When the Comedy Left Crashed L.A. Politics
How a ragtag group of leftist comedians went up against fossil fuel interests and corporate Democrats—and won.
Comedian James Adomian impersonates Sanders at an L.A. rally, 2018.
“Measure B, Measure B, Measure B, Measure B,” crooned James Adomian, dressed in a suit and an awkward bald wig. His shoulders were hunched over in what was, by all accounts, an excellent impression of Bernie Sanders, and he was singing to the tune of “Let It Be”. He stood on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall in front of over a hundred spectators who had come either because they were supporters of a public banking ballot measure, or because they heard that comedian Eric Andre would be there. The comedians were a crucial part of the Measure B coalition, without whom a rally like this would have been impossible.
It was 2018, and the Left in Los Angeles had not had an electoral victory in living memory. But there was an energy in the air—maybe this time would be different.
***
Comedy’s interference in Los Angeles politics began in earnest with Measure B, a ballot question for voters that would have created a public bank to fund affordable housing and green energy. In November 2018, despite the best attempts of Adomian and Andre—the two aforementioned comedians—Los Angeles Measure B was defeated, 55%-45%. Though the groundwork for success had been laid, it would be another two years before the leftist movement would have another shot at taking power at the ballot box. That second shot was a candidate for L.A. City Council in 2020 named Nithya Raman.
Raman, an urban planner and homelessness services non-profit leader, had never run for public office, and was running to unseat an incumbent Los Angeles City Councilmember in a city that had not seen any incumbent defeated in 17 years.
The incumbent, Democrat David Ryu, was a competent center-left technocrat. Local activists generally regarded his office as responsive, though your average Angeleno had no idea who he was or what City Council did. Ryu, who was then the most formidable fundraiser to ever run for L.A. City Hall, seemed impossible to dislodge.
Raman’s policy platform was aggressive, with writeups on a dozen issues, some exceeding 20 pages in length. The policies were written after extensive discussions with local activists—an unusual step for a candidate for L.A. City Council. But then, her campaign was unusual in multiple ways.
As it became clear that Raman posed a serious threat, Ryu’s true colors began to show. He took money from a company involved in the manufacture of plastics and styrofoam—a fossil fuel interest—and repeatedly compared Raman’s supporters to terrorists. Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi endorsed Ryu.
Just east of Raman’s district, Burbankers were getting phone calls about voting for Konstantine Anthony, a comedian and improviser running for Burbank City Council as an open socialist. One of Anthony’s main opponents, a Republican realtor named Paul Herman, received about half of his money from landlords, developers, and fossil fuel interests—with no small-dollar donations to speak of. It was comedians against landlords.
Raman and Anthony both won their elections. Anthony is now the first openly-autistic elected official West of the Mississippi. Raman and Anthony each received more votes than any candidate in the history of their respective cities.
Dynasties had been toppled. History had been made. But how?
***
“I’m like a gross-out, outrageous, annoying comedian,” says Sarah Squirm. “Our show, Helltrap Nightmare, is like me ripping my skin off, with blood spurting out of my eyeballs, but it’s like, hopeful.” Squirm, along with her comedian friends David Brown, Mitra Jouhari, Sandy Honig, and Jamie Loftus, have become unlikely players in Los Angeles politics.
“I am someone who has been directly very negatively impacted by the last few years, with regards to me and my family, like so many. It's caused me a lot of pain,” explains Jouhari, an L.A.-based comedian. “I was not involved in local politics until I met Nithya Raman.”
For Tim Heidecker, an absurdist comedian known for “Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job!”, a mid-2018 restaurant protest against Kirstjen Nielsen by DSA inspired him to see what he could do locally. “DSA protested Trump way more aggressively than the Democratic Party was behaving,” he says. “I felt very helpless, and these people seemed to be doing something, on a local level.” For the first time, Heidecker got involved, supporting Dan Brotman, a Sunrise L.A.-endorsed climate activist who won a seat on City Council in Heidecker’s hometown of Glendale, CA in March 2020.
Josh Androsky, a comedian who volunteered on the Measure B campaign in 2018 and worked on Raman’s 2020 run for L.A. City Council, says his slide into politics didn’t happen all at once. “I would have audience members kneel during the national anthem and then take a whippet, and then I would hand them stats on L.A.’s homelessness, and they’d read it in the really low whippet voice,” he says. “It wasn’t funny, it was just a spectacle. You know that you’re done with comedy when you’re not trying to get people to laugh. I thought, ‘This is not funny anymore, so I should research what is going on politically around me, and what needs to be done to get this fixed.’”
For people whose public personas are laced with jaded irony, they are all shockingly sincere when describing their motivations. They express disgust with fossil fuel capitalism, hope for a Green New Deal, and rage at a housing system that has left thousands of their neighbors stranded in the streets.
