Daniel Sloss’s new HBO special, aptly titled Daniel Sloss: X, keeps with the Scottish comedian’s tradition of straddling the line between ballsy and nuanced while deftly confronting tough issues surrounding sexuality and gender. In under 90 minutes, Sloss deconstructs toxic masculinity from the inside out while drawing from his own personal experiences and observations that he’s gleaned from those around him. He does so through his own brand of outrageously funny and thought-provoking humor while declining, even for a moment, to avoid even the most uncomfortable subject matter.
Sloss was gracious enough to sit down with us to discuss the evolution of this set, which dives into some bleak territory but remains as bitingly funny as his many Conan appearances and a couple of Netflix specials. We also dove into the timely subject of cancel-culture when it comes to old, terrible opinions and, most importantly, how Sloss hopes to help men do more to prevent sexual assault.
Man, I really hate to just start out with flattery here.
Oh pleaaaaase do. Please start with flattery.
This special revolves around what’s probably the best white-male take on toxic masculinity that I’ve ever witnessed.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
You’ve performed this show hundreds of times in various countries. Do you tweak some of your jokes on masculinity if you’re in unfriendly territory?
Yeah, I did that last year when doing this show in Romania in a comedy club there twice. In the first show, there was f*cking 85% men in the audience. In the part of the show with the sex-education stuff, that was edgy for Romania because they’re very Christian, so they don’t have sex education. So when I was talking about that, I was like, “Holy f*cking sh*t!” This would have been making people uncomfortable, and I was already challenging their ideas. I cannot imagine trying to address rape culture and rape and sexual assault and the #MeToo movement with them. And my best friend, who is also a comedian, was like, “Why didn’t you do the end stuff?” And I said, “Oh, wrong audience. I’d only make it awkward, knowing it wouldn’t make much difference.” A woman in the club [was] like, “That’s why you should have done it. If you’re scared to do it in front of them, then you don’t believe in what you’re saying enough to say it, and you’re just pandering, or you’re a coward.” And I don’t want either of those things to be true, so I did it in the second show. It went well enough, and it was definitely uncomfortable, but I’m glad I did it, and since then, I just make sure that I don’t back down.
That first show must have been extremely short.
It was really short, so I put in some jokes from an old show. Then again, the audience doesn’t know when the show’s supposed to end, so even if it feels like it ends abruptly for me, they can’t tell.
This special is launching at a time when a lot of people in the U.S. aspire to wokeness, although I’m not sure how well we succeed?
It’s just that we’re living in a time of polar opposites. Here’s the thing that I know about both the left and the right wing: they both don’t like sexual assault. And for the people in the middle, whose voices are never represented, there are these conversations being had where people are scared to talk about it. I don’t think America is particularly worse than anywhere else. I just think you’re going through a time. Everyone is hyperaware, and tensions are really f*cking hot.
Your bit about people being called out for old and “sh*tty” opinions and bad ones is certainly timely. Is that based on any particular public figure?
It’s not for any specific person, but it f*cking happens all the time now. You should hear the stuff I said five years ago. Like, I have had horrible opinions before, and I’ll probably have them again. It’s so weird with comedians because most of us have spent our lives on stage talking about how deeply flawed we are, and somehow, people find a flaw we haven’t pointed out. I’ve grown up, and I’ve been able to look back, and what happens when you attack people for old opinions, you make them regress and go back and defend your naive self, to say, “I wasn’t a bad person, I was just stupid.” So you find yourself defending an opinion you don’t have anymore. With James Gunn, his jokes weren’t f*cking funny. I’m a comedian, so I can tell you objectively that his jokes from ten or twenty years ago were very bad jokes. Were they enough to get fired? Absolutely not. A lot of his jokes in Guardians of the Galaxy were dead f*cking funny. People grow, and people change, and if people say that isn’t who they are anymore, I’m inclined to agree with them.
Gunn’s a prime example for how the cycle goes for unearthed bad tweets: apologies, firing, backlash, apologies, rehiring … and possibly redemption?
I just don’t think that any of us should be looking for redemption. Too many people are being canceled for things that too many people consider arbitrary and unimportant. People say, “Look at this awful thing.” Everything’s awful, and nothing’s awful, and I think we’re allowed to say, “Don’t pander to the crowd.” Especially when it comes to apologies. The reason I would never give an apology is that there’s not any point. We know they’re not accepted. The reason people want someone to actually apologize? In comedy, let’s say I make a joke that offends someone. First of all, I didn’t write the joke to offend that person, I wrote a joke about a topic, and then I told that joke. If it happened to offend one person, that’s because it was personal to them, and they took it as a personal attack. And that’s on them. If you can take a joke that a comedian says on a tour personally, then you’re the most narcissistic person in the world. Somehow, you’re even more narcissistic than the narcissist onstage.
