Adam Friedland Could Be the Millennial Jon Stewart. But Does He Want That?

This leaks over into the way he talks about his own work. He says comedians think they’re geniuses like Noam Chomsky or Pablo Picasso nowadays, when they’re actually just “content creators.” He speaks about his show’s aims broadly—to entertain, to make people laugh and feel good, to be a remedy for a political and digital landscape that has “broken people’s brains.” “This is the most demoralized I’ve ever seen people,” he says. “Everyone’s just bummed out. In the ’90s, dude, when I was growing up, we were like, ‘This is the best year ever. And next year’s gonna be the best year ever.’ It was incredible. People were buying Hummers.”

You could mistake the way he talks about his show for apolitical, irony-poisoned pussyfooting, but it’s really just a desire not to be didactic or sanctimonious. Friedland’s friend Brace Belden, a host of the leftist podcast TrueAnon, whose previous claims to fame include a voluntary tour of duty with a Kurdish militia during the Syrian civil war, tells me over the phone that Friedland does indeed have political convictions. While some might call him “the rudest person on Earth,” Belden says warmly, he’s actually “a great role model for people who have grown up in a pretty tough society, with either genetic or intellectual disabilities, that see somebody who resembles them on TV.” Belden doesn’t think Friedland would travel overseas to join a revolutionary socialist militia the way he did, but that that’s mostly because Friedland is smarter. “Despite his demeanor and general attitude, he does believe in things.”

Belden met Friedland five or six years ago; he says they both dated Nekrasova at points. They now hang out a couple of times a week, sometimes at the Russian & Turkish Baths on Men’s Only night, which is known to be tactile and welcoming. Belden says he (and sometimes 20 other friends) receive constant unsolicited calls from Friedland, who loves talking on the phone. “It’s sort of one long, slow, humiliating experience as opposed to a sudden acute one,” Belden says of their friendship. “Every time we’ve hung out it’s basically been the equivalent of a guy shitting his pants a little bit. It’s getting full. He’s gotta wear those giant officer pants they wore in the 1910s now.” The last time they hung out, Belden went over to Friedland’s home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, where Friedland bragged about his Bob Dylan bootleg collection.

Belden speaks about the show like it provides a borderline therapeutic or rehabilitative service for celebrities gone “spiritually or career-wise” awry. “It could be,” he suggests, “that Adam is so empty that your soul has to not only fill the vessel that contains it but part of his as well.”

His pal was mostly just taking the piss, but it’s true that Friedland humanizes his guests. His goal is to create a platform that lets a demi-celeb like Chet Hanks—who mostly gets treated like a clown by other comics—show he’s a normal person. Or in Cuomo’s case, to make the “meathead Italian CNN guy” seem like just a guy. The internet, Friedland says, ”doesn’t make people feel that way, typically. It’s nice if you’ve registered that [humanizing], that makes me feel really good.” At worst, you could say he’s normwashing evil dudes like Steiny, but it feels more like he’s revealing their vapidity. Inspiring or unsavory as the guests are, his interviews catch them in a doofy yet vulnerable light.