Some guy in the Clinton campaign leaned on the owner of a significant comedy club for putting up a 3-minute montage of comedians joking about Hillary Clinton.

The website Judicial Watch tells us.

The club is Laugh Factory (where Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, and many others have performed). The owner is Jamie Masada, who's run the place for decades. He says: "They threatened me. I have received complains before but never a call like this, threatening to put me out of business if I don’t cut the video." The campaign person isn't identified, but is called "prominent," and a masculine pronoun is used (so it's not Huma Abedin). What was the threat? The unnamed person also "said the video was disgusting and asked who put me up to this," and wanted to know the names and numbers of the comedians.

How could the campaign put him out of business? By what method, exactly? I'd like to know. What could the campaign do? Was violence suggested? Was there some notion of getting law enforcement after him somehow? Or was it more like a threat to use speech against him or to persuade comics not to perform there? I'd like to know. If it's only a threat of more speech, that's part of the free-speech regime we know and (some of us) love. Within that regime, Masada is taking his remedy, talking to Judicial Watch and getting this story out. It hurts.

The video clip is titled "Hillary vs. The First Amendment." Whether anything here is a First Amendment violation or not, it's fine to cite the amendment in what is now a criticism of the campaign for being repressive toward the freedom of speech.

Now, let's watch the video:



We see 4 comedians:

1. Dom Irrera says: "That woman should be President of the United States, because she knows what it's like to like men and love women."

2. Tiffany Haddish says "I would love if you become President, then you divorce Bill and you marry a bitch. Oh, shit! That would fuck the world up!" Haddish also likes the way Hillary didn't "trip off Bill and Monica Lewinsky," theorizing that Hillary was "hitting that too on the side," that if Bill liked "fat bitches," she'd get herself a "skinny bitch."

3. Greg Fitzsimmons says sarcastically that there's "nothing like" the "skirt suits" Hillary wears to say "I'm all woman." (He says "skirt suits" twice, but I've never seen Hillary in a skirt suit. I guess it's his attempt to say "pant suits.") "Who wore it better," he asks, "Caitlin Jenner or Hillary Clinton?" And he jokes that we don't have to worry about her getting her period, because she's 69 years old and "hasn't had a period since the 20th century."

4. Brian Holtzman refers to Hillary's mother's ethnicity — English, Welsh, French, etc. — and says that to get all that in one person, "You'd have to work in a whorehouse for quite some time."

So, it's very low humor, mostly based on the idea that Hillary isn't a real woman. She's a lesbian, she's unfeminine, she's unchaste, she's old. I can see someone in the campaign thinking it shouldn't be that difficult to persuade Masada that this kind of material is too low to belong on the internet representing Laugh Factory, that storied institution. But Masada took it in a different direction, and the Hillary campaign is getting lambasted for "threatening" Masada.

I'd like to hear from the campaign. What was said in that phone call? Does it deserve to be called a threat?