Latest / Mic Drop Comedy / Marlon James Shares the Truth Within _The Disappearers_ _ The Daily Show

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Marlon James Shares the Truth Within _The Disappearers_ _ The Daily Show · Mic Drop Comedy

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome, sir. Oh, my God.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: Applause all around.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: I know.
• 0:04
  Speaker 2: You have been getting your laurels.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I still like it, though. It's nice, right?
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: I imagine it would be.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: I'm like, people clapping beats people not clapping. Yes, this
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: is why.
• 0:14
  Speaker 3: One of the best parts about this job is if
• 0:16
  Speaker 3: they don't clap, we just do it again for me.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: So you've got to get into this comedy business.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Oh, I thought it was like some sort of a
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: blackmail thing if they don't clap.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: Well, we do have the social security numbers of.
• 0:27
  Speaker 3: Everybody here, so we will use it against them.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: This book is remarkable.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 0:33
  Speaker 3: But people are talking about it because right out the gate,
• 0:35
  Speaker 3: it's shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And the New York
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: Times had a wild review that called it the book
• 0:41
  Speaker 3: of the decade, if not the century.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: I mean.
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: We only have 75 more years to go.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of time.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: But still, 26 is pretty good. 26 is pretty good.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: What do you do when you.
• 0:55
  Speaker 3: I mean, that's such a massive accolade to drop at
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: your feet.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: What does that feel like? What do you do with that?
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Well, what you don't do is impress your mother. No? Yeah.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: She's still like, those gutters are not going to clean themselves.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: She's like... Maybe she'll read it, though. Has she read it?
• 1:14
  Speaker 4: No, but I figured best of the century she'll finally
• 1:18
  Speaker 4: be impressed.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: She's like, I don't know, maybe last century. There's a
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: lot of good stuff from that last century.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: You had to beat some pretty high praise last century.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: She's like, I've cleaned your poop. I'll never be impressed again.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: I've been talking with my mom about reading this book.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: That's going to be a moment. It is. Well, this
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: book is intense.
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: For people who have not read this book yet, how
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: would you describe this book?
• 1:46
  Speaker 4: I'd say it's a book that's set between the 80s
• 1:50
  Speaker 4: and the 2000s.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: And it's about a bunch of gay men who try
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: to put on.
• 1:53
  Speaker 4: This sort of subversive play in secret in Jamaica, which
• 1:56
  Speaker 4: is not the most open-minded place for gay people. And
• 2:00
  Speaker 4: in the midst of it, they're attacked and pretty brutally
• 2:04
  Speaker 4: beaten up.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: One of them dies.
• 2:06
  Speaker 4: And some weeks after all of that attack, two of
• 2:09
  Speaker 4: the men just vanished without a trace. And spoiler alert, sorry.
• 2:15
  Speaker 4: They vanished without a trace. I'm not going to say
• 2:18
  Speaker 4: if they're found or not. But what happens next is
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: that the characters who are left behind are left to
• 2:23
  Speaker 4: reel from it. And they make all these wild decisions.
• 2:26
  Speaker 4: Some race back into the closet. Some try to live
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: a normal life. One spends 20 years plotting revenge. And
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: then that's what happens, basically.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, it is.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: I love this book. I found it very profound in.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: There are a lot of alliterative devices here that tell
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: the story from a bunch of different angles. But you
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: don't shy away from graphic violence. There's cruelty that you
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: live in for a while. The sex in it is graphic,
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: and it's discussed thoroughly throughout. I think a lot about
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: my mom reading this.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: But I do think what is remarkable about this, and
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: you ask a lot.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: From a reader.
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: It's a 600 page book that you don't shy away
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: from any of these issues. And I found as a reader,
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: to be challenged in that way is something only an
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: art form like literature can do. You sit with these people,
• 3:18
  Speaker 3: you know these people, But I do think about the
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: mothers who read the New York Times, who might not
• 3:24
  Speaker 3: know your work beforehand, are going to pick this thing up,
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: and they're going to read the novel of the century.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Like, do you.
• 3:30
  Speaker 4: Do you want to hear what they've been saying to me?
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: I want to know, yes.
