The Lou Perez Podcast - Randall Bock

PODCAST COPY

 

On today’s episode, my friend Randall Bock returns to The Lou Perez Podcast — or do I return to his podcast? Both really.

 

As the good doctor describes our conversation:

Growing Up As The World Lost Its Marbles

Reflections on cities, family life, and institutional collapse

As prelude to Christmas and looking back on the year, comedian and social analyst Lou Perez speaks with the ease of someone who has lived through several versions of adulthood. He talks first about how California flattened experience for him, stretched days into a pleasant sameness, and dissolved memory as quickly as it created it. “California is like an orgy of perfect weather with the occasional wildfire (!)” he says, and the line works because it carries both pleasure and warning. When he left, the place left him too. “I don’t remember living in LA,” Family life pulled everything back into focus. Marriage and children changed what space meant and altered what mattered. Apartments that once felt fine began to feel constraining, while a house with a yard suddenly felt necessary rather than aspirational. He describes watching his children move through space differently once they had room, and he frames that change as something obvious only in hindsight. COVID accelerated those realizations and stripped away illusions about urban life. Neighborhoods once marketed as communal began to feel regulatory, and neighbors who once ignored each other began to enforce rules by proxy.

Leaving did not feel dramatic, and returning later did not feel restorative. The city no longer matched the memory, because time had moved on without sentiment. He talks about a favorite restaurant that closed after marking several stages of his adult life, and he describes paying the final check with clarity rather than grief. The moment mattered because it marked an ending, not because it demanded mourning.

Institutions enter the frame because institutions shape daily life, especially when they fail. Universities, media, public health authorities, and police departments all appear not as villains but as systems that stumble when certainty replaces judgment. COVID exposed that weakness quickly. Policies enforced mask-wearing during maximal exertion and restricted physical spaces in ways that made no physiological sense, even to MD-professionals who understood the body well enough to know better. Doctors complied anyway, because enforcement rewarded obedience rather than reasoning.

Perez uses humor to puncture abstraction. “You can’t abolish prisons until the moment you want (some criminal) put in one,” Reality resists theory, and fear reorganizes priorities without asking permission. Police body cameras’ ironies: anti-police activists demanded cameras as a corrective; departments adopted them, yet: “Nothing has hurt the anti-police movement more than the very body cams they demanded police wear,” Perez says. The recordings restore context; show why simplified morality tales fail. “For every bad police video, there are hundreds showing what officers deal with every day.”

 

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Find Dr. Randall Bock's articles at

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America Out Loud PULSE: https://www.americaoutloud.news/autho...

 

Check out my book, That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore: On the Death and Rebirth of Comedy https://amzn.to/3VhFa1r    

 

Watch my sketch comedy streaming on Red Coral Universe: https://redcoraluniverse.com/en/series/the-lou-perez-comedy-68501a2fd369683d0f2a2a88?loopData=true&ccId=675bc891f78f658f73eaa46d

 

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Lou Perez is a comedian, producer, and the author of THAT JOKE ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE: ON THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF COMEDY. You may have seen him on Gutfeld! , FOX News Primetime, One Nation with Brian Kilmeade, and Open to Debate (with Michael Ian Black).

 

Lou was the Head Writer and Producer of the Webby Award-winning comedy channel We the Internet TV. During his tenure at WTI, Lou made the kind of comedy that gets you put on lists and your words in the Wall Street Journal: “How I Became a ‘Far-Right Radical.’”

 

As a stand-up comedian, Lou has opened for Rob Schneider, Rich Vos, Jimmy Dore, Dave Smith, and toured the US and Canada with Scott Thompson. Lou has also produced live shows with Colin Quinn, the Icarus Festival, and the Rutherford Comedy Festival.

 

For years, Lou performed at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater (both in NYC and L.A.) in sketch shows with the Hammerkatz and his comedy duo, Greg and Lou. Greg and Lou is best known for its sketch "Wolverine's Claws Suck," which has over 20 million views on YouTube alone.

 

In addition to producing sketch comedy like Comedy Is Murder, performing stand-up across the country, and writing for The Blaze's Align, Lou is on the advisory board of Heresy Press, a FAIR-in-the-arts fellow, and host of the live debate series The Wrong Take and The Lou Perez Podcast (which is part of the Lions of Liberty Podcast Network), and co-hosts Happy Hour Econ with Phil Magness.

 

How’d Lou start out?

 

He began doing improv and sketch comedy while an undergrad at New York University, where he was part of the comedy group the Wicked Wicked Hammerkatz.

 

Lou was a writer for Fox Sports' @TheBuzzer; produced The Attendants with Lorne Michaels’s Broadway Video; produced pilots for FOX Digital and MSN Games; and was a comedy producer on TruTV's Impractical Jokers.

 

Lou hosted the stand-up show Uncle Lou's Safe Place in Los Angeles, performed at the Big Pine Comedy Festival, Bridgetown Comedy Festival, Punching Up Comedy at Freedom Fest, and co-created the political comedy podcast Unsafe Space.

 

Lou taught creative writing at the City College of New York, "writing the web series" for Writing Pad, and comedy writing workshops for the Moving Picture Institute.

 

Lou worked with The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression as Communications Manager and later as a producer and consultant. Their video "Taking a Knee in Sports? For what?" was broadcast during a USC vs. Notre Dame football game and was a SILVER ADDY® WINNER at the American Advertising Awards.