Who’s Laughing Now

Seven months before ABC and Disney pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! from the air, Elon Musk told the crowd at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference that comedy would thrive under Trump, reclaimed from killjoys on the left. While both Kimmel’s suspension and MAGA world’s broad support of it expose the bullshit hypocrisy of such First Amendment posturing, Musk wasn’t wrong about comedy thriving. Sure, an autocratic regime is attempting to deplatform those who speak truth to power, but it’s been a banner year for the stand-ups whose idea of free speech doesn’t extend beyond their right to make trans jokes and say “retard” onstage.

On a Saturday evening this August, Tony Hinchcliffe returned to Madison Square Garden for two shows, marking the comedian’s first appearances at the venue since he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” during his set at a Trump rally last October. Though Hinchcliffe entered the national spotlight following the rally, for more than a decade he’s been a central figure of what might be described as the anti-woke comedy movement: a loose coalition of comics-slash-podcast hosts whose concerns about cancel culture have pushed them into alignment with the libertarian wing of the Republican Party and whose brazen disregard for political correctness has endeared them to a large, and largely male, fan base. The mood in the arena was triumphant; two “USA” chants had already broken out before the show began. After a jumbotron intro set to Frank Sinatra’s version of “New York, New York,” Hinchcliffe took the stage in a navy suit paired with an oversized Western belt buckle. Goateed, already looking flush from exertion, the forty-one-year-old comedian resembled a cross between a WWE ring announcer and certain depictions of Satan. “They said we’d never be back,” he declared to the sold out crowd. “Who’s ready for the best fucking night of their lives?”

The occasion was a special edition of Hinchcliffe’s comedy-variety podcast, Kill Tony, an edited version of which is now streaming on Netflix as Kill Tony: Mayhem at Madison Square Garden. Following the Trump rally, backlash from both sides of the aisle was so severe that some pundits optimistically suggested that Hinchcliffe’s remarks could influence the Latino vote in Pennsylvania, costing Trump the election. Even Trump felt the need to distance himself from the comedian, stating in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity that he “never saw him, never heard of him, and don’t want to hear of him.”

Hinchcliffe’s star has only risen. In March, fewer than two months after Trump’s second inauguration, Netflix announced a deal with Hinchcliffe to air four comedy specials. The terms of the deal have not been made public, but Hinchcliffe Trumpishly told fellow entertainers, “You’ve never heard of anything like it before” and hinted at a payday comparable to his friend and collaborator Joe Rogan’s $250 million Spotify contract. Now in its twelfth year, Kill Tony has nearly 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube and is currently the platform’s third-ranked podcast. Kam Patterson, a twenty-six-year-old former Foot Locker employee who first appeared on Kill Tony in 2023 and has since emerged as the show’s biggest homegrown star, was recently cast on this season of Saturday Night Live. Patterson went viral last year for a stand-up routine about deciding to vote for Trump after the president was shot at a Pennsylvania rally. In a moment that’s seen the corporately motivated, government-endorsed attempted muzzling of Kimmel and successful cancellation of Stephen Colbert, Hinchcliffe’s Netflix deal and Patterson’s SNL casting signal the culmination of anti-woke comedy’s rise to the mainstream.

The premiseof Kill Tony is simple: comedians perform one-minute sets before a panel of judges and a live audience. The comedians are a mix of aspiring amateurs whose names have been drawn from a metal bucket and “golden ticket” winners—previous contestants like Patterson who Hinchcliffe has invited back, some of them many times. The format is similar to competition shows such as American Idol, though Hinchcliffe has said he modeled it after the “Attitude Era” of WWF wrestling, a period in the late 1990s and early 2000s categorized by charismatic villains and aggressively participatory crowds. The result is more like a fraternity hazing ritual. As on Idol, performances range from cringe to polished. Unlike on Idol, performers lead with their most offensive material. Each set is followed by an interview with the comedian during which Hinchcliffe, his cohost and coproducer Brian Redban, and a rotating panel of judges mix encouragement with mockery that leans on body shaming, gay jokes, and racial and gender stereotypes. On a recent episode, for one typical example, Hinchcliffe asked a biracial contestant how often he pictures his “sweet little innocent” Korean mom getting “absolutely ravaged” by his well-endowed Haitian dad. Hinchcliffe delivers this banter in the jocular spirit of a pledge master assuring his pledges that he’s their friend.

At the Garden, any concerns that the show might be sanitized for Netflix were dispelled when Hinchcliffe asked the evening’s first performer, comedian Martin Phillips, who has muscular dystrophy, where he likes to “waddle to” when he’s in New York. Guest judge Mark Normand had already suggested that Phillips would have more success on the streaming platform Twitch and joked about him eating at Shake Shack. Phillips has written about wanting to de-center his disability from his comedy, but he took their teasing in stride. He has appeared on Kill Tony twenty-five times—more than any other golden ticket winner. Hinchcliffe considers himself a champion of disabled comedians; three appear in the special, and however cringy his banter with them is to watch, it’s worth noting that Kill Tony launched these comedians’ careers and continues to support them. The roasting is the trade-off for a chance in the spotlight.

