One Strike

​On this week's episode of the Reply All podcast, a story plucked from the lost-and-found section of Craigslist. And in the second half of the show, we talk to Barry Crimmins, the subject of Bobcat Goldthwait's new documentary, Call Me Lucky.

[The segment detailed below begins at 12:21]

Barry Crimmins is a comic's comic. You may not have heard of him but many of your favorite comedians name check him as a massive influence. In the seventies and eighties, Crimmins ran several comedy clubs in Boston fostering the city's outrageous and unapologetic stand-up scene. Barry Crimmins is a self-described "lefty comic." Most of his material is overtly political. For example, he tweets at the pope every day, begging to be excommunicated. 

But for the most part, Crimmins' material is not confessional. "I mean I'm not the kind of comic that tells you every detail about his life," he says. "Who cares?"

That all changed in May of 1992, when he took the stage at a comedy club in Boston and told a story he'd never told before, how when he was a child, his babysitter would sometimes bring a man over, who would take him down to the basement and rape him.

Telling his story publicly was cathartic. But Barry wanted to find other people who had lived through similar experiences. Fortunately, there was a place where he could go. The Internet. And while he found other survivors online, he also found a virtually unchecked community that gathered in AOL chatrooms to trade child pornography and enable one another to commit heinous acts of child abuse.

On this week's episode of Reply All we spoke to comedian Barry Crimmins about his one-man mission to stop the trade of child pornography online. A mission that ended on the floor of the US Senate. 

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Bonus: Director Bobcat Goldthwait discusses Call Me Lucky on Comedy Bang Bang.