Who Goes Nazi? Pretty Much Everyone in Comedy, Apparently

As you know, it is my operating theory that comedy functions as a sort of collective id for American culture. Its artistic norms enable comedians to say whatever is currently unacceptable to say in polite society, and the success they enjoy is a bellwether for which of those unsayable things is gaining (or regaining) credibility, which groups might soon be under (or back under) the chopping block, and which acts of violence the commentariat will be willing to forgive, or even to endorse. Which is why I still think it is useful, if not terribly pleasant, to keep an eye on people like Theo Von, who this week pondered the possibility that scientists might someday find a cure for “being gay”:

Von: Do you think that being gay will be something that will be eternal or one day that, that will be hacked or something?

Ari Shaffir: That we can cure it?

Von: Or that it would be hacked, that they'll be able to hack the genetics?

Shaffir: If you were a scientist working on the cure for gay and you were halfway there, you lost a lot of funding recently.

Von: Oh, that's probably true.

Shaffir: Yeah, they're probably like, "We're not paying. We don't want it anymore."

Von: You don't think?

Shaffir: That's a small segment of the population like, "We got to cure this." Everyone else is just like, "Who cares?"

Von: Oh, I think most people are like, "Who cares?" But I just mean, maybe cure is not the right word. Do you think that they'll ever—

Shaffir: A vaccine?

Von: Vaccine, yeah.

Shaffir: So you won't ever get it in the first place?

Von: Right, yeah.

Shaffir: Get a kid when he's two. Didn't they say vaccines made kids gay? Wasn't that a rumor for a while?

Von: I don't know. We're going to find out soon if Bobby Kennedy gets in there.

[…]

Von: Yeah. I mean, a lot of kids, I will say, seem very gay though. Do you notice that? If you talked to a...

Shaffir: They're post-gender.

Von: Is it?

Shaffir: Yeah, they don't care. The idea that a man can wear a dress, like, "You cross-dressing?" They're like, "What?" When I grew up, you couldn't wear a pink as a dude. You'd be ostracized. Now there's no gay color. We're past that. So those kids are past that shit. They're wearing top hats and skirts.

Von: It doesn't matter.

Shaffir: It just doesn't matter.

Von: Okay.

Shaffir: Yeah. So yeah, we see them as gay, but they're like, "Oh, dude, we're not even using those terms."

Von: Yeah, you're from a different universe.

Shaffir: Yeah. That's why you go through Bushwick or something and you're like, "Oh, this is the cutting-edge kids."

Von: I've heard rumors that a lot of Haitians moved over there in there to the parks and stuff and were selling sex and stuff like that. Have you seen any of that over there?

Shaffir: Hookers in Bushwick?

Von: Yeah, in the parks over there.

Shaffir: Selling their bodies?

Von: Yeah. They were selling sex and oral sex over there.

Shaffir: I mean, Haitian, that's not who you'd want.

To state the obvious, what we observe here is not only outright homophobia but also a conflation of gender identity with sexuality, and then some racism and xenophobia thrown in as a bonus. As I’ve noted before, Von (who is currently starring in a movie he’s self-financing with David Spade) has lately been getting very comfortable with racist and anti-immigrant commentary. In this episode, Shaffir is happy to join in: 

Von: I think it was when Trump was running for office and nobody could understand how I was excited that Trump was running. I was like, if that fucking dude can win, then anybody could win.

Shaffir: Yeah. The way Obama gave Black people hope, he gives, Trump gives regular people hope.

Von: Oh dude. The first time that he won, I remember driving down the street and I've never even been a big Trumper. I've never endorsed Trump. I don't even think I voted for him the first time. I don't remember if I voted for him the first time, but I was like, fucking anybody can win.

Shaffir: And, like, “If you're born with a billion dollars.” Yeah, but you also say stupid [sic], and I'm stupid, so that's the part I'll relate to.

Von: Right. Anybody could win. That’s the part that was fascinating about it. 

Black people… and regular people. Hmm!

