Meet Ari Shaffir. Likes: magic mushrooms, destroying gods and a good holocaust joke. Dislikes: politicians, dishonest media and shit-stirring bloggers. Fresh off of his two-part Netflix special Double Negative, Shaffir sat down with HUSTLER to discuss his beef with Howard Stern, how Pauly Shore improved his sex life and the lighter side of shitting yourself.
HUSTLER: An entire page of your website is devoted to psychedelic mushrooms?
ARI SHAFFIR: Yeah, they’ve sort of helped me see things more realistically. You know how you step back and you look at yourself? On a good trip you take that and apply that to the world too. It gets you a better way of looking at everything, a richer way of looking at everything, where you’re not having to defend your own point of view. Mushrooms helped a lot for that.
Do you think social media is good or bad as a whole?
As a whole, I think it’s bad. The only reason I’m still on Facebook is so that I can keep track of the people I meet when I’m traveling. Social media brings down my life. You waste hours. You wake up at ten, which is early for me. I’m like, Cool, I can go outside, where the air’s fresh. Get my jump. Then it’s 12:30, I’m like, Oh fuck, I’ve got to get out of the house. I just lost a good two hours of sunlight. For what? It should be toilets only—that should be the only time you check that shit.
You talk quite a bit about shitting yourself in your act. Is this pure fiction or taken from real-life experience?
