it again.’”

Then he explained it, “If you’ve ever done sensitivity training at work, this is like de-sensitivity training.”

That de-sensitivity training is what America needs now. I remember when they tried to cancel Speedy Gonzalez over racial stereotypes. Hispanics protested because Speedy is a hero who always beats Sylvester. Speedy is the Bugs Bunny of Mexico.

Sure, not every Asian likes Bankas and his Accent. If something offends you, avoid it.

Whether Bankas makes it to America is a question that I cannot answer. He already has pissed off the wrong people in Canada.

On July 27, 2023, TNC reported, “Several venues have cancelled bookings by Canadian comedian Ben Bankas ahead of an anticipated cross-Canada tour after he posted a skit of Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow on social media.

“The controversial comedy skit mocking the mayor led to a coordinated social media mob intent on demanding venues who were willing to host Bankas to drop him from their line up.

“Bankas also ran for mayor in the latest mayoral election and used his candidacy to ridicule woke and progressive policies.”

I don’t see SNL or The Simpsons hiring him like they did with Hartman. Maybe it is just as well because both lost their sparkle when they turned 30. He’ll have to cut his own path to succeed. He looks like he can do it.

***

We need comic relief because reality has become a horror movie.

The other day, I wrote of big cities, “A look at their mayors shows a bunch of Angela Davises and Huey Newtons who allow hoodlums to loot stores, knock out Asians and Jews, and otherwise terrorize their towns. Democrats have turned the great American cities into third world hellholes with sections reserved for drug zombies who live on the streets.”

A reader replied:

Hi, Don. I continue to enjoy reading your column. In reference to your Jan. 5th column, ‘President Nothing,’ my wife and I were in NYC on November 30th, walking out of dinner back to our hotel, which was a five minute walk away. It was 10:30 pm in Midtown (43rd and 5th Ave).

My wife had stopped to laugh at a joke I’d just told, falling a few feet behind me when I was slammed into from behind, put in a headlock and taken down to the pavement, breaking my right (dominant) arm in three places.

The perp was a stylishly dressed black male with dreadlocks, matching ski coat and parachute pants and a black backpack with red flames on it.

After about a minute, I stood up, stunned, took one step to chase after the guy who skipped across 42nd to punch out a white woman, knocking her out from what I could tell, before the pain radiated up my arm, telling me I’d be in no condition to do anything.

My wife flagged down a female cop sitting in an NYPD mini sitting in the middle of 5th and in a clear voice conveyed that I’d been attacked, injured and that the perp was heading down 5th.

The cop said ‘Call 911’ before driving off and turning onto 42nd St, obviously not caring to see what kind of aid I might need and likely figuring it wasn’t worth pursuing a perp she couldn’t handle who would only be right back out on the street if, by some miracle, she could have handled.

So, no robbery. All mayhem, pain, and a $70K surgery to repair the breaks, with canceled trips and an incredible loss of productivity at work as further collateral.

My wife, a Latina, met, married and lived in NYC for years before moving to LA and now Miami, having left NYC because of the taxes and weather and then LA, ironically, because of the taxes and crime.

Since George Floyd, NYC has become a much more blatantly lawless border town with an apathetic police force comprised of demoralized officers or new cops who self-selected into the profession after standards were lowered.

I didn’t need to go through this to know the outcomes of ‘defund the police’ and similar anti-law-and-order rhetoric turned policy. Apparently, the only way for the liberal voters of NYC to understand the implications is to experience when the mob or the mayhem comes for them, as what Jewish voters are experiencing for themselves now.

Good luck to that city. You deserve everything coming to you based on what you voted for.

As an aside, my friends asked if I bothered to file a police report on the assault. My response is that we already tried the moment it happened, and it was met with indifference.

Keep up the wonderful work.

New York City is not healthy for children and other living things.

That’s no joke.