Elsewhere in the podcastsphere, Tim Dillon rose to the defense of Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón, making an impassioned case for ethnonationalism: 

Dillon: These tweets, forget their content. They're just fun. They're the best thing about Emilia Pérez, is that this bitch, a trans racist—now, by the way, if you want to talk about something that can bring us all together, it's not Emilia Pérez. It's this trans racist bitch. That's who can bring us together, a trans racist, not a movie, a fucking musical about a cartel tr—ny. No, a real life trans racist who criticizes—

And by the way, her tweets, they're a bit colorful, obviously. But listen, she can notice that there's a lot of Muslims in Europe. You're allowed to notice that. You're allowed to notice these things. She's allowed to notice this. She's doing it in a rather colorful way, but she's allowed to notice these things. And the people in her cast, Zoe Saldana and all these people, are disowning her. Zoe Saldana said something where she goes, "I'm disappointed in her actions, but I'm still allowing myself to experience joy." They're so psychotic. She's “processing."

He continues in this fashion for some time, basically recycling Gascón’s own racist tirades:

Dillon: Now, they are throwing this woman, this lovely lady, this feminine lady, woman [various unintelligible noises that go on for a bit]. They're throwing this lovely woman into the street just because she's noticed that there's a couple of burqas in France. She noticed that a lot of people in France are wearing the full garbage bag and she's not into it. A lot of people aren't because they like France and they want it to be French. 

I'm sorry. I apologize to you that you're so offended by that, that they want France to be for French people and Muslims that come there who also identify as being French. Not people that are just living on a landmass who want to keep every single component of their culture, even if it's in direct opposition to the values of the culture of the place they've lived and moved. So she noticed that in a colorful way on Twitter, perhaps too colorful.

[…]

It isn't really a big deal to me that a trans woman doesn't love Islam. Why is that such a big shock to people in Hollywood that a trans woman wouldn't automatically adore Islam? Why is it a huge deal to Zoe Saldana or any of these people? Now, obviously we know why it's a big deal because these people have to completely pretend—they have this logically incoherent position that even though fundamentalist Islam believes nothing they believe, they still have to welcome anyone into America. It just is the position of everyone in LA for whatever reason, to just say that everyone belongs in America no matter what they believe. Unless you're Russian, unless you're like a Russian or something. 

But everyone else. Even if you believe that women should have to wear a thing. And I'm not even, I'm not like a guy who's going on the crusade against Islam. I have no interest in telling anyone in any Islamic country how to believe, what to believe or how to behave or what kind of government they need. And I don't want American troops or American money or American resources trying to, quote, democratize any of those places. I have zero interest in it.

There's a lot of friends I have that are Muslim. I have friends that are devout Muslims. I have friends that are not as devout. I have friends across the spectrum. I do not care. I do not live in a Muslim country. I do not want to. I don't want to live in a Jewish country. I don't want to live in Israel, which there's one, called Israel. It's an ethnostate. I don't want to live there. Sorry. I don't want to live there. I like living in America and I like that America has different groups of people that are represented, but we have a separation of church and state. We have laws, we have customs. And here's the reality of this situation, we also have a culture. We have a culture, and we need to agree upon to some degree what that culture is.

Again, this is just straight-up white nationalism. He’s arguing, as he’s argued before, that people who migrate to the US (or France, or wherever else) should assimilate to American culture, which he sees as necessarily non-Muslim. It’s also evident that he recognizes this as a bit of a problematic position, which is why he works overtime to be reasonable about it—he doesn’t want to live in an ethnostate, just a country where everyone agrees on the customs and culture, which are in opposition to other customs and culture. 

These People Are All Just Racists

A temperature check.

