The Masks Just Keep Coming Off

In another world it might come as a surprise for a Manhattan comedy club to host a proud white supremacist. In another world, the very announcement might cause a stir throughout the entire comedy scene, as it did when The Creek and The Cave planned to host Milo Yiannopoulos just five years ago. Alas, we do not live in that world; we live in the one where it makes perfect sense that The Stand would welcome antisemite Sam Hyde to a live recording of Legion of Skanks on Monday July 15th.

Really the only surprise here is that it’s taken so long for Hyde to crawl his way back to a major comedy club following the collapse of his Adult Swim show Million Dollar Extreme in 2016. Plenty of comedians have returned from their own scandals much more quickly, and he’s friends with most of them. He appeared on Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast in 2020 and hosted Shane Gillis on his own podcast, Perfect Guy Life, last year. His cohost, Nick Rochefort, appeared on Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast just a few weeks ago. Both Hyde and Rochefort featured in the Legion of Skanks’ festival Skankfest last year and they’re both booked this year. Luis Gomez appeared on Perfect Guy Life earlier this year; so did Dan Soder, the Billions actor, Skanks regular, and former longtime cohost of The Bonfire with Jay Oakerson. Hyde, Rochefort, and their fellow MDE member Charls Carroll have spent this year touring comedy clubs across the country, that is, when they’re not too busy recording their own extremely racist podcast. (Among other things, they’ve used Perfect Guy Life to complain about “anti-white podcasts,” mock Black people, embark on various antisemitic rants, and spew anti-immigrant propaganda.) I suspect it’s only a matter of time before they are, once again, regulars in the New York standup and podcast circuit.

Shane Gillis Just Had One of Comedy’s Biggest Racists on His Podcast

His latest guest is Nick Rochefort of Million Dollar Extreme, whose Adult Swim show was cancelled over its use of Nazi imagery.

HumorismSeth Simons

From the other side of things, it’s only natural that Legion of Skanks would facilitate Hyde’s return. The group has long been friendly with far-right extremists, dating back to its origins on Compound Media, the comedy network where Gavin McInnes created the Proud Boys. As I have documented in this newsletter, Dave Smith is himself a Nazi sympathizer, anti-trans activist, rape apologist, anti-vaxxer, and race scientist; Luis Gomez just a few weeks ago declared his love of racist comedy on Perfect Guy Life; and Oakerson is pretty much one of the biggest all-around morons in an industry full of all-around morons. Perhaps it is worth a good laugh that their other guest on Monday’s episode is David Lucas, the Kill Tony regular who counts himself a friend of Kyle Rittenhouse; spoke against the Black Lives Matter movement in recent appearances on Perfect Guy Life and No Jumper, the podcast hosted by YouTuber (and alleged sexual predator) Adam22; and caused a minor controversy in February when he joked in a standup set that he would have shot George Floyd. 

Hyde’s appearance at The Stand—a routine stop for comics of every stripe, from Dave Chappelle and Mark Normand to Judah Friedlander and Janeane Garofalo—may be a bellwether of comedy’s rightward lurch, or it may just be a sign that the lurch is more or less complete. While this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, it seems to me that comedians in the Rogan-adjacent crowd are becoming increasingly comfortable graduating from quote-unquote ironic bigotry to completely straight-faced bigotry, with no gesture towards the plausible deniability of a comedic pretext. Consider a recent episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast in which Gillis complains about gay men having orgies during Pride, which he and McCusker agree is “medically” problematic:

GILLIS: I got in a Pride fight this weekend.

MCCUSKER: Where?

GILLIS: In Philadelphia. I was at a bar talking to a lady about it.

MCCUSKER: What was she saying?

GILLIS: I was just like, look, I'm all for gay stuff. Do whatever you want. But I know some of those guys that go to that and they get wild at that thing.

MCCUSKER: Yeah.

GILLIS: Like that weekend or that week. The Pride parade in New York is like—dudes are going into rooms and just having orgies every night. I'm like, you're fucking like 15 guys a night.

