Hate Speech Is Back, Baby
Comedy's most popular figures are going all-in on ableism and anti-Asian racism.
Matt Rife is possibly the most popular comedian working today, having spent much of the last two years performing in massive venues around the world, netting millions upon millions of dollars. Chris Distefano is a podcaster, actor, and stalwart of both the road and the New York comedy scene, and he recently joined the first class of artists included in Hulu’s new standup rollout, “Hularious.” Yannis Pappas is a guy who hosts a podcast with Distefano. Here they all are in an episode of that podcast recorded earlier this month, riffing about the Illuminati:
Pappas: You definitely get—the entertainment perks are probably better.
Rife: Yeah.
Pappas: The entertainment perks.
Rife: You're going to have more fun. The parties have got to be better.
Pappas: But what happens when China buys the Illuminati? That's when I'm going to be in a position of privilege.
Rife: The Iruminati.
Pappas: The Iruminati! That's a good one. Keep it in the clip.
Rife: And... canceled.
Distefano: You're too big to get canceled. That's what's good about all our—
Pappas: It's not a big deal. Look. When they speak in a second language, they do struggle with the "L."
Rife: Oh, of course.
Pappas: Yeah. They struggle with the "L."
Distefano: It's a good point.
Pappas: In certain languages—
Rife: My name was Matt Life before I joined TikTok.
Pappas: There you go.
Distefano: Which is a good name.
Pappas: Yeah, Matt Life. When he tours in Asia, it will be like, [Affecting a caricaturish Chinese accent:] “Welcome to the stage, Matt Life."
Distefano: [Also affecting a caricaturish Chinese accent:] Matt Life stadium.
Rife: Have you guys performed in Asia?
Distefano: No. I typically don't go behind enemy lines.
Pappas: He can't even eat in front of them. I'm just kidding.
Distefano: No. I don't perform in Asia, but I've seen Ronny Chieng's standup.
Distefano is right, isn’t he? Rife is indeed too big to get canceled over a casual dalliance in anti-Asian racism. Distefano and Pappas, meanwhile, are far too small for anyone to care. This is the world we live in now. So-called cancel culture—better understood as a patchwork effort to protect the culturally progressive gains of the 2010s against the backlash signaled by Trumpism—not only failed but is widely regarded as an overreach, and its onetime targets in media and politics are ascendant. Which is all very good news for the comedians who have made it their business, wittingly or unwittingly, to return their art form to its roots as a means of bullying the vulnerable.
Consider a recent, glowing Rolling Stone profile of Nikki Glaser:
Nikki Glaser is turned on. That the comedian is, at full volume, discussing her level of arousal in a restaurant — she is “damp downstairs,” to be precise — is probably not surprising to anyone who has seen her four standup specials. In her most recent, Someday You’ll Die, Glaser extensively describes her boyfriend of 10 years, Chris Convy (who also produces Glaser’s work), blindfolding and restraining her while pretending to be a parade of different men coming in to… actually, like Glaser, feel free to use your imagination here.
The HBO special came out in May, less than a week after The Roast of Tom Brady, a live Netflix production featuring everyone from NFL legends like Peyton Manning to Kevin Hart, Kim Kardashian, and a disheveled and pallid Ben Affleck. That night, Glaser had a career-changing set. After a series of (very funny!) jokes about how repulsive and pathetic her fellow roasters were and a public confession to Convy, “the love of my life,” that “I would shoot you in the fucking face for a lottery ticket to suck this guy’s dick,” she addressed the quarterback. “Tom also lost $30 million in crypto,” Glaser said. “Tom, how did you fall for that? Even Gronk” — that’s former Brady teammate Rob Gronkowski, who Glaser had just described as putting “the ‘tard’ in ‘retarded’” — “was like, ‘Me know that not real money.’” (“I did,” Gronk grunted onstage.) The crowd gave Glaser a standing ovation.
Suddenly, Glaser was everywhere. She appeared on The Howard Stern Show and the massive podcast SmartLess. She began a 67-show theater tour of North America that will continue through June. And she was asked to host the 2025 Golden Globes, where she is also nominated for Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television for Someday You’ll Die. The ceremony will air on CBS Jan. 5 and is the topic that led us to what Glaser describes as her “leak in the basement.”
You would be forgiven for missing what to me is the most noteworthy information in those paragraphs: Glaser’s use of the word “retarded,” which is in every sense a slur, and which Rolling Stone credits as the defining moment of her “career-changing set.” Oddly enough, this doesn’t warrant even a little examination in the rest of the profile, nor has it factored into any commentary about Glaser since the Brady roast aired in May. While I tend to think that comedians must not be very good at their job if they use hate speech to do it—slurs are, at the very least, lazy substitutions for thought—clearly this is not the opinion of audiences, industry gatekeepers, or the press that covers them, which appears content to let hate speech return to the mainstream.
