‘Being rich used to be cool in this country,” says Adam Carolla. The 47-year-old comedian remembers the good ol’ days, when “even if you couldn’t afford a BMW, you would buy one” to impress women. Now, “the guys who are getting laid the most are the ones with the skinny arms who are driving the Priuses.”
It’s a strange world.
But Carolla sees the humor in it; he exploits it, really, in his daily podcast, The Adam Carolla Show, which, with 60 million downloads, is the most-downloaded podcast in the world, according to Guinness World Records. And he points out the similarities between the rich and the poor in his new e-book, Rich Man, Poor Man, which debuted at number two on iTunes.
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The rich and the poor live a lot alike, Carolla contends: They wear their pajamas all day; they take outdoor showers; they keep their dogs with them at all times. “If you row,” for instance, “you’re either a poor, old fisherman [living in a] little village, or you’re on the Harvard crew team,” he says. “Middle-class people don’t really row anything.” Not using a wallet is also a shared trait: “Either you have a money clip with your initials on it, or you have a wad of singles in your pocket.”
Carolla warns his fans not to read any deeper social commentary into his jokes. He makes them because they’re funny. Listing the similarities between the rich and the poor is “really just a way to amuse yourself,” he says. “It just kind of turned out to be timely in terms of what we’re going through.”
Not that he’s agnostic on the issue. He hates the fact that the rich have to pretend they’re not wealthy. “We’ve turned our world into some kind of prison yard, and if somebody finds out you’ve got a couple of cartons of cigarettes stuffed down your pants, you’re going to get torn apart [on] the handball courts.”
Given the contributions rich families such as the Carnegies and the Rockefellers have made to the arts, Carolla finds it “weird” to equate rich with evil. If the rich are evil, “why are you sitting in their library? Why are you sitting in their hall? Why did I just listen to a whole show on orangutans with no commercials that they paid for?”
When asked about the hullaballoo over Mitt Romney’s tax returns, Carolla adds, “I don’t know who is sending mosquito nets over trying to cure malaria in Africa, but last time I checked it was Bill Gates. Is Bill Gates evil? Are all rich guys evil or just guys with nice hair?”
Despite the fact that he bears no political label, Carolla became a darling of the Right in December when he called Occupy Wall Street protesters “a bunch of f***ing self-entitled monsters.” On reflection, Carolla is more forgiving. He sums up: “Their heart’s in the right place, but their a** is blocking traffic.”
He actually agrees with them on one thing: “I don’t like lobbyists and generous campaign contributions affecting policy. I think that should be illegal.” He knows congressmen engage in insider trading, but “I really do think nine out of ten of us would probably do that and not think that much about it. We’re asking these people to be better than that; we’re not making them.”
Despite the flaws in our system, “it’s about the best the world has to offer, which is, come here, work hard, and you can succeed.”
Carolla chafes at the idea that the rich got their money from their mommies and daddies. “With every person I know who is considered rich — who makes more than $200,000 — it has nothing to do with their parents, other than maybe their parents fed them, raised them, and possibly helped them with college.” Rather, “every guy I know who makes over $250,000 has two or three jobs, and their parents are in a completely different field: They’re schoolteachers, bus drivers, or they work for the post office.”
Nice to hear at least one person in show business exhibit some respect for the heritage of our nation but I have two minor criticisms.........
1) "Despite the flaws in our system...." - give me a break. That's liberal utopianism raising it's head.
2) “it’s about the best the world has to offer, which is, come here, work hard, and you can succeed.” The purpose of the nation is not simply endless immigration. The American people do not want halfl the world coming here. Get it?
I love how the people who got lucky always want to tell you how it was some special inherent quality that led to their success.
I mean you're really trying to suggest to me that he is some kind of master jokesmith and didn't just ride a wave of extreme immaturity to success?
How did the Man Show add wealth to our society? Did the man boys work harder while they made cheap sex jokes at work the next day? How does men feeling more justified in treating women like dogs help preserve a stronger union?
I'm gonna go ahead and stick to not listening to simple minded comedians about complex issues!
Comedians/entertainers with sustained success don't normally "get lucky". My guess is he worked really hard at developing and providing a service (humor) which enough people were willing to pay for until his "overnight success" was complete. You may not be a fan and I may not be a fan but others are.
As to the wealth created, the shows he has been on require paid support staff and those people are part of the overall economy. He pays them, they pay others and the next thing you know the unemployment line is a little bit shorter.
Hey, given some time, this working for a living thing just might catch on.
What about the thousands of other comedians working really hard who are actually funnier than Adam Corolla & and most others with "sustained success" -- guess they were just unlucky, huh?
No, they're not unlucky but, if they haven't tapped into a defined market they're not matching his level of success. Financially, he appeals to enough people that are willing to pay to enjoy his comedy. Comedians and enetertainers who appeal to smaller markets are less financially successful. Comparing which ones are funnier is subjective. Individual tastes will vary but to say that someone who works really hard to identify and engage a large audience is "lucky" minimizes the effort involved.
In my experience, limited as it is, successful people are seldom JUST lucky.
Whether you find him funny or not is beside the point. The point is that many, many people find him funny enough, regardless of your opinion, to where he can make a great living. Luck doesn't perpetuate success, it's only part of the equation. Others who work hard and don't succeed on the level of Adam Corolla doesn't change the fact that he himself works hard at what he does.