MCCUSKER: Yeah, true.

GILLIS: And she was like, "So? That's fine."

MCCUSKER: No it's not.

GILLIS: And I was like, "It's not, though."

MCCUSKER: No, like, medically it's not.

GILLIS: And that's what I was saying. I was like, "If I went out and 10 different guys nutted in my butt, you would go, 'Hey, you have a problem.'"

MCCUSKER: Yeah.

GILLIS: And she was like, "No, that's fine. What do you care? They're using condoms. They're being safe." And I was like, "First of all, no. Trust me.”

MCCUSKER: Clearly. Clearly. Nuh-uh.

GILLIS: Trust me, daddy. It's just dudes. We're not using condoms, bro.

MCCUSKER: Yeah, dude.

GILLIS: But then I was like, if I went and fucked 10 women a night for three days, every one of my friends would be like, "Yo. What the fuck are you doing?" Not one person would be like, "That's cool." Everyone would be upset. But just because it's gay people, everyone's like [unintelligible]—.

MCCUSKER: At the same time. I might under the table give you a [unintelligible].

GILLIS: At the same time I would be a king. It would be over. I would blow my head off at the end of that. I would go, “I'm a God.”

You may recall that his 2022 New Yorker profile described Gillis as “the kind of straight guy who sometimes uses ‘gay’ as a mild pejorative,” noting elsewhere that he (mostly) had the wherewithal not to use a more offensive slur in the presence of a microphone. When he used “gay” as a mild pejorative during his Saturday Night Live monologue in February, he was cheered across the comedy manosphere for bringing it (and a certain ableist slur) back to the mainstream. Much like his long history of racism, this segment suggests that despite the popular rationalization of his casual homophobia—he doesn’t really mean it; in fact, he’s making fun of the real homophobes—these jokes are, in fact, rooted in regular old-fashioned disgust at the thought of gay sex, complete with a double standard for heterosexual sex. It strikes me, too, that these are not thoughts he spontaneously produces while recording his podcast, for the purpose of comedy: he’s recalling a conversation he had with a woman in a bar, who told him to mind his own damn business. 

Something must be in the air these days. In the latest Patreon-exclusive episode of Flagrant, Andrew Schulz treads similar ground in a conversation with his cohosts Akaash Singh, Mark Gagnon, Alexx Media, and producer Dov Mamann, complaining about a gay wedding he’s planning to attend: 

SCHULZ: I gotta go to a gay wedding that both of them are in open relationships.

SINGH: That's not a wedding.

SCHULZ: They don't want kids and they're in open relationships.

SINGH: That's not—what are you—why are you going? Why you gotta go?

[…]

SCHULZ: Don't you feel like it's performative a little? It's like, okay. I think the gays are going through this time where they're like, okay, we couldn't do this thing, so now we have to prove we can do it. So let's do all the things that we couldn't do to prove we can. But you're not actually doing the thing. Which is at least pretending to be faithful and starting a family. Which is the idea of marriage.

SINGH: Otherwise it's a waste of everyone's time.

GAGNON: But it is fun to have a party.

SCHULZ: So call it a party. Nobody's upset at that. Gay parties are the best. We've gone to gay parties throughout history because they're the most fun parties. If gays are like, "Yo, I got a nightclub, it's gonna be the most fly. Studio 54," we're there. Nobody's saying no to a gay party. But the institution of marriage—to not adhere to any of the rules of it—like, what are we doing here?

DOV MAMANN: When are we drawing the rules from though? Because back in the day, marriage was just a legal contract to join two families and they all had their side pieces.

SCHULZ: Now you make a fantastic point. You make a fantastic point. What I would say to that is—you're gay. No, no, no, no. You make an absolutely fantastic point. Now, what I would question is, not every marriage was a legal bond to—to, what's it called—unite wealth. Right? It was about populating families. We needed more people to tend to fields. Not everybody was in the situation that you needed to do it just to save the money. I would imagine. I would imagine the majority of people just didn't have any money. But part of life was creating more life. Not everything is Bridgerton, where it's like, how do we make sure our family names go on? I assume. Again, I don't know.

