Shane Gillis on the Revolutionary War

You have such a knowledge of history and you're so interested in so many different things that like it layers your comedy in a really cool way. Thanks. It's good, like that George Washington thing, I don't want to say anything, because it's so good. I don't want to say, I don't want to fuck it up, but it's so good. I love that bit. But it's also historically accurate. It's fucking fun. It's fun because it's like it's engaging me and it's entertaining me. It's engaging me, it's interesting, and it's also very funny. It never worked. I remember it in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, one of the open mics where I started, Amish country. There was a joke I always used to try, the guy who was running the mic would always be like, do it, do the Civil War joke. It never worked. It was just about dudes walking to shoot each other. Like you had to walk, it was something about like, you know how racist you had to be to be in the South and wake up one day and be like, wait, they freed who? What the fuck, I'm going up there. And then walking the whole way, you had to sleep at night and wake up and go like, son of a bitch. And then you walked from Alabama to Maryland and you got shot in the head right away. Who had that great joke about that? Where they'll tell you, the Civil War wasn't about slavery. It was about economics. Like yeah, you didn't want to pay the help. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whose joke is that? I don't know. Somebody has that joke. I don't know. People try to act like the Civil War wasn't about- Is it Bill Maher? Maybe. It might be Bill Maher. It's someone good. But I always wanted to do a joke about, because your company, whatever your group was, because they're all from the same town. Yeah. So they would, your division or fucking your brigade would be from your town. All right. So you never left your town. So your brigade back then was everybody you grew up with. Every dude. Your son, your brother, your uncle, and your dad. You're all fucking together. You're marching shoulder to shoulder and you watch your fucking dad get his head ripped off by a cannonball. You just got to keep being like, oh fuck. Whoa, fuck. Cannonball. He knew who was getting hit. You knew who was getting shot. Oh my god. Dude. Yeah. Can you fucking- Can you imagine? Yeah. How about the trench warfare of World War I? Started in Civil War. Siege of Vicksburg, I think. That's when they started trench warfare? They started, yeah. They say the Civil War in America was like the first modern war. This is revolutionary. Dude, it's just getting pop. Oh my god. This is so horrible. Look at this. Walking towards each other like the stupidest way to do it ever. Can you imagine that people did this for some- Oh god! Oh god! Hit in the face with a cannonball. Now that's- the Patriots roughly based off of, I think his name is Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox. And he was kind of an originator of guerrilla warfare. Because they were like, we can't stand and fight the British. God damn it. We're going to have to shoot them and run. Which is pretty funny. Wow, how crazy are the British? Just going to come over here and start marching. Yeah, we're going to walk right at you. The big white stripe on your chest. Red, red jackets. It's 100% a target. Red and white is what you use for archery targets. Yeah. They had to change. They had to change. It's so dumb. Once Rijling took over, they had to be like, we got to switch our uniforms. Isn't that amazing though? You had to think of how much the British Army conquered in the world. Everybody. Everybody. Imagine that their decision to fight was this way. Like how? How did you get from the Mongols to that? How does that happen in a thousand years? The Mongols had all these crazy tactics. They would starve people out, lock them in their cities. They would wait them out slowly. You get artillery and guns, you can just... But this is crazy. That's just running it down your throat, dude. It's like we're going to walk at you. I just can't imagine that someone wouldn't say, hey, isn't there a fucking better way to fight these people? Yeah. Like, let's get behind a tree and then shoot them. I can't even watch this, dude. I can't believe people did that. That's what's so crazy. It's like, how did they survive to become that silly? That's a silly way to fight a war, right? So how did they survive with those strategies? How were they dominant with those strategies? Because they're the only ones with... Well, most of them are colonies where the other guys are... They have fucking cowhide shields and spears, like the Zulu. So they were the only ones with monsters? They have fucking guns. You just... Yeah, you're going to win. You're the only ones with guns. So the British were the only ones with guns? Well, when it came to their colonies, in a land war, they would lose a lot to France, Prussia, those major continental powers, but England always had a navy. They always dominated through naval warfare, and then they had to team up with everyone to stop Napoleon. Dude, once they started shooting cannonballs off boats... That's a problem. That must have been a game changer. It's a problem. When did they start doing that? When they started doing cannonballs from boats, because that's... Bro, that is a motherfucker. Yeah. You got a cannon on a boat? Shooting people without cannons? Boo! Yeah, you just do this all day. How many times did they have to shoot that cannon before they figured out how hard they have to bolt it into the floor? A lot. They shot out the other side of the boat. You got a floating wooden thing with this giant iron tube on it that has explosions go off on it. And just four poor guys from Manchester operating it.