The Backlash Against Austin Anti-Woke Comedy

Austin is the capital of anti-woke comedy. The backlash is in full swing.

Nov 08, 2025

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Stavros Halkias broke my heart a little this week, but it wasn’t his fault. Halkias, better known as Stavvy, is a Baltimore comedian (Let’s go O’s!) who some of you will first see play a cop in Bugonia, the new Yorgos Lanthimos film, which came as a shock to him because he’s “a guy who kind of looks like this,” he said, and by that he means the target demo for Hawaiian shirts with beer logos. “If you need a diner owner, if you need a disgraced member of the community who’s being shunned for sexual harassment allegations, you need a landlord, whatever, in your small, small part in a movie, maybe think of me someday.”

Stavros Halkias, left, and Jordan Jensen, right, experiencing regrets

If you are familiar with Stavvy, you more likely know him from his podcasts (Stavvy’s World, Pod Don’t Lie), his comedy specials, Netflix’s Tires, or the 2024 comedy Let’s Start a Cult. As Jesse David Fox, host of Good One: A Podcast About Jokes, put it, Stavvy’s brand of humor was to be “offensive to the point of ridiculousness and everyone is in on it and there’s some racists who are like, oh, it’s cool, there’s this show where there are racists.”

Stavvy and his friends were “mean-spirited comedians who had a bad life,” explained Stavvy. “I didn’t care if we were offensive. I had nothing to lose.” His early podcasts, all group efforts of like-minded comedians, were a “knee-jerk rebellion” not against cancel culture exactly, but for the proposition that “young people should be able to make f*%ed up jokes and it not ruin their lives.”

Which, fair, but I was not a fan. All I knew about him at the time is that he, Joan Jett, and Josh Charles are what pass for celebrity Orioles fans, and of the three, I’d prefer to listen to Josh Charles tell jokes. The vague awareness I had of him was of being mixed up in the anti-woke comedy subculture, which he said was not accurate. “We would never consider ourselves anti-woke guys,” he said, “but we did hate f&*%ing tattletale losers.” Again, fair. Still, not a fan.

Nevertheless, so starved am I for baseball content that I happily listened to his appearance on Good One in which he dismissed the idea that he is the left’s Joe Rogan (“We’re f#@*ed if they’re even sniffing around over here.”) and how he felt bad for Jordan Jensen, a comedienne who recently plugged her Netflix special on his podcast. “We all say just kind of dumb sh*t sometimes,” he said.

Actually, there was nothing objectionable at all when she went on Stavvy’s World—for two minutes and 20 seconds. That’s when Jensen said her new special was about “blood and vagina and cum.”

“Some universal truths,” said Stavvy. “Everyone’s got two outta three.”

“We probably have the least amount of vaginas and penises in the United States,” she said, “because they’ve been all…” And here she made a face and mimed scissors snipping with her fingers. I felt the kind of tired and sick in my stomach I get when I’m angry and bored.

Stavvy, chuckling, tried to explain that trans surgery could include fashioning male genitalia into female, or as he put it, “You just make it into the other one.”

“Do you?” she said. “I think sometimes they just…”

Stavvy was working here, trying to pull Jordan out of the hole she’d dug herself, but she kept digging, conflating drag with trans women who choose to keep their factory parts in a weird digression about “lady boys” in Thailand.

“I think you’re being very xenophobic right now,” said Stavvy, sounding for all the world like a friendly bartender who wants you to maybe sit this next round out, eh pal? He made fun of where she was from—Upstate New York—and had almost got things back on track when she brought up her friend’s ex who “f*%#ed a tranny. … Which tranny to me is drag, in my opinion.”

Stavvy’d had enough. “No.” Not “nah” as in “nah, bro.” Just “no.” Even shook his head a little. “It’s a slur for trans…”

“Yeah, but it’s not transgender,” she said.

“Yes it is.”

“If you transition fully, you’re not really a tranny anymore,” she said, whispering the slur.

“OK, stop saying it.”

“Sorry.” But she keeps going with a story about her friend’s ex who was weirded out by the altered body of a trans woman, which was stupid but isn’t what broke my heart, and neither was it her musing whether a trans woman who fully transitioned into an after-market women’s body was no longer queer. It takes a lot more than badly articulated ignorance to hurt me these days.

It’s what Stavvy said next that cracked me. “You have got Austin trans brain,” he said. “You immediately brought it up as soon as the podcast started.” Stavvy gave her some rope, and she hung herself by blaming women for the unrealistic beauty standards expected of women. “Now you’re clearly practicing for Rogan,” joked Stavvy. “You’re going to do a great job on Kill Tony with these talking points.”