GAGNON: But maybe that's where the gays are getting the idea from. Kingdom marriages.

SCHULZ: Which is what they would rather want. They want some gala. They want some fuckin' flaunt-your-money shit.

This goes on for quite a while. Singh seems to get especially angry at the idea of the wedding, insisting he would have no issue if the couple simply described it as a party instead of “pretending it’s something much more sacred.” Schulz, who I cannot stress enough is talking about his own friends, notes that they didn’t invited their other boyfriends to the event, which he thinks is revealing: “You know it’s wrong,” he practically yells. “You're embarrassed. You would have to explain this lifestyle choice to all these people. It makes a mockery out of this fucking event if you brought your side dick.”

Again, this is all just straightforwardly homophobic: these aren’t jokes, they are norm-based arguments against the idea of gay marriage, in defense of the institution of heterosexual marriage. I am struck, too, by the religious tenor of the conversation, which follows an equally long segment in which the podcasters speculate that “the West” has cultivated Christianity in order to prevent people from practicing Islam, a religion that Schulz argues is much less conducive to capitalism. Even though the Ottoman Empire no longer exists, he ponders, the religion it spread is still practiced in many Middle Eastern countries, so can it really be said to have fallen? And since people need religion, it only makes sense for Western governments to prop up the one that facilitates the flow of capital—

SCHULZ: Does the West need Christianity to combat Islam? Meaning there's a certain—people need faith, right? I think we've realized throughout history  that that humans need something to believe in. That's not saying every single human, but I would say the majority of them just need a thing to believe in, a thing that they can be virtuous about, feel good about themselves. Something they can wake up and do every day, and then they get to feel like a good person. Right? It can't just be, "I make a lot of money," or it can't be, "I have a successful business," or it can't be, "I'm the most fucking badass gangster on the planet." 

Like, there should be another thing that can kind of organize and give people this good feeling, right? "I'm doing the good work." Does the leniency, or the perceived leniency, of Christianity function better with Western government and capitalism? And therefore the West needs Christianity to maintain the culture that we have built outside of religion. And without it—because people need religion, they need God—they would end up converting to Islam. So it is in the best interest of the West to prop up Christianity as a more viable option of faith than allow it to be taken over by one that doesn't necessarily fit with the values and the economic systems of the West.

[…]

And do you think it's in the best interest of like the state planners in America to say, okay, people need a thing, we gotta give 'em something, but we can't give 'em something that's gonna make them reject this other thing that we all really love, i.e. capitalism. Let's cultivate this one. Or at least reward this one over this other option. Because that other option might chip into capitalism. I mean, Just the fact that like with Islam, you can't charge interest—like, how the fuck could you run a banking empire without interest? If the banks are, you know, running the government.

This is all completely straightforward Islamophobia, not to mention completely bonkers, period. What it tells us, other than that Schulz and his fans will happily serve as cheerleaders for the stripping away of various civil rights over the coming decade, is that we cannot simply write off Sam Hyde as just another marginal crank with no hope of regaining a mainstream platform. Andrew Schulz and Shane Gillis are two of the biggest comics working today, with the power to fill arenas around the globe. They were thoroughly ignorant bigots when they started out, and they’re still thoroughly ignorant bigots now; success, it seems, has only empowered them to become more and more open about their beliefs, and to reach the audiences who celebrate them for it.

There is no reason to assume that Hyde, who is somehow even more hateful than they are, has no path to the same echelons of fame. As the terrifying prospect of unified GOP rule looms over us, it’s only sensible to conclude that there is a genuine hunger out there for what he has have to offer; and as Schulz and Gillis and so many of their friends illustrate, the comedy industry will forgive anything there’s a market for. It's very easy to see where this goes.