Growing up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, one of the best things I recall from my youth (and early adulthood) were the black and white cookies from Mother’s Bakery. No matter what day of the week, there was always a chance they would not have them when my father would go for an evening walk to buy them. On those disappointing nights he would often return with cupcakes from Mother’s, which although consisting of the same ingredients as the black and white cookies, lacked both the cake-to-icing ratio of the cookie and the diversity, equity and inclusion that I preferred in my desserts.

The Mother’s black and white cookie was simply put the best black and white cookie I’ve ever had (Producer Jack Woltz’ voice) and I’ve had them all over the world!  They were made fresh daily and sold out daily.  I would always begin with the vanilla side, which was a sweeter icing, at times with a vague hint of lemon (this was a change about halfway in my decades of experience with Mother’s). I always began with vanilla because the cold glass of milk I always had waiting to chug, was a much better chaser to the chocolate side.  After meticulously finishing the vanilla side, I got to my favorite part of the cookie: the bi-racial overlap (you are what you eat).   I would eat this part horizontally, usually 2.5 bites worth of chocolate missionary-on-top-of-vanilla icing/frosting (not really sure – sort of a hybrid, midpoint between the two states of dessert matter) and then crush the chocolate side. Then with mouth mouth sufficiently caked and satisfied would chug the glass of milk with a deep sigh of satisfaction that signaled that my day was over.

I have had black and whites from many independent bakeries and chain bakeries and I have never had a black and white cookie that came anywhere close to Mother’s.  Like Secretariat at Belmont level distance.  And then one day, maybe a decade ago, Mother’s Bakery closed.  They had vanquished rival bakeries in the area, but after decades (I was aware of them for about 20 years but they had been open before then) they closed.  I have heard that the landlord that owns many commercial properties near where I grew up is one of those “I have enough money that I don’t care if my properties stay vacant” types.  Beyond the closing of a neighborhood institution that seemed to do a thriving business, the existential question I had ever since was, what happened to the Mother’s black and white cookies?  It seems they just no longer exist, but in the memory banks of my tastebuds.

You may be wondering, J-L, are you really just writing a blog about the loss of a cookie?  No, of course not.  When my special, Half Blackface came out (reminder – it is free on Amazon Prime and only has 61 ratings and reviews – I have 200K+ followers on social media, so needless to say that is disappointing) the producers decided, based on my NYC and bi-racial roots, to make the cover a black and white cookie.  I had no input on choosing it, but enthusiastically approved of the concept.  But as I reach a real crossroads in my comedy career and life, it has me contemplating mortality. Not of my own life, but of the work I have made.  But unlike the black and white cookies of my youth whose disappearance shocked me and has stayed with me, I am witnessing the increasing irrelevance of my work as it is happening.  Like the difference between being hit by a car and wasting away with a terminal illness.

I told my girlfriend in 2021 as I was experiencing career firsts and career highs left and right that I never wanted to tread water again with my comedy career. That if the surge in interest in my work and the quality and volume of my work were not self-sustaining economically and emotionally that I would not go back to the life of spending 50% of my time working a day job, 45% of my time doing comedy and 5% trying to cram in life. If after 20 years, hundreds of thousands of followers and 3 comedy careers worth of output I could not be a full time comedian  then I couldn’t do it anymore. And yet, nearly 5 years later that is exactly where I am.  Producing videos, podcasts, prepping a new special and living month to month ( I try very hard not to touch the money I made in 2020-21 because that now feels more like prize winnings than a validation of my work and dedication as a comedian – the fruits born of algorithm fertilizer more than artful tilling of comedic fields. So don’t take the “month to month” as literal and desperate as some others may mean it). With a little over a month before I make a potentially life-altering career decision, it has forced me to reckon with the state of entertainment and the state of my comedy career in a very sobering way.  My fear at this point, as it has often been is not the idea of stopping my pursuit of comedy success and work, but whether my work has left any sort of legacy, big or small.  Will any of my work outlive me?  Not only is the answer no, but it seems that the exact opposite is true: I will outlive my art.

