Tim Dillon Helps JD Vance Pitch Mass Deportations
And other recent goings-on in comedy.
I hope, I plead, I pray that once this election is over, we can dispense with the notion that comedy has nothing to do with politics, or at least the notion that our current crop of beloved comedian-podcasters are anything but right-wing propagandists. In the last 24 hours alone, Joe Rogan hosted Donald Trump while Tim Dillon hosted JD Vance, capping off a campaign season in which both candidates made regular stops on the podcast circuit, currying favor with Rogan, Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, and their millions of young fans.
Vance’s appearance on Dillon’s podcast is a particularly rich illustration of the cynicism driving these comedians. They may fancy themselves heterodox freethinkers above the political fray, but they’ll fold as soon as you dangle a powerful person in front of them. Here’s Dillon in August:
By the way, they have their perfect candidate, half-Indian, half-Black, attractive woman. Every billionaire on earth—this is, if you were going to build a robot in a lab that would be secretly controlled by billionaires, it is Kamala Harris.
It doesn't help that JD Vance is bombing with his ferret face or whatever. He has this strange kind of, he has these beady eyes. No one likes tech people, even right-wing ones. No one likes tech people. Stop with the nerds. The Republicans thought that they were gonna get, they were gonna build a bridge to the nerds with this guy. Stop with the nerds. People don't like nerds.
No matter what ideological stance they have, he's not—because on one side you've got this guy, and on the other side you have—people are twerking, people are on molly, the glow sticks are out. It's fun. Kamala is the candidate. She—she would be built if she was, you know, what's that line about Israel? If Israel didn't exist, we would have to invent her. If Kamala Harris did not exist, billionaires would have to invent her.
Half-Indian, half-Black, attractive woman. Childless. She's a career bitch. Or should I say, BISH, B-I-S-H. Kamala Harris would have to be invented if she did not already exist.
Two months later, he canceled a gig in Orlando to sit down with Vance, giving the candidate ample space to question the results of the 2020 election, demonize trans people, and promote his plan to deport 25 million immigrants:
Dillon: Is it going to be difficult to secure a border and to deport people who are here illegally, some of whom may have committed crimes? Obviously there's been instances of people who've been murdered by people that are here illegally. How does that work? Are you able to do that? Is that possible and what would that look like?
Vance: Yeah, so I'm asked this question all the time, and I joked with a reporter who said, well, you know, you can't possibly deport 25 million people, that's too many people. And I said, it's kind of like you have like a Big Mac, and you say you can't possibly eat that whole thing. It's bigger than your mouth.
Dillon: Right. Right.
Vance: And it's like, well, the way you do it is you take one bite and then a second bite, and then a third bite. And that's how I think about deportations here, is you start with the most hardened criminals, about 425,000 violent, illegal alien criminals. And we know where most of them are because they've committed crimes, right? So you do law enforcement, you go and get those people, you send 'em back to where they came from, and that's where you start.
But then, you've gotta deport illegal aliens. If you are not willing to deport the people who came here illegally, especially those who came here over the last few years, then you're not gonna have a border. And it's just basic law enforcement, right? I mean people reveal themselves as illegal aliens all the time. You know, they try to apply, like there's a lot of social security fraud that happens in our country where somebody—and I've had friends where their social security number was stolen, that social security number was used to get a driver's license or a work permit or something like that. And then when they go and say, “oh, I think I think I've had identity fraud committed against me,” the Social Security administration will tell them, “Oh, we have to respect the privacy of the people who defrauded you and stole your social security number.”
Dillon: Right. Right.
Vance: Okay, well, when you defraud somebody and steal their social security number, deport those people. And then the final point is you gotta make it harder for illegal aliens to work in the country in the first place. Because then a lot of people will just go back home if they can’t— and I think it's really important, I think one of the biggest and most pernicious effects of illegal immigration of Kamala Harris' open border is it means that millions and millions of people are willing to work under the table. But that means a lot of Americans aren't getting good jobs because you have illegal aliens who are willing to work for much lower wages.
