Learning Day: Eddie Bravo's Lizard People Routine (Patreon)

Eddie Bravo is an accomplished jiu jitsu practitioner who founded his own grappling school and once submitted a member of the Gracie family via triangle choke. He is also a complete lunatic who regularly guests on Joe Rogan's podcast and hosts one of his own called "Look Into It," which you may recognize as the motto of every two brain-celled mouthbreather on the internet who thinks cell phone towers are the reason their family doesn't talk to them anymore.

This makes Bravo something of a unique specimen. He is not, in our parlance, a "karate maniac," because his martial arts training is real, documented, and effective. He does not believe in the Dim Mak, chi blasts, or Systema. Yet he is a maniac, a fact amply proven by a twelve minute video of his standup at the Comedy Store from a few years back.

In fairness to Eddie, this isn't one of his regular routines. "Stand-Up on the Spot" is a series where performers get up on stage without any material and respond to suggestions called out by the audience. It's kind of like Who's Line is it Anyway? if you replaced the simmering sexual tension between Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles with a man desperately trying to sound funny while barely restraining himself from hollering about how AIDS is a psy-op for a full ten minutes.

"I think everything is a psy op," is how Eddie opens the set. The audience reacts with mild amusement. They're thinking, "haha, who is this guy?" Note the reaction of the woman in the center of the frame. She will be our spirit level against which the reception of Bravo's performance is judged.

She's having a good time! She's at a comedy club with a bottle of champagne! People come to comedy shows to laugh. The performer has the benefit of the doubt. Nobody in the audience wants to see a comedian bomb, because to a normal person with a functional sense of empathy, secondhand embarrassment is as powerful as its immediate experience. Of course, we now know that empathy is weakness. Christ taught us this when he tore himself down off the cross and beat an entire legion of Roman soldiers to death with improvised tonfa.

"Someone yelled out lizard people," Eddie pronounces. They did not. Later, we'll see terms called out by the audience superimposed on the screen. At no point does the text "lizard people" appear. But hey, it's fine! He's kicking things off, maybe he's got some killer lizard people material. Have you seen how lizard people drive? Lizard people be shopping. Things of that nature.

"When you bring up lizard people, nobody takes you seriously," is how the lizard people bit begins. He's affecting kind of a joking tone here, but he also seems genuinely wounded by this failure on the part of society to take the plot of the miniseries V seriously. Especially because, as he argues, "everyone believes in UFOs." The obvious counterpoint here is that believing in aliens is, for the most part, a pretty harmless quirk, whereas the whole "lizard people" thing was popularized by a Holocaust denier who thinks Jews secretly funded Hitler.

But it's hardly worth trying to counter any of this with logic. We're less than a minute in and Bravo is already so far from consensus reality that he might as well be wryly asking the audience, "don't you hate it when electric dog king Christ-Mussolini scream scream seventy-five CIA neighbor pussy fucker?"

We're also seeing a problem that's going to plague the rest of this set. It's all setup, no punchline. Like fine, we're taking as given that nobody takes lizard people seriously. Then what? Then nothing. Then mostly manic pacing back and forth across the stage, doing exaggerated gestures and voices. Broad physical comedy is the last refuge of the bombing, the sole legitimate dominion of Chris Kattan. And Mr. Bravo, I served with Chris Kattan. I knew Chris Kattan. When my soul was catapulted back into the world of the living by Whoopi Goldberg to stop a claymation figment of my imagination from wreaking havoc, Chris Kattan was my host body. Sir, you're no Chris Kattan.

Let's check in on our audience bellwether.

Status: bemused, waiting for a punchline that will never come. Eddie is too busy waving his arms around in a display of useless flailing that looks like a mean impression of Ronda Rousey's striking game.

That's the "lizard people" well tapped. Jokes told: zero. Not off to a promising start. What's next?

"I love Hillary," Eddie begins. Evidently, so does our audience!

Specifically, what Eddie likes about Hillary Clinton is that she was once young and physically attractive.

"That's how she got into power! She sucked the right dick!" An icy realization creeps up the neck of the woman in the front row as she realizes she has made a terrible mistake in coming here tonight.

Sat in the front of the room, she has nowhere to go. Her friend chooses this moment to carefully examine the woman in the second row's baffling top. She desperately tries to block out Eddie's material about Hillary and Pelosi having gangbangs at Davos. But she's already picturing it. She would give anything not to picture it.

Not to belabor the point, but "Hillary Clinton was once conventionally attractive and she fucked her way to the top" is, again, a setup in want of a punchline. Maybe "I'm just kidding, the only thing she fucked was the Democratic party and America's young people by running as a historically unpopular candidate who believed she was owed the presidency." A little wordy, but we could workshop it.

To the extent that Bravo's getting laughs from these half-jokes at all, it's the right-wing equivalent of clapter. You only have to check the comments on the video to realize that the culture war has so firmly planted its flag in his viewers' brains that they applaud like trained seals when someone says something they suspect is triggering the libs.

But this shit isn't any different from a guy posting "Comedian DESTROYS Trump Loving Heckler!" shorts on YouTube. Both represent the degeneration of communication into the recognition of signifiers that convey in-group versus out-group membership. In other words, Kojima was right about everything.

