Matthew Filipowicz is the founder of the local chapters of Drinking Liberally, a social meet-up group, and Laughing Liberally, a diverse monthly comedy showcase.
“I can’t guarantee that Scott Walker lost because Laughing Liberally exists, but there’s correlation and causation—it could be the reason. And if it is, you’re welcome,” jokes Matthew Filipowicz, a comedian and animator. After high school, Filipowicz moved from Nebraska to Chicago, New York, Portland and then Boston, before he and his wife settled in Milwaukee two years ago. The couple recently became parents. After moving here, Filipowicz founded the local chapters of Drinking Liberally, a social meet-up group, and Laughing Liberally, a diverse monthly comedy showcase that celebrated its two-year anniversary show last month.
Tell us what Laughing Liberally Milwaukee is all about.
It’s a monthly progressive political comedy show. We have a rotating batch of a couple dozen comedians who cycle through. They’re diverse. I generally have a rule for a show—I’m a white cis dude, I only have one other white cis dude performer for shows, so when people come to the show they won’t only see a straight male perspective. We have racially diverse lineups, gender diverse lineups, transgender comics regularly—it’s a show I think expresses the values of what I want to bring forth as a progressive. It also makes the show a lot more interesting to me. I’m sure you’ve seen comedy shows where it’s all white dudes with beards (laughs). And they could all be funny, hysterical, but there’s sort of a limited perspective in a show like that.
Can you speak about the importance of comedy when Donald Trump is in the White House?
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Some of the old adages about comedy and satire go back to the days when the court jester wouldn’t be beheaded for saying what a peasant would say. That he could say it and make people laugh gave him a certain amount of shielding.
I’ve been a comedian-activist for quite some time. Something I’ve always said is that comedy is like a gateway drug to activism. We’re not going to be the people marching in the street that are needed to make change, but we can maybe be someone who introduces a concept to someone that gets them in. Because, when you laugh, there’s something that happens where your defenses go down, so you’re open to ideas through laughter. It stimulates a different part of the brain.
Comedy is not something that will save the world, but it can help. There is also value, in my opinion, of entertaining the troops. People talk about preaching to the choir like that’s an awful thing, but getting the choir happy, excited and tuned up is a skill.
Is it difficult to write material about the Trump administration? It seems like there’s something ridiculous happening every day.
It’s really hard. When I tell people I do political comedy they’re like “oh, Donald Trump makes your job easy, huh?” No. One approach to satire is you see something bad in the world and then you go into the land of illusion and make-believe, and you make up something worse to draw attention to the thing that makes it bad. Donald Trump starts at worse.
This is a true story—about four months ago, I was trying to think of a punchline to a joke about Trump, and what I came up with was “what is he going to do next, deregulate asbestos?” And literally the next day, he deregulated asbestos! It’s hard to come up with something more absurd than what he gives you.
Laughing Liberally Milwaukee takes place monthly, the next ones being March 9 and April 13 at 8pm at ComedySportz Milwaukee (420 S. First St.). For more information, visit laughingliberallymilwaukee.tumblr.com.
