Brazilian Comedian Was Sued Over Jokes (Lost $150,000) | Joe Rogan

So now when you were doing stand-up and you started to get in some trouble for bits. A lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. How much trouble? Yeah, a lot of money. I spent a lot of money. Really? I lost a lot of lawsuits. I lost a lot of lawsuits because of jokes. Really? Lawsuits? Yeah. So who was suing you? The people who felt offended. So people in the audience? Artists. When I make fun of a celebrity. They would sue you? Yeah. They can sue you. They can get money out of you. Really? Politicians. They can get money out of you. No, politicians? So who sued you? You know, I got this lawsuit that really put me in trouble. It was because of a singer. She was a singer and kind of almost killed my career. Yeah, actually it did. That's why I'm here. So yeah, I got in a huge lawsuit and it looks dumb when you explain, oh, it's just a singer, but it became all this talk about freedom of speech and what comedians can say and what they cannot say. Are you allowed to feel offended? And now there's like law school talks about the lawsuit that I had. Law school discussions about your case. Yeah, because I made fun. It was a shitty joke. That's the problem. You know, it's not because of lawsuits. I want to be sued by the good ones because I don't want to be known by a bad joke. Of course. Yeah. It's just like I was saying this. It's just like you meeting Eddie Murphy, one of the greatest comedians ever and they think, oh, there's Dr. Doolito. You don't want that. You know, this is the same thing with me. That joke was a shitty joke and she was like pregnant on TV and she was like doing a story on TV. She was the host of this huge TV show like The Daily Show. The Daily Show meeting The View. It was something like that. And in the middle of the thing she was there and my friend asked me, oh, she's pregnant and do you think she's still hot? And I said she's so hot that I would fuck her in her baby. And it's a shitty joke. But that was live. It was like right on time. Everybody laughed and there was no problem. But next week there was this huge thing because she was like her husband was very influential and her husband was managing Ronaldo, which was one of the biggest soccer players ever. So that was this whole thing. The TV show lost sponsors and they want to suspend me from the TV show because of a joke that I did. She didn't tell me to apologize at first, but they suspended me. So I quit the show. So you just apologized and I decided not to apologize because I felt that after like 10 years doing stand up or 12 years doing stand up, it was important for me to like put my feet on the ground and say, you know, if we step back right now, what am I going to do in like two years? This is important for all of us. It's important for comedy. So I lost lawsuits. I lost movies. I lost a lawsuit. So what did they what did they rule in the lawsuit? Like what was the ruling? I offended her honor. Or yeah, it was something like that. She was like, uh, uh, people can sue you. The suing is part of the democracy. It's okay to sue you, but to lose a lawsuit is that's the problem. I lost like $150,000 or, or did he, but in Brazil was 350,000. So if you're a lawyer and you get $10,000 a month, you get 10,000 has a month. So he's, you don't translate money. So I lost a lot of money, but the thing has got me a huge headache and uh, he was, he was, he was bad. It was bad just from that one. Just for that one. But you, you saw other lawsuits. Yeah. Also because I did like a rape joke and uh, I, I got like this women movement, like trying to break, break into my bar and break my, the door of my comedy club. And that was like, that was, uh, well, but the discussion was more important than the problem itself. I kind of, it was, it's the discussion about freedom of speech. And that was, that was huge. What is freedom of speech like in Brazil? Is it the same break? I mean, obviously we have the first amendment. You have the first amendment. You have something that we don't, we don't have that. They don't, they don't have that in Canada. We don't have that. I had Mike Ward on in Canada. Do you know his story? Yeah. I know he's the guy who, he made a joke about a sick boy that the boy was still alive years later. I thought it was. And you know, it was just a bad joke about this guy still being alive and can he get his money back? Cause like, cause they donated money. It's like, it's a fucked up joke, but it's supposed to be a fucked up joke. I was doing it in a nightclub situation where people are drinking. They say things that are inappropriate and that's the art form. He got sued and he's still in the process of it right now. There's another case in Vancouver where these women were heckling. They were yelling things out during the show and then the comedian went on stage and berated the women and then the women sued and won. Cause they were lesbians and he made some lesbian jokes about them at their own expense. And so then they took him to court and they won. They won what? They won some judgment where he had to pay them. Jimmy, how much was it? I want to say it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000. $30,000. Yeah. And for this gentleman, this comedian, I think that was a lot of money. 