Most of these comedians say they weren’t active in local politics until the Trump years, describe themselves as leftists, and use words like “absurdism”, “satire”, or “fringe” to describe their work. They are not mainstream in either their politics or their comedy. “If you’re a basic comedian, you probably have basic political views,” says Sarah Squirm. Each was drawn to the movement separately for the same reasons, like convergent evolution producing yet another crab. And they got right to work.
“At the very beginning of Nithya [Raman]’s campaign,” says Androsky, the whippet comedian, “the team included five of us, including Nithya, two of which are incredible field organizers: Jess Salans and Meagan Choi. And two are comedy dum-dums: Hayes Davenport and myself.”
Androsky attributes most of Raman’s strength as a candidate to her personal qualities, her policy platform, and her field team. But he also points out that comedians make good communications staff or canvassers, since they are used to persuading a hostile audience to be on their side within five minutes. And they had other skills that could be useful to a campaign.
Sarah Squirm had done a remote set in a lucrative comedy fundraiser for New York City’s DSA chapter’s DSA For the Many slate during their primary. She and David Brown, who collaborates with her to create the show Helltrap Nightmare, decided to try the same thing in Los Angeles. “We stole the technique,” she says.
During the primary, Raman’s campaign organized a comedy event at the El Rey Theater, but during the COVID era, in-person shows were impossible. Brown figured out the tech side of a livestreamed fundraiser, a tool Helltrap would deploy for Raman, and then for other candidates throughout the general election.
The Helltrap fundraisers were livestreamed on YouTube. Each comedian who participated did a five minute set or contributed a pre-recorded sketch, and they were all expected to promote the events on their personal social media pages. The events lasted two or three hours, and with the YouTube video embedded directly in the ActBlue donation pages of the candidates, audience members had many opportunities to give. With the comedians bringing in viewers who never would have otherwise paid attention to local politics, each of the events resulted in hundreds of small-dollar donations.
The campaigns of Raman and Anthony would have been challenges enough on their own, but the Left was fighting on more than two fronts. Further south in L.A., Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, a DSA-endorsed candidate for state legislature, also got her own Helltrap fundraiser, which raised about $8,000. Sunrise L.A., which had endorsed nine candidates, raised more than $10,000, which was split between the campaigns which needed it most. (Raman graciously declined to receive funds from the event, since by that time, her campaign was on track to hit its goals.)
By November, Squirm and Brown were now putting fundraisers on every week. The Helltrap fundraiser for Konstantine Anthony brought in just over $3,000. And the amount that pushed him over the $3,000 goal? A donation in the amount of $69.
The total that Helltrap Nightmare raised, for a combination of electoral and mutual aid projects, amounts to more than $40,000. The Raman campaign also put on a “Parks and Recreunion” fundraiser featuring cast members from the show Parks and Recreation—admittedly a more mainstream comedy—which brought in another $30,000.
So, comedians make good communicators, and good fundraisers. But did they really tip the electoral scales?
***
For Anthony, who ran for an at-large seat in a city of 100,000 people, the $3,000 the comedians raised for him in three hours went further than it would have in a bigger election. Another $1,850 came from the Sunrise fundraiser, and $600 from a joke ActBlue page called “Thirst the Vote”, which advocated giving to the leftist candidates because they were hot. It all added up to about 11% of his campaign’s budget.
Anthony ended up with more than three times the amount of small dollar donations than all seven of his opponents combined, an indicator of the grassroots enthusiasm which would propel him to victory.
Handling the pressure of the stage, apparently, is a skill that translated to campaigning. Anthony said his comedy experience gave him an edge in debates and endorsement interviews. “The abilities that comedians have to connect with their audiences is not something you can learn in a few months. It is a skill learned through years of practice.”
Asked if comedians made the difference in Raman’s victory, Androsky spread the credit around. “None of this would have been possible without the work of our field staff,” he says. But, as Raman’s communications director, his comedy experience brought a different perspective to their outreach. “You’re not going to change somebody’s mind with a traditional video ad. But if you surprise them and leave a kernel of doubt or possibility in their heads, then they’re more likely to come around to your message.”
Jamie Loftus, a comedian who performed in many Helltrap fundraiser shows, was more to the point: “I canvassed, baby! I called til my psyche was permanently damaged, baby!”
In other words, you won’t win an election if your only strategy is holding fundraisers with a bunch of weird comedians. But, as one component of a competently-run campaign with a serious field strategy, comedy fundraisers can help make a grassroots campaign competitive with a corporate-funded incumbent.
Though most of the comedians were circumspect about whether or not they made a difference—“I don’t know that we changed a single mind by doing these,” says Brown—Margo Rowder, a comedian and Anthony’s campaign manager, believes the impact of the comedy fundraisers can be measured: the event gave the campaign the capacity to immediately increase its phonebanking staff’s hours. And the impact transcended dollars and campaign hours.