For the following three hours, there were jokes from various comedians about the Holocaust, pedophilia, and New York’s homeless population. David Lucas, a black comedian who first appeared on Kill Tony in 2018 and has been inducted into to the show’s hall of fame, did a bit about black people hating trans people because “black people hate magic.” Ahren Belisle—who has cerebral palsy and performs using a text-to-voice app on his phone—showed the audience why he could never be a Nazi: he can’t heil due to limited use of his left hand. Harland Williams, a veteran comic whose name was pulled from a special “legends bucket,” had the crowd chanting “jump!” at his (supposedly) suicidal sister. Patterson discussed the challenge of doing love scenes as an untrained actor because his penis doesn’t know that it’s supposed to be acting. The spirit of the evening was perhaps best encapsulated by Finnegan O’Malley, an eleven-year-old golden-ticket winner who joked about wanting an “N-word pass.”

O’Malley’s performance was cut from the Netflix version, but his inclusion in the lineup at the Garden solidified my sense that we were witnessing Hinchcliffe’s vision for the future of comedy: a diverse army of equal-opportunity offenders primed to smash liberal pieties in one-minute increments. One thing that struck me is that, despite the politicized discourse around anti-woke comedy, the material itself was largely apolitical. This wasn’t Dave Chappelle railing against pronouns. Rather, it was Harland Williams, Chappelle’s lesser-known Half Baked costar, doing a bit about mistakenly soliciting a “tranny” sex worker—and liking it. One of the only routines to address politics directly was the Estonian-born Ari Matti’s joke about matching the political stance of any woman he’s with; if she’s Muslim it’s, “from the river to the sea, my queen.”

Certainly, there were funny moments. Another “legend,” Jim Norton, had a good riff on comedy being safe from AI because chatbots don’t understand shame, and Matti had an astute bit about the absurdity of the United States dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan when one would have sufficed. There was also hacky material, jokes in bad taste, and routines that fell flat. But this would be the case in any hours-long stretch of stand-up, especially one featuring amateurs.

Much of the bad taste came from the judge’s table. Normand, a boyish forty-two-year-old who wore sunglasses onstage, was a fount of lowest common denominator humor. “You get them on trains?” he asked a contestant whose day job involves coordinating substitute teachers at a Jewish school. In another segment left on the cutting room floor, Hinchcliffe asked a contestant whether he’d turned off the passenger side airbag during a road trip with his pregnant girlfriend to facilitate “the old Asian abortion.”

To be fair, these contestants willingly add their names to the bucket, and most appear to enjoy being roasted. They’re also at liberty to fire back. The evening’s other guest judge, Matt Rife—a comedian known for his largely female fan base—was the target of as many jokes as he made. Still, as a Korean American comedian joked about wanting to eat dog meat, I couldn’t help feeling that I was watching a parade of jesters debase themselves before a vile king.

Born in 1984, Hinchcliffe was raised by a single mother in Youngstown, Ohio, a mill town in the Appalachian foothills that was hit hard by the collapse of the American steel industry in the 1970s. A small kid in a tough neighborhood, he has said that he developed comedic chops at a young age so that he could defend himself from bullies. In 2007, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue stand-up. A regular at open-mic nights, he gained a reputation as an insult comic before landing opening slots for Rogan and Jeff Ross. An insult comic himself, Ross felt a kinship with Hinchcliffe and helped him find work writing for Comedy Central Roast.

In 2013, Hinchcliffe debuted Kill Tony at the Comedy Store to a crowd of twelve. It was the same year that Norton debated the Jezebel writer Lindy West on the FX show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell about the ethics of rape jokes, an event that augured tensions in the comedy world during its #MeToo reckoning. Much stand-up of the late 2010s reflects the era’s liberal anxiety about the relationships between speech and violence, comedy and rape culture. Specials like Patton Oswalt’s Annihilation, Aziz Ansari’s Aziz Ansari: Right Now, and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette felt less like stand-up than like confessional storytelling in which humor was a mechanism for self-reflection. These specials took on serious topics—grief, the culture wars, gender identity—and explored them at length and with nuance, often including meta-discussions of the value and purpose of comedy itself. But they weren’t always funny, and they certainly weren’t fun.

Kill Tony offered a defiant alternative. It was unpolished, unserious, and undaunted by cancel culture. The series also anticipated a shift in consumption habits. Both the podcast boom and the rise of TikTok democratized stand-up. Aspiring comics no longer needed to live in comedy hubs like Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles; they could start podcasts or upload to TikTok from anywhere. TikTok’s format encouraged a return to the kind of “club” comedy found on Kill Tony: short, standalone bits that could be cut into thirty or sixty-second clips.

In the fall of 2020 Hinchcliffe moved to Austin, Texas, where Rogan had recently set up shop. When lockdown lifted, he began taping Kill Tony at the blues club Antone’s. The residency was short-lived. In May 2021, a clip of Hinchcliffe using a racial slur to mock the Asian American comedian Peng Dang went viral on Twitter. WME dropped Hinchcliffe as a client, and Antone’s exiled the show. Hinchcliffe refused to apologize, saying, “It wasn’t even the worst thing I did that week.” He signed with UTA, and Kill Tony relocated to another club before finding a home at Rogan’s Comedy Mothership in 2023.

