Ben Bankas

This whole idea that you don't feel safe because somebody's making jokes is so dangerous for society.

Some guy was trying to get people to call the police during the show to have me arrested for hate speech.

One of my audience members told me that her union, teacher's union, sent her an email saying not to attend my show.

Imagine an email going out to a company or an organization saying, please do not attend this drag time story hour.

Improving your own life will do more for the country than marching around with a sign trying to get a comedy show canceled.

Be successful, start a business.

Clean your room.

Clean your room.

And I sound like a parent, but the right needs to parent the left.

They've all been infiltrated.

All the universities are infiltrated by China.

Yeah.

No, he takes good pictures of his cat.

We're starting strong here.

I mean, look, I say things that I think of and that's what the art form is.

And there are things that I would say to probably my mom if she was still alive and to make her laugh.

Growing up, my mom had a pretty dark sense of humor.

She was a high school teacher, 35 years in Scarborough, Ontario, which is a...

bit of a rough suburb of of toronto and she always had you know there was always things happening at her school you know robberies and murders and um she had a student shoot somebody in the in a bus with a sawed-off shotgun on the you know and it was a kid that she had just thrown out of her class like a week before and so she you know she saw stuff and she had a real life and and you know her like she was born in 1948 so right after

the war and stuff so i always made jokes about whatever i wanted at home there was never a a line you know maybe if it was really bad joke my mom would go like that's what comedy is sometimes it is you you're making somebody laugh and they're going stop that's not the right time but when it's on a stage and the people have paid for it