• 3:33
  Speaker 4: So the mothers who have been picking this up come
• 3:35
  Speaker 4: to me and go, oh, my God, your book is
• 3:36
  Speaker 4: making me so hot.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:40
  Speaker 4: And they'll go, like, you know, I'm hot right now.
• 3:45
  Speaker 4: And I go, and I go, and if I played
• 3:49
  Speaker 4: for that team, damn, girl.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: And I haven't done the research.
• 3:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so when I say you might have an uncomfortable
• 3:57
  Speaker 4: time with your mom, I think you're going to be uncomfortable.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Not her.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: Are you saying my mom's going to leave my dad
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: because she's going to read this book?
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Is that who's disappearing? My mom?
• 4:08
  Speaker 4: The book I wrote two weeks, two books before this,
• 4:11
  Speaker 4: I came up and go, dude, your book made me gay.
• 4:15
  Speaker 4: And I'm like, I finally become what preachers said the
• 4:18
  Speaker 4: gay is.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: You know? That's a testament to this book. There's times
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: where it's not very enviable to be gay in Jamaica.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: No, it's not.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: I don't read this and, like, I should be gay
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: in Jamaica.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't think so.
• 4:33
  Speaker 4: For a while, I went to the church because the
• 4:34
  Speaker 4: church made me straight.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: Yay.
• 4:37
  Speaker 4: But, you know, about the violence and the sex, I
• 4:40
  Speaker 4: think you just have to be real. You can't oversell
• 4:43
  Speaker 4: it because then it becomes this kind of porn.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Right. And you can't undersell it.
• 4:47
  Speaker 4: Either, because then you don't get a sense of what's
• 4:50
  Speaker 4: really happening and what's really going on. So you kind
• 4:53
  Speaker 4: of have to be a reporter and just get the story.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: And that's it.
• 4:59
  Speaker 4: I remember somebody saying about gratuito sex. And I remember thinking,
• 5:05
  Speaker 4: if you're not having gratuito sex, what are you having, boo?
• 5:11
  Speaker 4: As for the violence, violence is violent. I was on
• 5:16
  Speaker 4: this show once, and they asked me about it. And
• 5:19
  Speaker 4: I think I got fed up. And I'm like, who
• 5:22
  Speaker 4: you kidding? You know you love it.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: But then I described the type of movies they'll.
• 5:26
  Speaker 4: Watch where the hero kills 100 people and then walks off,
• 5:30
  Speaker 4: not even with his girlfriend, but with his dog.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: And I said, yeah, you didn't think about any of
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: those guys who died, did you? I was like, you
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: think I'm weird. But violence has suffering. Violence has consequences.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: When I write for TV, I always ask them, so
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: what gunshot do you want? Do you want a Hollywood
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: gunshot or a real gunshot?
• 5:52
  Speaker 4: Because if I shoot you in the foot in a
• 5:55
  Speaker 4: Hollywood thing, it's a flesh wound.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: As you didn't realize, you're gonna die.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: Well, you talk about writing for TV.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: You're right.
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: I mean, this book, I feel like, only lives in,
• 6:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, well, I hope it lives in another format
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: if you can make money off of that and somebody.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Buys it and makes it. I'm always for making money.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: You're always for making money, so I don't want to
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: take that away.
• 6:14
  Speaker 3: But I think what is remarkable about this, unlike watching
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: John Wick, where after two hours you watch 1,000 people die, like,
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: this is a book that asks you to sit with
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: it for weeks and spend time with it. Do you
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: think about the rhythms of... of graphicness and how a
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: reader reads it. I know you listen to music while
• 6:30
  Speaker 3: you write, and music is such a profound element throughout
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: this story. I think it really sets it in a
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: time and a place. The characters reach out for not
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: the reggae music of their homeland many times. They go
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: to American music and Kurt Cobain and what have you.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: Do you think about the rhythms of music when you
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: write a book like this?
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 6:49
  Speaker 4: I think because I came from that generation, some of
• 6:52
  Speaker 4: the stuff that, you know, like there are some passages.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: About Bruce Springsteen, which may have come from me.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: They're pretty erotic passages about Bruce Springsteen.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: It's a lot about that Born to Run cover.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: I'm telling you, you don't have to worry about your mom.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: I was going to say, it focuses.