Like I said: maybe now we can finally dispense with the lie that these comedians are anything but mouthpieces for fascism.
And speaking of mouthpieces for fascism, let’s check in quickly with Bill McCusker and Andrew Pacella of War Mode, Shane Gillis’s friends and frequent podcast guests. In their latest Patreon episode, the duo offers a disturbing glimpse into the psychological contortions it takes to be a Trump supporter who also believes a pedophile cabal runs the world. Here they are talking about former model Stacey Williams’ allegations that Trump groped her in 1993 after Jeffrey Epstein introduced them:
McCusker: She fucking was completely lying about this stuff, and then it was like "Trump found me in," or, "I went in the elevator with Jeffrey and Trump groped me and was like grabbing my tits and ass." And it's like, dude, you got to be a different beast to do that. To grope a fucking woman, you have to be from fucking India, dude.
Pacella: I‘ll play it. I’ll play the clip right now. I’ll play that full—
McCusker: You have to grow up, years and generations of people that have no idea that that's a bad thing to physically grope a woman in front of other people. It is fucking nuts that they tried to come out with this shit. You got the Billy Bush [clip]?
Pacella: I mean, if I can find it.
McCusker: I mean, he's not begging for pussy.
Pacella: I mean, listen, man, sometimes I just like to hear some locker room talk.
McCusker: Yeah, it’s crazy they’re trying to hit him with this? You got it?
Let’s fast-forward through the bit where they listen to the Access Hollywood tape and break down in laughter as Trump says “grab ‘em by the pussy”…
Pacella: Every time I hear it I laugh.
McCusker: Dude, the funniest part is he's probably never—
Pacella: Never grabbed ‘em by the pussy.
McCusker: He’s probably never at all.
Pacella: He went to an all-boys’ military academy.
McCusker: He probably took a chick furniture shopping, sweating all the time.
Pacella: He’s probably as smooth with girls as your brothers.
McCusker: Yeah. There's no way you're going like, "Oh yeah. I took her furniture shopping." It's like, dude, you were raised by [Ray] Cohn, a gay dude.
Makes perfect sense!
You may need to sit down for this one: Stand Up NY and its owner Dani Zoldan have been sued yet again, this time by a liquor vendor they allegedly owe $13,000. What’s left to say? The man—who was at a “Torah dedication ceremony” for an IDF counter-terrorism unit while his club was being served—is just that good at running a business.
Lorne Michaels simply cannot stop complaining about how unfair it was that he had to fire Shane Gillis. Here’s the latest, from an interminably long Wall Street Journal puff piece about SNL on Thursday:
He’s still sore about losing his chance to put Shane Gillis in the mix. In 2019, the comedian was fired from the cast without stepping foot on camera—a first in SNL history—after jokes Gillis had made on a podcast, including racial slurs about Asian people, sparked internet anger and talk of advertiser revolt.
“He said something stupid, but it got blown up into the end of the world,” Michaels recalls. “I was angry. I thought, You haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him, because I thought he was the real thing.”
Michaels had lots of experience in defending the show over things that happened on air—the O.J. Simpson jokes that made Norm Macdonald an enemy of NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer; Sinéad O’Connor ripping up a picture of the pope; polarizing hosts from Andrew Dice Clay to Trump—but with Gillis, the speed and force of the viral backlash couldn’t be contained.
NBC made the call to fire Gillis, Michaels says. “That was very strong from the people in charge. And obviously I was not on that side, but I understood it.” Michaels says he stayed in touch with Gillis as the comedian later blew up into one of stand-up’s top acts. He allows that there was symbolism in his choice to have Gillis host SNL last February.
As Deadline was quick to observe, NBC brass told a slightly different story in 2020, a few months after the firing. Obviously it’s doesn’t necessarily discount Michaels’ account, but I think it’s worth noting anyhow, especially given that NBC’s head of TV has said that Michaels calls all the shots at SNL:
Three months later, then-NBC boss Paul Telegdy talked about the decision. “How quickly Lorne acted and subsequently what happened is a testament to how we act as a company,” he said at the TCA press tour. “We acted fast, Lorne did the right thing, going forward we think we will rightly be accountable.”