42. $42,000. Yeah. That's a lot of fucking money for an opening comedian. I mean, he wasn't a famous guy. So you know, that might be two years worth for him. Who knows? Of course. Yeah. Lots of a lot of money as well. So Canada is similar. Canada does not have freedom of speech the same way the United States does. Yeah. So that's why I feel when I do comedy here and I feel that people get uncomfortable about a joke or two, that's when I get stressed. It's like you have the freedom of saying those things. Yes. Like I have this joke that I say it's about the N word as well. Maybe I have to change my content a little. But I have this joke that I do. It's like when I arrived here, someone said to me, you know, don't use the N word or people are going to kick your ass. But they never told me what the N word was. So for the past six months, I have been avoiding all wars with the other end. And the other day a guy came up to me and said, can I fuck your ass? And I was like, maybe. And when I say this joke, it's like I have to set up. It's crazy because when I first did, it was like a fucking thing. Everybody got uncomfortable. Yeah. But now I set up as a misunderstanding because I'm a foreigner. Yes. I'm free to do everything. Yes. Yeah. So I kind of, I found a way of doing it. You found a way in. Yeah. So that's, it's crazy. And I watch you a lot and I see a lot of people here. I saw the other guy, this guy, this guy did an interview with you and he did this show in a college and he did a joke and people took him out of stage. Yeah, Nimesh Patel. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy because you built the freedom to do that. Yes. And now you're discussing if you can or if you cannot. It's only in colleges though. When, children today, and I want to call them children, they do not understand the danger in suppressing free speech. And so they think that what they're doing is by suppressing free speech and changing the way people communicate, what they're doing is making the world a better place. They think they're signaling their virtue and making the world a better place at the same time. But it's just ignorance. They just don't understand that you can't, you can't necessarily, you can't control people. And to think that by just getting upset and silencing someone and removing them from the stage that that ends the conversation, it doesn't, it reinforces their position. It says, okay, look, I was right about you fucking snowflakes and you little babies. Like you can't even understand when things are uncomfortable that it doesn't necessarily mean it's negative and that like you're like try to put yourself in someone's position and see what he's saying. And in Nimesha's case, it's actually kind of funny. First of all, he's a very open-minded guy, very progressive. He's not in any way a racist. And his joke was that people say that being gay is a choice. And he said, I know it's not a choice because I have a friend who's black and gay and there's no way he would choose both of those things. And it was just him being funny. It's a funny joke. And they were like, cut, get the fuck off the stage. Like, what? Come on, man. You don't think that's funny? And it's also coming from an Indian man who I'm sure has experienced racism. So the whole thing is it's very fascinating to see young kids who are growing up in this PC culture bubble. And you know, and sometimes people say on this podcast that we talk about it too much. And maybe they're correct. Maybe sometimes it's annoying if you're listening to cubicle and you hear me talking too much about this. But it's because it's an issue that's very dear to my heart because I understand the dangers of not being able to communicate freely. And I also understand what happens when if you suppress free communication, the people that you're suppressing, they're going to get more and more angry and radical. And it just makes their position that they feel more justified in their perhaps even people who are racist could perhaps be more racist or people who are angry about gay people will become more angry about it if you suppress their ability to express themselves. That's when born those little movements, neo-nazi movements, little groups and little groups on the web and the deep web when discussion, it's like when you for when it's forbidden, I think is you kind of forgive them the power that they didn't have. I think so. And I think this is something that we're really just getting to understand now. You know, I have had a few conversations about this recently with the head of Twitter and with an independent journalist, Tim Poole last week. And I think what people just started to kind of understand, even though everyone's uncomfortable about this is we're still trying to figure this out. Social media is only 10 plus years old. This is an incredibly new experience for us. And I don't think everybody knows exactly how to proceed. And this idea that you could just ban people and then just ban people for life. If they say something that makes people uncomfortable, if they say an opinion that you don't agree with, ban them for life. And we're experiencing that right now. We're trying to figure out what to do and how to fix this and how to mitigate it without endorsing people, harassing people and endorsing people, threatening people and giving out their address and their phone number and things like that. So it's a process that we're all going through right now. It is a learning process for the whole country. But the thing that annoys me a little bit is that I live in another country and I see how things are difficult and how much time I spend explaining to people what I was doing. And for you guys, it's like I was having the same problems that Lenny Bruce was having like a long time ago. And you guys built that. To have that discussion, it's like it is important because that's the way the world evolved. But at the same time, it feels old. It feels old because you understand the history of it in America. It feels old because you already had that discussion a long time ago. Are you going to keep having this conversation when you think that you finally feel free to say whatever you want? Now there's people trying to hold you back. It's crazy. Well, it's not really effective. See there's people that are angry about it. There is on social media, there's certainly people that are being effective with it. But in stand-up comedy, there's blowback and pushback. But it's not very effective. For the top guys, for guys like Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr, it actually makes their stand-up better because people are so tired of all this shit. They're so tired of PC culture. They're so tired of being told what they should and shouldn't think is funny and what is acceptable and not acceptable. There's a lot of weird shit going on right now.