What would you say to people who might misinterpret your set and believe that you’re anti-masculinity?
Well, I’m not anti-masculinity. I enjoy being a f*cking man, and I go through struggles that men go through and many women don’t. I don’t get to speak on behalf of women’s struggles, but I do know what it’s like to be a man, and I know how I learn things. And when you yell at me, even when you’re right, I don’t listen. That’s not a good thing, that’s not a strong personality trait, and it’s not one I’m proud of. It’s something I’m working on, but it’s there. Now, having lots of male friends, I know that this is true for a lot of men. As necessary as it feels sometimes to want to yell at men … [it] should change the way men think, and in a perfect world, we’d listen, and we’d change, but that’s not the world we live in. So I know how I came to write and my conclusions, after people patiently explained to me that I was a f*cking idiot. And through baby steps and empathy and emotion, people held my hand, and it was a slow process. I remember how deeply flawed I was before this, and it might not seem so obvious now.
So with this special, I didn’t want it to be a show with yelling at men. It would be very easy for me to get a standing ovation from a crowd by just going on about why I think sexual assault is wrong and how men aren’t doing enough. And men would feel isolated and attacked. Not rationally because they’re not being attacked, but that’s how it would make them feel, and it wouldn’t do anything. So it’s important. In the movement, I can’t do much, but what I can do is talk to men and in a way where I’m not being a dick to men. I’m not making them react viscerally to something.
You’re now fully deconstructing toxic masculinity with this set. Did that evolve from your appearances on Conan, about why you find masculinity so funny, or where did that come from?
It comes from that fact that I’m a bit of a toxic man, and my friends are also toxic men. But for us, we know when to let our toxicity out. It’s just part of who we are, and as awful as it is to think, we all do enjoy farts and pissing and dick-swinging, like we’ve all got to one-up a bit. That’s just toxic men, but when we’re doing it together and around each other, we’re all understanding of that part of ourselves, but we’re not letting it out in society. There’s this bit that’s bad, and we know that it’s bad, and we’re playing with it in what we perceive to be a safe way. Me and my friends, we would never go out to a nightclub and yell and be aggressive with each other, but we will lock ourselves in a house, drink obscene amounts of booze, and then yell at each other and wrestle each other, and that’s stupid, but I don’t think it’s poisonous.
I’m not ashamed of that behavior, and traditionally, my friends and I know what we’re perceived as, especially after the incident last year when one of our female friends was assaulted. Me and all my boys, we felt culpable because he was our friend, and we felt like we missed something. We were friends with the guy for so long, and he did what he did, so how did we f*cking miss it? If you go back to base level, a lot of men feel like their job is to protect, so you’ve got all these dumb, toxic men who feel like they failed to protect someone. That’s a bad chain of thought, but it doesn’t negate how we all felt. I’ve seen a lot of articles and so many things talking about toxic men. I had a visceral reaction to a lot of things, and when I saw that reaction in myself, I thought, when you bring up this stuff, it feels like we’re being attacked. A lot of this show is that our behavior isn’t the best in the world, but let’s not take away these things that aren’t a danger.
I really don’t want to spoil the last 15 minutes of the show.
Yeah, that’s a tough bit to talk around.
But I can say that your female friend, the way you describe her, she seems like a total riot and awesome person.
Oh, she’s the funniest … she’s so good, she’s very, very funny and helped write the last twenty minutes of this because the first iterations of that twenty minutes f*cking bombed.
Since you’re tackling some dark stuff here, this line of yours strikes a real chord: “Making jokes about serious subjects doesn’t mean you don’t take it seriously.”
That’s something I’ve always believed in, but now, people who don’t understand jokes are being allowed to argue about jokes, which is the same as people who didn’t study medicine are being allowed to argue medicine. Jokes are jokes, and sometimes they’re about difficult subjects, but that doesn’t negate the joke. Sometimes you make a joke about something that, to you, is a joke, but to someone else, it’s not a joke, and those people take these things personally. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re overly sensitive and that they’re a bad person, but you don’t choose how it offends people.
Is there any subject that is off limits to you, that you would not joke about?
No. Absolutely not. There are jokes that, to me personally, I wouldn’t talk about because either it doesn’t affect me. If it doesn’t affect me in any shape or form, I don’t know why I’d be talking about it unless I had something constructive to add. The only subjects that I don’t talk about are something that doesn’t affect me yet, unless I had such a different or unique view on it or a funny view. Then I’d absolutely joke about it.
‘Daniel Sloss: X’ debuts on Saturday, November 2, on HBO in the U.S. and Canada.