This particular slur has become a regular feature of podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tim Dillon Show, Flagrant, and Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast. Shane Gillis, of course, used it in his Saturday Night Live monologue earlier this year, couching it in the voice of a bully insulting his relative with Down syndrome—much in the way that he has since deployed his impression of Donald Trump as means of distancing himself from his use of slurs. (Curiously, he’s had no problem using them in his own voice on his podcast.) What little gains in sensitivity towards disabled people have been made in the last decade, these comedians have been all too eager to abandon; or maybe it’s that everyone else has abandoned them, and these comedians no longer feel any social or professional pressure to play along. Not even the vaunted New Yorker, in its 2022 profile of Gillis, could bring itself to conclude that hate speech is really so bad:
One lesson from Gillis’s experience might seem simple enough: Don’t use racial slurs. But what about sexual slurs? Almost no one calls for male comics to be censured for saying “bitch.” And what qualifies as a race, anyway? Gillis recently filmed a sketch for “Gilly and Keeves” that consists of almost nothing but Italian American stereotypes; the underlying joke is that, in the current political environment, you can say whatever you want about Italian Americans. It is probable that the more taboo words there are, the less consistently the taboos will be honored. And it seems certain that there will always be comedians and audiences who revel in the illicit thrill of bad words, no matter how we define “bad.”
Whatever the case, it seems clear from these comedians’ embrace of other modes of bigotry—see above, or Theo Von’s recent comments on Black and Asian people—that they will ride this wave as far as it goes, and there’s no one left to rein them in.
Last week, Holocaust deniers Bill McCusker and Andrew Pacella appeared once again on Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, the podcast that has spent years helping them build an audience for their own show, War Mode, which is currently netting more than $600,000/year on Patreon. A few days later, they appeared on the Infowars program American Journal, hosted by Harrison Smith, where McCusker called for the execution of parents who give their children Covid vaccines:
Smith: The Guatemalan sex trafficking thing going on right now. Is it all about trafficking children? Is that like what our whole world is built on? Is this what we're all learning?
Pacella: Dude, I don't know. I try to stay away from the harvesting of the children's holy spirit and stuff like that. That freaks me out. And I know that if I go down that road in my mind, I believe it to be true. They fear that because—I mean, dude, then they look at what they're really going up against is God and God's children. I'd be scared too.
Smith: Yeah. Well, I mean, but how, how do we confront this and tell people about what's going on and not freak them out and drive them away? That's my main mission on this show, is to be like, I'm gonna describe the craziest insanity you've ever heard—they're starting wars so can keep making money. It's like, it's unimaginable what these people are capable of.
Pacella: You gotta find like little pills from history. Be like, "This was fake. This was fake." You know what I mean?
Smith: Yeah. Turns out all of it. Turns out all of it was fake.
McCusker: You gotta chill. Real nice and easy, just—'cause I tried with Covid. I was in group chats with my buddies. All of 'em got vaccinated. The whole time, I'm freaking out. And once I just kind of chilled out, was just, I'll throw out the flu graph where like, flu just disappeared for two years. No big deal. Just throw it out there and let them do their own research. But it seems like a lot of them are kind of turned around and like, kind of waking up? And not—my one buddy, his 1-year-old kid, they tried to get a Covid vaccine and he was like, "No." I was like, all right, now we're, now we're gaining some ground here
Smith: At the bare minimum, my God. Vaccinating your one-year-old against Covid. You're really gone at that point.
McCusker: You should be hung.
Smith: Yeah.
Pacella: They get paid to do the vaccines. They get bonuses and as soon as the kid's born—they inject premature babies with vaccines. What is the point of this? They're fighting for their lives.
The next time someone tells you that podcasters have no influence on anything that matters, show them this: Bill McCusker boasting that he prevented a child from getting vaccinated.
An update on last week’s story: the “Comedians for Conversation” event has been postponed after pro-Palestinian comics dropped out, perhaps because they recognized the event as very obvious hasbara. According to a report by The Algemeiner, Stand Up NY and The Heart Monitors released an “open letter” to the unnamed comics in question, whose emails and phone numbers they presumably already had on hand:
“By participating, you are not endorsing any narrative or perspective other than your own. You are helping to create a space where others can see what it looks like to sit in the same room, listen, and engage without fear or anger dictating the conversation,” they wrote in the letter, which was shared with The Algemeiner.”We need your voices. We need your humor. And most importantly, we need your courage to engage.”
Organizers also clarified in the open letter what they called a “fundamental misunderstanding” about the goal of the event. “This is not a debate about genocide; it is an exercise in dialogue, empathy, and understanding,” they explained. “Humor is one of the most powerful tools we have to lower defenses and foster connection. It disarms anger and fear, opening the door to conversations that would otherwise feel impossible. As comedians, you have the unique ability to shine a light on truths, challenge assumptions, and create moments of shared humanity.”
“Your participation would not just represent your voice but also signal the courage to engage, to listen, and to model the dialogue we desperately need in our world today to create change,” they added. “By stepping back, we lose not just your voices but also the opportunity to inspire others to engage constructively. Your presence would show that even amid intense feelings and profound disagreements, it is possible to come together and model the courage it takes to foster dialogue.”
Zoldan, meanwhile, was unable to maintain the pretense of respect in his own Instagram posts:
I know, I know, It’s been too long since I last shared some content I enjoyed. Fortunately my current favorite comedy group, Simple Town, has put out a bunch of new shorts lately:
I've also been enjoying Chloe Radcliffe's new interview show, In Tandem with Chloe Radcliffe, especially her episode with James Acaster:
Okay, that's all for today!