Welcome back to my column, where I take you on a tour of what’s happening in the culture—high and low, online and off. There’s a lot to think about this week, including the Girl Boss Space Mission, The White Lotus’s gift shop, a new photography exhibit at the Met, and the 24 hour surveillance state Gen Z can’t imagine living without. It’s an honor to be your safari guide.
Kill Tony Did Not Kill on Netflix
You'll remember, from the last election cycle, when a comedian at a Donald Trump rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” You might not remember the guy who made the joke. It bombed. But Tony Hinchcliffe burst back into the public’s consciousness this week, with the first of three Netflix specials—and he’s gotten roughly the same reception.
It’s been a month since Netflix announced a deal to run three filmed recordings of Hinchcliffe’s hugely successful podcast, “Kill Tony.” The show’s setup is that Hinchcliffe is on a panel with a bunch of other comedians—including, on the April 7 episode, Joe Rogan and an Elon Musk impersonator. Throughout the night, Hinchcliffe grabs a random slip of paper from a bucket filled with the names of aspiring comedians, and that guy—every performer on the show was a guy, bar one—does a 60-second set. Then, Tony and the rest of the panel roasts them. It’s like American Idol for class clowns. (If you crush your set, you may be invited to come back and perform at a separate ‘Secret Show.’)
Kill Tony is a part of the new alternative comedy world populated with podcasting bros. It’s a male-centric, right-wing adjacent world that prides itself on bucking progressive pieties and pushing the envelope with edgy jokes. Five years ago, all of these guys were outsiders. This was the era of intersectional trauma comedy like Hannah Gadsby’s scolding special, Nanette. Louis C.K. had been forced underground by #MeToo allegations. But now, the upstarts have won—they were credited with sealing the election for Trump, after he and J.D. Vance appeared on several bro podcasts, which were catapulted into the spotlight after the political upset.
That doesn't mean the bros are ready for prime time.
Kill Tony was terrible, but not because of its offensiveness—in the first five minutes Hinchcliffe tells viewers they’re only “two clicks from John Mulaney” (the more palatable comedian) if they get offended. It was bad because no one knew what they were doing.
The show opens with Ari Matti, an Estonian comic, riffing on fancy restaurants. (“It was one of those restaurants, you know, where the menu doesn't even have prices. I thought I gotta a broken menu!”) It only goes downhill from there. The next performer says, “I’m Vietnamese and Jewish, which makes me a Viet-Jew. God bless you!” Silence. Shane Gillis—who got booted from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for “offensive” statements he’d made on his podcast—was on the panel too. He was dressed as Trump, but was less funny than the real one.
You can tell everyone in the room knows the show is going straight down the toilet around the halfway point, when one of the stand-ups tells Hinchcliffe about how, for work, his girlfriend does “marketing onboarding for an at-home care facility.” The panel, made up of men whose job it is to riff, is stone-faced. The guy then offers to mow Rogan’s lawn, “if you need someone.”