HumorismSeth Simons

A few days before Dillon made these comments, Andrew Schulz and his guest, the English comedian Adam Rowe, offered an oddly sympathetic take on the far-right anti-immigrant riots in the UK over the summer: 

Rowe: The riots were anti-immigration riots being like, "Look what happens when we have borders open." Is this guy's parents get in, they have him here, and then he goes and kills. But again, it's because—look, what this guy's done is fucking horrific and it's very hard to have this conversation, especially because this happened in Southport, which is eight miles from where I live. It's up the road, maybe 20 at maximum. Southport is where on a sunny day in the summer, that's where me and my family would go. There's a theme park there with roller coasters. No Indians on them—

Schulz: Yet.

Rowe: —It’s absolutely harrowing, awful. It's one of the worst stories of my lifetime that I can remember. And because people got real angry, and they were given a reason, "He did it because of this." So then the protests were, and riots were fucking huge.

But then there's assholes tearing up to these protests and riots with six packs of Stella and they're being like, "Hey, we're at the riots." And it's like, you don't give a shit. You want a reason to go and smash a town up and get drunk with your mates. You're a thug. Some people genuinely care about the safety of children and they're there for the right reasons. But a good chunk of these fucking riots were people who'd just seen an opportunity to go home on a Tuesday night and smash up a place with no retribution.

Schulz: That's the tricky thing is that a certain amount of people are going to be crazy and that is going to be consistent across whatever culture. And when you have people that are entering your country, a certain percentage of them are going to be crazy. And the idea I imagine with an open border is that there's no way to discern who is or isn't.

Now, there's no way to tell if somebody's kid is going to be crazy. You know what I mean? But I get the anger that somebody has in a situation where, "We can at least control this if we just stop people from coming in." But you're not going to control crazy. There are gonna be fucking Jimmy Saviles. There's going to be monsters no matter what.

As is customary with these guys, this conversation has the pretense of reasonable analysis but is actually completely deranged. When Rowe condemns “assholes” taking advantage of an opportunity to smash shit up, he’s implicitly arguing that there were also legitimate rioters with legitimate grievances. Inconveniently, when you factor out any alleged opportunists who don’t actually care about immigration, you’re left with the far-right influencers who organized the riots and the neo-Nazis who heeded their call. 

Then there’s the completely nonsensical critique of open borders, which the UK doesn’t have. The problem, as they put it, is that migrants might have children who turn out to be monsters, like noted English pedophile Jimmy Savile. There’s no way to tell whose kids will commit violence in a couple decades—this is the sort of analysis that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. 

Does it get worse? It gets worse. Last week Tom Segura fondly recalled a show he did in Budapest, where he earned the crowd’s respect by saying “rotten Gypsies” in Hungarian. Then he and Christina Pazsitzky fawned over Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán and his government’s anti-LGBT policies:

Pazsitzky: Well, everybody, we covered it on this show, that Hungary was the first to really ban the study of multi-genderism and transgenderism and all this stuff. Looks like our country followed suit. There's only two genders officially now.

Segura: Well, he's a big fan of Viktor Orbán, Trump is.

Pazsitzky: There you go.

Segura: He's been like, "That guy gets it," because Orbán also was like, "You're not welcome here." That was one of his messages. He's like, "If you're looking for a place to go, do not come to Hungary." He's like, "We do not want you. We have fences, and we will shoot you if you jump over them."

Pazsitzky: Well, it looks like we're going that way.

Segura: "And also, we speak Hungarian. And if you want to be here, fucking learn it."

Pazsitzky: Yeah. Well, we're doing it too. So that's cool. [Pulling up a picture of Orbán:] There he is.

Segura: There he is.

Pazsitzky: There's the homie.

Segura: Yeah, he's very—

Pazsitzky: "Get out of my country, you fucking pig, Gypsy pig. This is great."

Segura: That's the kind of guy I'd like to have a beer with, by the way.

Pazsitzky: Oh, are you kidding me?

Segura: I would love to just hear him be like, "There's no one around. What's up?" Just be like, "These fucking Gypsies."

Pazsitzky: He would say what I'm trying to say.

What can I even say? These people are all authoritarians at heart, and it is clear today, in February 2025, that they will cheer on the Trump administration’s worst abuses over the next four years. It’s nauseating to watch.