To my eye, Michaels’ angst over the Gillis affair is the quintessential example of the ideological (and probably also intellectual) void in his soul: after 50 years on the throne, he has no idea what’s good or bad, what’s right or wrong; he only knows what everyone else seems to like, and adjusts his own opinions accordingly. Here’s Bowen Yang at the very end of the WSJ feature—
“Lorne’s mantra is: The audience is never wrong,” Yang says. “It doesn’t matter how funny or prepared you are in your piece. If it doesn’t land in the room, it’s not going to play at home. And if the audience in the bleachers doesn’t like it, then that’s not their fault.”
—which reminds me of an answer Michaels gave Vulture in 2020, in response to a question about what he thinks of Trump and Biden as impression targets:
Alec does his version of it, and his has more depth because he’s really doing a character. But then he’s also doing stuff that’s written by a fairly sophisticated writing staff. With Biden, I had this experience in 2000 where getting ready for the election, Darrell [Hammond] did Al Gore on Update in May before the election started, and the audience didn’t know who he was. The problem in politics is everyone they meet knows who they are. So, they don’t get the sense of how big the country is and how little anybody’s really paying attention. You know, I’m a baseball fan, but I don’t really know who’s playing for the Cincinnati Reds, but if they’re in the World Series, I’ll know. And that’ll be about the time I start to pay attention.
What I’m saying is these are national events — big and life-changing events. People are commenting on it every day for four years, but I’m not sure people pay much attention. This is the time when they pay attention. That’s why these debates will be important, and that’s why we’ll be doing all of that. It’s going to be a very, very close race. And as I said earlier, if it goes into extra innings, it’s going to be even more exhausting.
I was working on a show called Laugh In in 1968, and Richard Nixon came on. I didn’t know him, obviously, but he came on and said, “Sock it to me” — and, I don’t know, did it influence people or not? Obviously, I was the lowest end of writer there and a kid. But what I’m getting at is there’s no time that feels as divided as that period of ’68.
Here’s what I wrote about those comments at the time:
This is fascinating to me. He starts by calling Alec Baldwin’s Trump impression deep and sophisticated. Then he says the audience of a May 2000 SNL episode didn’t know who the sitting, two-term vice president was; that politicians only meet people who know who they are, which is why they don’t realize that nobody else knows who they are; and that because most people only pay attention to national politics during election season, it’s important for SNL to take advantage of that attention. Then he wraps it all up by recalling Richard Nixon’s famous appearance on Laugh In, which may or may not have influenced people, he doesn’t know. The question, to recap, was what he thinks about Trump and Biden as targets of satire.
[…] I think he’s earnestly filtering his take on American civic engagement through the lens of TV ratings. He’s saying political material gets the most attention during election season, just as baseball gets the most attention during the World Series, when the stakes are highest. This comports with the many points in this interview where he portrays SNL’s studio audience as some essential godlike force that determines what is and isn’t funny, as though no one ever made successful TV comedy without one.
A common response to criticism of SNL—one that I believe Michaels has trotted out himself—is that people always think it was best whenever they happened to start watching it, usually when they were teenagers. This may be true, but it is also perfectly consistent with the idea that it has gotten worse over time, as its central creative force gets older and more divorced from reality. I mean, come on—we’re talking about the guy who put Alec Baldwin on TV as Donald Trump for years!
Of course, there’s another possible reading of Michaels’ continued defenses of Shane Gillis: that he’s setting the stage for future guest appearances, perhaps following through on his previous hint that he might retire James Austin Johnson’s Trump impression. The good news is you can do your part to stop this from happening by making a plan to vote.
Last thing: I cannot speak highly enough of Conner O'Malley and Danny Scharar's brilliant and funny new film Rap World. Run, don't walk.