I’m sorry, Austin trans brain?!?! Are we talking about the same Austin? Austin, where Willie Nelson was welcomed as a weirdo? Austin, the city so self-consciously welcoming to people and beliefs that don’t fit anywhere else that “Keep Austin Weird” was conceived as a small retail business slogan? Austin, the city where the term “slacker” was revived to describe the live-and-let-live neo-bohemians who defined the city’s culture? Austin, a city so dedicated to not becoming normal that “Don’t Dallas my Austin” is a viable political argument?

What in the name of Kerbey Lane queso is “Austin trans brain”?

In college, I saw Richard Linklater’s Slacker, a loose-limbed meandering through a chilled-out college town, with a friend from Austin. “That’s exactly what it’s like,” he said, laughing. Less than two years after graduating college in Portland, I moved to Austin in a black Volkswagon with black leather seats and no A/C. It was 70 degrees in January, and I thought I’d found heaven. A few months later, I discovered my error, but like many who showed up in Austin with no firm plans, I made the city my home and lived there, with the exception of one year, until December 2022.

I loved my Austin. I almost didn’t want to know what “Austin trans brain” was like Brad Pitt didn’t want to know what was in the box in Se7en. I kinda knew, but the last degree of ignorance, while not bliss, was still mine.

A few months after I left, Joe Rogan opened the Comedy Mothership in a former Alamo Drafthouse. The Hollywood Reporter called it an “anti-cancel culture club,” and on opening night, the bro-y audience got the free speech they came for.

Within seconds of the first comic taking the stage, a gay slur was thrown out, followed by jokes about trans people. The audience hooted. For the anti-cancel-culture crowd, this is their new safe space.

Over the past two and a half years, Rogan and his hangers on have turned Austin into one of the tentpole cities of American comedy, up there in importance, if not talent or smarts, with Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. And if you’re a certain kind of twentysomething white dude who thinks telling trans jokes is edgy and not hacky, you’re either trying to make it in Austin or are saving up to move there.

“So many people think the only way to make it” in stand-up is to become an Austin comic, said Jay Jurden on a recent episode of Good One: A Podcast About Jokes. This is how it works: You go on Kill Tony, an open mic podcast where you tell rapid-fire jokes in front of a panel of comedians who then interview you and offer you feedback. The goal is to say something so outrageous and provocative that the comedians deem it “hilarious.” You may know co-host Tony Hinchcliffe as the one who joked that Puerto Rico was a “island of garbage” at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden.

The problem is that dumping on the world’s most marginalized people isn’t what gets you booked on The Tonight Show or that earns respect among comedians. Dave Chappelle is justifiably considered a legend in stand-up comedy, but find me someone defending his recent jokes about trans people, and I’ll show you an Austin comedian. “It’s such a specific niche skill set to say something crazy enough to get that crowd riled up in Austin that one night in front of that panel and then get sh*t on [by other comedians] for however long afterward,” said Jurden.

Jurden, who takes standup comedy seriously, is leading the backlash against the Austin comedy movement.

“I don’t think that these people driving a van from California to Texas on the hope they can make it … is comedy. That’s desperation,” said Jurden. “Howard Stern stopped that for a reason. I don’t think it’s comedy, I think it’s cruelty.”

Marc Maron was one of the early opponents of the anti-woke comics, arguing that what they wanted wasn’t free speech but to say horrible things without any consequences.

“The big question is when will they shut up about trans people, intellectually challenged people, immigrants, the disabled, and minorities,” Marc Maron said on a different episode of Good One.

And now maybe Stavvy is, too, though he doesn’t see it that way. He hates that his exchange with Jordan circulated online and made some minor waves in comedy circles. She’s his friend and has been on his podcast often. All he wanted to do was change the topic. “I’m not interested in scolding someone,” he said. “You get kind of like a pass on a slur, but you can’t keep hitting the slur button.”

The problem for him is that if you’re going to joke about something offensive, you can’t mistake causing offense with making it funny. “That’s actually the hardest hurdle to clear,” he said on Good One. “If you’re making me laugh at something that I fully disagree with, you’re really good.” And Jordan, who he thinks is a “hilarious comedian,” wasn’t even close to clearing that hurdle.

The good news is that the backlash is fully on against trans jokes. The bad news is that Austin trans brain has “become shorthand to show that I’m one of the … cool guys, and I don’t think that’s interesting,” said Stavvy.

It’s not cool, not interesting, and certainly not weird. Congratulations Joe Rogan, you’ve turned Austin into shorthand for everything Austin wasn’t. And that breaks my heart a little. But if someone like Stavvy is helping push back, then maybe these jokers will be moving on before too long.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of the NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Email him at jason31170@gmail.com.