Adam showcases exactly why I stopped siding with liberals after college. As he says about the Occupy people, yeah, a lot of them have their hearts in the right place -- runaway crony capitalism is not the sign of a healthy economy. But being pissy at rich people just because they're rich IS the politics of envy. Interestingly, I think it's the Baby Boomer Democrats who practice that. Sure, there's some residual of such envy in some of Obama's policies, but not nearly as much as the Congressional Dems, particularly in the House, who've been in power for a couple of generations now. I know plenty Democrats of my generation who are far more realistic on economic policies than those pie-in-the-sky faux-liberals.
What really gets my goat, though, is exactly what Adam says, that there are plenty of rich folk who do exactly what liberals want them to do. Sure, there are the corrupt kind, too, and they should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. But that right there is the problem: we need to punish *corruption*, not wealth.
See? Not all of us former Democrats are clowns! We can still give credit where credit is due, and on some of these matters, yep, conservatives are right. Sure wish the president could see that on the tax code.
What an inane comment. So now the yardstick is someone (who? you?) determining how much wealth an activity added to "society"? I suppose that opens up the question of determining how much wealth Jacob adds as well. How would you like that?
The "wealth" Adam added is determined by how many advertisers he and his producers could convince to support his show, how much enjoyment the people who were willing to pay for it received, and for how long they decided to support it. In other words, he had a product to sell, and could only succeed if someone decided to buy it. That is called a free market, which you obviously have a problem with, but the fact is your assessment of how much "wealth" he added to society is not for you to determine, thank God. If you didn't like it, you don't have to watch it. For those who did watch, it was by definition worth it.
The presumption of people who think they should be allowed to make these decisions for others is galling, and all too common. In fact, it defines Obama and his minions, who are certain everyone but they are incapable of deciding for themselves.
So, you think Adam Carolla just got lucky? Is every successful person just "lucky" and unsuccessful person just "unlucky"? I happen to know for a fact that Adam worked construction and worked hard physical labor before he got where he is today. He came from a home where his mother was on welfare and who chose to stay on welfare rather than try to better herself by getting a job. He chose not to live his life that way so, he WORKED his way up. Yep, pretty "lucky".Sounds like to me you may be a typical OWS-er - envious, covetous, and resentful of others' success.
If you didn't like "The Man Show", fine. That's why there are 999 channels on DirecTV.
Also, I don't believe all the issues are that complex, unless you choose to make them so.
Luck has nothing to do with it. You're talking about a guy who spent years at Groundlings perfecting his craft (just because he makes it look easy doesn't mean it's easy) while working construction jobs during the day. Begged and scraped for small morning radio spots. Developed a couple of moderately successful TV shows (and for every one of those there's probably two that got canned). Ended up with a hugely successful radio career. Wrote, produced and starred in a critically acclaimed indie movie. When his morning radio gig got cancelled he basically pioneered the podcasting industry, being probably the first person to develop a legitimate podcast business model that generates a lot of revenue, all while working several jobs and having a number of other projects in the pipeline.
It's always mind boggling to me when unsuccessful people dismiss the hard work of those who have had success. It's like they're comforting themselves for their own shortcomings by saying others have had all "luck."
Here's how you tell the difference. Lottery winners who are broke 5 years after their paydays are not successful, they're lucky. People in business who have been through multiple industry upheavals and have success after success are talented and hard-working. Bitter dems just want to dismiss the hard work of others and blame their lack of success on the world being "unfair."
Oh no you're not. I'm not going to allow a bunch conservative bandwagon jumpers to turn Adam Carolla into Horatio Alger. Carolla spent very little time in the groundlings, and got his big break through his friend Jimmy Kimmel. At Loveline he would always brag about showing up a minute before taping and doing zero prep. Half the time he didn't even know who the guest was. He's good at riffing, off the cuff stuff, he's not so good at interviewing or putting together a monologue which is why his talk show failed and his podcast isn't doing well either that's why he's doing stuff like the apprentice and stand up to supplement his income. The guy failed out of Jr. College! Do you know how lazy you have to be to fail out of Jr College. I don't even think Rick Perry could do it. Is he lucky? Of course he is! Does he have talent? Sure some, but had he grown up somewhere other than LA that talent wouldn't have carried him far. He'd still be a carpenter using free clinics.
I think that's an oversimplification. For years, Carolla worked his butt off, long before he got his podcast, to try to be a B- or C-list celebrity personality. It ended up working. Of course there is some luck involved; there's luck involved in anything. But the point is that there is *also* hard work involved. Carolla was at one point co-hosting a syndicated radio show, working as a writer and performer on a TV show, co-hosting the TV version of his radio show, DJing, and doing standup on the side. That's not easy to do. Yes, it helped that he made friends with Jimmy Kimmel. But it's not like Kimmel gave him handouts; the two worked *together*. That's an important difference about which you might need to think.
Oh, Please. Adam was on a funny show - The Man Show was great, and his podcast is popular. Nobody is forcing people to pay attention to him. I suppose you think that leftists like Joy Behar or Alec Baldwin are more "accomplished"? Give me a break.
Have you read his book..."in 50 Years We'll All be Chicks"...he came from dirt...worked his rear off to actually become funny and prospered. I hate it when hippocrites start spouting this type of non-sense. He knows what it is like to be hungry...for years. His family was broken, yet he rose above it all. Do your research before such rube-ish commentary.
Too bad a guy who used to host "The Man Show" can defend capitalism and being wealthy better than Romney. Romney should read this and grow a pair and defend his wealth and capitalism to the nth degree.
I've always like Mr. Carolla. Comedians, trained to look at life with an eye to why it is so funny, can sometimes clear away all the bull with surprisingly few words.
I am a long time fan of loveline and Adam. One thing not to forget is just how dirt poor Ace started. There was a classic loveline bit where Adam brought in his Social Security statement and made Drew read the year by year earnings.