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: More on him putting on jeans than it does the songwriting.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: You won't have to worry about her.
• 7:16
  Speaker 4: But you know, music was, you know, I grew up
• 7:19
  Speaker 4: with a generation where you listen to The Smiths in
• 7:21
  Speaker 4: your bedroom. Yeah, right? So music is a constant companion.
• 7:28
  Speaker 4: We're the first generation to have Walkman, Walkman, whatever you
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  Speaker 4: pluralize that with. And it becomes part of your language.
• 7:36
  Speaker 4: It's part of your vocabulary. I think at one point,
• 7:40
  Speaker 4: Jordan says in the book, music was the first thing
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  Speaker 4: to love him back, which is how I used to
• 7:45
  Speaker 4: feel about a lot of stuff in there. I remember
• 7:50
  Speaker 4: where I was when Kurt Cobain died. I remember where
• 7:53
  Speaker 4: I was when Sinead O'Connor died. And these are two very, very,
• 7:56
  Speaker 4: very important things to me. But also, these characters are
• 8:00
  Speaker 4: dealing with a music where their own country's music don't
• 8:03
  Speaker 4: like them. Their own country's music said they should die.
• 8:06
  Speaker 4: So they're going to reach for something that will embrace them.
• 8:10
  Speaker 4: So they'll go listen to Relax, Don't Do It. And
• 8:14
  Speaker 4: I love it when church leaders go.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: I love that little song. I'm like, you have no
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: idea what that song is about.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: How do you talk about, you grew up in Jamaica.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: You live here now. You wrote this here.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: I'm curious what the reaction has been back there. It's
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: a harrowing tale of what has happened in Jamaica in
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: the 80s, 90s, 2000, and a lot of the The
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: laws that were on the books are still on the
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: books right now. They're not supporting the LGBTQ community there.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of that.
• 8:42
  Speaker 4: But also, you know, the book ends in 2005. I
• 8:47
  Speaker 4: remember going back a few years ago, and there was
• 8:50
  Speaker 4: an LGBT association there.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: For students, which I didn't even know it existed.
• 8:56
  Speaker 4: And I'm giving them their it gets better speech, you know,
• 8:58
  Speaker 4: things are hard now.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: And you're like, we don't want to hear that crap.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: Do you know Beyonce?
• 9:06
  Speaker 4: And I'm like, and I realize I'm surrounded by these
• 9:10
  Speaker 4: teenagers who are like, you know what?
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: We reserve the right to be superficial.
• 9:15
  Speaker 4: You know, a quarrel for us is Beyonce versus Riri.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: They were like, not whether I'll get shot or so on.
• 9:22
  Speaker 4: And there is that. There is a sense that the
• 9:25
  Speaker 4: country has evolved and come a long way.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: But you don't have to go far to go, you know.
• 9:30
  Speaker 4: I haven't gone far enough yet, though. Because, you know,
• 9:35
  Speaker 4: I moved back in a way. I have a house there.
• 9:37
  Speaker 4: And you ask a taxi driver who's Marlon James, they go, oh,
• 9:40
  Speaker 4: you mean the gay one? And I go, you know,
• 9:43
  Speaker 4: I wrote a book.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: I've read a few of them.
• 9:47
  Speaker 4: So it is definitely different from the world of this book.
• 9:53
  Speaker 4: But I still think when you enter a room, you
• 9:56
  Speaker 4: still kind of make a threat assessment, what's going to
• 10:00
  Speaker 4: happen here?
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Can I even swish or not?
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: I think that's remarkable.
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: There's so many passages in here that get inside the
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: mindset of the threat assessments wherever they walk into spaces.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: It's curious.
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: I believe you say in the acknowledgements that I'm paraphrasing,
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: but it's a work of fiction, but all of this
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: is True. I heard you said this is an act
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: of record keeping in some ways. And I think we
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: are in a curious time right now where you see
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: institutions like the Smithsonian, history is being rewritten. How do
• 10:34
  Speaker 3: you see literature's role in record keeping and keeping the
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: stories alive for the future?
