A new satirical podcast imagines JK Rowling and Dave Chappelle in rehab for social media ‘villains’.
Self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ John Cameron Mitchell has seen liberals cancel his friends for ‘spurious reasons’. So he turned to satire
Asked which celebrities would fare well on Cancellation Island, his fictional rehab for social media villains, multi-hyphenate (actor, singer, songwriter, screenwriter, director, producer, playwright) maverick John Cameron Mitchell responds: “I would love to see JK Rowling and Dave Chappelle show up there, because I think hanging out with trans people who don’t have an axe to grind – [although] it’s totally understandable that they’re grinding that axe – calms everything down,” he says, referring to the trans characters in said fictional rehab.
“Being in people’s presence calms down a lot of conflict because online, you can’t see people’s faces and the nuances of what they’re saying. You could say that even JK Rowling has felt misrepresented. Cancellation doesn’t allow for redemption – it doesn’t even allow for evidence sometimes.”
Mitchell, who came out as non-binary but uses he/him pronouns, has always pushed boundaries in his quest for human connection, from hit Broadway musical and film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, in which he played title character Hedwig, to his raucous hardcore sex comedy Shortbus. But his audio sitcom Cancellation Island ventures into an area you might not expect a self-described “Leftist, socialist and anarchist” to tread – satirising call-out culture and virtue signalling.
Academy Award-winner Holly Hunter stars as Karen, a wellness guru attempting to rehabilitate social media pariahs marooned on an island (including a Harvey Weinstein-style serial predator, a comedian with a Netflix special called Kancel Me, and the first trans woman admitted to a Kansas University sorority whose reputation is tarnished when a racist video goes viral), aided by Gen Z therapists whose credo is: “What we lack in life experience, we make up for in certainty.”
Jokes abound regarding identity politics, such as Anti-Racism Spin Classes (“no matter how fast we go, we’ll never get anywhere”) and one character defining themselves as “a Gen Z agender, multiracial, consciously celibate, neo-aesthetic social influencer”. But as the episodes progress, Cancellation Island broadens out into a nuanced, surreal plea to find commonality in the face of a greater looming threat – and QAnon-inspired conspiracies about a cabal of lizards.
Over the phone from New York, Mitchell is friendly and thoughtful, explaining one of the catalysts for the comedy was his own personal brush with the wrong side of social media fury. Hedwig and the Angry Inch was beloved of both outsider icons like David Bowie (“He said, ‘You did it right John!’,” beams Mitchell) and those you might not naturally assume would embrace a punk musical about botched gender-reassignment surgery. For example, after Mitchell debated an ardently anti-gay marriage guest on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect in 2001, she asked him to sign her son’s DVD.
Yet in 2020, he was attacked by some members of the LGBTQ+ community when online protests erupted against the casting of a “cisgender male as a transgender character” in the titular role, resulting in the production’s axing.
Defending himself, Mitchell didn’t agree that Hedwig – the character he incubated in queer nightclubs in New York in the Nineties – was trans.
“The character is forced into an operation and they’re certainly not happy with it and it’s drag and rock’n’roll that saves them,” he argues. “It’s not a personal choice – it’s more of an awakening. And that part is for everyone – drag is for everyone. But the rush for justice left collateral damage.”
Since then, he’s witnessed artist friends in the community “cancelled for spurious reasons” or an inability to read the room. Though he supported retribution of Weinstein and Bill Cosby in the MeToo era, he sees “call-out culture” and moral-outbidding as symbolic of liberals’ inability to grapple with greater threats. “When Trump came in the first time, for liberal-minded people, there was a rush to fix things in their backyard because the government was so irrational. We were putting our energy into purifying our natural allies rather than the real enemies who tended to be beyond our reach. Like rats in a cage, we lash out at each other while Trump cackles.”
At 61, Mitchell’s wariness navigating the generational-difference politics of representation might partly be explained by his background. Growing up as a peripatetic army brat, he remembers military life as “socialist”.
“What you were was much less important than what you brought to the party,” he notes, before adding. “Also, I come from punk, at a time when the intentions were good – challenging capitalism, authority, conformism. But in punk, you could use all language to get your point across. Today, you can’t. Trigger-warnings, panic, and all that, so I’m confused.”
When I ask if comedian Kris’ Netflix special Kancel Me is a dig at high-profile stand-up routines by the likes of Chappelle, which have featured jokes about supporting Rowling as a “Team Terf” – leading comedian Hannah Gadsby to claim that “Netflix has made transphobia profitable in comedy” – he replies that no, the character is actually a homage to Joan Rivers-esque equal-opportunities-insult comedians.
“Unfortunately, someone like Dave Chappelle who was brilliant early in his career in satirising racism has changed and, like JK Rowling, he’s [now] attacking the most powerless minority out there of trans people.”
He believes people like Rowling to be sincere in her belief that she’s standing up for women’s rights, but he has a different viewpoint. “I don’t agree with zero-sum thing going on, which is if trans people have rights we all have then women have less – it’s a false analogy in my view.”
Nineteen years ago, Mitchell released the bracing bacchanalia of Shortbus, unleashing a liberating Karma Sutra’s worth of unstimulated carnality which still feels revelatory. A scene involving the Star-Spangled Banner makes Saltburn’s plughole-guzzling look like Anne of Green Gables.
“I don’t think it could be made today,” he sighs of the film, contrasting his growing up during the political resistance of ACT UP to reclaim gay sex as joyous after Aids re-stigmatised it, to a streak of puritanism among today’s youth; partly, he argues, a result of digital isolation. “In the past, the pressure would have been from the religious right, but now weirdly, the left – especially young people – have seemed to imply sex is bad, the idea that if somebody is having it, then somebody is being exploited.”
Having recorded in front of a studio audience in New York, Cancellation Island is Mitchell’s second foray into podcasts – “I prefer audio cinema,” he corrects. “When you say podcasts, people think of two idiots in a room”. The first was 2019’s ambitious dark musical Anthem: Homunculus, which boasted standout turns from Cynthia Erivo and Glenn Close, and the intimacy of the form reminds him of eagerly listening to Peter Sellers and Monty Python on BBC Radio as a child.
The next step is to turn it into an animation. Future plans involve putting the finishing touches to a new work for the stage – his first since Hedwig in 1998 – revolving around surrealist Claude Cahun, an anti-fascist who challenged gender norms and fought Nazis with her art. “The character [of Cahun] also says ‘identity is bulls*** - because it shifts - but it doesn’t preclude fighting injustice.
“Identity in the beginning is useful, but if you keep focusing on it, it starts to become escapism to me,” he adds. “Identity is like a barcode, a capitalist way to tell you you’re a product. It makes you feel like you belong and seems to empower you, but sometimes it can be a box you’re trapped in and doesn’t allow for evolution”.
Disheartened by Trump’s victory and the paralysis of the left (“Once jackbooted cops start dragging away your undocumented neighbours, things will change,” he hopes), he’s putting his head in the lion’s mouth by embarking on a speaking tour of US colleges. “To pass on what I’ve learned from the good punks like Bowie and Laurie Anderson and give them hope, because they’re scared right now – I’m scared too.”
Let’s hope it doesn’t lead to speedy boarding to Cancellation Island.
The first episode of Cancellation Island is on iHeartRadio now, with new episodes following weekly. Available across all podcast platforms
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