Oh no! He's going to go there, isn't he!?

Not really, no. All Eddie's got to say on the subject is that wow, Alex Jones had to pay a lot of money "just because" he said that Sandy Hook was a "psychological operation," so he'd better be careful himself! What a letdown. I'm not saying that you should joke about school shootings or that I think they're funny — I'm no Jason Pargin — but you don't get to present yourself as a brave truthteller in danger of legal consequences just for muttering "oh shit, Alex Jones, punitive damages," onstage.

But it's hard to make jokes about conspiracy theories, Eddie laments! That might be true, but man, you have set yourself up as the conspiracy theorist comic. Nobody is making you do this. You could tell jokes about racial groups or the differences between men and women or whatever — God's whole rich tapestry of hack comedy is open to you!

In lieu of telling a joke, Eddie now tells a story about a time he regaled the main room at the Comedy Store about Hillary eating babies and was met with silence in response. This is not the setup to a meta bit about how that experience pushed him to learn what a joke was. It is merely a story about a time that an audience didn't react positively to his fixation on a woman who ran for president once.

In the wake of this disaster, another Joe Rogan regular, Joey Diaz, gave Eddie a profound piece of advice: "you can't just fuck them in the ass. You gotta play with their pussy and nibble on their neck a bit."

Can we get an audience react on that?

Somehow, this allusion to at best being a selfish lover and at worst committing anal sexual assault has gotten them back on board. You did it, Eddie! The audience is on your team! You're in this together! And now they're giving you an exit ramp off the tinfoil hat expressway. First dates! Fun! Awkward! Relatable human experiences!

"When I was eight my 14-year-old babysitter dry humped me," Eddie says, swerving the car into the median.

He was "into it until it was over," at which point he escaped to his bedroom, thinking "what the fuck just happened?" Eddie explains this shame and confusion as his first taste of "post nut syndrome." But it is fairly obvious that we are in fact watching an adult man without the conceptual tools to process it publicly describe an experience of being sexually assaulted as a child. I yearn for the world of two minutes ago, when Eddie was gleefully imagining elderly politicians giving head. What a fool I was then.

Moving right along — a fork in the road. Monkeypox? Or his worst date?

"How did they figure out you can only get monkeypox from a guy's asshole?" Eddie screeches, in defiance of medical science, logical thinking, and good taste. He's lost them again.

Undeterred, he goes on. See, monkeypox is the new AIDS! You're thinking, oh, in that it's an ailment that can affect anyone and is frequently spread amongst injection drug users and men who have sex with men? No, you're not thinking that. It's because like AIDS, monkeypox was invented by the New World Order to control us!

At the risk of falling into the exact same trap as Eddie and getting so lost in the sauce that I forget to actually try and be funny, when he invoked AIDS denialism of the kind advanced by titanic piece of shit Peter Duesberg, he should have been yanked off the stage with a Vaudeville hook then had a piano dropped on his head so that when he opened his mouth his teeth would all be replaced by piano keys. He probably still wouldn't believe in gravity, though.

I mean, it's not really that surprising that Bravo believes AIDS was a psy op. He's a dumb guy! He's the kind of dude who learns one fact about something, say, the temperature at which steel melts, then decides that he's smarter than everybody else in the world because there's no way jet fuel could have brought down the Twin Towers.

But the magic of Eddie's tortured brain is the way it zags on you. He notes that they're going to announce the "first infected female butthole" any day now, then they're going to say that a total of 33 such cases have been reported. You know what 33 means, right? It means "red team go!" That's how they communicate! That's what it means! He's saying this in the tone of a joke, but it's abundantly clear this is just an extremely mentally ill man who's been allowed on stage and has now completely left the audience behind. He is no longer joking. He seriously believes that speaking as he is now puts Stand-Up on the Spot's YouTube channel at risk of being brought down by the Illuminati.

Even if you're the kind of person who laughs at the idea of Nancy Pelosi having sex, being lectured at about the number 33 is nothing to you. It's barely anything to anyone, except boomers who spend all their time on Facebook transvestigating Katy Perry. And the traditional conspiracy number is 23, but I guess inflation hit the NWO crowd hard.

Yeah, fine, if the "elite" are drinking kids' blood then there are probably tiers of the stuff, and Tom Cruise is probably on the good shit. This is the closest Eddie gets to an actual joke about a conspiracy in the entire set, but he has to go and ruin it by yelling about George Soros and again insisting that even mentioning that name will result in the immediate disappearance of everyone in the audience. It's classic paranoid thinking — huge swathes of the media ecosystem are set up to support your outlandish claims, you have a platform to spread them, but somehow you're also being suppressed.

But hey, Eddie Bravo famously pursued submission-only grappling, shunning traditional BJJ competition which scores competitors based on technique and performance. Maybe that philosophy has driven his approach to comedy, too. Because while he may not have won many points with the audience, I absolutely wanted to tap out. Unconsciousness would have been a blessing during Eddie's routine, but despite my training I have yet to master the ability to triangle choke myself. I'm confident that I'll get there though, as long as the dog across the street stops using its powers to make my computer open up erotic Who's Line is it Anyway? fanfiction whenever I sit down to work. I just found 33 results for Drew Carey/Wayne Brady. Red team go! Red team go!

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