Comedian and NYC-native Mario Benitez on the overlooked common struggle of poverty

And how weed doesn't make you lazy; "it makes you complacent"

Mario Benitez doing standup at a club in New York City. (Courtesy Photo)

After standup comic and artist Mario Benitez traveled the country with a rock band of fellow New York City natives, he realized something.

“I think people in trailer parks and people in the projects have the same ideas of similar struggles, and I don't think that they think they are struggling in the same ways,” Benitez said.

Benitez is behind the Saturday Gigantic podcast with co-host Jose Ortiz; they do sketches along with discussions on wide-ranging topical subjects. Partially because of his status as a native New Yorker, Benitez has the kind of perspective at the heart of the idea of the Chilltown Blues.

“I'm like, yeah, it's it's all the same s—t,” Benitez continued. “And it's like I get how skin colors would differentiate it, because you always see more Black and Hispanic individuals in the projects and white, poor individuals in trailer parks. But we all have that similar struggle.”

In the U.S. on a pop culture level “white” has generally been synonymous with a default identity that’s allowed for people who have the status to be divorced from the false idea of poverty as a moral or “racial” failing. Not every person with European heritage was seen as white when they immigrated to the U.S., but the ability to divorce themselves from “the other” even if they were considered on the bottom rung in European society … that became a tool to let someone “white” or (sufficiently “white”-adjacent) have status over somebody else … But when that “somebody” can only exist in a country with an official second-class of people, a status the country all too slowly dialed back from since its founding, poor white people are divorced from respectability because of the same old-world class system. I relay something along these lines to Benitez, specifically how no one who is white suffers profiling when someone else considered white does something heinous.

“I think that's an actually interesting point you're making because I never thought about it like that,” Benitez said. “But while it's wrong in that sense because there's a lot of stereotypical things that get placed upon people of darker skin, I think even the idea of white poverty gets swept under the rug, and it isn't spoken about enough. You could see how it's like become a boiling point to even sum up our political climate almost.”

“But when you see people that come and pay rent for a place where you’ve seen people get murdered before, and they're paying like three times or maybe quadruple the amount that you grew up remembering what the rent was there … it's like what the f---k are you doing?” - Mario Benitez

The New Manhattan

If you were to look at social media in the U.S., more people seem invested in entertainment that accurately portrays some franchised fictional character’s why status than why that feel way about something fictional.

And really, Benitez said, aspects of this can be funny. Benitez is a standup comic after all, he says, partly because of the need to laugh in a world full of things that aren’t funny … like the cost of living and rent in Jersey City or the New York City boroughs he grew up in, all due to the ever-inflated value of Manhattan real estate …