“Besides helping to raise money, it gave supporters and staffers a chance to take a fucking break and laugh a little during a very tense campaign cycle,” Rowder says.
Androsky agrees, citing the El Rey and Parks and Recreunion shows as the morale high water marks of the Raman primary and general election campaigns, respectively. He also points out that an interview with Chapo Trap House directly led to listeners volunteering for Raman. “You need young people to volunteer, and they listen to comedians,” he says.
Some mysteries linger: why are all these leftist comedians absurdists? Why isn’t Jerry Seinfeld out there knocking on doors?
“The comedians we’re talking about here, we’re not talking about mainstream appeal. These are people on the fringes of comedy,” says Heidecker. “We, as comedians that investigate or satirize the ugliness of our country, tend to be more sensitive to it. These are things that get filtered through me and come out as comedy ideas in my work.”
Rowder, Anthony’s campaign manager, agreed. “Leftists give a shit about human connection, and that is the basis of the best comedy.”
***
Whatever it was that brought them into the fight, they do seem to have affected the outcome. But was the 2020 comedy wave a one-time event, restricted to the time and place in which it occurred?
Duplicating the scale of the operation would be daunting. The entire L.A. Left comedy community, it seems, put a whole year of organizing in to defeat a handful of incumbents in one metro area. Other cities lack L.A.’s deep bench of celebrity talent.
Los Angeles is a huge city, and its City Council districts, the largest in the country, are home to 275,000 people each—about as many people as live in the entire city of Newark, NJ. It may be true that few other cities have this many leftist comedians ready to throw down. But other cities, with their smaller districts and lower fundraising totals, also don’t need a Raman-sized army to replicate the successes in L.A.
Both Squirm and Brown believe that their shows can be replicated, and they would know, since they happily admit to stealing the format in the first place. They also don’t think you need LA celebrities to pull it off. Squirm points out that every place has local comedians and community leaders whose voices carry. “Those people exist and care everywhere.”
In fact, the Burbank example shows that, in smaller cities, the strategy may even work better.
“There is a blueprint,” says Androsky. He points to the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which copied Raman’s Parks and Recreunion fundraiser and did their own (even keeping the name the same). And some national leftist organizations plan to deploy this playbook in the 2021 municipal and state elections, which are small-scale enough that the amount of money these events raise would be game-changing.
“You will lose a bunch of times before you win,” says Androsky. For him, Measure B was just a beginning. A pressure campaign in 2019 got L.A. City Council to pass an ordinance that accomplished the goal of Measure B, and —to the chagrin of fossil fuel companies worldwide—a Public Bank is coming to L.A.
The work has consequences.
The week after Raman won, L.A. City Council called for an expansion of social housing—a development that was unthinkable just days earlier. Her win shook incumbents to their core. Without even holding office yet, she had pushed the city left. DSA L.A. went from zero endorsees in office in 2018 to three in 2020, and Sunrise L.A. went from zero endorsees in office and now has five. Both organizations are working to make 2021 the year of the Green New Deal.
“Do not underestimate what you and your passionate friends are capable of,” says Jouhari. “Use your skills to the best of your ability and channel them into the candidates you believe in. Unfortunately none of us are going to get hand-written invitations to participate in local politics—you just have to ask how you can help and then do it, because your energy and your work matters.”
Climate justice advocate Mary Annaïse Heglar once wrote, in an advice column to newly-minted “Climate People”, that it’s “impossible for any Climate Person to tell any other Climate Person, new or old, what their own climate commitment should look like. We don't know that special thing that you bring to the movement—only you know that.”
What the comedians did in Los Angeles is a crystallization of Heglar’s idea. When a guest on a talk show is asked, “What can I do about climate change?” they don’t usually respond, “Run comedy fundraisers for candidates for local office.” Yet it turns out that Heglar is correct: winning a Green New Deal is really going to require activists with every possible skill set.
As for Squirm and Brown, they are not done. They just completed a fundraiser for tenants facing eviction due to COVID-19, raising more than $11,000. Though they are modest about their impact on the elections, they are both bullish on the mutual aid fundraisers. “The Food Not Rent fundraiser definitely had an impact,” says Squirm, and Brown agrees.
“We are offering our services to anyone who wants it,” Squirm says, though she clarified that by “anyone”, she means any working class people who need help, or any candidates endorsed by DSA. (The best way to reach her is by emailing helltrapnightmare at gmail.com.)
“The people who are funny today are the ones who understand real life,” Anthony says. “They’re broke, they’ve dealt with bullshit, and they’re not taking it anymore.”
(Disclosure: the author worked on Anthony’s campaign as a consultant, and Brotman’s campaign as his Campaign Manager. He also used to write comedy.)
Tom Pike is a climate activist with the Democratic Socialists of America and the Sunrise Movement. He tweets @StoryTom.
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