The Man Show Guy is Building a Pirate Ship

Remember The Man Show on Comedy Central?

I don’t know what the brunette on the right is doing but bear with me while I find out.

I do.

Women in bikinis jumping on trampolines, always closed out the skit comedy show that ran from 1999 to 2004 and was hosted by Adam Carolla and co-hosted by that sell-out and current social justice warrior Jimmy Kimmel.

Well, in case you didn’t know, Adam Carolla has made quite a name for himself in the last few years as a podcast host, independent film producer (The Hammer, Road Hard and Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman), and cable television host of shows focused around cars and home improvement.

Carolla infamously states on his podcast, The Adam Carolla Show,  that he’s “building a pirate ship” so that he can make what he wants in the content game without anyone telling him no.

Keep that in mind. It’ll be relevant later on here.

PragerU Is Gonna Educate You

Dennis Prager, on the other hand, is a fairly conservative, Jewish radio talk show host whose show, The Dennis Prager Show, often takes a counterintuitive perspective on social justice, censorship and the nature of secularism in America.

Say what you want, it takes guts to do an AMA on Reddit.

By the way, Prager is no fuddy-duddy or whimpering warrior: He’s gone to war with politicians, entertainment figures — he got into with Judd Apatow a few years ago — and others and has been very open about his own personal missteps in life and in decision making and what he learned from them.

Why am I writing about these two dudes?

Because they made a movie together.

No Safe Spaces, a documentary film about political correctness at universities, has been screening at theater chains across the country and is growing in popularity, expanding to hundreds of more theaters nationwide.

Including, curiously enough, at the Chinese hedge fund owned, AMC Theater chain.

Dalian Wanda Group purchased AMC for $2.6 billion in 2012, making China’s largest private company also the worldwide leader in theater chains.

The reason for my curiosity?

Well, the film has a scene in it about an event that the Chinese claim — some thirty years later — never actually happened.

From the trades, a quote from the film by Carolla himself:

“Free speech is unique to the United States; in Russia and China you go to jail if you say anything nice about gay people,” Carolla says in one clip. In another, a cartoon character dubbed Firsty sings, “I’m the First Amendment. / Without me you’d be living in China,” in a scene meant to invoke images of a protester who stood down a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Huh. Ok.

And then there’s this clip:

Well, that’ll get the dragon’s attention.

Which is what Carolla, that pirate shipbuilder, would like:

“We are proud of the film and of those scenes,” Carolla said of No Safe Spaces. ”As a comedian, one of my jobs is to point out obvious things that people have forgotten are obvious — and many other countries, including China, lack the basic freedoms we enjoy here. I’m glad we live in a country where we can still express ourselves freely.”

Well, Carolla, at least for a little while longer.

Look For This Everywhere But YouTube

Recently, the Chinese Communist government has been flexing their muscles in the entertainment industry all over the place, from locking down the NBA over Tweets about the Hong Kong protesters that no Chinese native on the mainland anyway, all the way to manipulating searches on TikTok to make sure that Westerners don’t see any of the Hong Kong protests.

Steve Jobs once said, “Don’t believe all that ‘don’t be evil’ crap.” And then, he died. Coincidence….?

To add to this mix, Google-owned YouTube has taken a hard line toward Dennis Prager’s conservative video channel, Prager U, over the last few years, where he has various academic, political and social commentators come on as guests and talk for 5 to 12 minutes about a social, economic or politically conservative topic.

Youtube has banned his videos outright in some cases, claiming that they “violate community standards.”

No Safe Spaces — which also features Jordan Peterson and Cornel West — is sure to have trouble either getting or maintaining a wider release and I wouldn’t bother looking for this on Netflix, Amazon or even YouTube.

I’ll close with this, from the trades:

Noting that in entertainment, South Park and Carolla seem to be leading the way when it comes to defying Chinese censors, Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and author of China Attacks, said: “Perhaps comedians will point the way when politicians, actors and sports stars fail us.”

Perhaps, Chuck. Perhaps.

I have no idea where to tell you to go see this, but it might arrive at your shores on October 25, 2019.