Even as I write this, an irony is present: my word press blog site is informing me through an obnoxious red dot that my blog is failing on its “readability” metrics (shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, shorter overall, etc.).  So, at the risk of losing the few of you who made it this far based on predictive attention span, I will continue.  When I began comedy the goals were to write jokes, practice/perform those jokes, refine those jokes, film those jokes for booking (not content) purposes and become a good comedian because that was the key to working as a comedian.  Then podcasts and YouTube and social media arrived, and while I have diligently worked on all those platforms, when Tik Tok came along it seemed to announce, with no ambiguity or respect for the old ways, that there was now only one path to success (for those not grandfathered in with success and fans before around 2015 or granted membership into the club/entourage of a legit comedy star): feed the content machine with what its algorithms want.

So the job of a comedian, especially one unrepresented by an agent, manager or other form of power broker, is to feed the algorithm. Like an art version of the machines feeding on comatose human bodies in The Matrix.  This would be bad enough if it was just affecting what percentage of artists became shameless, click hunting hacks, but it has affected the audience as well, and it is not fellow artists who eventually decide the worth and legacy of your work; it’s the audience.

Over the last 4 years I have seen everything from sketch videos to comedy specials to my appearance on Showtime’s Billions suppressed by algorithms.  Oddly enough it was a video filmed in Canada that exploded for me a couple of weeks ago, which raises the question: if I sell more tickets on a Wednesday to fans (not just regular club attendees, but fans) in a Canadian city than I can in any city in America on any night of the week, despite 85% of my fans being American, is the algorithm simply suppressing me where I live?  And before you get on your annoying partisan high horse, this began almost 2 years before Elon Musk bought Twitter.  Condemning Trump in 2021 meant condemning my work as well.  Social media wise, Trump and I shared 97% of the same DNA – like a chimp and human, respectively.

But it’s not just the algorithm, but the way social media has conditioned audience to consume.  I have had too many people write in my comments “where have you been?”, “where did you go?”, “I thought you quit”, “welcome back!” and many more comments like this that tell me my work is largely “out of sight, out of mind” for most of my fans followers.  This may seem like an odd complaint, but, to paraphrase Brian McKnight, “do I ever cross your mind… then go click on my page, my website, my YouTube page, anything!!!… anytime.”  Despite our near universal negative opinion of social media, we still seem to trust it to curate exactly what we want.  But if fans of mine think about my work, but then cannot take the 5 seconds to find me, often on the same site they are thinking of my work, then my comedy is no longer art, and is now mere distraction. Art is worth suffering for, hoping for and fighting for.  But distraction is not.  As more and more comedians, new and old, are content to bend the knee to the whims of algorithms and more audience treat comedy like a modern day joke-a-day desk calendar, it becomes a real question of whether it is worth it.  Because it is understandable if my work dies with me one day, but to watch it die while I am still making it is a much more difficult thing to accept.

Perhaps this is just something unique to me, but I don’t think it is. I see more successful comedians able to sell out huge theaters, not just small clubs with which I struggle.  I see comedians with smaller followings getting more gigs than me. Perhaps I simply rose during the pandemic because people were bored and receptive to politically-tinged comedy to get them through a day, but nothing more.  But it is little comfort when you want to keep making art and every common sense fiber is telling you that it is no longer with the effort, physically or mentally.

Whether it’s a greedy landlord pricing out Mother’s bakery, or algorithms exhausting the patience and desire of artists, the lesson seems to be that good things cannot last anymore.  But I will never have any doubts of the greatness and value of a Mother’s black and white cookie.  But if your entire success hinges not on the quality of your work, but the beneficence of algorithms and the increasingly addled minds they are cultivating, it forces you to wonder, like a tiny seed of doubt in a field of confidence you’ve spent your whole life working and perfecting, was it ever a good thing in the first place?