Given Hinchcliffe’s penchant for merciless heckling, contestants can be surprisingly candid in their post-set interviews. Each week, aspiring comics describe their experiences as war veterans, cancer survivors, addicts, and ex-cons. They open up about their difficulties making alimony payments and navigating the health care system. In a recent episode, a contestant relayed an anecdote about his father dying in his arms. The more Kill Tony I consumed, the more convinced I became that the male loneliness epidemic has sparked a male comedy epidemic, that instead of picking up guitars young American men—especially in red states—are going onstage to joke about their difficult lives.

Comedy can be a coping mechanism, and in its own way Kill Tony accommodates vulnerability by padding it in the armor of humor. Hinchcliffe sometimes plays therapist, asking contestants to confess the dark secrets of their childhoods. He then uses those confessions as fodder for mockery. The generous read is that it’s all in good fun, and that he’s helping people spin their traumas into stand-up gold—and stand-up careers. Of the twenty-three performers featured in Mayhem at Madison Square Garden, nine are golden-ticket-winners-turned-touring-comics.

I was admittedly more inclined toward generosity before attending the taping. This may have had to do with the audience. I’m not one to clutch pearls, but over the course of the evening, the crowd’s continual delight at Holocaust jokes made me uneasy. When someone yelled “queer” at a contestant during a quiet moment, I felt like I was back in my high school auditorium. The crowd’s automatic laughter every time a comic said “midget” or “retard” reinforced this sense of regression; in overcorrecting for the anxious comedy of the late 2010s, we’d arrived at a retrograde, and frankly sophomoric, sensibility that reversed hard-won shifts in cultural norms.

The audience also booed through nearly every regular contestant’s appearance, all but ensuring the absence of the moments of humanity I’d found on the podcast. “You hate that I have five kids?” a bemused contestant asked the crowd. Another contestant—a carpenter from Massachusetts whose segment was cut from the Netflix stream—was booed for talking about fighting to see his children in family court. The issue may be that I’ve never watched pro wrestling, and I wasn’t used to this style of audience engagement. But wrestlers are paid professionals playing characters; this felt like real vitriol directed at real people. When the booing reached a fever pitch during another contestant’s bit about gay sex, I was reminded of an old Eddie Murphy routine in which he suggests that black people avoid amped-up Italians leaving the movie theater after watching Rocky knock out Apollo in Rocky II. I wouldn’t have wanted to be wearing a Pride T-shirt in Midtown when the Kill Tony crowd dispersed to the bars after the show.

The day after after Hinchcliffe’s appearance at the Trump rally, Marc Maron, the host of the long running WTF podcast, wrote on his blog, “The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers . . . they are part of the public face of a fascist political movement that seeks to destroy the democratic idea.” Maron—who had been a guest judge on early episodes of Kill Tony—has continued the crusade. In his own recent stand-up special, Panicked, he points out that when comedians express concerns about censorship, what they’re really referring to is cultural pushback. While Kimmel’s suspension clearly went beyond pushback, Maron is correct that, in the current climate, anti-woke comedians have little to fear. This isn’t 1964, when Lenny Bruce was arrested at a Greenwich Village comedy club, tried, and convicted of obscenity charges. It’s not even 2019, when Shane Gillis was fired from SNL days after being hired when clips of him using Asian slurs on his podcast surfaced online. In 2025, politically incorrect comedy is not the kind of speech that’s being suppressed; no comedian is in danger of going to jail—or even taken off Netflix—for racist or homophobic material. Suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s killer voted for Trump? That’s another story.

In his 1992 special, Relentless, the comedian Bill Hicks does a bit about his unpopular position on Operation Desert Storm—he says he’s “for the war, but against the troops.” Hicks is kidding; the joke mocks the liberal sanctimony of the opposite position. It also happens to encapsulate my feelings about Hinchcliffe and his cohort: I’m for the war against censorship, but I wish the army fighting it wasn’t filled with Nazi-adjacent homophobes.

So where does this leave us? In supporting Kimmel’s reinstatement, must we concede to broadband sanction of all comedic material, no matter how repulsive we find it? I’m reminded again of Murphy. His debut special, Delirious, which came out in 1983, contains wildly homophobic material, including misinformation about AIDS. Revisiting it now, it seems clear that Murphy’s fearmongering and frequent use of gay slurs could embolden homophobes and incite violence. In 1996, after more than a decade of criticism from LGBTQ groups, Murphy disavowed the material and apologized for the harm it had caused. Thirteen years is a long time, but this is how discourse should work. Murphy wasn’t punished or censored, but conversation around the material altered public perception and caused Murphy to reflect on what he’d said. This kind of reflection seems unlikely for Hinchcliffe, who’s said his number one rule is “never apologize.” Before leaving the stage at the Garden, he thanked the crowd for supporting free speech.