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About 25 minutes into his new stand-up special Cole Hearted, which starts streaming today on Netflix, comedian Deon Cole glances down at the piece of paper he’s removed from his pocket and asks the audience this question: “Should a dude hold a door for a dyke?”
When the immediate reaction is a mix of loud laughs and uncomfortable groans, Cole proceeds to explain that he told that joke not because he thinks it’s all that funny—objectively, it’s not—but rather “to see what kind of audience this is.” He adds, “That’s America right now when it comes to comedy, everybody’s so timid about everything.”
Ultimately, Cole gets an applause break when he declares, “Comedy is the last raw form of expression and if you take that away, everything’s fucking gone to shit.”
When I ask Cole about that moment during this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast, he says, “I said that word on purpose in order to see the…
