How Moshe Kasher's New Talk Show Blends Shock Value with Civility

The debut episode of comedian Moshe Kasher's new Comedy Central show is about cultural appropriation, "a topic that I personally have found a great deal of eye-rolling antipathy toward in my personal life," Kasher told me in an interview at his Los Angeles home earlier this month. In a sketch at the end of the episode, the extremely white Kasher, along with his friend, the white rapper MC Serch, take it upon themselves to perform a joke-laden meta-rap about the very black culture they're in the process of appropriating.

Appropriately enough, the title of the show is Problematic with Moshe Kasher—"problematic" being one of the irritating and inescapable buzzwords of our current irritating and inescapable political moment. "Problematic," as you probably know, is a more academic and ambiguous way of saying something is "politically incorrect"—another phrase that was once the title of a Comedy Central show about hot-button issues.

So I figured as a host, Kasher might have a Bill Maher–esque mission for the talking-head portions of his show: Be the new "dangerous" TV guy! Blow minds! Push buttons. You don't like it? Fuck you, Grandma! But to hear Kasher tell it, that couldn't be further from what he wants. He says he hopes to steer clear of bluster altogether and to avoid politics as much as possible.

Kasher described most current political conversations as "someone's grandfather coming onto his Facebook thread to call someone else a stupid gay cuck." And sure, that's a funny state of affairs, but it's also toxic. "My ambition is for a substantive discourse to meet real comedy," Kasher told me.

The good news is that yes, the comedy was "real" and the discourse was "substantive" when I attended the first taping of an episode of Problematic in early April. As far as I could tell, the panelists—Black-ish creator Kenya Barris, Jamaican British American comedian Ian Edwards, and Chinese Korean American rapper Awkwafina—could all plausibly call themselves authorities on cultural appropriation. Meanwhile, Kasher's "eye-rolling antipathy" didn't make an appearance.

Problematic relies on a tried-and-true format: Introduce the topic; interview a principle guest; open it up for discussion; wrap it up; pepper with jokes, digressions, and comedy sketches to taste. But there's spontaneity in the Problematic format that you don't find in Real Time with Bill Maher, Last Week Tonight, or even regular old news discussion shows like Meet the Press.

"There came a point at which shows or ostensibly just talk shows really became all panel shows or talk-at-you shows," said Problematic showrunner Meaghan Rady, an alumna of NBC News shows.

Rady and Kasher are both taking inspiration from an unexpected source: "I think we need a new [Phil] Donahue," Rady told me. Donahue's issues-oriented 80s and 90s talk show relied heavily on its host running around the room with his head down, sticking the mic in the face of whatever lunatic wanted to ask a question to the show's panel of divisive guests.

Kasher says he's borrowing not just Donahue's egalitarian approach to discussion, but a similarly eccentric way of choosing subject matter, which was often utterly apolitical. "He'd toggle through intensely structural problems—police brutality and racism—and then bop over to next inane, surface-level topic," Kasher told me, adding, "What I don't want is for Donald Trump to be my editor in choosing topics."

But let's be clear: Moshe Kasher's TV persona couldn't possibly be further from Phil Donahue's. Donahue comes across as the peer mediator from your high school, while the quick-talking, elfin-featured Kasher reads as the Hebrew version of a Norse trickster god.

Kasher, who can (and does) boast some formidable brainpower, could probably also crush most political pundits in a steel-cage match of wits. But instead of going on the offensive, Kasher gamely plays the role of a magnanimous host, letting other people's thoughts largely set the agenda.

But when Kasher traverses the audience looking for commentary from the audience, the angelic Phil Donahue, and the devilish wise-cracking comedian on Kasher's shoulders seem to come into conflict with each other. That's where Problematic may deliver something fascinating and unique.

I know that's vague, so I'll try and illustrate what I mean: At one point in the audience participation part of the show, a representative from a local community of Native Americans popped up to add his much-needed two cents to the cultural appropriation conversation. What he delivered was a heartfelt, five-minute soliloquy about perseverance in the face of cultural erasure. It was equal parts angry and warm. It was also much too long for a 22-minute comedy show.

"it was beautiful, but in my mind I'm going 'we can't use this,'" Kasher told me. A host with too much tact might have left it there and moved on. Too much tact isn't one of Kasher's flaws.

Instead, he asked the guy to do another take, a little shorter this time.

During our interview, Kasher laughed at the interaction, remembering himself in the moment as the worst kind of showbiz monster, demanding that all of society's complexity be distorted and compressed into a marketable product. "'By the way, great stuff," he told me, mocking himself. "'If you could somehow encapsulate all the oppression of the native peoples into one quick bite size moment?'"

Rady told me to expect more moments like that. "We're looking for dynamic interviews and situations in which [Kasher is] extremely uncomfortable," she told me. Future topics—the dark web, for instance—may not be divisive per se, but the subject is meant to shake the guests, and host, out of their complacency. The trick will be "making everyone on the set as comfortable as you can possibly be, even while discussing topics that aren't easy to talk about," Rady said.

The best conversations, Kasher said, are "where Hollywood meets emotionality, meets intellectualism, or whatever," Kasher told me, adding, "And that's the show."

Problematic with Moshe Kasher airs Tuesday nights on Comedy Central.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.