• 10:39
  Speaker 4: Well, one thing literature does, and the literature I write
• 10:42
  Speaker 4: or like Edwidge Dantica writes, is you're responding to erasure.
• 10:46
  Speaker 4: So the stories aren't there in the first place. So
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: you're writing them into being, and that's the first thing.
• 10:52
  Speaker 4: Eventually history catches up. History changes every day depending on
• 10:57
  Speaker 4: who's writing it. So sometimes the stories that we need
• 11:02
  Speaker 4: or the stories that reflect on people who are not leaders,
• 11:06
  Speaker 4: who are not famous, have to come from fiction, has
• 11:09
  Speaker 4: to come from the books. There are certain things you're
• 11:11
  Speaker 4: gonna learn about yourself from Huckleberry Finn that you're not
• 11:13
  Speaker 4: gonna learn you know, from Shelby Foote. And what fiction
• 11:19
  Speaker 4: does is that it starts to create a sort of
• 11:22
  Speaker 4: internal history of how things were and how things could
• 11:26
  Speaker 4: be that becomes very important.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: And I think when you.
• 11:30
  Speaker 4: Read history through how people actually live it, which is
• 11:33
  Speaker 4: what I think a novel can do, then it becomes
• 11:36
  Speaker 4: more important to you and you realize why.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: You need to keep it, why you need to preserve it.
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: Tell me about the act of disappearing, what that means
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: in a novel like this.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: It means a lot of things. One of the reasons
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: why I could write it is that I was a
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: pretty good disappearer.
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: I remember the kids who would call me names would
• 11:53
  Speaker 4: take the 6 o'clock bus to school. And I realized
• 11:55
  Speaker 4: if I take 6.15, I still get to school. Or
• 11:58
  Speaker 4: if I leave school later. Or if I just don't talk.
• 12:03
  Speaker 4: And I remember I knew I'd pull this off when
• 12:06
  Speaker 4: the next door neighbor came over to my mom's house
• 12:09
  Speaker 4: and asked for recommendations on schools in America.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Because clearly Marlon has gone to school in America. And
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: she's like, he passes your house twice a day, every day.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: And I was like, damn, I did it. I vanished.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: I was reading a lot of X-Men at the time, too.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: So I really thought. I like.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: Was that a conscious choice at the time?
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: I really thought I had a superpower.
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 12:32
  Speaker 4: And no one's just called being rude. But every now
• 12:36
  Speaker 4: and then, people go, weren't you at my party?
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: I'm like, I was.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: Do you see it as an act of choice or
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: an act of necessity?
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: I think it's both.
• 12:43
  Speaker 4: I think when you're in the margins, sometimes, you know,
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: in order to not have the light turn on you
• 12:51
  Speaker 4: and in order to not have the oppressors come and
• 12:53
  Speaker 4: knock on your door, you find ways. And Jamaica is small.
• 12:58
  Speaker 4: So you have to learn how to vanish right in
• 12:59
  Speaker 4: front of people. And sometimes it's to give them a
• 13:03
  Speaker 4: reason to not look, which is what some of the
• 13:07
  Speaker 4: gay men did.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: It was like, how normal can I look? So going
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: into the closet is disappearing.
• 13:14
  Speaker 4: I did it by going into the church and that
• 13:17
  Speaker 4: was wild because they're surrounded by church gays and they're
• 13:20
  Speaker 4: a bunch.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: You talk about the church gays. That's a movie in
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: the book as well.
• 13:24
  Speaker 4: There's a scene in it where I outed one of
• 13:26
  Speaker 4: them because this movie came out and the church, the
• 13:29
  Speaker 4: other church gay was like, oh my God, I'm going
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: to do a dance tribute in praise of the crucifixion.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: And I looked at him and I go, you know what?
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Don't just stand there. Let's get to it. Strike a pose.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: There's nothing to it.
• 13:51
  Speaker 4: And the horror on his face when I'm like, mm-hmm.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: I see you're trying to disappear, but I see you.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I see you, girl.
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: It is a remarkable work.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: Congratulations on it and all of the accolades. The Disappearers
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: is available now.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: Marlon James.