What do these countries have in common?
China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq,
Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia, Bangladesh,
Afghanistan, and the United States.
I'll give you a hint. It's not the Paris Accord.
It's the death penalty.
These are the top 10 countries who execute the most prisoners,
and the U.S. isn't even the last one.
It's number 7.
Personally, I'm against the death penalty,
or, as I call it, grown-up abortion.
[ Laughter ]
I'm not saying we shouldn't punish people
who commit horrible crimes.
I think they should be locked up forever.
But life in prison is much worse punishment than death.
It's got to be so boring. I hate being bored.
How many times you been watching a one-man show
and you turn to your friend and said, "Please kill me"?
And that was after an hour.
Do you know how many hours there are in a lifetime?
Probably a lot.
[ Laughter ]
Now, I know many of you watching have very exact opinions
on who deserves to live and who deserves to die.
But guess what. It's not up to you.
I think Kate Upton deserves to be my girlfriend,
but ultimately it's not my choice.
It's her father's choice or whoever owns her now.
[ Laughter ]
Death leaves no room for error.
One study estimated that 1 out of every 25
death-row inmates may be innocent.
And 23 out of every 25 have their own Netflix documentaries.
[ Laughter ]
Even in the cases
where the victim's guilt is undeniable,
executions are problematic.
In April, Arkansas executed four people
in the span of a week.
The first, Ledell Lee,
had what we might call not the fairest trial.
The ACLU filed for a stay,
claiming Lee was mentally disabled,
but the court refused.
Then Lee was denied new DNA testing.
He was also appointed a lawyer who showed up in court drunk.
Oh, and one of the prosecutors in the case
was banging the judge.
[ Audience groans ]
Totally unethical, but they did later get married,
so there's a happy ending.
Not for Ledell Lee, though. He's dead.
It must be awkward talking to that couple at dinner parties, right?
Like, "So, how did you two meet?"
"Ha. Funny story.
We were both trying to kill a retarded guy,
and we just clicked."
Yes, I know I'm not supposed to say that word.
I swear we tried to find another word,
but nothing else really worked for that joke.
What's more upsetting is that
people will be angry at me saying the word "retard'
than they are about Arkansas killing one of them.
[ Cheers and applause ]
But here's my main problem.
Even if you ignore every issue I just listed,
the death penalty itself is unconstitutional.
It violates the Eighth Amendment
prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
We love the Constitution in this country.
And I guess that the people who like the death penalty
are also big fans of the First and Second Amendments.
But you can't just pick and choose
which amendments to follow.
And here's how I know it's cruel and unusual.
Most Americans don't want to see people killed
by a firing squad or a guillotine
because that would be [bleep] up.
So, instead, the majority of executions
are done by lethal injection, which works like this.
Man: The first drug administered
is sodium thiopental, a barbiturate.
It acts as an anesthetic used to render the person unconscious.
The second drug is pancuronium,
a muscle relaxant that causes paralysis.
The final drug is potassium chloride,
which stops the heart, causing cardiac arrest.
Pixar's gotten bleak.
Still, less sad than the movie "Up."
[ Laughter ]
The whole idea is to keep the inmate from thrashing around.
So we don't have the stomach watching a person die brutally.
We want to feel like he's just
peacefully drifting off to sleep.
But lethal injections don't always work.
Trust me. I live in L.A.
I see botched injections every day.
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
This is how one of the Arkansas inmates spent his last moments.
Man: Lawyers claim that officials spent 45 minutes
trying to place the IV line into Jones' neck
and that he was gasping for air.
Getting poked unsuccessfully for 45 minutes?
Sounds like having sex with a teenage me.
[ Laughter ]
I assume afterwards
Arkansas went around to all of his friends
and told them how great it went.
"Oh, yeah, I killed him. He was begging for it.
Then I killed him again afterwards.
He couldn't get enough of me killing him.
He loved it!"
Rather than take their time and do it right,
Arkansas rushed to execute these prisoners
because the lethal drugs
were about to go past the kill-by date.
Thank God they didn't expire.
Those death-row inmates could have gotten sick or something.
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Wait.
Why do only legal drugs have expiration dates?
There's no use-by date on heroin.
Well, maybe there is,
but no one's ever kept it long enough to find out.
No heroin user's ever gone,
"I'll do half now,
and I'll put the other half in the freezer for later."
Look. Let's be honest about it.
When we say executions shouldn't be cruel and unusual,
we really mean not cruel and unusual for us.
If we're going to be a nation that kills people,
we need to own it.
I say we go back to executions
by good old-fashioned stoning.
It's cheap. Rocks don't expire.
And we'd have one more thing in common with some of our friends.